Caleb is dressed in baggy clothing. He feels awkward like an eight-year-old in an older sibling’s hand-me-downs. Secondhand and recycled. Caleb always has this feeling: the drab, tawdry feel of someone else's things around him – coarse, odorous, and familiar. He is sitting in the cul-de-sac with the engine running, listening to the radio. A voice on the radio says something about rainforests. Rainforests are shrinking. The animals inside them are disappearing and dying. The planet’s temperature is increasing. Icebergs are melting. The ocean is rising. Caleb begins to feel paranoid and shuts the radio off. He thinks, The planet is a dangerous place, then runs his eyes for several seconds. He has had a recent fixation of imagining himself crashing in a car and breaking his nose on the steering wheel. Caleb sees himself hunched over with blood on his face, listening to the radio, laughing.
He is waiting for Irene. They are going to eat Chinese food because Irene has given-up. This is what she told Caleb on the telephone. “Because I don’t care anymore,” she said. Caleb looks at his watch, annoyed. He thinks, I am never not annoyed. He honks his horn at Irene’s house. A few moments later, she appears at the front door. She sees Caleb and waves. Caleb waves back. He moves his arms, thinking about the ocean, acutely aware of a landlocked sensation coming from somewhere around his spinal column.
Irene puts her seatbelt on quickly, as if afraid to be seen struggling with it. Her skin is pink and tatty. Her hair has grown out and Caleb can see brown roots revealing themselves through a matted fade of old highlights. She turns to Caleb and smiles. She says nothing for several seconds then says, “How’s it going?” cheerfully, but in a shy way that makes both of them feel weird. They had dated in a time before puberty. “What is that supposed to mean?” Irene says, then giggles. Her eyes are wide before she closes them. “I’m only joking,” she says. She touches Caleb’s arms, then the dashboard. Caleb thinks there is a concealed anxiety in the way she is behaving. He makes himself smile, wondering if he is expected to reply. He wants to scream. He says, “Okay.” _ A few days ago Caleb saw Irene at Blockbuster Video. They hardly recognized one another and made plans. Caleb was with his girlfriend, Ashley. Later, Ashley said it was okay for Caleb to see Irene because Ashley didn’t think Irene is attractive or happy. Caleb did not understand then, but pretended he did, feeling like a fraud. At the time, he thought, I am never not pretending. He is pretending now. Irene's parents will only allow her to see people they know and trust with their daughter, so here she is with Caleb. _ Several things go through his mind as they drive down the road: mailboxes, bills, the curb, rainforests and the animals inside them. They pass several houses adjacent to a grassy fairway of an eighteen-hold golf course. There are golf carts in the distance. Caleb looks at Irene holding herself with her own arms. They barely reach around her anymore. It has been almost two years since Caleb has last been alone with her, before she discovered cocaine and dropped out of college, before she moved back in with her parents and gained twenty-five pounds. Caleb thinks, Before a lot. He tries to remember the last time he spoke with Irene prior to their most recent encounter. It was around Christmas. Caleb can’t remember which one. She called him on the telephone. He didn’t know why. She was sick and had infected everyone in her family with strep throat. She was crying. Everyone was ill. “It only hurts when I swallow,” she told him and said she had to go. _ It begins to rain. “Are you sure Chinese is okay?” Irene says. “Sure,” Caleb says. “I mean, Totally.” He stares through the windshield. Turns the wipers on. They move one way then back again. Everything is wet. Caleb begins to feel sodden in a gradual way. He tells himself he should have worn something waterproof. The Chinese restaurant is at the mall. The mall has a large parking lot. Staying dry will be impossible. “Now that I live here again, we should hangout more,” Irene says. Caleb looks at her. He says, “I know.” His eyes are irritated and feel dry. When he looks around the car, he sees the freckles on the bridge of Irene nose float off her face. He blinks. His eyes begin to water and his contact lenses move across his irises, grinding against his pupils. He doesn’t know what to do. He thinks she should have Lasik surgery. The laser would zap his eye into focus. It will be a painless procedure. Things will become clearer. Everything will make sense. “When I stretch, I always get a head