Downtown Owl

  Kate spit on the ground and pulled the hood over her auburn hair.

  “Run a buttonhook,” said Mitch. “Ten yards.”

  She did as she was told. This time, Mitch fired the ball with unnecessary velocity. For the first time all morning, it slid through Kate’s hands, bouncing off her concave twelve-year-old chest.

  “My hands are getting cold,” said Kate. “We should go inside.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  They started to walk toward the house. They could see their mother in the window, mashing potatoes.

  “That was a hard throw,” said Kate. “I think I have a mark where it hit me. It’s a good thing I don’t have boobs yet.”

  “Don’t swear,” said Mitch.

  “That’s not swearing,” said Kate.

  “How do you know that?” asked Mitch. They went inside and watched the Detroit Lions until dinner. The Cowboys played after that. They were thankful for things they were not conscious of.

  NOVEMBER 25, 1983

  (Julia)

  “I want to smooch Vance Druid,” Julia said. “I’m so serious. I want to walk up to his house, knock on the door, and just smooch away. I want to enforce the Smoochie Rule. I’m serious. Nobody believes me, but I want to smooch him hardcore.”

  Julia said this from the backseat of Ted’s car. Ted was behind the wheel and Naomi was in the passenger seat. They had been drinking for seven hours. Ted was trying to drive off his buzz.

  “You don’t wanna kiss that guy,” Naomi said in response. “That guy…you don’t need that guy. You can do better than that. He’s just a small-town drunk who needs new pants. You deserve a real man. And what the fuck’s the Smoochie Rule?”

  “The Smoochie Rule is in effect!”

  “You’re a crazy woman, you crazy woman.”

  “Don’t tell me who isn’t crazy,” said Julia. “I’ll tell you who the crazy woman isn’t.”

  Ted turned onto a gravel road. A fox ran across the path of his Chevy Cavalier, but no one inside the car noticed.

  “Kissing is a problem,” slurred Ted. “Smooching, kissing, human relations, whatever you want to call it. It’s complex.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Naomi. “You don’t know how to kiss people? Is that why you never kiss me? Because you don’t know how to kiss people? It’s not like driving a speedboat. It’s easy. A child could do it.”

  “No, no. Shut your mouth, woman.” Ted drove with his knees while lighting a Camel with the car’s cigarette lighter. He shook the still-glowing lighter and threw it out the window. It was that kind of night. “That’s not what I mean. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. You never listen to me.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  “Here is what I am talking about,” said Ted. “I had a kissing problem when I was in college. Before I quit college. It was complicated. I still think about it.”

  “What is this regarding?” Naomi demanded. “If you’re homosexual, I’m going to shoot myself. And you. And Jules, probably.”

  “What the fuck did I do?” screeched Julia.

  “Just tell the goddamn story,” Naomi said to Ted. Her right foot was resting on the dashboard. She suddenly looked like Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, which may have been the look she was going for.

  “When I was a freshman at Mayville State,” said Ted, “my two closest friends were a guy named Tiger Lyons and a girl named Sarah Greenberg. Tiger Lyons was from a farm outside of Hazen, which is about five miles from Beulah. Sarah was from Saskatchewan, and she also happened to be Jewish. An authentic Jew, for real. I didn’t even know that until we’d been friends for over a year. She never went to church or anything. I guess Greenberg is—supposedly—a very Jewish name.”

  “No shit,” said Julia. “Christ. Don’t you people have Jews here?”

  “Not really,” said Ted. “She’s still the only Jewish person I’ve ever met. It was very interesting. For example, are you aware that Jewishness is more than just a religion? It’s also an ethnicity, like being black or white or Japanese. Sometimes there are even atheist Jews.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” said Julia, now laughing. “Who doesn’t know those things?”

  “I didn’t know those things,” said Ted. “I guess that notion had never occurred to me. I had always thought Jews were just white people. But here’s the thing: Sarah loved to kiss strangers. She did this wherever she went. She would get drunk at a party and suddenly just kiss a man she’d never met before. Right in front of everybody. This happened a bunch of times.”

