The Onion Was Me by Paul Michel  

     Not for the life of him would Elliott consider beginning a story like this:

     A man walked into the tavern where I was drinking and set a life-sized bust of John Wayne on the bar. 

     It’s not his style.  He’s come to accept that, for better or worse, he’s a straight-up domestic fiction guy; stories of hospital vigils and turgid summers at the lake house, coming of age conundrums and the jangling triangles of middle-aged romance.  He learned how to write these stories in graduate school, nearly twenty years ago.  He writes them still, late into the night, deep in his basement study, while his wife and two sons sleep in the house above. 

Back in those early, buoyant years Elliott filled marble-covered composition books with labored drafts, canny plots, robust outlines, clever sketches, taut beginnings, pithy endings and muddled middles, this last the hardest by far.  He hid the notebooks in a locked cabinet drawer, fearful of premature discovery—that someone would read his work before it appeared between the slick, sacred covers of The New Yorker or Harper’s or The Atlantic Monthly.  Or even in a novel of his own.  Before he was an Author at last.

Now, with a 40 gigabyte hard drive to fill, his visions of fictioneer fame are considerably subdued.  Not that the dream has died.  But over the years, especially the past few, he has readjusted his sights.  A small literary journal—any journal—would do.  From one of the lesser universities, perhaps.  Or maybe the quirky, self-produced project of some bon vivant eccentric.  A community college quarterly.  An internet “zine.” Anything.   He’s thought of blogging, but it wouldn’t fill his need.  He wants to be chosen.  Considered.  Approved.  Published.

I set my beer down.  I considered the head.  It floated in and out of focus, like my thoughts.  The guy looked me up and down. Then he turned to the bartender and ordered a shot of Jack and a Rolling Rock on tap. 

One for your friend, too? I asked him.

Funny, he said. 

“Write what you know” was the mantra Elliott learned years ago. It guided him still.  The richest literary epiphanies, he believed, occurred in the every day lives of ordinary people.   He wrote of families, of his neighborhood, of age and loss, and sometimes of youth and folly, but in all cases of things he’d seen and (he hoped) understood, not invented or imagined.   He stalked the fiction aisles at the Border’s on Fourth Avenue, studying the blurbs of the lucky few, the writers he envied so savagely that he could barely bring himself to say their names aloud.  There was something vital missing on those shelves, the something that kept him in his basement night after gnawing night, chiseling at the stubborn block of his imagination with the brittle, dented tools of his desire:  Not one had yet (or apart from him, ever could) write of his life. His life, damn it.  His vision.  Surely it was worthy of a few pages, somewhere?  He gritted his teeth and went home to write some more.

I ordered another beer.  That made seven, and it wasn’t even six o’clock.  This was not going to sit well with Jen and the kids.  But hell, a guy doesn’t lose his job of fifteen years every day.  I said this to the guy.  He told me I didn’t know the first fucking thing about loss. 

Like this head here, he said.  You’re thinking its some kind of joke.

I’m not thinking anything, I told him. 

Yeah well shut the fuck up while I tell you, he said. 

 This clipped, flippant form; this absence of punctuation—what on earth has gotten into Elliott?  He minds the forms.  He colors inside the lines.  He does not embrace that hackneyed aphorism, “thinking outside the box,” which more often than not (in his experience) is merely an excuse for lack of focus.  “There is beauty to be found within the box as well,” a literature professor had said once back in school.  His favorite prof, he’d decided over the years, a grizzled Episcopalian scholar who’d flown fighter jets in World War II, and who in his old age drank Scotch and chopped firewood—at the same time—to rest his colossal mind.  “I’ve been teaching this book for forty years,” he’d say, waving his ragged copy of The Canterbury Tales like a battle flag.  “And I’m just starting to comprehend it.  Everything I need is right in here.”   Elliott took this lesson to heart as his own life’s anthem:  Stick with what you know, and it will reward you in the end.   Or something like that.

You seen the Sands of Iwo Jima? 