rush,” Irene says. “Does that ever happen to you?” Caleb doesn’t know what to say. He watches the road. A mailbox. The curb. Rainforests. Thing are not clear. Lasers make things clear. He needs a laser. It is the only thing he can think about. “I think there’s something wrong with my body,” Irene says. “Like, cancer or something.” “I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” Caleb says, he smiles at the road. They talk for a while about nothing. The mall feels no closer. Irene seems to be encroaching on Caleb’s personal space, little by little at first, but soon she is almost touching his shoulder. The streets fill with water. Caleb can feel the tires rip through puddles of standing water. He pictures himself as the captain of a ship on an ocean. He doesn’t know what ocean. He thinks, The Indian Ocean, as he touches his foot to the gas pedal, concentrating deeply on his make-believe nautical dexterity. For a second, he feels okay. _ Irene’s parents’ house has a pool. Caleb remembers swimming in the pool one day before puberty. The sun was out and the air was hot. Underwater, Caleb opened his eyes and the chlorine irritated them. He thought he was going blind and when he crawled out of the pool, Irene asked him what was wrong. Caleb looked at Irene and said he could not see anything. She told him to stop pretending and ran away. Caleb can see himself wrapped in a towel sitting on a lounge chair saying something indecipherable under his breath towards the sun. He remembers feeling blind because he was bored. He took three deep breaths and felt a dryness in his mouth. As he pulled the air in, he was convinced there was something massive inside him wanting to get out. “I’m going to be a psychologist,” Irene says at a red light. “A psychologist, huh?” Caleb says. “The classes start this fall,” she says. “Psychiatry really interests me.” There is silence for several seconds. The wipers squeak, sounding louder than usual, pushing rain across the glass. Caleb’s contacts glide between his cornea and eye muscles. He rubs his sockets, furiously at first, then gently massages. “I don’t think those are the same things,” he says. He looks at Irene. She is peering out the window with a blank facial expression. He can tell her skin is sunburned. When the light turns green, traffic begins to move again. “What do you mean?” she says into her window. Her voice is aimless. Fog condenses on the inside of the windshield. Caleb thinks about answering, but doesn’t know what to say. “I tell you later,” he says, cranking down his window. Irene says something else that Caleb cannot understand. In his peripheral vision, he can see her mouth move as a damp breeze blows through her hair and eyes. Caleb keeps his eyes ahead of him. He looks at the road. There are trees along the median. Shrubs. Illegible signage to nowhere. When he looks back at Irene, she is fishing in her purse for a cigarette. “I need to lose weight,” she says. She presses the cigarette lighter and turns on the radio. They listen to a commercial for a car dealership, a commercial for all-inclusive Caribbean vacations, and a commercial for Lady’s Night at a college bar downtown. She turns the radio off and lights her cigarette. Caleb watches at the end of the butt ignite in a pink cherry and thinks it looks like the same color as Irene’s skin. Her face is a cancer ember and hot to the touch. She smokes very quickly and cracks her window to exhale. It is very sloppy outside. Rain drops edge across the windshield, leaving crooked trails of oil and saline, and fall to the pavement, dissolving in the microscopic cracks on the ground, bleeding little by little towards the center of the earth. _ At the restaurant, a man with a dark complexion says, “Sorry. No more food.” He smiles when his says this, standing behind a register. Caleb looks at Irene, feeling confused. There are several people dining quietly. Caleb and Irene look at one another, then at the host. Because of the rain, neither of them wants to go back outside. Caleb looks around the restaurant at the families eating Chinese food, each appearing the identical, sticking forks into blank faces. “Just kidding,” the host says. He is gap-toothed and smiling. Caleb sees the gap and wants to scream. “No. I only make joke. Good. Good joke – No?” The man laughs. A girl in a black t-shirt walks up behind the man and leads Caleb and Irene to a table. “Enjoy,” the she says. She smiles and walks away. Caleb watches her disappear behind a door in the rear of the dining room. The restaurant is a Chinese buffet run by Mexicans with two self-serving lines running through the middle. There are treys of