They’ve come to Ribs again, the barbecue place in Cedar Crest, by now less a deliberate choice than the result of a summer’s worth of accumulated habit. It’s all familiar: the bottles of sweet barbecue sauce in the caddies, smoked turkey on Tuesdays, the paper placemats and Crayons they pocket and stash in the truck’s glove compartment. Matty tries to eat but just musses his coleslaw around, crisp and acidic, not overmayoed, and Sam and Mason talk and make points and laugh, so easy their way of being, sucking juice from their fingers. Matty’s stomach, always his internal barometer, is unsettled, has been unsettled for weeks, a yawning nausea punctuated by cramps and spasms. He carries tubes of Tums with him, slipping them surreptitiously into his mouth; he’s good enough now to do this without anyone noticing, even Sam and Mason, brushing it off like a nervous tic or messing with an ingrown. But Ribs is safe, or at least he’s come to believe so. Meat and potato salad, big glasses of iced tea, nothing weird or alchemical. They share brisket and pulled pork, load white bread with pickles and spicy sausage. They pass the Styrofoam cups of potato salad laced with dill, and sometimes go for the banana pudding shingled with vanilla wafers. That is the point, the sharing. They’ve grown tired of individuating, making protective decisions, catering to specific tastes. They’ve earned, by a patient, subtle osmosis, the unspoken status of a unit. Today he and Sam go in on a sweet potato pie, a splurge Mason disapproves of. “That’s a gallon of gas,” he points out, but Matty and Sam know by now not to listen, that Mason’s frugality is all bluster.
At home Matty’s room is packed. He’s leaving the next morning, early, at dawn, for his second year of college. Sam and Mason don’t go back for at least another month, their summer not even halfway over. His car is loaded with bags of clothes he’d wash when he got back to California, an old lunchbox in the fridge with Mom’s classic travel snacks: frozen grapes, ants on a log wrapped in tinfoil steepled by toothpicks to prevent smearing, two brands of protein bars, and ginger chews. The rhythm of the drive is familiar now. The early start, gas in Gallup, speed traps outside Payson, Phoenix’s byzantine concrete interchanges. Stopping for Chipotle in Yuma beside the world’s largest mobile home park, and the final push through the mountains, trying not to burn out the radiator. The drive used to provoke days of stomach trouble, hand tremors, flashing mental scenes of roadside vomiting or splitting an axel in the snow just outside Holbrook. To quell these incursions he gave himself assignments: listening to audiobooks of classics he’d pretended to have read, or lectures on chamber music and macroeconomics—all of which were abandoned by the hundredth mile for the crackling country stations of the inland. At summer’s onset he decided to make a point of stopping every fifty miles or so to take photos with his point-and-shoot, a hand-me-down Yashica, documenting the American West’s wide squalor—the gas stations, oil rigs, border patrol squads, thunderstorms, roadside casinos. To come out of these drives with some kind of artistic product, or at least something for the scrapbook. It occurred to him how much of his life, his inward formation, had happened while driving, in cars. How many falafel wraps had he eaten in the Co-op parking lot? How many laps around the city with Sam and Mason listening to Daft Punk or Kanye or Something Corporate, or else exchanging freestyle verses over pirated backing tracks? Leaving for Taos at dawn for a ski day, sleeping all the way with his forehead against the window’s cold glass; weekend trips to White Sands or Carlsbad Caverns, Mom pointing out bird species from the front seat or unfolding MapQuest printouts on the dash. But really it was the idle car time, the weeknight crosstown meanders, avoiding I-40 because who cared about getting anywhere efficiently. It wasn’t cruising because it wasn’t an occasion. It only became strange when you thought about it. To them “subway” meant sandwiches, not a commute. Walking to the store for milk, just the notion of it, felt as alien as sailing a skiff in the Atlantic. What did it do to a brain, a brain in motion, to be conveyed over land at high speeds in machines? When that was all you knew of space and city and scene? He wants to be on top of things, as in achieving a certain elevation, looking out, seeing the concrete arteries, the green patches, the patterns of industry and natural encroachment. To see oneself from above or afar, if only for a moment, standing in the foothills or on top of the mesa. This is what he likes about the mountains. Where he lives in California now, by the water, there are no mountains.
