Rob McClure Smith
”It’s raining diamonds on Uranus right now.” Julia smirks, staring rapt at her phone in that irritating way she does. She has the sense of humor of a ten-year-old boy.
“What?”
“That’s the weather forecast for Uranus today.” She giggles. “Diamonds are falling out of a methane sky. It’s the exact same on Neptune. I was just reading about it.”
Brandon wants to puncture her balloon. It’s a perverse desire, but there you go. “I’m sure that’s totally normal for planets like that,” he tells her.
“Huh?” He has her full attention now. She looks up sharply at him, chewing her lips. Julia’s pretty, but right now her face looks like a jellyfish in a string bag.
“It’s not unusual to have showers of diamonds on gas giants,” he explains. “Here it wouldn’t be normal, obviously, but you need to consider how so much of what we consider normal on Earth isn’t at all.”
Julia regards him skeptically, beetling her brows.
“So there happen to be two planets in our solar system get diamond rain?” He shrugs. “So what? There’s only one planet gets to have humans, right? See, our sense of what’s typical is warped. As a matter of fact, there’s actually a whole lot happening here on Earth right this minute that is really odd if you pay attention.”
“Yeah,” Julia sneers. “I can see that.” She turns to stare out the window, seemingly admiring the landscape. The train is stopped in a tunnel.
“And if you were on Neptune, you’d need a steel umbrella, right? How convenient is that?” He nudges her playfully, but she doesn’t respond. Brandon makes a study of her in the glass, gauging how bad his circumstance is. It’s really bad. “Come on now,” he cajoles, stroking her arm. “Don’t be a cranky-puss.”
Julia inches away, scrunching against the glass like a small frightened animal. The carriage jolts into motion. “Why do you always do this?” she hisses at him.
Brandon contemplates his knees as she drifts back into the digital space where she really lives, a place weirder by far than any gas giant. She punches at her keypad furiously for a bit then says: “Why do you have to go spoil everything?”
The night before in the Filomena Ristorante in Georgetown, wolfing down ravioli like an addled voodoo priestess, she’d announced, apropos of nothing, her most recent diagnosis as bipolar. She’d sat back in her chair the better to process his shock.
“Oh, honey,” he’d said, pouting sympathetically. “You poor little thing.”
Like he hadn’t figured out ages ago that she was totally Looney Tunes. There was a mountain of evidence supporting that conclusion, a veritable Everest of crazy. He supposed Julia being half mad might be what made her so much fun: you were never altogether sure who it was you were climbing in bed with.
“I read in the Post the other day that the bears in the Arctic are depressed due to global warming,” he’d told her, grim-faced. “They sit on the melting icebergs all day getting sadder than sad. Scientists at the North Pole are dosing them with Seroquel. They slip the meds into the bladders of dead penguins.”
Julia stares at him, a square of ravioli pierced on her hovering fork. “What?”
“See, they’re becoming bipolar bears.”
Julia’s eyes narrowed to slits. “WHAT?”
At Arlington Cemetery, a tourist mob spills on, cameras slung around necks like tribal necklaces. Back on the emptied platform, scattered piles of leaves adjust themselves to the wind and a white plastic bag ghosts the embankment. Safeway. But there’s no safe way out of the ditch he’s dug for himself this time.
“What kind of person visits a graveyard for fun?” he whispers. Julia ignores him, gazing at her little screen as if hypnotized, big-eyed anime lovelies pursued there by a green octopus. What was the appeal of that at all? Brought to you by the same folks gave us Tamagotchi, maid cafes, and the Bataan Death March.
The kind of person who visits a graveyard for fun is the big man in Bermuda shorts spreading tanned legs catty-corner before them. He wears a t-shirt says Sewer Crew (presumably ironic) and is padding at the braids of his little girl with a solitary meaty paw. The girl looks about six and currently gorges on a gargantuan dish of ice cream. There must be an ice cream truck circling the grave plots ensuring the MAGA crowd gets to scoff their Moose Tracks by the Tomb of the Unknown.
“That looks good,” Brandon says, nodding at the dish. “What is it?”
“Ice cream,” she declares, profoundly.
“Well, I know that.” He grins cretinously into her freckles. “I mean does it have any other name?”
The little girl regards her dish seriously and presses her lips together around the spoon and shakes her head. “No, it’s ice cream.”
Her father intervenes. “That’s a vanilla fudge sundae.”
