Cool for America: Stories

No Cops

The ants had gotten in through the shattered bottom half of Leslie’s laptop screen. Now they crawled across her green-and-blue-tinted Word documents and websites one or two at a time, with no discernible pattern or destination. It must have been a hell of a place for an ant, all that glowing landscape to be negotiated, possibly forever. It wasn’t clear whether any ants ever escaped or if they all just died in there. If they were dying, they at least had the decency to do it over in the dark border area of the screen or down in the keyboard, rather than within her line of sight. She was trying to see how long she could go without buying a new computer. The sound of crackling glass every time she opened the screen suggested that the reckoning was nigh.

She was on her front porch, trying to make herself write an email to her ex-boyfriend Marcus, who was, she had just learned, due back in town in a week for an exhibition of his drawings at a local gallery. (Well, exhibition, gallery—his work was being featured in the basement of the camera store in downtown Missoula.) She wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be worried about running into her, that she no longer had any loose feelings about the breakup, that she thought it would be nice to have a drink, even, if he found himself with some time on his hands. But these thoughts wouldn’t form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she wasn’t sure they were true. She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass. The worst thing about studying art history was the artists.

Her newish man, a mannish boy, was named Cal, for the baseball player, he claimed, though Cal Ripken would have only been a rookie when he was born, so it was probably made up, like Hillary being named after the Everest climber. Anyway, he was from Baltimore originally. Like many of the men she knew in Missoula, he was a dog trainer, novelist, and organic grocery store employee. His sweaters had moth holes in them. He rolled his own cigarettes. His novels weren’t self-published, technically, but only because one of his friends in town printed and distributed the books for him. His friend’s service fee was mostly offset by the handful of sales Cal made at his readings, which were attended with shrugging obligation by his friends and the town’s mostly elderly patrons of the arts. There was, in fact, a reading that night at Marlowe’s Books for his latest opus, a four-hundred-page novel set in Butte on New Year’s Eve, 1899.

It wasn’t ideal to date a bad—or, okay, flagrantly mediocre—writer, but it wasn’t as terrible as she’d worried it might be. Cal had decent, if very male, taste in books (Bolaño, Roth, David Foster Wallace) and wasn’t aggressively dumb about most things. He also, blessedly, lacked ambition; he didn’t seem too stressed out during the composition of his books, and he didn’t seem to worry about the fact that no one outside of Montana, and few people within it, would ever read them. He was smart enough not to push it, and that counted for something. And, frankly, she wasn’t in a great position to judge his work or his choices, given her own life situation (this being a polite euphemism for depressed and barely employed), but she did know what was good and what wasn’t. This hadn’t blossomed into an ethical dilemma yet. Politeness and desire and taste did not all have to be mutually exclusive, did they? And maybe it was his lack of anxiety about his literary status that made him so good in bed. Leave it to somebody else to pierce the human heart with punctuation.

She gave up on her email to Marcus for now. She picked up the laptop—one hand supporting the bottom, the other cradling the fragile spine—and went back into her apartment through the propped-open front door. She laid the computer on the couch gingerly and got a beer from the refrigerator, then drank it in the kitchen, staring out the window at the parking lot, thinking about Marcus.

She was five minutes late for her copyediting gig at the Open Door, and Lyle called her out for smelling like booze. But what was the point of working for an alternative paper if you were supposed to show up sober? She was told to start with the fourteen-page community calendar as punishment. Join BodyWorks from 3:00–4:00 p.m. for a free workshop on mindful living and stress reduction. Kids and pets welcome! Sounded reasonable. There was a bluegrass band at one brewery, crafts for charity at another, and a scandalously cheap happy hour at the new distillery. Kids and pets were welcome. A rap-metal band last heard from in 1998 was playing the Wilma. And yes, on Friday, Drawings from Life by Marcus Cull was being displayed in the basement of the Compound Eye as part of First Friday, 5:00–7:00 p.m. She considered using her copyediting powers for evil—dogs and firstborns executed on sight?—but Lyle had a tendency to check her work, especially when she’d been drinking. She changed her ex’s name to Markass Krill, hoping this might be subtle enough to slip through the censor’s net.

She got a text from Cal—Gonna read chapter 8 good choice yes/no? Was chapter eight the mine cave-in? The dissolution of the affair between the former slave and the alcoholic homesteader? Cal’s books tended to be quite—one might even say gratuitously—violent, and she hoped he wouldn’t read one of the many sequences of mangling or disfigurement. He’d gotten the idea, from movies and Cormac McCarthy, presumably, that the best way to depict the past was through unrepentant brutality, because that’s how it was. Maybe, she thought, better not to depict it at all, then. She responded to his text with an equivocal yeh?

