The pizza night table (continued)

  Eugenie

  Thankfully, Barry and Joe let her dissipate slightly from the conversation when they finally found that they had tons of things in common: science, electronics, nature, things that didn’t make Eugenie’s heart flutter. She asked a lot of questions to prompt them and launch them into acknowledging that fact and then, they were flying. This was on of her basic teacher’s talents.

  She was praying with all she had that the dinner would soon end without having to explain that story which, perplexingly, Barry had told Joe about their presence at the now destroyed Grand Central Station a couple weeks before. Then, she hoped, she would have time to decide what to do, but she knew already that her decision could never include the truth. It would either be dumping him (although he might as well be the one on the active end of the breakup, displeased by everything he was learning) or lying to him but, at least, she would have time to fabricate something.

  After two glasses of rosé on an almost empty stomach, she was definitely feeling tipsy, so she appreciated the small break the men were giving her from participating into the talk and devoured her entire slice of pizza to soak up the booze. She felt better, and tipsy. As usual, when she was a bit inebriated, she started excessively rolling her hair under her earlobe, which was such a pleasant sensation, so soft, so rocking, in a way, so soothing. She knew her autism was making her stim, but she could hardly help it. And now, she was sitting in the middle of Barry and Joe, and finding herself thrown off her axis. The hair was floating under her ear like a cluster of clouds.

  What was Barry doing? She asked herself, observing him. Throwing you off your axis, evidently, her inside voice informed her. Strangely, she noticed that the voice sounded a little bit like her interred grandmother. Eugenie glanced at Joe and, because she was starting to really appreciate her alcohol, she discreetly checked him out. Then looked at Barry in the same scanning, undressing manner. Repeated the motion with her eyes. Ingesting the beverage helped mixing amusement to apprehension and the feeling of urgent damage-control, trying to forget that she had just been denounced as partaking in train station destruction events and shootings a few minutes earlier.

  Had she let her heart open to a new person, finally? She watched Joe. He was such a refreshing arrival in her existence. A man that was not a mutant or a teenager (like Barry’s mutant teenage or teenager-like friends) and not a geezer (such as Alphonse) and also not a psychopath (compared to Hobbes). That they were both in their forties was reassuring to Eugenie, and she meant to keep it that way. It had been so long since she had dated that she felt like she pretty much skipped the thirties’ dating to get to the forties part, the midlife part. And discovered that there was no such proverbial crisis about it, when you shared that same age with a normal person, a boring person, would have said the grandmother she had just buried in her little village in Sweden. A teacher! She heard the old lady, SO BORING.

  You are dead Mormor, shut your mouth.

  Bo-o-o-oring she had the vision of the witch blowing smoke rings with her mouth shaped by all the O’s.

  Zip it! Then she thought, Where will Barry be when he becomes forty? Dead, she heard and swallowed her bite of pizza crookedly, muffled her cough by chugging a big gulp of wine. Jesus Christ, where did that come from, she wondered, and she did her best to recenter on Joe. He was a very attractive man, especially when he was wearing a simple back tee shirt like he was tonight, and when his thick short hair was hanging out at the top of his skull with no sort of order in it but still giving a clean cut flow. A vegetarian man, a jogger, a hiker, someone who breathed the open air every Wednesday out of leisure, his body tight and nimble with an exquisite roll of fat on top of his belt, the kind of belly flap she found a major turn-on. He was energetic, athletic, but also capable of potato-ing on the couch, which was admirable.

  They liked to go on long walks and hold hands and wear some knitted hats, they didn’t need to be talking all the time. Having the same profession, they both knew what it was like to spend the day in the middle of screams and shuffles and doors slamming and bolts jamming and whistle blowing and constant horrendous level of decibels, and both appreciated to tread inside a bubble of quiet and breezy vibes. Who would exchange years for youth regained, at the cost of surrendering that understanding and those wiser ways. No one, she comprehended, she hoped. He smiled a lot but not the unbearable American way which, as a mixed European, she couldn’t agree with, and it magnified the little wrinkles at the fold of his eyes, dug deeper into the big line barring his forehead, cut into his cheeks. Rendered his eyes more serious above his smile. More yin to the yang.

  Those things awoke a moved feeling inside her heart, like the salt-and-peppering sides of his short beard, climbing up to curl the color at the tip of his mustache. When they made love, he was strong, audacious, in charge, but he wasn’t afraid to show his soft side either. Plus, he taught math and even advanced math, which was really sexy. It was like a superpower only, not a deadly one or one that put someone in constant danger.

