The Day After

David Hollander

Summer. Blinding, blistering, suffocating summer. On Long Island, middle Long Island, west of the vainglorious Hamptons and east of any bonafide Manhattan affiliation, on this Long Island of housing developments and strip malls, of American Dreams flayed across the blanched sod of half-acre rectangles, here all summers are such, as far back as anyone remembers. Which, after all, is not very far. This island's heritage is a generation old, maybe two, and no older. It's a land of local immigrants, the expatriates of New York's outer boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. This Long Island has no history, no antecedents, and these smothering summers of mosquito plagues and rainless humidity are the birthright of the younger generation, the true claim-holders of an already-failed project, that lower-middle-class quest to conquer anonymity, to dip a pan in the river, to take a shortcut, to hope like only the hopeless can. This younger generation, rife with all of the expected adolescent cliques and stereotypes, ripe with sexual desire and its blind and feverish directives, these are the frontiersmen and women competing to pitch flags, to make this island their own, to find meaning in it.

So then, this summer, 1983, economic boom, a time of plenty even for this lower-middle-class, who climb like grinning monkeys into fuel efficient subcompacts, or onto the shining steel of the Long Island Railroad, armed with lifetime round-trip tickets to Manhattan employment, involved in a constant voyage to replenish themselves (not unlike those great pandas that spend the entirety of their waking lives chewing bamboo). 1983, a job for everyone, a litigious America that believes wholeheartedly in legacy, in claim-making, in getting what you've got coming, a Republican America for those who care, an old-school commitment to the old-school ideals and values of the obviously old-school Framers. 1983, the cold war still cold, a deep freeze, really, although anyone on this Long Island would scoff at the notion. This must, after all, be an invisible cold, hovering miles above the oppressive felt blanket of Long Island summer. Cold war, nuclear paranoia, like a tale from childhood, nothing more.

Pan-in, Medford, dead center Long Island, a hub of sorts, marked most by its total unremarkability. Perfect geometry in Medford, one housing development connected to the next via simple and straight spokes of asphalt, a bird's eye view yielding the impression of a high-school molecular model, the parts combining to make some new erector-set reality. Perfect square houses arranged in perfect mile-wide rectangles on land perfectly razed and flat as stone-ground wafers. There are rumors that farmers once cultivated this land and forced crops from its arid underbelly. Could this be true? Cedar-shingled houses raised hastily and then forgotten by mad and frenzied builders, houses coated on back and sides with flat orange-tiled exoskeletons, houses inhabited in a rapidfire gracelessness. This is the nature of Medford, a place that sprang from cracked mounds of dry earth. It's suburbia at its most nonsensical, houses corseted by collars of dead or diseased sod, occupied it seems by default, and by people who are interchangeable by virtue of their identical impulses, interchangeable by virtue of their identical shelters, interchangeable by virtue of their competitive scorn for one another (one man's success is another's failure, after all, the golden rule of capitalism). No, not a friendly place either, this Medford, not a place where you talk to neighbors in atavistic small-town quaintness. And if ever it had been farmland, then the farmer's dedication to the earth, that crucial beautiful laborious symbiosis, has long gone belly-up, pitting earth against the stuff above it in a flavorless war. Long Island, the literal littoral of this island, does not care for these shoddy, heavy boxes of lumber, squatting like the soldiers of an occupation.

Medford, then, a geometry of blacktop. A line in this geometry, line A-B, let's call it Rustic Avenue, just another row of residences like so many others. And a year not unlike other years, 1983. Put yourself there, at 31 Rustic Avenue, Medford, 1983: Sun-baked cedar shingles, black shutters clinging like prehistoric beetles, a lawn burnt and yellowed in patches like eczema. Inside right now, Harlan Kessler, rising high school junior, 16 years old, a teen like other teens, in a year like other years, in a story like so many others that it hurts to have to tell it.

Friday, late afternoon, and Bob Kessler, patriarch of this nuclear unit, wants breakfast.

