Life Lessons Read online

  Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature. Stefan's stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR's Radiolab, GRANTA, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Stefan lives in Brooklyn. His latest novel is Oliver Loving.

  Find out more at www.stefanmerrillblock.com

  Atlantic Short Stories

  A Lesson in Englishness

  Unnatural

  The Hall Chimp

  Published in Great Britain in 2019 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Stefan Merrill Block, 2019

  The moral right of Stefan Merrill Block to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 8389 50392

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  LIFE

  LESSONS

  One night, about a month into my first semester, my new floormate Kenneth spent a long while probing the throat of his empty bottle of Natty Light, in and out, in and out, as his eyes went narrow and fixed on me. Kenneth was a lapsed Rugby flanker, the sort of beer-paunchy, overconfident white guy who liked to wear doo-rags ironically (it was Kenneth who threw the annual Pimps n’ Hoes Party, the pictures of which he’d much later use to mock-blackmail us all), and even still it had taken Kenneth a half-case of beer to work up the nerve to ask me the question that everyone had been wanting to ask about my face. “I’m sorry,” he said at last, gesturing toward the purplish mass that I could still occasionally feel throbbing over my head’s eastern hemisphere, “but this can no longer go unmentioned.” His friend Victoria swatted him.

  “No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “These scars? Life lesson: after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, you should never step into a campfire, no matter what seductive nonsense it tries to tell you.” We were sitting in a dorm hallway at 3 a.m. then, the cinder-block walls spinning with a night of heavy drinking, and through my woozy double-vision I watched the warped faces of my floormates buck and sway in a sudden frenzy of laughter. At that point, their sum-total knowledge of me was that I had been in the army and that I had arrived at campus with half my face torched; they had every reason to believe I was just bullshitting. But the sardonic, fair-skinned and alarmingly beautiful young woman seated across from me — a kind of punk, tattooed Swiss Miss — nodded gravely. “It’s true,” this girl, Ava, told the group. “One of the RAs told me all about it.” Our gaze met, and I tucked my monster’s face between my knees.

  “Seriously? Fucking shrooms?” Kenneth crowed. “I’m really sorry, bro.”

  “That’s okay.” I shrugged, hoisting the ache of my grinning cheeks. “Actually, I like to think of it like the origin story for a superhero. I walked into that fire as a normal boy and emerged as Inferno Man!” For some reason, I kissed my biceps.

  All this was, of course, bullshit indeed. It was 2003, and I should have been off tearing up the oil-sodden deserts with the 4th Squadron, 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment, but after just three months of basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, an incident with a stun grenade had snatched me away from that future at the cost of my Black Irish good looks, which had been the only true thing I’d once known about myself. In the burn ward at Walter Reed, I’d been neighbor to a number of men whose explosions had come at hands other than their own. They’d come back from that nightmare without appendages, portions of their torsos, the ability to string their words together on a coherent thread. “That some shit, but happy you never see real shit over there,” my roommate Tony Beans had slurred after I related my story, and he offered a knowing grin, as if I might have wanted that training grenade to explode in my fist — in that, the hospital therapist and my parents were all in agreement. I was put on psychological watch, and my mental health care had mostly consisted of sitting in over-bright group therapy sessions with the rest of my mutilated ilk while a pert, impatient woman named Dr. Weitzer held court. “The real devil,” Dr. Weitzer told our group one afternoon, “is that feeling of purposelessness. It is up to each of us to find meaning in what we’ve suffered. So here is my assignment to you all. I want each of you to keep a list of lessons you have learned, which you would like to tell your children, if you have them. To your future children, if you don’t.”

  The other guys shrugged off Dr. Weitzer’s advice, but if I was ever going to leave those linoleum-drab hallways I knew I had to adhere to whatever sentimental nostrum she prescribed. Life lesson, I wrote with my aching, mutilated claw of a hand, never sign up for military service to gratify your parents.

  Life lesson, I added. When you blow yourself up with a hand grenade, you will learn certain surprising truths about your family - for one, that they will never forgive you.

  These lessons became a routine that deepened into a habit, and I found that I quite liked to imagine the immaculate pink shell of a child’s ear, listening.

  Life lesson: If you fail to secure financial aid when you apply to college, self-immolation is a good Plan B. Before I’d gone in for the army, I’d been accepted to a nice little university in St. Louis that I could never have afforded. And yet, after my long stint in the burn ward at Walter Reed — granted Dr. Weitzer’s stamp of certified sanity and an honorable discharge — I was offered admission to the second semester, a nearly full scholarship, a room of my own, and the unbearable pity of the fresh-faced, slightly booze-bloated freshmen who shared my hall.

  By that March, however, I had already cracked on the stratagem of a great number of sideshows and circus acts before me; like The Siamese Twins, The Three-Legged Man and The Camel Girl, I was trying to best pity by sheer force of clownishness. I was going around calling myself not only Inferno Man but also Grotesque Pumpkin Head and Sloth, after the basement-dwelling monster in The Goonies, whose general affect I often aped. “Heeey, yoooou guuuys!” became my own trademark bellow.

