The Brick

“Why are you crying?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No.” I paused. “I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to leave you alone?”
“Yes.”
The tears came then, heavier than before, blurring my vision until I blinked and the fat drops rolled down my cheeks in the same wet trail the others had followed.
“Ah baby, come’re. Will you tell me why you’re so upset?”
By now I had the blanket pulled up to cover my face, like on Sesame Street when Big Bird believed if he covered his eyes, he became invisible. I never could let anyone see me cry. When I regained my composure, I uncovered my face and looked up at the ceiling. The light from the street casts patterns on it. They reminded me of January when I had to rearrange the room because I couldn’t sleep with the way the lines of the shadows undulated.
“I don’t know what it is. It’s just sometimes I feel … I feel like I’m falling.”
“Are you sick? Let me…”
I shook my head.
“No, not like that. Like I’m suspended. Weightless. Like that feeling you get right before a sneeze.”
“Have you been taking your St. John’s Wort?”
“Yes!” I said in exasperation. “But I still feel so anxious all the time, even when there’s nothing to be done.”
“Let’s smoke some weed. That’ll calm you down.”
“No, not right now,” I said. “Maybe I’m just going crazy.”
“No you’re not. Did I ever tell you about my boy Crazy Dave? The schizophrenic? One day when his girlfriend wasn’t home, he put their kid in a garbage bag and drove around with it on the top of his car.” “So what happened?”
“Kid died.”
“Obviously. I mean what happened to Dave?”
“Oh … I dunno.”
“You’re not helping me here!”
“I’m pointing out that you’re not crazy.”
“Then why do I feel so weird all the time?” I picked at the stitch of the bedspread until the translucent fishing wire snapped, “It’s like sometimes I’ll be sitting in class or reading a book or looking out my window into the city and all of a sudden everything becomes so clear. Colors look so bright and outlined like they’re in digital and sounds are crystallized, so it’s like I could almost see them too. And everything makes so much sense, like I’m on the brink of epiphany and I feel almost … happy. But it only lasts a minute and then I’m back in real time with a story to write and two hundred pages to read and a bathroom to clean.”
I wound the clear thread around my index finger until the tip throbbed purple. He slapped at my hands and I stopped.
“Maybe you should slow down on your drug intake. You’ve been doing way too much of that K lately, anyway.”
“Whatever. I don’t want to talk about this right now,” I rolled over and stared at the alarm clock. The numbers read 11:11. It was two hours slow.

