Trouble Read online

  Patrick Somerville

  Trouble

  Patrick Somerville was born and raised in Wisconsin and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught English and creative writing at Cornell, where he also earned his MFA. This is his first book of fiction. He currently lives in Chicago.

  www.patricksomerville.com

  For my family

  Contents

  Puberty

  Trouble and the Shadowy Deathblow

  Black Earth, Early Winter Morning

  Crow Moon

  The Train

  English Cousin

  The Whale

  The Future, the Future, the Future

  The Cold War

  So Long, Anyway

  Puberty

  Young Brandon has some problems, but they will be going away shortly. What will make them go away shortly is a magical process of physiological, hormonally induced changes to both the body and the mind, and after these changes, there is a kind of freedom waiting for him, a vista of unbounded green pastures defined by

  all-around faster running

  larger penis

  height > 4′ 11”

  confidence in the face of danger, danger being

  big men

  all women

  all girls

  competitive sports

  public speaking

  social interaction

  physical fitness tests in gym class, which involve mainly

  pull-ups

  rope climb

  50-yard dash

  1-mile run

  going downtown

  Kyle Zarnoff

  pain-tolerance threshold

  basketball dribbling skills

  sexual allure, due to

  deeper voice

  more jawline definition (eliminate doughy face)

  winning, cocky smile

  other benefits already discussed

  Brandon knows that a change is coming, and he is simply waiting. He reads about it at the public library after school. Puberty books. Books about puberty. There is one in particular called What’s Going on in Me? that he has found to be especially helpful. He looks at an artist’s sketch of the ADULT MALE smiling, standing in the nude, huge peach dick dangling between his legs, well-defined pectoral muscles glowing in warm, dramatic, perhaps Tuscan light. On the facing page there is an artist’s sketch of a naked ADULT FEMALE. She is also happy, and she has breasts, which are called MAMMARIAN ORGANS.

  Brandon takes big purple vitamins from a purple bottle. These vitamins, which he found in the kitchen cupboard above the water bottles and the plastic coffee mugs from gas stations, purport to contain over 1,500 percent of nearly every chemical requirement of the human body. On the label there is a tranquil scene depicting a lake and a vast blue sky; to Brandon, the lake and the blue sky represent the peace that comes after a terrible thunderstorm. The first time he studied the label, holding the bottle so close to his glasses that he heard a quick click when the plastic touched the frames, he believed he detected the presence of a thunderhead receding (its aura, at least) and a certain postrain mist hovering above the lake. Since this is such a rainy time in his life (the magic is coming, the magic is in the future), he believes that if he takes them every day, they will speed nature along. After all, they are vitamins, and vitamins are natural.

  Speed is important. Speed is the most important thing for Brandon. Other boys at school have already embarked on their magical journeys. He has lost friends because of his effeminate prepubescent characteristics and his mediocre sprinting speed, which is symbolic of his mediocre maturation speed. Typical descriptions of this turbulent premagical time in a young man’s life concentrate on the confusion, the misunderstanding, the misdirected anger, but the truth is that Brandon knows exactly what’s going on, is completely conscious of the biology. He knows that this is basically random, that there is very little he can do, and the vitamins give him a sense of agency. He remembers waiting seven months to hear back from Nintendo when he designed an entire video game (Nenderhal’s Quest) from scratch for a kindergarten project and his mother, Shelly, encouraged him to put it into a high-quality binder and send it off to “the real people.” This was when he first learned that waiting is horrible. In the months that passed, Brandon imagined what he would do with the $10 million Nintendo was going to offer him to buy his game. He was probably going to buy a submarine, which he would take to the local YMCA and operate in the deep end of the swimming pool.

  When the white envelope from Nintendo finally came in the mail one summer afternoon and the letter inside said simply, “Thank you for your interest in Nintendo,” Brandon was hurt, but at least the waiting was over. At least he could get on with his life.