rice, chicken, pork, and green jello squares. Irene sees the treys and says, “Delicious.” Every few minutes, the girl in the black t-shirt emerges from the same door to stir the contents of each trey. Caleb thinks the restaurant smells like a zoo. He shuts his eyes and breathes, picturing a zoo full of elephants. The elephants are eating fried Chinese food through their trunks. A gap-toothed man is feeding them. Irene watches and says, “Delicious.” At the table, he realizes he hasn’t said anything for a while. Irene has been talking the entire time about the weather. About the air. About nothing. Caleb doesn’t know what to say. He thinks he would be happy to not say one word for the entire meal. He smells the air, feeling distantly calm, but a little nauseous, as if somehow intoxicated by the aroma of fried-something. There is a painting on the wall of a bird on a branch. An ornamental print of washed-out earth-toned color. The branch stretch from somewhere off canvas. Everything is two-dimensional, floating in an ambient drift. The bird is pecking a bushel of yellow fruit. Raw mucous core. Sweet like honey and vaguely aromatic. Caleb thinks the fruit looks like banana-tumors. He doesn’t say anything. He thinks about the fruit and cancer and wonders if the fruit is poisonous. He pictures the bird eating the fruit and falling off the branch, dead. Caleb imagines the branch belongs to a tree in a rainforest. The tree has cancer. The rainforest and the bird no longer exist in real life. The bird has red eyes. It is looking straight at Caleb. “I’m thinking about puking again,” Irene says, smiling half-heartedly. There is an apparent vacancy in her voice. “I need to unload some of this.” She pinches her arm as she says this. Caleb feels a little afraid of Irene. There is something dangerous about the way she is. He thinks about Ashley. She is not dangerous. She is the opposite. Most women are not dangerous. Irene is not most women. Something blurry moves across Caleb’s sights. Fuzzy globs of nothing creating indistinct ripples of distorted shapes. He fixes his eyes on the painting. The branch shakes. Caleb thinks the bird has moved but cannot be certain. The leaves become velvety and dense then evaporate. Caleb’s eyes begin to water so he closes them. An oyster-like sweat christens his skull. He cannot concentrate. He thinks his vision is rapidly deteriorating. His eyes and mind are dysfunctional balls of corrosion. “That’s how most actresses stay thin,” Irene says. “I think.” “Don’t some of them, like, die though?” Caleb manages to say. He focuses deeply on inhaling. “What’s her name…Karen Carpenter? Karen Carpenter died that way.” He fills his lungs. Exhales. “That’s anorexia,” Irene says. “If you vomit, it’s called something else.” She scratches her elbow. She looks at Caleb then at the ceiling. “I’m starving,” she says quietly to the ceiling. Caleb wonders what Irene is looking at and follows her line of vision. There are spirals, zigzags, dot, and animals with wings and tails. These animals are in a rainforest. Patterns and designs drift in errant revolutions making a Stone Aged picture of petrifies heads of cabbage, glowing blue, reminding Caleb of space. “Yeah,” Caleb says. “I mean, No. I don’t know.” He looks away. The man behind the register brings over to two glasses of water. He winks at Irene before retreating to the register. After a while, Irene tells Caleb about her current romantic interest. He pays a marginal amount of attention, thinking about the bird. Red eyes. Static. He watches it watching him. “This one guy does the nicest things for me,” she says. “I feel really lucky for some reason. It kind of sucks.” Caleb isn’t listening, but feels the need to laugh at least once before responding to the things Irene says. He believes this will make it okay if he provides the wrong response to a comment he didn’t hear. Caleb thinks about being unable to think for several minutes. Something autistic and mute is moving from the wall through him. A cold, stationary chill, piercing his skeleton. There are icebergs in his lungs, melting, rattling against his ribs. When Caleb breathes, he can feel frosted cords breaking inside him. He convinces himself nothing is wrong. He thinks if he was a better person, he would be able to participate more proactively in the conversations people attempt to have with him. He thinks, I would be able to see and hear things more clearly. Caleb decides he will work harder on being a better person. He thinks, It will probably take a while. He has the mental image of himself as an angry person, driving a golf cart at maximum velocity. He pictures his eye sockets