I awoke early the next day to sirens. Somewhere across town something was on fire. I hadn’t slept well. I dreamt of Stonehenge in black and white. It’s been a reoccurring dream since my father showed me pictures of his trip to England when I was four. I remember thinking it was the bleakest place on Earth.
Michael was still sleeping, so I let him. I padded across the wood floor into the bathroom and flipped the switch. The harsh fluorescents irritated my eyes as I detected every blemish on my mirrored face. I dressed quickly and left Michael a note saying ‘I wish I knew where I was going. xoxo, Kate.’
In the elevator I ran into my neighbor across the hall. She’s of that indiscernible age common to elementary school teachers; probably late fifties. Her hair is swept back into a taut bun, pulling her eyebrows into perpetual surprise. She smiled at me condescendingly, with the mouth of a Cheshire cat. I gave her a half smile that told her I knew she used to be a ballerina and that, because she either had bad feet or lacked the dedication of a bulimic, her failure had crushed her into living in an overpriced penthouse and feigning foreign accents whenever she met a new person in the elevator. Sometimes she assumes a distinguished Brit, sometimes a haughty French, but every time she’s in here, she wishes her name were Juliet.
I walked out of the building and under clouds heavy with gray. At the corner I saw an old man with his dog. The dog’s hind legs had been amputated and it was pulling itself along by two wheels attached to its midsection. It kept in time with its master’s steps, all the while panting and sniffing bushes, still looking so damned happy to be a dog. Maybe Descartes was right, I thought, and turned in the opposite direction.
On my way past the diner, I glanced in the window and behind my own reflection was Danny, sitting at his favorite booth, staring blankly at the formica tabletop, coffee cup in hand.
“Danny!” I said after I had already slid across the Naugahyde seat.
He looked up startled.
“Kate! Sorry I didn’t see you. I was thinking about something.”
“What?”
“The creation of the universe.”
“Nice,” I sighed. Here we go, “What about it?”
“Well, that there had to be one. A start, that is. The universe couldn’t always have existed, because it is impossible to have an infinite set of events.”
I played with a saltshaker and regretted coming in here.
“So there’s no such thing as infinity? Then what the hell were they teaching me in high school algebra?”
“Not infinity. Infinite set. Like Hilbert’s Hotel: if all the rooms of the hotel are filled to infinity there shouldn’t be any empty space, but if someone comes in and wants a room, all the manager has to do is assign them to room one, and move the people in one to two, and those in two to three, and so on into an infinity that can never be reached. But this is a contradiction. If this were the case then the sign outside the hotel would have to say: ‘No vacancies. Walk-ins welcome,’ and that …”
“Stop. You’re making my head hurt,” I said, un-sticking my thighs from the bright vinyl seat.
Danny is a boy who takes classes like Symbolic Logic for fun because he doesn’t own a television. His hair always hangs in his eyes, unwashed and matted, and his wardrobe consists of browns, taupes, and khakis. He’s a vegan and listens to experimental noise, much of which he composes on his keyboard.
“Wanna hear a joke?” I said, hoping to pull him out of his intelligence.
He nodded while staring at the floor, calculating.
“Okay. So there’s this guy and he wants to know whether the house he is building is going to bring him luck, so he goes to a wizard and asks …”
“There’s a wizard in this joke? I don’t think …”
“That’s right. Don’t think. Shut up and listen. So he goes to this wizard and asks him whether or not his house will bring him luck. The wizard answers by telling him to continue building his house and before putting in the last brick, he’s to take it into the middle of his yard, spin around three times and throw it over his left shoulder. If he turns around and the brick is gone, his house will be lucky and all who live in it will be granted happiness.”
“How’s he going to finish building his house if the brick is missing?”
Danny’s practicality was making my molars ache. Why was he always questioning everything?
“It’s a goddamn joke, Danny,” I said. “Let me fucking finish.”
He blinked several times, slowly, then motioned for me to finish.
I tore a napkin into confetti and continued, “So the man builds his house and takes the last brick into the middle of his yard, spins around three times and throws the brick over his left shoulder. He turns around and the brick’s still there. He figures he must have done something wrong. He spent a fortune building this house and he’ll be damned if it was going to bring him bad luck.”
By this time I was losing Danny. He was picking at his fingers, punctuating his thoughts through exhales. I laughed softly as I went on.
“So he picks up the brick, spins around three times and throws the brick over his left shoulder. He turns around and the brick’s still there.”
I spoke louder now, drawing the attention of the booth beside us. I didn’t care. I wanted Danny to look at me; to listen. Really listen.
“The guy figures that the third time’s a charm and picks the brick up, spins around three times and throws it over his left shoulder. He turns around and the brick is gone.”
I waited expectantly, breath drawn, leaning forward.
“That’s it? I don’t get it.”
“What do you mean you don’t get it? The brick is gone.”
“It’s not funny.”
I laughed hard until I thought I felt a kidney burst. Tears welled up in my eyes and I wasn’t sure they were from laughter.
“It’s not funny?” I said a bit too loudly, “It’s not fucking funny? The brick is gone. Gone,” I yelled, “Don’t you get it?”
But before he could answer I ran out of the restaurant, leaving him with his dirty hair and infinite sets.

Outside it had begun to snow. A bum sat on the stoop of a fish market, keeping the streets dirty for me, a reminder of what would happen if I stopped walking. I can’t end up with a shopping cart mumbling to myself about stellar parallax, I thought. I kept my eyes turned down as I went on, directionless. On the sidewalk someone had written in pink chalk ‘An eye for an eye and we all go blind.’ No, an eye for an eye and we all have one eye. Then someone jumped on my back.
For a second I thought I was being accosted and cursed myself for not having paid more attention when they taught self-defense on Oprah, but then I recognized the maniacal laughter; it was Patrick.
“You scared me half to death!”
“Well good then, you’re almost there,” he said smiling.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were moving back to Japan.”
“Decided to stick around for another semester.”
I looked at him closely. Gabber blared from his headphones as he stood in front of me in a black rubber tech vest, matching pants and bright blue and yellow Pumas. His hair was gelled into liberty spikes and his eyes looked like almonds.
“So what are you studying?”
"Physics,” he said.
“Can you explain Quantum Mechanics to me in under two minutes?” I asked jokingly.
“Well,” he said without hesitation, “say you have a bag with a red marble and a black marble, even if you take the red marble out you know that the black marble will always be there…”
“Hey! I was joking, you nerd.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” he said and smiled. “So what’s been up with you?”
“Get this, I was on this bus, right, with these two women. One of them had a pig and the other one had a baby. Well the pig was oinking and the baby was crying and you could tell they were getting really pissed off at all the noise each other’s bundle was making. So they finally get so annoyed with each other that the woman with the pig grabs the baby and the woman with the baby grabs the pig and they simultaneously throw both the pig and the baby out the window.”
“Are you serious?”
“No.”
He flinched and looked past me. “I never know what to make of you, Kate,” he sighed and looked at his swatch, “but hey, I’ve got to run. It was good seeing you again.”
“You too,” I said. “Good luck with everything.”
“Yeah, you too,” he said over his shoulder and then disappeared around a corner. I couldn’t stand the cold any longer. I had to go back. I wound my way through the streets, looking for the breadcrumbs I thought I had dropped. Pigeons must have eaten them. Damn birds.
When I got back to the apartment, Michael was smoking a bowl.
“Hey where’ve you been? I was getting worried about you.”
Breathless I said, “I have to ask you something. And it’s very important.”
“Shoot.”
“If a man is walking down the road and he sees a pig and a baby fly out a bus window, which one does he catch?”
He closed his eyes and thought about it a minute.
“The brick.”
“What brick?” I said, surprised.
“The brick from the joke you told me last week.”
I collapsed on the couch in a fit of relief. Thank god someone understood.