“It looks real good,” Brandon says, winking. He is mortally afraid of children.
“It is good,” she tells him. “It’s ice cream.” She is very literal and pragmatic for a six-year-old and stares hard at him now. It’s just not his day for sweet-talking the ladies.
“There’s a star in the galaxy Andromeda is a pure diamond,” Julia observes.
“That’s not unusual either,” he blurts, discomfited by sundae girl’s Jackie Onassis impersonation.
“Are you going to pull this shit all day?” Julia snarls. “Is that what it means to be old? That you sit around spoiling everything for everyone all the time?”
The girl observes this exchange wide-eyed, spooning melting fudge in the vicinity of her mouth and causing a spectacular drippy mess.
“Are you about done?” her father asks, sighing. He moistens a napkin with his tongue and rubs a chocolate smear off her mouth. It’s quite the tender scene.
Brandon does his bit for tenderness by having another paw at Julia’s arm. He’s decided it’s for the best to communicate by gesture only, in the fashion of the chimpanzee, and by the time they get to Braddock Street, he is almost forgiven.
“It’s called 55 Cancri E,” Julia offers, quietly.
“What is?”
“The star,” she says, rolling her shoulders in exasperation. “My diamond star.”
Brandon can almost see it, a star pure and clear as a first-water gem in an engagement ring the size of a puddle. “Up above the world so high,” he chants softly at her. “Like a diamond in the sky.”
“What the fuck?” Julia says, shaking her head.
Noticing the big man flinch in his seat, Brandon decides a change of subject is in order. “There’s a statue of Robert E. Lee downtown,” he says. “‘Appomattox,’ after the battle before his surrender to Grant. Lee is facing south, pointing. The local council discussed taking it down but there’s a lot of …”
“Racist scumbags,” Julia observes.
“Lee was from Alexandria,” Brandon mumbles hurriedly. “So to some extent …”
Julia is incredulous that he’s progressed to defending the Confederacy. “Doesn’t mean they’re not a shower of white privilege fucking racists though, does it?”
“Keep it down,” he whispers. “You’re on a train.”
“I know I’m on a fucking train,” she barks. “I figured that out. I know you happen to think I’m the fucking R word.”
“That’s right,” says Sewer Crew, wheeling to confront the reprobates with his big Easter Island head. “You’re on the D.C. Metro system and we’d all appreciate it if you contrived to keep the expletives to a minimum.”
“Why?” Julia glowers at him. “Are you a fucking racist too?”
The big man drapes an arm around the little girl’s shoulder. “I don’t think my daughter need be exposed to a deluge of random profanity.”
“Why can’t you talk properly?” Julia inquires. “What’s the matter with you?”
Sewer Rat glares at Brandon, making an appeal to reason and adulthood. “I’m sure when your daughter was the same age mine is you didn’t want her hearing foul language and imprecations of that sort. It’s gross and repugnant.”
It’s true. The chap does talk peculiarly. Brandon wonders if he’s a lawyer or if he perhaps does in fact work with sewage in some capacity, exposure to toxic waste impacting the verbal selection axis.
“I’m not his daughter,” Julia announces, clawing her hand on his knee and gripping cartilage like a vise.
While Brandon winces, Sewer Rat regards the pair with palpable disgust.
“We’re sorry,” Brandon ventures, plaintively.
“I’m not,” Julia says, fingers still pinching like steel. “I’m just sitting here minding my own goddamn business. I’m not butting in on anyone’s conversation.”
“My friend is upset about something else,” Brandon declaims and Julia’s eyes scorch into him, hot as Neptune raining diamonds.
“Just mind your language is all.” Sewer Rat sniffs significantly and fires a humdinger of a look at Julia. “Maybe try to have a little class is all.”
This would be a classic exit line if anyone was exiting, but now they have to sit in silence until King Street, the little girl studiously licking, Julia seething like Krakatoa, Brandon the color of a traffic bollard. He should have said something, leapt to her defense, fought for her honor like a knight of old, challenged Sewer Rat to a joust, like Ivanhoe. That’s a coincidence, old boy, I’ve an hoe of my own too.
When the train jolts out of Braddock Street, father hauls daughter to her feet. She grasps the rail by the door but won’t let go the spoon. The ice cream tastes that good.
