The Bend of the World: A Novel Read online

  We turned onto Eighteenth Street and wound our way up the Slopes. In the daylight, these were lovely neighborhoods, if a little run-down. The houses sat at odd angles to the streets, and the streets ran in switchbacks crosswise to the hills, and the whole thing was reminiscent of an Adriatic hill town, suggestive of a militarily defensible poverty, or else, not in the least because of all the little Slovak churches, of a winding stations of the cross, but there, at night, with the stands of houses suddenly replaced by bare sagging trees, with the occasional howl of a distant dog, with the old, orange streetlights buzzing and the intermittent creepy pickup truck rattling in the other direction with a slight few inches between sideview mirrors, with—was it me, or did everyone sense it?—something vague, insubstantial, and yet still threatening among the stands of weedy woods, something misty, something that, even if it didn’t have the material form to drag you down into a ravine and have its murky way with you, might just have the power to compel you to wander off on your own into the weeds, well, the point I’m making is that on a strange road in a strange car with people who were, after all, still strangers to us, there was something odd about that drive, something unsettling, something that strongly suggested no good would come of it.

  But then, quite suddenly, we were above the city. We’d stopped climbing several minutes before and were winding through an unfamiliar neighborhood when we burst out onto Grandview. The city, at night, was like a strange ship, like a sharp barge splitting a larger river; the black tower of the Steel Building like a crow’s nest; the filaments of bridges like gangplanks, and you could almost imagine the whole thing plowing right on down the Ohio, hanging that gentle left onto the Mississippi at Cairo, and floating toward the Gulf; you could imagine waking one day to find yourself on an urban island, surrounded by water; or, anyway, I could imagine it, Atlantis, or thereabouts.

  We ended up somewhere just off Grandview in a little commercial district with an Italian grocery, a storefront pharmacy advertising diabetic socks, and a few square cement-block buildings that might have been plumbers or repair shops. Mark parked along the curb across from the largest of them. Here were are, he said.

  There was light coming through the glass door. There was an unilluminated sign on the wall above it. THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE OWLS, it read. NEST #93. And underneath, painted right onto the blocks: A “PLACE” FOR “FAMILY.”

  17

  It was a sort of social hall, smoky and too brightly lit, the bar populated by very fat old men and very skinny young ones with a few girlfriends and wives scattered among them, the former in tight jeans and little T-shirts that squeezed their bellies and accentuated their tits, the wives in high-waisted jeans and Steelers sweatshirts and sensible hair. Everyone was drinking beer; some were backed up with watery-looking scotch; one girl with a huge purse was drinking something pink and laughing too loudly and attracting some eye-rolling. That’s Alyssa, Mark said. She’s a regular. She gets all tooted up, and then she gets loud.

  This place is cool, said Lauren Sara.

  I have to tell you, I told Mark, that when you said we were going to your club, this isn’t exactly what I imagined.

  You thought we were going to drink brandy in the library? I’m a proud Owl. It’s an important service organization.

  I glanced around. There were pool tables in the back. There was an unattended karaoke station. There were two bartenders, a pretty black-haired girl who looked no older than fifteen, and a thirtyish dude with a high-and-tight haircut and a twice-or-so-broken nose. No one was paying us the slightest attention. I feel conspicuous, I said.

  Why? You think you’re the first suit that ever wandered in looking for something? Go grab us a pool table. I’ll get some beers. He strode toward the bar and snapped his finger toward the bartender and his voice and demeanor changed into something very nearly close to almost authentically Pittsburgh: Joey, you dick, he said.

  My man, said Joey.

  18

  Mark and I played a game of pool while the ladies “used the restroom,” so to speak, and then they returned, glassy-eyed, and a small fold of glossy paper passed between Helen and Mark when she kissed him on the cheek. Then Mark led me down a flight of stairs, but instead of going into the bathroom we walked through a blank door at the end of the hall and into a portion of unfinished basement that was filled with broken artificial Christmas trees and light-up Santa Clauses. This is the stuff of nightmares, I said. I’ll never sleep again.

