'smoking vegan, smiling gun' -- part two


eight


Some people say there's no past, and no future, just an ever-changing present. Events stack up like snowdrifts, or sand dunes, making the present a never-existing pile of existence.

Some say time loops around. And not just in a "history repeats itself" sense.

In this sense, I'd say that the first time I should have realized the Smoking Vegan was going to get me was when my girlfriend bought her used car. This was six months before I met the Smoking Vegan at the poetry reading.

My girlfriend's car was supposed to cost her $9,100. It wasn't a bad price, for what wasn't a bad car. My girlfriend did research on all aspects of the deal. She figured how much her insurance would cost. She took into account the state of Indiana's ridiculous license plate tax. She sat up at night at the dinner table in our shared apartment with a leather portfolio full of yellow legal paper. She scribbled calculations and figures with a ballpoint pen. At some points, the end of the pen was in her mouth. At other points, she was using it to punch keys on a calculator.

She went back to look at the car a total of four times. I went with her the third time. The car was a magenta kind of maroon that struck me as neither wholly pleasant nor wholly ugly. My impressions were important only one out of the four times the car was viewed, perhaps because my usership of the car -- barring emergencies, strictly passenger -- was about one-fourth normal.

On the fourth time my girlfriend went back to have a look at the car, she went alone. What happened then, I can only be half-sure. She came home a hundred-percent more car-endowed, and fifty-percent pissed at something. She drank a peach wine-cooler and looked over a law textbook at our dinette table with the ceiling fan on. My -- our -- gay black roommate was out playing basketball with some female friends.

I asked my girlfriend what was wrong, and she said, "Nothing." I asked her again, and she said nothing. She was wearing her reading glasses, and sniffing with hay fever. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and loose. She was scratching the paper of her textbook pages with the end of a pen.

The next day, my girlfriend bought the car. She uses that car even today.

I wasn't sure until the second time everything came around what had happened to my girlfriend during her fourth viewing of the car. It really wasn't too complicated a thing. It was simple.

She asked to see inside the trunk. The dealer -- a guy in a black suit with a white shirt and a yellow tie -- popped the trunk open, and blasted some comment about its square-footage. My girlfriend was in a blue T-shirt-ish blouse and khaki shorts. She wore a quizzical expression from the second after the trunk was opened.

It was clean, and black, and felt. It smelled like something old made new again. If you were two feet tall or made of porcelain, it'd have been an appetizing bed.

Tucked toward the back of the clean, black, felt trunk bed was a shine of aluminum longer than half of human arms. My girlfriend began a legal-precision inquiry.

"What's that?"

"What's what?"

"That, back there?"

The salesman kept his right hand on the opened trunk as he leaned in. He narrowed his wrinkled ocular orbit-muscles as a sheriff in a movie about a small town would.

"It looks like a bat."

My girlfriend wrapped her torso in her arms. She squinted, and looked.

"A bat?"

"Yeah," the salesman confirmed. "It's a bat."

"What kind of bat?"

"It looks like a metal one."

"Let me see it," my girlfriend commanded, just to command something.

"Go on, grab it," the salesman said, maybe-lost. "Feel free to touch anything."

My girlfriend's arms didn't leave her torso. "I want to see it," she said.

"Okay," the salesman said, before going quiet.

A strand of my girlfriend's hair found the corner of her mouth. Her right nostril flared. Her left one might have stayed its original size.

"Let me see it," my girlfriend repeated.

This goes on for three more repetitions before, every time, the salesman reaches in, and pulls out the bat. The rubber grip is just small enough to fit within the width of his hand. The bat's metal surface is lonely, and shiny, and not chipped.

My girlfriend takes the bat in her hands and holds it with a sword-grip. Her little purse slips down to the crook of her right arm. Like the end of it is a laser pointer and the sky is a diagram full of charts and graphs and important figures, my girlfriend turns her wrists, then shoulders, then elbows, then waist, like a Barbie doll testing its own articulation limits.

The salesman, in present tense now, is tensing up. He's such a seasoned salesman he's sweating beneath his clothes. His face stays dry like dry rubber. Not in the least tempted to hook a finger under his collar to release some steam, he manages to ask, and rosily, under the sun, "Do you . . . like it?"

My girlfriend, waiting back in the past tense, looked at the top of the bat from a distance; she seemingly regarded it as a telescope aimed at some celestial body she'd rather not see. No -- she couldn't see it. One look at it from any distance would turn her into stone.

"Yes," she said.

"You can keep it," the salesman said. He put his hand atop the opened trunk, and smiled. His touch of hand on trunk was not sexual in the least. My girlfriend didn't notice. She couldn't have possibly.

My girlfriend bought the car that day. Without the use of words, the bat was put back into the trunk and sealed away. When my girlfriend drove home, it was in her new car, with her new tee-ball bat inside.

She never said anything to me about the bat. She never said anything out loud to me about a lot of things. That night, though -- when the wine cooler and law textbook were spent, as she punched at calculator keys with the end of a writing instrument -- she was telling me about the bat without telling me about the bat.

It's neither the case that she was proud of the bat nor the case that she was ashamed of the bat. She simply didn't tell me about it because she was confused. The bat confused her. That bat, in the trunk of that car: when she'd seen it for the first time, it was like a rare fit of wordless poetry. A shiny, not-chipped, not-banged-up metal bat, lying on its side, rolled to the back of the trunk of a car that would sooner or later be hers. Nestled some place safely in the back of the trunk, its name -- "EASTON TEE-BALL" -- hidden by the courtesy of its roll, lying atop charcoal-colored felt, it was a cylinder that itself felt nothing.

The metaphysicality of the situation, for my girlfriend, was only the least troubling thing. When she saw that bat, part of her, eyes shaded by an opened trunk on a sunny day, came to feel like gray clouds were sweeping in, and it was going to rain a humid rain. Far from feeling troubled at weather, she was troubled at the most concrete, most down-to-reality reality of her reality:

Why hadn't she checked the trunk before? She'd looked at the car three times -- and once with me, which didn't count -- yet she never asked to open the trunk? She never looked inside the trunk?

Had my girlfriend been a man, and I myself been the woman, I'm guessing -- and maybe educatedly -- she would have beheld the bat for the first time with a kind of jealousy: had someone else opened the trunk before, and -- when the salesman wasn't looking -- tucked the bat away in there? It wouldn't be my girlfriend's nature, were she a man, to question why another man would do such a thing. It would, however, be mine. And that is the point of this anecdote.


**


It is further the point of this anecdote to say that my girlfriend's fears that she'd never find a job, that she'd never pass her Bar Exam, and that she'd never make enough money to pay for all the things she wanted in a future that most likely didn't include me all came to a tapered, aluminum head the morning she purchased and drove off in a used car containing a not-used tee-ball bat. At twenty-four years old, wearing a newish pair of glasses with tortoiseshell frames, my girlfriend passed the point in her life where she was too young to think about getting too old. I could only look at her, half-fathom her expression as she squinted down her calculator, and offer her one banana from a bunch.

