On the eve of my brothers’ last day as sophomores, Claudia Berman rings the bell. They barrel down the stairs and Brian trips on the way and says Timmy tripped him. Timmy makes for the front lawn and Brian puts a tackle to Timmy’s knees, flips him over, and starts whaling on his face. I run outside to pull the skull-sapper out of Brian’s calf-sheath while Timmy, spouting purple from the nose and mouth, Brian’s forearm pressed against his trachea, flails his arms around, trying to get hold of something. He gets Brian’s ear. The left one. It comes off. Brian falls backward, on top of me, holding his earhole, bleeding less than I’d expect. Claudia screams Timmy’s name and runs inside for towels.
It’s the end of Brian’s alpha. It’s the end of Timmy’s optimism. It’s the end of a lot of things.
Dad takes bedding to the attic and sleeps on a slab.
Mom hits the local singles bars on Fridays.
Months pass.
Brian’s prosthetic ear—which the insurance company covers only half the cost of, thus engendering the misappropriation of tuition for my first year of college and destroying, once and for all, any false hopes I might have had of getting even a used Kia—starts coming loose on cold days and finally falls plum off after the Winter Formal Dance, while he’s walking to an Inspiration Point–bound Chevy with Claudia, for whom he knows he’s consolation meat. I graduate high school, turn eighteen years old, and when I try to enlist in the Coast Guard, they won’t have me. As I walk out of the recruiting office, the guy who’d been queued up behind me calls me a homo and I pretend not to hear because no one cares what I do anyway. Timmy wears all black all the time and, with hot irons and scalpels stolen from Dad’s lab, he mutilates his thighs and lower abdomen to absolve his guilt about Brian’s ear, which Brian keeps milking, the guilt. Mom starts dating a rhubarb farmer from Kenosha, telling me about it. She says he’s gentle, and clubfooted, but he loves her.
Our life, by this time, has become a cartoon. Maybe it’s an X-rated cartoon, and maybe it would seem more real if, in my bumbling, fleshy way, I weren’t trying so hard to make a prime-time morality play of it, but still: if on a certain moonlit evening in Arizona, I’d seen my mother drop off a cliff and go SPLAT, I doubt I’d be very surprised to find her cooking eggs in our kitchen the following morning. Rather, I’d be surprised to find her cooking, but if she were standing beside the stove, chewing her nails or talking to herself, I’d only squint a little before I believed it. And yes, it’s true that The Catcher in the Rye took ten years to write and no one’s cured cancer yet, but a Barbie with a working digestive system? We let him turn us into Looney Tunes for a high-concept doll?
On my nineteenth birthday, Dad hands me the card-stock receipt for a six-month subscription to Hustler, a block of two-by-four, and a tube of vitamin-enriched protein paste. He invites me into the lab and sits me down before a lathe-drill, props the two-by-four under the bit. Hand on the grip, eyes engoggled, he tells me, “You’re eighteen now. It’s about time you and your dad had a talk about girls and technology.”
“Okay,” I say.
“They don’t go together,” he says. “Look at me, Mike. Do you see?”
I look at him. He looks sick. He looks embarrassed. A pearl of saliva is drying whitely in the cleft of his chin. He smells like Mad Dog and burned plastic.
“I hate you,” I tell him.
“I hate me, too,” he says.
I start crying, which is pretty typical.
“It’s nothing to cry about, kiddo. Well, maybe it is. But wouldn’t it be a whole lot worse if I thought I was a good man? It would be irresponsible. It would lack rigor.”
He aligns the drill. When he moves, the chainmail against his chest-skin makes a noise like velcro. He picks at his scabs, forgets I’m there with him.
“What do you want, Dad?”
He snaps to, coughs something up and swallows it.
“Manage a restaurant,” he says. “Sell insurance. Harvest rhubarb like that Swedish guy. For chrissakes, though, don’t try to battle eating disorders with new technologies. Don’t create systems. Describe systems. The ideal doll is a girl, so don’t bother making dolls or trying to improve girls. I’ll tell you what. I’m not God. I’m not even any kind of Frankenstein. When you were born I bawled my eyes out because I knew I couldn’t do better. And then the twins. Them, too. But not a daughter. Never had one. How can I describe a girl if I’ve never had a daughter?”
