
Every morning, all around the world, people woke up and promised to change their lives, but they never actually went through with it. Petey had done that a million times and he was done now—he was done trying.
There was a time when he wanted to be a singer-songwriter in New York. He’d gone
there after university, he’d done the whole thing. It didn’t work out. If he’d tried harder it might have happened, but he didn’t and it didn’t. Anyway, who listened to that shit these days? So now he’d moved back to Ontario. He was renting a little farmhouse two towns over from the place he was from. He’d decided to give up. He thought it would feel freeing, giving up, but it didn’t feel like much. He was twenty-nine years old.
Petey sat in his living room and put on the Jays game. The Jays were lousy, but the sight of all these guys running and swinging and slapping each other’s asses made him depressed. They’d worked hard and they’d gotten what they wanted. He watched Vladdy drain a fastball to deep center field. He turned the TV off and called his mother.
“Hi, honey,” his mother said.
“Hey, Ma,” Petey said. “Can I come over for dinner?”
“Of course, honey,” his mother said. “Stu will be here too. Is that okay?”
Petey hung up. It wasn’t that Stu was sleeping with his mom. It was that Stu was a too-accurate vision of one alternative future. A couple years of education and a lifetime humping a desk at Uline. Now broad and glazed in retirement. Petey turned the TV back on. The Jays were up, 1-0 over the Orioles, which somehow made him feel worse.
Petey wasn’t going to do anything interesting, like kill himself or drink himself to death. He didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. He was just going to sit in front of the TV for the next thirty to sixty years. He’d rented the farmhouse because he thought it’d be nice. Exile in the countryside—a little bit glamorous. It wasn’t, though, not really. The property was ringed with new development. Machines ate the earth. Streetlights polluted the night sky, obscuring the stars. Plus Petey’s landlords, a British couple, lived in a big house in the middle of the land. He saw them all the time. They were always outside with their enormous dogs, tending to the property or whatever. It seemed like a lot of work.
Now Petey stared out the window at his landlords’ house. It looked like they were having a party. Petey felt powerfully restless. He thought about calling AJ, his friend from high school, or Meg, his friend in New York. But the idea of talking on the phone was exhausting—catching up, making plans. Who had the energy? Maybe he should just go to the party. Dusk was falling and there was a little string of lights up on the landlords’ patio. He hadn’t been invited but the landlords wouldn’t turn him away if he just showed up. He could pretend he’d just been walking by.
The enormous dogs were running around the party, barking. Margaret handed Petey a gin and tonic and ushered him in, like she’d been expecting him. Margaret and her silent husband, Philip, had made their money in educational software or something. They’d lost it all to an unscrupulous business partner, then made it back. Petey forgot how they wound up in Canada from England. Margaret had probably told him once. She was a nice enough lady. She introduced Petey as “the tenant.”
“Before Petey,” she said to someone, “we rented that farmhouse out to a Montessori school.”
“I’ve got friends who sent their kids to Montessori school,” someone said. “Those kids were functionally illiterate, right up through high school.”
“That’s Waldorf,” someone else said. “You’re thinking of Waldorf.”
“That Montessori woman really took advantage of us,” Margaret said, shaking her head. “I’m a soft touch. But Petey here is a good boy.” She patted his arm maternally. There was complicated jazz playing in the background.
Petey wandered around the outside of the house with his gin and tonic. It was a big old stone house. Margaret and Philip had probably spent a lot of time and money fixing it up. Sometimes Petey saw deer and coyotes at the edges of the property. Margaret and Philip had chickens they were always losing to the coyotes.
At the side door Petey found a woman sitting on the steps. He stopped and stared at her. She was holding one of Margaret and Philip’s chickens. It looked perfectly natural, the way she was holding it. It was a profoundly domestic image. For the first time ever, maybe, Petey had visions of quiet traditional bliss—a house, children, chickens. He decided to run with it. He hadn’t talked to a woman in a while, except at the canoe livery, which didn’t count since they were customers. The woman wore a pink tank top and khaki shorts and had long brown hair, almost to her waist. When she looked up at him, her eyes were green.
“Hey,” Petey said. Then he said, “Nice chicken.”
The woman stared down at the chicken in her lap, like this was her first time noticing it.
Petey said, “Needed a break?”
“My parents dragged me here,” the woman said. Now Petey wondered how old she was. She had one of those faces. She could’ve been thirty or she could’ve been twenty.