  Sleep is a human weakness, Mark said. He’d latched the door behind us. There was a glass table with a couple of chairs near an old slop sink, and the purpose of this room, and of our visit to it, if it had not yet been obvious to me, became so. Do you know that dolphins sleep by shutting off one hemisphere of their brain at a time, so they’re always active and aware? That’s my goal. I’m training in that direction.

  Chemically? I grinned.

  By any means necessary, he answered.

  You should meet my friend Johnny. He could probably tell you about sinister yogis or something who can already do it. Or a government conspiracy. CIA mind control. Military psyops. Jesus, those are serious.

  Your friend sounds right up my alley. I’m into anything sinister. And as for all this, we ought to get while the getting is good. My darling Helen tends to have little mishaps in which the stuff [he drew quotation marks in the air] tends to fall into the toilet. He drew them again. I’ve strictly forbidden her from purchasing any more from our friendly bartender, and since I know that’s useless, I’ve also forbidden Shawna from selling her any.

  I sniffled and handed back the bill. Shawna?

  The bartendress, I should say. The Owlette. The brains of the operation.

  19

  The following occurred:

  (1) Did cocaine. (2) Took a piss. (3) Returned to the pool table. (4) Played doubles: Mark and Helen vs. Peter and Lauren Sara. Lost. Mark and Peter vs. Helen and Lauren Sara. Lost. (5) More beers appeared. Several shots of whiskey appeared. (6) Peter and Helen vs. Mark and Lauren Sara. Won. (7) Rematch. Won again. (8) Girls wandered off again. (9) Mark said something like, Just you wait and you’ll see what I was talking about. (10) Asked him what was the real story with my company. Your company? he said. Never confuse service and ownership, he told me. (11) Felt a slight pounding behind my eyes. Concluded I should not have mixed quite so carelessly. Decided another beer would do the trick. (12) Girls returned. (13) Honey, Helen said, you’re not going to believe what happened. I believe everything, Mark said. I dropped the stuff in the toilet, Helen said. Incroyable, Mark said. I don’t believe it. You’re making fun of me. I’d never. Asshole. Couldn’t tell if they were fighting or not. (14) Felt a thin current of hate as if near a lightning strike. (15) Got the feeling from the placement of their bodies, however, the cant of their hips toward each other, the tilt of Mark’s head toward hers, the way they drew into closer proximity as they fought or pretended to fight or flirted by means of fighting, that there was an intense and frightening physical attraction between the two, something stronger than magnetism, as in the bonds of an atomic nucleus, which, if broken, would explode. (16) Felt self-conscious staring and tried to talk to Lauren Sara. Found her tap-tap-tapping on her phone. Who ya textin’? I asked. Tom. Fuck Tom; what’s up with Tom? He says there is a party in the apartment where Steinman is staying. It sounds terrible. I want to go. We just got here. No, we’ve been here, like, an hour, and it’s boring. It’s not boring. You’re just staring at that fucking girl; it’s boring; I’m gonna go to the party. We don’t have a car. Tom said he’ll pick me up. Whatever, I said. Do what you like. (17) Felt bad twenty minutes later when she left. (18) Ran out behind her and said, Listen, stay at my place tonight. Yeah. She shrugged. Okay. Cool. (19) Realized that she hadn’t been half as angry as I’d imagined her to be and found myself infuriated by her nonchalance, as it suggested something inadequate about us, something not quite fully felt. (20) Went back inside. (21) Found Mark and Helen playing pool. (22) Reali
zed how very good they both were. (23) Realized that I hadn’t sunk a shot in either game that Helen and I had won. (24) Listened to them circle and taunt each other. You’re always behind the eight ball, Helen said. That’s funny, Mark said, coming from you. (25) Zoned out for a bit. (26) Came to and heard Helen say something like, Fuck your new friend. (27) Heard Mark say something like, Just don’t talk about it on Facebook this time. (28) Saw Helen throw her cue onto the table and stalk up to the bar. (29) Tried to appear as if I hadn’t been listening. Didn’t fool Mark. (30) Nevertheless, Mark said, So, Global Solutions. You know I’m going to fuck you. You’re going to fuck me? Not kindly, not lovingly, without compassion or quarter. That sounds terrible. Fair warning; get out while you can. Eh, if you lay me off, I can get unemployment. You don’t seem like the type. I shrugged and said, All scams are essentially the same, something Johnny had once said to me in another context entirely. It seemed to impress Mark; at least, he smiled. (31) Mark said, Where’d your girlfriend go? Her friend got her; she went to a party. We bored her. She’s not excitable. You stayed. You guys are more interesting, and I hate her friends. That’s a recipe for disaster, Mark said; you can neither like nor dislike each other’s friends; all outside affections are doomed, or else yours is. So I shouldn’t have any friends? I asked. (32) He shrugged. We don’t, he said.

