The Relive Box and Other Stories Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Milo, Alexis and Olivia

  EPIGRAPH

  I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

  —George Gordon Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

  —Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  THE RELIVE BOX

  SHE’S THE BOMB

  ARE WE NOT MEN?

  THE FIVE-POUND BURRITO

  THE ARGENTINE ANT

  SURTSEY

  THEFT AND OTHER ISSUES

  SUBTRACT ONE DEATH

  YOU DON’T MISS YOUR WATER (’TIL THE WELL RUNS DRY)

  THE DESIGNEE

  WARRIOR JESUS

  THE FUGITIVE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE RELIVE BOX

  Katie wanted to relive Katie at nine, before her mother left, and I could appreciate that, but we only had one console at the time and I really didn’t want to go there. It was coming up on the holidays, absolutely grim outside, nine-thirty at night—on a school night—and she’d have to be up at six to catch the bus in the dark. She’d already missed too much school, staying home on any pretext and reliving the whole time I was at work, so there really were no limits, and who was being a bad father here? A single father unable to discipline his fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone inculcate a work ethic in her? Me. I was. And I felt bad about it. I wanted to put my foot down and at the same time give her something, make a concession, a peace offering. But even more I wanted the box myself, wanted it so baldly it was showing in my face, I’m sure, and she needed to get ready for school, needed sleep, needed to stop reliving and worry about the now, the now and the future. “Why don’t you wait till the weekend,” I said.

  She was wearing those tights all the girls wear like painted-on skin, standing in the doorway to the living room, perching on one foot the way she did when she was doing her dance exercises. Her face belonged to her mother, my ex, Christine, who hadn’t been there for her for six years and counting. “I want to relive now,” she said, diminishing her voice to the shaky hesitant plaint that was calculated to make me melt and give in to whatever she wanted, but it wasn’t going to work this time, no way. She was going to bed and I was going back to a rainy February night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy, a band I loved then, and the girl I was mad crazy for before she broke my heart and Christine came along to break it all over again.

  “Why don’t you go up and text your friends or something,” I said.

  “I don’t want to text my friends. I want to be with my mom.”

  This was a plaint too and it cut even deeper. She was deprived, that was the theme here, and the whole thing, as any impartial observer could see in a heartbeat, verged on child abuse. “I know, honey, I know. But it’s not healthy. You’re spending too much time there.”

  “You’re just selfish, that’s all,” she said, and here was the shift to a new tone, the tone of animus and opposition, the subtext being that I never thought of anybody but myself. “You want to what, relive when you were like my age or something? Let me guess: you’re going to go back and relive yourself doing homework, right? As an example for your daughter?”

  The room was a mess. The next day was the day the maid came, so I was standing amidst the debris of the past week, a healthy percentage of it—abandoned sweat socks, energy-drink cans, various crumpled foil pouches that had once contained biscotti, popcorn or Salami Bites—generated by the child standing there before me. “I don’t like your sarcasm,” I said.

  Her face was pinched so that her lips were reduced to the smallest little O-ring of disgust. “What do you like?”

  “A clean house. A little peace and quiet. Some privacy, for Christ’s sake—is that too much to ask?”

  “I want to be with Mom.”

  “Go text your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Make some.”

  And this, thrown over her shoulder preparatory to the furious pounding retreat up the stairs and the slamming of her bedroom door: “You’re a pig!”

  And my response, which had become ritualized ever since I’d sprung for the $5,000 second-generation Halcom X1520 Relive Box with the In-Flesh Retinal Projection Stream and altered forever the dynamic between me and my only child: “I know.”

  Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn’t want to go back there? Who wouldn’t want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours? What of girlfriends (or boyfriends, as the case may be), wives, ex-wives, one-night stands, the casual encounter that got you halfway there and flitted out of reach on the wings of an unfulfilled promise? I was no different. The sex part of it obsessed me through those first couple of months and if I drifted into work each morning feeling drained (and not just figuratively), I knew it was a problem and that it was adversely affecting my job performance, and even, if I didn’t cut back, threatening my job itself. Still, to relive Christine when we first met, to relive her in bed, in candlelight, clinging fast to me and whispering my name over and over in the throes of her passion, was too great a temptation. Or even just sitting there across from me in the Moroccan restaurant where I took her for our first date, her eyes like portals, like consoles themselves, as she leaned into the table and drank up every word and witticism that came out of my mouth. Or to go further back, before my wife entered the picture, to Rennie Porter, the girl I took to the senior prom and spent two delicious hours rubbing up against in the backseat of my father’s Buick Regal, every second of which I’d relived six or seven times now. And to Lisa, Lisa Denardo, the girl I met that night at the Roxy, hoping I was going to score.

  I started coming in late to work. Giving everybody, even my boss, the zombie stare. I got my first warning. Then my second. And my boss—Kevin Moos, a decent-enough guy five years younger than me who didn’t have an X1520, or not that he was letting on—sat me down in his office and told me, in no uncertain terms, that there wouldn’t be a third.