It was hard, sometimes, putting up with the town’s cheerful, half-assed shtick, but most days the alternatives seemed worse. New York was a nightmare of pointless ambition, people waiting in endless lines for nothing. In Boston they didn’t bother with lines—they just jammed as many white people as possible into anyplace showing the Pats. She’d spent her early years in Princeton, with its liberal old-money complacency, dominated by good families who produced good kids, most of them zapped awful by divorce and private school. They’d never get her back there alive, at least not for more than a long weekend. She’d spent her childhood wanting to be from somewhere else, anywhere that didn’t draw a wince. Of course, name recognition was the whole appeal for her mother—when people asked where she lived, she could just say, Princeton, and they’d know she was a person of wealth and taste, whereas when people asked Leslie, she said, Jersey, then, if pressed, Hopewell Valley, in Mercer County? Near Princeton? Which was true—one good thing about New Jersey was that there were so many townships and villages and what have you that you could always just claim the nearest one that appealed. In Montana, the categories were broader. You were from Back East, Around Here, or California. It was best to not be from California.

She moved on to copyediting the arts section, her favorite part of the job. She hoped that if she hung around the office making snappy comments for long enough, she might someday be allowed to write a film or concert review. The current movie critic, Amy Freitch, trashed almost everything she saw in a biting, faux-naïve voice, saving her praise, it seemed, only for films about martial arts and animals. Leslie had gone camping with her once, and they’d taken mushrooms and read tarot cards. Amy claimed to know how to do it, but seemed to be making things up as she went along, possibly because she was hallucinating too much to interpret what the cards portended, probably just because she thought it was funny. Nevertheless, she’d predicted a hard year for Leslie, which had proved accurate. But wasn’t every year a hard year? Even a good year took a lot out of you.

Amy was sexy in a way that Leslie envied—boyish in her carelessness about clothes and posture but still long-haired and vulnerable. She also drank too much, like most of the people Leslie admired. She hoped that Amy would get a job writing for a real newspaper so that Leslie could take her place at the Door. She wouldn’t be as good as Amy right away, but she’d find her voice. A voice like a girl with ants in her laptop, they’d say, marching in dissolved and scattered ranks toward some obscure but essential truth. Most people she talked to disliked Amy’s pieces, so maybe she’d get fired. Leslie couldn’t in good conscience hope for that, but, well, it was out of her hands, wasn’t it?

Amy’s piece was pretty clean, but the week’s book review, of an eco-memoir about the grasslands of Eastern Montana, was a mess. It was by a recent graduate of the MFA program, an eco-poet who couldn’t, or chose not to, organize his sentences in the traditional manner. Nature careth not about such frivolities, but even an alternative weekly required the occasional comma. She spent a solid hour rewriting the piece, knowing she’d catch shit for being overzealous. But she didn’t want to contribute to the prevailing idea that everyone born after 1984 operated in a vacuum of good intentions without recourse to actual knowledge.

Despite her rejection of its trappings, Leslie had been thoroughly and expensively educated, and some of the content had stuck, even as she’d worked hard to smother her recollection of it under a scratchy blanket of booze and other. Oh, she was an expert on encountering the other, and she wasn’t talking about UM’s shit show of a diversity fair. She missed cocaine, but there wasn’t much of it in town, and the couple of times she had run across it, it was awful. The grungy kids did heroin—it was back! again!—but she’d always been afraid of that. She wanted to kill time but not, you know, kill it. Like, permanently.

She arrived at the bookstore a half hour before Cal’s reading so she could look at books and help set up. There was a local itinerant man sprawled on the sidewalk next to the door. He was moaning and slowly kicking his legs like he was swimming.

Are you all right? Leslie said loudly.

The man moaned louder and kicked with more purpose, in her direction. She went into the bookstore. Kim was behind the desk staring intently at the store’s computer screen.

Have you seen that guy out front? Leslie said.

I don’t want to call the cops on him, Kim said, eyes still on the screen. But if Max gets here and he’s still out there, he’s not going to be happy. Mostly I don’t want to deal with it.

He doesn’t seem to be in a position to be reasoned with.

Accurate.

Leslie wandered among the new-books tables, browsing through the poetry and the stuff from the independent presses. How the store stayed in business selling such strange and unpopular books remained its enduring mystery. There must have been enough people buying them to sustain the small shop, but Leslie never seemed to meet them. Secret intellectuals, speak up! Reveal yourselves!

The big problem that Leslie had, as far as she could tell, was that she was still, at twenty-seven, a person without well-established and verifiable thoughts or opinions about things. Other people were moving through the world and analyzing what they saw with some kind of consistency, a set of values that was sustainable and based on … something. What they grew up with, what they had developed later in opposition to what their parents had told them. Of course, she knew that there was no such thing as a balanced consciousness, or, if there was, it existed primarily in idiots and self-satisfied creeps, men mostly, who chose not to question their lives for fear of realizing they were terrible failures. But still. Everyone else always seemed to be doing better at it than she was.

You want to help me with the chairs and stuff? Kim said, finally turning to her.

Sure.

Kim was one of the good ones, a seriously noncomplacent person. She struggled openly with the borders of her life. She was writing a memoir about her peripatetic childhood, much of which involved traveling the country in a van with her family, moving between cultish New Age communities in dire poverty. Kim’s rejection of her family was partial and unhappy. She loved them and forgave them in principle but also had to stay away from them and have almost no contact with them whatsoever because most of their interactions triggered major depressive episodes.