I shook my head. The bust danced back and forth.  It was made of porcelain and wore a green Army helmet and a red bandana.  Its lips were thin, its eyes bright blue.

Fuck, said the guy.  I don’t believe it.  Where you from, anyway?

He’d been talking for a while. Mostly about his father, who was dead.  And something about his girlfriend.  I hadn’t been paying much attention.  Now he was looking at me like I was something that had come out of his nose.

Iwo Jima?  You never saw it?

I don’t go to movies much.  Was he talking about a John Wayne film? I always thought of John Wayne as a cowboy.  Actually I’ve never thought of John Wayne for more than thirty seconds total in my whole sorry life.   But there he was, staring at me from under his porcelain helmet.

Guess not, I said, as much to the head as to the guy.

Ira Hayes?  Ira fucking Hayes?  You even know who that is?

I drank my beer.  Fifteen years, I was thinking.

Guess I don’t. 

What the fuck, man?

Elliott’s wife Jen thought that he’d been acting strangely.  He was spending more time than ever downstairs.  He was drinking more wine at dinner.  When she or the kids spoke to him, he would snap at them like they were misbehaving puppies.  She spoke to her friends about her concern.  “Midlife crisis,” they said.  “A phase they all go through.”  She was ready for the phase to end.   

They were arguing more often.  Usually it was about the boys.  He let them run all over him.  No discipline, no consistency, no limits.  “I parent by example,” he told her, “not by fiat.”  She asked him what in the world that was supposed to mean. “Having a strong male role model as a father will be a lot better in the end than having a drill sergeant,” he said.

“Who told you that?”

“Stands to reason,” he said. 

A strong role model, Jen thought.  Example, not fiat.  Right.  Huddled down in the basement with his computer, writing stories nobody would ever read.  He wouldn’t even show them to her.  Not that she hadn’t offered.  “Want me to have a look at what you’re working on?” she would ask.  “It’s not ready,” he’d say.  He’d been saying that for twenty years.  A phase.  Right.

From where I was sitting I could just see the door and out to the street beyond.  The afternoon sky was fading.  Inside the tavern it wasn’t day or night. The head was starting to seem a little too genuine.  I half expected it to start talking.  I hoped to hell it wouldn’t. 

So which of his movies have you seen?

I couldn’t think of one.  But then I couldn’t think of much.  Fifteen years.

Nothing comes to mind.

Are you for real, man?

Good question.

There had been rumors at the office, a City finance department where Elliott was an assistant to an assistant director.  There were going to be budget cuts and lay offs, the fall-out from a couple of failed referendums last election.  An audit committee had been through, reading files, conducting interviews.  They hadn’t talked to Elliott directly.  Because he was safe, or because he was on the block?  Nobody would tell him.  In his heart he knew just how superfluous he was.  He made a list one day during his lunch hour, one column of all the projects he’d worked on in the past three years, another showing the contribution each had made to the department’s Goals and Milestones, which were set forth in an annual assessment written by his boss, Ms. Larson.  The second column was empty.  Fifteen years on the job and he was merely taking up space.  If he knew this, surely everyone else did too.

“I’ve been under a lot of pressure at work,” he’d told Jen.  “Increasing experience means increasing responsibilities.”

“So does a growing family,” she’d said.  

He’d promised to relax, to lighten up, to start spending more time with the kids.  Then he’d gone downstairs to write. 

This Ira guy—the name rang a bell. Wasn’t there a song?  I couldn’t recall.  Iwo Jima I did remember, from a picture when I was a kid, a paint-by-number kit my Uncle Bert bought with his Raleigh cigarette coupons.  It hung over the sofa in his house.  It was a lot cooler than the abstract stuff my mom put on our walls.  He’d gotten the faces of the Marines real good and painted the sky blood red.  My mother’s art, you couldn’t tell what it was. 

I looked again at the bust.  There were two new drinks next to it. A draft and a shot of bourbon.   The guy must have bought them for me.  I drank the bourbon.  He started talking again.