“I grew up around here too,” Petey said. “Two towns over.” This didn’t appear to interest the woman. So he said, “I was living in New York for a while.”
“New York?” the woman said.
“Yeah,” Petey said. “New York.”
“I’ve never been to New York,” the woman said.
“It’s great,” Petey said.
“Why’d you leave?” the woman said.
Petey thought about this. Finally he said, “It’s not the same New York it used to be.” He hoped he sounded wise and jaded. “There’s too much money there now. It’s only for rich people now.”
“I’d like to go to New York,” the woman said. She put the chicken down and stood up.
“Well,” she said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
“Sure,” Petey said. “Be seeing you.”
The woman walked back around the house. After a moment Petey took her spot on the steps. He reached for the chicken but it darted away, clucking, so he just listened to the buzz of the party. He heard someone say, “You talk the way people with Botox smile.”
The canoe livery was on the river that wound its way through town. In the summer months people came to rent canoes and kayaks. Some people rented big plastic tubes and just floated there in the river, like they were in a pool. Petey had no particular experience with canoes. It was just a job. He sat at the cash register and ate Twizzlers out of a glass jar. He listened to new country on the radio. He handed out life jackets and paddles. There were bottles of sunscreen and mosquito spray by the till but nobody ever bought any. Customers would squint at the bottles and ask how much they cost and then leave. A few hours later they’d return to the canoe livery, bright red and scratching themselves.
Next door to the canoe livery was a little ice cream parlor. Customers went there for ice cream after their little boating trips. When there weren’t any customers, Petey sat at the door of the livery and looked at the river, the water’s edge, the ice cream parlor. He was doing this one day when a Lexus pulled up. The woman from the party got out of the passenger seat and walked into the ice cream parlor. She was wearing shorts and a tank top again. The Lexus drove off.
Petey waited a little bit. Then he put the back in five minutes sign on the door of the canoe livery and walked to the ice cream parlor. The woman was standing behind the counter, eating two scoops of ice cream from a sugar cone.
“Hey,” Petey said.
The woman looked at him blankly. “Can I help you?” she said.
“We met at the party the other day,” Petey said. “Margaret’s party. You were holding a chicken.”
“Oh,” the woman said. “Right.”
“I didn’t know you worked here,” Petey said. “I work at the canoe livery right next door.”
“Canoe livery,” the woman said.
“That’s right,” Petey said.
“I just started,” the woman said. She went right on eating her ice cream. There was nothing erotic about the way she ate it. Nor did it seem particularly wholesome, the way she was when she held the chicken. She just looked hungry. She was eating it like an apple, biting it with her teeth. One scoop was white and the other was fluorescent pink and green, like an oil slick in a parking lot.
“My name’s Petey,” Petey said.
“Lenore,” the woman said. “You want some ice cream?”
“No thanks,” Petey said. The woman—Lenore—shrugged. She went on methodically eating her ice cream. When she had worn the two scoops down to the edge of the cone, she reached into the display freezer and got two more scoops and put them back in the same cone. The flavors she was eating were called Thrilla Vanilla and Bubblegum Breeze.
“When you’re a kid, you’re only allowed to have ice cream as a treat,” Lenore said. “But
now I work here. I can have as much as I want.” She took one more bite and then held the cone
out, considering it. She threw it into the garbage can behind her.
“Listen,” Petey said. “You want to get a drink sometime or something?”
Lenore shrugged again. “Fine,” she said. She gave him an address and told him to pick her up tonight at nine.
Sometimes, when Petey remembered what music used to mean to him—when he was driving and listening to the radio and a song came on that he’d loved as a teenager, say, or when he was in his little farmhouse and noticed his guitar sitting accusingly in the corner—he was shocked at how naïve he’d been. The person who’d thought he would become a professional musician—that person was like an alien from outer space.
In New York he’d played cafes and open-mic nights, hassled promoters for opening gigs, paid through the nose for studio time. It didn’t come to much. He was in the US illegally and he worked a couple of under-the-table jobs to make rent. One was at a shitty by-the-hour practice space in East Williamsburg. It was called the Sweatshop, which seemed sort of insensitive since it was in an actual former sweatshop. Hordes of rat-faced kids and dudes with lank oily hair would stream through, playing just the worst music imaginable, all of them sure they were titans of rock and roll. It made Petey feel both superior and depressed. It was a lot to juggle, mentally. There was lewd graffiti all over the walls of the Sweatshop. One bit of graffiti said, “The Ballad of John Henry but instead of folk music it’s porn and instead of a steam drill it’s a Sybian.”