  One of my favorite party tricks was to present the scars that mottled the left half of my face as a kind of Rorschach Test, asking people to free-associate on what shapes they saw.

  “A ballerina!”

  “A downed airplane!”

  “Another poor sap in love with me,” Ava said one night, nudging my ribs with her elbow, testing the waters of the little friendship that had already begun to grow between us. We were strolling under the jaundiced streetlight of Delmar Boulevard then, on our way to some house party.

  “Na,” I said. “You’re just projecting.”

  My floormates still laughed a little too loudly at my jokes, but I laughed too, as if laughter it
self might be erosive, like wind or rainwater, slowly wearing away what stood between us. Three squad cars wailed up the shattered pavement then, bound for some fresh catastrophe in the urban hinterland that began just on the other side of Skinker Boulevard. I followed my new friends silently into that strange city, letting myself feel a little happy for the first time in months.

  ****

  Having never left my dusty home state once in my childhood, Saint Louis might as well have been Afghanistan to me. Certainly, it looked like a war had come through. To the unspeakable east, whole neighborhoods had gone to seed, trees twining through the busted-out windows of industrial-era row houses. Late that spring, casting about for a place to spend our Sophomore year, my new friends and I took a tour of a once-fine Georgian Colonial-fashioned manse on Etzel Avenue that had fallen into an advance state of disrepair. Most of our classmates intended to move into the apartment buildings in the tony area near campus, but my crew — the T3ers we called ourselves, after our Freshman floor (Tabert 3) — had an appetite for depravity in all its forms. We delighted at the tour a real estate broker gave us: the peeling ornamentation of the foyer, the mahogany stairwell with its balusters missing here and there, like a man who had been punched in the teeth. The basement gave off the rich, seminal smell of mushroom that permeated all the way to the top floor.

  Guiding us through the rooms, the broker hardly bothered to code the racial undertones of his speech into Real Estate lingo. “It’ll be good to have some folks like you here in the neighborhood, bring some class back to the place,” he said, scratching his pale bald pate beneath a fedora. “But I should tell you that the lease situation is a little, ah, complicated?”

  544 Etzel Avenue, the broker explained, belonged to a family called the DeWitts who, until the previous February, had been the home’s sole residents. Our would-be landlord, Andre DeWitt, had fathered a young girl born with terminal birth defects, and the treatment of her six years of life had all but bankrupted the family. After the daughter’s death, Andre’s wife had left for her parents’ home in Chicago, and Andre and his mother had moved into the basement apartment of a friend’s house across the street. The DeWitts’ plan was to use rental income to stave off foreclosure. “You’ll be helping them out,” the agent told us, like a question. Only a few of the T3ers had heard this sad tale in its entirety; an arm-wrestling competition, to settle the question of room selection, had broken out among the boys on the DeWitts’ avocado Formica dining table. I smiled wearily at Ava then, giddy for my future with her in this or any house. A few months later, in the miasmic fug of an early Saint Louis September, we carried our liquor boxes of effects through the front door.

  Andre’s mother, Annabelle, did not approve of her new tenants. The loss of her grand-daughter, and also, I suppose, a long history of miseries with which I was unfamiliar, had made her a little touched. In the months that followed, I’d often see Mrs. DeWitt out on Etzel Avenue, sweeping the cracked, gum-spangled sidewalk like a kitchen floor, two and sometimes three times in a day. “I hope my grandbaby haunts your dreams,” the old woman greeted us that first afternoon, right on the weed-choked front lawn.

  “Ma,” Andre said. “C’mon. These look like nice folks.”

  We were nineteen and twenty years old, and — with the exceptions of Ava and myself — the entire T3 crew came from untroubled childhoods in leafy suburbs. I submit that fact as a kind of excuse, I suppose, for why my friends were not so very upset by the curse Mrs. DeWitt placed upon us, for the reasons the T3ers were able to accept the ghost of a child, and the general hostility of the otherwise exclusively black neighborhood — the many hairy eyeballs that fixed upon us as we strolled up and down Etzel Avenue— as a great adventure. To my housemates, this mansion was the blighted, bizarro version of the McMansions in which they’d grown. To me, it was something even better. A thousand miles away, figuratively and literally, from the squat prairie ranch house in which I had been the only child, sole hope, and failed corrective dream to an alcoholic career officer and his profoundly bored wife. But here was another life lesson I was already learning: it’s true what they say about home. You really do carry that fucker with you wherever you go.