I should have noticed, then, that the look in her face was the look of a person who feared that she wasn't noticing enough, and never would notice enough. I should have noticed this only because I didn't notice it. It is my human vortex that I'm only capable of future noticing my failure to notice one past thing after I've noticed a problem in the present.

No large amount of forethought, I hear, is ever enough. Otherwise, it depends on what you consider to be "enough."

It wasn't enough, for her, for me to sit at the dinner table peeling a banana with care. It wasn't enough for me to finish the banana, break apart and stack the sides of the peel, and sit with folded hands, beating my tongue against the sides of my lower mouth cavity, until she asked what was making that noise. She needed her concentration to figure out how much gas her car would burn on the way to Chicago the next weekend. I was not invited to Chicago. It was her friend's wedding, not my friend's wedding. If it had been my friend's wedding, I'd probably have invited my girlfriend.

I went to bed, as not drunk as, in a few months, I'd be drunk every night. Sprawled out on the bed until she never showed up to push me rolling over, I felt my body grow small, and large, and even my hair grew longer. My sense of direction spun inside my skull like a small pebble. Which way was south, east, west? North? Northwest was where Chicago was. I felt my hair grow longer, into a northwest-pointing, loose ponytail. Until then, I'd had no idea what a ponytail felt like. Part of me was closer to Chicago. I wondered as I slept how many girls from Chicago have loose ponytails.



My girlfriend sat out at the dinner table with fear in her face for as long as I slept. Who is she? What's her name? How often does she get hungry? What's her favorite cold thing to drink? Why didn't she want a banana? Did I really care to see her eat something? Does any of it matter?

The most that matters about her, and the small thing that I noticed when I knew that, at some point in the past, the Smoking Vegan had bewitched me wrongly was that the taciturn fear on my girlfriend's face was at once her defining characteristic and no more telling than a signature.

They say you can tell a lot from a person's signature. If you look closely enough.

A cashier at a drug store has no trouble declaring a signature authentic when you use a credit card. They'll just look at the credit card, look at the loops you put on paper with pen, and think "That's about right."

From that point, for more than a year, my girlfriend's facial signature looked like just a lot of loops. I figured anything with that many loops must have been the real thing, and never noticed I was failing to notice the loops weren't even spelling out her name. It'd be more accurate to say they weren't even spelling out any words at all.



nine


If you must know, I did once or twice imagine sex with the Smoking Vegan. I imagined dry, unbuttered sex with the Smoking Vegan over breakfast. Whether I ate toast with jam or eggs with ketchup or cereal with skim milk or bacon with grease, alone or with my girlfriend, sex with the Smoking Vegan once or twice was on my mind. Only over breakfast.

Once, over lunch, when sex with the Smoking Vegan was off my mind for the rest of the day, I asked her what had happened in Hawaii.

It was three days before the first day of spring, and more than a week since the end of Indiana University's Spring Break. We were on a bench with a view of the arboretum, I with a bag of peanut-oil-fried potato chips and a box of one-hundred-percent juice, and the Smoking Vegan with an organic bagel and no juice -- for she'd given it to me.

"I don't need that shit," she'd told me. "I got a bottle of water."

I didn't see her bottle of water, and I didn't look for it. Instead, I asked her a question, like making conversation.

The arboretum's famed cherry trees had yet to bloom. I'm not sure I've ever seen them bloom. Ten months out of the year, they're the color of dead wood, like a mirror of a winter behind or a telescope to a future winter. Eleven months out of the year, I'm busy doing something I don't want to do.

So I asked the Smoking Vegan what had happened in Hawaii. She was finishing her organic bagel when I asked her the question, and staring at the tip of a cigarette, inhaling, when she smacked her lips and resolved to answer.

"Two people got married. I got sunburn."

I slid the ends of my eyes over Smoking Vegans jutty shoulders. Shadowed with sunlight and twigs of a cold dry dead tree, she had freckles. The freckles, too, had burnt in the sun. Smoking Vegan's bandana that day was a dried blood kind of brick red.

At home, there was a documentary on one of those channels that shows documentaries. My gay black roommate was sitting in his big black beanbag chair with a sack of tortilla chips, a backwards baseball cap, and full attention. He didn't greet me. I didn't greet him. I stood next to him with my hands on my hips, and took in what he was taking in.

They were talking about Tanya Tucker. She was a country music star, and one I'd honestly never heard of until that afternoon. If my mother had been around, I could have admitted I'd never heard of Tanya Tucker, and she'd probably have told me it was impossible for me to "live in this country" my "whole life" and "never hear of Tanya Tucker."

They showed this guy with a face like a burlap sack. He had a mustache that wouldn't have looked out of place on an antique lampshade. He was proud of something.

"We took her into the dressing room and told her to sing for the man, and he couldn't believe the voice that little girl had."

I could imagine the man's face slightly less burlap-sack-like. He had his hands on a little girl's bony shoulders, and was guiding her into the dressing room of some kind of famous singer, and he asked her to sing. He had a look on his face like a woman with a baby in a beauty pageant.

For a few small seconds before I asked my gay black roommate if we had any more of those peach wine coolers, I wondered when and why no one ever pushed me by the shoulders into an important person's dressing room. I wondered why I'd never tried to sing. I wondered where my life -- or anyone's, really -- really heads after their first sold-out show at the Grand Old Opry.

The burlap-faced man spoke with authority when he said "And the rest was history."

His words made me swell with desire to drink, and feel big and small again.

"Two people got married. I got sunburn."

And I think: that's about right.








smiling gun.



ten



The day I was hired to assassinate American Rock Legend John Mellencamp, formerly John "Cougar" Mellencamp, began with a morning almost halfway like any other morning. The sun was high and yellow, the air was clean, and my alarm went off at ten-fifty-eight AM.

I broke out of a sleep that smelled like alcoholic floor cleaning and into a waking that smelled like overburnt raisin toast. A scraping metal butter knife somewhere was spreading cream cheese over raisin toast, drowning the smell. I scratched at my T-shirt after I'd put it on and yawned into the hallway.

My gay black roommate stood, a curious sight, spreading cream cheese he'd stolen from his job at a bagel shop over a slice of raisin-bread he'd bought full-price at the supermarket. Over jeans and a polo shirt, he wore a crayon-green apron. On his bald head was a visor. Those hands that could and did frequently palm basketballs were performing a culinary task of such small-scale I almost recalled King Kong with a woman in his fist. Who was that woman? What was the actress's name? I stood in the hall, wondering, until my gay black roommate folded his long legs enough to fit into his beanbag chair. He turned on the television, and took a bite that consumed half his slice of raisin toast. The news was on, and I was in the kitchen with a glass of water.

