Featured Fiction: Adam Krasnoff
Adam Judah Krasnoff is a writer and editor based in New York. His work has appeared in The Oxonian Review, Harvard Review, and The Southampton Review, among others. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the New York State Summer Writers Institute.
An Introduction from John Fulton
It’s my pleasure to introduce the readers of Arrowsmith Journal to the darkly lyrical work of Adam Krasnoff. In “Recovery Room,” we find out what happens when two strangers meet to hookup. They remain nameless from beginning to end, though they’re hardly anonymous thanks to Krasnoff’s vivid evocation of character. When the narrator and “the boy” talk, their diction and voices tell us what they want and who they are without any weighty exposition or information. Perhaps most impressive in these pages is Krasnoff’s set pieces and his full and spooky evocation of place. We’re in Charleston, though not the high-end parts. Here, for instance, are children at play: In the parking lot of a foreclosed gas station, three children were chasing one another with water pistols, ducking behind the rusted pumps for cover as they darted to and fro. Even from this distance we could make out the colored Band-Aids mottling their knees. With equal dexterity, the author shows us the interior of the bar in which the drunks were more interested in the bottoms of their glasses or the tops of their feet to bother venturing us a glance—all, that is, but one thinly smiling woman in the darkest corner of the room, the only woman in the entire place, whose toothsome Cheshire sneer winked in the semidarkness as if to acknowledge the consummation of a mistake. The “Recovery Room” treats us to many such moments and will leave readers wondering if, in fact, this is a story about “the consummation of a mistake” or not.
Recovery Room
He’d told me to meet him at the Recovery Room, a sorry place underneath the interstate in the gray-brown quarter that divided Charleston’s upscale shopping districts from the rows of ranch houses where men with municipal jobs sat on screened porches and thought aloud. Though it was barely half past three in the afternoon, I could hear from a block away the bellows of a group of guys in camo hats in the paved biergarten arguing darts.
He would be seventeen by Labor Day. His profile had said twenty-one—the blessed, distant year they always seem to choose—but after we’d gotten each other’s phone numbers he quickly told the truth. It was better that way, he said, and I agreed. Dishonesty was of little use. In three days’ time I’d leave the state with two boys I’d met landscaping an old folks home in Goose Creek. The six years between us was no more than a simple curiosity. As I approached the door, a rusted door that could easily have led into the bowels of a ship, my stomach turned, though I’d come here by choice, as if in pursuit of a stench.
I saw him at the farthest stool, locked in an arm-wrestle with a rangy ponytailed guy, a decade my senior at least, whose silver danglers glinted in the dim electric light. The boy was almost double my size in terms of musculature and a good three or four inches taller, too. He won easily, pushing the ponytail’s knuckles onto the surface of the bar and finding my eyes in an instant, the whole of him lit with a knowing smile. I extended a hand, expecting him to shake, but instead of a friendly grasp I received a laddish slap, the sort of hardscrabble gesture I recognized from the mildewed locker rooms and fluorescent halls of certain decrepit schools, which began with clasped hands and ended in the knock of shoulder on shoulder.
The ponytail slunk away.
“You like the place,” he said, without the hint of a question. Surveying the room, I saw only downcast faces in hushed conversation; in here there was none of the animalism of the men outside, caught in the rush of their penetrative game.
“How come they let you in?” I replied. “Does nobody care?”
By way of an answer he clicked his tongue at the bartender, a sinewy black guy whose bald head winked under a naked bulb. He marched over, set a fresh glass on the bar, and poured a whiskey. “Omar doesn’t give a fuck,” the boy said, at which the bartender laughed.
My beer was halfway flat and growing warmer. The mugginess of the afternoon had doubled in here.
“You know Charleston?” he asked me.
“Some,” I said, “I had work in Berkeley County, so I’ve been up and down the last month, and I’ve been down twice before, never for more than a few days at a time.”
“You just working?” he asked.
I shrugged. It had been part of my gambit to keep details like these out of the picture—they helped neither of us, and besides, my situation would be for him either uninteresting or downright disheartening. “I’m working on a project,” I answered eventually. “A photography project, but my equipment was stolen.”
“What’s it you take pictures of?”
“Boys,” I said. “Cities.”
