Vacation (2 page)

“Mr. Johnson?” she says.

“Yes?” I meet her eyes, and she doesn’t look away, the way I would.

She’s familiar. If she were music, she’d be a song you start humming out of nowhere.

And usually when you do recall the song’s origin—
if
you do—it’s no big deal. No relevant revelation. Oh yeah, you say, it’s that so-&-so band I used to listen to. I had shitty taste in music back then. Or, oh yeah, telejingle. Every once in a while, though, you say, Holy Jesus, my mom used to sing me that song when I was a kid. Or, god damn, I wrote that song for my first love.

Or, the woman says, “It’s me, Mr. Johnson. Marvin Blackrow.”

Part 2

Yeah, Marvin’s shocked me, like a nipple slip at an award show would shock me. You expect to see skin, but not this much skin.

I say, “You’re…”

“A woman. Yeah. Since two years ago. Biologically, since two years ago.”

“Well…” My vocabulary plays dead.

“It’s a strange coincidence, don’t you think?” She picks at the smiley Pax clam on her chest, but it doesn’t frown. “You and I, choosing Vacation the same year.”

“It is.” I look at my watch, even though there’s a clock on the wall right in front of me.

“What Tour number are you?” she asks.

“Three.”

“Me too.”

“That’s…” and I can’t think of anything else to say but, “good.”

I’m waiting in the Waiting Room, like I changed in the Changing Room, pretending to read a book, and I tell myself Aubrey’s the reason I started collecting gold.

Aubrey. Au.

Dad, if you still don’t understand, get mom to explain it to you. She’s the scientist.

Before Vacation, you can’t go to the world, so you bring the world to you. My microcosm glimmers in the theoretical guest room of my home-bitter-sweet-home with an invisible unwelcome mat guarding the doorway.

Once, when I first start dating Hill, I let her in. And she stands there, mouth a big O like some cartoon character while thousands of golden Hillaries gape back at her, in coins, bars, jewelry, pottery, furniture—and she falls in love.

“You Argonaut you,” she says.

Literary—I like that.

So we make love on the golden fleece.

Years ago, this collection (which is a nice way of saying obsession) of mine starts out innocently enough. I become aware that the price of gold is being suppressed, and that as soon as this suppression bursts, the market will climax. At that point, I’ll dump all this booty on the rest of the world, simply to make more money that I don’t need.

That’s my initial plan anyway.

You start out by purchasing plain gold bars. But then you learn that for virtually the same price you can buy coins. And not just coins from your own country. You look at the various designs—the zodiacs, the panda hugging that last piece of bamboo with his dear life, tsars and emperors, kings and queens, leaders and politicians (sometimes mutually exclusive)—and you feel connected to the world. Things escalate. Before you know it, hours die at the hand of online auctions, where you’re duking it out with Hercules for a brooch shaped like a fly, or a 500 year old cane, or a bracteate of Odin, or an Egyptian mummy ring, or an Incan plate that somehow survived the Conquistadors, or a cauldron decorated with Celtic figures designed by some Nazi wacko who happened to like mythology, or, or, or. And it’s all gold. All the time. And for all the diversity in my golden world, in my golden room, it takes a backseat (or gets kicked out of the moving car, where it tumbles down the road until it hits a mailbox) to the sameness of it all.

Whether or not I’ll sell out during the economic orgasm, your golden child doesn’t know.

I tell myself Aubrey’s the reason I started collecting gold, because I don’t visit her grave anymore.

“This is it, folks. The beginning of the best year of your lives! They make me say that.” We laugh like schoolgirls. “My job—according to the job description—is to show you the world and impart my knowledge on said world. And boy howdy, they’ve pumped me with so many useless facts, I don’t know where I keep it all. Seriously though. I’ll do my darndest to stay out of your way and let the good times roll. Because, honestly, I’m no fun. I’m downright boring.” This is Jack, our Guide. As his name suggests, he’s what you’d consider an everyman, and therefore not like any man you’ve ever met. You want to be his friend. You want him to like you. And more than anything, after Vacation you never want to see him again.

We follow him through a white bright corridor into the plane, but honestly, we’d follow him off a bridge. I take my proverbial seat next to Krow. Yeah, she calls herself Krow now.