He was the Tough Guy.  They hated how he rode their punk asses.  You know?

Sure, I said.

But they learned to love the son-of-a-bitch in the end. 

I guess, I said.

He swiveled in his seat to face me. 

Your old man still alive? 

It was the first question he’d asked that I could answer.

No.  He died when I was three.

Fuck.   

Dirk, Elliott’s older boy, was in middle school.  Andrew was in fourth grade.   Both got into fights, and their grades were poor.   Jen seemed convinced that Dirk would be stealing cars and knocking off convenience stores before he started shaving unless Elliott put his foot down soon.  Andrew was following in his brother’s footsteps.  Two weeks ago he had set a classmate’s hair on fire.  Today was the first day back to school after his suspension.

“They’re going to do what they’re going to do,” Elliott said.  He’d read those very words, he insisted, in one of the self-help parenting books Jen brought home in piles from the library.  It seemed like an odd piece of advice from a self-help book, and Elliott expected that there’d been more to it, but he’d only been skimming.  He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what he could say or do that would make a difference. Not a real difference.  Not anything that would stick. 

Elliott barely remembered what it had been like to be a teenager.  Everything before junior year in college was pretty much a blur to him.  “The fog of youth,” he called it, a phrase he liked that he may have made up; he wasn’t sure.  But he did recognize that his sons’ childhoods were very different from his own.  Between their TV shows and their DVDs and the countless hours they spent playing video games and wandering the dead-end streets of cyberspace, it was hard for Elliott to believe that he knew their world, or them, at all.  He’d tried to talk to them about books, about writing, about the things he loved.  They simply stared at him. He’d tried to write about them, to weave them into his stories, but he discovered that he had very little to say about them.  He hoped that he would understand them better as adults.  

 “They’re on a slippery slope,” Jen said. “This is a critical age.”

 “They just need time. They’ll turn out fine. We did, after all.”

 Jen bit her tongue.  He could tell. 

Fifteen years.  They can kiss my ass.

You said that already.

John Wayne’s eyes were kind of beady.  He looked older than when the guy first set him down.  Fifteen years.  Not so much as a fare-thee-well.  I still couldn’t believe it.

Not so much as a fare-thee-well, I said.

You said that too.

I still can’t believe it.

We drank in silence for a while.  The guy was about my age, maybe a little younger.  Hell, maybe ten years younger.  I never can remember that I’m as old as I really am.  Two kids.  Shit.  What was I thinking?  He had a beat-up look to him:  Ripped T-shirt, leather jacket, baseball cap, pony tail.  One of his upper front teeth was broken at an angle.  His father was dead. 

Where the hell did it come from? It just occurred to me to ask. 

It was supposed to be for her, he said. 

I supposed he meant his girlfriend. The clock above the bar said seven.  Jen did not know where I was. 

Fifteen fucking years, I said.                    

I hear you. 

Elliott considered warning Jen about the impending lay-offs.  But she would have worried herself sick, and until he was certain that he was on the list, it seemed cruel to put her though the agony.  Just this morning, over coffee, she’d asked him how things were going at work.   It was a conciliatory question.  They’d argued again last night.  Jen wanted them both to drive Andrew to school his first day back, have a talk with the principal.  “He’s got to understand how serious this is,” she’d pleaded.  Elliott disagreed.  “He’s got to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around him.  If we’re both there it will just exaggerate his sense of self-importance.  Let him take the bus.  He could use a little humility.”   Jen said he was just trying to avoid an unpleasant situation.  Maybe she was right.

Had he known what today would bring at his office, Elliott cheerfully would have carried Andrew to school on his back.  For when he returned to his cubicle after his afternoon coffee break, there was an envelope lying on his chair.  Inside was a notice on City letterhead, a half-sheet of paper the color of split-pea soup.  It was one of the “with genuine regret” letters that had been the talk of the department for weeks.  He’d never actually seen one.  They’d spelled his last name wrong, as usual. 

