RIDE THE COMET by Vincent Reusch
Sexual desire triggered Larry’s most acute bouts of heartache – though the sex was not really what his heart ached for, he knew – and masturbation brought his greatest depression, each hopeless ejaculation a microcosm of his life, now single at forty; beached whales, sharks lost in freshwater deltas, salmon trapped on the wrong side of the dam.
In these moments alone, as his tension mounted, he focused his mind straight ahead, using any tricks he could – Asians, Native Americans, Latinas, fat women, short women, black hair, red hair, green eyes, blue – anything to keep his vision from sneaking to the peripherals where he’d pushed nine years of Susan’s sandy hair and curious brown eyes. For the four or five seconds of release, ten if he were lucky, between the heartache and the depression, he was there with himself in his hand, floating two inches off the bathroom floor, wrapped in a cotton gauze of music, the final frenzied clash of Zorba’s Dance giving way to the weightlessness of The Blue Danube Waltz. Away he floated, mouth open, hardly long enough even to hope he never came down.
When he did descend, he landed on cold tile beneath the flicker-ing bare fluorescent bulb of a 1930s-era bathroom in his new apartment, a one-bedroom in a broken-up house in the city. He hadn’t known how he would ever get through apartment hunting, stepping through the doors of so many one- and two-bedroom boxes, each still with the smell of shampoo and floor wax and dogs and cats and cigarettes and spaghetti, a long straight hair still clinging to a tub, its tail down the drain, the back of an earring lost in the dust on a window sill.
Light. That’s what his Aunt Penn had told him. Look for lots of light. When she walked through the door for the first time, she said only, “Oh, Larry, what did you do?” She came back half an hour later carrying a floor lamp with three swiveling lights at the top, and she placed it next to him where he sat in a reclining chair beside an old record player. He’d found both the chair and the record player in the classified ads. A thirteen-inch black and white Zenith TV sat on the floor in front of him, also from the paper. “Soap operas and game shows,” Penn said. “That’s no good. I’m taking it.” And she did.
The first thing he’d bought for his new apartment had been a phone and an answering machine. After that, he bought a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner that he still hadn’t used. He’d gone to Sears and, knowing nothing about vacuums, he’d listened to the sales woman detail the features of several models. He was giving her the money for a bagless with a HEPA filter that she’d recommended, when he felt her hand on his forearm. She wore a single ring, a wedding band, and her fingers were lined from years of worrying over limed sinks and scuffed floors. He looked from that plain honest hand to her eyes, eyes so like her hand, like a helpless wringing of hands. “I just can’t take it,” she said, sniffling as she gave Larry back the two extra twenties he’d given her. “I had a man in here yesterday in his sixties, and I can’t stop thinking about the cook-set he bought. Twelve pieces. He’ll never even take it out of the box. You poor things.” He knew then he couldn’t possibly again step foot into another household goods department, small appliances store, kitchenware or linen store. When he got home with the vacuum cleaner, he watched, as he always did, the steady red light on the answering machine.
After Penn left with the TV, Larry cued up Zorba’s Dance and mouthed the intro along with the actors’ voices. “Teach me to dance, will you?” Basil asked, tentatively. “Did you say . . . DANCE?!” Zorba replied, exuberantly. “Come on, my boy!” Larry stepped into the bathroom in time with the first slow notes, and for three and a half minutes he worked himself faster and faster into a lather beneath the flickering light. He weighed anchor with the last note and stomp of Anthony Quinn’s feet, the next record dropped, and as the cellos opened The Blue Danube, he rose this time up and out of his bathroom. He floated over the streetlights of his neighborhood, up and over the twinkling city, and there, spinning slowly, watched amazed as a steady trickle of men, pants around their ankles, spiraled lazily up around him, like fireflies. A man with white hair and delicate thighs floated past, gazing, bewildered, into a double boiler.
He bought another floor lamp from the paper the next day and stood it in the corner opposite the first. It had a beige shade and tassels that caressed his wrist when he turned it on. He’d bought a three-way bulb, and for ten minutes he clicked it from one brightness to the next, testing every combination between that lamp and the lamp that Penn had bought him. He settled on the lowest setting on the tasseled lamp, and two of the three lights on the other, one pointing at the ceiling and the other down at his lap.