  But it was a miserable night and I was depressed. And bored. So bored you could have drilled holes in the back of my head and taken core samples and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already denied my daughter, who was thumping around upstairs with the cumulative weight of ten daughters, and the next day was Friday, TGIF, end of the week, the slimmest of workdays when just about everybody alive thinks about slipping out early. I figured even if I did relive for more than the two hours I was going to strictly limit myself to, even if I woke up exhausted, I could always find a way to make it to lunch and just let things coast after that. So I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin and tonic because that was what I’d been drinking that night at the Roxy and carried it into the room at the end of the hall that had once been a bedroom and was now (Katie’s joke, not mine) the reliving room.

  The console sat squarely on the low table that was the only piece of furniture in the room aside from the straight-backed chair I’d set in front of it the day I brought the th
ing home. It wasn’t much bigger than the gaming consoles I’d had to make do with in the old days, a slick black metal cube with a single recessed glass slit running across the face of it from one side to the other. It activated the minute I took my seat. “Hello, Wes,” it said in the voice I’d selected, male, with the slightest bump of an accent to make it seem less synthetic. “Welcome back.”

  I lifted the drink to my lips to steady myself—think of a conductor raising his baton—and cleared my throat. “February 28, 1982,” I said, “9:45 p.m. Play.”

  The box flashed the date and time and then suddenly I was there, the club exploding into life like a comet touching down, light and noise and movement obliterating the now, the house gone, my daughter gone, the world of getting and doing and bosses and work vanished in an instant. I was standing at the bar with my best friend, Zach Ronalds, who turned up his shirt collar and wore his hair in a Joe Strummer pompadour just like me, only his hair was black and mine choirboy blond (I’d dye it within the week), and I was trying to get the bartender’s attention so I could order us G&Ts with my fake ID. The band, more New Wave than punk, hadn’t started yet, and the only thing to look at onstage was the opening act packing up their equipment while hypervigilant girls in vampire makeup and torn fishnet stockings washed round them in a human tide that ebbed and flowed on the waves of music crashing through the speakers. It was bliss. Bliss because I knew now that this night, alone out of all the long succession of dull nugatory nights building up to it, would be special, that this was the night I’d meet Lisa and take her home with me. To my parents’ house in Pasadena, where I had a room of my own above the detached garage and could come and go as I pleased. My room. The place where I greased up my hair and stared at myself in the mirror and waited for something to happen, something like this, like what was coming in seven and a half real-time minutes.

  Zach said what sounded like “Look at that skank,” but since he had his face turned away from me and the music was cranked to the sonic level of a rocket launch (give credit to the X1520’s parametric speaker/audio beam technology, which is infinitely more refined than the first generation’s), I wasn’t quite sure, though I must have heard him that night, my ears younger then, less damaged by scenes like this one, because I took hold of his arm and said, “Who? Her?”

  What I said now, though, was “Reset, reverse ten seconds,” and everything stalled, vanished and started up once more, and here I was trying all over again to get the bartender’s attention and listening hard when Zach, leaning casually against the bar on two splayed elbows, opened his mouth to speak. “Look at that skank,” he said, undeniably, there it was, coloring everything in the moment because he was snap-judging Lisa, with her coat-hanger shoulders, Kabuki makeup and shining black lips, and I said, “Who? Her?,” already attracted because in my eyes she wasn’t a skank at all or if she was, she was a skank from some other realm altogether and I couldn’t from that moment on think of anything but getting her to talk to me.

  Now, the frustrating thing about the current relive technology is that you can’t be an actor in the scene, only an observer, like Scrooge reliving his boarding school agonies with the Ghost of Christmas Past at his elbow, so whatever howlers your adolescent self might have uttered are right there, hanging in the air, unedited. You can fast-forward, and I suppose most people do—skip the chatter; get to the sex—but personally, after going straight to the carnal moments the first five or six times I relived a scene, I liked to go back and hear what I had to say, what she had to say, however banal it might sound now. What I did that night—and I’d already relived this moment twice in the past week—was catch hold of the bartender and order not two but three G&Ts, though I only had something like eighteen dollars in my wallet, set one on the bar for Zach and cross the floor to where she was standing just beneath the stage in what would be the mosh pit half an hour later. She saw me coming, saw the drinks—two drinks—and looked away, covering herself because she was sure I was toting that extra drink for somebody else, a girlfriend or best bud lurking in the drift of shadow the stage lights drew up out of the murky walls.

  I tapped her shoulder. She turned her face to me.

  “Pause,” I said.

  Everything stopped. I was in a 3-D painting now and so was she and for the longest time I just kept things there, studying her face. She was eighteen years old, a commander of style, beautiful enough underneath the paint and gel and eyeliner and all the rest to make me feel faint even now, and her eyes weren’t wary, weren’t used, but candid, ready, rich with expectation. I held my drink just under my nose, inhaling the smell of juniper berries to tweak the memory, and said, “Play.”