The letter listed the telephone number of a grievance board with which one could register a protest.  Elliott thought of the lay-offs he’d heard about in the past month: Rick Johansen in Accounting, Doreen Epplenberg in Human Resources, Rodney Beaudoin in Special Projects.  Even Vicky Spencer, the administrative assistant who sat outside Ms. Larson’s office.  She was young and gorgeous and had a degree from one of those East Coast schools you always saw in the N.I.T. tournaments.  If they could get away with canning her, Elliott thought, what possible argument of unfairness could I make?  Vicky actually did something.  He didn’t know what exactly, but she was always looking frantic, with a stack of files in one hand and her cell phone in the other, late for some meeting that couldn’t start without her.  The substance of his grievance would be simply this:  Fifteen years.  A third of a working man’s life.  How can you do this to me?

He tossed the notice in the trash, picked up his briefcase, and slipped out to the hall unseen.  He took the elevator to the lobby, pushed through the revolving doors, and walked almost twenty blocks before he thought about where he was going.  He’d made it to a part of downtown he did not know well, a stretch of Third Avenue between the big department stores and the Seattle Center, a desolate few blocks of union halls, social service centers, thrift stores and a couple of struggling restaurants.  And Lucky’s Tavern, which he had driven by a hundred times without noticing it.  When he first lifted his head out of his stunned reverie he saw the neon beer signs in the window just in front of him:  Rainier.  Budweiser.  Miller.  He didn’t even break stride.  He walked in, took off his jacket, sat at the bar, put his briefcase on the floor, and ordered a beer.  He needed to think.  He would have to tell Jen.  He would have to go back and get his things.  He would have to face his coworkers.  He would have to tell Jen.  He would have to talk about his severance package with Ms. Larsen, a thin lipped statue of a woman who had never liked him.  He would have to find another job.  He would have to support his family. He would have to tell Jen. 

When he finished his beer he ordered a second.  Then he looked around.

Elliott had not known that there were still places like Lucky’s in Seattle.  Certainly there were none in his neighborhood, on the other side of Lake Union.  He guessed there might be some in the grittier south end, where he seldom had reason to go.  Lucky’s aspired to nothing except quenching a man’s thirst as cheaply, expediently and voluminously as possible.  No food, no pool, no darts, no pinball, no video games, no pull tabs, not even a TV.  Well, actually there was a TV, high above the bar in the corner, an ancient relic with bent wire rabbit ears and a lightning-bolt crack across its dark, bulbous screen, as though someone had thrown a brick at Howard Cosell in 1976 and they’d never bothered to get rid of the damned thing.  There were a dozen other men present, their ages indeterminate, their hair stringy, their beards scraggily, their eyes red, their postures those of rank defeat.  The music—old rock classics—was loud.  Beers were cheap.

He would have to tell Jen. 

He signaled for another. 

By the time the man with the bust came in, Elliott had examined and rejected every option that had come to mind.  The only certainties he’d arrived at were all aligned against him:  Jen would blame him for his dismissal.  His old officemates would shun him, fearful of contagion.  Ms. Larsen would condescend to him.  His severance pay would not cover his mortgage. His boys would not understand.  No one would hire a man his age with the few paltry skills he had—or didn’t have, when it came down to it.   When he stood up from this bar he’d be indistinguishable from the other guys here.  He yanked the tie off his neck and dropped it on the floor.  The man with the bust sat down.

He had thirteen genuine fucking autographs, three hundred fucking posters, every fucking movie on Beta, VHS and DVD, over thirty biographies, forty-one studio glossies, two dozen figurines, boxes of buttons and souvenirs and programs and cigarette lighters and fuck knows what else.  But just this one head.   It’s one of a goddamned kind.

I looked again at the bust.  It looked back.  Every time its gaze met mine, it was like a layer of a big fat onion peeled way.  The onion was me.  Soon those beady eyes would see into my very core.  My heart.  My soul.  If I had either.  Fuck.

