Mylar Man (Part Two click Here)
Jeff Kass
The Mylar Man claws through the sand. His fingers dig and tug bits of balloon and balloon-ribbon and I walk next to him because the Mylar Man is my brother and I love the Mylar Man. But more than that, I love his wife. I always have, and I want desperately to sleep with her.
I am a shitty brother, I know this. But I’m walking next to the Mylar Man and most people are afraid of the Mylar Man because his back and shoulders are knotty and hunched from crouching and digging, and his fingertips are raw and dark and flaking, and though I call him the Mylar Man, no one else does. No one else, except for his wife – except for Naomi – even talks to him. She calls him Warren, which is his name, and he calls himself Old Goat on his blog The Human Factor where he writes daily about the ravaging and pillaging of the environment. He lives in a slowly deteriorating house on a southeast bluff of Lake Michigan and he is not old, only forty-two. He is not a goat either, though I want so desperately to bang his wife, who’s my age, just thirty-six, and she owns the house. It’s been in her family for a hundred and nine years. Old Goat has no job and doesn’t do anything except flail against humanity on his keyboard for several thousand words a day, and walk four miles on the beach after dinner in quest of balloon remnants.
He hates latex balloons, which is what he mostly finds, but at least—he says—they eventually decompose. Maybe it takes six months and longer for the ribbons, and most likely large numbers of birds and turtles die from eating them, but eventually they do go back to the earth. Mylar balloons don’t. They never decompose. They just float in the water looking like giant jellyfish, making their way to the beach to nestle in the sand and live there, like hermits, dead but alive, until the Mylar Man finds them and bags them and throws them into a trashcan.
“Look at this one,” he says.
It’s heart-shaped, but the little paint that once adorned it remains, just a few white frills and splotches of red. “What does something like this have to do with love?” he says. “This is a symbol of non-love. This is a symbol of hatred. If you profess your love to your girlfriend by buying her one of these, you’re professing your hatred of your planet. This balloon is a death-sentence to your grandchildren.”
“Don’t aim your Old Goat venom in my direction,” I say. “I didn’t let it go.”
“You would have though,” he says. “If you had someone you were in love with, you’d do it. You’re romantic and stupid like that. I know you.”
He’s right. He does know me. And I am stupid, though not romantic. I would never give his wife a balloon on Valentine’s Day, just an earth-shattering orgasm that would simultaneously make her both love dearly and forget entirely her planet. I love Naomi. She is short, under five feet, and a fireball of thick black hair and compact muscular body that I know will just shake and shake and I wonder if my sand-clawing brother has any clue how to make her happy. She always seems happy, always laments the state of her falling-down house with a fond joke like, “sit on that side of the dining room, and you might wind up bobbing in the surf,” and when she jogs barefoot on the beach she is far away from her husband digging up balloons. Her gait is forceful and resolute. She runs out of sight and I want to catch her behind one of the dunes and hold her around her shapely waist and do her until she shakes and whisper to the top of her lush, rain-forest head, “I will not let you support me with your job teaching kindergarteners while I rant and rave to either no one or maybe just some small pathetic cadre of other online whack-jobs. Together, we can save each other and your family home and keep it from falling into the lake.”
“Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says, after he’s waded hip-deep into the water to retrieve a balloon that’s still partially inflated, his cut-off jean-shorts now soaked. “From Chicago, I bet. Some idiot let it go during a festival. Ate too many hot dogs and didn’t give a shit about his grandchildren’s future.”
The balloon is a familiar design, mylar, and once a glowing yellow moon-pie with a smiley face, like a floating tab of acid with two black dots for eyes and a slice of semi-circle for a mouth. Most of the yellow paint is gone, but the smiley face remains, looking like a leer now, a grin that’s taunting and scary when its background is transparent.
“I understand the impulse,” the Mylar Man says, “ trust me, I do. It’s fun to let go of things. To feel a sense of release when something you’ve been holding for too long drifts away. Your load lightens, I get that. Your life is suddenly more carefree. But here’s the thing, John,” he stares at me a moment and looks like a God, bronzed and unhunched and strong, silhouetted by the sky’s pink embers. My brother is beautiful and always has been, a force of skin and beard and purpose. “John,” he says, “it’s an illusion. Life is never carefree. If you don’t care, you die.”
I had a balloon exactly like this yellow one once, back when I was after Rachel. She had an eight-year-old son named Micah and I tried to fill my apartment with all manner of playthings, like baseball cards and Hot Wheels cars and plastic machine-guns and balloons so he wouldn’t mind the significant time I spent with his mother in the bedroom. But Rachel dumped me for a guy who makes hinged models of teeth and sells them to dentist offices, and I don’t know what happened to the big yellow balloon. I don’t remember letting it go, but I don’t remember popping it and throwing it away either. It wasn’t hard to let Rachel go. She wasn’t Naomi. If she drifted to the clouds, growing smaller and smaller each time I looked until finally I could no longer find her in the sky—fair enough, happy flying. Land safely with the teeth-maker.