After dinner, they drive to East Mountain High to shoot on the goals there. He cleans his hands with the little wet wipes and cups the air out the open window. Sam is driving. Mason has a baked potato wrapped in tinfoil in his lap, cupped in his crotch, as though incubating an egg. Out of the twenty bucks he spent he’ll get three meals. All Sam listens to now is “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce or “Operator” by Jim Croce. Both play on the drive over. He totaled the old Supra by hydroplaning into a telephone pole and then bought a ’94 F150 at auction with money he got from selling basketball shoes on eBay. It had no bench seat or rollable windows but Sam didn’t care. Slugging the gearshift and rattling over potholes, whining into the school parking lot with a loose muffler felt appropriate to the scene—sufficiently western. What people might expect when you say you’re from New Mexico.
From the truck bed, Sam pulls a soccer ball and on the field he and Mason peel off their shirts. The sun hasn’t yet set but they’re cast in the long shadow of the Sandias; the grass is cool and long, sharp after months without mowing, and taking on a slight indigo hue in the thinning light. Mosquitos swirl around their ankles, and occasionally the mercurial, inky slash of a bat slaloms between light poles in the parking lot. The sprawling plain to the east is dotted with sagebrush, and the winding interstate is a great grey vein pulsing toward Texas. Does he always do this? Take inventory, survey the land? Is it because he is leaving, an attunement to the end of things? Or is it the way an architect responds each time she walks into a new building, that unconscious, intuitive assessment?
Matty keeps his shirt on, having failed to shed the rolls of dorm fat that grew that winter and spring. He used to drive around shirtless, practice tennis shirtless, exist shirtless, pulling his shorts and boxers down below his hips to emphasize his v-cut obliques. Now he rotates between two pairs of old soccer shorts, the only ones that still fit him, the elastic in the drawstrings having long lost its pull. His sense of expectation hasn’t caught up either, still the three-sport athlete of years past—a distant memory now, although he knows, yes, he knows, he’s barely twenty years old, so young. Regardless, he’s gripped by the sense that possibility has dissipated behind him like a contrail. He fishes a Tums from his pocket and sucks it down to dust.
They take turns in goal. They imitate free kick form: Ronaldo’s deep breath, the Neymar stutter-step. Even after two years at Syracuse getting piss drunk in the cold Sam retains the effortless liquidity of an athlete, a smoothness to even his simplest gestures. At Weston he could run a 4.5 forty and carry whole conversations while doing pull-ups, barely out of breath. He once dropped 29 on La Cueva with a head cold and Adderall high and fouled out midway through the second half. He serve-and-volleyed with the scrappy ruthlessness of an Aussie doubles specialist. Yet he seemed somehow to subsist only on Arizona Iced Tea, off-brand Kool-Aid from Albertson’s, cold pizza and Skittles. “That’s why my pee is always bright orange,” he’d say, his tone falling somewhere between boast and wonder. “Pure toxins.” It seemed almost a test, a dare, how nutrient-deficient he could get while still being the fastest kid in the district, maybe the state. His skin is as bad as it’s ever been, the network of oily craters on his jawline and neck now permanent scars. Riven, Matty thinks, his face is riven. While Mason shags balls from missed PKs Sam torques his head to see his upper back and shoulders, picking at zits, coaxing them to a head.
Barefoot, Matty begins to get a sense of the ball, to open his hips to curl a shot far post. Sam feeds him. When he hits it squarely he can feel the ball depress into his foot and ankle, the sting of skins, and as they find a rhythm he works into a slight sweat. Motion’s memory comes back, keeping his weight over the ball, his shoulders level as if they were balancing a broomstick crosswise. Mason keeps leaping up to skim his fingers on the crossbar. The cool grass on the soles of his feet like water splashed on the face. Feels good to move, to act on the world.