  “Was this because she was Jewish?” asked Naomi. “Is this normal behavior among the Jews? Maybe we should ask Jules about this. Jules seems to be our resident expert on Israel.”

  “It had nothing to do with being Jewish,” said Ted. “She was just a wild, slutty drunkard. And she always claimed that who she elected to kiss was a completely random decision. Sarah swore that there was nothing premeditated about whom she would hook up with: She claimed that she would just suddenly find her tongue in some unknown bozo’s mouth, and it was always random and meaningless. But Tiger and I were skeptical of this. We were skeptical about her story. And the reason we were skeptical was because—inevitably—the random person she kissed was always the best-looking stranger in the room. It was always some guy who played lap-steel guitar or some pole-vaulter from the track team or whoever seemed to be the coolest person available at that particular moment. Tiger and I always accused her of this, and she always denied it. She insisted she smooched haphazardly. This behavior went on for all of the fall quarter and all of the winter quarter: The three of us would party together, and then Sarah would kiss a stranger.”

  “Did she ever kiss you?” asked Naomi.

  “No,” said Ted. “That was the thing. She never kissed me or Tiger. We were just friends. There is a word for this.”

  “Platonic,” belched Julia.

  “Is that a Yiddish word?” asked Naomi.

  “Whatever,” said Ted. “But yes. We were plutonic friends. But after a while, Tiger and I came up with this plan: We decided to get Sarah as wasted as possible, and then we took her to an architecture party. We knew these pre-architecture majors who were total weirdo geekazoids, and every Saturday they sat around a dorm room and drank Wop.”

  “Wop?” asked Julia.

  “Wop is when you fill a garbage can with whatever alcohol you can find,” Naomi said. “You just pour in a bunch of Ever-clear and vodka and schnapps and rum, and then you fill up the rest of the garbage can with Kool-Aid or Tang. Sometimes you add fruit, if you have fruit. It’s like a communal punch. Sometimes they call it a Hairy Buffalo.”

  “Exactly,” said Ted. “So we’re all in this dorm room getting obliterated, and there are simply no hot guys to be found. Everybody in this room looks like a skeleton wearing eyeglasses. Everyone is completely pale and uncomfortable and dressed in a turtleneck sweater. Everybody in that room is still a virgin, probably. And Sarah is drunk. I mean, she is a basket case. It’s like she’s on LSD.”

  “Wop will do that to you,” said Naomi. “That shit is liquid fucknuts.”

  “Exactly,” said Ted. “So this was going to be the ultimate test: Would Sarah still make out with one of these dweebs? If her selection process was truly random, whatever these architecture goons looked like should not have been a factor. She still should have kissed one of them.”

  “But—obviously—she didn’t,” deduced Julia.

  “She didn’t,” said Ted. “She ended up kissing Tiger Lyons. And that ruined everything.”

  “So you were in love with her!” exclaimed Naomi. “You were in love with the Canadian Jew. I knew it. I knew that was where this story was going.”

  “No, I was not in love with her,” said Ted. “Honestly, I never found her particularly attractive. She had thick ankles. I never thought of her as a woman, you know? But—even so—the moment she made out with Tiger, everything got weird.”
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  “How?” asked Naomi.