The explanation never sufficed, and as if to confirm this suspicion he leaned forward in excitement, like a local cop who’d been fed a faulty lead. He was now close enough that I could smell the liquor’s bitter sneer issuing from the corners of his mouth. At this distance his green eyes outstripped the paper surface of the face.
“Dirty pictures?”
“No,” I said. “Not exclusively, at least. Any subject is fine with me.”
“No cocks?”
“Sure,” I said, “that’s art, too, but not always, and not without intention.”
“What’s your intention when taking a picture of somebody’s cock?”
“Well, it isn’t much different—at least I wouldn’t like to think so—than taking a picture of an empty plate, a barn, a woman’s nose. Those are just examples. It’s only an object, grasping at an object.”
“Grasping at a cock?”
“If you like.”
“My cock is seven inches,” he said. “Ever taken a photo of a seven inch cock?”
The door swung open with a crack. The darts players stumbled into the bar and began rapping their knuckles against it, beckoning Omar to pull more beers. With the anticipation of the starving or insane they watched the wheat-colored liquid course into their glasses before raising and clinking them together, leaving a few soaked bills for Omar to sort.
“Fucking rednecks,” I said automatically.
“All sorts like that,” the boy replied, “and I’m convinced half of them take it up the ass, anyway.”
“Doesn’t it disgust you?” I asked.
By way of an answer he drained his glass and pushed it away, almost hard enough to force it over the edge of the bar. Sensing his hesitation I pulled closer and whispered in his ear: “It disgusts you, doesn’t it?”
Instead of wincing or drawing back, however, he looked up and said, “My mother will be home. You won’t speak to her.”
“I’m going home with you, am I?”
The question brought a grin to his face.
“She’s a bum,” he said, “a fucking disgrace, likely as not she’ll be asleep and you’ll leave her that way, get that into your head now. Two years and I can make like you, hit the road, find work—for now I live with that woman and it’s up to me to lift her as far out of her own shit as she can possibly be lifted. It’s either one thing or the other, you see, me or her. Make it her, I say. What does it matter living like this right now, knowing what comes later?”
In a swift gesture I lifted the beer to my lips and took the remaining liquid in one long, lukewarm gulp, holding it in my mouth before seizing the knob of his nape and thrusting my lips against his, depositing the remains of the flat, half-swallowed liquid into his gaping mouth. He spluttered, seeming for a moment to choke on the beer before hacking it up onto his lap. His eyes darted around the bar, a terrified narrowing careen of pupil upon iris, but the drunks were more interested in the bottoms of their glasses or the tops of their feet to bother venturing us a glance—all, that is, but one thinly smiling woman in the darkest corner of the room, the only woman in the entire place, whose toothsome Cheshire sneer winked in the semidarkness as if to acknowledge the consummation of a mistake.
“Let’s walk,” he said. As we sped past the bar, he and Omar shared a quick, conciliatory nod. I set down three bills and followed him into the comparatively blinding light of the clouded day, to a sidewalk over which a vague, misty rain now spun. The cop was gone.
“It’s only a few blocks,” he told me. “You’ll come, won’t you?”
Sweat had bloomed against my back, and the faint, needling raindrops were cool and delicious. We walked away from the city, the last evidence of the moneyed and guileless—a wine shop shielded by a striped awning, coffee shops outfitted with gleaming marble counters and plate-glass windows—giving way to ancient barber shops, shuttered florists, and Mexican groceries from which the fatty smell of suadero drifted into the street with the sound of haggling voices and the bassy, aqueous pulse of rap music played on cheap portable speakers. The road arced gently down toward a four-way intersection above which the interstate twisted northward, past the towns where I had found slow, menial work, little more than clusters of strip malls buffering clapboard houses from the noise of the highway, and then into the dusty, bean-covered hills of the piedmont.
“The rains will be picking up,” he said. “In a few weeks’ time this whole block will be standing water. If you want to learn a thing or two about the way we live, you should stick around for another month, smell the air when a storm’s a day or two off the coast.”
In the parking lot of a foreclosed gas station, three children were chasing one another with water pistols, ducking behind the rusted pumps for cover as they darted to and fro. Even from this distance we could make out the colored Band-Aids mottling their knees.
