Content warnings:
Cultural appropriation, bodily harm and dismemberment, war violence
Jeffrey, chin glazed in grease, leans his head over my cubicle wall and asks me what I’m working on. He slurps something from his bento box—the one with his name supposedly written in kanji on the side—and noodles hang trembling from his lips. Jeffrey’s the senior sales associate, which technically makes him my superior. He’s wildly unsavory for a number of reasons; the fact that he insists on eating at his desk every day is pretty high on the list. He tilts his head back and drops a wedge of mushroom into his mouth. Watching it trek down his throat is like performance art, or something out of a nature video.
Jeffrey’s chopsticks rove around his box and he says above me, still chewing, “Was that the Swan Valley account you just hung up on, Gillian?”
“I didn’t hang up on anyone. I finished a call.”
A shrug, his throat working on another mushroom like he’s ingesting a mongoose egg. “If you say so.”
I count to five and hold my breath. I picture the pit of rot inside me. The seed I will expel. I am brave and competent. I can do this job. I can tell this man to back up.
“It’s kind of rude, actually,” I say quietly.
“What is?”
I gesture at the dots of broth that have splattered the cloth partition of my cubicle. “You’re kind of invading my space, Jeffrey.”
Another slurp. Another jab and stir. His chopsticks click against his teeth. “Oh, sorry. Anyway, I’m just saying,” and if Jeffrey’s not well actuallying something, he is just saying it, “with your call numbers the way they are, it might behoove you to step it up a bit. Swan Valley’s a big account.”
“I know that,” I say.
He holds up a finger. “Don’t interrupt, please.” He swallows. “Besides, it really is such a Western notion, this idea of acceptable closeness. You know? In Japan, pasonaru supesu, personal space, is literally where you make it. Like, literally actually what you make it, Gillian. It’s up to the individual to craft his own sense of space there.”
I will expel my rot, my poison seed. In the meantime, I make vows. I vow to get my numbers so high that Rachel will have no choice but to make this a one-woman sales department. I vow to financially castrate Jeffrey, to send him out of here with his miniature Samurai swords and ivory chopstick collection in a cardboard box, his tie damp with ramen broth and tears. I vow that I will do what is necessary to never again have to hear about his one year in Tokyo after college. The Swan Valley deal fell through last week, but there’s not a screaming chance in hell I’m telling Jeffrey that.
Jeffrey still leans over my cubicle, staring down at me. His jaw rotates as he chews, his blood humming with what I can only assume are redline-levels of sodium. I leave a voicemail for a potential client; his eyes are on me the entire time.
“You still sound a little shrill, Gillian. Just a little raspy. Maybe insert a little more melody in your voice, you know? Soften it. Embrace your femininity.”
That poison seed, it rattles in me like a stone in a cup.
Jeffrey shrugs. “I’m just saying.”
I see Thurman then, his severed head resting in the crook of his arm, standing in the corner of the office next to our fake ficus plant with its dust-rimed leaves. Thurman’s eyes stare at nothing. The neck of his tissue-thin Reebok shirt is black with blood.
“Ganbarou,” Jeffrey says, and gives me a little bow, finally disappearing behind his partition.
• • • •
That evening, we sit cross-legged on yoga mats in a dance studio that was once a slaughterhouse. Now there’s track lighting, lacquered floors. Brick walls. They’ve fixed it up nice. Sometimes I think about all the dead pigs here, how if every dead pig’s soul would be stacked up on top of each other, the souls would reach to the rafters. Seeing Thurman always makes me think thoughts like that.
Primal Slap is two hours long, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Sundays. I go to every class. It’s the best six hours of my week.
“Breathe,” Maryanne tells us. She’s sitting cross-legged before us, and her little belly pooches out in her workout gear, and this is one of the reasons why I love her. She gives no shits about the trappings of the world, physical or otherwise. She smokes, she cusses, she doesn’t try to hide her gray hair. She’s just here to help us. She’s real and imperfect.
