The Made-Up Man Read online

  I brewed coffee. She drank two cups, fast, while I scrambled eggs and Krakus ham.

  “Ouch,” she kept saying.

  I offered her aspirin. She chewed two nonchewable capsules.

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said. “I’m going to be a doctor-nurse.”

  She explained that she was about to begin her final year of a PhD in nursing. When she first went into nursing, she said, she wanted to help patients, but before long, she realized that who she really wanted to help were her fellow nurses. We ate standing in the kitchen. While she spoke, she seemed under twenty-one; while she listened, over thirty-five. She was just as short as she’d been the night before.

  “With that hat, you look like a private eye,” she said, tapping at the photos of me and Ro. “A real ‘dick.’”

  I set the dishes in the sink.

  “Do you have a career?” she said.

  I said I’d be starting grad school next week—anthropology, a concentration in archaeology.

  She’d been bored until right then.

  “You want to be an archaeologist!” she said, impressed. “Tell me why.”

  “I’ve wanted to be one since I was a kid.”

  “Yes. But why?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  She laughed. “That’s your motto, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’”

  “I know I have a reason. It’s there—I feel it. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. “You either know the reason or you don’t have one. That’s the type of guy you are, I can tell.”

  I told her that it’d taken me three colleges and six and a half years to twist through to the other side of undergrad. I’d emptied plenty of time into thinking that I knew what my reasons were for transferring to this or that school, for trusting this or that professor’s guidance, for declaring this or that major, for pursuing or maintaining or ending this or that romantic relationship. But the truth was that I hadn’t known my reasons. What I’d done was mislabel them, consistently. I’d needed to believe that pretending to know what I was doing was the first step to knowing what I was doing.

  “I want to be more careful,” I said. “I want to know what I’m saying.”

  Bernadette wrapped herself up in my arm in such a way that I had to put down my coffee.

  “We could get to know each other,” she said.

  8

  Stanley Hears More Footsteps, Then Doors

  Whoever had been plodding up the staircase turned off on my floor.

  I was still flopped out on the couch.

  This person walked the hallway, the footsteps big, angry, booming. He or she stopped at what sounded like the door across from mine. A bag thumped down.

  The door unlocked. It juddered open.

  The bag was picked back up and the unit was entered.

  As soon as the door closed, though, a door farther down the hallway opened with a slow croak.

  Then shut with a whoosh and a clap.

  When it shut, another door from another part of the hallway whinnied open.

  It closed—another opened.

  This went on, doors opening and closing, one at a time, as if they were all connected to a single system of interlinked hinges, their swinging and moaning and scraping and banging a demonstration of that system’s power, until it seemed that every door to every unit had had its turn except for mine.

  Without meaning to, I’d sat up on the couch. I watched the door.

  A decisive silence.

  I lay down again, this time on my face.

  9

  Stanley Continues to Reflect on the Sort of Man He Was

  Bernadette and I did dinners and movies and study dates. She spent a Saturday at Taste of Polonia with me and my brother, even though she didn’t like ethnically themed festivals, and I spent a weekend with her and her work friends at a fancy lakehouse in Michigan, even though I didn’t like fancy lakehouses or her work friends. Once or twice we went to dinner at each other’s families’ houses. If she was upset and venting, I learned, she expected me to pretend she wasn’t, which I found frustrating, and if I was upset but silent, she learned, I expected her to ask me what was up, which she found ridiculous. Mostly we watched true-crime TV.

  Later that fall, Bernadette submitted her dissertation to her committee. Because she worked full-time at a hospital, she’d pulled a month’s worth of off-day all-nighters to finish it. Excited, she planned a big party at Moody’s Pub, setting it on the date of her dissertation defense. She was sure she’d pass.

  When the day came, she didn’t.

  I went straight to her apartment, where she paced, trying to stomp down her resentment. She kicked a hard copy of the dissertation across the floor. Her advisor, a man she’d trusted, had called her work “intentionally incomplete.” I sat on a fluffy rug between her two pillow-shaped dogs, Mango and Coconut. She opened a dresser drawer, shoved her face into her folded underwear, and screamed. Her dogs scuttled out of the room, spooked. My sympathy rerouted to revulsion.