“I’m gay.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“It’s got nothing to do with sense.”
“Well, either way, I got you the wrong subscription. And I’ve fastened the wrong drill bit. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yes,” I lie.
“Is he nice to you? I mean, does he treat you well?”
“He’s okay.”
“I suppose I’ve never met him because you’re embarrassed to bring anyone to the house… Listen. Don’t settle for a bunch of nonsense. You’re better than that. I don’t deserve to have you as a son. You’re a shining example of goodness and tolerance and I’m this crazy piece of shit over here. I’m trouble. It’s a privilege to even be despised by you—”
“Dad.”
“Ditch that boyfriend and find yourself a good one. Adopt a baby girl. Teach kindergarten. Don’t worry about humanity. Love humans, boy-o, be close to them. Let humanity work things out for itself. You’ll be a happy man. You know you enliven me? You’re an endless well of hope!”
He drapes his arm over my shoulders, squeezes. “Do you think you were born gay, or was it the way you were raised?”
“Born,” I say.
Then, as suddenly as Kekule’s snake became a benzene ring, Dad theoretically solves the problem of the smell of paste. His face twitches.
“Son of mine!” he says. “My son!”
He figures out that changing the makeup of the paste isn’t the answer, but that copper-coating small portions of the plastic joints in the mini-tract will cause the digested paste—in its present form—to stink up real bad upon its regurgitation or elimination, and now all he has to work out is (1) how to push forth the hairs in the follicles in the Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips that he’s embedded in the rubber over Bonnie’s upper lip and below her navel, and (2) how to trigger them at the appropriate time, i.e., when Bonnie becomes “anorexic.”
To actually sprout the hairs, it’s a simple matter of activating microgram weights and polymer pulleys not dissimilar to those used in the mini-tract system. As for the situation-appropriate triggering of the sprouting activation, Dad decides to plant a function on a microchip, the workings of which are a little bit beyond me, but entail the delicate balancing of a paste-intake equation with a limb-movement equation. A large enough imbalance translates to “anorexia” and, depending on the degree of the imbalance, commands certain weights to shift and certain pulleys to pull so that one or both of the embedded Mustache & Happy Trail SkinStrips can do what they were made to do.
Now it’s only a matter of time.
One summer evening three months later, our family, minus Dad, plus the limping rhubarb farmer, is eating barbecue at the picnic table in the backyard. Brian sits to the right of Timmy, and whenever Timmy speaks Brian says, “Who’s talking? I know I heard a voice, but for some reason I can’t tell where that voice is coming from. Funny,” he says, “I can’t seem to tell where just about any sound I hear comes from.”
It’s cooling down outside. A rabbit chases another rabbit until he catches her on the cement patio and they have sex until they become distracted, at which point they stop and stare at the sky and become distracted and start having sex. Moths bang their heads on lamps. Squirrels chew. Mosquitoes wobble. Fireflies incandesce.
The farmer’s wearing a checked bow tie. He’s had his shoes and socks off since he lit the grill, and Mom keeps admiring how “brave” and “open” he is for showing off the naked lump. Cutting into some sausage, he asks me if I’m interested in doing man’s work, and Mom, bou
ncing in his lap so her jowls sway, leans toward me, karate-chop hand at the side of her mouth. She chokes down potato salad and stage-whispers, “Olaf has big plans for you. He’s a man of ideas.” The farmer’s eyebrows rise and fall, rise and fall.
“I’m a homosexual,” I tell the table.
The farmer says, “Why do you want to go and say something like that at dinner?”
Timmy raises his fork over his head and jams it into the soft side of his own elbow. Misses the arteries. He twists the fork, then pulls it out of his arm and reaches across the table, directing the thing at the farmer. Tines drip blood onto Olaf’s sausage. Timmy says, “Don’t threaten my brother, Olaf.”
“Who said that?” Brian says.
Olaf says, “I wasn’t threatening no one, young man.”
Timmy drops the fork. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I misunderstood.” Sucking on his arm, he steps out of his sandals. He goes to the patio and starts kicking it hard, toes first. The rabbits keep pumping.