She says, “Breathe in—Ahmed, straighten your shoulders, hon—and hold it for five, four, three. Okay. Picture yourselves ingesting all those nasty spiritual toxins you’ve taken in today. The physical toxins too. All the emotional sludge. Now allow them to superheat in the cauldron of your inner-ness, your inner you.” And we do, and it feels good. All that spiritual wreckage inside me roiling, ruinous, congealing into this hard pit of rot. Like a trash compactor of the psyche. I can feel it in me blackening, charred, getting ready to be cast out. You can read a lot of stuff on the internet about Primal Slapping being a scam, but if it is, I say fine. If a scam can calm me as much as this does, okay.
Another bonus: Thurman’s never showed up to class, not once.
“Now scream,” Maryanne says, and we do. The ceiling is so high that we sound tinny and small, even though there’s eight of us here tonight. “Imagine all of that poison,” Maryanne says, “escaping you in a superheated blast of air, an invisible fire. Regrets, humiliations, resentments, your inadequacies. All of it leaving you. A comet of entropy you’ve cast out. Scream.”
I scream.
And I scream again.
I feel something start to tear in my throat, and I scream again. It behooves me, I think.
Later, we warm up with the slap-bags and then put on our headgear and slap each other, screaming and grunting. We get down to it. We slap each other senseless, fearless. We slap each other until there’s nothing left, until our emotional waste-buckets have been scoured. Until our shoulders ache with the effort. I get Rhonda, who forgets to take her earrings off and they go flying first thing. We slap the great grand hell out of each other, Rhonda and I, and afterward she cries so much her mascara runs. She hugs me and thanks me over and over again.
I’m sitting in the car, just feeling that good smoothing out that comes afterwards, and the guy on NPR starts talking about the upcoming sale of stealth bombers the government’s buying from Terradyne Industries. It’s just a quick top-of-the-hour mention scattered among other tragedies—highwire-level tension with Iran, a looming bird pandemic in China, a white supremacist driving his truck through a protest for racial justice in Ohio—but I turn the dial fast to another station, my already-shredded throat threatening to constrict.
I check my phone and my mouth goes dry when I see my mom’s called and left a message during class. I haven’t spoken to either of my parents in a year.
I drive home and park in front of my apartment and listen to the message. There’s a long enough stretch of silence that I think maybe she butt-dialed me or something, but then she clears her throat and says, “Jilly, it’s me. When you’re willing to discuss what happened—and apologize—we can talk about reinstating your finances and your placement in the will. I know it’s important to your father.” A pause, and then, drily, like she’s the one spitting out something poisoned, my mother says, “I love you, Gillian. We both do. We strongly urge you to reconsider your position.” This borders on speechifying for her, and for a while I just sit there, thinking.
When I look in the rearview mirror, I see Thurman in the backseat. Holding his head in his lap, presumably. His shirt’s different—a yellow long-sleeve thing from some tech company I guarantee he never had the opportunity to use in life—but it’s still blood-spattered, coated in dust.
“I didn’t notice you come in,” I say, trying to make a joke.
Thurman, as ever, says nothing.
• • • •
For the past nine months or so, my father’s been emailing me the stock market summary every morning. Never a message. Never anything that says “I love you” or “I’m sorry for what I said” or even “I’m really mad at you and I think you’re goddamned nuts and painfully idealistic, daughter of mine, but let’s talk about it.” Just this passive-aggressive email that serves as both admonition and half-assed petition for me to grovel and reinstate myself into the family.
Most mornings I don’t open it. This morning—maybe because of my mother’s voicemail—I do.
Terradyne’s stocks are up thirty-six points over the past two weeks. If the company actually does get greenlit to sell a fleet of a hundred and eighty Armada stealth bombers to the Department of Defense, as well as tens of thousands of Mako missiles, my parents and the Terradyne board and the company’s shareholders will make a lot of money. I mean, it’s a two-hundred-billion-dollar contract. It’s been in the works for years, this deal, and I know that this is my father holding out his hand in the only way he knows how, saying Come home.
• • • •
The next morning, I get called into Rachel’s office and catch Jeffrey’s inevitable smirk before I head in.