  “Don’t,” she said, meaning: Don’t think that you can comfort me.

  She didn’t want her family to know she’d failed her defense, so we trudged to Moody’s. The front room filled up with aunts and uncles and cousins from the old country, who brought gifts and cards, and with work friends from across the city, who brought cheers and shouts and party drugs. Bernadette performed Successful Bernadette. I stood by the cake, under the WHAT’S UP DOC? banner, feeling like a security guard. I tried to remember what else I wasn’t supposed to say to what family members. Her tiny mother whisked by without a word, close enough to let me know she’d seen me, and her squat dad shook my hand and said he’d be right back, and her cousins nodded cool hellos from across the room. The only person who stopped to talk was Jiselle, Bernadette’s kid sister, a self-assured high school senior with her sights set on a career in criminal forensics. She wore Día de los Muertos skull earrings, a Dimmu Borgir T-shirt, and short shorts. She wanted to know if my classes were just as full of slackers and quitters as hers were, or if that was what was glorious about grad school, that all the fuckups were Darwined out. When I graduated, would I be presented with an ancient treasure map instead of a diploma? What was I learning about right now, this week, today? “Bones,” I said. “I fucking love bones,” she said, punching the air, “tell me what you know about bones!” I said that a bone’s strength was directional, anchored in anticipated angles of usage; I said that although a close study of a complete skeleton would reveal a database’s worth of facts specific to that deceased individual, bones were more alike from one person to another than not; I said that bones were what we carried, and at the same time, what carried us. “That is fucking amazing,” said Jiselle. “I can’t fucking wait. I can’t fucking wait to see the world that way!” A shriveled pair of great-uncles, slurping on margaritas, evil-eyed us. Nobody in the family wanted Jiselle to study dead bodies. She was supposed to be a real doctor, like her gastroenterologist mom, or an ambitious nurse, like her PhD-pursuing sister.

  It was at this moment that Dominic, the only person at the party more disliked than me, stepped in to “rescue” Jiselle. He pointed at her. “Your mother has a request,” he said. She rolled her eyes but followed him—he stopped to scold her in my line of sight. Dominic had the shape of a trash bag about to burst. His face was wide, but everything on it was close together, which gave him the appearance of being in a state of constant irritation, which he was. Like Bernadette, he was a nurse who hated being a nurse. Unlike Bernadette, he didn’t keep it to himself. Anytime I’d seen him at a family party, he’d gone from complaining about a terminally ill patient’s whiny demands to shouting insults at a cousin’s significant other to threatening to skull-fuck the peacemaking uncle who stepped in to mediate. He was the kind of man who wanted to look like he was looking for a fight.

  Everybody but Bernadette blamed it on his divorce.

  “He’s been an angsty te
enage bastard since birth,” she’d said.

  “Stanley is a caveman,” Dominic said to Jiselle. “Stay away from cavemen.”

  I relocated to the bar. The only open stool was next to Bernadette’s dad. When I took it, he stood up, as if he’d just remembered to feed the meter.

  I examined myself in the bar mirror: it was true that I should have shaved.

  Older family members left.

  Dance music thumped and buzzed.

  Dominic called somebody a “cocksmoker.”

  Bernadette and her work friends pounded shots, and instead of saying, “Cheers!” they said, “Medicine!”

  Dominic said, “You don’t know how to listen!”

  Bernadette’s parents pulled on their coats. They gave their daughter long, proud hugs. As Bernadette watched them leave, her performance of Successful Bernadette slackened—guilt and fear wrinkled through, and pain—but as soon as she caught me staring, she straightened herself into a how-dare-you frown. She pouted over to a group of aunts and uncles.

  Dominic intercepted her, flagging her down like she was a server.

  No longer needing to pretend to be a nonsmoker, I went to the beer garden, a patio enclosed by weathered stone walls and scrappy old trees. Crushed leaves scraped and crinkled, scooting on the wind. A group of Bernadette’s work friends swapped racist impersonations of their boss. From where I stood, they were backlit, a gallery of shit-talking shadows.