There was this one band, though, that was pretty good. They were young—not kids, but young—and they played this kind of synthy dance-punk that should’ve been annoying but wasn’t. When they practiced in the room next to the main office Petey would listen with genuine interest, and he noted the way they worked and reworked their songs over time, never quite satisfied until, suddenly, they were satisfied. There was a song he especially admired, sort of eerie and chilly, that went, Sometimes things just fall apart. / Sometimes things just fall apart. Unlike the other bands they didn’t hotbox the practice rooms or leave beer cans lying around. They just came and went and paid in exact change.
At some point they stopped coming to the Sweatshop, and Petey didn’t think much of it until, one day, he was coming out of the subway and saw a stretch of posters plastering a construction site. The posters were of the synthy dance-punk band. They were releasing an album on a respected independent label. The four members of the band stared out from the poster at Petey, and he stared back at them. He didn’t do anything dramatic, like pack up and leave New York that very day, but something sort of changed in him, and a couple of months later he headed back to Ontario and rented the little farmhouse and bought a large flat-screen television and decided he was done.
That evening, as he got ready, Petey watched Jeopardy. He wasn’t great at Jeopardy but he’d liked watching it with his mother when he was a kid. Occasionally he knew the answers. He said, “Who is St. Augustine?” He said, “What is spooky action at a distance?” He said, “What is Life?”
When he went to pick up Lenore, her address turned out to be a big McMansion-type place on the other side of town. He figured it was her parents’ place. Petey had put on a collared shirt and a pair of nice jeans, but when Lenore came out the front door she was once again wearing shorts and a tank top. He wondered if she only had the one outfit. The house seemed big enough that she ought to be able to afford more than the one outfit. When she got into his car, he said, “You live with your parents?”
“Yup,” she said.
Petey paused. “How old are you?” he said.
“Twenty-five,” she said.
Petey figured they’d go to one of the nice new bars in town. He was expecting to pay fourteen or even fifteen dollars for a cocktail and he had made his peace with that. Instead, Lenore suggested they go to Duke’s, a roadhouse-style spot on the outskirts. Petey had driven by Duke’s a lot but never gone in. It didn’t seem like his kind of place, or hers for that matter, but he said sure and they drove out there, not talking. Lenore fiddled with the radio.
There were a couple of cars and motorcycles in the parking lot at Duke’s. A group of guys stood around at the entrance, smoking. They grinned at Lenore as she went in. Then their eyes passed over Petey and went hard.
Inside there was a band playing something like lounge music. The singer had a blonde wig on and a silver sequined dress that glittered like a disco ball. There was also an actual disco ball dangling from the ceiling. The bar was mostly empty. As they approached, the bartender poured a shot of whiskey and put a bottle of Labatt on a coaster. “Hey, Lenore,” the bartender said. Then he turned to Petey. “And what’s the lady having?”
Petey said he’d have a gin and tonic. By the time they sat down on their stools, Lenore had already downed her shot and the bartender was pouring her another.
As she drank her Labatt, Lenore dispelled most of the mysteries surrounding her existence. She said her father was an executive at a weapons manufacturer, producing things that killed people and increased the net total of misery in the world. He had just sold a bunch of tanks to Saudi Arabia. Lenore had barely graduated from high school and never went to college. Her father made her get the job at the ice cream parlor after she got arrested. Petey waited for her to say why she got arrested but she didn’t. Finally he said, “You like working at the ice cream parlor?”
Lenore shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said.
“Something else you’d rather be doing?” Petey said.
She did her second shot. “When you’re pretty, everyone wants something from you,” she said. “They don’t really want you you—they want some piece of you they can carve off that nobody else can have. It’s all they can hope to own. And when enough people do that, over time, there isn’t enough of you left over for yourself. I’ve spent most of my life just kind of selling myself for parts. So, like, now what?”