Since Mason blew out his knee in the state semis of U17s he’s hated running. Refuses to run. He has the metabolism and genetic makeup of a person who will never, can never, be fat. Matty envies this, that advantage, but also wonders if there’s something almost epistemological there, that he has access to a body of knowledge neither Mason nor Sam will ever have. Not to hate oneself, one’s body or appearance—not that. Rather to feel that one’s body is in revolt, is a separate entity from you, with its own set of priorities and moods and daily shiftings. To feel like a guest in your own skin, having overstayed your welcome.
*
In the spring he’d had some sort of spell, a virus the campus doctors thought was mono but which never rendered the test result. A weird sensation in his vision, a looming intensity from tight spaces and loud conversations, as though a dormant sensory hypersensitivity had suddenly awoken. He skipped classes without realizing, failing to write his weekly poetry analyses or watch the assigned documentaries for Spanish. He walked from campus to the donut shop on the corner of Morena, buying a cinnamon twist and carton of orange juice and eating on the curb while watching the traffic stream by. He bought cigarettes at the gas station and walked back up the hill to campus, hiding behind the architecture department to smoke in the shaded patio there. His appetite shrunk then bloomed, shrunk again. Everyone was always sick, coughing wetly into elbow crooks, tissues crumpled in palms. He avoided touching doorknobs, washed his hands a dozen, two dozen times a day, carried bottles of Purell in his backpack and glove compartment. He came to look forward to visits to the health center, for repeat blood work, the rotating docs trying to figure out if he was just a fried freshman or if something was awry in the blood, and even as his symptoms eventually burned off, his breath returning, spleen shrinking back to normal size, he still went to the health center every Friday, just to cede his body to someone else, for the coolness of the stethoscope on his back, a new nurse taking his blood pressure, and then the hands on his abdomen, checking for irregularities. He claimed fatigue, allergies, stomach stuff, an unnecessary STD test. He went to be touched, touched without asking, without the transaction. To be put in a gown, have his fingernails examined, told to cough, to take big deep breaths. He never mentioned the hand washing.
As his dried-out hands bled, clouds moved in and brought grey and a choky humidity with no rain. The sunsets were always prime but often he missed them, slept through them, power naps that became something else, something harder, deeper. He dropped the poetry class, then “Fundamentals of Music Theory.” He ducked texts from the girl he was sort of seeing, a poli sci sophomore from Spokane. If pressed, he said he was busy with a project or sick and contagious, but mostly he said nothing.
At the mall he bought a pair of moccasins from a Macy’s sale bin, moccasins that were actually slippers, the kind you get your dad for Christmas when you run out of ideas. He wore these everywhere, the tying of laces somehow too much of an undertaking. He wore a beanie to cover his unwashed hair and always had headphones on, headphones which piped in nothing but silence, merely there to dissuade conversation. He watched Champions League games in the lounge with the Saudis and Spanish graduate students. He wore the same pair of Adidas track pants everywhere. He received the world as if through a film or veil, the feeling of moving through a beaded curtain but never fully emerging on the other side.
The one class he kept up with was called “Literature in Violent Times,” taught by a heterodox octogenarian who shunned hand-raising and letter grades and took particular relish in books written during the perpetration of historical atrocities. They read Faulkner, Ghassan Kanafani, Peter Handke, Svetlana Alexievich, Isaac Babel. Dr. Gallagher’s argument was basically: history is one long massacre, witnessed by poets. Matty was, after all, an English major, albeit a reluctant one, albeit one by default, who was less stolidly bookish than the kid who wanted to write dispatches from war zones for high-watt magazines—for the combination of sexiness and peril, etc. There wasn’t a class for that. There were “Woman Writers of the Middle Ages,” “Culture and Hybridity” and “Development of the English Language.” But then there was “Literature in Violent Times,” which was nearer his ambition, such as it was, and he found the work easy, fluid, preoccupying in a proper way, an eagerness in his participation that had eluded him elsewhere that whole first year.
