As Lie Is to Grin Read online

  “You don’t get it.”

  “I don’t. I was never a teenager.”

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “No.”

  I stared at her back, which had become more hunched over the years, and bit down on my fork by accident, which sent a ringing through my jaw. I tempered my condescension. “Thank you for breakfast.”

  “You are welcome.” I left the house.

  Meat and I moved past the green fields where the community band played concerts every Tuesday night in the summertime. He lit the joint from his sock. We coughed and made sure to keep the ember below our waists for a while before laying out the carnival plan. “If you want to fuck before high school ends,” he said, “stick to the carnival plan. No girls from Montauk. No girls with younger sisters. No girls we already know. No girls that are friends of girls we already know.” The rules were too time-consuming for me, plus I was waiting to mature, I thought, while pretending to pursue the only real ritual for young men in America—not school or Confirmation or Bar Mitzvah, but the loss of virginity. I had dreams that my penis had split down the middle; it bled out in a thick puddle of maroon. Five years ago, we were in Meat’s living room playing video games at three in the morning when his older brother came downstairs and turned to Black Entertainment Television. “Watch this.” The men paraded around the screen with the newest cars, watches, and pretty ladies. One man pulled out credit cards and slid them into the crease at the base of women’s spines. Meat said, “If these niggas could guarantee me this shit in heaven, I’d blow up the fucking White House.” We arrived at the mouth of the public beach and walked past the hard stares of white men in fluorescent security vests.

  Most of the kids were vacationers. You could tell by the clothes they had on. The sneakers were too clean, the swim trunks too new. Part of their vacation was the acquisition of new things to bring on their vacation. Meat separated from me. I stopped by the Graviton and my eyes fixated on the red-and-purple machine as it sparkled and whirred around in a loop until the edges got blurry. “Dave!” By the fried dough truck, Meat called out to me, with his left hand hugging the flesh of a girl we knew. Talking to her was against the rules, but, as I saw him smiling, I realized there were no rules. Meat had laid out the “carnival plan” as a game; now he was acting on the will to quench the simplest desires, a frequent occurrence in adolescence. I walked toward them, stopping first at the fried dough truck for a funnel cake, before deciding not to enjoy their company. “Dave!” Meat shouted. I put two fingers to my lips, then turned away from him.

  An alarm went off. I spilled some powdered sugar on my left pant leg. Looking down into the dead grass and straw wrappers, I saw a small red-and-white basketball shoe—spotless, barely touching the ground. My eyes traveled up the leg to a figure sitting on a stool and the face of a girl about my age. As your lips moved, the frown didn’t lift from your brow. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “This?” I pointed down at my funnel cake.

  “Yeah.”

  “Most of it.”

  “Can I have a piece? What’s your name?”

  “David.”

  “Hello, David.” You bit into the hardening cake. “So, do you live here?”

  “No.”

  “I saw you talking to those kids, so I thought you did.”

  “No. My aunt lives here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Harlem, with my mother.”

  “I’m from the city, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Midtown.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  You paused. “I’m just visiting my father’s friend.” I could not find my words, so you said, “I go to the Fieldston School. Do you know it?”

  I shook my head and asked, “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I have to be back at seven thirty.”

  “Can we hang out tomorrow?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Oh.” I shuffled my feet and could not find a way to move the conversation forward.

  “That’s it? Don’t you want my number?”

  I dusted off the cardboard plate and handed it to you, clutching the last piece of cake. Your handwriting was not curly; each line bumped into the next, making hard stops at the end of consonants. “MELODY.” I put the cake on the plate again and left the carnival, passing the five safety patrolmen in orange, feeling nauseated, and headed in the direction of my house. Shit. I ran back to the water drain on Bay Street and tried to fish out the paper plate with those nine numbers etched onto it. I couldn’t reach the ruffled edges. I searched my mind for the figures, 917-9(blank)31, but could not remember them. I turned and searched the carnival. You were nowhere to be found.

  november 5, 2010

  What bothered me about what I had written was that I had borrowed so freely from my experience to produce the characters. The changes that I did make were small. Aunt Doris is my real mother, I had not thrown away Melody’s plate, but had waited—as the days went by, I became too nervous to call her. In truth, I was devising a way to keep up the lie I told about my mother living in Harlem. Still, I did not know what drove me to make the protagonist lie as well.

  Why I had chosen to write like this, so self-consciously, was probably due to a misreading of Cane, I thought. I assumed Toomer had created so many characters in his work as a way to distract the reader from his inability to sustain one narrative, but maybe that was not the case. I was then shaken by the realization that literary genius was the ability to create strong, original characters, and my main character was myself. I should think about going to the student health clinic, I thought. I said to myself, “You should mull over going to the student health clinic,” just to hear it out loud. How do you control your mind? Rather, how do you force your brain to stop remembering? The questions remained unanswered, so I returned to the living room of the Rib Shack and drank my ninth shot of whiskey. Jimmy kept looking at me and grinning, though I chose not to engage him. Then I was vomiting; then there was a tab of lysergic acid diethylamide in the beer I was drinking; then I was out in a meadow next to Centennial Baseball field for the first time, with my ear to a large oak tree; then I was running behind Chittenden dorm—

  Me: How have you been, Melody? 2:13 a.m.