The reflection off the disco ball passed across her face like a meteor shower. “For a little while I was seeing this rich guy in Toronto,” she said. “He tried to, you know, attend to my cultural education or whatever. He took me to the opera and the symphony. I didn’t really care about any of it. One day, we were out on the lake in his boat. It was a nice enough summer day. The water was, you know, glittering. And I could tell he wanted it to be a sort of meaningful experience. But I also knew that deep down he just wanted to trap me in this moment for himself. This would be the piece of me he would keep forever. And really it was just another day, like any other day. So I wasn’t, like, in awe of the whole thing the way he wanted me to be. He kept saying, ‘Isn’t this beautiful? Isn’t this beautiful?’ I just kept drinking his champagne. Finally he snapped and asked if anything at all brought me joy, and I realized he was actually onto something. I couldn’t name a single thing. Not one.”
She finished her beer. “After that I spent a while wondering why I wasn’t happy,” she said. “I really tried to figure it out. But then I decided it was a boring thing to think about.”
Lenore got another beer and also another shot of whiskey. Petey had barely touched his gin and tonic. He realized with some sadness that Lenore was just slumming it at Duke’s. Probably she was just slumming it with him. He thought of her holding the chicken on the steps of the stone house, the throb of longing he’d felt. That was the problem with hoping someone would save you: that particular someone always needed saving too.
“Fuck it,” Lenore said. “Let’s have some fun.”
They played darts in the corner and Lenore laughed and clapped when he missed by a mile. They played pool and Lenore cleaned his clock. Everyone at the bar had their eyes on her. By the time Petey finished his gin and tonic, Lenore was on her fourth or fifth beer. At some point she said something that sounded like, “I’m going to call the galaxy.” She tottered off to the corner and spoke for a while into her phone. Then she came back and leaned into his shoulder, just resting for a moment, and he smelled the lilac or the lavender of her shampoo. She got on her tiptoes and whispered in his ear.
“I know a place,” she said.
Petey figured the place would be a motel or another bar or something. Instead she directed him to one of the half-finished housing developments that encroached on Margaret’s property. The development was called Silver Acres, which when Petey thought about it didn’t make a lot of sense. Lenore pointed him to some specific house that seemed identical to the others. It was incomplete, still covered in Tyvek, which flapped in the night breeze. Petey parked out front and Lenore took him by the hand and they went around the back. The rear door was propped open by a brick.
“Your parents own this place or something?” Petey said.
“Nope,” Lenore said. They went down a flight of stairs in pitch blackness. Lenore released his hand and Petey heard her shuffle around in the dark. Then there was the chunk of a switch and suddenly the room blazed with light.
The basement is unfinished. The walls are pink with insulation, the floor is just poured concrete. A mysteriously stained mattress, a beat-up vinyl couch. Empty beer bottles everywhere. Industrial lights, running on a generator or something like a generator. A pile of waterlogged books in the corner. Petey picks a book up and flips it open. He reads a line. There comes a moment in a person's life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit.
“I’m going to tell my girlfriend to come by,” Lenore says. She takes out her phone and taps a message. Then she disappears into the darkness beyond the lights and music begins to play, coming from a set of hidden speakers somewhere. It takes Petey a moment to recognize the song. The song goes, Sometimes things just fall apart. / Sometimes things just fall apart. Lenore reappears in the light and starts to dance. She doesn’t really do it in time to the music. She just sort of drifts.
When Lenore had said my girlfriend Petey figured she meant a platonic girlfriend, a girlfriend in the old-fashioned sense of a woman who was friends with another woman. But when the girlfriend appears in the unfinished basement of the unfinished house it’s obvious that Lenore had meant it literally. Lenore and her girlfriend kiss passionately for a while at the bottom of the stairs while Petey watches in the bright industrial lighting. Then the girlfriend removes herself from Lenore and walks over to Petey with her hand outstretched.
“I’m Galaxy,” the girlfriend says. She has a thick Quebecois accent.
“I’m Petey,” Petey says.
“Hey Peewee,” Galaxy says.
Galaxy is tall and wide and wears a flat-brimmed Expos hat. She has a constellation of scabs on her face. Her handshake is surprisingly limp. When they’re finished shaking hands she walks over to the couch and collapses with a sigh, like she’s at the end of a long day of work.
“So, Peewee,” she says. “What’s the story?”
“The story,” Petey says.
“The story,” Galaxy says. She takes a large butterfly knife from the depths of her pockets and begins to clean her nails. The music pulses. In the corners of the room, in the corners of Petey’s vision, Lenore dances and twirls, dances and twirls. He decides to be honest.
“The story is that I’ve given up,” he says.
Galaxy seems interested in this.