  So you like him because he stayed alive for forty-three years, is that it?

  Fucking Grandma, Mormor!

  Joe’s current mannerisms showed that he was fervently getting into it, and he and Barry were reviewing some waterfalls in Brown County, which adventure-seekers could either raft down or climb up if equipped with the right gear, and she nodded to the both of them to pretend that she was listening. “A woman had a near death experience there, though” Joe reported, “she got pinned under some rocks when falling on the wrong side of her kayak, and she was deprived of oxygen for twenty minutes, but she survived, against all odds, and she wrote a book about it”

  “Oh my god, what’s the book”

  “Well it’s called Life After Death”

  “Good title”

  “Good title isn't it”

  “Would you try rafting it down?” Barry asked

  “No” Joe giggled, as he was a bit tipsy too. Barry had not touched his glass of wine, and Eugenie could easily guess that it was because he was still taking too many crazy pills at the moment.

  “Why not” Barry said, “I mean, brushing against death, the promise of life after death” Barry was not drinking but he could match the depths of someone’s boozy conversation, actually, he could match anything, Eugenie thought, get another slice of pizza, you need to eat, she heard. She obeyed.

  “Because I… don’t want to die that way” Joe laughed with candor, “and honestly, I don’t know what life after death exactly means”

  “Me neither” Barry lied.

  They shared this moment, Eugenie grinning ferociously at them like a dog mom who managed to introduce two different breeds to each other, and then they started listing all the hiking trails they knew that were more perilous than the ranked scenic waterfalls of the state park, so she retreated again into her own hidden corner, drinking slowly and chewing and munching and watching them. She remembered Ram Dass, one of her favorite spiritual teachers, saying: ‘When one can allow themselves to step aside a crowded bus stop or an animated dinner table, ask the creatures of God around the table or waiting for the same ride, ask their soul, mindfully: hey, How did you end up here?’

  Then her eyes laboriously rolled inside their orbits, because she knew they were following the sound of Barry’s voice on her left side. Almost reluctantly, they rolled, Granddaughter of mine is a coward, the grandma had never been so vocal before, granddaughter is a fucking chicken. When Eugenie had visited her before, as a child and then as an adult, the woman had always been sulking, sucking on a straw from a mysterious smoothie in a ceramic mug, not saying a word, sitting in her wooden chair like a statue. And now, she was talking, like, a lot.

  Eugenie asked Mormor, Mormor why is Barry obsessed with me? Why is Barry pursuing me like that?

  I always preferred your mother to your aunt, those sisters, they were like day and night, sun and moon. Your birth mother was a witch like me and, my other daughter, she’s always been a chicken too.

  Mormor, CONCENTRATE! Why is Barry like that with me?

  Because he’s insane.

  Is that IT??? Nothing more to say?

  All of a sudden, the dead ancestor was gone. Convenient, to be evaporated like this, one second, a chatty ghost in the physical realm and the other one, too busy with something in the ether to answer important questions from your descendants.

  Barry was fiddling with some crumbs from the pizza dough in his empty plate, saying yes or no, the promise of life after death channeled into his very being, his persona. Eugenie was not sure how he had successfully escaped Hobbes’ vault with the indefatigable scrutiny of Alphonse’s surveillance, paired with Uberwoman’s watchful eye, but she could bet it was not through bolting. It might have cost him a lot, though, she saw in his disheveled appearance, and felt a tug of guilt inside her chest, about her initial rejection to his presence between the walls of the apartment.

  He was interacting with Joe as if everything was casual, simple, unbothered, but she could see he was very focused on his movements, tense and stiff on his chair. Only a trained eye would notice, she guessed, and something stirred inside of her, something warm, something at the bottom of her. She changed sitting position by uncrossing her legs and switching the leg up.

  *

  Eugenie thought back to the funeral she had just attended, all those distant relatives that knew of her –she was the girl who’d lost her parents right after being born, raised by her hippie uncle and aunt— more than they knew her, followed by a selected few who had shared many close years together with her and remembered she liked pink, orange colors, and that she was a teacher, that she lived in Indiana, that when she was a child, she dreamed of becoming a crab fisher. All those people had one thing in common though, now that she was well swallowed into adulthood and preserved from any adolescent phase or youth period of perdition: they were continually bewildered.

