Island City: A Novel

Part I

1

I can tell by your faces that you think you recognize me. I can see you trying to figure it out. It’s true, I grew up here, I’m from here, but I haven’t lived in town for some time. Even then I never really made myself known. There’s no reason you’d know me, I guess is what I’m saying. I wasn’t out and about. I mostly just went to school or drove around. The usual things. You must know there’s never been much to do here. For a while when I was fourteen or fifteen I had this thing where every couple weeks I’d poke around in the antique shops down the street. I’d never buy anything. There was never anything new, always the same old crap. But I kept going back, creaking into each room and picking through it all, like I might find something I couldn’t live without.

Maybe you recognize my dad in me. The resemblance is not exactly subtle. My mom used to make a big deal about it, like it was some mystery where I came from. I’ve seen that face before, she’d say. I know that face. Whenever I would scrunch my nose or bug my eyes. Whenever I was being impatient or ironic. Whenever I gave a look that said, What are you gonna do? or, Hey, don’t look at me. That’s when the face I was given became most like the face of the man who’d given it to me. But then again, I doubt you’d remember him either. My dad lived here for far less time than I did and wasn’t exactly what you’d call a social butterfly. He was never much interested in people, or only ever in the smallest doses. And from what I remember, he did most of his drinking at home.

Or maybe it’s that I don’t look like you all. It’s a difference you’re noticing rather than any familiarity. That’s not an insult. It’s just a function of a small town and this one is like any other. Sometimes the clichés are true. Everybody kind of looks the same, dresses the same. It doesn’t take a lot to stick out. It can be as subtle as a hairstyle or the cut on a pair of jeans. Small towns lag behind. That’s partly why I came here. You can feel untethered in a place like this. There’s a sense of no consequences, like you’re in a foreign country. It allows for a certain kind of freedom. Like, I’ve never been embarrassed in front of a dog, you know? It’s the perfect place to give up, is what I’m saying. That’s not an insult. I’m sure each of you has somewhere you’d think of going when you want to go lower. Each of you has your own personal below-sea-level. Island City just happens to be mine.

It’s funny, Mom told me never to come in here, I don’t know why. You’d think it would have been the bar farther down the street. There was always a line of motorcycles in front, spread out like a deck of cards, and tough-looking dudes milling around in leather jackets and bandanas, their skin so weathered that it had become a kind of shell. Or the place on the way out of town with all the pool tables where they let high schoolers drink. But of all the bars, this is the one she told me to avoid. Of course, she told it to me when I was something like seventeen, when there wasn’t much to do with the information. This town is funny, it’s only bars and antique shops. Yes, and churches—bars and antique shops and churches.

But I like this place. I really do. I like when bars are one big room and the bar of the bar is right in the middle. A square inside a square and everybody can see everybody else, like theater-in-the-round. You know, when the audience is seated on all sides of the performer. I like how generic it is too. The outside probably looks no different than when it was first built. I’ve always liked that chipped blue-gray paint on the brick and the gold script stenciled on the window. Plus, who doesn’t like fake wood paneling? And that black board with the drink specials on it—how do they make the writing glow like that? I wonder what my sister would think of this place. I can’t see her choosing it. Then again, sometimes she’d surprise you. She’s always had a way of making things work. She’d probably think this place is funny. Like the air conditioner in the window—she’d get a kick out of the garbage bag taped around the sides. Ah yes, she’d say. It has all the modern amenities. It’s like a black lung, that thing, sucking in and out. I love it. There’s the world outside—bright and warm, summer just beginning to open its arms to everyone—and we’re all here inside this dark, sealed chamber. There’s something about a bar that you can’t see into from the outside and that you can’t see out of either. It’s the way it should be, I think. We’ve got our own business to attend to.

There was a second as I was walking through the door, then that hallway before you make the turn into this room, when I wasn’t quite inside but wasn’t quite outside either. It reminded me of this time in the city, I don’t know, something like ten years ago. It’s funny, it’s only an hour and a half away, but it might as well be a day and night’s drive. It’s not just the difference in landscape, but there’s something of a lack of culture here. And industry and ambition. Like I said, I grew up here, I can say that. Either way, I think we can agree there are some differences. For good and ill. I’m not going to get all the way into it. Okay, I have always found the name funny. The tiniest tributary breaks away from a river and loops back, making an island no bigger than a couple football fields. The town builds a park on it, the town’s main park, the only thing close to a destination this town has, which I understand, I get it, it’s a good use of the space, but then they put island in the town’s name—island in the name of a town in the middle of a prairie. And then the city. That must have been more than the usual dose of wishful thinking, even when the town was new and optimistic and the trains still stopped here. I get it. Once I met a very short man who shared a name with the tallest tree on the planet. It’s just that this town is closer to not existing than it is to being a city. You have to admit that’s funny. When Mom still lived here, she’d tell Sister, who’d then tell me, all about Island City’s most thrilling developments, like when they finally tore down the train station. I pictured tractor shovels slowly pushing into its side, the thing putting up as much resistance as a sandcastle. Walking down here I saw the field where it used to be. A lovely array of empty bottles and an old TV, if I’m not mistaken. Then I came in here and I remembered.

