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By Darren Kaminsky

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Darren Kaminsky's novel, Sugar Spun Sisters, appears in serialized form every Monday right here on Me Three.  The story follows the lives of five twenty-somethings living in Washington D.C.  As far as the editors are currently aware, none of these characters work in politics.

Click here to start with Chapter One.

Chapter Five

June 9

The phone rang. No one seemed to be on the other end. There was just some background gobbledy-gook as if the caller had turned away and was talking to someone else.

After about 30 seconds, I heard a sound like someone breathing into the phone, and then a tentative “Hello?”

“Nell?”

“Yeah, um, sorry. I was being asked a question, but…guess what?”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to guess.”

“OK, we got the house.”

“How’d you know?”

“It was a guess”

“Oh.”

“When can we move in?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Well, um, as long as it’s soon.”

“Yeah, sorry I’ll call back and find out.”

“No, I’ll do it, but we should get margaritas to celebrate.”

“OK, but not tonight. We’re rallying against that bastard Pinochet. The Chilean parliament won’t remove his immunity. Will you come and bring your camera?”

“Sure, what about tomorrow night for the margaritas?”

“Peru, that bastard, Fujimori.”

“Thursday?”

“Honduras. Embassy protest: one of the bastard death squad captains is finally going on trial, but he’s not a head of state so maybe the protest won’t take too long, maybe afterwards? “

“Sure,” I say and we hang up.

* * *

June 10

The Margaritas didn’t happen, but truck rental did. Kerran, Brenna, Nell, and Jean needed to be moved to Park Road...then the five people that the impending roommates promised truck time to needed to be moved. And somehow when we got to the various homes to move those 10 people at least three or four others--roommates, crashers, friends-- asked if they could move things too. I think we moved 15 people between four in the afternoon and 4:30 in the morning.

To get the truck, Brenna and her inexpressive boyfriend Kyle picked me up in his very clean, well-kept Buick. He said nothing the entire trip. In the month since I’ve met him, we’ve exchanged all of three sentence-long scraps of conversation. He’s driving me because Brenna wants him to drive me and he’ll do anything for her except participate in a conversation.

U-Haul is closed on Saturdays and they left the truck in the parking lot. (I picked up the keys yesterday.) I got in and it was so hot that I could see the air shimmer. The plastic of the seat--hot like the melted cheese on a grilled cheese sandwich--adhered instantly to the back of my legs. I ignored it. The truck started up fine and I followed Kyle and Brenna out of the parking lot.

Traffic sped up. The truck was a stick shift. I tried to put it in second gear and there was no second gear, not even a grinding sound; it wouldn’t go in at all. I panicked, hit the horn and waved my arms in a lame attempt at getting Kyle and Brenna’s attention.

They didn’t seem to notice. I could’ve pulled over and abandoned the truck -- rented in my name -- but then we couldn’t move. Or...I could...and I remembered my father doing something like this...rev the thing up passed second and jump it into third. I revved; the engine roared, I popped the stick up and over and it jumped into third almost smoothly. “Fuck ya,” I said to myself and then realized that there’d be no way any of the others were going to want to try that (except maybe Kerran and it’d make no difference to him if he got it into third or stripped the gears). So, I’d have to drive the thing for the entire night.

I had more stuff than anyone else. An amount that became embarrassing when the entire Cochrane family, Nell’s two sisters, aunt, father, mother, and cousin, all visiting from New Mexico, insisted on carrying my boxes from the bend in the street, up the broken concrete stair to the sidewalk, then up the short stair from the sidewalk to the little winding path that leads to the three stairs into the house. I felt like an overseer at the building of an Egyptian pyramid.

Brenna, with a half-smile, somehow knew exactly what I was thinking, walked up behind me and whispered in my ear, “Let her people go.” I laughed, made an effort to look pained and rolled my eyes.

Through all the moving, only Jean was with me up until I finally found… just before dawn… an illegal but “who-the-fuck-cares” parking spot up on Knoll and Wood.

Nell was awake when we got in. She’d managed to find the boxes with everyone’s kitchen stuff, unpacked and organized it all into a single really randomly equipped (we have a miniature garlic press and a set off lobster forks, but no kitchen knives) set-up. We also have the most comprehensive set of diner dishes in the Northeast and plenty of boxes of Tuna Helper with low UPC numbers which I’m told are worth more to serious collectors than the later, higher numbered boxes.

None of us slept in our rooms. Nell and Jean slept on the two sofas. Kerran and some friend of his were so stoned that they slept in the backyard. Before crashing on my futon mattress in the middle of the living room floor, I went out back and talked to them, but they were already beyond words and in the midst of punching each other in the arm to see who could take more pain. Luckily, they kept missing.

And every time they missed, Kerran would double over so his surfer hair would get in his eyes and he’d let off a high-pitched squeal of a laugh that was part foghorn, part dog-whistle, part cat’s mating call.

* * *

June 11
8 a.m.

I lay on the lumpy futon mattress for a while, wide awake, then without noticing that I’d even gotten drowsy, I started having one of those dreams you know is a dream: I was in a circular room with a crowd of people, some of whom were vaguely familiar. People from high school were there, so were the roommates, other friends, even Coby, though even in the dream I knew he was actually in Africa. Maybe that’s why he was wearing a grass skirt and a big necklace of animal bones?

Half the circular room’s circular wall was thick glass. We were below sea level and light trickled down from above and made some parts of the water light up in patterns of jade lace. Rainbow-glistening fish writhed up to the wall and I heard them calling my name in a fish language that sounded like Mandarin. On the stage, a girl made of gold slow-danced with a platinum python to a song by Great White or Whitesnake or White Lion or some other bad heavy metal band.

Suddenly, I knew we were at a refugee camp. Four emaciated girls ran up to us and I knew they’d been forced to be prostitutes. I told them where to hide to escape their captors, but they refused and stood in the open until they were surrounded.

One held up her arm and there was no forearm between her hand and her upper arm, just empty space. “Do you care? “she asked me. “Not contractually,” I told her (and remembered a round of heavy negotiations during which I’d held out on this very point. I’d stuck to principal, a principal of cowardice, and eventually agreed only to “notice.”
The negotiator, a large fat woman in a gray wrinkled polyester suit, had flapped her Nixonian jowls in displeasure.)

It started to snow and through the snow I saw a greenish forelock to the armless girl’s hair. I knew her, but couldn’t say her name. Her face was hidden in the blinding snow. “She is the contract,” the negotiator’s voice said. The girl became a pile of snow and I looked at her and she became bone and contractually I noticed but didn’t care.

Another of the girls grew deer antlers; she became taller, then her face bubbled like lava and she became Nell. Everyone was watching her and everyone pulled their passports out and stood in line for her to stamp them with the blood on her fist.

Everyone watched deer-Nell and didn’t seem to care that the last girl’s legs had fused and become a tail. She squirmed and wriggled up to the glass wall, pulled herself through it; her body making a scratching sound as the glass passed right through her like viscous liquid through a strainer. Once on the other side, she called my name. Her hair grew long and flowed down her bare back. She did a back flip in the water and pressed her face against the glass. All the fish wriggled and glistened around her, cuddling to her like puppies. It was Dani. “Drown here,” she said, her voice echoed and bubbled through the room, “Drown here.”

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Darren Kaminsky is a writer living in Brooklyn.  He can be contacted at sugarspun @ bigbagoftricks dot com.

© 2004 Me Three