  During her years without dating, which had amounted to almost a decade, as Eugenie was openly showing fewer and fewer interest in romance, her aunt and uncle had teased her ‘Girl, you think you will find love without going out, without attending your colleagues’ parties, and when you are not accepting invitations from your friends? A man will not appear magically on your balcony, you just waiting there’ Well, she nodded at no one in particular, just herself, how wrong had they been.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “I’m saying” Barry said to Joe, sticking a thumb up, “that was so persuasive a friend of mine even tried the putting AI into a robotic body”

  “You can’t be serious” Joe retorted, frowned, “what kind of friend?”

  “A nerd”

  “A… really big nerd I suppose”

  “He didn’t succeed, okay” Barry presented his one active hand in moderation, “it’s bordering to like, Mrai Moumou entity, so he was careful and stopped early enough but I’m saying, it can be done”

  “I’ve always believed so. How old are you Barry, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I’m twenty five years old”

  Eugenie was always depressed by that number. Grandma Mormor had not stuck around to help her dig out why exactly the number depressed her so much so she was left alone to ponder about it. He was so old, she guessed, compared to the little Barry, Douchebarry, she had encountered at school. She missed the simplicity of their relationship back then, he was just a very annoying student and she, on the other end, was just an annoyed teacher like a thousand others. And yet he was still so young now, today, she felt, and she didn’t understand her own heart, why she loved him so much.

  “Well you sound very wise for your age” Joe said, almost pushing her in that direction, “when I was twenty-five, man…” Barry waited in anticipation, then Joe darted a look at Eugenie, “I’m not even sure what I was doing!” he laughed generously, “Eugenie do you recall precisely what you were doing when you were Barry’s age”

  “NO” Eugenie replied with a bright smile. Exactly, that was centuries ago. That was another era. NOTHING remembered.

  “I thought you said that, according to Swedish tradition, the day you turn twenty-five, if you are not engaged or married, the women of your family make you a giant green hat that you have to wear for a whole week?” Barry said

  She forced her eyebrows to remain motionless, and with so much energy contained above her eyes, this was a very challenging task. Sent him a reptilian smile, an iguana smile, the smile of a lizard eyeing a line of ants on the next branch, but too lazy to throw a long and sticky tongue at them yet, oh NOW you remember my country, NOW you remember my stories, you little shitbag.

  Why are you obsessed with him? And presently, grandma was back. Of course, at the precise moment that Eugenie was cornered. It was Barry’s face, probably, that was the face made by some angels. They had stumbled upon some very ordinary facial traits and assembled them all divinely. His eyes were soft, sleepy, droopy, his smile was wild, it was a crazy kitten smile, the smile of a kitten who’s just learned he can spin around during a fall and land on his paws, the baby jaguar who can walk through fire, the little lion cub who just realized he has incarnated on this earth as a killing machine.

  “Wow, you know a lot about… Sweden” Joe was sitting on his left butt cheek, followed by the right one, perturbed, sliding from one side to the other. Barry was not moving one millimeter.

  “You see I even forgot that I remembered that” Eugenie laughed horrendously. Speaking of forget, Mormor sneered, here is a gift, a memory. Eugenie jumped on her chair. She saw the same Barry who was sitting on her left side but this time, he rapidly lost altitude to slide under her, his whole entity alight by a harsh white handful of sun rays from above. Is that heaven, Mormor? It was Grand Central Station. Barry’s eyes were this dirty pool color under the glow, his pupils anchored into hers, half of his face splashed with bright red blood. His lips parted and she heard ‘run’.

  I gotta stop drinking right now, she pushed her glass away from her, comforted by the presence of the table, the plates, the living room around them. It was a just a vision, a snap, “you’re okay Eugenie?” Joe asked, preoccupied.

  “Yes I… m just tired, from traveling, that’s all. But at least my stomach is happy, this pizza has some piquant aftertaste, I love it Joe”

  “Actually, I recall now” Joe said, Thank Goodness, “At the start of my twenties, I used to work for a pizza place, then deliver the pizzas on my bike. I lived in New York City back then, can you imagine? Sometimes I had to bang on the accordion buses to get them to let me pass through the traffic”

  “Bang with your actual hands like, punching it?” Barry wanted to know

  “Yes like, in my younger mind, I imagined it was like the knight against the dragon”

  Eugenie got her second reprieve of the night, the feeling lingering inside her that it would be the last and then she would have to start working on the convincing, clarifying, deconstructing and rebuilding phase. What a waste, she had a thought about the pizza, a piece of homemade meal that had been attentively assembled and which deserved to be savored, bite after bite, rolling inside one’s digestion track, and not absorbed by the body in between shakes and gurgles of stress.