  “Yo, what’s your name again?” said one to me.

  “Stan,” said another. “His name is Stan.”

  “Stan the Man!” said one.

  “Let me ask you something, Stan the Man,” said the first one, laughing.

  “Oh, leave the guy alone,” said another.

  “It’s a personal question,” said the first one.

  I took a step toward them.

  “What,” I said.

  They stopped talking.

  I put out my cigarette.

  Back inside, Bernadette and Dominic were yelling at each other. Spectators ringed them, friends and family alike, some grinning, some recording the fight on their phones. Dominic yelled that nurses like Bernadette were destroying the profession with their checkbox pursuit of meaningless degrees, and Bernadette yelled that it was male nurses like Dominic, with their long-standing disproportionate share of administrative positions, who had been systematically mismanaging everything for everybody for decades. Dominic did a crybaby face, miming tears. “Grow the fuck up,” said Bernadette. “Wake the fuck up,” Dominic said, “the PhD in nursing is a joke! It’s a joke degree given to any idiot willing to go into debt to pay for it!” Bernadette’s face blanched; Dominic hesitated, aware of having hurt his cousin, and of having said something that wasn’t even close to being true; before he could take it back, or say something worse, I pushed in between them. Dominic smiled. “Look at this Polack,” he said. “You’re not family, no one has to like you. Go home and put a potato in your ass!” I kept my hands at my sides. My intention wasn’t to knock him down, or even to make him think that I was going to knock him down. I only wanted to provide Bernadette with an out—I thought she might shout some final words and storm off, or walk me away from Dominic, and in doing so, walk herself away from any further escalation. But she didn’t take either of those actions. The action that she took was to seize me from behind, and with bare panic in her voice, yell, “Stan, no!” as if I was the one who couldn’t be counted on to restrain myself, even though restraining myself was what I’d been doing since we’d decided to get to know each other, restraining myself from thinking conflict-starting thoughts and from feeling conflict-starting feelings and from asking the set of conflict-starting questions that would lead to the conversation about why in the holy fuck we bothered to be together if most of what we did was stay out of each other’s way. I stood very still while Bernadette tugged at my elbows. Her fear transferred to Dominic, who covered it with a confident laugh. “Control yourself!” screamed Bernadette. I didn’t; a roof crashed down in me, burying me in darkness, burying me in demolition, and I broke out of Bernadette’s grip and wrenched Dominic by the shirt and walked him through scattering onlookers and into a wall, where I held him, holding him too close for him to land punches and kicks, too close for him to work what looked like barely remembered martial arts takedowns, and although part of what I was doing was waiting for him to hit me so that I would have permission to seriously hurt him, part of what I was doing was preventing him from following through on any action that would give me that permission. He spluttered—I was pressing on his neck. I let up. He popped me with a sloppy headbutt and I felt his nose break on my forehead. Bouncers intervened, men who weren’t as big as us, but were big enough.

  I was outside. I was out of breath.

  I was rubbing my face hard.

  I was lighting a cigarette.

  Bernadette was there, shouting something, and I wasn’t hearing it, and she was screaming something, and I wasn’t hearing it. A local homeless man who called himself The Real Thing wobbled by on a bike, singing, his bag of collected cans rattling. He threw up a peace sign. I peace-signed him back.

  Bernadette plucked the cigarette out of my mouth, turned it, and stabbed it dead on my chest.

  “You make me into a terrible person!” she screamed. “I’m not a terrible person!”

  I called her once a day for a week or so, and she didn’t answer or call me back, and then she called me once a week for a month or so, and I didn’t answer or call her back, and then we were done.

  “You can do way better than Bernadette,” said Torrentelli. “Not her fault, but that girl’s got a lot to work through.”

  Barton agreed: “You were basically dating yourself. Raise your standards.”