  Me: I’m lost without you. 2:16 a.m.

  I threw the phone back in my jacket pocket, zipped it all the way up to my neck, and caught some skin in the metal contraption just below my Adam’s apple. I walked right, down Colchester Avenue. I began to jog as the road descended, winding left at the bottom of the hill. Finding myself at some point on the bank of the Winooski River, which seemed to be miles from where I had come, I went to sleep on a bench, too disoriented to trek back uphill.

  I woke up with my hood over my head and my feet curled up beneath my butt. The tree in front of me had two placards nailed to it, one labeled “Closed to Fishing (March 16–May 31).” The other had a painting of an endangered lake sturgeon and begged you to release the fish if caught. I stretched my arms and legs, turning to see the sign “Salmon Hole (0.2 Miles to Path)” before looking back to the river, where the man in the gray suit was standing by the bank. The sheen of water that moistened the marsh appeared in a trinity of shallow pools. He stared at me, then started spreading the riverbank on his face. I turned back to the road. I could not feel my fingers or toes, which would have worried me had I strayed as far from campus as I had assumed last night. The sun was bright. I walked uphill, past a graveyard with a tall statue of a man on a pillar raising his left hand next to an obelisk. The path bent, and I headed northwest toward the dorms before the sight of a building with a golden orb above its belfry caused me to stop again. This chapel had been constructed by McKim, Meade & White, just like Southwick Music Hall on Redstone Campus, which had prompted me to start researching campus architecture. None of the buildings designed by the firm
had been erected before its founder Stanford White was killed.

  Now that I was thinking clearly, it seemed obvious that the architecture and the man in the gray suit were pointing me toward some truth. The aphorism “reach back and get it” came to my mind. It meant to take the best of the past and bring it into the present. I was not heeding this advice. There was the sound of a car’s horn. I turned around and saw that I had been holding up traffic while staring at the building from the middle of the street. My mouth, like an oven of lies and deceit, spoke to itself, as the grease of intoxicants animated my legs. Move forward.

  november 8, 2010

  I am walking with a group of students, but I am not myself. We move down rows of naked saplings, some of which had been uprooted in a storm last November. A path lights up in front of me. In the near distance is the university’s furnace. It is engulfed by flames. I crouch, put my fingers on the chalked outline of a cross that is adorned with a heart and bloodied human ribs. All around there is a humming. It reaches a deafening volume. I look up to the fire and find thousands of students, their arms spread out, ascending.

  I woke up drenched in sweat, remembering the barest hints of the dream. My voice was saying “prescience.” The word, meaning foreknowledge, was linked to some painting I had walked by with Melody, and a scene that had yet to occur. I could feel a presence in the room. I did not open my eyes. I felt him hovering over me, staring into my dream. His mouth was ajar, bearing a white grin, as if each tooth was a joke he was dangling above my head. “It is cynical,” I thought. “His grin is cynical.”

  I dressed without using the bathroom and rushed to the Davis Center to look for the school’s newspapers. I pushed past students who were eating, interrupted then upset, and collected Issue 9, November 2, 2010. Page 1 read, “Student Found Dead in Chittenden Hall on October 18,” and I realized that had transpired on the last day I visited Delilah’s house. On page 7, there was another article about a young man’s demise, “Loss Felt Throughout UVM Community,” which occurred earlier in October. The whole issue conformed to a narrative: youth and death. There was something horrifying and reductive about the way we memorialized the deceased. I continued to turn the pages to a headline that read, “Students Gather for a Marathon of Writing.”

  november 11, 2010

  The wait for the psychologist was seven minutes. It had taken three days to get an appointment through the school’s website. I woke up to the sight of snow flurries and got dressed, putting on a blue-and-red tie before picking my hair out so that the dense curls became an afro. I felt like a child going to his first day of school.

  “I’m Dr. Amelia.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “Can you tell me why you came in today?”

  I felt like a boy in a man’s body. “I need help.”

  “That is a brave thing to say.”

  “I have not been myself lately.” I looked at the wall behind her; there was a purple flag with a golden wheel in the center pinned to it. “In the preference column I wrote female, and I hope that does not offend you.”

  “Should it?”

  “My mother is also a psychologist, of sorts, so I thought it would be more comfortable.” Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “Where did she practice?”

  “In the living room.”

  “While you were there?” I tried to redirect her attention. I gave a road map of my life, making sure to omit mention of the man in the gray suit. I talked about my mother in Long Island, feeling alone, and Jean Toomer, ending with Melody. She wrote something down, then removed her glasses and spoke frankly about this being her first job. I told her I hated everyone, hated this session, and hated her compliance, which did not abate until I was empty of thirty-six minutes of talk.

  “Have you ever thought it’s not your mother you dislike but your father?”

  “No.”

  “Why isn’t your father in any of the stories?”

  “Because he wasn’t there.”

  “But not at all? That’s a little strange, don’t you think?”