He was a Remington. Like that meant something. Cory’s real father owned steel plants. Or rubber plants. Or some plants that don’t exist now because every one of them relocated to Mexico. But that’s beside the point. The point is they were well off. They even had bidets instead of using toilet paper like the rest of the neighborhood. Cory’s mother was head of the PTA, spent a good portion of her existence in the bed of weeds she called a garden, and was always trying to organize a crime watch even though there were only four houses on the block. The most grating part about her, though, was the hyphenation. Janet Remington-Winemueller, she insisted on being called, after the remarriage.

Lynne lived next door to Cory. Lynne’s parents hated Janet Remington-Winemueller because she always called the cops on Lynne’s father when he shot his guns in the wooded backyard. One day she “anonymously” put a sign up on the street that said “No Firearms.” Lynne’s father and Mr. Biasella blew the sign up. Janet Remington-Winemueller stopped calling the cops.

Lynne and Cory were the only children in the area. Cory, who was three years Lynne’s senior, used to be friends with the Church boys who lived in the house before Lynne and her family moved in. One day Lynne’s mother got angry because Cory walked into the house at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. The Church’s had given him a key to the house. So, with a “but the Church’s let me do it,” the locks were changed.

Lynne, who was five and did not yet understand the importance of lipstick, was a tomboy and liked to climb trees. Cory liked to climb trees, too, and in fact had a pretty impressive tree house, but he also liked to mutilate snapping turtles and ignite puddles of gasoline in his driveway; things Lynne preferred catching fireflies to.

Lynne’s mother used to make her play with Cory until one day Lynne told her that while they were playing in her sandbox, Cory unzipped his pants and peed all over her three-tiered sandcastle. Lynne told Cory to get out of her yard and not to come back. After Lynne relayed the story to her mother, she replied, “You’d think with all their fancy European toilets, he wouldn’t have to pee in your sandbox.”

Stacey

I was 16; he was 19. We met through a mutual friend, on a vomit soaked couch, at a party somewhere down the street from nowhere. He was tall, with a lean physique, dark blond hair that grew into thick, ungroomed, porkchop sideburns and had these vivid blue eyes that I could backstroke in.

Chris and I hit it off immediately, talking like we'd known each other for years instead of minutes. The night went on, and I eventually passed out, only to awake to an empty, mud-caked apartment, littered with bottles and cigarette butts. It looked somewhat like the backdrop of Trainspotting. I glanced among the piles of bodies and saw that Chris was gone; my memory of him was replaced by a dull ache behind my eyes.

A few days later, he showed up at my house. It was pouring rain. The water caused his eyelashes to cling together in families and his hair was plastered to his head like the feathers of a duck trapped in an Exxon oil spill. Without any protection, we walked side by side, hand in hand, through the downpour, all the while being pelted with belts of raindrops. I still don't know how he discovered my address, nor do I care.

We spent the next year together, skipping school and getting trashed in the morning, scamming anything we could get our hands on in the afternoon, and making out until morning in his rickety trailer. We were comfortable, a couple stuck in routine, but we wanted danger, excitement, something more reckless and less stable. Caution was a word we could not understand.

We ran away the next day and hitchhiked all the way to Kentucky before we were picked up and arrested for possession. You wouldn't believe the humiliation I went through downtown. They stripped me down and searched me in places that were reserved only for Chris and my OBGYN, then they made me shower in front of like, 20 cops. Then there was the holding cell itself, which let me tell you, was no Bed & Breakfast. It was no bigger than dog run and freezing cold to boot, plus they didn't let me wear shoes or socks. Luckily, I only had to stay there overnight. Chris's aunt came and bailed us out the next morning.