  I didn’t regret the breakup like I’d regretted it with Ro, and thoughts of Bernadette didn’t scratch across the emptiest stretches of my day like thoughts of Ro had. I’d known there was no way we were going to last. But over the next few months, when I’d spot Bernadette sitting on the L with an open book, or poking through fruit at the grocery store, or walking Mango and Coconut by the lake, on the phone with someone, laughing, it was different—everything bunched up. I’d be cramped with an urge to talk to her. Standing there, I’d imagine the conversation: I’d say the things we’d been careful not to say, and the saying of these things would take us to where we could’ve been, and when we were there, we were happier, if not happy. I couldn’t tell if Bernadette saw me staring at her on these occasions, but if she did, she didn’t turn my way.

  I decided to commit to a new simplicity. I bought a week’s worth of the same shirts, jeans, slacks, and boxers. I shaved daily and kept to a monthly haircut. I returned to my boxing workout: bags, weights, cardio, cardio, weights, bags. I went to class when there was class and I went to work if there was work and I went to Huettenbar for happy hour with Torrentelli and Barton. I wanted to be a long dumb line, running straight, running blank, and for the most part, I was. In class, I wasn’t; in class I was a shorter, sharper line, a line that aimed to shoot through to the insides of ideas—hypotheses and conclusions, beliefs and customs and cultures, the lost lives of vanished peoples. I was outside of any intended routine. I was someone else, someone stranger, someone brighter.

  I said to myself: This someone is your reason.

  This someone is the reason Bernadette wouldn’t believe existed.

  This someone is the reason you knew you had, the reason you felt, the reason you didn’t know the shape or the size or the weight of until now.

  This someone is who you want to begin to become, I said to myself.

  The next step was to join a dig. To work with a team in the dirt. To be on-site, all day, screening soil for the scattered fragments of forgotten peoples—bones and ruins, splinters and bits and shards—cleaning and cataloguing, drafting reports, readying conclusions, and at the end of the day, with the team, around a fire, debating dimensions of meaning.

  I applied for summ
er internships at competitive excavation sites, and although I came close with one, I didn’t land it.

  Dr. Madera, my advisor, assured me that before long, I’d be in the hole.

  “Most people get really boring when they have a significant other,” said Barton. “You get really boring when you’re single.”

  I’d been explaining what could be learned from the analysis of ancient garbage.

  “Play the field!” said Torrentelli. “All the fish in the sea are your oysters, and other clichés!”

  Barton slid his phone to Torrentelli. It was open to a dating app I’d used. “Stan’s got to change his profile picture.”

  Torrentelli agreed. “You look like a dad.”

  “He looks like he lives with a dad,” said Barton.

  I didn’t change my picture. I had a drink at a downtown pub with a social media consultant and a lunch at a taqueria with a hair stylist and a dinner at a sad sports bar with a no-show and an afternoon at a neighborhood music festival with an academic assistant who revealed that she was “semi-happily married” and a night at the Lincoln Park Zoo with a line cook on cocaine, and after that, I went to a Hypocrites play at the Den with a woman named T.

  10

  Stanley Decides to Day-Trip from Prague to the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora

  The space at the center of myself that wasn’t me had expanded. It was nothing like an emptiness: it was full of itself.

  I had stayed facedown on the couch.

  The hallway and the stairwell had stayed quiet.

  I shuffled off the couch and unpacked my laptop. A flickering one-bar network called CAFÉ HOUSE FREE offered access. No email from T. One from my brother, the subject line reading, “Tip #3: Fried Cheese Sandwich Right Now,” and in the body, the cartoony image of a man holding a sandwich, his head exploding.

  I picked up my Prague guidebook and made another go at finding the things to see and the interest to see them, but the words flattened like they’d flattened on the plane, and I slid from them into other thoughts, meaning T. Meaning T rose in me. T rose in me in a looming in-love way—her face filled me up, completely, but other faces flickered in hers somehow, as faces do in dreams—and despite my hoping otherwise, seeing T’s face in me in this way again, in Prague, didn’t make me wild and loose with the in-love hope of when we’d met. Instead it had me feeling handcuffed.