Before the silence flips that switch to awkwardness, she says, “So, Mr. Johnson, what’ve you been up to?”

“Work, mostly. I write lesson plans.”

“You don’t teach anymore?”

“I teach teachers. But no, not in the traditional sense.”

“I see.” She says this without a hint of satisfaction, and I don’t want to acknowledge the disappointment buzzing through my skull.

I ask what she does for a living.

“I make perfume. Not the bottles. The smells. Here.” She puts her wrist an inch from my nose and let’s me sniff.

I do and I smell grapes. “It’s nice.”

“It’s called Undone.” After a moment, she holds out a tiny bag. “You want my peanuts?”

“What?” I ask, as if I don’t understand the question.

“I’m not a big fan of nuts.”

I’m frozen.

“That was a joke, Mr. Johnson. You can laugh.” She does, and tosses me the peanuts.

My gut tells me that by now I should’ve said, “You can call me Bernard,” but the opportunity passes, so I don’t. Instead, I eat the nuts.

One of them’s too crunchy and leaves in its wake a horrible tang on my tongue, but it’s too late. That’s the problem with bad aftertastes. By the time you know you’re in trouble, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. Except, of course, get over it.

I do.

I pretend to sleep because Krow’s still awake.

And I don’t think about everything I’ve left behind. My job, my girlfriend, my house, my gold. If I can forget all of this so easily, then why is it my life to begin with?

No, I think about the Jennings.

No, you don’t know them. They’re one of the many families whose ex-houses I cleansed for Aunt Janet before I got my teaching credential.

The Jennings don’t pay their rent for two months, and I’m there on eviction day, moving out everything they’ve left behind. And they’ve left everything. Like usual.

I invade their now lifeless living space. I load the boxes. With a snow shovel, I scoop up the wrappers and diapers and rotten food and cat shit and cigarettes and unopened bills and spilled milk (and yeah, I don’t cry) off the floor, and put it in plastic bags, and load it with the rest of the stuff. I don’t throw away the trash. I can’t. Legally, Aunt Janet has to store everything for two weeks so that the Jennings can take back their belongings. If they pay the storage fee. They won’t.

These are the Jennings’ computers and stereos and TVs, and none of it works, but the Jennings don’t give a shit. They don’t give a shit because this is a façade, and not the kind you show to the world. No. This is a simulation created by the Jennings for the Jennings.

Ordinary people own ordinary things. The Jennings own ordinary things.

Ordinary people have pets. The Jennings have pets.

But once the Jennings are kicked out, they leave their things and their pets behind, because they don’t give a fuck about their things and their pets, because all of their fuck is reserved for their drugs. Despite this seemingly important fact, the Jennings care enough about being normal to build a broken stinking shitty stage of a world around them. And they’ll keep building it, wherever they are, whoever they are, because the Jennings aren’t just one family in one home in one town.

“I’m finished,” I tell Aunt Janet on the phone, so that she can punch the clock.

But I’m not finished. Before locking up, I spend a few minutes petting the cats. I don’t call animal control. This is a city of cats and they don’t stand a chance in lockup. No, after I finish maybe the last petting of their lives, I’ll carry them outside and lock them out of their home-stinking-home.

And say goodbye.

One summer I start reading like Quixote on crack. That very same summer, Mrs. Royal, the hottest librarian in the known universe(s)—sorry, mom, I’m not sure how many you and your scientist friends know about—starts working at the public library. Not a coincidence. And maybe, just maybe, this sort of thing happens all the time. Maybe the future Olympian overhears one day that his secret love thinks swimmers are sexy. Or the future Guinness World Record holder for Farthest Spaghetti Nasal Ejection eats at an Italian restaurant under a busted heating vent and sneezes. Or a grandmother buys a box of medical textbooks at a garage sale because they’re “so cheap and in mint condition” as she explains to her bemused son, and gives them to her granddaughter, the future doctor, on her sixth birthday. Or the very horny future English teacher meets a woman with a low-cut shirt and well-formed breasts and an unhappy marriage and a need for attention.

And this is her library. When I’m inside, I’m inside her.

And these are her favorite books. When I’m reading them, I’m reading her.

Touching her. Opening her and closing her.

The novel is nothing but a thick line between our two minds.