filling to the brim of all the things in life he ignores. He thinks, My eye sockets are huge. “I could never marry a guy like that,” Irene says. “I don’t know why.” Caleb laughs once and says, “Uh-huh.” He looks at Irene and sees a girl in her late-twenties. She is nervous and lonely, with a distant fear of infinite loneliness compounding with each day. He wonders if Ashley ever feels the same way. He wouldn’t know if she did. Caleb watches Irene drink from her straw and thinks he doesn’t know her anymore. They were close a long time ago, before puberty. He considers the word “puberty” and compiles the letters in his head. When he closes his eyes, he sees the word “aggression” flash through his head in black calligraphy. The ink mixes with an inner rain and runs down Caleb’s neck to the base of his spine, pooling on the floor beneath his chair. For a second, Caleb feels briefly focused on Irene’s words then loses his train of thought. He has the mental image of people driving golf carts in a Chinese rainforest. There are trees with branches, birds, and golf carts. There is a slow drone to battery-powered engines blending with taciturn avian chirrups echoing beneath a jungle canopy. Caleb looks around. He wonders why he is surrounded by people in golf carts in a rainforest in China. Irene says something about exercise and sips her water. Caleb scans the restaurant. He sees the bird looking at him from the rainforest. Its food and habitat are disappearing. The bird is exposed to the elements and is starving to death. Caleb feels he can empathize with the bird. He knows that if the mall ever closed indefinitely, he too would perish. _ That night there is a television show about biblical prophecies and Caleb watches it. Several ancient predictions have come to fruition in modern times. Caleb thinks each prophetic forecast sounds equally imaginary and coincidental. On the television, people speak on camera about when and how the world will end. They hold bibles tightly to their love-handled torsos. For some reason, Caleb thinks these people are from Missouri. He thinks, A landlocked region. When the people are finished talking, a carousel of apocalyptic illustrations envelop the television. Birds fall from sky. Mountains go up in flames. Earthquakes tear yawning holes in the planet. Caleb feels a little dazed watching and closes his eyes for a while, trying to keep himself from thinking, feeling immobile and confused. Outside, there are sirens in the street. The screams encroach rapidly then fade as they pass. It becomes very quiet. Caleb senses a looseness to his own skin and begins to feel gradually disembodied. He recognizes an exhausted feeling everywhere, he thinks, inside his bones – the flaky sponge within them, dry with dust and oxidation. Caleb does not want to go to sleep. He stands up and gazes out the window for a very long time, picturing imaginary people from the future and the things he will talk about if he ever has meet them in real life. Caleb thinks about “real life” for several minutes. Every once and a while, he catches himself smiling and laughing a little, feeling both exhilarated and anxious – disappointed and satisfied with everything, and feeling nothing. Bio: Adam’s writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3 A.M. Magazine, Johnny America, PANK, Storyglossia, and Underground Voices. His story "Star-Spangled Enterprise" is/was a nominee for Best of the Net 2009. He is the author of an ebook, The Nurse and The Patient (Pangur Ban Party, 2009). He lives in Brooklyn and works in publishing. Visit him here: http://adamadamadamadamadam.blogspot.com
“I’m good,” Caleb says. “Are you hungry?”
Irene yawns in an obnoxious way, pawing her mouth like an Indian. Caleb tries to breathe. He can feel the car filling up with Irene’s breath. His eyes jump in and out of focus. He sees Irene stretch her arms upward. For a second, Caleb thinks she is about to rip the roof off of his car. He pictures Irene driving her arms through the ceiling and tearing the roof away in one fast tyrannosaurus-motion. In his mind, he can feel rain falling on his face, the water rising from the driver’s seat. Waves froth, rocking him back and forth, before crashing into the radio dials.
_
“I guess that’s true,” Caleb says. He looks at Irene. They make eye contact. She squints at him and looks away. Caleb watches the painting. Brush-dipped calligraphy along the side of the frame begins to rope around in slow, meticulous movements off the canvas onto the wall – as if some invisible freehand is engraving an unknown language across the restaurant.
“Are you okay?” Irene says. “I mean, is something wrong?”