“Hon, it’s not a question of not liking you,” Rachel says, “or thinking you’re not great, or any of that. I do think you’re great. I think you bring great energy to the place. It’s purely your numbers. That’s all. We’ve got a small staff here, and we just need you to up your outbound calls. Outbound calls generate sales. And you’re in Sales, Gillian. Okay?”
Rachel’s office is pretty much as crappy as our cubicles, just bigger. There’s the same coffee-spotted carpet, the same crooked blinds overlooking the parking lot, a desk with tiny gouges and scrapes riddling the veneer. She’s got a plant—this one’s alive, at least—and a framed picture of her son in a baseball outfit, kneeling in the grass. My father makes more on a trip to the urinal than Rachel does in a year. How can I get mad at Rachel? She has someone else breathing down her neck about my numbers, that’s all it is. Rachel is not my peach-pit.
“I understand,” I say.
She softens, grateful. “You’re a total asset to the company. Okay? You’re reliable, you show up on time. It’s just a matter of making more calls. That’s all we need. It’s a numbers game.”
“Okay.”
When I go back to my cubicle, Jeffrey is right there, spinning slowly in his chair, his hands behind his head. I see his tattoos poking from the cuff of each shirtsleeve. Japanese characters for Peace and Prosperity on one arm, Embracing the Warrior Life on the other. So he says.
My God, I think, I’ve remembered his tattoos.
“Boss lady chewed you a new one, huh? That’s rough.”
“It was fine,” I say, putting my headset on.
“It was your numbers, right?”
“Jeffrey,” I say, wishing I could find that reservoir, that fierceness that lives inside me on Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday from six to eight o’clock. But it just dissipates so fast. Since first grade, when Melinda Butriegli pushed me off the swings and I chipped my front tooth, I’ve always backed down from a fight. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” I manage.
Later, I can hear his laughter rippling over our partition; it’s his good-natured, aw-shucks laugh that he uses when he’s pitching clients. So different from his real laugh, which sounds like what I imagine a horse angrily giving birth would sound like.
I hit my call quota, mostly out of spite, and even book two demos with clients. Rachel walks by and squeezes my shoulder, and Thurman, his back to me, stands next to the ficus. He holds his head up on his shoulder like a boombox so he can watch cars passing by.
• • • •
At home, I heat up a can of soup and watch television and try not to think about the call from my mom. The sound of the TV thuds against my temples. I sleep with a pillow over my face like always. It’s better than seeing Thurman, headless and morose in the corner of the room, or sitting on my bed. Waiting for me to wake up, dirt on his eyeballs.
• • • •
Thurman showed up last year, after I divorced my family—my word for it—and I saw him on a very low-budget YouTube expose about Terradyne’s various crimes around the globe. Back when I was puffed up with righteousness and still had some savings left. Just this brief image of a dust-coated dead boy on the ground. Some dead boy in some desert. The way the camera panned his body and you saw the gritty, granular blackness at his chest, the way the shitty camera pixelated it, but you knew what it was anyway. Knew it was a massive, profoundly lethal chest wound. How you could see that absence of anything in his eyes. The way the sun shined bright in them, and he didn’t blink. He showed up in my living room the next day, holding his head. Mute.
• • • •
I don’t know his real name. Thurman’s just something I made up.
• • • •
I signed up for Primal Slap class four months ago.
I was out driving after work, angry at Jeffrey, angry at being poor, angry at deciding to make myself poor, and the sun was falling over the buildings and even though I was mad, it was really a pretty sunset. I was in the industrial district by the river, where old warehouses and luxury lofts carved from old warehouses sat side by side, and I saw Maryanne by the door of the studio, one leg cocked up against the brick wall. I did a double take: in military stencil, a sign over the door read PRIMAL SLAP, and here was this woman, smoking a cigarette, wearing black jeans with holes in the knees. A jean vest and sunglasses. She looked like a movie star, I’m not kidding. Our eyes met over the crack in my windshield, and I drove around the block a few times and finally just pulled into the parking lot, my heart thudding because I knew something was happening. Thurman was in the back seat and Maryanne walked over to my car. It felt, truly, like this destined thing. I rolled my window down and she leaned in and said, “You look like you want to slap someone.”