  Andre, for one, was an object lesson on the inability to leave one’s home behind. During our every-night demi-parties and the ragers we conducted at least twice a week our landlord would often drift across Etzel Avenue to involve himself in the proceedings. At first, we received Andre warily — we would dial down the stereo, disperse to our rooms — but after a time it became clear that Andre just wanted to drink with us. The man was in his early thirties, and he had a kind of retro style, arriving in his argyles and cabby hats, stroking his pencil mustache. He was the only black person in regular attendance, and in the delighted way my housemates always greeted him, I saw that they received Andre DeWitt as part of their experience. Andre DeWitt, they decided, was a “crazy character”: the highest compliment my new crew could offer in their boozy self-mythologizing lifestyle. At 544 Etzel Avenue, as on Tabert 3, each night became a kind of impromptu theater, and we maintained a quote board, where the most outrageous things we uttered were immortalized, drunken avowals that read like bawdy fortune cookies by the daylight: “There are more than three holes on a woman,” and “You’re fucking your way to the bottom,” and “Orgy! Orgy! Orgy!”

  One otherwise unremarkable Blender Drink Thursday night early that October, I noticed that Andre’s hand had climbed across the split and tufted sofa where he sat with Ava, that Andre had lay his fingers squarely upon her denimed thigh. Others had noticed, too. “Get a room, you crazy kids!” Kenneth was soon shouting as he and a couple others actually led Ava and a grinning, gently protesting Andre toward her room, and sealed the door. “Fucking crazy!” Kenneth fairly wailed, fifteen minutes later, as he shook his head to the rhythmic squeak of Ava’s mattress echoing through the ceiling. Behind a two-foot bong, I sighed audibly, expelling an angry plume. A guy named Chad, nested in a beanbag across from me, squinted. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “A little jealous?”

  “Such is the life of Sloth,” I told Chad and did a little mock-self-hatred bit that was a reliable part of my repertoire by now, slapping my own fire-stained face. “Ugly, ugly.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re in love with that crazy bitch,” Victoria said frankly, as I handed her the pipe.

  “Of course not,” I lied.

  Oh, Ava. The sunlight in your over-bright hair, the downy peach fuzz on your cheeks, the birthmark just below your mouth like a North Star, guiding the parched sailor home. Your high, sardonic laugh: it’s still in my ears. By that fall, we had become “besties” (in Ava’s description) or “non-sexual life partners” (in my description) or “fuck buddies without the fucking” (in Kenneth’s words). Within the hierarchy of the T3 crew, Ava and I were our own little echelon of two, our outsiderness reflected in the secluded upstairs hallway of 544 we shared. And certainly, there was something a little loftily different about us. While the rest of the T3 crowd found entertainment enough in the dunderhead theater of their drinking sessions, Ava and I, though we did often partake, also lived half our lives in the territory of fiction. As the others recalled the epics of last nights’ drinking, Ava and I gossiped mostly about make-believe people. We would tear books to pieces by the binding, trading chapters, and we treated our thrice weekly movie matinees as seriously as a course load.

  “I just can’t hear another person talk about how real, how true Holden Caulfield is. He’s just a spoiled little rich boy!” Ava once complained.

  “Well,” I told her, “only people like us could ever understand that.”

  I watched the moths playing against Ava’s window screen for a while then, wondering if she would think it was hokey or beautiful, the metaphor that had just flittered into my head, something about all those pale, solitary insects, drawn from the dark by a native alikeness, a hunger for the same quality of light. I chose to say nothing.r />
  Ava came from a town called Axel, Idaho. A Google search of that place had turned up a succession of grim cement buildings and trash-strewn fields of asphalt, framed by low, arid mountains. Ava herself had never told me much about her hometown. As for the family she likewise consigned to silence, she kept just a single picture in her bedroom: seven towheaded siblings, each a variation of Ava’s face, grinning behind a moose someone had clearly struck with a car. Her parents were absent, both in the picture and in her conversations. “Tell me about Axel, Idaho,” I’d asked her exactly once.

  “Nothing to say,” she’d replied.

  Of course, I wondered: why did Ava keep my company? Why did a beautiful young woman find herself, more than occasionally, spooning with Grotesque Pumpkin Head in bed? It was true that my burns seemed to provoke a sudden intimacy in a certain kind of person. Uninvited, strangers on the city bus often admitted to me their own sorrows: all those lost children, stints in the loony bin, regrettable felonies. I supposed that the life lesson they were trying to relate to me was that we are all scarred in one way or another, and I had come to wonder if the same might also be true for Ava’s interest in me. But where, then, was Ava’s hidden scar? It would chagrin me later that I never pressed Ava for greater specifics, but at the time it seemed only a favor returned. Dr. Weitzer had told me that, if I ever wanted a real adult relationship, I’d have to find a way to tell the story of my burns. But behind whatever had developed between Ava and me, it was clear that our friendship was a territory strictly demarcated by many unspoken rules, and one of the most important was that Ava and I never ask each other about our true histories.

  And we likewise hardly spoke of the future, that territory I could fill only with erotic, Ava-entangled daydreams. The fact was that Ava had a great many boyfriends, and we would often pass whole hours laughing together over the lies she’d use to squirrel out of her budding romances.