“Congratulations,” Penn said that evening. “I’m proud of you, Larry. Now when are you going to go back to work? Bill wants to stop coverage on his boat for the winter.”
Larry adjusted the lowest light on the lamp beside him.
“I wish you’d talk to me,” Penn said. “This isn’t healthy.”
He clicked off the lamp.
“Larry, you know I love you. I feel for you, I really do, but sooner or later this has to end. I’m going to do your dishes.”
“They fired me,” he said.
“Really?” she asked, pausing on her way to the kitchen. “No,” she said, continuing. “They didn’t fire you, Larry. You just stopped. You did. You really did.”
There weren’t many dishes to do. He’d bought just two of everything necessary from St. Luke’s Thrift Store, the only place he shopped now outside of the classified ads. He had two plates, two bowls, two glasses, and two of each utensil. He had a saucepan and a cast iron frying pan permanently on his stove. He had a spatula and a wooden spoon.
After Penn left, Larry circled garage sales in the paper, and the next day he picked up an end table and yet another floor lamp, this one splaying into multi-colored fiber-optic threads. He put it behind his chair where it arced over his head like a little firework. He’d also bought a record that day at a yard sale, the soundtrack from the movie, Ordinary People, starring Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore, and featuring two of his all-time favorite classical pieces, Pachelbel’s canon in D and Handel’s Messiah, Hallelujah chorus. The man who sold it to him was middle-aged, a black man with white hair creeping up his temples.
“My wife played cello,” the man said, standing in his front yard, pieces of their life like bones around him.
“I love the cello,” Larry said.
“I did too,” the man said.
Larry gave him a dollar for the record. The man gave him back fifty cents, and for a moment they looked at each other as if it were the most absurd transaction either of them had ever made. When Larry returned home, his answering machine light was blinking. The message was ten seconds of silence.
“King of kings,” the Mormon Tabernacle Choir shouted. “And Lord of lords. He shall reign forever and ever. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.” And Larry was gone, wrapped this time in sacrilege, blasted off with endorphins, and finding a stable orbit over the city with the opening bass notes of Pachelbel’s canon. He didn’t see the record’s previous owner that night over the twinkling lights, though he looked for him among the crowd of men, gyroscopes, spinning slowly around themselves in the amber glow. But as he descended he caught the attention, disturbing for her, perhaps, of a woman with her hand between her naked legs, her hips darting involuntarily. Their eyes met for what seemed a long time, but the only description Larry could conjure an hour later was that of the expression on the man’s face who’d sold him the record, the look in his eyes as he’d held out the fifty cents change.
Moving from the household goods section of the classified ads, Larry found the events section and began showing up at this or that community affair. He went to craft shows in the park. He went to flea markets. He visited soup kitchens where he sometimes volunteered and sometimes just sat down and ate. And at all these places he saw the shocked and the dazed. He watched the slow rolling eyes and listened to the shy faltering utterances of people suspended in disbelief – separated, widowed, divorced, broken. And each evening he dropped his keys on his end table and stared at the steady red light on his answering machine.
He went one Saturday evening to the public library where he sat through their children’s story hour, boys and girls in flannel pajamas scattered like jacks across the floor while the librarian read. When she finished, she asked him if he’d like to read on the following Saturday. “The poor man,” she said to a mother, as Larry walked toward the children’s section where he would agonize for two days, looking for the right story. “Just look at him,” she said. “He must have lost a child.”
Larry sat on a metal chair and read to the children, “The matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day.” He struck a wooden match as he spoke, “And it smelled so deliciously of roast goose. Her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beauti-ful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.”
The match snuffed out at Larry’s fingertips while the little match girl froze to death on the sidewalk, and as the smoke trickled up, two girls in the front grabbed each other and burst into tears. The librarian blew her nose into a damp Kleenex, looked around the room at the sniffling children and clapped uneasily.