  “I did have a couple of dreams about him.”

  “And?”

  “My mother is crazy.”

  “Is there no empathy for people who suffer from mental illness?”

  “You’re twisting my words. I didn’t say she was mentally ill.”

  “Sorry. You said crazy.”

  “I meant crazy like black crazy, you know, she’s crazy.” Amelia wrote that down. She moved on.

  “Has there been any significant change in your schedule since you left home?”

  “No.”

  “Did you work out before, play an instrument before coming to college?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any hobbies or—?”

  “I was trying to write a novel.”

  “Have you tried to submit to the school literary journal?”

  “It’s not finished.”

  “Do you want to finish it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If the mood strikes you to write, try. If it is making you stressed, then stop.” I assured her I would follow this advice, and she sent me to the medical offices across campus, to have an appointment with Dr. Hume.

  The building was a quarter of a mile away, so I opened the Internet browser and searched for “Vermont, medicine, psychology, tests,” stumbling upon a narrative I had not read before. The page heading was a picture of green mountains, interrupted by straw huts and a leafless white tree. The portal told the story of eugenics at the university, starting with Professor Henry F. Perkins, director of the Department of Zoology. In the photograph, dated 1928, he was clean-shaven and his mouth was turned down. Though confidence was depicted in this pose, the receding hairline, the small left eye—little imperfections—seemed to hint at the mania that led to his descent into alcoholism. He had spent his life trying to weed this and other diseases from the genetic pool. I entered www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/partnersf.html and read the report of the Academic Advisory Committee, which presided over the Vermont Eugenics Survey. The study targeted those with the traits of mental illness called Huntington’s chorea. They included the pirate families of Vermont (French Canadians living in houseboats on Lake Champlain) and the Gypsies (those with dark skin because of African or Abenaki Native American blood). Between the years 1933 and 1938, 131 sterilizations took place. This number is skewed, as are most American surveys of the time, because the state did not keep proper records of the Native American population. As I looked to the Internet, under images of the Abenaki tribe, I saw many descendants who had strong European roots. As I tried to do more research on eugenics and Native Americans, the information became harder to find.

  Dr. Hume shook my hand and asked me some questions, before deciding: “Twenty-milligram tablets of citalopram.” I went to the pharmacy on the floor above the doctor’s office to fill my scrip before braving the flurries and returning to the dorm just in time to see three young men at the end of my hall get arrested. Two cops passed me without a word. I felt removed from the present. I entered my room and sat on my bed. Time passed as I looked out the window at the night sky. I rolled a joint and sat smoking by the fan, with the orange plastic container in my hand. The floor was beginning to collect pizza boxes and old newspapers. From the bedside, I picked up my notebook, placing it in the trash. I closed the blinds and shut off the lights, then lay on the bed in darkness. My eyelids began to sink, though my mind kept my body from falling into sleep. Between here and there I saw a wound, big and pink, with veins and blood, which I could crawl into. I wanted to lock myself inside and heal until I was new, but time continued forward, and on and on and on.

  september 5, 2009

  Melody had given herself a haircut. “Take a picture of me.” The thick curls stopped near the middle of her neck. They stood in contrast to the black t
uft on my head, which was behind the lens of an instant film Polaroid camera. We were on the West Side Highway, passing the new bike lane, avoiding each other’s eyes. I stole glances. Everything fought on her face, from her full mouth to her narrow eyes, her straight teeth to her crooked teeth. As we began moving again, the sound of a thousand bumblebees followed us through the sky, which was clear. She asked, “Do you hear that humming?” I nodded. Planes crossed high above. My eye caught the construction that would become One World Trade Center. It was designed to appear as two buildings wrapped in one. Each would be four-sided, triangular, though one stretched down and the other up, as if they had resurrected the two older towers and combined them. Now it was just loud banging and a rust-colored frame. I continued to pan. A yellow sailboat with white masts pulled into the harbor. Melody’s eyes followed as it docked. We walked out on the stone jetty and sat facing New Jersey. She liked to sit in quiet, I in discovery. The Colgate sign illuminated the Jersey City shoreline. We were staring at the horizon, watching a ferry leave for Staten Island, when I placed my hand on hers. We sat like that, occasionally parting to wipe sweat from our faces. I thought I would be more nervous—that somehow I would stumble and she would discover that I did not live in Harlem. This fear excited me, and any hesitation I may have had about seeing her subsided. I turned back to her face and she was smiling, still looking at the horizon.

  After an hour or so, I stood and apologized for having to leave so soon. She hugged me and then walked east toward the center of the financial district, though she lived on the west side. I stayed behind her at a distance and crossed onto Vesey Street, watching the pink soles of her sneakers, her awkward gait, until Church Street, where she turned right. The word voyeur popped into my head. I stared up at St. Paul’s Chapel, which had served as a base for rescue workers after September 11, 2001, and let her disappear around the corner of an office building. I entered the 2/3 subway station at Park Place, and took the train to Fourteenth Street, transferring back to the 1 train to Canal Street, where I got off and walked up Varick, making a right on Broome Street, arriving in the classroom at 5:07 p.m.