"It's that Mellencamp bitch," my gay black roommate said over a mouthful of crispy raisin toast. He said it like I'd asked him a question. I hadn't. I was a glass of water richer, and still looking through the cupboard, just because.

"Mellencamp?"

"Yeah, that John Cougar Mellencamp asshole."

"What about him?"

"He's on TV."

"Why's he on TV?"

"Fuck if I know. Look at the bitch."

So early in the morning, and my roommate was already moody. It must have been because he'd just gotten off work. He worked three hours a day at the bagel shop, four days a week. It must have been tough.

I eyeballed the TV. Sure enough, there was Mellencamp. He was wearing jeans and a checked blue button-down shirt. He was smiling, and wrinkled like a catcher's mitt. He was sitting in a chair in a television studio talking to some woman with jagged frosted hair.

"I like to see the kind of turnout we get. It's a real thrill," I caught him saying.

"Fucker's giving a concert downtown today."

"Downtown where? Downtown here?"

"Downtown here, yeah. Cracker son of a bitch."

"Where in downtown here?" I asked.

"Fuck if I know. In the street."

"In the street?"

The news cut away to footage of Mellencamp in the middle of some city street. It was a real American city street. There was a barbershop somewhere in view. If its neighbor were a candy shop, I wasn't able to tell. The camera stuck on Mellencamp. He was strumming an acoustic guitar with a pickup. He had a microphone a quarter of a foot in front of his smiling face. The music was thankgodfully muted as the interviewer asked questions. I was listening to neither the questions nor the answers. My roommate went on talking, and I looked for a harmonica, or else another band member. Some drums, a bass, or something. Was this guy really hot enough to stand in the middle of a street, alone, with a guitar, without percussion or bass? Was he that cool?

"John Cougar Mellencamp Fucker was up in Indianapolis yesterday. It's a surprise thing. Touring the nation or some shit. Started in Indiana. He's coming down to Bloomington today, it being his hometown and all."

"Hell."

"Yeah, so watch out for that bastard."

I clamped my lips around the rim of my glass, and repeated: "Hell."

"Watch out for that cracker motherfucker."

"I will, I will," I assured.

"He might be poking around corners or some shit, looking to start trouble."

In a second, I was standing back behind the kitchen counter, looking in at the living room, fumbling with the twist-tie on a loaf of white bread. It was orange, and torn. A piece of silver-colored wire jutted out and glared at me. I avoided being cut, at the expense of taking more than a minute to open the bread. When it was open, I had no idea what I'd wanted to do with it. I dropped a slice in the toaster, took a sip of water, cracked my back, and yawned. The newswoman went on talking about the way John Mellencamp's brand of rock and roll had "changed" the "historical landscape" of the "State of Indiana." I wondered how big an accomplishment, really, that was. In a standing half-sleep, I reminded myself of man-made lakes outside office parks. If I ever get a job, I thought, I'm going to be seated in a cubicle with my back to a door whose other side is positioned opposite an office door that opens into an office with a view of a lake. What's the use of constructing a lake at an office park, if the typical employee can't see it? It was a half-hungover Zen-meditation one-hand-clapping kind of state of mind, with the slight intrusion of a TV news broadcast's capsule John Mellencamp rock and roll history, set to the time limit of a toaster set on "light." My toast popped up about as white as I am. I didn't look for butter. I thought half of one time about frying some bacon, and gave it up. I crunched into the toast with mild anger. It made a sound like an old woman balling up a square of sandpaper.

"You got your class today?" my roommate asked me, eyes still on the Mellencamp still on television.

"Yeah," I said, chewing my dry toast. It made me thirsty. A sip of water rendered the cut-up toast pieces in my stomach acidic sponges. Some bubble of gas got lodged halfway up my esophagus.

"Your ho said she'd pick you up at the mall."

"The mall? The mall?"

"Yeah, she said she'd be waiting for your white ass outside Applebee's."

"Applebee's?"

"That's where she picked you up last time."

"Yeah, it is. It is where she picked me up last time."

"Well, there you go. So that's where she's picking you up again."

"Well, I didn't ask her to pick me up there again."

"She said she picked you up there last week, and the week before."

I thought back two weeks ago. The week after spring break, I'd gone to the mall to buy a new pair of comfortable walking shoes. I'd eaten a pretzel with cinnamon, played some Street Fighter II in the arcade, tried on a baseball cap, and then called my girlfriend from a payphone when I realized I was on track to be late. The week after that, I'd woken up at seven in the morning for God-knows-what reason, and my girlfriend was still at the Law Library. I went over to Steak 'n' Shake around seven-thirty, ate some strawberry pancakes and sausage, and drank three-quarters of a glass of syrupy orange juice while thinking about sex with the Smoking Vegan. Around nine in the morning, I found myself looking over a display of feminist literature at a Border's book store; much later, I repeated the pretzel ritual at the mall, before calling my girlfriend from the same payphone. Come to think of it, it might have been the payphone adjacent to the same payphone.

"Well, . . . yeah," I said, long after the conversation had disappeared, long after the news had started talking about something else.

"Yeah what?"

"Yeah, I was at the mall two weeks in a row. That doesn't mean I'm going to be there this week, though."

"Shit. I guess she just figured it was your new Friday thing."

When he said "Friday," I realized -- it's Friday. I should be at the mall or something.

"Well -- it's not."

"Well, it looks like you don't got no say in it. She said she's going to meet you there at eleven-thirty. Outside Applebee's."

"Why Applebee's? Last time, it was the side of the movie theater?"

"Well, you know how she don't like driving around the mall like that. She said it'd be easier for her to pick you up near Applebee's."

I opened my mouth, felt air touch the insides of my cheeks, and then closed my mouth. There was nothing more to be said. Someone else had clearly thought this portion of my day out way ahead of time; as a person who had done such, they were probably right.

"So, uh, what are you up to today?"

My roommate didn't have classes on Fridays.

"I got to go meet someone for dinner."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I haven't seen them in a while."

I almost scoffed. Here, this two-meter-tall black man was omitting pronouns in his speech. It reminded me of the way my best friend in the ninth grade talked about girls. When he'd finally made friends with a girl, he wouldn't stop calling her "They." I didn't bother to note the sitcom-ish shame evident in his speech; rather, I marked it for its stupidity and tactlessness. Why not just say "She"? He wouldn't say "They" about a guy, would he? Of course not. Now, my gay black roommate -- did he really deserve to be any different? Worse yet, did he think he'd have to use "They" in front of me when he was talking about another man? Did he think I was somehow unaccepting of his homosexuality? Did he think it made me uncomfortable? And if he was meeting a girl -- what does that say about children, if anything?

I was whisper-talking at a corner of a slice of white toast. I put it in my mouth, soaked it with saliva, and swallowed. My roommate went on looking at the television. They were talking about rock and roll again.