  “You look thirsty,” I said.

  The music boomed. Behind me, at the bar, Zach was giving me a look of disbelief, like What-the?, because this was a violation of our club-going protocol. We didn’t talk to the girls, and especially not the skanks, because we were there for the music, at least that was what we told ourselves. (Second time around I did pause this part, just for the expression on his face—Zach, poor Zach, who never did find himself a girlfriend as far as I know and who’s probably someplace reliving every club he’s ever been in and every date he’s ever had just to feel sorry for himself.)

  She leveled her eyes on me, gave it a beat, then took the cold glass from my hand. “How did you guess?” she said.

  What followed was the usual exchange of information about bands, books, neighborhood, high school, college, and then I was bragging about the bands I’d seen lately and she was countering with the band members she knew personally, like John Doe and the drummer for the Germs, and letting her eyes reveal just how personal that was, which only managed to inflame me till I wanted nothing more on this earth than to pin her in a corner and kiss the black lipstick right off her. What I said then, unaware that my carefully sculpted pompadour was collapsing across my brow in something very much like a bowl cut (or worse—anathema—a Beatles shag), was “You want to dance?”

  She gave me a look. Shot her eyes to the stage and back, then around the room. A few people were dancing to the canned music, most of them jerking and gyrating to their own drugged-out beat, and there was no sign—yet—of the band we’d come to hear. “To this?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and I looked so—what was it?—needy, though at the time I must have thought I was chiseled out of a block of pure cool. “Come on,” I said, and I reached out a hand to her.

  I watched the decision firm in her eyes, deep in this moment that would give rise to all the rest, to the part I was about to fast-forward to because I had to get up in the morning. For work. And no excuses. But watch, watch what comes next . . .

  She took my hand, the soft friction of her touch alive still somewhere in my cell memory, and then she was leading me out onto the dance floor.

  She was leading. And I was following.

  Will it surprise you to know that I exceeded my self-imposed two-hour limit? That after the sex I fast-forwarded to our first date, which was really just an agreed-upon meeting at Tower Records (March 2, 1982, 4:30 p.m.), and took us thereafter up to Barney’s Beanery for cheeseburgers and beers and shots of peppermint schnapps (!), which she paid for because her father was a rich executive at Warner Brothers? Or that it made me feel so good I couldn’t resist skipping ahead three months to when she was as integral to my flesh as the Black Flag T-shirt that never left my back except in the shower? Lisa. Lisa Denardo. With her cat’s tongue and tight torquing body that was a girl’s and a woman’s at the same time and her perfect, evenly spaced set of glistening white teeth (perfect, that is, but for the incisor she’d had a dentist in Tijuana remove in the spirit of punk solidarity). The scene I hit on was early the following summer, summer break of my sophomore year in college, when I gave up on my parents’ garage and Lisa and I moved into an off-campus apartment on Vermont and decided to paint the walls, ceiling and floors the color of midnight in the Carlsbad Caverns. June 6, 1982, 2:44 p.m. The glisten of black pain
t, a too-bright sun caught in the windows and Lisa saying, “Think we should paint the glass too?” I was oblivious to anything but her and me and the way I looked and the way she looked, a streak of paint on her left forearm and another, scimitar-shaped, just over one eyebrow, when suddenly everything went neutral and I was back in the reliving room staring into the furious face of my daughter.

  But let me explain the technology here a moment, for those of you who don’t already know. This isn’t a computer screen or a TV or a hologram or anything anybody else can see—we’re talking retinal projection, two laser beams fixed on two eyeballs. Anybody coming into the room (daughter, wife, boss) will simply see you sitting there in a chair with your retinas lit like furnaces. Step in front of the projector—as my daughter did now—and the image vanishes.

  “Stop,” I said, and I wasn’t talking to her.

  But there she was, her hair brushed out for school and her jaw clenched, looking hate at me. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  Bleary, depleted—and guilty, deeply guilty, the narcissist caught in the act and caring about nothing or nobody but his own reliving self—I just gawked at her, the light she’d flicked on when she came into the room transfixing me in the chair. I shook my head.

  “It’s 6:45, a.m. In the morning. The morning, Dad.”

  I started to say something but the words were tangled up inside of me because Lisa was saying—had just said—“You’re not going to make me stay here and watch the paint dry, are you, because I’m thinking maybe we could drive out to the beach or something, just to cool down,” and I said, or was going to say, “There’s like maybe half a pint of gas in the car.”

  “What?” Katie demanded. “Were you with Mom again? Is that it? Like you can be with her and I can’t?”

  “No,” I said, “no, that wasn’t it, it wasn’t your mom at all—”

  A tremor ran through her. “Yeah, right. So what was it, then? Some girlfriend, somebody you were gaga over when you were in college? Or high school? Or what, junior high?”