I loved his aunt. She was a hefty lady who wore a lot of hemp.

Anyway, it was a beautiful spring day when we got out of confinement, but despite the copasetic song the birds and butterflies were trying to persuade unto me, I felt uneasy. I was 2 weeks late.

The next couple of weeks were a blur. I cried myself to sleep every night and woke up praying every morning. It's hard on a girl when the blood won't come when it's supposed to. I made lots of trips to Planned Parenthood by myself. Chris had skipped town the day he found out I was pregnant. Three months later I had a miscarriage.

Days passed. I was heart broken. He showed up a few weeks later acting like nothing had happened. It was as if the novel of our relationship had fallen off the shelf of life and knocked the bookmark aside. Chris left me searching for the place in our library that no Dewey Decimal System could find. I hated him for that.

When I said we should break up, he got weird on me. He started stalking me, no joke. He'd follow me everywhere, make threatening phone calls to my mother and break into my house. He even sent me a pig's heart on Valentine's Day. I always knew he had a romantic side. My parents filed a restraining order; he wasn't allowed within 60 feet of me or my property. He broke it, of course, typical male, and was sent to prison.

I know it sounds crazy, but despite everything we've been through and after all he's done to me, I'm still desperately in love with the lunatic.

That was two years ago.

He got out of jail yesterday.

- "Cosmo says the way to a man's heart is through his taint," she said matter- of-factly.
- "I can't believe you read that shit. None of it's true."
- "Oh yeah? Cherylin says so, too."
- "Maddy, Cherylin is a lesbian. How would she know?"
- "Good point."
It was a Tuesday evening and we were killing time in the most unproductive way we knew, hanging out at Madelyn's place. The apartment ambiance was like a motel, complete with a family of roaches and cellophane pulled tight over her bedroom window, but it was hers and she loved it, despite the fact that it made all her clothes smell like raid.
Sighing, I reached across the counter and took a sip out of a "#1 Grandma" mug.
- "Ugh! There's gravel in your coffee again," I said in disgust.
- "Well, I told you not to use the water from the tap."

We bleached the night with our headlights. The bright light reminded me that my night life was crumbling. School was going to start next week and waking up at 6:00 a.m. was not going to improve upon my hangover status. My Faberge thoughts were shattered by a stop at Maddy's P.O. Box.
- "I don't need a college to validate my life ..."
She must have gotten another rejection letter.
Madelyn was on an ever-failing mission to find a place in life, in a life where a good place is hard to find. She grew up in a house the same blue as her eyes, where shag carpeting and linoleum lined the floors, and family portraits adorned the dark paneled walls. Her kitchen always echoed with stale laughter and the garden behind her house concealed Barbie's obscure, decapitated head, but her childhood was no sitcom, no senior prom. Her dad left when she was seven and her mom comforted her by slipping sedatives into her peanut butter and jelly. The house soon fell apart. The overgrown lawn generated whispers between neighbors and the various cars of unidentified men parked in the driveway night after night drew more than just whispers. Maddy became a dependent of the state just after her fifteenth birthday.

The air smelled different at 3:00 a.m. We had just left the bridges and were heading toward Damon's, whose father we were positive was in the mafia. When we arrived, there was some skinhead chick chasing the dragon in the living room. She must have been a regular, for you could play connect the dots on her arms. Madelyn disappeared into the bathroom and divided $120 dollars between each nostril, subtract the Iso and that equals a pretty good evening. I counted the minutes until she passed out on the stairs. Nineteen. Sixty seconds for each year of her life. I doubt math would miss her. After covering her with a blanket I hitchhiked home.

A knock at the injured screen door awoke me from my nap. The dreamy reds and blues that flooded my slumber seeped out of my pores and dyed the down feathers purple as I collected myself for the walk to the door. It was Damon who was incessantly ringing the bell. By the solemn look on his face I could tell this visit wasn't for small talk.
- "You'd better sit down for this," was his greeting.
Skin crawling, I walked into the kitchen, but remained in my upright stance.
- "There's no easy way to say this, so here goes. Maddy's dead.”
My insides felt like a skyscraper, fully lit and bright against the night sky.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to yourself,” he said to her after his knee knocked against the ‘10% Discount if Paid in Cash’ sign that stood to the left of the entrance.
I glanced up and saw an Amazon of a woman before me. Her Pantene hair fell to mid-back and her eyes were heavily scarred with mascara. She was a bit thick in the middle but her height and the width of her shoulders carried the weight well, like a linebacker. Her boyfriend looked like Napoleon next to her.

