You are in a house on a block with other houses that look just like yours. You are part of a family. There are other families in the other houses. Those families look like your family. A mom, a dad, children. A community alongside other communities in a town in a city in a county. A pattern.
You know you are not like them. They know they are not like you. But everyone is uncertain just how much disparity there is. You stay quiet like this. Keep to yourself. Pay attention. Head down, eyes up.
You wake each morning at 7am. Put your pjs under your pillow, put on the clean clothes folded and set on your dresser. Pee. The scent is always heavy sweet and sickening. You thoroughly wash your hands. Brush your hair. Mom has a bowl of cereal on the table. You pour the milk in and eat it with a spoon. Drink your juice. Wipe your mouth with your napkin. Take your bowl to the sink. Rinse it with water, drink the water, set the bowl down. Walk to school. This is order.
You don’t hurt the dog. You can shoot birds from trees but birds are nothing. They are so far away and there’s a BB gun between you and it and too much air. It’s not much of an animal. Cats are fast and distrustful. Plus, someone always misses them. They put up little flyers. Have you seen me? Hamsters are stupid. Dull nothings. You can hold them. The heartbeat is nice. You can hold it up to your ear, close your eyes, pretend you are holding someone’s fresh heart. It’s so fast and fluttery and then it slows and goes away. And no one cares.
You get older.
You get a girlfriend. You bring her flowers. Take her to movies. You actually don’t have to smile or even be nice. But you can’t hurt her.
You graduate from high school. Get a job. Get married. Buy a house. You take care of furnaces. It’s easy. You drive. You get to know places. This block. This house. This town. This street. That window. This door. You scrape off your shoes at the front mat or take them all the way off, walk in the front door and are shown to the door that goes down to the basement, take out your tools and go to work. Just do your job. This is fending off the chaos.
The day ends at five. You park your car in the driveway, walk in the back door, go upstairs, change clothes, wash hands, comb your hair. Sit down at the dinner table. She asks you questions. Tells you about her day. She serves you. Your beer’s right here. Your water here. Your napkin in your lap. It’s orderly and pleasing.
You have sex in the morning and sex at night. Sometimes you wake up to pee in the middle of the night and when you get back in bed, you fuck some more. Right after you’re done, you want to do it again. But you can’t. That’s not normal.
You need children. A house with a husband and a wife and no children is not a proper home.
You eat, talk, smile, a peck on the cheek, a pat on the bottom, no foul language. Always be polite.
Sometimes you have to work nights. You’re on call and someone’s furnace stops working. People need a warm place. On your way home, you can drive the strip in the dark of evening with the slick streets, the crazy neon colors reflecting in the rain. It’s so dark, the moon hidden in the clouds. There’s so much more darkness but with all these thin shocks of bright color being blasted about, making the dark darker still. There are so many places to hide. The whores strut about in tiny little pacing movements. Cold hands in the pockets of used fur coats. Short skirts. High heels. Too much make up. Big hair. The early morning’s even better. They stumble around, strung out with drugs and little sleep and not having a warm place. A car with a heater looks good in that bright gray off-light of morning.
If you wear a suit and tie, they think you are trustworthy. They’ll pick you over another guy in a t-shirt. Even if he has a nicer car. It’s most important that you have the tie. Anyone can throw on a jacket. A tie takes time. It has more significance. You keep a few in the glove compartment. If you have a wife, you are safe. If you have a wife and kids, you are the safest of all. You keep a recent photo of your family visible in your wallet. Once it gets worn, you replace it.
You go to parties. You mingle. Make friends. You watch that guy there. You can be friends. He laughs. You laugh. A little too loud. Too long. It wasn’t that funny. You messed up. You got to keep everything just right. There are parameters. Obey the boundaries. He stops smiling, looks at his clear plastic cup and says he should top it off, gestures to the keg. You move on to the next guy. You laugh just right. Mimic his gestures. Cross arms. Open arms. Cross. Hand in pocket. His head quickly snaps to the left. He looks at his hand, his fingers in his pocket his thumb hooked into his belt loop, then to your hand, your fingers, in your pocket, thumb hooked into belt loop. Fuck. You can’t over do it. You move on.
Church on Sundays. You sit right here. You have your own Bible which you bring. It’s white worn leather and has a zipper with a dangling cross. You run your thumb along the zipper, feeling each tooth. The thin transparent pages. You like the words of God. You like God. You like punishment. Being the arbiter of punishment. You are the man. You are the boss. You like it.
Week nights are easy. Weekends can be trying. You got to watch the game. Sit in the armchair, drink beer, call out, “O!” when a goal or basket is missed. You say, “Goddamn it,” and the wife calls out about the Lord’s name. And you get to say how sorry you are and ask forgiveness. You’d rather be in your car, driving. You can smell whatever’s cooking in the kitchen. Maybe you got a little dot of blood on your shirt or a broken fingernail in your pocket you can feel or even put in your mouth. It won’t taste of anything but that doesn’t matter. There’s going to be meat, vegetables, bread, butter. Chicken, steak, or pork. There’s no pizza. You don’t eat pizza or casseroles. You never have breakfast for dinner. You put that directly into the trash and have her make something proper instead while you sit at the table and watch. Once she calls you to dinner, you turn off the TV and put on the radio. The table in the kitchen is white and round with four chairs. There’s more talk. And the kid won’t sit on her bottom, she’s got to be on her knees. And she won’t be still. She’s got to bounce. Make a mess. Babble. Wiggle as she feeds herself. Sing. The peas have to talk to each other. And the wife with the kid, entertaining the kid, helping the kid, feeding the kid, then feeding herself, constantly looking at you and smiling, Aren’t we happy? Aren’t we having fun? Trying to keep everything just so, and the constant chatter, it’s just all this sound and movement in this tiny little kitchen space with the bright fluorescent light buzzing and you can’t slam your hand down on the table and yell, “Shut your stupid whore mouths.” You just can’t. That’s outside the pattern.
