Mission to America by Walter Kirn

Author:Walter Kirn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307278555
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-10-10T04:00:00+00:00

Betsy lived in the basement of her mother's house, a triangular redwood structure with tall bay windows built against a brushy eroding hillside where the sidewalks of Snowshoe's downtown neighborhoods turned to narrow dirt paths, then petered out. Cars shared the driveways with boats and campers and motorcycles—thousands of dollars of gear for every household and most of it looking forgotten, barely used. I'd stopped wondering on my fourth or fifth day out where all the money came from in Terrestria—from nowhere, apparently; it simply was—but the ways people found to waste it still dazzled me.

Inside, Betsy turned on a yellowed ceiling light, revealing dozens of stacked-up plastic grocery sacks knotted shut and containing what looked like clothing. “My thrift-store addiction,” she explained. The piles left little space for furniture other than a queen-size mattress and box spring resting without a frame on the bare floor. Betsy asked me to excuse the clutter but there wasn't any clutter; the bags appeared to have been placed by a trained mason.

She crossed to a little half bathroom, shut the door, and a moment later I heard water running, followed by the high annoying whine of what I supposed, though I'd never heard or seen one, was an electric toothbrush. It sounded painful.

We sat on her mattress and ventured a first kiss that began with such force it had nowhere left to go and had to be abandoned and restarted. Her front teeth, which had looked smooth and glassy at the restaurant, had two tiny chips that kept rasping against my tongue tip. Her mouth and her breath were absolutely odorless and her saliva reminded me of mineral oil—slippery, tasteless, and neither warm nor cold. I suspected that she was the cleanest human being I'd ever touch, and this scared me for some reason. I feared it might spoil me for anyone else.

We stopped to rest after ten or fifteen minutes and regarded each other's faces from inches away, our chins rubbed raw, our lips all gnawed and puffy, and in her eyes (I could only guess how mine appeared) was a misty, vague, anesthetized detachment that convinced me she was seeing a composite of all the men she'd ever done this with.

“I want you to be mean to me,” she said.

“How? In what way?”

“Whatever way you feel like.”

“Mean like cruel?”

“Like my feelings don't matter. Only yours do.”

I translated this into Casper Wiccan terms. The doe was asking the stag to romp unchecked.

I tried to satisfy Betsy's wish, aware the whole time that meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far. I squeezed her left arm above the elbow until all I could feel was the pulse in my own thumb. I turned her face to one side by pushing her cheek and dragged my teeth down her neck from ear to collarbone. Still, I sensed she was frustrated with me. I hadn't uncoiled, I hadn't blasted through. To want this, she must have had it before, I realized, and I wondered from whom, and how recently.

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