"Fucking cracker John Cougar Mellencamp motherfucker."

Dusting crumbs off my hands, I informed, "You know, he dropped the 'Cougar' from his name back in, like, the eighties."

"Well, shit. I didn't know that shit."

"Well, uh, neither did I."

My roommate scoffed at the television. "You know, his bitch wife came in this morning."

"To the bagel shop?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"She knows the owner. She, like, went to high school with him or some shit."

"Shit."

"Yeah, he gets her free bagels, all the time. Fucking bitch. She had this grin on today. I wondered what it was for. White bitches and their bagels. Shit."

"She's a bitch?"

"Yeah, shit, ain't you heard?"

"You never told me about this."

"Well, fuck. Shit, man, you never ask how my day at work was or nothing. Shit. Well, shit, she's a real bitch."

"How?"

"How what?"

"I mean, how is she a bitch?"

"She need some kind of excuse or something?"

"Nah, I mean, what's wrong with her? What's she do? What's she say?"

"Just envision a bitchy bitch, and you got it."

"I'm thinking of some gray-permed woman in a nurse's outfit, missing half her teeth."

"Nah, shit, whitey, that ain't how it is. She's . . . she's one of those supermodel types. Kind of. Look like she was a cheerleader in high school or some shit. Shit, she ain't a cheerleader now."

". . .Okay."

"Yeah."

"So, what does she say? Is she bossy? Mean? Pushy?"

My gay black roommate snorts. He's looking at the television. Five minutes after its first airing, the Mellencamp interview is repeating from the beginning. The Indianapolis news broadcasts want to give everyone in their wrong mind time to call in sick to work and drive fifty minutes down to Bloomington.

"John Cracker Mellencamp," my roommate is saying when I decide to go to the mall.

He's still staring at the checked flannel and blue jeans of John Mellencamp when I emerge from my bedroom in a black T-shirt and blue jeans of my own. I put on my comfortable walking shoes, and I'm gone, without even noticing that my roommate still has that half a slice of raisin toast in his lap.



eleven



It was cold inside the mall. My bare arms turned red like in hot bathwater. I ate a hazelnut pretzel at a plastic table in the section of mall hall one might call a food court. I read a copy of the Indiana Daily Student while I ate the pretzel. Another (white, male, rich) student had died of alcohol during some kind of fraternity party the night before. It was his nineteenth birthday, and he drank enough to cause him to vomit six times in his sleep. The first time he vomited, it was into his pillow; he was lying on his stomach. By the fourth time he vomited, one of his friendly and drunken housemates saw fit to roll him onto his back. He then vomited two more times. Unlike in the cartoons, the vomit didn't form any kind of geyser. It just kind of bubbled halfway up his esophagus, splurted up into the back of his throat, and settled in the upper part of his trachea. The article is very clinical, and even technical, in the way it describes the physics of the vomit-settling. No more than fourteen hours after the death, autopsies are revealing things like questionable lividity -- apparently, some blood settled to the inside of the dead bastard's elbows, indicating that he might have died on his stomach. If this is the case -- and the Indiana Daily Student will let you know by tomorrow -- then there's a chance he died of alcohol poisoning, not dumb luck of the vomit variety. If it's alcohol poisoning, we can expect a sad mother to give a televised speech about responsibility to the entire frat house. This isn't the question I wanted answered, however. My question wasn't even a question. No, the tip of my inverted pyramid was much smaller. I wanted to know what kind of sheets the kid was sleeping on. When I wondered that, I felt like I'd just gotten to the end of one long sentence in the story of my life. I didn't even remember what I was getting at when I got there. All I knew was that I'd ended in a different tense than I'd started in.

When I looked up from my newspaper, it looked later than it did when I'd first looked down at it. To be sure, it was later. Still, something about the later-feeling left a bad taste in my mouth. The mall felt darker.

College Mall is a dark mall. Far away from a metropolis, far away from any other mall, and guaranteed patrons by the close proximity of a university full of kids with nothing else to do, College Mall doesn't have to resort to petty interior decoration tricks to get people shopping. There isn't another GAP or Abercrombie for miles; if the late-teenagers want to show up for the first day of Generic Business 101 in uniform, they're going to have to settle for this Eddie Bauer, or no Eddie Bauer.

A little girl with hair like a rag doll's and eyes bigger than her forehead was looking at me from behind her mother's back. Her mother was waiting in line for a chicken sandwich. The look on the girl's face -- like a boy fifty feet away from her had just tossed a boy fifty feet away from himself (and a hundred feet away from her) a toad the size of a silver dollar -- made me vaguely hungry for chicken fingers.

I checked my watch. What time was I supposed to meet my girlfriend again? It was a minute after noon. I stood up and folded my newspaper. I walked past the hat shop, and three kiosks selling wretched multicolored glass beads. Beside a place that sold daggers and crystal statues of dragons was a Kay-Bee Toy Store. A large piece of human male was stuffing giant yellow rubber balls into a white metal cage as tall as he was. Just as it occurred to me to check out the ATM, this guy piped up.

"Yo," he said.

I looked at him. If not for the bald head, I got the impression he'd have had a receding hairline. If not for the large yellow ball he held between his hands, I'm sure I'd have had the opportunity to more accurately represent his fatness. His nametag said "Gary."

"Gary?" I asked him, like I wasn't sure. I was sure.

"Yo, Jack," he said, like he knew me. He did.

"How you been doing?" I asked him. I already knew.

"Last year of my MFA."

That means "Master of Fine Arts;" I used to like to joke -- to myself, since I never took up the practice of talking to other people about such things -- that it stood for Mother Fucking Asshole. Which was supposed to describe Fat Gary. See, that's clever. I used to be clever like that.

"Wow, third year already, huh?"

"You working on that MA in Journalism?"

"Yeah."

"We both never left IU, huh?"

"I guess not."

"You been writing anything, you know, creative, lately?"

"Not unless you count commenting on student papers."

"Oh yeah? Can't you never tell them how much they suck?"

I had my left hand in my left pocket. My right hand gripped my sweaty forty-two-ounce cup of Coca-Cola from The Great American Cookie Company.

"Not really, no."

"They don't have workshops in journalism classes, do they?" Fat Gary said with a scoff.

"Not really, no."

"Remember that workshop, years back?"

"Not really."

"It was kind of fun."

"Yeah, it was alright."

"Dr. _______ is my mentor, this year."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"I wonder if he remembers you?"

What a nice question for Gary to ask on my behalf, while himself wearing a polo shirt carrying a toy store's logo. Were there no paying jobs in the English Department? Hell, are there ever paying jobs in any English Department?

"I wonder," I said.

"Hey, I saw you at the poetry reading a few months back."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah," Gary went on, palming and squeezing his yellow rubber ball. "Really wacky shit. You wrote that poem?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I did."

"Sorry I didn't get a chance to say hello."