One story he read in LVT had dogged him, haunted him really, for the months since he first discovered it. Mid-semester he’d been flipping through Babel’s collected stories looking for something short, ultra-brief, to write about for his weekly submission. “Doudou” was a mini portrait of an unusually lovely young nurse, a tight two-pager from which he could squeeze a few paragraphs of formalist riffing. The eponymous nurse is unfazed by the brutal indignities of injured soldiers and goes about her ministrations with a combination of solemnity and good humor. She’s plucky. She tends to one soldier in particular, a Breton with shattered legs, awash in agony in a grim medical ward somewhere in the east, waiting to die. She tends to him with great care, and they develop a bond, often talking late into the night. Eventually, as their conversations grow more frequent and intimate, and as the soldier begins to surrender to death, Doudou permits the soldier to kiss her breasts, remove her dress, and possibly make love to her: an act of pity or tenderness, or both—or more. Other students found this grotesque, even offensive, or else a kind of joke. The sort of thing that didn’t track a century later. But he read the story dozens of times, in part for the ease of its brevity, but also to comb for details he’d missed, some crucial tonal shift or quirk of translation he’d misapprehended. Maybe it was the soldier’s total futility that had needled him, a futility not against violence or subjugation but to gentleness, closeness. Maybe it was the ambiguity in her consenting to his desire, his dying wish—to touch and be touched. Matty didn’t want to be the soldier, and he didn’t want to be fucked by a nubile nurse—he wanted, and maybe this was it, to be in possession of a secret, bound in silence with another. The nurse and soldier were bound by shame and transgression, a knowledge that their lovemaking would never be spoken of, recognized, replicated. It was fleeting and final. Something about that closeness pierced Matty, drew his breath in, produced a swelling ache in his marrow. And the more he thought of the story, turned it over in his mind’s fingers, he felt a sort of kinship not with Doudou the nurse nor the immiserated Breton, but with the story’s narrator, the Babel avatar, who tells the story from a close remove, a quiet observer who relays the morbid tryst with the solemn yet somehow gossipy tone of the skilled observer. He wasn’t Babel, obviously, a titan of literature, but Babel’s position, his there-but-not-there vantage, wasn’t foreign-feeling. Watch, pay attention, tell about it. That, he could understand.
Something about being in the field with Sam and Mason, in that quaking quiet of the east mountains, has summoned the Babel story. Maybe it’s the way Sam absently massages his chest with one hand while checking his phone with the other, pressing his muscles as if to verify their pliancy. Or the way Mason, having shagged another errant free kick, cleans the ball of goatheads and spurs, brushing a palm over the panels, flicking the stickers to the grass. Perhaps it is their bodies, the fact of their familiar bodies, torsos and calves and soft necks that are so evocative, so distinct, they seem inseparable from his own.
And yet he can’t tell them of the Babel story, try to explain its eerie softness, or how it has worked on his nerves—not because Mason and Sam are dumb or illiterate or will think his ruminating dweebish or tryhard. To speak of Babel is to speak of a future in which they figure foggily, abstractly. And even so, they don’t talk about books or much of what they feel. Mason is pure politics and Sam a committed dilettante and this is part and parcel of what makes them so viable, so safe: he can fold them into the story privately, strategically, on his own terms. It is, after all, all in his head.
Later, after shooting, bugs whir in the fluorescence of the garage light at Mason’s house. Matty and Sam play ping-pong while Mason works on his bike, tweaking brake lines. Barefoot Matty walks into the driveway when a ball whips past, Sam getting impatient in a long rally. They don’t keep score, but not out of gallantry. More like they’re past keeping score, having something to prove to one another. The quiet of the east mountains settles around them like mist. They drink a particular kind of soda, the blood orange San Pellegrinos Mason buys in bulk at Costco, one of his permitted indulgences. Playing ping-pong and drinking Italian sodas in a mountain town in a landlocked state—there was something in that, Matty thought, something humming and worthwhile, maybe just in the collection of textures, the textures that ultimately constitute a life. So often growing up he’d felt Albuquerque was a kind of regional relegation; things were happening elsewhere—in Los Angeles, Seattle, even Denver. What claim does this city make? Why do people move here? Do people move here? Why does it feel so aimless, so stagnant? For years he chalked up his shortcomings to having absorbed the city’s mediocrity, that all his misfires and regrets had been scripted by the very streets he drove, the sand that stuck in his teeth. He can see now with just a couple years of retrospect the internal flaw in these questions, namely that pretty much every kid everywhere asks this about their hometown, and yet even with this knowledge he can’t entirely disavow the impulse. He knows the land, its stark colors and undulations and abrupt shifts in terrain, the wide sky everyone gushes over, the evening light over the mesa, and yet it does little to him. Instead, an empty laundromat in a low-slung strip mall can make his vision shimmer and call his skin to attention. He can cry at a laundromat in the right light. It’s as though his aesthetic radar is fundamentally askew.