It was one hundred percent the cheesiest thing anyone had ever said to me in my life, but I almost started crying for real then. It felt like a boulder was slowly moving off of my heart. I was squeezing the steering wheel so hard. “I’m not really a confrontational person,” I said.
Maryanne blew out a jet of smoke, her cigarette in a V of her fingers held next to her face. She lifted her sunglasses and gave me that crooked, kind smile of hers. She said, “I know. But what if you were?”
• • • •
I do both the demos that I booked the other day and they go well, and a few hours later I get emails from both clients that they want to buy our programs. Neither account is a huge sale—if I told my mother the size of commissions I’m getting, I know exactly the kind of mortified, pitying look she’d give me. But if it keeps up, it means a new windshield, a frugal weekend trip somewhere. I tell myself I don’t miss my family’s money.
But I miss having to not worry about money, if that makes sense.
I send the paperwork over to Rachel, who seems a little too jubilant. She bounds out of her office, her arms raised in a little victory dance, all of her jewelry clinking. “Whoo hoo!” she cries, and Jeffrey, on a call with a client, scowls at his monitor.
“Big time, Gillian!” Rachel yells. “Yes! You got your swing back!”
“Maybe I do,” I say, a shy smile on my face. I mean, I’ll take it, you know?
• • • •
That night I absolutely rage in Primal Slap class and it’s like a reckoning; my voice feels like some ripped muscle, like something still surviving even though its skin’s been peeled off. It feels good. When Rhonda slaps me, it’s like she’s molding me from clay, like she’s carving off all the useless parts of me.
• • • •
My mother emails me a link to an MSNBC article: the sale of Armada bombers to the Department of Defense has been approved. Terradyne’s stock has climbed to somewhere around the upper atmosphere. My father must be ecstatic, which means he’ll probably celebrate with an extra inch of scotch while he stares out the window of his office. Maybe he’ll get really crazy and drum his fingers on the armrest of his chair. He’s not a man given to grand gestures.
I can’t help but picture a string of bombers like smudges in the sky, or a Mako tunneling through the air, a fantail of smoke trailing behind it before it detonates against some building, turning everyone inside to red pulp. Except before they were pulp, they weren’t terrorists or rebels or whatever—they were kids. And the building wasn’t a bunker but a school, a hospital.
You know, the usual. The usual, inevitable byproduct of this sort of thing.
Our family traffics in death, always has.
God knows there’s money to be made in it.
• • • •
The next morning, my phone wakes me up.
“Hello?” My eyes are still gummed with sleep.
“Hello, Jilly,” my father says. His voice is as gravelly as ever, the rough edges never smoothed over in spite of the bullshitting of a thousand boardroom meetings. Hearing his voice, it’s as if no time has passed at all, like the past year was nothing.
“Hey, Dad.”
It’s the middle of the morning on the East Coast, so I can picture him in his office at Terradyne. That huge, glossy desk, the little phalanx of miniature flags clustered in one corner, the pictures on the wall that show him shaking hands with presidents and generals. Whatever paperwork he might have will be stacked perfectly even with the edge of his blotter, and at an exact right angle with his monitor. My father’s fastidiousness is no surprise to anyone—just watching him walk into a room, it’s clear his rigidity carries over into every aspect of his life. I feel the same smallness I’ve always felt when he says my name, another reminder that with us, time doesn’t matter. We are who we are. Bound forever to each other.
“Your mother sent you the article. About the sale.” It’s not really a question.
“She did,” I say. “Congratulations.” I try to sound like I mean it. What’s the point otherwise?
He clears his throat again. I’ve already disappointed him. “I’m not seeking accolades, Gillian. That’s not why I called.”
“Okay.” Smallness aside, I decide I’m going to make him work for it. I’m the one that’s already given up everything, after all.
