“You can’t wash shit,” is what her mother said when she called home and asked what she should do about her brother. “That kid’s been a screw-up since he was five years old.”
He should write the story down. He went back upstairs and sat down at the keyboard and pecked out the sentences that had come to him, but they seemed very sterile there aglow on the screen, in just the same way that they’d felt restless and alive a moment before. The sunny day beamed through the study window and put a glare up on his screen that made it hard to type, and when he moved to the other side of the desk, he found himself looking out the window at the city and the spring.
He checked his calendar and his watch and saw that he only had a couple hours before the reporter from NOW magazine came by. The reporter—a summer intern—was the only person to respond to his all-fluff press release on the open network. He and Kurt had argued about the wording all night and when he was done, he almost pitched it out, as the editorial thrash had gutted it to the point of meaninglessness.
Oh well. The breeze made the new leaves in the trees across the street sway, and now the sun was in his eyes, and the sentences were inert on the screen.
He closed the lid of the laptop and grabbed his coat and left the house as fast as he could, obscurely worried that if he didn’t leave then, he wouldn’t get out all day.
As he got closer to Kurt’s storefront, he slowed down. The crowds were thick, laughing suburban kids and old men in buttoned-up cardigans and fisherman’s caps and subcultural tropical fish of all kinds: Goths and punks and six kinds of ravers and hippies and so forth.
He spied Link sitting on the steps leading up to one of the above-shop apartments, passing a cigarette to a little girl who sat between his knees. Link didn’t see him, he was laughing at something the boy behind him said. Alan looked closer. It was Krishna, except he’d shaved his head and was wearing a hoodie with glittering piping run along the double seams, a kind of future-sarcastic raver jumper that looked like it had been abandoned on the set of Space: 1999.
Krishna had his own little girl between his knees, with heart-shaped lips and thick matte concealer over her zits. His hand lay casually on her shoulder, and she brushed her cheek against it.
Alan felt the air whuff out of him as though he’d been punched in the stomach, and he leaned up against the side of a fruit market, flattening himself there. He turned his head from side to side, expecting to see Mimi, and wanting to rush out and shield her from the sight, but she was nowhere to be seen, and anyway, what business was it of his?