Six nights after the Christmas Eve Aventura Outlet Mall bombing, a freak winter storm wiped all familiarity from the streets. Snow lay atop mailboxes, rendering them as gently mounded boulders lying in formation. The storm stranded us while it recorded the silent passages of stray pets, their piss spots dribbled across the white.
Michelle and I celebrated the New Year in her stainless-steel kitchen. White cornflakes of snow worried about the flood lights in the back yard. Michelle toasted me, made a fake smile—clink, android smile—until the end of the second bottle. Then she stopped looking and switched to watching me. Michelle had gotten good at believing her analysis is unassailable, especially when she believed I had an agenda.
“Richard,” she said. “Your resolutions are pretty far-fetched.”
“This is for an entire year,” I said. “Next year, this year—whatever.”
“What are you up to?” she said. She pressed her right index finger to my forehead. “In there.”
Parenthetical smile lines cup Michelle’s mouth, making her lips powerful; she’d no idea she could do it, use her mouth’s power with good or bad intent. Her smile is a triple-eight piece of good luck for a South Korean who, at the time, was facing forty-three years old and who believed that holding onto sexiness couldn’t be more on the mind of an aging Asian-American.
“We lose it later, but we lose it faster and we lose it a lot fucking harder,” she once told me.
Michelle said, “I get that it’s this big thing, for you, a year. But your resolutions are so crazy. Walk into the mall again. Get your dad off pills. Do whatever you’re talking about with radio signals.”
“A year is shit,” I said.
Along with her wine glass, her smile tilted. She didn’t know what I was talking about. She crossed her index and middle fingers and laid them on my nose. Maybe that was her way of signaling exactly that misunderstanding.
Speaking sense had become a biggie. There were no answers to the Aventura bombing without my personal testimony, my witness’s account. I was the only one living to have seen the suicide bomber’s face, so people wanted words from me. I made sense. That’s what fucked me.
I took Michelle’s crossed fingers and moved them away from my face.
“One year,” I said.
“One year is shit,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “One year is shit. But, still.”
I met daily with a talk guy in a folding trailer moored outside the Aventura, just close enough to the east entrance to flood my fear. I talked to everyone: staffers and briefers, psychologists and psychiatrists, media, officers, and agents, some as early as when I was in the hospital and laid out on my stomach. No eye contact was required, except through a round cosmetics-aisle mirror I’d been trained to use to look back at them as they plucked shards of Bag and Baggage’s plate glass windows from my back.
Between visitors, I ate nurse Faught’s contraband oxies so fast I’d reach peak dose after they’d all left for the day, after the nurses turned off the hallway lights and turned on my TV, and there was no one left to share my serenity but the slandering sluts on Jessie’s Possie, until there came a news report on local kids blowing themselves apart at an old folks’ restaurant and returning home alive, but not well. Broken in a way suddenly very familiar to me.
To be continued.
Art by Barnaby Furnas
I love the "Android smile" line. I want a dad off pill.
The last scene was crazy and this is oddly normal until the end. Interested in seeing how this lines up.