  He can’t get on with his life now because without puberty, he has no life. It is like he has died along with the twenty or thirty other kids in his class who still look ten. They are the walking, invisible dead. If they weren’t all so strange and devastated and incomplete, it would make sense for them to form a club as a way of fighting back. The club would be called STRONG POTENTIAL and would meet in Brandon’s tree house. Of course he would be the leader.

  Brandon’s father, Ralph, is worried. Just last Tuesday he caught Brandon measuring his penis in the work shed with his new one-hundred-foot Stanley measuring tape. Brandon was embarrassed and surprised, but not nearly so embarrassed and surprised as Ralph would have liked. Instead of addressing the implications of Brandon’s investigation, and instead of saying a word about the notebook Ralph saw on the workbench or the pencil-drawn graph Ralph saw on the first page of the notebook, he tried to explain to Brandon how to use the Stanley measuring tape responsibly, how to use the safety lock to make sure the tape did not recoil at dangerous speeds. Afterward Ralph patted his son on the head and said, “Do you understand?”

  “I get it,” Brandon said, and went into the house with his notebook.

  Ralph has other reasons to be worried, and cannot spend too much time worrying about Brandon. His hair, for example, is almost gone. And yet new hair keeps magically appearing on his shoulders and inside of his asshole. Usually Ralph appreciates intellectual paradoxes and inverted meanings; he sometimes even gets out of bed to find a pen to mark particularly ironic passages in novels. Yet for some reason the redistribution of hair across his body does not register in Ralph’s mind as ironic. Tragic is the word. All through his twenties and thirties and even a good part of his forties, Ralph’s hair remained prominent and thick and intimidating atop his head. No longer. Now he feels as though he is losing some important and deeply personal battle with his mind; with each poor life decision an important neuronal hook detaches from the bottom of a hair follicle and one more strand drops away; there is a sense that beyond what they say about your mother’s father and your levels of testosterone there is in fact a causal mechanism to hair loss, perhaps even to aging itself, something having to do with free will, choice, and personal responsibility. Ralph believes that he is losing an important existential battle to a dark, nameless knight who has arisen from the swamp of his own middle-aged and slightly malfunctioning subconscious, a red-eyed knight who stalks his dreams and lurks in caverns below his waking thoughts, manipulating, infuriating, and making a mess: shattering peace. The knight’s power source is Ralph’s increasingly frequent and detached appraisals of his own life: his job is meaningless; his relationship with his wife, once new and alive and fulfilling, has become a heartbreaking and guilt-ridden burden; his son is strange and secretive, which makes Ralph paranoid and suspicious; both of his own parents have dropped into a semivegetative world orbiting the five o’clock news, kept alive only by rabid criticisms of the new kinds of coffee that have infiltrated American society; and the house, the nexus of his family’s life f
or fourteen years, has started to leak a rusty brown liquid that no plumber is familiar with. So the dark knight, dormant for many years, imprisoned in the ice of Ralph’s former happiness, has now thawed and grown strong. The knight never speaks, he only stalks and stares his red stare, but if he did speak, his voice would be deep, and he would say something like: you are an embarrassment to consciousness.

  Last night Brandon beat the greatest video game in the universe. The game was called The Warriors of Ice Castle, and he had been playing it for four to seven hours every day for the last sixteen weeks. In the game, Brandon’s avatar—his personally designed protagonist—was a highly intelligent wizard named Gooligan capable of summoning devastating fireballs at a moment’s notice and even seeing into the future during meditative trances. He was also physically strong, unusual for a wizard but not unacceptable to the game’s electronic administration. Brandon and Gooligan had traveled thousands of miles together since he first slid the hard plastic rectangle into the console; there was the bugbear incident near the Copse of Psychosis, when Gooligan was reduced to only three hit points and very nearly made into a harlequin slave. There was the exhausting battle of magical abilities with the arch-mage Cladivaxos, Gooligan’s longtime nemesis, so bloody and horrifying that Brandon had been forced to turn his head many times and pause the game to catch his breath; and of course there was the finale with Lord Egelbund, the feudal master of Kendrathiel, whose charmed armor could reject all but the most powerful of Gooligan’s spells, who wielded two war hammers as though they were plastic baseball bats, who called out humiliating jeers about Gooligan’s orphaned past and diminutive manhood as Gooligan hid in the closets and hallways of Egelbund’s notorious Ice Castle, shivering. In the end, Brandon and Gooligan had outwitted him by learning the layout of the castle and engaging in a kind of drawn-out guerrilla war, using secret passages and arrow slits to take potshots and then running away to regroup. It was the way of the weaker combatant. It was intelligent and nuanced. And over time, it had been too much for Lord Egelbund to resist. In his dying moments, the fallen demon reached out a charred hand and asked for forgiveness, which Gooligan and Brandon condescendingly granted.