"Likewise."

I think -- and I'm probably not mistaken -- that Gary had read a story at the reading. The story was most likely about leukemia. All of his stories were.

When we were in the same fiction workshop, he'd won an award for a story about a young guy with leukemia which he kept a secret from his mother, in a shopping mall shortly after it opened, with his girlfriend, searching for the suit he'd be buried in. It was narrated by the girlfriend. The girlfriend was a "Smart cookie," as the teacher put it.

As the narrator put it, early in the story, at a point when the girlfriend pushes down the boyfriend during an argument, "Now, I'm a short, petite, maybe even mousy girl. Still, that boy went down like a gumball machine." The workshop attendees, ever-the-lazier-than-the-writer, commended: "I like the gumball machine line." At one point, the girlfriend complains about her life with a leukemia-stricken boyfriend, shedding light on their lack of money, their cold apartment, how they use the oven for heat: "Sometimes I want to stick my head inside." The teacher said this "fusion of humor and dead-seriousness is big in today's literary fiction."

My tales of life with an inguinal hernia went ignored, no matter how subtle or un-subtle I told; when asked if he'd known anyone with leukemia, Fat Gary struggled to answer. I don't remember what he said. He might have said something about how leukemia interested him enough to make him want to write a "collection of short stories about coping -- with the pain of leukemia." The title was most likely something very unobtrusive. I don't remember what it was.

I do, however, remember a story he'd written about a man whose mother had just died of leukemia. He met his stepsister for dinner and will-discussion, which climaxes in kind of a romantic relationship. At one point, when the stepsister orders a drink for her stepbrother and is asked why she knows what he wants, she replies, "Because I'm a detective. I'm incognito. I know everything. I've got it all researched." During my round in the workshopping, I told him the facts -- after everyone had expressed their delight at the "spiciness" of the "stepsister character," I pointed out how dumb that "detective" line sounded.

"I just . . . I don't know," I told him. "I just don't think it fits. It feels weird. It's kind of embarrassing. Like watching your little brother die in a play." I was only speaking so many words because they were flowing out; I was criticizing Fat Gary because it was easy, and to me, my words weren't unnecessary. Far from my usual terse "Yeah" or "No" criticism, I was being specific on how his piece made me feel.

Gary drummed sausage fingers on the table and looked at me with a level stare. His eyes had a socket-y kind of look that made his nose appear bigger when he was talking defensively about something.

"You mean it fell flat? If you want to say it fell flat, just tell me it feel flat."

I didn't know what to say. I was sure "It fell flat" wasn't quite the expression I was looking for. My attempts at further criticism, sadly, fell flat.

I dropped the class soon after that. Gary had four other stories due that semester. I'm sure at least four of them were about leukemia. And after the detective incident, I was certain he'd never known anyone with leukemia in his life.

Years later, he was asking me a question in a friendly tone. He was asking it not scared. He was asking it a little jealous, and air-conditioned. He'd only been on his feet for two hours, three tops. Though he'd be on his feet for eight more hours that Friday afternoon, he wasn't thinking about the future, or my and his almost-headbutting past. He was only thinking about the present -- maybe a little jealous, like I said -- maybe just making a little conversation.

"Say, you hear anything about Mellencamp being in town today?"

Half a second passed, me with my hands in my pockets, cold arms red, warm, goosebumpy like in hot bathwater, and I toyed: with my house key in my left hand in my left pocket, and with the idea of teasing Fat Gary. I let go of the idea

"A little bit, yeah."



Outside, it was sunny, and not sweaty. The sky was blue without clouds. No clouds clouded the world over, no clouds moved in the wind. Turning fifteen degrees at a time, squinting in the sun at the flatness of the paved plain of a shopping mall parking lot, seeing stories-tall signs change places on the horizon under power lines that separated one world from the other, I got the impression that the sky was moving.

Whether the sky was really moving or not, my girlfriend's car was moving toward me with the right turn-signal blinking. She stopped with the passenger's side door a half an inch away from optimally lined-up with my hips. With a click, the door unlocked. I opened the door and ducked inside, where the air-conditioner was louder than the radio.

If I had leukemia, and I had just been shopping for my burial suit, and my girlfriend had had to go inside to retrieve me, that's where my being late would have gotten me knocked over like a gumball machine. With no leukemia, the most I could do to make my insignificant other angry was try to put my sweaty forty-two-ounce Coca-Cola in her cup-holder. With no leukemia of my own, the most confrontation I'd see would revolve entirely around someone else.

That is, she said:

"I circled the parking lot three times."

Here, I didn't have to ask, "This parking lot, or the whole mall parking lot?" I asked it anyway.

"Just this parking lot," she said, motioning with the corner of her forehead to the cracked concrete surrounding Sears and Applebee's.

"Oh," I said, not being able to tell you how the information made me feel.

"I'm taking you to the journalism building?"

"Yeah."

"You'll be done at two-thirty?"

"You're going to the Law Library?"
"Yeah. Two-thirty?"

"The students are working on their projects today. I might be able to leave early."

My girlfriend turned the right turn-signal on, and prepared to slide out onto College Mall Road. With microwave-oven precision, she removed her cellular phone from a compartment inside the armrest. She dropped it onto my lap.

"Have them page me at the Law Library. The number's on the speed dial."

Here, for the last time in a long time, I was tempted to use her name at the beginning of a sentence.

". . . Uh . . . I don't need to bother with that."

"Well?"

"I can just meet you at two-thirty."

"What, and make you stand around?"

"I'll find something to do."

I remembered the pinball machines in the basement of the Indiana Memorial Union Building, conveniently connected to the journalism school.

My girlfriend's car began the journey toward Third Street. The cellular phone in my lap began to vibrate.

I picked it up. I showed her the face, and the incoming phone number.

"You want to get this?"

"Ignore it," she said.

Her eyes were on the road. Her eyes were hers. Her cellular phone was in my hand. Her cellular phone was mine.

I hear they can cause cancer. Maybe, by the end of the day, I could put a nice down-payment on some leukemia.



eleven



The dean of the Indiana University School of Journalism has a trapezoidal prism of hair atop its head. The dean happens to both like me and teach the magazine-layout/editing class I assistant-taught on that day. The students were supposed to be working on their final projects. When the dean hadn't shown up past the first fifteen minutes of the class, everyone decided not to do their projects. They were talking.

I couldn't see why anyone in their right or wrong mind would want to do a boring magazine layout project, anyway -- especially with the iMacs in the Journalism School computer labs. Seriously, could they have picked a worse sponsor for a journalism school's computer labs? iMac keyboards are about one-eighth the size of normal keyboards, and eight times as sticky; when a student takes it upon him or herself to major in a subject where each spelling error results in a lost letter-grade, this is an unnecessary insult. Normally, I'd unplug my own keyboard from my own computer, and carry it under my arm like a rock guitar. On that day, what with my having been scheduled to walk to the mall and eat a pretzel, I'd forgotten.