 Elliott carried his cell phone in the pocket of his tweed sport coat, which he’d draped over the seat of his barstool when he first sat down.  It fell to the floor.  Its custom tone ring had been a gag birthday gift from Jen, a snatch of a love song from The Sound of Music, the one the Captain sings to Maria called “I Must Have Done Something Good.”  They’d seen the movie together early in their courtship, at midnight in the University District, a gag-date where half the audience was dressed up like the characters—the nuns, the Trapps, the Nazis, Maria herself.  Snatches of songs and dialogue still resonated faint bells of romance for them, a memory of the days before kids and mortgages and visits with principals.  If the cell phone rang now, it would be faint indeed—impossible to hear, in fact, above the throbbing bass beat of the tavern’s sound system.  They’d played old Stones and Doors until twenty minutes ago when the shift changed.  The evening bartender, a tattooed hulk of a man, put on his own CD.  The new music was very different.   Elliott asked what it was.  The bartender told him that it was a Portland band called “Auschwitz,” and turned up the volume.  A singer screamed, raw and angry, above a background of thrashing, tuneless guitars and relentless drums.  Elliott and the guy had to shout to hear each other. 

It was supposed to be her goddamned birthday present!  I drove all the way out to Daddy’s storage locker to get it!  He died in a fucking nursing home in Auburn!  A total shit hole!  You hear what I’m saying?!

Once again, I’d barely been listening, though he wasn’t easy to ignore.

It’s a shit hole! I yelled.

Fuckin’ A!  You been there?!

Fifteen years! I said.

In fact, the phone had been ringing (“Here you are, standing there loving me, whether or not you should…”), and Elliott hadn’t heard it.  The Auschwitz CD was soon replaced by a band that the bartender said was called the “Dung Doctors.”  This was truly primitive and damned disturbing music, with a locomotive beat and lyrics that were exclusively swear words (Fuck fuck cunt cunt shit shit shit), chanted by a trio of husky-voiced women in ragged unison.  The bartender brought Elliott and the guy two beers they hadn’t asked for, turned up the volume even louder, and went into the back room to get stoned.  

So I get to the party, and the bitch isn’t even there! 

Maybe she was late!

It was at her work!  They said she left early!              

I left early too, I thought.  So why aren’t I home?

Daddy hasn’t been dead a week yet, and she fucking rejects his prized possession! Without even fucking seeing it!  That’s disrespect!  She ain’t getting away with it!

So how are you going to stop her?!

Fuck if I know!

Jen has called Elliott’s department, which is closed.  She has called his buddy Toby, with whom he sometimes plays golf. Toby isn’t home.  She has given up calling Elliott’s cell phone.   The boys want to know when dinner will be ready and where Dad is.  He must have gotten held up, she tells them.  Traffic, maybe.   Or a deadline at the office.  He’ll be home soon.

She calls his doctor, his dentist, and the guy who cuts his hair.  Maybe he had an appointment and forgot to tell her?  He is telling her so little these days.  She tries to call his boss, an unsmiling woman whose name she finds on their Christmas card list, but she gets no answer.  She remembers the name of one of the men in his department, Les Little.  How could she forget a name like that?  She looks him up in the phonebook.  He answers on the second ring.  She hears classical music in the background.  Les was not at work today.  “This damned flu,” he says.  “It’s going around.”  Jen hangs up. 

 The boys are in the living room watching TV.  She tells them she’ll order a pizza, which elicits cheering and high fives.  She calls in the order, pays by credit card, hangs up, and gets her car keys. “I need to go pick him up,” she says.   “Save me some dinner.” She hurries out the door.  

I’m going to find her.

Where?

Wherever she’s fucking hiding.

I tipped the dregs of my beer down my throat.  I turned on my bar stool. The guy was gone.  I stared at the bust, which he had left behind.  The burly bartender had his back to me, fussing with something at the cash register.  The CD was over and he hadn’t bothered to change it.  In the sudden quiet I thought about my old professor, the one who chopped wood.  Within the box, he said.  Beauty within the box.   What else had he said?