“Oh, Timmy,” Mom says.
“That’s the kind of thing,” Olaf says. “That temper of yours. Your boy’s temper,” he says to Mom. “That’s the kind of thing lost your other boy his ear, now isn’t it.” Olaf establishes eye contact with Brian in what seems to be a gesture of solidarity.
Brian says, “Don’t pity me, you milky fucken lame.”
We’re quiet for a minute, plate-gazing. It’s on me to break the silence.
I tell them, “I’m okay with myself.” I tell them, “I believe the world is mostly good, a self-repairing blemish on the face of God, an open system moving away from chaos, toward organization. I believe that each of its many seemingly awful components are essential to its betterment and will, in distant, perfect retrospect, be understood as wholly functional.” I’m in the middle of telling them, “To hate him requires us to hate ourselves and we don’t need to hate ourselves, we can have a little faith,” when there is a cracking sound and Olaf’s head smacks the table and Mom screams and Brian stands and Timmy crawls back to us and I look up to see Dad, free of stage armor, holding a blood-covered Bonnie by the waist. The blood is Olaf’s. The victory is Dad’s. He raises the doll, high, over his head.
It’s the first time we’ve seen her with all her skin on. Dad tosses her to me, and when I catch her against my chest, she nearly undoes the scoop of my arms.
“She feels heavy,” I say.
“She feels very heavy,” Dad says, “but boy is she beautiful!”
I pass Bonnie to Brian, who passes her to Timmy, who says thank you, and Brian doesn’t ask who said thank you, and Mom gets smelling salts from the first-aid kit and Olaf snaps awake and asks what happened to my noggin and Mom tells him that he banged it on the patio after tripping on his foot and Dad winks at her and that’s when we know they’ll patch it up.
Negotiations take seventeen days. Good Parent offers Dad a touch over half a million for the patents. In the end, he goes with Hasbro for something in the low seven-figure range.
Bonnies line the shelves of all the major chains by Thanksgiving. They cost ninety-nine dollars a pop and come with a free tube of paste. By mid-December, parents across the country take to camping out in toy-store parking lots the night before doll shipments come in. A couple predawn fistfights are reported in Lubbock. A Hasbro truck hijacked at gunpoint en route to St. Louis. A Christmas Eve riot in Denver.
Mom is liposuctioned, chin-tucked, retires early. Brian gets an ear with a built-in phone. Timmy is pierced, tattooed, has velvet-tipped fiberglass Pan’s horns implanted in his forehead. I can’t decide what I want, so I’m given a red Volkswagen and a condo where I lose my virginity to a skinny fatman who’s gone by sunrise. Dad builds a private kindergarten in Evanston, pays me to hang out and tell stories to the kids before naptime. I keep fucking up the happy endings, but they fall asleep anyway.
CONSIDERING THE BITTERSWEET
END OF SUSAN FALLS
(Author's note: Chapter 130,022 of this story, as seen in the print edition of Hot Pink, features text in its margins. Due to restrictions of the .epub format, marginalia cannot be sufficiently represented on your device, and so the text that constitutes the print version's marginalia has herein been rendered as a pair of footnotes. —Levin)
CHAPTER 130,020
DREAMS ABOUT FLYING
Susan Falls hates the flying dreams. She wakes up and she can’t walk, which is beside the point. She can’t walk when she wakes from non-flying dreams, either. The flying dreams speak of an unconscious obsession with walking, her therapist tells her.
The therapist tells her about the stages of death and dying, harping mostly on the denial stage. What the rest of the stages are isn’t important. What is important is that when the therapist tells her about the stages, he does so, he says, because he does not think the loss of Susan’s legs has been properly mourned. To Susan, this is nonsense.
She lost her legs as a baby, in the jungle, to gangrene, after the leopard bit her. So she’d never really had them to begin with, at least not long enough to require her to mourn their loss. Besides, what upsets her isn’t that she can’t walk, but that she has dreams which would seem to suggest that somewhere deep inside she wants to walk, when nowhere non-deep inside does she.