“Excuse me,” she said, like I had been interrupted, “Do you spore test your autoclaves?”
Her voice resonated, overpowering the meek acoustic protests from behind her. Obviously she had read the ‘10 Things to Ask Before Getting Body Modification’ article.
“Our certificate’s up on the wall,” I said, pointing to the framed blue receipt hanging beside the Sailor Jerry tattoos.
“Great. This is what I want.”
She slid a piece of notebook paper with a sketch on it over the freshly windexed counter. Her nails were acrylic with a tropical scene airbrushed on them, but her cuticles were torn and the skin around her thumb was chewed so that it was seeping tiny droplets of blood onto the paper. I examined it for a minute and then told her that I could do it.
“You mean you’re the artist? Aren’t you a little young?”
I wanted to poke her in the eye. I looked down at my reflection in the glass display case. Among the tongue studs and nose rings my face peered back at me, raising an opposite eyebrow. I rubbed the nightly stubble that shadowed my chin. Did I look untrustworthy?
“You don’t exactly need a PhD.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“Is this your first tattoo? You’re going to have to fill out some paperwork.”
I watched her fill out the forms. Her handwriting was girlish – loopy and slanted. She wound the chain that was attaching the pen to the counter around her fingers and put the tip of the Bic in her mouth. Ew. Not everything in this shop is sterilized, I thought.
While all this was going on her boyfriend was in the back flipping through photographs of previous customer’s piercings, alternately contorting his face between disgust and disbelief. He looked up.
“This is torture! Why do people do this?”
I wanted to tell him that a little bar of metal through his eyebrow might be a nice distraction from the volcano of a pimple he had erupting on his forehead. Not to mention his Dennis the Menace haircut.
“Relax,” I said instead, “We got rid of the Iron Maiden last week.”
I purposely began fiddling with my labret stud. He looked a little green. I turned to the girl and motioned her behind the swinging door into the back rooms. I glanced down at the forms she had just handed back to me. Her name was Natasha. I knew she had to be a stripper. Her boyfriend started to get up and follow her, but she looked back and, like with Medusa’s gaze, he froze.

Natasha rolled down the waist of her sweatpants and hiked up her tank top that looked like it was purchased in the Junior’s section of a department store, revealing tan lines that must have taken months of dedication. She laid on her stomach and the displaced skin made her look even wider than before. I rubbed iodine on her lower back that was the same color as her crisped skin.
“You know you can’t tan for at least a month after getting this done and even after that you should wear sunscreen.”
She crinkled her nose and said, “My friend went tanning a week after getting hers done and it looks fine.”
I swallowed hard. Her friend must be a dermatologist. I mean, what do I know? I just work here.
“Is that your boyfriend out there?” I said, positioning myself in the seat and unwrapping the needle from the airtight package.
She squirmed a bit and then said, “He thinks so.”
“So, how long does he think you’ve been together?”
“Two years.”
I noticed a mole on her back that was vaguely shaped like Texas.
“Alright. Take a deep breathe and then exhale slowly.”
She did and I began outlining the picture in coal black. She cried quietly but I felt no emotion towards her.
“Ow. God. This hurts.”
Her nails dug into the leather table until a lone palm tree popped off and made a faint ‘clink’ on the floor.
“Just keep breathing,” I told her, trying not to let her know by my tone how little I thought of her.
“How much longer?” she winced.
“About an hour. Do you need to take a break?”
I had just finished the outline, but she said yes, so I stopped. She was panting and I thought she was going to faint.
“Have you eaten anything today?”
She shook her head ‘no,’ and said, “I’m on a diet.”
For Chrissake. I went to the refrigerator and pulled out a grape Flavor Ice. “Fat free,” I said and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she said, some color returning to her face.
“I really can’t do anymore today. I-I’m sorry.”
There goes my tip. I helped her off the table and she followed me back into the lobby. Before we reached the door though, she had regained her composure and pressed a small slip of paper containing seven digits into my palm. When did she have time to write it down? Then I realized she was probably planning on giving it to whomever it was that was working here. I kicked the door open. “What’s wrong?” the putative boyfriend stammered, probably with visions of AIDS or Hepatitis dancing in his head.
“Shut up,” she said, and hurried to the door.
They left without turning around. I knew they’d never be back. I threw her number in the drawer that we throw all the numbers we get from girls that come in here. I took out the folded pieces of paper we kept hidden in the Time magazine under the counter and wrote ‘Natasha’ in the ‘N’ column, next to Natalie and Nikki. Only two more numbers and I’ll have beaten Jeff’s record, I thought, and went back to doing nothing.