Larry came home to find his answering-machine light blinking again, another message of silence. He listened to it several times.
On Sunday he sat down with the paper and flipped through the City Life section. He saw that the autumn county fair was a week away, and that Art Fest was coming up. He saw an ad for a skywatch party at Milham Park. They would be watching the Leonid meteor shower, the debris from the Temple-Tuttle comet. “Come after midnight,” the ad said, “when the eastern hemisphere will be riding on the front of earth’s orbit and facing directly into the storm.” He also found that a local car dealership was open that day for a hunting-season special, giving away a free shotgun and a frozen turkey to anyone who test-drove a car. He slicked back his hair with water, put on a tie and drove to the car dealer.
Getting no preference from Larry, the salesman put him in a Ford wagon. He said that while Larry was out, they’d appraise his trade-in, a rusting Toyota that had been a second car. He took the wagon out of the city, wandering along back roads and looking at country houses set among patches of red and orange. On the way back to the dealership, he bought earplugs and shotgun shells – slugs, each shell containing a single marble-sized ball of lead. He told the car salesmen he’d think about his offer, put the gun and the turkey into his trunk and drove to another dealership. An overweight salesman showed him their cars, sweating from one section of the lot to another. Larry picked out a gray Chevy Blazer and took the shotgun and the turkey out of his trunk and put them in the back of the truck.
“Wait just a minute,” the salesman said, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “What’s the idea?”
“I don’t want to leave it in my car,” Larry explained.
“But you can’t expect me to let you drive off with that thing in there.”
“Well you can’t expect me to leave it here.”
Sweat beaded over the salesman’s top lip. Larry took the gun out of the Blazer and walked back toward his car.
“Now, let’s not get hasty,” the salesman said, shrinking into his flesh. “You’ve got a point,” he said. “Just so the boss doesn’t know. Let me get you a plate.”
Larry drove again into the country until he found a power line, where he turned off the road and followed a dirt two-track that ran beneath the wires. At a bowl-shaped clearing, he parked the car, loaded the shotgun, pushed in his earplugs and carried the turkey to the far slope. He walked back toward the Blazer, turned and took aim.
His first shot tore out a crater of sand two feet to the left of the turkey. He pumped the stock clumsily, and the smoking shell arced off to his right. He aimed again. The slug hit, and the turkey exploded. Shards of frozen bird, like pieces of china, rained down around him as the sound of the blast echoed through the woods and fields. Larry smiled sadly, a feeling in his chest like the ejected shell that flipped smoking through the air, landing by the first – two spent shells in the sand. He watched them until the last trickle of smoke rose from the newest. It didn’t take long, and he wanted to believe that that was good. Fires die, he thought. But looking from the empty shells to the pieces of turkey, he wasn’t so sure. “And what was still more wonderful,” he’d read to the children at the library, “the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled across the floor, with a knife and fork in its breast, to the little girl. Then the match went out, and there remained nothing but the thick, damp, cold wall before her.”
Larry bought a spring-loaded skeet thrower and a box of clay pigeons, and he drove to the power lines every morning that week, shooting through boxes of ammunition until he could knock down two birds thrown together – firing, pumping and firing again before the second clay disk hit the ground. He shot until his finger was sore. He shot until his shoulder was bruised, until his left arm was stiff and heavy from raising the gun and working the pump. And when he came home, he lit up the house and looked at the little red light on his answering machine, some days glowing steadily, and some days blinking to announce so many seconds of silence.
The county ran a full-page ad in the paper the day the autumn fair opened – livestock judging, bake-offs, free warm cider and hot chocolate, rides and games, a motorcycle stunt show, and a demolition derby. Larry spent the first day mostly in the barns, smelling the hay and watching the animals. The horses took to him, and they nuzzled their velvet noses against his neck, turning sideways to present him with their enormous teardrop eyes.
