Future Home of the Living God(10)

He’s right, I think as we walk to the casino. I remind myself to lay in a stock of powdered milk right away, to maybe hit a big Cub or Rainbow market before I get back to the Cities. I make a mental list of long-shelf-life high-protein foods. Peanut butter. Durum pasta. Rice, beans, lentils. And salt. I’ll get a lot of salt. We’ll need salt whatever we become. And people run quickly out of liquor, right? It’s good to have it, to bargain with. Walking toward the restaurant, I imagine myself hunkered in my house with a closetful of Morton salt and fifths of vodka, which I can trade for diapers.

“Since you know so much then, Eddy, what’s going to happen?” I ask.

“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.”

“But the world is going to pieces.”

“It is always going to pieces.”

“This is different.”

“It is always different. We’ll adapt.”

We make our way through the jangling gloom, past Treasure Castaway and Bullrider quarter slot machines to the entrance of a discreetly Native-themed grill. Geometric wallpaper, heavily varnished stripped pine, metal light fixtures with eagle-feather cutouts. The booths, solid Naugahyde, are comforting and cushy. We order our food—everything is on the menu—and it comes in the usual amount of time. I noticed when Eddy got out of his truck that he had a briefcase with him, and I think immediately of Sweetie’s description of his manuscript. Sure enough, once Sweetie finishes her food and takes off for the tribal offices, where she works as some kind of special coordinator, a job I’m unclear about, he lifts the briefcase onto the tabletop between us and takes out some pages of what turns out to be his book.

“I’m revising,” he says, “not that it’s going to matter, ultimately. Short is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of earth where he lives, and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings. Marcus Aurelius. Typically up to the moment.”

Eddy says that although he quotes the Roman emperors and orators, he also likes Russian novels. Dostoyevsky is a favorite. Eddy lugs The Idiot around in an old clothbound edition. That’s what he was bent over when I saw him through the big glass windows. He says that people buying gas at the Superpumper sometimes catch the title and ask him if it’s his autobiography. But Eddy really does feel that Dostoyevsky has used up the only two titles that could possibly work for his own book—The Idiot and Notes from Underground. He is constantly searching for a title as good as those. He is keeping a list. Eddy tells me that his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.

“Some potential titles include the very literal,” he says. “Why Not to Kill Yourself. There is the more colloquial, Don’t Off You. The triumphant declarative, I Live Yet! The confusedly academic, Contra Selbstmord. Here!”

Eddy pushes the page he is editing across the table. That page, numbered 3027, is titled “Even Gas-Station Food Can Save You.”





1


Today I did not kill myself because of the sweet foam on the top of a cheap cardboard cup of cappuccino. What can I tell you except that it was delicious, swept off the surface of the denser brew onto my finger, which was slightly redolent of windshield wiper fluid. As I lowered my lips to the steaming liquid, I inhaled tones of vanilla, then took a tentative sip. Intense sweetness filled my mouth. I tasted fully. Malt dextrose and a resonance of airplane glue with a scorched plastic finish. My senses fully awakened. Awful and Superb!





2


I had a cardboard tray of nachos for lunch that was slightly flawed in the presentation, as I pushed on the hot cheese pump too forcefully and splattered the edges of the tray and counter. But that failing was made up for by the implacably rich marriage of salt and sodium, corn and hydrogenated grease, vegetable gum and number-five red that lingered in the back of my throat for hours.





3


I ate a postdated ham-and-cheese sub. Then two oranges from the fruit bin. Thusly, tasting deeply of all that gave me life, I made it through another unpromising morning and wholly treacherous afternoon in which between ringing up sales and unblocking gas pumps I attempted to manage my dread. The syncopation of my heart. A willful retreat of my entire mental process as I contemplated the 1 p.m. tribal council meeting which I was scheduled to attend.

Strike that. Endure. That I was scheduled to endure.

“I wouldn’t change a word,” I tell him. And I wouldn’t. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think that my services as an editor are really required. I’m pretty sure that what Eddy mainly wants is validation. I am happy to give it, although you may think, given the subject of the book, that I should perhaps ask Eddy to report to a psychologist. I do consider it, and then decide not to because even now I believe Eddy’s book serves as therapy. Like this book, or notebook, like yours. Also, Eddy makes me promise not to.

But there is something. Something that occurs during that lunch, during my first meeting with Eddy. Something clicks, is what I’m saying. Eddy talks, but Eddy also listens. He is the first person in this newly met family and also, come to think of it, the first person including my adoptive family, who actually sits and just listens to me.

“Yes,” he says, nodding, or “Hmmm,” he says, or “More, more on the subject?” Or even, “What do you think?”