I didn't try to push the students to complete their projects. If they wanted to sit by and fail the class, that was fine by me. It meant less papers to grade.

It wouldn’t have been so boring to grade all of their papers if they weren't all doing the same thing. Essentially, the dean had dredged up some old New Yorker article about Tiger Woods, typed it up, and inserted hundreds upon hundreds of random spelling and grammatical errors. The students were to fix the errors, create creative infographics, and invent an inventive new layout.

My project -- I had to do one, too -- was to research and write a feature article and create a layout. This took considerably more work, and made me considerably more irked when the kids kept talking during class.

I was writing about an English school in Indonesia. It was easy to pound an article out. All I had to do was look up the information, send a few emails, cultivate a few statistics, and I had a nice-sized lifestyle piece. I tried my best to use descriptive language. I wanted to paint a picture -- otherwise, the article wasn't interesting. Who wants to read about an English school in Indonesia if it's not interesting?

I had names of teachers, names of cities, names of villages, and names of islands. I'm not sure I remember even half of them, now. It's not important. The names were never important. I just plugged them into the article, making sure to spell everything correctly, and then surrounded the names with descriptive language.

The water is blue, and mirrored. The sun is high and white. The clouds are translucent, and puffy. Night falls after ten in the evening.

The teachers, because of immunization issues, live in air-conditioned huts on a rocky shore a half a mile away from the island on which the school is located. Every morning, with the sunrise, they awake, bathe in a lagoon, board a canoe, and paddle past jagged rocks, under a big wooden watchtower platform in the water, and to the beach where the village is located.

Here, I inserted a great quote from a female teacher about how, every morning, it's like the first time arriving in the village. Every morning, a few kids -- skin shiny, black, and wet from a morning swim -- line up on the beach to gawk at the teachers like they've never seen them before.

I then talk about the program, and how it got started. Who wants to send foreigners to Indonesia, to teach English, of all subjects? How much of a demand is there for English, in Indonesia? Why teach Indonesian kids English?

I quote a male teacher as saying that everyone -- even implicitly unfortunate little Indonesian kids -- deserves a second chance. I then try hard not to ask, "Second chance? What about a first chance?" That wouldn't be consistent tone.

At this point, I resolve to tell an anecdote. One morning, while bathing in a supposedly pure spring, a male teacher's groin attracted a large number of not-quite healthy slugs. It was shortly before sunrise, so he didn't notice them until he'd already started to get a little lightheaded. This happened to be on board the canoe to the English school. He freaked out at this point, screaming at the native paddling the canoe. He commanded him to stop. The teacher jumped in the water, and flailed around, screaming, for half a minute, before spasmodically climbing up onto the first tier of the watchtower standing in the middle of the lagoon. With his arms held out wide like hugging a grizzly bear, he gripped one of the log watchtower struts, and moaned, and wailed. A female teacher had to follow him up the tower. He kept inching away from her, screaming that she should stay back. He didn't know what was wrong with him. He thought he was possessed (earlier, I mentioned something about spirits of the islands, so as to avoid tossing in something parenthetical at this point). The female teacher told him to stop being silly, and tried to lure him away from the strut he was hugging. He wouldn't move. So the female teacher took the initiative: she scooted around the other side of the wooden tower, and grabbed hold of the male teacher's swim trunks -- yes, the male teachers taught classes in swim trunks and sandals, and I had some full-color photographs to prove it -- and yanked them off. They tore like something out of a cartoon. The male teacher screamed like a female as the boatman laughed. The male teacher then jumped into the water. Everyone laughed. How many people "everyone" consists of, I'm not sure. I think there were two other teachers in the boat.

My first draft of the story mentioned that two other teachers were in the boat. My second draft left this detail out -- I'd gone over the 3,000-word limit. Also left out of the second draft was my description of the boatman's rowing all the way back to camp so the teacher could put on a new pair of pants. My second draft skipped straight to a candid quote by the male teacher in question, in which he says he's now able to laugh at the incident, and think of it fondly -- he even goes so far as to call it "good times."

This is where the drastic change of tone occurs. The teachers awoke one day, as the story goes, to find the canoe unmanned. The boatman was nowhere to be seen. They board the canoe, paddle to the beach, and see the village smoldering. In the night, some Muslim group had attacked the village and destroyed the school, mistaking it for a Jesuit church. I then list facts about the Muslim situation in Indonesia, give a "where are they now" of the teachers, and close everything up with an image of the high tide coming in under the watchtower.

The gist of this assignment was to teach me precision in editing and revising my own work -- both written and visual. The way the exercise was to teach me this was pretty simple. I had to turn in two stories: the first was to be between 2,900 and 3,000 words, and could be laid out over as many pages as I saw fit. The second was to be between 750 and 800 words, and restricted to one page.

It is, perhaps, impossible to write the short version of the story first without raising innumerable red flags deep within the Indiana University School of Journalism Dean's trapezoidal prism of hair. The reason for this is that written small things can't become bigger without a certain degree of awkwardness. That awkwardness is like the inverse of stretch marks on a human being who lost a lot of weight very quickly. Though the small thing made large might fit the size requirement, it will not do it cleanly, and this is the problem. It has to be clean. Everything in the world of precision writing has to be clean. Otherwise, what's the point of precision?

The only way to complete the assignment, the dean knows, and I know, is to write the long story first, and then -- as per creative writing classes -- "kill your babies."

Looking at my 3,000-word article, it didn't take long to notice that the anecdote about the leeches and the ripping-off of the swim trunks was longer than the anecdote about the burned-down village. The latter being the point of the essay, anyway, I figured this wasn't good. So I spent a week removing the leech anecdote from the writing.

It was slow. At first, I tried trimming two or three words out of every sentence. With each deleted word, with each restructured sentence, I took a tally in my head, counting backwards from 2,991. After three days of trimming, I started to question where I got off thinking I could keep this part of the piece in any form. I had 2,601 words to turn into 800. The entire leech story would have to go. So I cut it out. I then had 1,714 words. This was still twice as much as I was allowed.

During class hours, I brooded about this. I chewed on pencils, avoiding the erasers. When a student asked me a question about his or her boring paper, I answered it boredly, and then went on brooding over my story.

It cut straight from the quote about showing up on the beach every day and into the bit about the boat being empty that one fateful morning. Without the story about the leeches, this didn't flow for me. The dean had a look at it, and told me to try to read it one more time, as a reader, not as a writer -- try to imagine I'd never read the story before, and then it would start to seem that way. Did the story not flow without the leech anecdote? Or was I only missing it because I'd written it? Was all the information still in place? Would it still be a good read? Remember, you're being graded on layout, editing, and content.