  Barry asked a couple of questions that sent Joe on a path of answers and anecdotes. Stop drinking wine, she told herself but, Eugenie was in such a state of distress that she emptied yet another glass. Three glasses and two slices of pizza, she didn’t run the chance of being drunk yet but, certainly, she was getting closer. She wasn’t a big drinker, she didn’t have enough practice, what the fuck am I thinking about.

  You are in awe of him. The voice spoke plainly. Whether it was her own or Mormor’s, she couldn’t tell. That was true.

  Don’t think now, you have had too much too drink!

  She was in awe of Barry. She blamed him for getting his ass kicked majorly but, without it, would she ever have known his resilience, his combative spirit? The flash of blood spattered on his cheeks underneath her re-appeared, and vanished again. Don’t sweat the small things, just see the big picture, my little doll.

  Grandma, what is the meaning of this? She loved his face, it was driving her mad, she loved the kindness that radiated through it, she loved his confidence, his goofiness, she loved how the light fell on it. Looking at him while he was sleeping, scanning all the details of his face, she was sometimes breathless, punched in the gut. Such a mix of peace on the outside with a burning head on the inside, beyond the envelope of his skull. The times where she had watched him in his slumber from the observation point of her pillow, she had felt the bed dissolve under her, she had felt her heart melt. She swallowed yet another sip of her wine. She had felt like she was falling in love.

  And in spite of being occasionally chopped, fissured, notched, Barry’s body was striking too. He had been carved out of a marble piece, without mercy for the audience, without the concern that the shape of his broad shoulders, their wave-like rhythm, their ripples, the arch of his back or the the way he leaned over things could possibly lead an audience into craziness. Eugenie suddenly so near crying that she grunted and made another attempt at pushing her glass away, although a thin line of wine was still appealing to her at the bottom of it.

  “Stop drinking” she commanded herself, “I mean” she cleared her throat in front of Barry and Joe, “I’m going to stop drinking for tonight I… I don’t know I usually don’t drink that much”

  “It’s because of the extra pinch of salt I put in the pizza” Joe reassured her.

  “So, water then”

  “Hum” Joe passed her the water and said: “so what happened at Grand Central Station?”

  Then Eugenie was completely sober.

  Listen. She became lost in a vision again, she was on top of Barry and the dust and glass morsels from the ceiling were pouring on them, creating a veil on everything that seemed to be sparkling and making everything soft, faded, a mist of glitter. The sound of the glass cascading, jingling, clattering, was deafening. Listen. He smiled at her from very far, far away, he was slipping away, he was losing his strength, his vitality, the things that usually made him jump around and be merry, he was dying, she could see it in his eyes, under some very heavy eyelids. ‘RUN’ she heard.

  Then she lost it once more. The memory was sucked out, so vividly erased that she counted down the pixels that disappeared into oblivion. Eugenie held her breath and searched for it inside her mind, it was a tiresome brain trick that made her feel like she was flipping the pages of a hundred books all at once, sitting on a vibrating swing in the cosmos, but she couldn’t retrieve the memory anymore. It was again forbidden to her. She had the feeling that she was letting time pass dangerously while a lot was happening in the real world like, Joe bending on the table to show something on his phone to Barry across the table.

  Now, Barry was back and no longer dying, undeniably here with one elbow on the dining table, a piece of furniture that he had actually assembled with his own hands after breaking her old one. She wished the food would erase itself from it, she wished the table was clear and they could embrace on the rectangle of it, feeling his heartbeat just because they’d be so near, stuck to each other, hearing, I’m alive, you are alive, switching her nose from the right side to the left side of Barry’s nose, feeling his smile with her own lips, something exploding in a series of blasts from her lower tummy to her belly button, dilating inside her chest.

  “What are you guys talking about” she asked them, the more reasonable version of herself dragging her other self by the hand like a reluctant child to school

  “Good of you to join us” she heard the resentment in Joe’s voice or, rather than that, she quaked with the contagion of his confusion. She was confused too.

  “Sorry I was… lost in my thoughts”

  “I was showing Barry this article I saved when the train station was attacked” Joe explained. Why would you save that? She wondered, and he seemed to be reading her thoughts, went on, “I saved it because I genuinely feared it was the end of the world” he laughed lightly or, more believably, with an undertone of relief.