He’s getting ready to serve when Mason’s wrench clatters to the floor and the sprocket on the bike whirs, sending the pedals in motion.
“Fucking shit,” Mason says, kneeling on the concrete with his hands tucked in his crotch.
“You good?” says Sam.
“Fuck me in the face,” says Mason, his voice muffled, teeth gritted. He rocks slightly on his knees. The soles of his feet are grey with dust.
Matty moves quickly to Mason, kneeling. “Let’s see.”
Mason’s t-shirt is already blood-stained and as he draws it up to get a look runnels draw down his forearm.
“Wrench slipped and caught it on the teeth,” he says.
Matty can’t see Sam but feels him behind him. The drops of blood on the garage floor take on an avid, crimson hue. He is still holding the ping-pong ball in his left hand.
“Come inside,” he says. “We’ll wash.”
In the laundry room he goes through cabinets looking for peroxide, but finds only dog food, gardening gloves and old gingham napkins. He moves through the house’s cabinets with an uncommon authority. Injuries and crises focus him, shrink his vision. The clarity of need. Less time for ruminating when people are bleeding. He eventually finds the bottle under the sink in the hallway bathroom. Mason is in the kitchen running his hand under the faucet. The night has settled into its impenetrable inkiness, peppered only by the far-off windows of houses in Cerritos, small and steady as candle flames.
“Stitches situation?” Sam asks. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his body, crossing and uncrossing his arms, leaning on the doorframe. He seems determined not to look straight at Mason’s hand (he’s always had a blood thing).
Matty approaches the sink and squeezes Dawn into his palm. Not the ideal antiseptic but here they are. He takes Mason’s hand from the flow of water and rubs the soap into it. Mason winces, draws his hand back, but Matty holds it steady.
“Easy,” he says, his voice gentle.
He lathers the soap into the wound until the blood begins to clot. The suds carry a faint redness and coil pinkly into the drain. Their hips touch at the sink counter. The wound is clean. He turns off the faucet but doesn’t want to release Mason’s hand.
“Hand me some paper towels,” he says to Sam, who’s been leaning by the fridge, clicking through his phone. He lurches to action, as though remembering where he is.
Matty tears panels of paper towel and dabs the wound, drying it. He bends over slightly and blows on it.
“Ow. Ow. Ow.”
“Oh hush,” he says. “It’s working.”
Next he opens the bottle of peroxide and rests Mason’s forearm on the edge of the sink. At first he tips the bottle onto a fresh paper towel but then just pours directly onto the wound. Mason inhales sharply.
“Over soon,” he says. He tells Sam to find some Vaseline, look in the bathrooms and cabinets.
With a magazine from the island counter, Matty fans the smooth cut. The blood has mostly clotted but the wound runs down Mason’s palm, adhering to the lines and crevices in his skin. For a moment it’s beautiful; he wishes he could take a cast of it, an impression, fixing the shape in place.
“Do we go to the ER?” says Mason. “In Edgewood?”
“I don’t think so.”
Mason gives him a look.
Matty says, “I’m in charge here.”
He wads paper towels and tells Mason to grip them, apply pressure. He runs the faucet again to clear the remaining liquid and bubbles from the basin.
“Go sit,” he says, nodding to the kitchen table. Mason moves and sits down. He crosses the room to flick on the light, then comes back to the sink and wets more paper towels. He hands it to Mason.
“For your arm, your elbow.”
The blood there is already rusting, mingling with streaks of chain lube and grease.
He caps the bottle of peroxide. Sam comes back with a tub of Vaseline and some gauze.
“I found gauze,” he says, a snatch of pride in his voice.
“Brilliant.”
He balls a paper towel and scoops a shining daub of Vaseline and smears it down Mason’s palm.