  20

  The drugs, or, more accurately, the baby laxatives and other miscellaneous and sundry substances with which they’d been adulterated, had found their way to my beer- and hors d’oeuvres-soggy gut, and I had to dash to the bathroom. It was not clean. While I sat there, I felt the first nibble of conscience, the first stage whisper of what would several hours hence crescendo into the next day’s regret, the sense, strange but familiar, that I could hear my own future self whispering to me across all the hours between us. Asshole, he was saying. I didn’t do drugs, nor drink heavily, nor abandon my girlfriend in favor of strangers I’d only just met; well, not habitually—plainly I did do these things, when pressed, or when sufficiently tempted, or, anyway, I had done them, at least once, that night.

  Conscience is a strange thing. I didn’t believe that drugs or drinking heavily or staying out late were bad or morally suspect; I wasn’t especially worried about Lauren Sara, who, I was sure, I would find later that evening in my bed, or who would find me there, depending only on which of us escaped our respective parties first; we might have sex, or might not; we weren’t that kind of couple; I might hold her, or might not; it was warm enough that whichever of us was first into the apartment would open the windows in the bedroom; there would be the distant sounds of hospitals, which were ubiquitous in the city, and ambulances and late-night traffic and the strange, feral children whom we never saw, and who seemed to play only at night. In the morning, one of us would make coffee; Lauren Sara would get on her bike and ride off to do whatever it was she did when I wasn’t around; I sometimes thought that she proved the crackpot science that said the world is created by observation and those things not observed at a given moment cannot with any certainty be said to exist. I would putter around the house, make more coffee, call my parents, check my email, chat with Johnny online or on the phone, consider dinner, run to the gym to play racquetball or swim a few laps once my hangover had become manageable; meet Derek or someone at a bar and have a beer and watch the Pens for a period or two; go home early to Lauren Sara or not to Lauren Sara; sleep well, get up, and get on with it.

  Nevertheless, I knew that I’d be nagged, rationally or not, in proportion to the night’s excesses or out of proportion thereto, by that second self, the creature of habit and indoctrination and acculturation that lives in all of us and delights in nothing so much as picking at the scabs of our venial wounds.

  When I’d emptied my bowels and small intestines and pride and dignity into the dingy toilet and cleaned myself and made it back to the bar, I found myself in the middle of an altercation. A hairy Sasquatch in a sleeveless T-shirt and a hat that read HOMESTEAD HARLEYS had Mark in a sleeper hold. I blinked. Not a Sasquatch, but a man of Sasquatchian stature. I knew I shouldn’t have done those fucking mushrooms. He kept saying, Easy now, easy now. The bartender, Joey, was trying to reason with Mark. I didn’t see Helen anywhere. Mark, buddy, he said. Come on. I sidled up to the girl with the bright drink; whatever she’d moved on to, it was now as blue as something out of Star Trek. What the fuck? I said.

  Aw, no, she said, and her voice was every Pittsburgh accent blended, distilled, and evaporated into a little bouillon cube of swallowed vowels and nasal consonants. He was beatin’ on his girl.

  Easy now, easy now, said Bigfoot.

  Mark? I said. That guy?

  Naw, Billy, she said.

  Who?

  The dude who gawt him in the sleeper hold. Yeah, of course Mark.

  Get off me. Get the fuck off me, Mark was yelling

  No one else was paying much attention; they’d seen this shit before. Shawna was leaning on the bar with her chin in her hands, watching the struggle with the look of a businessman eating alone in an airport restaurant.

  He hit her? I asked.

  The girl shrugged. He snatched her up n’at, she said.

  He snatched her up? I repeated.

  Yeah. She looked at me as if we were speaking a related but mutually unintelligible language. He snatched her up.

