The Minor Outsider E-Book

Ted McDermott

• Herausgeber: ONE
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Ed and Taylor, both aspiring young writers, fall in love during a summer of aimless drinking and partying in their university town of Missoula, Montana. Lonely and looking for love, they connect despite their profound differences: Ed is brooding, ambitious and self-destructive, living in denial of a mysterious tumour spreading from his limbs to his brain. Beautiful Taylor is a pure soul, positive, full of hope and emotional generosity. Their difficult relationship is intense, exciting yet doomed from the start, complicated further when Taylor falls pregnant. As Ed resists the harmony she brings to his life, Taylor's need to protect herself and their child also grows, until a dramatic finale.Ted Mc Dermott's stark writing speaks truthfully and with a touch of dark humour for and to today's generation of young people trying to find hope in what feels to many like an existential void. The Minor Outsider will be read as the young literary voice of our dark times.

Leseprobe

THE MINOR OUTSIDER

TED McDERMOTT

For Shawn

Contents

Title PageDedication12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243About the PublisherCopyright

1

On a sunny summer weekday afternoon, Ed rode his bike to a head shop called Piece of Mind and bought a one-hitter that looked like a realistic sculpture of a cigarette. Ed was twenty-eight years old and single. He was thin and just over six feet tall. He had dark hair cut short and he wore round wire-rim glasses, cut-off khaki shorts, and a long-sleeved collared shirt. Ed was enrolled in a graduate creative writing program, which meant he taught one section of composition a semester and took workshops and other easy classes, but now he was five weeks into a four-month summer vacation and he had nothing he had to do. He’d been rolling joints for himself, but he thought he’d be able to moderate better how much he smoked if he had a small bowl. He’d never bought a bowl. Never in the seventeen years since he’d started smoking weed, as a sixth grader. Now he had one. Now what?

Ed biked through the quaint downtown and across the bridge that spanned the river that ran through the little city, which occupied a valley surrounded by rolling green mountains. Starker, darker mountains existed in every distance. From here, on his bike, on the bridge, he could see at once so many places he’d never been, would never go. He could see snow on a peak that was thirty miles away, a lone pine tree tiny on a ridge without a trail, what might or might not be a tent set up above a black scree.

This was in Missoula, Montana, a town as orderly and idyllic as the landscape a model train loops through, a town of some 60,000 people, a town eight hours from the nearest major city, Seattle. Together, these qualities—Missoula’s self-containment, its smallness, its isolation, its layered and intangible landscape—shrunk his range of concern and facilitated an ease he’d never felt elsewhere. Still, he was suspicious of it, this ease: life, for him, was a commodity, and he was frugal.

After the bridge, Ed took a gravel path that ran along the river’s bank. He stopped when he came to a little trail that led through some tangled brush, to a sandy beach where he liked to swim when the river was lower. Now, though, the river was still raging from winter, from the snowpack that was still melting down from the mountains. It was June.

He took the trail toward the water, laid his bike down on the sand, sat on a log, and looked back to check that he was hidden from view. He was—but on the other side of the river, at the top of the high and steep bank, there was a Taco John’s franchise. The back of a Taco John’s franchise. There was a blue dumpster and a rusted a/c unit and some half-hearted small-town graffiti sprayed on the cinder-block side of the building and there was a drive-thru window and he wondered if the employees could see him through it. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, they’d be too far away to matter, so he packed the fake cigarette and got high. But not too high. Just high enough to make everything a little less like it was.

Ed looked at the river. It traveled as fast as it could but it went nowhere. I’m like that, he thought. Then he thought, I’m high. Then he got up, got on his bike, continued down the path, and crossed the river again, this time via a pedestrian bridge, and rode through a hotel parking lot and waited at a stoplight and rode under an interstate that sounded like the river, except amplified. Ed turned off the busy road as soon as he could, into a dirt alley. He passed backyards. He passed garages and grass and a trampoline and a wooden boat overturned on a pair of sawhorses. He came out onto a street, turned again, and went as far as he could—a few blocks—to where the pavement dead-ended at a trailhead, where a sign provided information about invasive weeds.

Ed locked his bike to a young tree and started walking. The trail led to a giant “L” made of poured concrete and set on the side of one of the green mountains that defined the valley. This mountain was Mount Jumbo. The next mountain over, Mount Sentinel, had an “M” the same size. “M” stood for the name of the town or for the name of the state university in the town or for both, depending who you asked. But the “L” stood for a local high school called Loyola Sacred Heart, whose mascot was the Breakers, which pleased him, made him proud that the people here—a group that for the past year had included him—were so casually clever.