It was June or July, a warm summer night after work, it was really nice, I remember, still light out. I was outside the big art museum downtown waiting to be let in for a reading. Some famous writer was there and a not-small group of people had gathered. I don’t know why it was taking so long, but when they finally funneled us in, one at a time, it was through the revolving doors of the side entrance. The doors’ glass was opaque white, so that you couldn’t see anything on the other side, only dark shapes. When it was my turn and I stepped inside the door, I realized that anything could be waiting on the other side. I mean, sure, it would probably be one of the museum’s lobbies, the museum I’d visited a dozen times before, but I wouldn’t really know until I got in there. The few seconds I turned inside that white, airless capsule, with someone in the slot ahead and someone behind, I was trapped. I was locked in. I couldn’t see anything except the dusty white of the glass, my feet shuffling on the cement floor. I pushed into the unknowing. It felt like it took a long time, but soon I was released. It was a relief. Not what I found on the other side—the welcome desk, the donation box, people milling—but just that the in-between was over. It was what I imagined dying to be like. Passing from one thing to another without knowing exactly what awaits you. I had that same feeling coming in this place. I had an idea what would be here, but didn’t know until I was all the way in. Turning that blind corner, I found myself making a wish: I want someone to tell me what’s going to happen.

2

I’ll tell you why I’m here. You don’t have to twist my arm. I’ll tell it, but I’ll need another drink. And maybe we can turn down the jukebox. I think the music will work best as accompaniment, like a set of backup singers. I would love some old country actually, something lilting and unobtrusive. Sure, that’s okay, but older. Whatever they used to sing into a tin can. A sad little guitar—not too sad, not obviously sad. Dark but with a sense of humor. A shrug, an Oh well in the face of oblivion. Well, we’ll just see how it goes.

Like I said, you probably don’t remember my dad. When he lived here, he wasn’t especially social or civic-minded. He was what you might call a character. A curmudgeon, a jokester. A real wisenheimer. Once on a camping trip when Sister and I were girls, he put a smoldering log from a site that had just been abandoned into the back of the minivan for our fire later. One time he threatened to give my youngest, brattiest cousin a can of spinach for Christmas and then did. When they met in college, he told my mom that if he wasn’t doing anything better that weekend he’d give her a call. Good thing she had low self-esteem, otherwise Sister and I might not exist. I never saw him eat a piece of fruit, only cherries from roadside stands so he could spit the pits out the window. He called coffee jebby, and Sister and me jamokes. We called him Dad. Even when his mind began to slip out from under him, he kept something of everything. On his cot in the home, surrounded by people twenty, thirty years older than him, he would scrunch his big nose, then let his eyes go wide and shake his head, like a bemused drunk who can’t believe the trouble he got into the night before. He had the same problem I do. Or, rather, I have the same problem he did. He held the worst as far away from us as he could for as long as he could, so I can only imagine what it was like for him. What I mean is, I can imagine it was for him the way it’s been for me. Words became elusive. It was as though he were on the hunt for an object in a dark room, bumping into an armoire when what he really wanted was armchair. Usually he said nothing. It was less that he couldn’t find the right words and more that he no longer wanted to use them.

This morning I went to the kinder, gentler grocery store, the one on Water that changed its name. I walked the back way, past all the sunny houses next to the middle school and then behind the liquor store and the gas station and the hardware. I like the exhaust grills and dumpsters. The oily air and gum flattened like moles into the asphalt. I was looking for Nutella, but couldn’t think Nutella, only the idea of it: sweet and smooth. As homogenous as spackle, the same warm brown of baby shit. I was walking up and down the aisles, starting at the dairy case along the far wall, putting food in my basket. I worked my way into the center of the store. The red-and-yellow cellophane bags shone obscenely. They matched the music overhead, which sounded like someone crunching down on one of those hard candies from when I was a kid. You know the ones filled with the sour powder that fizzes when it hits your tongue? I used to think I could prove a connection between eating this kind of candy and later entering into an unhealthy relationship with some other habit-forming substances. It’s a fun theory. Satisfying in the same way blaming gun violence on video games is. But now I think the only thing that pushes a person into addiction is being born. It was all doing a number on me—the music, the food’s outrageous sparkle. An assault so dumb I felt like I was in an amusement park in a foreign country. All the signs were written in a language that looked upside down and backward. So when some teenage girl in a red apron finally asked if I needed any help, her blond hair confused on the top of her head like an armful of toys dropped on the floor, I gritted at her, Where the fuck is the—and here her face bucked like a frightened horse—but the word I needed fell away from me so surely it might as well have been a set of keys in the ocean. Then I walked, rather swiftly, toward the exit. But before I did, before I dropped my basket near the automatic doors, which never open until you think you’ll run right into them, I said to the girl, Suck your father’s nutsack. Not my finest moment, to be sure, but if nothing else, I should get points for poetry.