"Jesus Christ, Alice," he whines, head buried in the refrigerator. "Haven't we got anything to eat around here?" Powerful and obese, his round body juts from the opening like a cist; his plaid pajamas are frayed at all edges, and torn beneath the armpits, part of his casual collection, one supposes. He cranes backward to address his wife more directly, eyes lined with frustration and fatigue.

"Can't we keep some food in the goddamn house? That's not much to ask." His black hair is thick and tousled, and in his beard and moustache a white residue, some pasty remnant of the ether-world, of dreams and spittle, clings. He gives off an odor not unlike cheese.

"Eggs," Alice says from her seat at the kitchen table. "There should be eggs." She has a pile of bills before her, and a black-bound checkbook. Joint account, of course, one of those clever conditions of matrimony. Her long black hair, once silky and liquid, has dried up on her, its frazzled ends sweeping from gray roots onto the faux-marble veneer of the Formica table. It was part of their initial booty, this table, one of the furnishings purchased for the specific conquest of this house. Large, cheap, and (initially at least) sturdy, it's a quintessential Tableau Americain (despite its Tokyo origin and construction). It's also a symbol of rank-promotion, too bulky, too decadent, to have been imagined in the little apartment in Queens, eight years ago, before Medford made its siren-call.

5 PM breakfast, for Bob Kessler, is not a function of sloth or unemployment. His is the night shift at the Post Office in Flushing, Queens. A ninety minute drive during rush hour, but a mere sixty at 8 PM, when he makes his inspired dash against the flow of traffic, the evening rush hour just petering out on the other side of the divider. Sometimes, watching those cars returning from Manhattan, jostling like arterial freight through the Long Island Expressway, Bob has the oddest premonition of impending doom. He doesn't expect a car wreck or a hurtling meteorite, it's nothing so tangible. Just a feeling that this has all happened before, to disastrous ends, and that his behavior can have no bearing on the eternal recurrence not only of traffic patterns, but of the cramped lives and unresolved emotions within those loops and straightaways.

Other times, he puts on his favorite oldies station and croons doo-wop and Motown like a teenager, which he once was. He'd sang in a band himself, four-part harmony; he was a soprano despite his big bones. Nowadays, he sometimes sings for his children, his three boys, who laugh at him in response. It embarrasses them, he knows. But is it his voice that is embarrassing? That's a hard pill to swallow. He likes to believe that it's just the idea of his singing, the idea that he might once have done it seriously and with conviction, something they can't accept of their postal-oriented father. An even harder pill to swallow, actually. The glory days lose their gloss when they're so steadfastly mocked. What good are his epic victory tales of yesteryear when told and retold to these dazed offspring? They take everything as tongue-in-cheek, even his most earnest triumphs and regrets: "I sang in a band, we almost cut an album, there were companies interested in us...."

Alice stands before the stove now -- it's the path of least resistance. Eggs crack and fry, sizzling, the humidity holding the grease like a prize. Through the back window, behind the chain link fence that envelops their plot, hovering just above the mussed permanent-wave of malformed scrub pines, the sun is going orange. In the thick air, its edges blur, it becomes a cotton giant, tired and sad, endlessly pitiable. Think of all that pressure, the responsibility, to never burn out, to stave off darkness forever, no respite, not unlike the burden of a heartbeat.

Bob slouches his usual slouch. His habit is neither to read nor to converse at table, but simply to eat. To be seated without a full plate throws him into anxious confusion. He knows this is gluttony, and tries regularly to reduce food's crass power over him. He invents games; he plays a warden of sorts: Who's in charge here? he asks of his steaming mashed potatoes. So what's so special about you? he chastises his chicken cutlets. Soon, he will diet, he'll retrieve his youthful build, so long buried, and the redness of his eyes will fade to lucid white. Those charming eyes he had as a younger man! Not unlike the viscous egg white sizzling in the pan. He'll take control of his fat and Alice will love him for it, it will be love again and not this other thing. He'll do better by her, he'll switch from nights to days, more time with the kids, less regret, less nostalgia. Action! Action now! He can do it, goddammit!

Alice rushes at the stove, the clink and clatter of discontent, her body going stiffly through the motions of over-easy. That's how he likes them, runny, sickly, like flu-mucus.