“I’m calling—” he clears his throat again “—to request that you reconsider your position.”
“I appreciate it. But I can’t do that, Dad. I’m sorry.”
“And why is that?”
I say, helplessly, “I don’t know. Syria? Chad? Turkey. Iraq. Cameroon. Pick one.”
A little chuff of laughter. “What—Those are places, Gillian. Those are the names of places.”
“Dad, come on.”
“I don’t understand.” He’s resolute in his supposed ignorance. Neither of us will give an inch, both of us just bludgeoning each other with our unwillingness.
“These are countries that Terradyne’s sold weapons to, Dad. You know this.”
“Jesus, Gillian.”
“And what do they do with them? Who have they been used against?”
He sighs, and if there’s anything that will bring me back to memories of my childhood, it’s my father’s exasperated, disappointed, world-weary sigh. “We’ve gone around and around on this.”
“We have,” I say.
“Endlessly.”
“I agree.”
“Nations have the right to arm themselves. Against insurrections or outside agitators. This is in the interest of the world. This is Global Defense 101. Hell, it’s Common Sense 101, Gillian.”
A year later and here we are again.
“I urge you,” my father says, “to think this through. You are our only child. This is your legacy. Think of the altruism you could foster. Think of the good work a well-funded, well-intentioned organization could do with you behind it. You want to counteract some of the supposed darkness surrounding all of this? Do something. Hiding out like this—working some phone job—it’s beneath you.”
Thurman sits perched on the edge of my bed, his back turned to me.
“You bear a responsibility. It’s that simple.”
“I agree,” I say again.
“I’m talking about your family, Gillian. Not some, some obtuse moral code that refuses to factor in the realities of the world.”
“Dad, we’re just gonna go around and around with this. I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t say anything, and I hang up on him.
And what is guilt, really? I mean, why Thurman? Why did this headless brown boy in his dusty t-shirt suddenly begin appearing in my life after I walked away from my family? And why do I simply accept his presence as if it’s something I deserve?
I mean, has my father ever felt guilty for a single second? For a single fucking thing he’s ever done in his life?
Where’s his Thurman, that’s what I want to know.
• • • •
I schedule a few demos that morning. After lunch I close another contract, a bigger one. Rachel comes out and does another celebratory dance, and even says to Jeffrey, half-jokingly, “You better catch up.” He looks at both of us, alarmed, like I’m a face that just appeared at his window at night.
• • • •
I’m driving to Primal Slap class after work. Thurman’s in the back seat. A light rain stipples the windshield and I’m fantasizing about what I’ll spend my commissions on next month. If this keeps up, can I swing getting a new car? Like one that doesn’t leak oil and can actually go up hills? Or what about getting a dog? Someone to sit on the couch with, to rest its head on my lap. We never had a pet when I was kid. Both of my parents claimed to be allergic, but mostly I think they didn’t want anything on the furniture, and who was going to take care of—
Thurman screams.
It’s an unearthly sound, impossibly close in the confines of the car, and anguished beyond words. I shriek in response and then Thurman’s head rolls into the front seat—either it falls somehow, or he actually throws it there—and I pitch the wheel and the car collides against a telephone pole, its surface shiny with tar and a galaxy of rusted staples. The airbag ignites with a whoosh and slaps against my face. Thurman’s head rolls onto the floorboard and now there’s just the sound of rain tapping on the roof. The settling ping of relaxing metal. My own jagged breath in my ears.
• • • •
Mostly I’m embarrassed. Sick with adrenaline. I don’t know how to explain to the cop what happened.
Well, my ghost screamed, officer, which he’s never done before. And he threw his head in the front seat, which, again, ooof, that’s new.
Or, I don’t feel crazy, officer, but who knows?
Or, well, you see, I’m the daughter of Theodore Marsden, the CEO of Terradyne Industries, who started the whole thing forty years ago with a grad school buddy of his, and recently, well, I cut myself off from my family and moved out here, and even after all that altruistic, wretchedly naïve shit, I’m regularly haunted by a headless, war-dead boy, so, yeah. That sucks. Instead, I tell him between shaky breaths that a cat ran into the road, and I swerved to avoid it. Passersby have left, now that they’ve seen I’m not drunk or unhinged and that no one was hurt.
