a cigarette butt screwed into the middle of a strawberry-rhubarb pie. Walter clicks the dead boy’s folder icon open. Hobbies: Likes skateboarding. Walter prints a copy for the parents.
This Tuesday. This Monday that refuses to end. Every day a stretch of endless Mondays.
— Have you solved your problem then, Walter whispers to the dead boy. — Awesome.
He leans his chin on his fist.
The radiator ticks.
He stuffs The Pride and the Joy deep into the outside pocket of his briefcase. He will abandon the book at a bus stop on the way home. Maybe someone will read it and it will change his life. Or drive him further to the brink. It will end up in a landfill. As a hunk of trash in the sea. A skateboard in a river.
When Walter finally unlocks the front door of their house Tuesday evening — Max still muscling around at work making phone calls, writing agendas for Wednesday morning— the first thing Walter does is gobble down one of the two foil-wrapped Grandpa burgers with added bacon and cheese he bought on the way home, the warm meaty treasures at the bottom of the paper A&W bag, one for him and one for Max. He unpacks the burger, unhinges his jaws and bites into it, one bite so big the burger he draws away from his face is only a quarter its original size, a chubby crescent moon. He chews through the juicy meat patties, wipes ketchup, meat-juice drips, bacon fat from his beard with a paper napkin, slurps the stringy, wet lettuce splattered on his cheek. Lieutenant Fong leaps onto the table and perches next to his plate, her tail whisking, head cocking side-to-side as she assesses the waning burger, the cardboard container of disappearing french fries percolating with grease. Walter takes a long, freezing slurp of his chocolate shake, the ice cream chilling his tongue, the roof of his mouth, his throat; he waits for the fat from the burger to give him a great big hug from the inside, but today the hug doesn’t come.
The cat yawns, her mouth bristling with fangs. He tries to pet her, hopes she might curl into his lap, but she squirts away from his outstretched hand.
When he’s crammed the last of the burger into his mouth, landslid the rest of the french fries down his throat, he scoops up the chocolate shake and screeches his chair away from the table.
He unfolds himself onto the carpet in the basement den; his upper half releases so quickly he falls straight backward and his head bounces. He lies on the carpet, his head bloated, his joints hardening, tears streaming from his eyes, pooling in his ears. A very nice pose for a man of fifty-two, only three years away from retirement. How terrific for a man whose job it is to advise young people about career choices, course schedule timetabling, how to participate in the world as upstanding citizens, and how not to kill themselves. The cat licking her anus right next to his face, her leg sticking into the air like she’s offering it for supper.
His heels grilling on the heat register, he can smell sweaty stink billowing out the collar of his shirt. He reaches for Lieutenant Fong’s left paw. She lets him take it in his hand, she spills onto the floor next to his face, her body hot and solid. He strokes the pads’ cool, soft leather, the furry knuckles. She pretends to sleep, her eyelids slightly parted. She presses her other leathery palm against his chin. Listening to the furnace sighing, belching through the vent at his feet, smelling his own shame, eyes sticky with tears, resting his hand on Lieutenant Fong’s back as she clambers up onto his stomach and curls herself into a warm turd.
His stomach flip-flops. He has to tug open his eyes, gummed together as they are.
He lurches to standing, Lieutenant Fong swinging to the carpet, a claw hooked into his sleeve, and he lumbers to the kitchen to eat the second Grandpa burger, the second set of french fries he’s stowed in the warm oven. Max won’t be home for ages. And burgers don’t taste good cold.
Walter is not the dead boy’s mother. He is not the dead boy’s father. He was just his guidance counsellor. What was the last thing he said to the dead boy? Good luck. Or Perk up.
Max
Today is Tuesday. The day is one elongated blob. A temporal Möbius loop that makes him so dizzy he might vomit.
Saturday night Max the school principal drives his parents to a female impersonator show. He inhales his cigarette to the glorious, bitter end, grinds it into the ashtray on their porch, then ushers them into his car.
— Mother, you’ve slammed the seatbelt in the door. Mother, the door, Mother, no, the door, your seatbelt. Right. Good.
And his car spins off into the snow.
Before he leaves home to pick them up, he pecks Walter goodbye on the top of his thinning curly black hair, Walter haloed by the lamp next to the couch.
— Mmm hmm, says Walter. Walter wearing his bifocals and thumbing pages in his novel, chewing his moustache. Not until Max’s key is turning in the lock does he hear Walter yell, — Bye, Maxie!
Max would rather be sitting beside Walter, his bony toes tucked under Walter’s warm buttocks, watching old DVD reruns of Sector Six or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica with a Guinness at his elbow, but it is his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary and his father specifically requested that Max come along, said, — Your mother and I won’t have anything to talk about, you’re a terrific buffer, sonny.
So even though he would rather be stuck on the wrong end of Satan’s pitchfork than watch men mincing around in miniskirts for two hours, he drives his parents on the bitterest night in February, the windshield brittle and bumpy with ice from falling wet snow. The star female impersonator is named Crêpe Suzette — how original. Obviously Max has accidentally stumbled into 1977. The waitress deposits their drinks, a giant strawberry daiquiri in front of his mother, a White Russian for his father, a club soda for him— no, he doesn’t care if it’s a lemon or a lime slice, — Surprise me, he says to the waitress. He jingles the keys in his pocket while his parents order their food, quesadillas for his mother and spaghetti and meatballs for his father, then he stands up and straightens the crease in his pants. Sits down again. He could roar for a cigarette. — I’ll have the salmon steak, he says, then he puts his head in his hands.
He lifts his head from his hands and nearly faints when a brown female impersonator in a Wonder Woman costume checks him out first thing, before the show has even started. She glides into the room on her red stilettos, jerks to a stop, her shoulders and long black hair flinging back, and violates him with her neon-blue contact lenses from under her impossibly long, curling eyelashes. Does she recognize him, he doesn’t recognize her, he hasn’t been to a bar in decades, oh God please make it go away, and his father’s face is chubby and wide with smiling when Crêpe Suzette kicks her back heel and sashays a perfect forty-five-degree angle toward their table. Jazz-stepping toward Max, she glides right past Max so she can stroke Max’s father’s bald head with one long, golden brown finger. She cradles his father’s face right next to her gold bald-eagle breasts. His father almost exploding right there, his mother smiling wildly into her strawberry daiquiri. Walter would laugh hysterically if he were here. He thinks Max’s parents are secretly swingers.
During the show, Crêpe Suzette and the other men in dresses swan around a giant leopard-print high heel set right in the middle of the stage. They single out men in the audience— the ugliest, dweebiest, oldest men who are sitting next to delighted, laughing wives. The drag queens crack jokes about Prince Charles, balls, princesses, balls, tiaras, balls, balls, balls. Max, the soon-to-be-dead boy’s principal, drinks his club soda. He could be smoking on his back porch right now, or at his desk, his fingers ragged with