In December, it’ll be fifteen years since Dad died. Today it’ll be fifteen years until I’m as old as he ever got to be: fifty-two. I’m at the perfect midpoint between the awful past and the terrible future. I can’t help but think of what awaits me. I’m an old neon sign. Half the bulbs are burnt out, but I know what it says. I realize this rings with drama. I’d wager you all play it pretty close to the vest. But once I realized a couple years ago what, exactly, I’d inherited from my dad and delivered this unfortunate news to myself, I became better able to make some decisions. To give up the way I wanted to, I’ve come to a place I never wanted to be. I’ve come—I hate to say it—home. I don’t just mean Island City. I’m back in the house I grew up in too, the burnt-red four-square at the beginning, or end, depending on how you look at it, of Main Street where the street T’s. Main Street—it’s a real paving stone of a name. Yes, that corner lot with all the trees. There’s some kind of stunted apple you wouldn’t want to eat and a few maples that cough up those winged seeds every spring. Sister and I used to grab fists of them and throw them in the air to spin like whirligigs, up then back down. You could say I’m drawing a circle. There’s something tidy about coming back here, like destroying a piece of metal in the same fire that cast it. There’s a purity in it, I think. I don’t have what you’d call a plan. When the time comes, I trust I’ll know what to do. I need only open up every pore on my body and say yes. What I do have are images, images of end points of what are commonly referred to as methods, and those have a way of repeating themselves. The funny thing is I never imagine the scene as myself. I’m not looking out from my own eyes. Instead I see my body bent on a spread of pavement below an open window. I see my stiff body in my childhood bed. I see it all from someone else’s point of view. The person who might eventually find me.

If Sister were here, she’d tell me to stop being so dramatic. Nothing could be as bad as I’m making it sound. I’ve got all kinds of stories—both lows and highs. Some are fun. Snappy even. Uplifting little ditties. Like, some of the best times I ever had were when I lived in Spain. It was for a few months in college. I got to skip turning twenty-one and go straight to drinking watery beer and cubatos with my friends every night. A real coup. My señora was an aloof older woman whose four kids were all grown and out of the house. She was on a decade-long diet and her husband suffered some kind of colon or gallbladder disruption while I was there, and she couldn’t seem to recalculate how much food to make for just three people, but really more like one and a half. Every night she’d set a table overflowing with salad and pasta, tortilla, fish, fried zucchini. Bread and wine everywhere. I did what I could to make up the difference. My señora’s nose would grow red from the wine while I ate and ate. My jeans started to cut into my gut, but I couldn’t stop.

I had this art history professor, an old man from a western part of the country. He had a white beard, a deep voice that gave his speech the weight of age-old authority, and a grand, sculptural head like a Roman bust. It was an exceptional head, that head. Maybe because my frame of reference was narrow at the time or because he talked about having had trouble with his sight, but he reminded me of Borges. The writer. He’d sit in a chair at the front of the class and lean back with one leg crossed over the other. When he wasn’t lecturing, he told stories. We could never tell right away if they were real or not. They were all fantastical, or they unfolded just so. He told us once that, a number of years before, due to some progressive congenital disorder, he’d gone blind and become extraordinarily depressed. He had a young female assistant at the time and they were in love or something like it, but they shared an understanding that, because of the difference in their ages or for the sake of their careers, their relationship should stay platonic. Maybe she had a boyfriend, I don’t know, but they loved each other, they cared deeply for one another. And one day she got into a car accident. She wasn’t going to survive—I’ll never get out of this world alive—and as she was dying, she told the doctors, Give my eyes to Losada. Here he paused, just long enough, and said, So now I see the world through a woman’s eyes. Somehow all the wordplay and idiom translated. Once at a rest stop on a day trip down the coast, he told us all before we got off the bus, There are telephones for men and women, for those who need to make calls of nature. A real character, as Dad would have said. Despite his obvious embellishments, I imagined something within each story was true. Maybe he’d really had an assistant he’d been in love with. And maybe she’d even died. And maybe he’d actually had a disorder that made him go blind briefly. It came up in more than one of his stories, and like I said, Borges. It all fit together, if not logically then romantically or poetically.

In another story he was the one dying. He told it to us the first day. The university sat at the north end of the city’s big downtown avenue, and the traffic noise would come through the open, airy building in waves. He was sitting in his chair at the front of the room, talking about the structure of the course, or he was already clicking through slides of Altamira, when an ambulance whined outside. At first the sound was some blocks away, then it swelled as it came closer and faded out as it retreated. He stopped mid-speech and looked somewhere between us and where the noise was coming from. A few beats later he came back. I’m sorry, he said—this was all in Spanish, mind you—whenever I hear an ambulance, hay un click. Here he held his fist near his ear, like this, and turned his wrist like he was starting a car. There’s a click. And I remember the time I was in an ambulance and I died. As you might imagine, we were dubious when we first heard this, and he never did say what he was dying from, but it happened every time an ambulance went by, which was not infrequently. He’d always go to this other place, shake out of it, then explain again, as though for the first time, why he went away. Eye oon cleek. His voice was incredible, like if a cave talked. I was convinced he’d been an old man his whole life and would live