  The problem is that Brandon has nothing to do anymore. Gooligan protected him from free time—he has a lot of free time—and now he must field the long evenings alone. During dinner Ralph asks him how things are going with the video game, and Brandon tells him that he’s finished it. His father nods as though he cares. His mother remembers aloud how Brandon designed his own game, how he was so creative even in kindergarten, and Brandon shovels rice into his mouth. He wants to tell her that it’s been a lie, all this talk about the value of creativity. He’s heard it his whole life, and has only recently realized that his parents have doomed him to irrelevance by forcing him to care about the wrong things. He sees now that it would have been much wiser to concentrate on sports and swear words growing up, that these are the true loci of power. As a retort to his mother’s musings he asks to be excused to go out to the driveway and work on his basketball-dribbling skills. He knows that this will upset her.

  It is September, and still warm, and the giant moon lights the concrete driveway in white. Brandon runs back and forth with the basketball, tentatively dribbling, watching the ball rise up to his hand with every bounce. He can’t dribble without looking, but his goal is to be able to do precisely that within two weeks. Tomorrow the basketball unit is starting in gym class, and he is going to do something spectacular, something that will raise eyebrows and usher in an age of respect—two or three months, it’s all he needs—and this age of respect will protect him until puberty takes over. After some attempts at between-the-leg crossovers, Brandon takes a few shots at the basket Ralph installed above the garage two summers ago. At the time, Brandon thought it was so stupid. That was back when he was into art. Now he is happy to have it. After he finally makes a layup, he dribbles to the center of the driveway and looks at the house. His parents are both still at the kitchen table. They’re not arguing, but something is happening. Ralph has moved closer to Shelly and is rubbing her shoulder, saying something. Shelly looks angry and sad at the same time. She looks like she does when she’s standing in front of one of her paintings, alone and upset with herself, shaken by not having gotten it right. She has been trying desperately to be a painter for the last three years. Even Brandon knows that she’s no good.

  She stands up suddenly and starts clearing the table. Brandon dribbles around in a circle and then walks into the street, bouncing the ball, listening to the strange hollow high-pitched echo that seems to emerge from the inner sphere of static air sealed within the rubber. He is going to dribble all the way around the block without looking at the ball. That is the plan.

  Things don’t go according to the plan, but that’s okay, this is practice, and no one is watching. When he dribbles off his foot, he can chase the ball down the street with no self-consciousness. He can slow it down and concentrate. He can find out exactly what went wrong. For fifteen feet he doesn’t look once, but he’s so scared to mess things up he stops, just to keep the streak perfect—accumulation of self-esteem is incremental and delicate. As he turns right at the corner, ball cradled under his arm, a few cars roll by. Someone calls out “Homo” from a silver Nissan Pulsar. Brandon starts to dribble again.

  He turns right at a street parallel to his own, a dark street called Terracotta that he has always loved, and he decides that he will run at top speed while dribbling, just to see if it works. He allows himself to watch this time, since running makes it so much harder.