The mountain was relatively small, but the hike was still hard. The ground was green grass and loose rock and dry dirt, and every step he took made a little mess of the earth. It took a while but he got there and sat down exhausted on the white-painted concrete, beside a plaque that commemorated a student named John Tyler Howard who’d died a few years before, at the age, he calculated from the birth and death dates, of fifteen. No cause was recorded.

Ed looked out at the mountains that made the valley that held the town. He saw the little Division I-AA (or whatever it was called now) football stadium and the crummy dorm that was Missoula’s tallest building and the interstate that would take you all the way to the ocean, if you wanted to leave, and the river that would take you there, too. In theory, at least. Surely something would stop you before you got very far. And Ed saw someone coming up the path. Two people. He saw them come closer and he saw, when they were close, that they were female and that he knew one of them, that she was a twenty-four-year-old nonfiction writer in the program whose name was Melanie and who, according to his friend Dave who’d had a workshop with her, exclusively wrote personal essays about how her mother was an unsuccessful folk singer who drove her daughters all over the country in a conversion van, playing gigs that barely paid. He didn’t recognize the other girl, but as Ed watched them approach, he saw she was blond and that she wore a light-blue tank top and short jean shorts and that she was thin and that she lagged behind Melanie a little.

He said hey to them when they were close and they looked up at him, out of breath.

Melanie gave him a little wave and said, “Oh, hey,” and stopped before him with her hands on her hips. She was wholesome, plain. The kind of girl who’s so sincere and has such a bad sense of humor that they’re difficult to talk to, like an aunt.

“How’s it going?” Melanie said.

“Good. It’s good. Nice day, huh?”

Then the other girl arrived and looked at him and breathed heavily, with an eager and shy smile that seemed to mean she was relieved to have arrived, and Ed saw she was disarmingly lovely. He wanted badly to be disarmed.

“This is Taylor,” Melanie said. “She’s a first year.”

By this, Melanie meant that Taylor would be starting their same graduate writing program in the fall. Their program was like a high school where angst had been replaced with irony.

Taylor’s skin was pale and her cheeks were flushed pink and her hair was long and blond and curled with a curling iron, he could tell, and her eyes were green and bright and the only way he’d be able to think of her later would be as a series of adjectives—girlish, pretty, radiant—but right now he was nervous and couldn’t think anything.

Ed introduced himself, put out his hand. Taylor shook it. Her hand was warm, and Ed felt shy, holding it. He let go and asked her where she was from.

“California.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Oh, Southern California. The Mojave Desert. Kinda between LA and Vegas.”

“Is Death Valley in the Mojave Desert?”

“I think so,” Taylor said. “Pretty far north of where I’m from though.”

“I had a step-grandmother who was a fire lookout out there.” Ed hoped this would make him seem interesting and a maybe a shade blue collar, which is to say authentic, which of course he wasn’t, even though it was true, this fact about his step-grandmother, Joan. “But what would even burn in a desert?”

Melanie laughed a little, in an attempt at agreement, but Taylor looked at him mystified, like she wasn’t sure what he meant, what the joke was supposed to be, and she didn’t answer. Ed tried to convey with his expression that he didn’t know either, but he doubted this came across. He felt embarrassed, dumb. The three of them made bland introductory conversation for a little longer, and then Melanie said they should get going.

“Maybe we’ll see you later,” Melanie said.

“Maybe.”

Ed watched them walk back down the mountain. Before following them, he had to wait until they were way ahead, since it would be awkward to catch up and run into them again, so he lay back on the “L,” felt the sun and felt a shock of pain shoot through his arm, into his hand, where it echoed within the elements of his anatomy. His bones, his muscles, his nerves, and his blood. Or felt like it did. It was a common feeling, this shock. It happened every night when Ed lay in bed—except when he was drunk—and at other times, too, seemingly at random. It—the shock—originated in the golfball sized tumor that had been growing on the inside of his bicep for nearly three years. The tumor sent pain into him but he pretended it wasn’t there, inside him, harming him.

The tumor was like the millions of children starving in Africa: too alarming to think about. It wasn’t like that: he could go to a doctor tomorrow and do something about it. But he didn’t. He lay on that letter, on that mountain, and he thought about Taylor, about how beautiful she was and about what she might be like and about how it might be to touch her and about how she might respond and about how she might become his and about how that would be, how perfect it would be, how jealous everyone would be, how proud he would be, and meanwhile cancer spread through his body. Or so he believed.