It’s a love spell, written in code.

We talk about her favorite books—now our favorite books—and I feel almost like a man.

There’s a reason intercourse refers to both the act of making love and conversation.

But the library’s empty now, and Mrs. Royal isn’t queen here anymore. In her place, I find the ugliest, fattest, most annoying woman in the Universe(s). She bites her nails like my college roommate, the grit under those nails leaving streaks of brown on her yellow teeth. She can’t stop moving—tapping her fingers or bouncing her leg or swiveling her chair or rolling her neck. And every few seconds she sniffs at nothing like Uncle Steve, like her nose is a ticking time bomb you wish would go off.

She smells like raisins.

And when she speaks. God, when she speaks. “Like, um, can you hear me alright? Am I getting through to you?”

“I can hear you just fine,” I say, and I’m starting to wonder what I’m doing in an empty library.

She smiles. “That’s great, Berny.”

And now I’m wondering why this woman is my sister. And why she’s alive. “Aubrey, what are you doing here?”

“Aubrey, huh? That’s, um, the name of your sister. I’m pretty sure.”

“Am I dreaming?”

“You’re not awake.” She picks at her teeth with a pencil, adding to the mosaic already in her mouth. “It’s an interesting choice, your sister. I can only imagine how, like, ugly I am right now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She laughs like one of the Jennings’ thrown out dolls would laugh. “You’ve never, like, met your sister before. So I’m obviously gonna be the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen, because, men have a difficult time desexualizing a beautiful woman that they’ve never met. Subconsciously especially. Therefore, unless there’s some incestuous stuff going on, I’ve gotta be, like, a troll or something. Am I right, bro?”

Part 3

After they crown the topless Queen, and race banana tree trunks down the hillside wearing nothing but body paint and a loin cloth, and parade for us, and dance for us in traditional Polynesian hula skirts, then we all—Rapanui and Tourist alike—head into the gymnasium for the not-so-traditional disco party. Most of the island women wear coconut bras. Some let their own coconuts hang out. And here I am, alone in the corner.

Until Jack saves me. “You alright, Bernard?” He lends his hand to my shoulder. “Missing somebody back home?”

“It’s not that. I’ve been having these…what do you call them…those very detailed dreams.”

“Lucid?”

“I’ve never had them before. Or I have and couldn’t remember them.”

You’ll tell Jack anything, but god forbid that you learn any of his deep dark secrets. Or even that he has any.

“That’s normal,” Jack says. “I don’t know what it is—the change in altitude, the jet lag, some other factor. We’re all affected by travel in one way or another. For people like you, it’s dreams. For me, explosive diarrhea. Consider yourself lucky.”

I grin, and Jack reenters the mass of bouncing flesh. At that exact moment, as if the crowd can’t accept Jack without sacrificing another, Krow materializes at my side.

“You should dance, Mr. Johnson,” she says. “The Rapanui know how to party. And usually I hate disco.”

Bernard. My name is Bernard. But I say, “I’m enjoying the free drinks.” I raise my cup and jiggle it as if to emphasize its existence.

“Good. As long as you’re enjoying yourself.” She lets her back slide down the wall, little by little, but keeps her legs straight as her sandals slide forward. After a few seconds of this, she’s almost sitting, but there’s no chair, and she doesn’t fall. “These Rapanui women. They’re amazing, aren’t they? They’re not afraid of going topless. They don’t wear makeup. Seeing women like this, that’s why I’m here.”

I face her. She smells like plums about to burst.

“I mean, on the inside I’ve always been a woman. Always. But after my surgeries…” She sighs, maybe in disappointment. “I felt so insecure. Are my breasts breast-like enough? Is my labia labia-like enough? But once I allowed myself to fully immerse into the female world, I was reminded that I’m not the only one asking these questions. Women who are born women, they’re just as insecure. They have these outrageous paradigms of beauty. So I promised myself that I’m not going to live like that. Or think like that. And that’s why I’m here, really. On Vacation. To experience, firsthand, everything that beauty and femininity can entail, so that I can eradicate their paradigms and make my own. Reinvent myself. Does that make any sense?”

Yeah, Krow’s shocked me, like sinking in a puddle would shock me. You expect depth, but not this much depth.