  Mark told the big man, I’m warning you.

  Come on, dude, said Joey. Let’s call it a night.

  What did she do? I asked.

  Who?

  Helen. His girlfriend.

  Aw, she slapped the fuck outta him and took off.

  I saw Mark take a deep, three-part breath. He closed his eyes for a full second. He stopped struggling and his body went slack. He opened his eyes. He took another breath. All right, he said. Sorry. He opened his palms as much as he was able in that yeti’s absurd grip. It’s cool.

  All right, then, said the yeti, all right. And he set Mark down.

  Mark turned his head and looked straight at me. Mark, I said. The fuck?

  Then I thought I saw him flash another reptilian wink. Then he wheeled around and sucker-punched the poor fat fucker right in the nose. It made a sound like someone opening a bag of chips. The bigfoot stumbled back, hand to his nose, tripped on a barstool, and sprawled on the dirty floor. His hat fell off and sat sadly on the floor behind him. His nose might have been broken; anyway, it was bleeding. There had been a few screams as it happened, well, anyway brief yips of surprise or dismay. Joey took a step backward. Shawna now had the surprised look of a woman who never expects to be surprised. Mark straightened his tie, turned to Joey. The poor bigfoot on the floor was sitting up and gripping his damaged snout. Mark seemed about to say something; I waited for him to deliver some sort of terrifying and deadly ultimatum, but he just made a sound between a snort and a laugh and rolled his eyes and turned and walked out.

  Then I somehow found the presence of mind to dash back to the pool table and grab Mark’s jacket, which he’d left slung over a chair, before I scurried out after him.

  21

  Oh, thanks, he said. He reached into the inner breast pocket and pulled out his wallet. I thought I’d lost this. He extracted two twenties, paused, and added a third. He pushed the money into my hand. I stared at it. Listen, he said. Sorry. She gets a little crazy. I’ve got to go find her. She’ll try to walk home and end up in a ditch. Cab’s on me. Sorry for the whatnot. Listen, we’ll have lunch or something next week. I owe you.

  Then he walked across the street.

  Then he got into his car.

  Then I said, mostly to myself, But you can’t get a cab on Mount Washington, but he was already pulling away.

  Joey the bartender and Homestead Harley, who had a wad of brown institutional paper towel over his nose, came out onto the sidewalk. Your friend’s a real piece of work, Joey said.

  A real piece of shit, Bigfoot said. I think my nose is broke.

  Sorry, I said. He’s not my friend. I ju
st met him.

  He leave you up here? Joey said.

  I shrugged. Gave me cab fare, I said.

  What the fuck, Joey said. You can’t get no cabs in Pittsburgh.

  Yeah, I said. Whatever. I’ve got a friend who lives down on the South Side. I’m just going to walk to his place to crash.

  Well, said Joey, you might as well tie one on for the road, since you’re not driving.

  Oh man, well, I’d feel a little awkward after the, uh, the whatnot.

  Aw, shit, said the yeti, and he gave me a brotherly clap on the shoulder that reverberated through my spine. You can’t hold nobody accountable just because his buddy’s a douche. Anyways, he just caught me off guards is all.

  So I had another beer, and maybe Shawna gave me a little bump for the road on my way out.

  22

  The Mount was a mystery to anyone who didn’t live there, and although I was sure there were shorter and better routes down its face to Johnny’s street, I only knew to take the McArdle Roadway, which ran crosswise to the hill from Grandview down to Carson Street on the Flats four hundred feet below. It took me a few drunken minutes to get my bearings and find my way back to Grandview; then I turned left and walked along the scenic overlook toward McArdle, the bright city across the river to my right, a half mile distant but seemingly so close that I might, with a running start, leap from here to there. I’d texted Johnny and told him I was en route; he’d replied: my r not we out late. It’s a long story, I typed. U can pay for breakfast, he replied.

  As I neared one of the small overlook balconies perched off the roadway, weird modern toadstools sprouted on concrete stems from the cliff below, I noted a solitary figure, and a few steps later saw that it was Helen, and I thought that Mark must not have been looking very hard, because here she was in the most obvious place you could imagine.

  Helen, I said.

  Oh. She only glanced at me before turning back to the view. You.

  Me, I said. Are you okay?