“Then come the warnings,” he went on. “Boards are tacked onto windowsills, chairs and tables are taped to the floors, and the floodgates open, the highways fill, they shut down the southbound lanes so everybody can run in the same direction. If you don’t know the shortcuts you’re screwed, plain and simple, the freeway to Columbia could take half a day. Evacuation’s not for us, as long as I’ve lived down here we’ve never fled to Rock Hill or Florence on account of a little storm. They’re picking up, see—until I was ten they only told us to get away three times, but the last few years they’ve evacuated the county every September. You know something? On my word, I was conceived in the middle of a hurricane. Ask anybody who knows my parents well and you’ll get the same cockeyed story. Jeanne, they called that storm. Of course everyone turned tail but them—as ragged, stubborn and ugly a pair of lovers as you can imagine. One day before landfall you could hear a pin drop, or so Mom told it. She and Dad—that fucking waste, he couldn’t have been bothered to marry the woman if she’d gotten down on her knees, even if she taunted him to buy the cheapest ring in the dirtiest pawn shop in all Goose Creek, he never so much as put a palm to her cheek, the bastard. He called himself a painter but the only work he got was repainting the same gaudy mural year after year, three bony Percherons right on the side of a carriage-house. Imagine getting paid once a year for a cheap picture of horses. He must’ve been one good ride to justify buying all those drinks, a decade of drinks in fact, and rent, and plenty of tasteless food, the same food that woman cooked until I started managing for myself. On that day, as the storm approached, the two of them walked outside and drank vodkas cross-legged in the street until the first drops hit their foreheads. Then they ran inside. The walls shook. They kept all the lights off, all except for a camping lantern in the center of a room. How she tells that story with a smile on her face is a mystery to me. She’ll tell anybody who’ll lend an ear about that callous motherfucker, God knows where he ran off to. Used to sing us ‘Pearl of the Quarter’ before bed.”
Above us the sound of idling cars on the interstate mixed with the whispering rain. We turned onto a narrower street lined with crepe myrtles. The funk of garbage lingered. One or two of the houses—all one-story with small rectangular front lawns or hedges framing paved paths—had been recently developed, painted in pale yellows or blues rather than the aged grays, browns, and reds of their neighbors, and bearing the blocky insignia of a real-estate group on plastic signs stuck in the grass before them. Without warning he crooked his arm in mine, a gesture I did not reject. The edge of him was bony, hard, exposed.
“A pack of lies,” he murmured.
I wondered whether he, like me, was now attempting to conjure the images we had shared with one another online. Harshly lit, artless, angular, they bore us no resemblance.
“Ever been to Greenville?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Ever driven north out of there, past Travelers Rest, past Marietta, past Tigerville?”
He shook his head.
“That’s where it happened,” I went on. “On the road up from Greenville to Jones Gap. The park up there on the Saluda, the dark-blue hills. Four Alabamans I met cleaning a Days Inn. Two of them were political types, rabble-rousers trying to unionize the place. The others were flat losers living in a Winnebago. They let me sleep with them for two weeks after I got evicted from a room overlooking the railroad. From their lot you could see a detention center poking its head up from a grove of bald cypress. That got them going, you know. The unionizers held meetings three times a week in the rec room of a YMCA. Of course nobody showed up but a few ladies in their calisthenics clothes. Any hour they weren’t folding sheets and towels they knocked on doors up and down that ugly county, where a guy’ll spit between your eyes if he so much as hears you talking about worker’s solidarity. Fuck the righteous, I say, but I took their pictures all the same. One insisted on wearing a beret. It was impossible to sleep in that van. The bums stunk, they must’ve washed twice a month maximum, always sucking each other off or running off at godforsaken hours for a little buzz. The hotel was managed by a pair of old Czechs—they served kolaches at the continental. If the wife caught you twisted up with somebody in an empty room she gave you a real good licking. The husband got off watching the girls at the pool from his office. Every morning we were reminded our replacements were on a boat somewhere in the middle of the Gulf, lorded over by some pimply coyote. Any day they’d be bussed in from Panama City and we’d be out of luck. Sure enough one morning a group of exhausted girls filed out of a Greyhound and we handed in our brooms. The boys told me we’d drive their van into the Blue Ridge and camp. We had a few hundred bucks each, but you could tell easily enough who’d be hard up first. They pulled over someplace in the dark, that mountain dark where you can’t even see your hand in front of your face. The one laid a cold blade flat on my chin. The other got out of the driver’s seat, came up behind me and took my bags. Take off the belt, they told me, the shoes, the earrings, the chain. What could I say? They left me with my phone and wallet, bless them. You can’t blame the desperate and stupid; they knew I’d come out upright. I found a road called Persimmon Ridge. It curved up. In the morning I found a stream. A clear, cold stream. And I washed my face in it.”