"You know," she says, her face sweating beneath a heavy coat of foundation, her eyes buried in the pan, "you could do this yourself. I've got a million things to get done tonight."

There it is! Personal reform is impossible around her! Every time he vows to make things better, she ruins his eager fairy tale. A million things to get done, he knows what that means! She's been working more and more lately, telephone soliciting for "BriteShine Carpets," an operation run by this guy Scott Hickey, a real asshole, Bob is sure, though they've only met once or twice, in passing. Hickey swings by the house from time to time to discuss the business with Alice. Guiltlessly, Bob eavesdrops, despite the fact that Alice has established the living room as her office, the only downstairs room that can be sealed off, its long open arch partitioned by a set of track doors, wafer thin and laughable but a barrier nonetheless. They discuss demographics, Scott and Alice. Hickey suggests neighborhoods to canvas: "Lots of Italians in Mastic Beach, working class. Carpets matter to those people. Their houses are gaudy, hideous! But everything's gotta be dusted and waxed five times a fuckin week."

And Alice giggles in agreement.

For a while, Alice made a simple and meager commission on sales, but now she's getting a percentage of profits and, fact is, she's making more than Bob is comfortable with. His wife shouldn't have to work. His wife shouldn't want to work. His are old-school values, and this is (in his ideal and fantastic version) an old-school household, being dragged under by shifts in the hierarchy, fault lines in what his own father used to call the natural order of things.

"Like what?" he asks, his voice going up an octave, as it does when it's meant to threaten. Eggs and toast land before him, rattling in a violent drum roll. He smells her, for a moment, the pungent odor of her flesh and makeup, sweet and sour. He imagines making love to her, and is repulsed. Not by her, though - at least not exclusively. It's the image of the two of them together. Something inside of him flips and swells with this image, and he feels a wave of nausea come and go.

"You know what," she says. "You know I've got work to do." Her voice rises, a preemptive strike. "I've gotta pay these bills and then I've got the books to balance for Scott and then later...."

"The hell with Scott!" he explodes, only a moment after feeling the little match-flick in his head. That's what his temper is like. There's an instant in which to prepare for it, not unlike the moment in which one realizes an orgasm is imminent. There's a surrender to this inevitability, an opportunity to prepare for pure sensation. A fuse sparks to life, and then there's gunpowder.

"That job's ruining this family!" he suggests. "You can't even sit down to dinner on a Sunday without the goddamn phone ringing off the hook!"

"We couldn't live without that job!" she screams. She's a fair match for him in the screaming department. She never cowers, and there's a certain pride in her violence that frightens Bob. He relies on his ability to intimidate; that's the glue that holds this all together. But Alice's dour confidence seems to grow every day, and Bob holds his pole position in this family's race to the grave precariously. And to think, only a moment ago he'd had loving thoughts, he'd had that urge to take responsibility for this family and its shortcomings. He'd had that pioneer's urge to mend things, to make them livable, to pit himself against adversity and to overcome. And now, sixty seconds later, he is filled with a killer's venom, with no urge other than to shred, pulverize, and devour.

"Bullshit!" he rallies. "Bullshit! I've been supporting us for twenty years! Twenty goddamn years! Who's this Hickey character, huh? Who's he think he is! I don't want you doing this work anymore!"

"It's my job!"

"Yours!?" she wonders. "Look around. They can't stand you. You don't even talk to them."

"They hate you," she spits. "Don't you know that? They hate you!" She pauses just a moment as he reels from this, and then delivers the uppercut: "And they're not the only ones. You're a coward. Cheap!," she spits. "Lazy! You eat like a pig. I hate you."

She storms from the kitchen, and her heavy footsteps punish the stairs. Bob doesn't reply or pursue. She hates him. They fight a lot; they yell a lot. But can she really...hate him? That's never passed between them before. It hurts. Like a lithographer's stone dropped on his chest. His children hate him? Not true! He loves his boys. He's bewildered. Hate. Like a bone in the throat. Hate. They hate him.