In the afternoon, Larry watched the stunt cycle jump cars and busses, the rider doing wheelies and handstands on the bike as he circled the track between jumps. As the sun set, Larry rode the Ferris wheel. While he waited at the top for the carney to load more passengers, the lights came on, colored neon all around him blinking to life, a watercolor wash on everyone at the fair. He rode more rides, spinning and flipping until his stomach grew queasy, then he walked along the midway, its dancing lights like shouting voices. Now and then he stopped to throw darts at balloons or to squirt water into a clown’s mouth. He was about to leave, the desire to look at the answering machine gnawing at his chest, when he found, at the far end of the avenue of games, the skeet-shoot booth. Hung in the back of the booth was a movie screen painted with a silhouette of trees. The guns shot at disks of light that flew across the screen. “You’re kidding me,” Larry said as he looked at the prizes – lava lamps, Japanese lanterns, neon lights, black lights, Christmas lights, Halloween lights, nightlights, and glow in the dark stickers.
A thin woman leaned against the counter, her hands stuffed into her money pouch. Her hair was flat and colorless, her face hard and lined. “No kidding here,” she said. “One dollar, twenty shots, twelve or more hits gets you a prize.” Larry gave her a dollar and picked up a shotgun.
He hit eight on his first try, still dizzy from the rides and unused to the gun.
“You don’t have to pump it, sugar,” the woman said. “Just pull the trigger.”
He hit ten with his second dollar.
“You sure like to pump that thing, don’t you,” she said.
He hit thirteen with his third dollar, and she gave him a choice of four glow-in-the-dark stickers. He chose Saturn. He played four more times, the last time hitting eighteen and winning a string of orange patio lights in the shape of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. When he came home, the answering machine was blinking double for two messages. The first was his Aunt Penn wondering “Where the hell are you, Larry? I’m worried about you. I saw your gun. What does that mean?” The second was a long silence, longer this time than any of the others, and ending with a muffled sound that might have been a sigh, or might have been a sob. He replayed the message a dozen times, reading in that single sound entire essays, memoirs, apologies and explanations. He played it again and again until the stories turned back upon themselves, convoluted and contradictory, and finally meaningless.
The big attraction the next day, at sundown, was the demolition derby. The stands were full and raucous as the field turned slowly into a steaming auto graveyard. The winner stood shirtless on a podium, his belly hanging over his belt and his sweat steaming in the cool air as he shook a forty-ounce bottle of beer and sprayed it over his head. The crowd went nuts. Larry stepped down the bleachers and into the midway.
“Back for more, hey Pumper?” the skeet-shoot carney said.
He put a fifty-dollar bill on the counter and picked up a gun.
“I don’t have change for this,” she said.
“I’ll shoot it up.”
“Shoot away,” she said through a cigarette, shielding her lighter with her palm.
An hour and a half later she helped him box up his winnings, an assortment of lamps, strings of lights, and a pile of stickers. “The boss isn’t going to like this,” she said. Their hands touched as she handed him the box. Throughout the evening, as he’d won his prizes, she’d straightened herself here and then there, pulling her shirt-waist down, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, displaying his prizes with a little bob of her hips.
“See you tomorrow night?” she asked as he left.
“I suppose,” he said.
The last night of the fair, before shooting skeets, he took another round on the rides. He bought a string of tickets and worked his way from the Matterhorn to the Recoil to the Barrel Roll to the Comet, where he found himself alone. He locked down the bar, and the ride spun to life, whipping him until his hip ached from being forced into the metal side of the carriage. Two or three minutes passed as he strained to hold himself away from that biting edge. Another minute passed, then another. He whipped toward the operator, and as he paused for a half-second at the apex of the arc, he saw the man on his stool, arms crossed on the console, head on his arms, sleeping soundly. On the next pass, Larry yelled, but the noise of the ride overwhelmed his voice. He continued to yell anyway, each time he passed close. His head throbbed and grew heavy, and he felt himself sliding backward down a hole. The light of the world grew smaller and smaller until it was a pinprick far away at the hole’s opening. Then it disappeared altogether.