“Come on now” he said. “Don’t lie to me.”
His house was the second-to-last on the left.
When he opened the door, his mother was asleep in front of the television and he switched it off. Head against a yellow wingback chair and legs up on a leather stool, she was at the quiet equipoise between the darkening afternoon and a dream, and I wondered whether the images from whatever show had been on were now whirring against her closed eyelids, teasing her with the promise of the real but faraway. Splayed open on her lap was a cheap faded paperback. Gingerly, he picked the book from her rising and falling belly and placed it on an adjoining table. He put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to sit before slipping off his shoes and walking silently into the kitchen. In the cool gray light from the window, somehow the only window in that room, I could see it had begun to pour. Then came the low glugging sound of the bottles being poured into the sink, an even, thirsty sound, smooth and desperate. Five bottles of dark rum, one after the other. As the last drops receded into the rusting pipes, the drain emitted a satisfied ahh, a barely-perceptible hint of unknown pleasure. He gathered the empty bottles, cheap plastic things weighing no more than a pile of folded shirts, and dropped them into a brown paper bag. Together we made our way down the short hall to his bedroom, he carrying the bag of empties. The copper door knob was loose in its jamb, and as he closed it behind us he pushed it out with the flat surface of his palm, such that the outer doorknob fell loose from the frame and landed with a dull thud on the carpeted floor of the hallway. The room was adorned with nothing but a twin futon and a monitor without a stand, lopsided on the uneven floorboards. He placed the bag at the edge of the closet and removed the cap from one of the bottles to breathe in its scent. I had no idea why he wanted to do such a thing, and just as he raised the open neck to his face he drew away, nostrils crinkled, though I suspected there was not only disgust implicit in this gesture but a haunted, formless fascination, the bitter phantom of a bad idea I would have participated in without question.
The rain thrummed against the tin roof. Once more he lifted a finger to his lips, then offered me his closed fist thumb-up against his open palm. For a moment I wondered if he wanted me to raise my fist to his, to measure them against each other, or to massage the fingers slowly, to force the fist open, soothing the joints. But before I could move, he brought the fist down against his palm in three short raps and I understood the game. He crushed my scissors easily, his eyes on my eyes, and I saw then what I had always taken for pure arbitration as a rational sport, a system of burdened choice. Rock, he chose again, and as if placing a sheet over a sleeping child I covered his fist; I saw then his knuckles were filmed with scabs, fresh scabs I supposed, and he saw in my seeing a kind of apology for which I could not answer. Our meeting would be short, then. Often I had placed myself in rooms like these, squalid rooms without light or shape, and gladly, with relish for the exceptional promise of anonymity. But a certain distance was required, I thought, not a sexual distance per se but a distance from true images. And though I had been warned of his mother’s presence, that sleeping presence beyond the walls of a being who would never ask anything of me, I gathered from that body, the emptied bottles, the rasping throat of the sink, a true image. It will not do, I thought. There is a window here. I will make use of it. For a second time his fist crushed my scissors, closing the index and middle fingers into a thick line. Why has he chosen this game, I asked myself. But I felt my silence was a rule each of us had imposed on the other. So I repeated the gesture, scissors crushed by rock, an admirable pattern, and as if encouraged he brought down his rock with growing force against my hand, never meeting my eyes as they searched for a sign in his downcast face.
I heard then the inevitable sound, the great rising, the four syllables conjoined in sour disappointment or the simple confusion of the tired and overdrunk. From beyond the door his name was being spoken. A light had been switched on in the hall.
Scissors. Rock. Alexander. Scissors. Rock. Alexander.