2

Ed had first noticed the tumor while living in Normal, Illinois, and working in marketing for a prestigious small press that published experimental literature in translation. The press’s offices were in a windowless warehouse surrounded by a chair factory, a trailer park, a cornfield, and an interstate. His job was to garner attention for the obscure and dense books they published and to convince bookstores to buy them. The authors were from places like Romania and South Korea, and their books were difficult to read and almost impossible to sell.

Ed worked at one of those glowing-blue iMacs from the late ’90s. It had a round mouse. He shared an office with a man who used hair gel to conceal his bald spot. The press’s director was maniacal and paranoid. The director didn’t even allow his employees a lunch break, much less a vacation or health insurance. Ed could’ve quit at any time but, like all of his coworkers, he’d been convinced that the press’s mission of making commercially unviable books available was noble and necessitated sacrifice, so he remained.

The job was miserable but the town was worse. In fact, there were two towns, Bloomington and Normal, which were connected and separate, like an amoeba midway through meiosis. Most locals called the combination “Blormal” but he preferred “Normington,” as he believed it better captured the particular form of bland despair inherent to the place. The town was all dirty grocery stores and faltering strip malls and brand new subdivisions spilling out into the surrounding fields of ten-foot-tall corn. The town’s primary employer was a major insurance company, and there was something actuarial about the local population. People there were guided by a cruel kind of caution. Nothing ever happened and everyone conspired to keep it that way.

He’d moved to Normington because everyone else he knew from college was moving to Brooklyn or Portland or going on tour with their band, and Ed wanted to do something different, something interesting. It turned out, though, that he spent most of his time working in marketing, getting drunk, getting high, and pining for his college girlfriend, who was the only person he’d ever slept with and who’d left him for a guy she met in one of her scientific illustration classes. After enough pining, Ed convinced himself he still loved her and sent her embarrassingly “poetic” emails that he imagined might win her back. They didn’t and he started sleeping with a girl who had patches of blond facial hair on her cheeks and her chin. Her facial hair wasn’t immediately obvious but it was the only thing you could see when you saw her, once you saw it. She was thin, though, and she liked to be choked and otherwise fucked roughly and he was angry about his ex-girlfriend’s rejection, so he slept with her but rarely hung out with her otherwise. She was a nurse who owned her own home. She worked in the ER. Her name was Rachel.

It was one morning at Rachel’s house, while showering before he went to work, that Ed first noticed the tumor. He was soaping up his arm and he felt something hard between the muscles of his bicep. He looked but saw nothing. He pressed his thumb against his skin, in search of it. When he found it, a shock of pain shot down his arm and into his hand, where it swelled and spread until it reached his skin. Then the pain reverberated within his skin. Or that’s how it felt. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but it was unpleasant.

Ed finished showering, put on the same clothes he’d worn the day before, resolved to ignore the bump until it was gone, left the steamy bathroom, and drove to work. Rachel was already at the hospital, saving someone’s life or something, and Ed sat at his iMac in the windowless warehouse, sending emails to lit bloggers about some forthcoming Czech novel the press was reprinting. It was one of those times when you realize how differently we all experience the world and you feel alone.

He spent the next few years like that, though without Rachel: going on with his life and pretending that he’d discovered nothing, even as the tumor grew and sent shocks of pain down his arm with increasing frequency. Eventually, Ed moved to Chicago, where he lived in a studio apartment, dated a plain and cautious girl who was a few years older than him, and worked as the only staff writer at a disreputable regional boating magazine. He made a living writing articles about boat design and boat models and boat manufacturers and boating accessories, but Ed had only been on a boat once, while in high school, on a pontoon, on a huge manmade lake outside of the South Carolina city where he grew up. He also wrote features about places he’d never been, places where Great Lakes boaters might like to go: Ashtabula, Ohio; Quebec City, Quebec; Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

He was good at telling convincing lies. So, in his free time, he wrote a few grotesque and maudlin short stories about retarded children. Ed’s sister was retarded, and her life made good material, unlike his, so he used it, used her. With the stories, he applied to a few graduate creative writing programs and only got into one. The one in Missoula.

3

Ed lived with a twenty-three-year-old Ohioan who wrote religious poetry and who was also enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. They shared a little house with low ceilings and lots of wood paneling, linoleum, and carpet the color of curdled cream. Ed believed the house was technically a shotgun shack, but he felt that using this term would imply that he was poor and he wasn’t poor, even if he didn’t make much money, so he just called it a house.