“Let me tell you something about giving up,” she says. “Last time I was in the can, I was in maximum security, because of my record. There was a riot. I got accused of being the one that started the riot. So they sent me to supermax. Okay. So, according to the system, I’m dangerous. But even in supermax, people got a choice. Some people talk to the prison chaplain and try to go to lower security. But that’s using the system, which I refuse to do. I did my crime, I do my time. They go, Oh, we’re going to give you early release—fuck you. They go, Do a skill and we’ll give you six months’ release in four years—fuck you. I’m not doing shit. You go for a parole hearing, you know you’re not going to tell the truth, because you didn’t change. Nobody ever changes. Fuck off. I don’t have the time to walk over there and lie to three assholes who’re just going to lie to me too. No fucking way.”
“But you talked to the chaplain,” Lenore says, suddenly, from the corner.
“I talk to the chaplain,” Galaxy says. “She asks me to come in one day. She goes, Galaxy, you know, you can come to the chapel all you want, it won’t get you a minute less time. I don’t have that power. It doesn’t matter here. In the chapel you actually can’t play the system. You won’t get early release. You won’t get another piece of bread. It doesn’t work that way. So I say, Okay, great. We can talk for real now. We can tell the truth. The chaplain says, Galaxy, I would like to lay my hands on you. This is just fucking insane. But I got nothing better to do. So she lays her hands on me. And she says, Galaxy, God is telling me you got the gift of mercy. Now, nobody who knows me would say I’m merciful. That’s just not me. So whatever, I leave, thinking this chaplain is just some crazy lady. But the next time I’m in the dining hall, and some bitch gets in my fucking shit, and I got her on the fucking floor and I’m ready to just fucking do it, just fucking do it, I hear some little voice in my head. It’s the chaplain, or God, or whoever, telling me I got the gift of mercy. So instead of leaving this bitch’s brains all over the fucking floor I just break her nose and walk away. I was stuck in solitary for the rest of my time and that was that. Now, that might not sound like mercy to you, but it’s mercy to me. And I knew after that that the chaplain was right and I had the gift of mercy in me. And I knew that God put it there.”
The music goes on and on. Galaxy takes the tip of her knife and uses it to pick a scab from her face. She examines the scab for a moment, then puts it in her mouth and eats it. She points the knife toward Lenore, who is still flowing in and out of the shadowy limits of the industrial lights.
“Anyway,” Galaxy says. “It’s a hundred bucks for a blow job. Three hundred for the whole nine yards. Anything beyond that is negotiable, but she’s got to be okay with it.”
“Oh,” Petey says. It dawns on him what’s going on. “I’ve never really done that before. I’m not sure that’s what I came here to do.”
Galaxy looks up from her nails and stares at Petey intently. “I respect that, Peewee,” she says. “Why don’t we all just party, then, huh?” From the depths of her pockets she produces a glass pipe. From another depth she produces a baggie. Inside the baggie is the glitter of two hundred billion trillion stars.
Lenore emerges from her dwelling place at the edges of the darkness. She slips onto the beat-up vinyl couch next to Galaxy. Galaxy takes a single exquisite shard from the baggie and puts it in the pipe and heats up the bowl and breathes in deep and then blows potent clouds of chemical pollution into the air. Lenore laps the smoke from the air like an eater of spirits.
Galaxy gestures at Petey to come over. He sits down on the couch and she hands him the pipe.
“I gave myself up to God,” she says. “That’s what giving up really is.”
When Petey inhales he understands that this is the feeling he’s been looking for all along. He is going to annihilate himself in the service of something greater. A purpose! O Lord, at last, a purpose. He is Abraham on the mountain, he is Joan of Arc at the stake. Lenore gets up and resumes dancing to the cold beat of the music, and Galaxy joins her, but now the dancing is very fast, frantic. They are ecstatic with charisma. Above the music Petey hears, or thinks he hears, the yips of the coyotes, making their nighttime raids on the borders of civilization, and he imagines their shining eyes at the edges of the light in this very room, looking on hungrily as a clan of ancient peoples dance around a fire. The coyotes are getting closer. Their teeth, their tongues. The world is fallen but Petey is very far removed from it now. He knows what to do.
He gets up and goes out in search of something to take apart and put back together again..
Drew Nelles has an MFA from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He has worked as the senior producer of the podcast Crimetown in New York, as a senior editor at the Walrus magazine in Toronto, and as the editor-in-chief of Maisonneuve magazine in Montreal. His journalism and fiction have won numerous awards and been published throughout the United States and Canada.
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