Larry walked down a cobblestone street in the light of a few gas lamps. A horse-drawn carriage clattered by. Snow drifted up against the sides of buildings, and the stones shone with a film of frost. In one hand he held his shotgun, in the other, the hand of a little barefoot girl. She carried a bundle of matches in her free hand, carefully, as another child might carry a cupcake. She led him down the street to a small alcove beside the front steps of an apartment building, and there they huddled together, while she worked with stiff fingers a match from the bundle and struck it against the stone wall behind her. The match flared, and the wall to the apartment grew transparent in the yellow light. The Christmas tree from her story was there in the apartment, and the table decked out with a New Year’s Eve holiday feast, a goose on a platter in the center. “See?” the little match girl said, pointing, and the goose stood up, the carving knife and fork stuck in its abdomen. But it wasn’t a goose at all. It was Larry’s wife, Susan, her curious brown eyes looking out through the wall.
Larry opened his mouth to speak, but she was a headless goose again. With her nubbed wings she pulled the knife and fork from her body and began to carve herself, laying slices of her flesh on the dinner plates around her. Then she dropped the fork and knife, lay on her back, and reached a wing between her legs. Even with no head, Larry could see the look in her eyes, pained and unsure, hollow like his own, but determined. “The Christmas lights rose higher and higher,” the little match girl said, quoting her own story, “till they looked to her like the stars in the sky. Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. ‘Someone is dying,’ thought the little girl.” The match went out, and the stone wall reappeared. Larry and the little match girl looked at each other. She looked down at her legs. Her toes were already black, her feet two deep bruises, and her ankles a beautiful sapphire blue. Larry put the barrel of the shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
“Mister. Hey mister,” the carney was saying from the far end of the hole, as Larry sped back toward consciousness. “Are you okay? I’m sorry. I’ve been on the job since dawn. God, I’m sorry.”
Larry didn’t know how long he’d been out, or how long he’d been conscious again. “It’s okay,” he said. “Where am I?”
“Oh, Jesus,” the carney said, looking up and down the lane. “Look. You’re okay. You won’t say anything, will you?”
“What? No . . . no. Say something? No.” Larry was fifty yards from the ride before he fully realized where he was. He remembered seeing his wife. He thought he remembered them making love. The fair came slowly into focus around him, the din of sound clearing into voices and bells and whistles. He stood still in the center of the midway, trying to remember where he’d been going. People stared as they walked by. The skeet shoot, he remembered and walked first in the wrong direction, then turned.
The skeet-shoot carney’s hair was lightly curled. She wore lipstick, a white silken blouse and a short black skirt.
“Welcome back,” she said. “Miss me?”
“Miss? Who? What are you talking about?” Larry said, irritable in his confusion.
“Okay, okay,” she said, pulling at the hem of her skirt. “It’s just a joke, all right.” She waved a hand at the shotguns. “Go ahead, Pumper, shoot your heart out.”
After ten dollars worth of shooting, Larry hadn’t won anything, hitting only four or five skeets each time.
“How about a shot of whatever you’ve been drinking,” the carney said.
“I haven’t been drinking,” Larry said. “I fell asleep. I think I fell asleep. Somebody fell asleep.”
“Well, that case then,” she said, and she pulled a pint flask from beneath the counter. It made a small whistling sound as the whisky bubbled into her mouth. “Join me?” she asked.
He took a drink from the flask and handed it back. The warmth from the whiskey felt good against the cool night, and he relaxed and won a glow-in-the-dark sticker in his next turn.
“Now you’re warming up,” she said, and she took another drink.
Larry had a neon sign in the shape of a smoking cigarette under one arm, as they walked to her trailer an hour later, a Mickey Mouse nightlight under the other, and stickers falling out of his shirt pocket. “I want to show you something,” she’d said, when the fair had closed. She held the flask to his mouth as they walked, and he crouched to drink from it. She laughed and he laughed and whiskey spilled down his neck and under his shirt.
Her trailer was black with two small windows near the top, looking as if it might have been made for horses. She opened the door. “You first,” she said. He stepped up, into the blackness, and she followed, closing the door behind her. “Ready?” she said.
“Shit. What?” Larry said, panicky. “Ready for what?”