Not only was he not poor, Ed had $82,000. He told no one about this money and barely even admitted he had it to himself: privilege is humiliating because it precludes suffering, which is ennobling. Almost all of the money was invested in stocks, and it was held in an account that he could view online. At least twice a day he logged onto the investment firm’s website and checked whether he’d gained or lost since the last time he looked. Yesterday he had $81,982 and last week he had $84,215. It was a number, though, so it was abstract, even when it appeared to be precise.

Before the current recession started, he’d had about a third as much money. His grandmother had left it to him when she died. His grandmother was a Polish Jew who’d fled Hitler and gone to New York, where she married a Russian Jew who owned a linoleum store. Soon after the market crashed in 2008, Ed had bought stock in a computer company with his grandmother’s money. When the market bounced back, his shares tripled in price and he profited greatly. The money ensured that he couldn’t be poor, unless he indulged extravagantly, which he would never do. Though he did occasionally loan himself a few hundred dollars, when his checking account was especially low, he always paid it back.

Like the other privileged people he knew, Ed was afraid to take his advantage. He didn’t want to appear comfortable and therefore aloof from the hard realities of being alive, even though of course he was and even though he did nothing to change that fact. Instead, he elaborated hardship whenever he could. To do otherwise, Ed believed, would be bad for his writing. And writing was a way of imbuing his life with purpose, direction. Writing gave him an aim that was both specific enough to be pursued and so vague that it could never be achieved and, thus, would keep him continually moving forward, toward something: to be a writer. And this sense of progress allowed him to forget where he was actually moving: toward nothing, toward death.

Ed’s room was in the back of the house, and all of the room’s walls and even, weirdly, its ceiling were painted the same sea-foam green. The room had one big window that looked out on the backyard and the garage and a dirt alley. The only other window was small and near the painted ceiling. It was like a porthole, except rectangular, and it gave the room the tucked away feeling of a berth on a boat. Instead of a dresser, he had a stack of plastic bins his mom had bought for him at Target ten years ago, when he was eighteen and about to live in a dorm room with a kid named Johannes, though he went by Joh, pronounced “Joe.” The drawers of the plastic bins were clear, so he could see his clothes folded and stacked inside like the organs of a complicated animal.

When he was home, Ed spent most of his time in his room because his roommate spent most of his time sitting on a futon in the living room, smoking a glass bowl and watching the same scratched Seinfeld DVDs over and over and reading Wittgenstein and working on a long prose poem about King Herod, all of which bothered Ed. Ed thought of his roommate as a precocious and entitled child, much as his actual younger brother had actually been when they were kids.

So Ed stayed in his room, smoked his one hitter, and masturbated in the middle of the afternoon as quietly as he could to his idea of how his ideal girl would behave in bed. Obediently. Innocently. Then he read a Belgian novel about the mundane complexity of the modern world. Then he drove to Wendy’s. When he was on his way home, eating fries out of the paper bag, his sister called.

“What’s up Ellie Bird?”

“Hey,” she said. “How’s your car doing?”

“It’s doing good.”

This was how all of their phone conversations started, verbatim. His sister, Ellie, had an IQ of sixty-five. Ellie was three years older than him. She had a boyfriend named Roger who worked in the produce department of a Piggly Wiggly in the South Carolina town where they grew up and where she still lived. The Piggly Wiggly on Devine Street. Ellie lived with their parents and worked in an industrial laundry. She stacked baby blankets that came from various area hospitals. That was her job. She did it for eight hours a day, had done it five days a week for thirteen years. It was something a nun would do. It was a life of penance, but for her there was no purpose, nothing to repent. At birth she’d been burdened and now she suffered senselessly, endlessly. No one knew what had caused her deficiency, but their mother blamed herself. Specifically, she blamed Ellie’s condition on a urinary tract infection she’d had when she conceived. Based on no evidence, other than the coincidence of her infection and her daughter’s retardation, their mother believed this infection caused the defect that caused her daughter to suffer. To substantiate her belief, she sought the appropriate evidence. At age thirty-eight, she returned to school to get her master’s degree in epidemiology and study the causes of mental retardation.