Brandon bearhugs Julia a discreet distance behind, but the little girl turns and crooks a finger right at her. “You should have some. It was Lucy scrumptious.”
“Maybe she will,” Brandon squeaks. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“It’ll make you feel not as mad and nasty,” the girl adds.
“Yes,” Sewer Rat says, bending to pat her head. “Like Crooked Hillary. No one wants to be like Crooked Hillary, right love?” He looks at Julia. “All mad and nasty.”
It’s a Scylla and Charybdis situation now, on one side Sewer Rat looking like he can’t wait to take a major swing at Brandon, and he’s the type could go fifteen rounds with Behemoth, and on the other Julia making this weird hissing noise with her teeth like steam bleeding through a valve. Brandon is only rescued by a metallic female voice: “Door’s opening, step back,” it lilts, and he is saved by the chime.
The late afternoon sky is that blue that’s called sky-blue. A sky so clear and true you could put your fist through it. And Brandon wants to. They cross by the Amtrak depot and begin the climb up Shooter’s Hill. Crossing Callahan, he looks back to catch a glimpse of their doppelgangers in the distance.
“This is not the way to town,” Julia observes, correctly.
“I thought we’d have a look at the Masonic Memorial first,” he explains.
“I don’t want to see it,” she says.
Neither does Brandon. The Memorial is fashioned after the Lighthouse of Alexandria albeit no sane Egyptian architect would concoct nine floors of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian into this stone tier-cake monstrosity, although he might have stuck that step pyramid on top and approved the double keystone light fixture that caps it.
The information board is a dark and solemn blue. Open daily. No dogs allowed. No filming. Proper attire required. On top a golden crest, sun at the top, moon at the bottom, columns at upper left and right surmounted with globes, sheaves of wheat, tools and pomegranates. In the center a G surrounded by square and compass and the year 1910. In bright crimson, three stars and two horizontal stripes. In Memoriam Perpetuam.
“Why do I have the urge to rip off my bra and film my dog?” Julia says.
“Because you’re a little scofflaw.”
She laughs at last and they scale the granite tiers, the embankments framing the steps stippled brown, sparse bushes ranged symmetrically. One tier from the top is an enclosed glass case with a reproduction of Brady’s 1864 panoramic view of Alexandria. The city of Lee was smoky gray, a military tent village erected at the west end where the train station now stands. Brandon reads about the Ellsworth Avengers, glancing down at the town and back at the sepia daguerreotype, hands gripping a rusted red railing. Locating landmarks then and now, he contemplates the vagaries of time, the hidden meanings of architecture. Sloping downhill, another representation of the emblem, a stone G enclosed within the square and compass.
Julia gazes at the horizon, low brown rooftops, distant snaking blue of the Potomac, a far away Ferris wheel, unturned. A flag flaps on a flagpole causing it to creak. She examines her phone.
“What you suppose the big G stands for?” Brandon asks.
“Huh?” Julia looks at him like the question is mined.
“That big G on the stone?”
“George.”
“You think so?”
“George Washington, founding father freed the slaves and shit.”
“Washington didn’t free the slaves.”
“I know.” Julia looks like she’s about to burst into tears. “I was kidding.”
“I’m so sorry.”
She shakes her head. “Jesus. You really think I’m that stupid, don’t you?”
An elderly black man in carpet slippers plays a flute by the fountain outside City Hall. Julia wants to give him a dollar. She doesn’t have one of her own.
“You’re a beautiful young woman,” the flautist tells her.
“You used to say things like that to me,” Julia says, accusingly.
“Maybe you should hook up with him instead.”
“I should.” Julia smirks. “He’s at least talented.”
Brandon arranges a smile. “Old man take a look at my life.”
“What?”
“It’s a Neil Young song he’s playing. When Neil wrote it, he was a young man, and I was young when I heard it. But now Neil is very old, and of course I’m older too.”
Julia wrinkles her nose. “You mean, the guy’s name is young and he sings about being old. What’s with that?”
“It’s a coincidence. His nickname is Shaky.”
“The flute player?”
“Jesus.”
At the Warehouse, the seafood omelet comes with complimentary champagne. Julia orders a margarita too, for symmetry she says. The waiter’s eyes flicker between her face and her license. She sips from the thin glass and licks her lips. “I suppose it’s true.”
“What is?”