I spoke to the Duke’s head:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote, the droghte of march hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in swich licour, I said.

The bartender turned around.  He was as bald as a hubcap.   Above one bloodshot eye was a blue tattoo of a swastika.

Fuck you say?

It’s Middle English.

Then fuck off to middle England, he said. 

Wouldn’t I love to.

What happened to your friend?

He went to settle a score. 

The bald guy leaned across the bar.  His breath smelled like an oil change.

I think it’s time for you to go too.   

Ira Hayes, I said.  We’re talking heroes here.

I’m counting to ten.

Holler if you need help.

 I was pleased with my wit.  I tucked the bust under one arm and gathered my coat and briefcase off the floor with my free hand.  I left my tie curled on the floor like a snake. I figured I wouldn’t be needing it again.  It occurred to me that I had not given either of the bartenders any money for my drinks.  This felt oddly like a victory.

 I pushed through the door and stood on the sidewalk.  The world was gray and muted.  It would be dark soon. I began walking back uptown. 

Jen takes Second through Belltown.  It’s one way south, the fastest shot to City Hall.  She needs to go somewhere, and Elliott’s office seems as good a place as any to start.  Traffic is sparse, but at the corner of Second and Lenora she has to slow down.  A man and a woman are standing in the middle of her lane, blocking her way.  They appear to be having an argument.  He’s grabbing her wrist, and she’s attempting to pull away.  An abduction?  Domestic abuse?  Jen reaches for her cell phone.  Should she call 911?  She doesn’t need this, not now.  She has no time for anyone else’s business. 

The man and the woman are shouting.  He is in his mid-thirties she guesses, overweight, with a brown leather jacket, a ragged blonde ponytail, and a baseball cap.  The woman looks younger. She wears torn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt.  Spiked black hair, streaked with blue, radiates high off of her head.   Jen taps her horn a couple of times.  They ignore her.  The man pulls one way, the woman pulls the other.  Jen’s window is rolled down, and she can hear them clearly.  “The Duke, the fucking Duke!” he is yelling.  “Let me go!” she yells back. 

“Hey!” Jen hollers.  “Get out of the street!”

 They turn toward her.  He still has the girl’s arm, but she is no longer resisting.  They walk slowly toward her, staring at her through the windshield.  Jen is scared.  It is as if her shouting has flipped a switch and redirected all their rage against her.  She puts the car into reverse and looks into her rear-view mirror, intending to back away, then swing wide around them—the lane is clear—and leave them standing in the street.  But the view in her mirror causes her to slam on her brakes and scream.

Walking down the sidewalk behind her, not a block away, coming her direction, is Elliott.  He appears to be talking to himself.  In front of him, held in both hands at arms length, he is carrying a human head.

I’d never been thrown out of a bar before.  Something told me I ought to start getting used to it. I held the Duke in front of me.  I had a plan.  I would go to my office.  I would sit at my desk.  I would turn on my computer and write a letter to Ms. Larsen.  I would lay out exactly what I thought of her.  The Duke would tell me what to write. I would leave the letter, and the head, on her chair.  Fuck her.  I said this out loud, and it felt good, so I said it again:  Fuck her. I looked John Wayne in the eye.  His gaze was steely and strong.  Let’s go, tough guy, I said.

I heard a scream.  I looked up to where the Duke was leading me.  There was a familiar car stopped in the street in front of me.  Where had I seen it before? Behind it stood the guy from the bar with a young woman I didn’t know.  Her hair stuck up in rays, like a child’s drawing of the sun.  The guy rushed at me.  He was coming for the bust.  But it was mine now.  I wasn’t giving it up without a fight.  I put my briefcase on the ground, planted my feet, and tucked the Duke under one arm.  Then there came the sound of singing. It was familiar, too.  It was coming from me. 

