balloon with your name and your address and a little postcard that says something like ‘whoever finds this please mail this postcard and tell us where you found the balloon’ or something like that? Then you wait and wait until you finally give up and you think that you’ll never see that postcard again. Then months later you get your postcard back and it’s from a little blond girl somewhere in Maine.”
I am lost in the sounds of mothers telling their children what not to do. “No, I never did that.”
“It’s amazing,” he says, his voice quiet and young. “Let’s do it. Let’s tie a postcard to a balloon and let it go floating away.”
I don’t really answer, just touch his elbow, thinking he’ll let it go. He waits a moment, and then says in this other voice, this collegiate voice, this voice that comes out of nowhere, “I’m so afraid for these families. I wonder if they know that their biology is programmed to work differently. All this talk of marriage and morality, and I’m not even sure that marriage is the correct organizational structure to begin with.”
Farmer’s apartment is covered in books—huge cabinets of books, their shelves sagging in the center. It looks like they are stacked here and there, wherever things might fit, in no particular arrangement, but I know that Farmer’s books are delicately sorted in a kind of invented Dewey Decimal System. I know that he has tiny, emotionally draining dramas about why a book might remain on a certain shelf—at eye level or not, on the end or in the middle. Farmer loves not just the stories but the books themselves, as objects. He even loves the ones in other languages—the languages he can’t even read.
I notice the grass against my ankles again and sit up. Jaron, a good friend of ours, an undereater, emerges from the chaos.
“Hello, boys,” he says, drawing out the words for as long as his breath will let him. Jaron is fond of appearing when you least expect it—and always from the opposite direction. Wherever you’re going, Jaron has just been there and, bored of it already, has decided to leave.
“What are you two doing out here among the people?” he says. Even in the dim light of dusk, Jaron has brought sunglasses. He pulls them off; his eyelids look wrinkled.
“It’s good to see you,” Farmer says.
“There never was a more lovely sight. Simon and Farmer sitting together on the grass listening to the happy music.”
“Want something to eat?” I say.
“You know, I’m so hungry I could eat the ass out of a rag doll.”
On any given day, Jaron might ingest five to ten no-salt crackers, a banana, a gazillion pills of various sorts, and a gallon of water. Perhaps some days he eats less. Your typical binge and starve. Once I caught him at my refrigerator with a soup spoon in the grape jelly, the purplish goop smeared across his lips and snaking down his chin. He smiled back at me, embarrassed, his mouth full of glossy indigo teeth. If we go out to dinner, which is historically rare, Jaron has a salad, removes the tomatoes (“The acid is bad for my stomach,” he says), and proceeds to slowly, methodically, clean his plate. I wonder how he stays alive.
Jaron also cuts himself—a self-mutilator, they call it. Knives, razors, nail files, thumbtacks, whatever he can find that will make a mark. His arms and hands are scarred from the constant nicking. We mostly ignore it. He’s made it clear that we’re not to ask. And the times when he ends up in the hospital, from a combination of cutting and not eating, we never ask, “What was it this time?”
Sometimes I read the files after he’s been discharged. It occasionally takes years for files to make it to my stack, so by the time they get to me, they’re practically ancient. But once or twice I have reached into the bin to find a folder with his patient number—433.533.3—this thing that makes you what you are in these endless rows of bureaucracy. And I know that this means that Jaron was in the hospital long before I knew him. The nurses often mistake the cuts for a suicide attempt, and sometimes they try to send him to the psychiatric unit—which is a pink sticker. Sometimes I take the files home with me and bury them under the mattress. It feels like spying, in a way. Or lying, because I never mention it.
“What did I interrupt?” Jaron says.
“I was just telling Simon how sad I am for these families,” Farmer says. “I don’t know why the system hasn’t failed. Or failed in a more obvious way.”
“Television,” Jaron says, “has taught the American family a spiraling pack of lies. If you want something to blame, blame that. But I’m tired of people acting like the television is an invasion. It merely lies there. You’re the one who has to sit in front of it and pay attention. People only do what they want.”
Farmer and I lie back in the grass. The arias ebb and swell, like water.
“And furthermore, these people out here, these sad families, they aren’t here because they are fans of Puccini, or they want to spend time with one another. They’re out here because it was on the news, or they saw their neighbors going. Herd mentality, you know. It’s disturbing.”
Jaron situates his sunglasses on his face again, like a final fantastic stage exit. I’ve turned off. Farmer is tossing little stones into the air above his head and catching them. He’s startled and sits up fast. “More balloons, look.”
Jaron turns his head slowly, as if it were filled to the crown with lead. “Don’t tell me he tired you with that postcard from the blond girl in Maine mumbo jumbo.” Farmer keeps staring into the cooling air.
I say, “No, not really.”
Jaron looks around at the stage, at the happy people. “Here we are, all of us staring up at the sky, searching for these balloons, and he’s the only one who isn’t bored to tears. Do you ever wish that you didn’t know some of the things you do?” Jaron says. “Do you ever wish you could let go, quiet your brain? All the silly voices in your head telling you truths about reality. Yapping all day, blah blah blah. I wish I could turn them off.”
I rub my hands together, noticing for the first time how itchy my skin is. Farmer nudges me with his elbow. “Simon,” he says. “The balloons.”
“What about them?” I say.
“They’re gone.”
Chapter Four
I get called to do this S&M party and although I don’t really want to go, I do anyway. I could use the money. At the last one someone paddled my nuts for like a thousand hours, and the next day it hurt to wear underwear. This guy’s basement is filled with all kinds of slings and sex appliances, even a mechanical chair that fucks you while you sit in it. (No thanks.) When I get there everyone is already in their chaps and harnesses. “Fantasies are completely unoriginal these days,” one of them is saying, “handed to us by Scandinavian illustrators and fake porn narratives from the seventies.”
Still, I think, here we are.
My clothes come off. I feel a mouth on my asshole and then a tongue reaching inside. One guy sucks on my nipple while I bite down on his fingers. Eventually, I come in somebody’s mouth.
Then I stand by the door while the host counts out my money, watching the faded green bills flip over in his hand, trying to count them as he’s counting them—one hundred, two hundred, two-fifty—without being obvious about it.
That’s my favorite part—the gathering up of clothes afterward. Everyone is more relaxed, the nervousness dissipates, and you can have interesting conversation sometimes. Boundaries are less important, and people tell you what they do for a living, or they complain about their boyfriends and how they never have sex anymore. They swear they’re good husbands and fathers, despite our transaction—I think most of them are. Sometimes you still sound like strangers afterward, which of course you are, even though you’ve shared something personal. Or deeply impersonal, which itself is a certain kind of intimacy—what it says about the person who requests it. And all that can’t make you completely unfamiliar. Can it?
After