I went the shallow route, and cut two hundred words on a sentence-to-sentence basis. At one point, in quick, wood-tasting semi-anger, I trimmed the story down to 600 words by way of removing every piece of description. The Reader's Digest version of my story was slim, to be sure -- and also flat and dull. I saved it into my personal online directory, and never bothered to look at it again.

On the morning the dean didn't show up to class, I was staring at a 1,601-word version I almost liked. I was chewing on a ball-point pen, and the window to my right was opened wide. The yellow, bright air outside, not blowing in, reminded me of a thawed, empty refrigerator that's still plugged in. The metal electric fan on the ledge by the printer wasn't plugged in. It didn't need to be.

One girl in a "SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM" sweatshirt poked by to ask me where the dean was.

"I have to talk to the dean."

"Oh."

"It's about my project."

"Oh."

"Do you know where the dean is?"

All of the other students were chattering mostly quietly when this happened, about nineteen minutes past twelve-thirty.

"I don't know where the dean is."

"Can you call the dean?"

"Can I -- can I what?"

"Call the dean?"

The girl was pointing at my girlfriend's cellular phone. The phone is a metallic kind of lavender, and clearly not mine. At least, to me, it's clearly not mine.

"That's not my phone."

"It's not?"

"No."

"Whose is it?"

Here's where I looked at the girl. She had a face caressed by acne scars, and hair curled by a vengeful genetic god. She was leaning forward in such a way as to suggest hands on knees. She licked fat silver braces.

"It's not mine."

The sound of an official key in the official lock of the official computer lab shut the thirty whispering girls up. The door clicked and rattled open. The dean strode in, trapezoidally excited about something. The girl with the braces turned around, and said "Dean!"

The dean was by now in the middle of the aisle separating the two rows of rows of computers. Hand to side of face, the Dean declared, "John Mellencamp is outside!"

The girl with the braces dropped a pen when she squealed. I followed it to the carpet.

When the dean said "Class dismissed!" -- that's when I noticed the pen was mine. When did the girl with the braces take the pen from me?

I didn't care. From outside, on the dead-refrigerator wind, a single strum of a low-E string being tuned floated into the opened, dirty window by my right shoulder.

I fixed my eyes on the single compound word "wooden," embedded within my computer monitor. I held my gaze with the force a man applies to a bear-hug on a watchtower strut after he's just been stripped of his pants.



"You coming, Jack?" the dean asked me, when I was the only student left.

"Nah, nah."

"Not a Mellencamp fan?"

"Nah, it's -- it's not that. I've got, uh, work to do. Lots of catching up to do. You know."

"Don't work too hard. And lock the lab up."

"Sure."



I went on gripping the watchtower strut in my mind, pantsless, until thirty-six minutes after twelve-thirty. My 1,601-word story was now 1,533, and I felt like I needed a cigarette. Only I don't smoke. I stood up, pocketed my girlfriend's cell phone, and somewhere deep inside my brain resolved to find someone who did smoke.


twelve



The Smoking Vegan was waiting for me outside the front of the Journalism School. She was smoking a cigarette. Seeing her fingers around the cigarette made me push my right hand into my right pocket, and push down on the lavender cellular phone that rested there.

With the back of her head, she motioned to the street, and greeted me without greeting me.

"You hear about this shit?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Fucking hick bastard."

"Mellencamp?"

"The whole town's in an uproar about him. People are cutting work and everything. Traffic on I-46 is backed up past Seventeenth Street. Hell."

"Shit."

"You hungry?"

"A little."

"Want to go to the Union? I forgot to bring a bagel today."

"Sure."


The Indiana Memorial Union Building, on a day when Indiana's Proudest Son is come to town, I take it, is always something like a ghost town. On any other day of the week, the dozen-dozens of students lodged around on benches or food courts chairs would have looks of mostly-contentment on their chewing, talking faces, like they felt pride to exist beneath the seven-foot ceilings of the Largest Student Union Building in the World. Sometimes, you'll catch someone passing around a rumor about how some Chinese university is trying to build a larger student union building in China, and if the person passing that rumor around isn't a business major, they might mention how Indiana University's Musical Arts Center's stage is only inches larger than that of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, and it was made those few inches bigger for the bragging rights alone.

When Mellencamp is in town, the kids behind the Pizza Hut counter wear frowns, and serve no one. It made me wonder, that one time I saw it -- saw the emptiness of a usually-filled place -- how many people could fit in the street, within hearing distance of that one amp, that one guitar, and that one man.

The Smoking Vegan and I shared conversation about ants (how many it takes to lift a piece of steak) and club soda (why, really, does it get out stains?) as we sat at a table overlooking a staircase that reminded me of something unspecific about middle school. I drank what remained of my two-hours-old sweaty paper cup of Coca-Cola as I took turns listening, then being listened to. It was less difficult than it might have been.

The Smoking Vegan had a lot to say. My mind wasn't on what she was saying, nor was it on predicting what she might say next. It was on counting the students in the cafeteria.

People were evacuating the place like it was a nice day outside. In a way, I suppose you could say it was a nice day outside. You couldn't tell from the Indiana Memorial Union cafeteria. There are no windows. I sat across from the Smoking Vegan as she sipped a bottle of spring water. Her big amber eyes leapt out of her skull and followed each deserting student out of the cafeteria.

"Busy day," she said, and she didn't mean it.

"Tell me about it."

"These hick bastards."

"Yep. Hick bastards."

"Come on," Smoking Vegan said, holding her bottle of water under her arm. "Let's go play some pinball."

"Sure."

I followed the Smoking Vegan down a hallway that had once been three hallways. One floor was made of tiles you'd see in an elementary school classroom. One floor was made of tiles you'd see in a university dormitory bathroom. The other floor was carpeted in thick green. Smiling down at the thick green carpet were various paintings of various old people in old clothing.



In a little grotto in the basement, a pair of black students with arms thicker than my head were playing pool and talking loudly. They were dressed entirely in sweatpant material, and one of them was chewing a toothpick when he tipped his head to the Smoking Vegan. The red-faced girl behind the bowling alley's shoe-rental counter was reading an issue of the school newspaper with a dropped jaw and frequent scoffs of teary anger. The Smoking Vegan kept her eyes on the shoe counter girl as she rounded the corner. She watched the shoe counter girl like an off-duty crook watches a cop.

I laid a hand atop a Star Wars pinball machine from the early 1990s. Using my right index fingernail, I groped at the glass. Someone had taken a blunt object -- most likely a key -- and scratched a long, wide groove into the window to the playing field. With all the internal bonus lights turned off, the inside of the pinball machine struck me like a the interior of a closed shopping mall. I envisioned an off-duty gumball machine somewhere around a corner, and a still on-duty security guard, or woman pushing a floor-buffer. My imagination wasn't strong enough. I let my thumbnail settle into the key-scratch groove. I felt it, with carved-out wonder. I though philosophical things I couldn't begin to describe. Beneath a place where thousands of students ate lunch daily, just not today, behind a would-be pool hall, I was thinking -- and I know not why -- that the person who'd scratched the pinball glass with a key had wanted to touch the pinball.