He sticks a fork into tepid eggs, staring into his plate. Swirls of white and pale yellow, a foam rubber discus that turns his stomach, an odor like a wet, dirty rag. Outside, dropping beneath the scrub pines, the sun is blood red, a tropical red, red like a maraschino cherry, floating in a sky of pink liquid haze. The back lawn has grown too long, this typical Long Island backyard, eighty percent crab grass and endemic weeds, overgrown and patchy, crisp blonde blades severe enough to discourage prospective wildlife. Three sons and it's a headache just to get the lawn mowed. He'd asked Harlan to do it, days ago. Why should he have to ask again? Harlan, typical middle child, always thinking, goddamn lazy son of a bitch. Bob is tired of Harlan's attitude, that smirk he brandishes too readily, and all the intelligence crap. Everything's a discussion. It burns him up. He's the father. He's always right by virtue of that alone. It's sabotage, that's what. His vision, his ideal, his sense of what his life (and thus these ancillary lives) ought to be, all under a constant and unbearable pressure, a seismic subterfuge, slipping away from him like a strand's disappearance into the undertow.

And then there's that sun, that fruit salad melon of a sun, invincible witness and voyeur. He feels a tear accumulating, and then rolling hot down his face.

Upstairs, Harlan lies on his bed, shirtless, pants around his ankles, lost in a chaos of masturbation fantasies, one image running up against the next like the churn of stormy seas: Girls from school offer themselves; women from porn mags; his own aunt Susan (who he wants desperately!). They line up outside his door and, in a hailstorm of desire, he takes them on one by one, assuring the anxious onlookers that they'll get their turn soon enough.

To see him in this position is to witness him in his natural habitat. Masturbation, for Harlan (who at sixteen is still a virgin), is at the very foundation of a personal Hierarchy of Needs. Without it (four, five, six times a day), nothing else can be accomplished, nothing else can be imagined. His collection of science fiction books could never count for more than their weight, and his guitar would grow warped and dusty in a hidden corner.

So then, see him in this position: His straight brown hair is long and growing, part of his recent commitment to rock stardom (more to come on this, be patient). He is thin in many places, most notably in his long face, but also in his shoulders (which taper in a narrow, inverted "v," a far cry from the broad-backed male ideal), and in his slender fingers and wrists, those delicate fingers that he tells himself are the mark of his artistic promise, fingers meant for greatness, freakishly thin spokes of bone. And, since we do have him in this position, his sexual organ (is there no better way to say this?) is also rather thin, which he has noticed via comparison during recently mandated showers after summer baseball practice. He has managed, trembling and terrified, to hide his diminutive centerpiece from peering eyes, disrobing behind a wall of lockers, the industrial stench of adolescent sweat and testosterone suffocating him. He has managed, thus far, to keep his ass turned toward potential witnesses, he and his member showering inconspicuously, in panicked silence.

The act of self-fulfillment does not take long (it seldom does), and his orgasm is dire and excruciating. He sprays the already splotched orange carpet with white droplets, like little pools of light exploding from within. There's an ocean of this light inside of him, and his apparent duty is to empty this reservoir, to deplete this supernova, that's what will bookend his lifetime. He's becoming darker inside, and a splinter of shame wedges into his heart and throat.

He hikes up his torn blue jeans, and turns his attention to an outfit for this evening's event at Dave "The Hitman" Silver's house (a nickname of unknown origin, though Harlan is often accredited with its devisal. The fact that he doesn't recall this moment of alleged genius leads him to believe that it was The Hitman himself who coined the alias, somehow circumnavigating the ridicule associated with requesting a nickname, something any child knows is taboo). Tonight, ABC television will air their much-hyped stab at nuclear prevention, a self-proclaimed "warning to the people and leaders of the world's nuclear powers," and a "devastating and unflinching" stare into the abyss of a post-nuclear-war planet, a made-for-TV social drama set in and around Kansas City entitled, The Day After. It has become, for Harlan and his circle, a much-anticipated excuse for a party, and part of a fortunate confluence of events. The Hitman, son of eccentric, overeducated, and mysteriously wealthy parents, has been left alone in a large house for two weeks while his folks travel aimlessly through small European towns in search of what his father calls, "the dying embers of Old World authenticity." The Hitman loves repeating these snippets, and he and Harlan enjoy a clever rapport surrounding them. ("Ah...yes..." Harlan had quipped in his worst English accent, "the Aww-then-ticity of the Old World, so unlike this hideous New World hamburger fascism."