“Do you need a ride?” the cop asks after a tow truck has been called, and for a moment I have this idea, like he’ll give me a ride home and we’ll have this romance and I’ll struggle with his being a cop and he’ll lay his gun belt over the back of a chair and then I realize I’ve just seen too many movies. When will this bullshit stop? It makes me mad at myself.
“I’m fine,” I say, and point a shaking hand down the street. “I’ve got a class right down there.”
• • • •
But I can’t find my center. When Maryanne tells us to scream, I wait to hear Thurman’s voice next to mine, behind me or beside me, some throat-rending howl entwined in my own. I can’t get past the banked fury and anguish I’d heard. How alive he’d sounded.
When Rhonda and I slap, I look for him in the corner of my eye. Then Rhonda clouts me when I’m not paying attention and it sends me wheeling on the mat and suddenly I’m furious as I raise my hand—my fist—to hit her back, which is absolutely, totally, entirely not allowed in Primal Slap, and Rhonda flinches under her headgear. Maryanne blows her whistle from across the room and my hands drop and I turn and walk off the mat, out into the parking lot with the tape still on my hands. It’s raining and I’m just, you know, lost. So lost. So totally frozen with my own unsurety. This is not a bad life, I tell myself, apart from Thurman, and the problems with my parents, and Jeffrey; it’s a small life, I think, but a small life is different from a bad one.
Maryanne comes out after me, her arms folded. We stand under the eave of the building as the rain falls. She takes a cigarette from her fanny pack and lights it. “You wanna talk about it?”
I look down at a puddle in front of us that’s jittering with rainwater. “No.”
“Noticed you walked here today, hon. Everything okay?”
“My car broke down. I got into an accident.”
“Everyone okay?”
“There’s a telephone pole that may never recover.”
Maryanne smiles. “You need a ride home tonight?”
It’s like a crappy riddle, trying to figure out the answer to that: If Thurman screams in someone else’s car, will anyone hear it besides me?
I’m just so exhausted with everything. “Okay,” I say.
She says, “Why don’t you come on inside,” and there’s such a gentleness there that for a second, I think about telling her all of it, the whole thing—Thurman and my parents and everything—but instead I walk back through the door and spend the last twenty minutes of class getting resolutely slapped around by Rhonda while I whisper fierce apologies to her.
• • • •
“So this is where you live, huh?” Maryanne says.
“This is it,” I say, and give a weak little wave.
“It’s nice,” Maryanne says, but it’s not like she can tell. It’s nighttime. All she can see is a couple of windows and a door in a row of apartments. I have a half-dead begonia on the stoop, and that’s pretty much it.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about Rhonda. We all go through it. It’s part of the process.”
I don’t say anything. I don’t feel like I’m processing anything. The world is just doing things to me, is all.
I thank her. Inside my apartment, I expect Thurman to show up—perched lotus-style on the coffee table, maybe, his head in his lap, blood spackling his lips. But I don’t see him at all that night.
• • • •
That weekend, I stare at my phone a lot. It would take one call and I could have my car fixed. Hell, could have a new car. Hell, would not even need a new car because it’s not like I would need to go to work. Just tell my father he’s right. That weapons are not the issue, that it’s people. That if it they didn’t use cluster bombs, it would be rocks and bottles. That humans have the right to conflict, that Terradyne is simply providing the means to resolve those conflicts. Yes, Dad. You’re right, Dad. What’s that? If we didn’t do it, someone else would? Oh, absolutely.
• • • •
On Monday I take the bus to work and it’s not bad. Different, but not bad. My mother would just straight-up perish if she knew. Curl from shame like a wick of burnt paper. Jeffrey isn’t at his desk, and at some point it becomes obvious that he’s not going to be coming in today. When I ask Rachel about it, she shrugs. She tells me it’s more meat for me.