“Vaseline is better,” he says. “Neosporin doesn’t prevent scarring, and its antibacterial properties are sketchy at best.”
“Of course,” Mason says.
“Everyone knows,” Matty says.
He presses a gauze pad down, using the Vaseline as an adhesive. He’s impressed by his own facility, the ease of his care.
“Pain level?”
“Nah,” Mason says.
Matty says he’ll be back, off to find some sort of athletic tape or Ace bandage to do the final wrapping. After scoping two bathrooms’ worth of cabinets he starts opening and closing doors in the laundry room, stepping on dog beds, listening to the extra fridge work through its key changes. Among leashes, poop bags, and heartworm pills he finds some bandage wrapping, purple and stretchy, for when the dogs get into scraps with snakes or barbed wire. He unwinds the bandage as he moves back into the kitchen, Mason now leaning his head on his arm flat on the table in a pose of almost theatrical despondency.
“Almost done,” Matty says. He wraps Mason’s hand, using figure eights around the thumb and wrist, and tucks the end into the binding.
“Like a boxer getting your hands prepped,” Sam says.
“You’re good at this,” Mason says. “How do you know?”
“Isaac Babel,” Matty says.
“Who?”
Matty shakes his head. “Guess I just have a sense. Where things ought to go.”
Sam sits down across the table. He’s pulled a Pop-Tart from the pantry and is biting its wrapper open.
“Really, help yourself,” Matty says.
“What?” says Sam. “He’s fine. I thought consensus is he’s fine.”
“It’s the principle.”
Mason says, “The optics.”
“You want some?” Sam extends the Pop-Tart toward them. Strawberry.
“No,” they say together, their voices tandem.
“I’d go at that potato, though,” says Mason. Abruptly he stands and leaves the room, as though fully healed and respawned. His gait is even, a little spry. A minute later he’s back holding the tinfoil parcel in his uninjured hand. He clicks open the microwave and places it atop a folded paper towel. He watches it rotate in the microwave, rapt by the rearranging molecules, and Matty has to curb the impulse to scold him, to think of the waves, the brain cancer, the way Mom would how many years ago.
At the table, the potato steams as Mason unwinds it from the tinfoil. He goes to the fridge for the butter dish, a slab of Irish butter, always salted, a color so rich it verges on egg yolk. He lops off a knob into the steaming potato, then goes to the pantry and comes back with a little bottle of bacon bits. He shakes generously, and caps the lid. From the drawer by the sink, he gets a fork. They all sit around the potato, as though it demands a prayer. Mason dips to blow on it, sending steam into Matty’s face.
“Mix it,” Sam says. “You gotta mix it.”
He takes the fork and mushes around the butter and bacon bits, turning it into almost a puree. Then they pass the fork and take bites, scalding the roofs of their mouths. The light outside hits that pure indigo of late summer, turning the yuccas and sagebrush and conifers to soft pastel smears in a darkening distance. The sky sweeps west with the trace of another breathtaking sunset, a sunset on account of the mountains he’s again failed to appreciate, as he’s always done with everything here.
And the knowledge settles on him then that he won’t be back, won’t ever come back, not like this, not live here again, spending nights at Ribs in the east mountains with Sam and Mason. Of course he’ll visit, fly in, make the rounds. But the tether has frayed—perhaps as it should. He looks at Sam and Mason, as though to imprint their faces on his memory, as if that weren’t already done. Always, his skin is too thin—too porous, too permeable. A pressure builds behind his eyes, his mouth dry. He can still smell Mason’s blood, a smell he wants to hold onto, bottle, recall on-demand.
But instead he says, “Save me the skins.”
“For sure,” says Mason.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” says Sam.
They exchange stretched silences, a joke here and there, Mason checking the nutrition label on the bacon bits, something about lethal sodium. Matty sits and watches his two friends. Sam’s acne, Mason’s thick glasses. The room holds them like a womb. They sit there and eat until it is dark, passing the fork between them. Then the night takes them back to themselves.
Miles Parnegg is a graduate of the Programs in Writing from the University of California, Irvine. He lives in Los Angeles.
Instagram: @mmb_mpp
Photo by: Ta Z