"Yes," the Hitman returned, "how they do trumpet their burgers nowadays! A veritable brass section of Big Macs!"

"Yes, you bloody old fucker! It's nothing but New World Beef Mongering for us!"

And so on.)

Unlike most hyped products of television and cinema, The Day After has been mysteriously hidden from its prospective audience. No previews, no detailed images, no gory revelation. Instead, there has been only a constant, ominous reminder, thrust upon the unwary during commercial breaks, in the listless interregnum between sitcoms. Black lettering on a candescent screen of hot white: THE DAY AFTER. And a voiceover announcing it as "the most important television event of the 20th century."

This does have Harlan curious, despite his practiced cynicism (even at 16, it is possible to be cynically practiced). And while he and the Hitman have mocked the postmodern simplicity of the ad (as in: "Don't miss the most minimalist television preview ever to brainwash the ignorant masses"), he is also victim to its understated appeal, addicted as he is (and as are most adolescents on this Long Island) to doom and to suffering and to the portent of all things terrible.

But beyond this, the party has that additional appeal of all parties, that glowing hope that tonight's the night, that sex throbs on his crimson horizon, that he will finally, thankfully and gloriously, enter another human body (never mind which body!), that the chemical suspiration of flesh entwined, a rich musty smell as he imagines it, a smell like damp earth, that this will be his. Sweating and naked, feeling what it is to be an adult, a member of that elitist community of fornicators. God, let it be tonight!

He rummages through his dresser, raising a black U2 concert tee-shirt to his nose. Dressing has become difficult for Harlan; he is caught between two worlds. On the left there is his past as an athlete (albeit a mediocre one), his one connection to his father and his brothers, the Wide World of Sports their only forum for communication, and a forum that his father seems to require more than ever, now that Gary is attending a local community college, invisible to professional scouts, flushing his own hopes of baseball glory down the toilet (and home less often, too). And on the right, his future congealing from the amorphous ether of all futures, his life as a guitarist and popular icon, the months on the road, the groupies delivered secretively to his hotel room, the interviews with Spin and Rolling Stone, in which he talks about himself as an awkward adolescent: "Man, I was really shy with girls back then. I didn't get laid until, like, my mid-teens." This character schism is most easily negotiated by the frequent contemplation of suicide, which beckons harmlessly from afar. In aristocratic decadence Harlan assures himself (and others, when the opportunity arises) that he will not make twenty-one. Despite his discerning cynicism, he has yet to recognize the paltry triteness of such assurances. For him, it's a conviction, despite the contrary conviction that he's bound for fame and long lasting glory. In fact, these convictions rely on each other; one could not exist independently of the other. Logic be damned.

The black tee-shirt ("U2" lettered in white), he decides, will do, and he pulls it over his bony frame, standing before his upstairs window and gazing into the backyard, where the sun phases slowly from a deep, fuzzy orange to an exotic red. He stares into this eye, imagining himself as a character in a film, which is how he approaches his life, generally, with some strange inkling that it's all being recorded for later viewing. This explains why, if you were to see him alone, and if he were unaware of your presence, there would be an occasional grin or smirk, an unexplained flexing of his muscles as he turned stage right or left. He's intuitively certain that he's on screen somewhere - his angst and sadness are for an audience other than himself - and the proverbial curtain never drops on this long-running spectacle. Downstairs, voices rise, and Harlan sighs and smirks. "At it again," he says aloud. His parents are fucked up, he's aware of that, and resigned to it, although this particular fight captures his attention as soon as Scott Hickey's name is dropped. His mother's boss. A hairy, broad-shouldered block of a man, like something unfinished.

His father shouts: "Who is this Hickey character anyway?! I don't want you working for him anymore!" It's a fresh topic from Downstairs (Harlan and his younger brother, Terry, have long associated the Downstairs with parental pugilism, and aside from the twenty mandated minutes of Sunday mealtime torture the bottom floor is generally shunned), and one that Harlan has been expecting his father, an old-school man of old-school values, to breech for a while now.