  She squinted at the small screen of the phone, which displayed an old photo of the team under the headline, Team of Superheroes makes it out of Leveled Train Station, Repels Alien Droids. At the middle of the picture was the Bolt, the lower part of his face the only thing not covered by his suit and mask. Presently, it was impossible for Eugenie not to see all the Barry Masquevert details of that half of a face but she recalled that she had not computed two plus two back before Barry entered her life again. It was not so obvious to people who didn’t know him. And yet, she couldn’t ignore the skills that Joe possessed at being a great physiognomist. She smelled peril.

  Why in the world was Barry not saying anything? Just letting it all happen. Where he was sitting at the table wasn’t his usual spot, it was the side which was reserved to guests and, positioned this way into the darkness cast by the wall behind him and the black screen of the television, he could hide and display only a shadow of him. The potted plants placed on and around the fireplace behind him stuck their long stretchy stems out, ornamenting the head of Barry’s silhouette with a crown of round and pointy leaves. Joe continued, unstoppable, “another website talks about some bolting energy being recorded during the shooting at the station”

  “Bolting?” she said timidly, as if she had never heard the word before.

  “Yes and then, this one, saying that the Bolt hasn’t been seen in a couple weeks”

  Eugenie darted a panicked eye at Barry, interrogating him, did you know that the local newspapers wrote so much about YOU? He didn’t reception her alert, staring at Joe without much of an expression, his left hand relaxed on top of the table cloth. He had a full glass of wine in front of him, and Eugenie very much wanted to grab it and chug it. “What were you doing at the train station when the shooting happened?” Joe asked.

  “Oh lord” she sat up, feeling the complete absence of the alcohol, as well as the total desertion of the memory she had just been shown and cut off from, “it’s a long story, I’m not sure that… that… that uh”

  “That what” Joe interrupted her from her trailing off

  “I’m not sure I’m ready to talk about it”

  “We met right after that, Eugenie” Joe opposed, “I believe I need to know what the hell took place like” he looked down at his phone’s screen, back up at her, “right before we met”

  Finally, Barry spoke: “I will say something”

  Eugenie and Joe threw their faces at him, in shared but different states of despair, so he nodded and said, “I understand, Joe, that you are implying that I am the Bolt”

  “Indeed I am”

  “Well he’s a pretty boy, so I can see that association in my mind, but that’s not the case”

  “Not the case?”

  “No” Barry shook his head, brushed some pieces of pizza crust from the rim of his plate with his left hand, “I’m flattered that you think I could be a possible candidate for a mutant vigilante, but no. I’m just a volunteer firefighter, so that’s why I was there”

  “But there was no Ladder, Whatever Number it Was, present at the scene”

  “What can I say I.. am passionate about my job. I needed to intervene”

  “Intervene?”

  “Try to stop the robots” Barry shrugged magnificently even with his shoulder being stiff, a masterpiece of blasé high school student restored from the past, reverberating with boredom in all his being, “obviously it was idiotic, I paid the price of my foolishness”

  “I didn’t mean it this way” Joe’s hands joined palms in a gesture of guilt, “it’s very respectable. But I don’t believe you”

  Idiotic, Eugenie replayed right away, I paid the price of my foolishness. “I’m a rookie” she was surprised at Barry’s attempt to persuade Joe, as he kept going, “I guess I have to prove myself to my t… to my company. Of firefighters. Not superheroes”

  “Right. And Eugenie was there because…?”

  She felt their faces madly swing towards hers, almost catapulted. You’re not fast enough, stop dwelling, start talking.

  “Wrong place, wrong time. She was getting a train ticket for—”

  “Nice try Barry” Joe said, “but ticket sales had been suspended the day before the assault for reasons of threats”

  Eugenie intercepted Barry’s eyes, ah shit. She was angry now. She couldn’t locate the memories that had been played from the lowest levels of her subconscious, now, and she was grieving them. She was mourning her nice, Saturday-evening-on-planet-Earth tipsiness.

  She was enraged at Barry and his revelations, baffled by his forceful attempts to fix the situation at the moment, which were too little too late, she was irate at her grandmother for parading key pieces of her time frame in front of her and then snatching them away. Anger was growing into her and she said “you know what?” Eugenie faced Joe, her hands glued on to the table cloth, “I don’t remember a thing about it”