Their mother spent six years seeking a connection. She got numerous grants and even a non-tenure track position at the local state university to facilitate her research. She worked long hours and conducted increasingly outlandish experiments in search of an answer, but her results were finally inconclusive and funding eventually stopped coming through and her position was finally discontinued. Now she no longer worked, but she said she’d learned something from her failure: all you can do for the helpless is help them. So she took care of her daughter.

She drove Ellie to work at 6:40 a.m. and picked her up at 3:20 p.m. She drove Ellie to Special Olympics basketball and Special Olympics swimming and Aktion Club meetings and friends’ houses and doctor’s appointments and grocery stores. She cooked for her daughter and cleaned up after her and did her laundry. She held her down on the couch and flossed her teeth. She checked in on Ellie before she finished showering, to ensure her hair wasn’t still soapy, but it always was, so she told Ellie to rinse it better. Sometimes, Ellie obeyed.

Ed talked to Ellie as he drove and ate fries. She asked him the same questions she always asked him—What did you do last night? When are you coming home to visit? What did you have for dinner?—and she didn’t respond to his answers. She never did. She’d memorized all the empty pleasantries of conversation but she didn’t know how to assemble them, what to make of them. She was laconic and distracted. During their conversation, no information was exchanged. He pulled up in front of his house and said, “I’m gonna let you go.”

She kept talking and he kept trying to tell her he had to hang up, but she wouldn’t take the cue, so he ended the call before she could say goodbye. He loved her automatically, effortlessly, the way you would your child. She was a kind of child.

When Ed went inside, his roommate was sitting at the kitchen table, beneath a cheap chandelier. Only two bulbs weren’t burned out.

“What’s up?”

His roommate was eating a frozen pizza off the cardboard it came on. “Not much.” Only one piece was left. They talked about what they might do later, what they’d been doing earlier, and his roommate said, “I saw that new girl. The cute one. Taylor.”

“The blond one?”

“Yeah,” his roommate said. “I guess she’s super Christian.”

“How do you know?”

“She was going to church.”

Ed laughed.

“She was all dressed up, in like a conservative dress, but she was still hot. But her boyfriend, he seems like kind of like a dork,” his roommate said. “It’s weird, but I guess that’s how Christians are.”

“So does the boyfriend live here?”

“I guess.”

Ed went in his room, sat on the bed, and ate, disappointed. He felt rejected, even though he’d made no advance. This, he thought, was indicative of how much he desired her, despite how little he knew about her, despite the fact that all he did know of her—her evangelical, he imagined, devotion to Christ—seemed dumb. In search of an explanation, he tried to align his impressions of Taylor with his impression of Christians in general. He was able to, easily. She’d seemed wholesome and hopeful. Naïve. Wrong somehow about how the world saw her. Too demure for how striking she was. But all of that only made him desire her more deeply, he realized, because his attraction was rooted in his perception of her innocence, which he wanted to exploit. Wanted to but wouldn’t, since she had a boyfriend. He tried to think of someone else he might desire but only came up with a certain bartender who treated him like a burden.

When Ed was done eating, he smoked his one hitter and he had this memory, which he remembered often: his sister was in high school and she was as frustrated and pent-up and confused as any teenager but she lacked the government of intellect, so she couldn’t console herself, so she would scream and cry in tantrums that could go on for an hour or more and one time she was being unreasonable and weeping at the top of the stairs and their dad, who worked as an economist for the South Carolina Department of Revenue, was trying to calm her but he couldn’t and then he reached back and slapped her and you could hear the smack and of course this only made everything worse. His dad must’ve felt a version of disappointment then that Ed would never understand.

Ed’s father was the kindest man he knew, but Ed was suspicious of this kindness, suspected that his father was disguising disappointment and resignation as acceptance and satisfaction. This was a cruel distrust. His father didn’t deserve it. His father stayed up late, drinking beer and flossing his teeth and watching soccer on TV by himself. His father spoke four languages plus some Russian and he’d read every story J.F. Powers ever wrote, but life, it seemed, was a chore he was just trying to get through in good spirits.

Ed knew this was the wrong way to think about life but he didn’t know the right way, so he called his sister back, thinking maybe she’d unwittingly offer him a clue. She didn’t answer but there was no reason to leave her a message: he knew she’d call him as soon as she saw his missed call. She loved him, Ed knew. It felt good to know this. And maybe this was the clue: love feels good and should be pursued. If this was a clue, it indicated nothing about what he should do.

He took another hit from his one-hitter and sunlight came in through the small window near the ceiling and he thought about how the afternoon is so inviting when you aren’t inside it. So he remained there, in his room, all afternoon.