Joan apologized three more times, then returned to her seat, feeling evil. As usual, when she confronted the world about one of its problems, the world suggested that the problem was Joan. She vowed to pry herself out of her misophonia and be a better person, from then on.
But on the evening of Tuesday, July sixteenth, as Joan Kowalski attempts to read on the tram home from work, she is tested again. The tram is red and flashy, brand-new but nostalgic, evocative of early locomotives and vintage American optimism. Normally, Joan drives an inherited station wagon to and from work, but her tank is empty, and she doesn’t get paid until Friday. Recently, the preparatory stage of Vacca Vale’s revitalization effort spawned the tram and its artery of tracks. To encourage transit use, the city has provided every denizen with one free monthly pass. The promotion worked, and now, during rush hour, there are at least ten people in every car.
Despite the severe air-conditioning, the interior is cheerful. Joan grips a Venetian detective novel that her aunt Tammy mailed to her, still stinging from her earlier interaction with Anne Shropshire, hoping to distract herself from lingering shame, but the cackles and squaws of three tween girls overthrow the words on the page, infuriating her. They sound like chimpanzees. Just when Joan thinks the tween cackling will stop, it gets louder, engulfing her flammable peace along with the compartment. The tweens screech like they can’t see anyone else. Joan is confident that nothing in the world is that funny.
After shooting a glare at the girls, Joan transfers tram cars, running between them to make sure she doesn’t get left behind, feeling ridiculous. The next car is quiet until three people in their thirties start to yell.
“Just you wait!” shouts a very tall man. “Males will bear children, soon enough!”
“It’s only a matter of time!” adds a second, sunburnt man.
“I hope you do!” declares a woman in a camouflage jumpsuit. “I really hope you and all your balls get pregnant!”
Joan can’t tell if they are outraged or thrilled.
She transfers cars.
The quiet in the next compartment lasts nearly two stops. Then, a child pulls his sweatshirt on backward, conceals his face in the hood, and stalks like a zombie, screaming. His father stares at his phone, noise-canceling headphones clamped over his ears.
The last of the tram’s cars is empty but for a woman and her service dog. Both the woman and the dog are beige. Don’t pet me, reads the dog’s vest.
Joan steps inside and clears her throat. “Mind if I—”
“Please shut up,” says the woman, her eyes closed. “Please just shut up and leave me alone.”
My First Was a Fish
Just a lousy, half-dead fish I found by the river. Bronze and thin, no longer than my hand, base of palm to fingertip. Almost cute. When I found it in the frozen mud, it was only an inch or so from the water, but there was no tide to pull it back in. I swear it saw me. Witnessed me. For a minute it was just the fish, a couple opossums, a load of rabbits, and me. Silent besides a look-how-big-my-dick-is motorcycle revving on the road. Frigid, too, since this was back in February, and my coat was shit, so I was shivering a bit. The fish’s gills were pumping like they still had water to breathe. I took it by the tail and carried it a mile back to the Rabbit Hutch. Pinched its scales between my fingers. Slimy. The fish sort of flailed once or twice, but then it died for real.
I know that it was only a fish, and I know that most people wouldn’t feel bad about its death, but that night—bear with me—it was like the fish was teaching me something about my soul. Teaching me that my soul was faulty. I know this is stupid, but it’s what I thought, and I wasn’t even high. I thought the fish was saying: Yes, Jack, you are wicked. Something went wrong inside your machinery, maybe in vitro, maybe in childhood, and now you’re wound to the wrong moral time zone, maybe even to the wrong solar system. You, Jack, are coldhearted. And you have no excuse. You may have been trapped in the system, the fish said to me, but you got lucky—nobody hurt you. They put you with Cathy and Robert, those older Catholic folks, when you were eleven, and you honestly can’t remember much before that, when you lived with your grandma, but you’re pretty sure you were fine. Not great, but fine. Your grandma worked a lot, but she took care of you, didn’t she?
When I was still in the system, therapists were always trying to extract pre-eleven memories from my mind, but I never had any to offer. Nothing specific, at least. Just vague things—Grandma would smoke in the car; Grandma had a gumball machine that she kept stocked; Grandma wore hot pink lipstick; Grandma used a perfume that smelled like nothing from the natural world. When we were driving somewhere far away, the smoke-and-perfume combo would make me carsick, but instead of changing her habits, she just rolled down the windows, even in the dead of winter. I remember I had to cross some old train tracks to get to the bus for school, and they were always flooded with rabbits. Grandma made me Cream of Wheat in the mornings when it was cold, and even though the utilities would sometimes go off, we always had enough to eat. In the winter, she’d pile three blankets on me as I slept. She was a cashier at the grocery store.
One psychologist suggested I was repressing traumatic memories, maybe dissociating, and I wanted to believe him. It would explain how fake everything felt, how lonely and digital. How often I wanted to hurt somebody, just to see if either of us was real, just to move someone’s face around, just for the fucking thrill of it. But two other psychologists told me my childhood passed the smell test. There was no record of abuse in my file. It didn’t sound easy, they assured me, but it didn’t sound so bad. One therapist suggested that I couldn’t remember anything because I smoked too much pot.
I talk big and flex like the next foster kid when I have to, but Cathy and Robert were good to me. They were gone a lot, hoarded angel figurines, kept creepy parrots in the sunroom, and almost never looked me in the eye. But they cared, in their way. Paid for my jujitsu out of pocket. Rarely went into the basement, definitely not into my bedroom, so it was easy to sneak girls over, when I could convince them—mostly Anna, this curvy chick a couple years older, from the community college, who actually enjoyed having sex with me, bless her soul. Sex with Anna was the brightest thing in my whole overcast life. She had these freckles on her shoulders that I loved. During sex, she liked to take control, always telling me exactly how to touch her and what to say. She said her parents hated her, said I was lucky I didn’t have any. The miracle of Anna got me through junior year of high school, until she met a full-time boyfriend in a class called Money, Banking, and Capital Markets. Then she cut things off. If Cathy and Robert knew about Anna, they never said a word. Cathy taught me stick shift, Robert grilled three different meats on my birthday, they never criticized my grades, never forced me to read or pray, never hurt me, never turned a blind eye to somebody who might. Gave me freedom. A reasonable curfew. A phone. What I’m trying to say is, Cathy and Robert never subjected me to the kind of shit that mutates your life forever, the kind that basically every foster kid I know has to take. A girl like Blandine would have faced it from Day One. It’s hard to believe that our hands were dealt from the same deck of cards.
Cathy and Robert hosted two other kids, but they weren’t from the system—they were exchange students from China, sent to Vacca Vale by some godforsaken program that mistook Vacca Vale for a worthy American place. The students were named Wang Wei and Li Jun, but in Indiana they went by Tyler and Chip.
Tyler and Chip stayed in the basement, but I barely interacted with them. They saw Anna all the time, but never acknowledged or reported her. We had an understanding: live and let live. On Christmas one year, Tyler left a box in red paper outside my door. It was a handmade notebook with some royal-ass pattern on the front in blue, and even though I knew I would never be caught dead with that fruity notebook, as I held it, I felt like Tyler was my brother. It sounds dopey. It felt dopey. But it also felt real. I opened the cover, my hands hot. Inside was a notecard that said: for your writing.