  “For one thing, there was suddenly this unspoken rivalry between Tiger and me, because it was suddenly obvious that—evidently—he was more handsome than I was, a possible reality that had never occurred to either of us before. It was humiliating. I started to hate my hair and the size of my nose. But that wasn’t even the crux of the issue. The larger problem was that Tiger fell in love with Sarah as soon as she kissed him, probably because no woman had ever kissed him before, or at least not so aggressively. He never told us this stuff directly, but it was completely obvious. So now—whenever we went to a party where Sarah got drunk and kissed a stranger, which still happened constantly—Tiger would act all jealous and brooding. It was pretty pathetic. Plus, we still had no idea if our original theory about Sarah was right. I argued that—by kissing Tiger—it proved she wasn’t drunkenly kissing strangers at random: When left with no other option, she resorted to kissing the hottest person in the vicinity, even if that person was a nonstranger. But Sarah claimed that kissing Tiger proved her actions were random, because if her selection process hadn’t been arbitrary, and if she had been consciously kissing people she was physically attracted to, she likely would have kissed Tiger months before that party, since she obviously would have been attracted to him at an earlier juncture, too. It was kind of a good argument. The point is that we all eventually started to resent each other for different reasons. By the time I quit school the following year, we hardly saw each other. That architecture party was pretty much the end of our three-pronged friendship.”

  It was time to go home. The car entered an empty intersection. Ted applied the brake, swung the vehicle 180 degrees, and started driving back toward Owl.

  “That’s a good story,” said Naomi. “How come you never told me that story before? We’ve been drunk about a million times.”

  “I guess we had never really talked about kissing before,” said Ted.

  “So what do you think, Jules?” said Naomi. “Do you think that whore was kissing people at random, or do you think she knew what she was doing all along? Personally, I think she knew exactly what she was doing.”

  No response.

  “Jules?”

  Naomi looked over her left shoulder. Julia was passed out, facedown on the backseat.

  They drove the next four hundred yards in silence.

  “Ted?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you ever wish that Sarah Greenberg would have kissed you instead of Tiger Lyons?”

  “Never. I used to, but I haven’t for years.”

  They drove another hundred yards in silence.

  “Ted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes I would like to kiss you.”

  They drove another hundred feet.

  “Naomi.”

  “Yes?”

  “You need to pay closer attention to the stories people tell you about themselves.”

  They were almost back in Owl. Nothing was different.

  DECEMBER 9, 1983

  (Horace)

  There was not a name for what killed Alma in 1972. Eleven years after her death, there still wasn’t. In the future, doctors would begin referring to the disorder as fatal familial insomnia, but Horace would be equally dead before anyone had the chance to explain that to him. As far as he could tell, the problem had been completely straightforward: Alma just quit sleeping. And then she quit acting normal, and then she quit being alive.

  It started on Thanksgiving.

  “I can’t sleep,” Alma said. She wasn’t even in bed yet. She was just sitting in a living room chair, playing solitaire on a TV tray. But Alma usually fell asleep in her chair at 9:00 p.m., woke up for the local news at 10 o’clock, and then retired to the mattress at 10:30. For Alma, going to sleep was like working out; she liked to warm up first.

  “Too much turkey,” said Horace, never turning away from the television. “Maybe you ate too much turkey.”

  “Turkey is supposed to make you sleep,” Alma said. “That’s what they always say about turkey.”

  “You’ll fall asleep,” said Horace. “Just don’t think about it.”

  “Maybe I’ll pray a few decades of the rosary,” Alma said. She finally fell asleep at 2:00 a.m. It was curious. She hadn’t stayed up that late since the 1950s.

  This happened more and more; by Christmas, it was happening all the time. It did not matter how tired Alma felt; she could not fall asleep. She started drinking peppermint schnapps with warm cocoa, and then she tried cans of beer. It usually made things worse. The couple began having sex every night, partially out of desperation and partially because she was always going to bed drunk; this improved Horace’s demeanor, but it did not have an impact on the insomnia.

  “Are you worried about something?” Horace asked every morning. It did not matter what time he awoke; Alma was always sitting at the kitchen table, staring into a cup of decaffeinated coffee, teetering on the precipice of explosive tears.

  “No,” said Alma. “I’m only worried about not sleeping. That’s all I ever worry about anymore.”

  “Is there something you’re not telling me?” he would ask. “I will understand. I don’t care what you have done. Just tell me what is on your mind.”

  “I haven’t done anything,” she would say. “Nothing is on my mind.”