• • • •
At break I go to the bathroom and keep waiting for Thurman to appear behind me in the mirror, like he almost always does. But nothing happens. I finish, wash my hands and walk out. Maybe he’s truly gone.
It’s not that I miss him, exactly. It’s more like when you see someone raise a hammer and wait for the bang.
• • • •
The car’s totaled, and I take the bus for the rest of the week. After work, I scour Craigslist and used car sites. Even with low expectations, it’s an exercise in misery. The bus, meanwhile, is always packed. People stand in the aisles, step on each other’s feet. A miasma of odors. A lady jabs me in the stomach with her elbow and then stares at me, daring me to say something. Someone lets out a long, pained fart, and in the back, a man listens to R&B loudly on his phone, staring glassily at the screen, oblivious. People in crisis wander on and off the bus, calling out to the air, the rest of us working hard at not making it our business. Through the shifting origami of bodies, I keep waiting to see Thurman. Maybe there isn’t room for him on here. Maybe he’s gone, haunting someone else. I don’t know.
I don’t know anything anymore.
• • • •
The next Monday, Rachel tells me that Jeffrey has quit. I stand in her doorway and in halting, pained speech that is so unlike her, she says he sent a very long email—titled “Seppuku,” the ritual suicide that Japanese samurai did by cutting their stomachs open, because of course he did—and that he mentions me by name. When I ask her what it says—if there’s anything I have to worry about—she says she’s forwarded it to both HR and our legal department, and will provide me with any and all pertinent information once she hears back.
“But, I mean, if it’s about me, isn’t it all pertinent?”
“Well, you’re mentioned in it, but so is, well, Jackie Chan and Sony Pictures. Oh, and Mark Lanegan.”
“What the hell.”
“I know.” Rachel winces. “It’s not terribly coherent, and some of it’s in Japanese. I ran that part through a Google translator, but it doesn’t make very much sense.”
“What the hell,” is all I can manage again. “Can Jeffrey actually write Japanese?”
“Well, he thinks he can, I guess. Meanwhile, I just, I wanted to let you know in case you wanted to make any arrangements.”
“Arrangements? Like what?”
Rachel kind of shrugs. “I don’t know! Honestly. This is just what HR’s advised me to tell you. And I’ll know more once I hear back from the legal department, and I promise I’ll keep you updated.”
“Has he, you know, lost it? He’s always been pretty tightly wound, right?”
“Again, I can’t really talk about it yet.” Rachel lets out a brittle, shocked laugh. “Suffice to say, Jeffrey’s no longer an employee here.” She brightens. “Which means I have good news!” She tells me she’ll be transferring his pipeline of clients over to me while she looks for a new hire. I should be happy—Jeffrey was always good at generating leads—but too much is changing too fast.
On the way home, I listen to a thing on NPR about the Terradyne sale going through. The reporters voice the usual quandaries and reservations—how many stealth bombers does a country need? And how much meaningful change could be brought about if that two hundred billion was used differently?
• • • •
It’s Wednesday night after Slap Class, and I’m wearing sweatpants and eating popcorn, listlessly watching television, when there’s a knock at the door. Some part of my brain thinks Oh thank God, it’s Thurman, and a surprising joy jolts through me.
I open the door and it’s a person in some kind of an outfit. All black, with a hood, and I feel this person grip my arm with one hand and put the other one over my mouth as he pushes me back. We step inside and he lets me go. He pushes off his hood.
It’s Jeffrey.
He stands there, his hair stuck in whorls to his forehead, his thin red beard and little belly, his feet wrapped in those toe-shoe things that ninjas wear. Someone says something on the TV and the audience laughs for a long time. I backpedal so the coffee table is between us, and then we just stand there.
Jeffrey says, “Do you know what happens to a samurai when he’s been disgraced, Gillian-chan?”
“What the fuck, dude,” I say, my hands touching my shoulders. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
“It’s not pretty, what happens. It’s not a pretty event.”
“You can’t just come in here,” I say. “Into my apartment.”