She flipped the light switch, and they were bathed in the light of dozens of lamps, neon and liquid and sparkling and spinning. “I might as well enjoy them,” she said.
He turned, and she kissed him. He fell backward onto her bed, dizzy from the whiskey and still sick from the ride. She did most of the work, Larry blind on his back beneath her until he opened his eyes and he and the carney were floating over the fairground, the city surrounding them, and the air filled with couples copulating. He saw the woman who’d sold him his vacuum cleaner, now on her knees in front of a thin man in glasses who looked like he’d just come in from gardening. He saw the black man with the graying hair who’d sold him the record – he was crouched gently over a middle-aged woman, her fingers on his back long and elegant, perfect for strings. Larry noticed that a piece was missing from the back of the man’s head, and he looked away. He saw the librarian, head to toe with another woman. He saw a tanned man wearing a gold chain, spanking a young blond as he took her from behind. He saw costumes and bondage and food and toys. Then he saw his wife. She lay on her back, looking far up into the night sky while a man sweated on top of her.
“We break camp at dawn,” the carney said, and they were back in her trailer. She was up and putting on her bra and underwear, mechanically, elastic bands snapping and little plastic hooks clipping. “It was nice, though.”
“Where are you going?”
“Another fairground, sugar. They’re all the same.”
It was two a.m. when Larry got home. His answering-machine light was blinking in a series of three. The first message was from Penn. “Larry, damn it, call me.” The next was also from Penn. “Larry. I need to talk to you. It’s about Susan.” The third message started with silence, then Susan’s voice. At the sound of it, Larry remembered a dozen things at once, Christmases and anniversaries, a bungalow in Costa Rica, broiled whitefish they’d learned to cook together. “Larry,” she said. “I can’t be here anymore. It’s too hard. I won’t call again. The lawyers can handle it. Goodbye, Larry.”
He stood still for several minutes after the beep. The phone rang, and he jumped. It was Penn. “Jesus, Larry, it’s about time. I’ve been calling all night. Are you okay, Lar?”
“Susan called.”
“I wanted to warn you, Larry. I couldn’t reach you.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. It’s shitty.”
“She never told me why, Penn.”
“I don’t think she knew.”
“Maybe I could have done something.”
“I don’t know, Lar. I’m not so sure.”
“Just before she left, she was working on the car,” Larry said. “I keep thinking about it.”
“Oh, Lar,” Penn said.
“She wanted to install the new alternator. She ordered the parts and bought a book. She put on overalls. I ordered a pizza and sat on a stool in the corner of the garage while she worked. She reached for screwdrivers without even looking. I put my pizza down and went to her. I put my arms inside her overalls. It was so soft and so warm. I can feel it still. Then I sat down and finished my pizza, and that was it for us. I don’t remember a word we said to each other over the next two days. Then she was gone, and there was a note.
“Why did I stop, Penn? Why didn’t I spin her around and kiss her? Why didn’t I say something? Why didn’t she?”
Penn was quiet, and Larry breathed into the phone, unused to talking and winded. “I have to go,” he said.
“I’ll come by in the morning,” she said. “I’ll fix you breakfast.”
He drove to Milham Park. Fifty or more people were gathered in a large clearing looking at the night sky. Most lay on lawn chairs, covered with blankets or wrapped in sleeping bags. A few milled between telescopes. Larry walked into the clearing and looked up. The sky was a barrage of shooting stars, the debris left behind by the Temple-Tuttle comet, a dozen meteors streaking over the crowd at any one time. Most were thin white lines, but now and then one shot by orange and jagged, and he could see the fire in it. People oohed and aahed at the brighter ones. They cheered and clapped at the brightest. A few minutes passed while he stood and watched the show, then a big one crashed into the atmosphere, a bright red flame ripping across the sky. A great cheer arose as it arced over the people’s heads, and Larry lifted off the ground, catapulting up toward the red comet and the streaking pinpricks of light. Higher and higher he flew until he shot out of sight, leading the way as the planet turned its naked face toward the storm and punched a thousand miles a minute through the tail of the comet.
Vincent Reusch is a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University. This is his first published story in a national literary journal.