And tacky dreams at that. The flying is always travel-channel scenic: Susan soaring over the ocean or the mountains, between skyscrapers with puffy-cloud reflections on their windows. It might be different, might point to something real or individual about Susan, if she flew over the Gaza Strip or post-NATO Belgrade. Mazar-i-Sharif. She never dreams of what she wants to, though, no matter how hard she thinks about whatever that might be before she goes to sleep. Last night, for instance, she thought of Carla Ribisi’s ass for nearly an hour, and ended up cruising over the Grand Canyon at four thousand feet.
CHAPTER 130,021
THE ACCIDENT, PRETTY TO THINK SO
Susan and her mother are in the all-white kitchen, drinking orange juice, waiting for Susan’s father to come downstairs before eating the egg dish that Jiselle, the distant cousin who came to America to be an au pair but could not find a job as an au pair and so has become the cook, has made. Jiselle is on the balcony, smoking cigarettes.
“You don’t look so good today, Sus,” Susan’s mother says. “Bad dreams?”
Susan nods, staring through the glass table at the glass table’s frosted glass base. Where the kitchen isn’t white or transparent, it’s mirrored, and if she looks up, she risks being confronted with a vision of herself first thing in the morning.
“Was it about the accident again?” says Susan’s mother.
Susan shuts her eyes with a force that, had she any magic in her, would be great enough to knock the whole penthouse into orbit. Susan’s mother likes to talk about the accident. She likes to say, “Susan would do well to talk about the accident, herself.” She says it to everyone.
“I asked if you dreamed of the accident,” says Susan’s mother.
“The accident?” says Susan. “How could I remember the accident well enough to dream about it, anyway?”
“Now don’t—”
“Don’t what?” Susan says. “Don’t mention your lackluster mothering style? Your irresponsibility? Don’t question the sanity and goodness of a woman who’d not only leave her baby on a jungle floor but let the wounds she suffered by the leopard’s fangs fester and—”
“Oh, the leopard. Isn’t it pretty to think so!” Susan’s mother says. Susan’s mother sneezes, angrily, and screams for Susan’s father.
Susan’s father, dressed in beige suit-pants with braces half-braced, his untucked U-shirt flapping at his belt-line, thumps down the spiral staircase to the kitchen. “What is it?” he says. “What’s happened?”
“She’s talking about leopards again.”
“Oh my God.”
“Forget it,” Susan says. “Forget it.”
“Susan, do you need to go back to the hospital?” Susan’s father says.
“Yo
u’re still in the denial stage,” Susan tells her father. “Dr. Fleem told me to expect that from you. But what I want to know is: what about me? What about me?”
“Damn that Fleem,” Susan’s mother says, and to her husband: “Call the Medicar.”
“Frances, just hold your horses for just a second here, honey.” Susan’s father pulls a cigar from somewhere in his pants and fondles it against the beam of a mean halogen bulb. He says, “Now Susan. What was it you were saying? Something about leopards?”
“No. Nothing,” Susan says. “I wasn’t saying anything about leopards.”
“How did you lose your legs, Susan?” Susan’s father says.
Susan is crying. Her mother is staring at her. Her mother looks like a bug and Susan does not want to one day look like her mother. “A car,” Susan says.
The egg dish that Jiselle made is getting cold and it looks very good, too, very tasty. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that she’d been formulating this egg recipe, experimenting with temperature, testing various sauces, spices, and coagulants for nearly six months, and that it had, at last, become perfect; there was not a similar egg dish all the world round, at least not one Jiselle had heard of, and while it was true that the appeal of eggs for breakfast tended to be their banality, Jiselle believed the dish, novel though it was, would, owing to its deliciousness, prove itself to have serious staying power. Last night, Jiselle told Susan that, in her most private thoughts, she called the thing Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish and that, of late, she had something of a dream, and this dream (in sum) was of Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish becoming vastly popular over the next twenty years, worldwide popular, and thereby eventually becoming a banal egg dish itself, at which point the dish’s name would be simplified, shortened, to Eggs Jiselle.
And now it was getting cold, Jiselle’s Delicious Egg Dish. The auburn-tinged glaze atop the whites was becoming a filmy gel.
“She’s only just saying it,” Susan’s mother says. “She doesn’t really mean it. She’s only just saying it.”