“Somewhere in my youth or childhood...”  Elliott reaches into his pocket, pulls out his phone, and flips it open.

“Dad?”

 It’s Dirk.  He sounds frightened.

“Give me the Duke.”  This is from the guy.  The spiky headed woman stands behind him with her arms crossed.  Elliott hugs the bust close to his side.

“Where are you, Dad?” 

Elliott watches the familiar car ease into the empty intersection, executing a careful U-turn.  It comes closer, pulling nearly alongside the guy.  Elliott recognizes his wife in the driver’s seat. 

“I’m downtown,” he says into the phone, as evenly as he can.

“Where’s Mom?”

“Right here with me.”

“When are you coming home?”

Jen’s window is open.

“What’s going on, honey?” she calls to him.  “Who are these people?  What are you holding?”  The guy has his hands on his hips, looking angry but unsure.  Elliott presses the phone to his ear.

“We’ll be there soon,” he says.  “Don’t you have some homework you should be doing?”

“Are you okay?” says Dirk.

Elliott looks down at the head.  He looks at the guy, at the spiky-haired woman, at his wife.  He takes a deep breath. 

“I’m fine,” he says.  “Now go get that schoolwork started.  And…”

Jen’s face is screwed into a mask of confusion and concern. 

“No TV until we get back,” he says.

He snaps the phone shut and puts it in his pocket.

“He’ll love me in the end,” he says to his wife. 

“Who?” says Jen.

He holds the head out in one hand.  

“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “It’s not real.”

“Not real?” says the guy.  “It’s as fucking real as you are.”

Jen looks helplessly at her husband

“Honey?”

Elliott turns to the spiky-haired girl and holds out the head to her.

“Happy Birthday,” he says. 

The girl wipes her hands on her jeans and steps forward.  She takes the head and presses its face to her bosom.  Elliott picks up his briefcase and moves slowly to the passenger door of the car.  He gets in.  Jen pulls away.  They don’t look at each other. They have not gone half a block when they hear a sound like breaking glass behind them, and a man’s voice.

“Fuck!”

“Just drive,” Elliott says. 

He looks over his shoulder and sees the man pointing at the ground.  A police car, its lights blinking, is pulling slowly into the intersection. 

You can go faster, I said. 

My wife turned right on Battery Street. 

Who are those people? she said.

No one I know.

Where were you?

I thought for a moment. 

Iwo Jima.

Elliott? she said.  I knew she was about to cry.  I tried to cheer her up.

England, too, I said.  It was springtime.  April.  I was reciting poetry.

Elliott, honey, what are you saying?  Have you been drinking?

I looked out the window at the carwash on the corner, the one with the giant, twirling pink elephant.  A haggard panhandler stood in front of it, holding a cardboard sign that said God Bless You.

I was writing, I said.  I should have called.

Oh Elliott, she said.

As they pull into the traffic on Aurora Avenue, Elliott’s cell phone starts up again.  He ignores it.  It is completely dark now.  Jen drives without speaking, fat tears rolling down her cheeks.  Elliott watches the road and the buildings.  He looks at Lake Union from the bridge.  The lights of the boats on the water seem to him the loveliest thing he has ever seen. There is nothing he can say to Jen that she does not already know.   And yet here she is, driving him home.  Talk about your heroes.

He reaches for her hand on the gearshift.  The cell phone stops its song.  One of the boys, no doubt.  Ah, the boys.  They have their ups and downs, but they’ll turn out just fine.  All they need is a little guidance.  He looks forward to seeing them, to hearing about Andrew’s first day back.  He’ll tell them about the guy he met, about the John Wayne head and the dirty word band, and the hulk with the swastika tattoo.  He’ll get them laughing, and Jen will calm down, and everything will be okay again.  It has been a long day for everyone.  He looks forward to something to eat and a good night’s sleep.  To life within the box.   Everything is going to be fine and full of beauty.  Mostly he looks forward to his basement room, and his computer, and the story he will write tomorrow. 

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