“Do you understand how many hours I put into my pipeline?”
He has those little throwing stars in his belt, and a poker thing with a long blade. It’s so strange to see his red face above the collar of this ridiculous costume. “Just to have you . . . usurp me? In a matter of days?”
“Holy shit, I got like three commissions, Jeffrey.”
“Commissions that you don’t even need,” he hisses. “I know who you are.”
I will expel this poison seed.
I am competent and brave.
There’s no way I can fight him; I’ll have to be smart. “What do you want?”
He smirks and pushes sweaty hair off his forehead. He holds out a length of dark fabric. “I’m blindfolding you. I’m blindfolding you and we’re getting in your car, Gillian. I’m taking you to a safe location, and then we’ll begin negotiations.”
“Negotiations with who?”
“Your father. Like I said, I know who you are. You think I don’t know your family’s rich? It took one Google search. You’re slumming it, Gillian.”
Me, shifting on the balls of my feet, ready to run. “I don’t have a car anymore.”
He blinks. “We’ll take mine then.”
“You think you’re going to kidnap me? For ransom?”
“Hai.” He pulls out the long pointy blade from his belt and feints at me and I backpedal again. We pace around each other with the coffee table between us.
And that’s when whatever show is on cuts out and some talking head appears, standing at a lectern in front of the United States seal, announcing that Iran’s just sank a US naval destroyer and in retaliation the US has struck a number of Iranian military targets via a fleet of Armada stealth bombers—both Jeffrey and I watch the TV, enrapt—and Iranian officials have announced they consider it an act of war and are mobilizing a response.
I see the glaze of the television in his eyes and I walk towards Jeffrey, slowly, and then wrap my warm hands around his cold ones, with that blade standing up between us. He’s surprised, of course, and then I see his eyes travel over my shoulder and widen even more. When I look over at the doorway, I see that it’s still open.
And my father’s standing there.
He steps through into my apartment. Hair maybe a little more silver now. Still a stern, joyless man, still striking in his tailored suit. I look at him and find myself seeing what my father sees. Imagining it through his eyes. My tiny apartment, how the thin metal slats on the left blind are bent and won’t close quite right. The couch that I got off Craigslist with its stained cushion that I keep a blanket over. The knocking of the pipes in the walls. The tea-colored water stain on the ceiling that looks like South America. He sees all this, I know it, even before he sees Jeffrey dressed up like a half-assed ninja, the both of us fighting over what amounts to a small sword.
“Speak of the devil,” Jeffrey says, and yanks the blade from my hands. It slices one of my palms and I hiss in pain.
My father looks from me to Jeffrey, and says, “What’s going on here, Gillian?”
Jeffrey raises the blade and pulls it behind his ear. He gets in some kind of stance, crouching low, and pauses there.
And then my father pulls a black pistol from a holster at his ribs and Jeffrey’s eyes go wide, never considering, I guess, that a billionaire arms dealer might carry a gun.
I open my mouth to scream—this is the end of the world, after all, the world has come undone—but someone else screams first.
Thurman.
We all turn to the kitchen. Standing in the doorway there, Thurman screams again, holding his own head by the hair like a lantern, like some terrible gift. And as if the scream itself is pulling his body forward, he runs toward my father, the dusty soles of his feet slapping the floor of my apartment.
And my father sees him, somehow, his eyes widening at the sight. This dusty, headless boy, blood at the ragged circle of his neck turned black with dirt, shrapnel wounds spattering one of his arms today, his side, filling that part of him with scores of minute red holes. Thurman holds his own head and screams, racing toward my father.
My father, a look on his face that might actually be edging toward some awful understanding, begins to raise his pistol at this ghost made flesh, a gun no doubt filled with ammunition manufactured by his own company, the same ammunition that has killed Thurman and thousands of boys like him.
And that poor dead boy, holding his own head aloft, he runs into the maelstrom. He screams a scream that Maryanne would be proud of, I think. So loud, so broken and hurt. So freeing that even the architect of his death is forced at last to hear it, to acknowledge him.