"Look at this shit," the Smoking Vegan was saying.

"What shit?"

She held up a newspaper. The front page headline was eighteen points larger than regulation. If it hadn't said what it said, someone on the Indiana Daily Student Staff would probably have gotten fired:

"MELLENCAMP IS HERE!"

There was a picture of John Mellencamp playing his shitty little acoustic guitar in the street. It was that same American town I'd seen on the news that morning. Behind him was a barber shop, and . . . just beyond that barber shop was a candy shop. Hadn't I imagined a candy shop that morning? Was I psychic or something?

"Where did you get that paper?"

"It was right here, on the NeoGeo."

"Right there?"

"Yeah, rolled up."

She rolled up the newspaper, and tucked it between the joysticks and the television monitor of the NeoGeo cabinet. The paper unrolled a little bit, and spun. Both the Smoking Vegan and I looked at it when it did so. I picked up the paper, as the Smoking Vegan reached into her corduroy jacket pocket for her cigarettes. She licked the length of the cigarette as I unrolled the paper, and saw that headline again, for the first time:

"MELLENCAMP IS HERE!"

There was that picture of John Mellencamp. He wasn't even looking at the camera. Though I already knew -- thanks to Indiana University's Visual Communication J210 -- that it was wrong to take a picture of a subject who was looking at the camera, since Mellencamp was the subject, it struck me as distastefully unaesthetic. How dare he . . .

"Hey, is this a special edition or something?" I asked the Smoking Vegan. She was going through her pockets for a lighter. She kept her cigarette clamped in her teeth.

"Fuck if I know."

"It doesn't say 'special edition,'" I said, inspecting the paper.

"Should it?"

"Well, yeah," I said. "I think. I mean, I read the paper this morning. The front page story was all about some kid who drowned on his own vomit last night."

"A frat boy?"

"Yeah."

"I heard about that shit yesterday."

The Smoking Vegan had found her lighter.

"Where? The paper? Word of mouth?"

"Could have been," the Smoking Vegan said, exhaling her first puff. "You wanna play some Samurai Shodown?" She threw her amber irises at the NeoGeo's faded television screen. I rolled up the newspaper like strangling a snake. I scanned the lit-up panel with the game selections in it. It was either Bust a Move, Samurai Shodown, or Shock Troopers: Second Squad. I remembered the latter, from my own college days.

"They have Shock Troopers--"

"Nah, chief, it don't work. Only Samurai Shodown."

I stared at the faded monitor. It should have cycled through all three choices. However, when the Samurai Shodown demo ended, the next demo to begin was . . . Samurai Shodown again.

The announcer read, in Japanese, dramatically:

"A Samurai fears not death."

A minute later, I was afraid of something else. Cigarette clamped in her teeth, the Smoking Vegan was smoking me again and again. I was running out of the quarters I'd need for the bus later. The Smoking Vegan's cigarette tip turned as white as her bandanna was green. She managed to puff and exhale without removing the cigarette from her lips. On any other day, when her hands weren't so busy clicking a joystick, I'd not find the lip-dexterity so overly interesting. Somewhere neither inside me nor outside me, I was thinking of how the Smoking Vegan might kiss, if she were to kiss something.

The Smoking Vegan's onscreen avatar was Earthquake, a great fat ninja whose weapon was a hooked blade on a chain. I was Nakoruru, a purple-haired, four-foot-tall girl ninja with a pet falcon. The game was muted. As the giant fat man vertically and horizontally slashed the tiny purple girl, the only sounds to show for it were the angry clickings of fingers on buttons, echoed on the shallow Union Building ceiling, calling to mind keystrokes on keyboards on computers in a nuclear bomb shelter within a mountain.

It was a mismatch in more than just aesthetic terms. The Smoking Vegan played the attack buttons like a four-keyed piano. She manipulated her joystick with the ease and grip one uses to tap ash from a cigar. I was pounding, tapping, and losing. I was thinking we'd come down here to play pinball. The humid basement air filled with a wet-nicotine aroma. The fat man stomped on the little woman, and then finished her with a hook-blade-slice that tore her chest open. A geyser of red blood sprayed up. The screen faded at the conclusion of our seventh furious battle; when all was in blackness, I could see and feel the Smoking Vegan's reflected eyes looking at my reflected eyes.

She fetched the cigarette from her mouth and tapped out some white ashes onto the tile floor. Her cigarette in her right hand, she scratched at the index fingernail of her left hand with her index thumbnail. She watched the fingernail-on-thumbnail scratching as I stepped back from the NeoGeo cabinet and grabbed the abandoned newspaper.

The Smoking Vegan threw her left hand to her side. With some kind of red-haired grace, she brought her cigarette-holding right hand down to the flat surface of the NeoGeo cabinet, just above the "B" button of Player Two's joystick. With a hiss, the plastic sputtered and curled around.

"Let's go," the Smoking Vegan said to me, and I didn't refuse.

She was already gone out into the pool hall when I made the decision to go with her wherever it was she was going. For those few seconds without the Smoking Vegan, I stared at the singed NeoGeo. There had been a few other cigarette burns before the Smoking Vegan's. The idea of the vandalism isn't what bothered me, however.

I'd lived -- how many years was it? -- this long, and seen many a cigarette-burned arcade cabinet. Yet it's taken until right now, today, to actually see a cabinet be burned.

I felt like something beyond me was ending, or else something involving me was about to begin. It wasn't a good feeling. It made me thirsty. Tap water would have done nicely.

Just as I stepped around the corner, past the sleepy bowling-alley-shoe-rental girl, my right pants pocket emitted a hard vibration. I ducked back, out of the Smoking Vegan's possible earshot. Hip to an old pinball machine, I took out the cell phone, and had a look at the incoming phone number.

"PAYPHONE," it said.

Who would be calling from a payphone?

I pulled the phone further out of my pocket. Many of the flowery dangling ornaments got stuck on my house keys. I had to wrestle with metal cords and chains for three moments before I was ready to pick up the phone.

"Hello?" I said, looking at my reflection in the Star Wars Pinball scoreboard.

"Jack!"

"Yeah?"

"Damn it, why didn't you pick up?"

It was my girlfriend. She was speaking in a nasal scream-whisper.

"I . . . had trouble with the phone."

"Damn it," she said through her teeth.

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. There's -- there's a problem."

"A problem? What kind of problem?"

My girlfriend took a breath with a sound like she was lowering her voice into the phone with a fishhook.

"Listen -- there's been . . . an emergency."

I gulped. "A-an emergency?"

"Yeah. An emergency."

"What . . . what kind of emergency?"

My girlfriend thought about it with a hum.

"It's an . . . emergency!"