But this argument has another, more piquant appeal to Harlan, who is in a unique position regarding his mother and Mr. Scott Hickey. After all, he was the one who saw them together, in Scott's van, that luxury cruiser with swiveling captain's chairs, rows of carpet samples tucked beneath the rear bench, prickly swatches of color, steeped in sweet acid vats of scotchguard and other chemical preservatives, the van like a stain-proof tomb. She (his mother) had left the house that evening with her girlfriends, Debbie and Linda, for a night of "bunko" (some sort of card game as far as Harlan can tell), a girl's night out, and a reliable bi-weekly event. Bunko has some substance in Medford. It's as historical a tradition as anything here.

She'd left for bunko, but it wasn't bunko that she returned from. Debbie and Linda, makeshift alibis, weren't there. He'd seen it all. Three AM, insomnia, Harlan suffered from it periodically. He heard the van pull up, he knew its well-oiled hum even before climbing to the window and peering down onto the dark street, a single streetlamp casting cool blue shadow, his mother and Scott silhouetted in this indigo haze, groping across the gulf separating those majestic captain's chairs, faces locked together.

His immediate reaction was to think: This is just like that movie, [x]. And then he knew that he was not a good person (not the first time that realization dawned), because here was immediate reality, and already he'd removed it once to the ether-reality of cinema. He shouldn't have been thinking about anything but the fact that his mother was there, ten yards below him, making out with someone who was not his father. This was adultery, and in the balancing ledger of good and evil this was evil simple, his own mother, how could she? But no, these were not his thoughts. His thoughts were of films, and then of religious instruction (was adultery forbidden by the ten commandments? How could it possibly be ranked beside 'thou shalt not kill'? What kind of a system was that?), and then finally, of sex. Of the musty, acrid smell of sex, the imagined scent on his fingers, the way entry would be, warm and wet, like satin, it had been described in pornography he'd found stashed in his father's wardrobe. And the language of those magazines, "Fuck my cunt, baby" and "I want your cock." He'd seen films, read books, but oh! to touch and to be touched that way! His heart ached with this need, his lust came from the heart, lust like hot mercury, sizzling wire through the sternum...he needed it.

And then, with his erection throbbing in his hand, he'd done the worst thing yet. He'd conjured up the image of his own mother, guiding his hand between her legs, then lying back, pulling him on top, the smell, moist lust like a swamp, blissful miasma, his own mother, "Fuck me Harlan," and still he watched the two of them below, watched as he fired his semen as if from a canon, glutinous pellets of light streaming into the carpet in furious bursts as he watched her, his mother, shaky-legged and smiling, exit the decadence of Scott Hickey's carpet-mobile, throwing one last glance toward Scott's own leering, rakish smile, a smile like a hyena, partly human at best. And then she was through the screen door, she was in the house, and Harlan sat in bed holding his spent dick in his hand, panting, with yet another useless morsel of information to catalogue in the family dossier. His mother's infidelity, so what? So what? What good was it to him, what good were these parents, these friends, this neighborhood, these limited possibilities in this spiraling world of red lust and blue death? To fuck, he thought...to fuck.... And in adolescent angst, teenage superiority, he'd said aloud, "I won't kill myself until I fuck." As if this promise to the Death God would pay dividends, a promise he could parlay into penetration, worth his life! Worth it! Worth it!

He hears his mother's angry footsteps rising toward him, and then he hears her slam the bedroom door, the room adjacent to his. He imagines going to her, comforting her, telling her that she's right, that he does hate his father, that they all do, just like she said. And while this starts innocently enough, he then begins to imagine her breasts, her nipple in his mouth, and his hand running up her inner thigh. Do his thoughts condemn him of anything? He isn't sure, but he turns his attention to his guitar, practices his open chords (E, A, D, C, G, the only five he knows). The music thrills him, his participation in it, it's a small miracle. Eventually, his erection subsides.

© 2001 by David Hollander

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