  Actually, something was on Alma’s mind. It was plaque. There was plaque on her thalamus, the region of the brain that regulates sleep. The proteins in her brain were mutating. It was congenital. Her father had had the same disorder, but it was never diagnosed; he hung himself in the barn before anyone noticed.

  “We have to take you to the doctor,” Horace said in January. “This not sleeping all the time…this is not normal.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” moaned Alma. “I am not going to see a doctor because I’m too dumb to fall sleep. How embarrassing! He’d laugh me out of the clinic.”

  Alma was certain she was responsible for her own sleepless exhaustion. She changed her diet (more fish!) and quit wearing makeup. Nothing changed. She prayed for help, but she started to have a hard time concentrating on any given prayer (even the Hail Mary, which is only forty words). Every day, the universe seemed to shift. The sky would move. She kept seeing gophers and rabbits darting into corners and running through doorways. She could telekinetically melt ice cubes by staring at them. In February, Melba Hereford tried to murder her.

  “I think we need to call the police,” Alma said at supper. Amazingly, she could still cook, even though she no longer experienced the sensation of hunger. “Melba tried to kill me today.”

  “What?” asked Horace.

  “Melba tried to kill me.”

  “Melba Hereford?”

  “Yes,” said Alma. “I have no idea what got into her. She tried to hit me with her car, and then she chased me around with a butcher knife.”

  “What are you saying?” Horace pleaded. “Are you listening to yourself? Why would Melba want to kill you?”

  “She was frothing at the mouth,” said Alma. “I think she has rabies. I tried to call the police when it happened, but the phone wasn’t working. She might have cut our phone line with the butcher knife. I’m pretty concerned about this. I think she’s a Cuban.”

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Right outside. I was in the garden.”

  That day, the high temperature had been eleven degrees.

  That night, Alma screamed at the television. She thought it was a panda bear.

  Horace drove her to the emergency room. The ER doctor did not believe him when he said she had slept only thirty hours over the past thirty days. The doctor said that was impossible. But this is possible. And Horace was actually lying when he said this; during the past thirty days, Alma hadn’t slept at all.

  You can give sedatives to victims of fatal familial insomnia, but they don’t help. Sleeping pills help people reach sleep; fatal familial insomnia makes sleep unreachable. The protein in Alma’s brain
had changed, and it could not be changed back. They prescribed her massive quantities of Valium. Sometimes it did nothing, sometimes it made her vomit and sweat. There was nothing that anyone could do except a) watch her lose weight and b) watch her go insane. Which is precisely what Horace did.

  Living with a crazy person is difficult, but living with a crazy person who never sleeps is worse. Like any normal being, Horace still got tired; Horace still needed to go to bed every night. But whenever he tried, he was buried by an avalanche of guilt. He had terrifying dreams that he could not remember. More problematic was the idea of Alma wandering the house alone, bumping into bookshelves and arguing with the sewing machine. They never turned off any lights in any room, ever. They lived in a state of perpetual noon.

  “Horace,” Alma said in April, “you have to plow the fields. You have to get the crops planted. I did not marry a lazybones.”

  “I know,” said Horace. “Our friends are helping us. We’ll get the crop in. Everything is fine. Maybe you should try to lay down for a little while.”

  “Why are other people planting our wheat? It’s our wheat. We invented it. We don’t have any quality neighbors. They steal from us. I don’t think it’s justified. What about the Indians?”

  “Please, Alma. Please. Lay down. Just for a little bit.”

  “We should have children,” she said. “We should have twin boys. They could be named Buck and Otto.”

  “We tried to have children,” he said. “We tried.”

  “We really have a beautiful carpet. I never noticed it before, but we do.” In Alma’s universe, the living room carpet was made of glass.

  “I like it, too,” said Horace. “I like it. Maybe you should rest on the couch for a little bit?”

  “I’m tired,” said Alma.

  “I know,” said Horace. “I know that you’re tired. That’s why I think you should lay down. You could lay right down on the carpet.”