“That when you get older, time moves faster. It’s the holiday paradox. You need new experiences to not feel it. As you get older, you fall into lame routines, which is why time seems to speed up. There are fewer memories of new things. So it’s like you’re having the same moment over and over. It’s all basic science and brain chemistry.”
“We can try some new things in bed tonight,” Brandon suggests.
“No you won’t. You’ll just want to do the same things over.” Julia sips again, not looking at him. “You’ll do the same things over and over until you die.”
“No, I won’t.”
“You’ve gotten used to me too.” Julia swigs her bubbly. “I’m not slowing down death for you anymore. I’m failing.”
Brandon almost hates her then. “So you want to look at old colonial houses?”
“I want ice cream,” she tells him.
“You just ate,” he says, pointing. “You’re just eating.”
“There’s a Pop’s Old Fashioned next door. I have a craving for fudge tracks like you wouldn’t believe. I had it back in Michigan when I was little.”
“What, like three years ago?” Brandon says, maliciously.
At night their room at the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill is too humid. Tonight, if Brandon were slightly less excited, he’d be up fiddling with the thermostat.
“I’m going to fuck you hard enough to rattle your teeth,” Julia has said, slinking from the bathroom. His erection is so fierce it hurts. It’s like he is seventeen again. Brandon has never wanted to be seventeen again.
Julia walks slowly towards the bed, unbuttoning her shirt, enjoying his eyes upon her. She is naked now but for those boots, lovely brown Italian leather, thin and soft. There are thirteen boot-holes top to bottom, sheathed with silver catches. Brandon counted when he purchased them. She unlaces, one foot on a stool, instep pendant and arching, the laces snakelike against her wrists. Leather crinkles as she runs the laces through her fingers. She peels the boots off, her eyes on him, the suck of the leather like a shedding of skin. She enjoys this, her power over him, showing him something. Now she dangles white panties from a finger. That’s new.
He catches her shoulders and tilts her head back, her knees buckling. She laughs and slaps him and her mouth opens beneath his. The aroma of her arousal makes him stupid with desire
“I want to do something different tonight,” her hand on his chest. “New.”
“I’m up for that,” he says, hoarsely
“I want you to wear these.” She holds out the panties. “While we fuck.”
Brandon achieves a smile. “I’m not into that.”
“Please.”
“It’s just not me.”
“But it would turn me on so much. I can’t explain.” She touches between her legs and moans slightly. “Do it for me.”
Brandon snatches the panties from her and reluctantly slips them on. He laughs hysterically, turning it all into a joke, seeing his reflection in the wardrobe mirror, the flimsy white between his legs. It’s not so bad. He isn’t humiliated at all.
“Oh look at you,” Julia says. “That’s so cute.” She indicates where his erection tent-poles the white. “See, it’s a little circus. The South has risen again.”
Brandon is relieved she’s not angry anymore. “Thanks,” he says, making a little moue, playing along. “Who ever thought I’d ever be caught dead wearing a pair of your undies?”
“But you’re not dead,” Julia says. “Not yet anyway. And they’re not even mine.”
“They’re not yours?”
“No silly. They’re my grandmother’s.” She’s giggling. “I brought them specially. I thought it would be funny.” She covers her mouth, stifling a guffaw. “And it is.”
“Your grandmother’s?” Brandon says. He notices an old man in the mirror looking back at him, frowning and incredulous.
“You’re not laughing now,” he seethes, gripping her by the hair. “Not laughing now, are you?” Brandon’s exploring being vicious and domineering, it’s role play in a sense, but it doesn’t come naturally and the grandma panties have gotten all tangled around his feet somehow, impeding his thrusts, and he’s stumbling around on the carpet now and it feels like he might have pulled a hamstring and, as a matter of fact, Julia is still laughing. She never stopped.
“Harder,” she says, giggling. “Harder, Daddy.”
He lay in the dark for hours listening to her breathing, unable to sleep, unable to think. In the bathroom he poured a plastic tumbler’s worth of water from the tap, pulled back the big heavy curtains and looked out at the city, the Capitol dome white in the distance, a luminous spiked mushroom. The sky was like tar and thin gauzy clouds could venture nothing against the star-pocked black. But it was only when racked with sobs that she woke and came to him and reassured him that it wasn’t over for another two days.
Rob McClure Smith’s fiction has appeared in many literary magazines, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Barcelona Review, and Manchester Review. His short story collection The Violence was published by Queen’s Ferry Press in 2015.