Leslie had been at the Rose with Kim one night when Kim got a call from an unknown number. Usually she screened such calls, but she was drunk and expecting to hear from a man she’d recently slept with, so she answered it. Leslie watched as Kim listened in silence for a minute to someone speaking on the other end, and then held down the power button until the phone turned off.

So that was my father? she said. I’m going to need you to hang with me for the rest of the night. Sorry.

Then they’d gotten ugly drunk—drink-spilling, falling-off-of-barstools, shouting-at-the-TV drunk. Jamie had been there, blessedly, to drive them home, and they’d lain on the hardwood floor of Kim’s apartment, curled up against each other, Kim’s hair in Leslie’s face.

I really hope I don’t puke in your hair, Leslie said.

If there’s any chance of that, you should not stay there, Kim said.

I’m sorry your family’s so fucked up, Leslie said.

It’s okay. I deserve it.

You were bad in a past life.

Past, present, future. There is no temporal zone in which I have not been, or will not be, a terrible person.

What did you ever do to anybody?

Nothing, Kim said. Not appreciated the gifts God gave me.

Well, what are you supposed to do?

Help people. Do something besides be selfish and wasteful.

You will, Leslie said. We’re still just little babies.

Drunk-ass babies, Kim said. Look out, America: the babies found the liquor cabinet.

This week’s episode: Babies get their stomachs pumped. Bad, bad babies.

And more like that. They’d both thrown up eventually, Leslie in the middle of the night, Kim in the morning, though they’d made it to a trash can and the toilet, respectively. Respectably.

Do you know this other girl who’s reading tonight? Kim said.

"I didn’t know there was anybody else," Leslie said.

Megan D’Onofrio? Kim said. Lyric essayist?

Weren’t essays bad enough before they got lyrical?

Maybe she’s cool. Let’s try really, really hard to be open-minded. That might be interesting.

Do you have weed? Leslie said.

Yes!

My mind is open to smoking your weed.

They went out to the alley behind the store, Kim carrying a box full of unsold literary magazines with the front covers ripped off for recycling. Leslie stood in the spot closer to the street as a lookout while Kim leaned against the wall and loaded the one-hitter painted to look like a cigarette. Their furtiveness was mostly for fun—they were aware of exactly no one who’d had any trouble getting stoned in Missoula. Still, Leslie found it hard to strike the surreptitious East Coast habits she’d developed as a teen during the late, feeble years of the war on drugs, even as, she’d been told, you could now smoke a joint on the street in Manhattan without fear of anything more than a ticket, at least if you were white.

Yo, hit this, Kim said, and Leslie did.

We sold, like, three books today, Kim said. And they were, like, the gluten-free cookbook. All of them.

Leslie passed the piece back.

Is Max, what, selling organs on the side? Leslie said.

I wish he’d cut me in if he was, said Kim, exhaling smoke. I think he might just be rich somehow.

Leslie took another hit.

How’s the book coming? she said.

What are you, my agent? Kim said.

Sorry for being curious about your stupid life ambitions, Leslie said.

It’s going slow, man. She looked down the barrel of the one-hitter and then tapped the ash out against the wall. "You think, like, Oh, it’s my life, I can write that, I went to graduate school. But you have to not hate what you write, you know? Which is hard if you hate yourself to begin with."

Maybe you should try not writing about yourself, Leslie said.

"Who’d want to read that?" Kim said.

They went back into the bookstore, which was dim following the late-afternoon glare. Leslie was surprised by the sharp vertigo of despair—stoned in the company of her favorite friend, surrounded by good books. She had to admit that she was dreading Cal’s arrival and subsequent reading. She knew this was unkind, but lying to herself wasn’t going very well. Her attempt at self-deception involved rehearsing dramatic internal monologues of uncertainty. Well, I don’t know I’m unhappy. Thinking that Cal depresses me doesn’t mean he actually depresses me. But she knew, underneath these contortions, that if one had these thoughts for long enough, self-obfuscated or otherwise, one would eventually need to act on them.

You okay? Kim said.

Leslie looked up and realized she’d been standing at the poetry table unconsciously holding a waifish new Anne Carson hardcover.

Can I use the computer for a minute? she said.

Let me just close out for the day, Kim said. Unless you’re buying that.

"Right, like I’m going to just buy a book, Leslie said. Oh, look at me, I’m contributing to the local economy by purchasing important literature."

It does sound pretty dumb when you say it in that voice. Computer’s yours.

Leslie fell into the padded swivel chair and opened her email. It seemed important to write this on a computer instead of her phone. In two blurry minutes—the pot helped, if that was really the right verb—she typed out a truncated version of the gracious, medium-true email to Marcus she’d been drafting in her head for days. She hoped all was well, was glad he was coming to town, hoped they could interact without issue. She signed it With love, Les, deleted that, retyped it, deleted it again, retyped it again, and hit send. Then she hurriedly logged out of her email, closed the Internet browser, and shut down the