This one girl picking her nose with her long fake nail. Looking it over. Flicking it onto the sidewalk. Absent minded. Disgusting. Leaning up agasint the brick wall. The movie theater right over there, the marque in the early morning looking so unreal. She lights a cigarette. One of those long ones. As if the long ones mean she’s a lady. A special whore lady. You keep that packet of 100s in the trunk of your car, under the spare tire.
You read books at night. It’s how you put a kid to bed. Good Night Moon. Where the Wild Things Are. You find Waldo together. He’s right over there. One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. Funny things are everywhere.
Prostitutes sell an action. An event. They give you this, you give them that. You put on the tie and the jacket. You drive around. One comes up. You can always see the relief when they spot your tie. It’s like a Quaalude. You take them into the woods, into the wet ferns, between the trees and the moss, and the living scent of earth and bugs and the decomposing trunks of trees. The easiest way is to take your forearm while you are on top and press down on their necks, using your upper body weight and just push down. You drag them deeper in, leave them naked, maybe pose them just so. You take note of where you are, map it in your mind. You are very fucking specific. If you’re not exact, you won’t be able to find your way back again.
You fill your tank with gas and wash up in the bathroom. It’s okay if you get home and there’s still some dirt under your nails. You fix furnaces for God’s sake. Your wife expects your hands to be dirty.
You pull over on the side of the road on the way to the movie. You got a sitter. She says, “What are you doing?” You say, “I just want you so bad.” She says, “We just did it.” She says, “It starts in fifteen minutes.” You say, “Who cares,” and grab her hand and pull her along behind you. You go left and then right and then left, deeper into the forest. She doesn’t want to follow. She doesn’t want to miss the movie. She wants to know, Why are we paying a sitter for this? You’ve made a mistake. You go back a little then take a left. You can’t go by the stars because there are almost always clouds. Your socks are wet. You tell her to stay, and go deeper in without her, get on your hands and knees, reach out your hand into the darkness of leaves and wet and feel the sudden cold of a dead hand and startle yourself and laugh. You go back for your wife and bring her in. You press your wife’s back against a tree. You slip your shoes off, your socks. You lift your wife’s skirt, pull your pants down, get her legs over and around your hips. Your left foot on top of the prostitute’s cold hand. You can feel her knuckle bones in the arch of your foot.
You play peek-a-boo. Hide and seek. Hot and Cold. You celebrate birthdays. Have dinner parties. There’s this day for this and that day for that. You wear this here and that there. You keep a calendar. You keep track of everything on a calendar on the kitchen wall over by the pantry. Your wedding anniversary. Mother-in-law coming to stay. You carefully cover your tracks with work and business and adhering to the pattern. This is when you wake up. This is when you smile. This is when you cry. When you pray. If you are out late, there’s a reason. If you get up early, there’s a reason. You look like you are coloring within the lines. You even sit at the kitchen table with your daughter and color together in her Princess Pony book as your wife makes breakfast. You drink your coffee. You say please and thank you and my pleasure. You say, Good job!
This one girl was so skinny her shoes didn’t even fit. Your hands around her neck. It was like breaking sticks for kindling.
You sit at the dinner table every night. It’s the bargain. You don’t want anyone to know. You’d like a backyard full of dead girls covered in pretty green grass. Crawl spaces stuffed full. You’d do it to the babysitter. The preschool teacher. The woman across the street. Instead, you got the woods along the river and all the little lost girls. And where you put them is all mapped out in your head. You can look across this table at your wife and think, The things I could do to you. You can shake hands with anyone and think, If you only knew. That keeps you going. That keeps you quiet and happy. You know all sorts of things others don’t know and never will.
The closer you get to the river the colder the air gets. The river running over the rocks. How it gurgles. How it can sound like salvia caught in the throat of a woman dying. You can follow the sound. You can think of it as the first music. The first language. Before the birds. Before the fish. It calls itself out. In the daytime some of the river looks green, emerald green. You don’t know why. It’s not the entire expanse of water either. There will just be this sudden flow of beautiful green water running through. You dump the body there, like that in all this lush foliage. It’ll cover and grow over. It’ll rot and rebirth not itself but something different. No one goes looking all that hard for these kinds of girls. They’re an endless repetitive blur. They’re a nuisance. Nameless. Replaceable. Hungry in a way which can’t be fed. You’re the only one who will get on your hands and knees and look for them. You roll down your window, drive right up and smile. You’re a nice guy. A family man. You’ve got a tie and a casually placed photo of your family right here. You just want a blow job. No big thing. It’s like ten minutes of her time.
Each night, after reading your daughter to sleep, you put on your pajamas. Matching top and pants. Brush your teeth. Wash your hands. Worry over the hair you are losing. You ask your wife who is already in bed if she minds that you are balding. She doesn’t mind. She loves you the way you are. You think about flossing, but don’t. You clean off the counter. Make sure your razor is in the right place. The shaving lotion. Straighten the hand towels. You get in bed. Read a magazine. Turn off the light. Fall asleep. Just like everyone else. Just like all of us.
You are hiding in the pattern. You are right there, right there, right there. On every page you are there, but some place different, visible but camouflaged. They’ll never find you.