  For a while things go okay, but then the bounces get too high, he loses control, and he dribbles down onto the curb, and the ball shoots off diagonally. Brandon chases it over freshly cut grass. When he looks up at the house in front of him he sees, in a glowing window on the second floor, a naked woman stretching her arms above her head. Two weeks ago Gooligan was frozen in a giant block of ice by the magic breath of an angry swamp troll, and now, mouth open, Brandon feels exactly the same; he knows what Gooligan went through, how hard it was to look at that dreadful terrible truth straight on and not be able to turn away, how at certain moments, certain critical moments, you seize instead of act, how time itself stops working in the right way. The naked woman is now brushing her hair in front of a mirror. Gooligan escaped by dropping into a meditative trance for the night, a religious stasis that slowed down the heart and put him in touch with the astral plane. When the sun came up, the ice block melted, and the troll had fallen asleep. Gooligan brained him with his Mace +4. Some would have called it a cowardly attack, but Brandon and Gooligan had learned that morality must be temporarily suspended when dealing with a greater power. The woman sits down at a desk and leans over a piece of paper with a pencil in her hand. She looks like she is writing a letter, but naked. Brandon climbs a maple tree.

  For fifteen minutes of Utopian suburban nighttime silence it is only two strangers, watched and watching—one is writing, her MAMMARIAN ORGANS visible, sagging more than Brandon would have expected, but in a way that is more real than anything he has seen on TV or in magazines. Brandon pushes his hairless cheek up against the moist black bark of the maple’s telescoped trunk fifteen feet from the ground, smelling fecundity, leaning, afraid he’ll be seen, afraid his basketball will be spotted by a husband or a policeman or a jogger or anyone who may ruin this gift that has been granted. He can see one nipple well from this angle; he lusts for it to be in his mouth; the desk is almost perpendicular to the window, and he observes her whole body in profile: wriggling painted toes on the carpet, round calves, thighs compressed on the chair, arched back, potbelly, partially discernible fuzz between her legs, scribbling hand, small chin, warm cheek, intent eye, black hair to the shoulder. She must be someone’s mother, he thinks, and immediately finds it strange to have thought it. What is she writing? Where are her clothes? Where is her man? He is lost in questions, but he is ravaged also. To be alone with her, to slide up against her and s
mell her, would be so new and powerful. She’s a woman, not a girl, and it stuns him. This is an example of a danger he is not yet equipped to handle. But he is fascinated.

  He once accidentally saw his mother Shelly’s MAMMARIAN ORGANS on a family camping trip to Lake Menotomanok; he and Ralph had gone down to the shore to fish and left her to take a nap in the tent, but Brandon had run back to get his Swiss Army knife. He came around some bushes and there she was, topless, sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag, looking through her purse. They made eye contact for one one-millionth of a second before Brandon pirouetted and ran away. Also danger. He told Ralph that he couldn’t find the knife. The feeling now, too, is to pirouette, but this time he can’t. He’s in a tree, and it’s not his mom.

  Just as the wind picks up and the whole maple sways and creaks, the woman finishes her letter, leaves the bedroom, and flips off the light. Again he’s all alone. He climbs down with patience. He looks up at the house one last time, wondering if she is going to pop out the front door and invite him in for hot chocolate. He waits a minute. He picks up his ball. Clouds are rolling in. When he turns to go home, he runs.

  That night, during the thunderstorm, Ralph has a nightmare about harpooning whales. Big satanic whales that probably do not exist in the oceans of the world. He is in a small wooden boat, standing, legs braced against two seats, knees bent, hand gripping the shaft of his long barbed harpoon. Shelly and Brandon are paddling. He can’t see their faces, but he knows that it’s them, straining against the choppy sea. And then suddenly a great orange leviathan breaches in the foreground of the ubiquitous ocean and salt water sprays everywhere. Ralph has enough time to see one pale red eye, and he gets the feeling that the whale is looking right through him and that, furthermore, the whale is a new incarnation of the evil knight he knows so well. The glowing red eye is the same. They greet each other. He balks. He should throw, he knows, but the waves are too tumultuous. He’s worried about going over, about his family capsizing and sinking. There aren’t any other boats around. So instead of throwing, he crouches, leans forward, and puts his hand right on top of Brandon’s head.