Chicago—the idiot city, my brother calls it—is where I live. Not exactly in the wind-battered, big-shouldered heart, but in a bleak condo-town on the outskirts. My apartment, where I used to encourage Micah to cultivate imaginary friends as I investigated his mother below the belt, is characterless. It’s embarrassing, I’d say, so when my Dad travels out of town, which he often does for his consulting job where he draws shapes and arrows on legal pads, I borrow his Lincoln Park brownstone and bring women there. It's always nice to screw them on the $4,000 leather couch where—when he’s not traveling—my father also screws while my mother sleeps alone in the suburbs with the over-sized stuffed penguin my dipshit older brother and I bought her for Christmas one year so she wouldn’t be lonely in the vast wasteland of her California King. She hates that stupid non-animal with its creepy glass eyes and bright orange beak. She hates all that it mockingly represents, but she’ll never tell that to me or the Mylar Man because she wants us to believe we harbor a modicum of essential goodness, which neither of us actually do believe, but when we’re home visiting, we’re willing to fake it to make her happy.
That’s the kind of family we have, but none of that bothered me if the woman I was screwing on my father’s couch was attractive enough or groaned provocatively. Except yesterday, when my father’s phone rang while I had a mouthful of breast and when the machine came on, and one of my father’s many paramours left him a message that said, “Franklin, when you get back to town, call me. I owe you a back massage.”
Because it’s bad enough to hear the voice of my father’s lover leave him a message while I’m trying to bang a woman I’m not in love with because she’s not my brother’s wife who I am in love with—who I’ve always been in love with since the first time I saw her running the 400-meter hurdles back in high school and those short but super-powered legs were pumping like two steam-engines clanking—but it’s worse, way worse, when the message spews coy flirtations like I owe you a back massage. Nobody wants to imagine his father at a seventh-grade party in somebody’s well-shaven backyard where two adolescents who want to do the animal-romp have to mask their intentions with a new age reach-out-and-touch-somebody-with-your-sensitive-fingertips philosophy as if the exchange of backrubs constitutes a legitimate form of sexual currency. The net result left me spitting the breast out of my mouth and sitting rigid on the leather couch because I realized my Dad left my mother and caused her a quantity of misery equivalent to my hardly being able to talk to her anymore because I’m afraid of disappointing her with all I’ve never lived up to, and the thing is, is this what it was all for?
Some pathetic slitbag still playing the same act that probably worked twice, or maybe three times prior to the middle school Bar Mitzvah season when everyone started trying it and there was a viral outbreak of backrubs at every encounter between the sexes, and then just as rapidly the movement began to stink of the weight of its own self-consciousness until, at last, it putrefied into a hulking landfill, smoking and fetid?
This is all to say I’m sorry for forgetting the name of the woman whose nipple I spit out, and for being an asshole, and for walking her so quickly back to the dance club she had to hold her heels in one hand and half-jog to catch up with me, but the fact is when I heard the chirping of my father’s lover and her ample and well-constructed persona of cheesiness, I finished up quick—one final and shameful spurt—and had to evacuate the brownstone immediately because I knew it was a profanity against nature for Naomi to be with my brother when I loved her more than he did.
Here’s one truth: my father, though at 67 he continues to dye his hair with a paste as thick as shoe-polish and wear a diamond stud in his left ear, is nevertheless heroic. He left my mother and that did suck but on some level I understand it. She’s needy and nerdy and has an ornithological proclivity to find out everything she can about penguins even if she doesn’t like sleeping with a creepy stuffed one. He’s a big, strong guy with big, strong hands and his voice is deep and musical enough to make people believe in the magic of his shapes and arrows and his laugh is the kind of laugh that restaurants refer to as ambient. But, my mother, for all her faults, is a sturdy woman grounded in a kind of natural and beautiful earthiness— like Naomi, in that way, like the planet somehow pushed her up from its soil and gave her the gift of understanding its rhythm and spin, a quality both rare and brimming with rebirth and bottomless desire—all of which is to say my mom is capable of offering much more than massages. Much more truth and much more spirit and maybe my Dad just got overwhelmed and couldn’t handle something older and deeper and more layered than his $4,000 furniture. Which means I can no longer have random sex with women I don’t love anymore because I think of my father, with his miserable adolescent-minded girlfriend trying sadly to be sexy, and I consider my chance at love, a real chance with a gorgeous firecracker earthwoman less than five feet tall, and what if I just let that chance float past me and never reach for it?
Here’s another truth: I love my brother. I have for years. We spent many hours together delivering newspapers and he carried the larger canvas sack because he was bigger and the strap cut into my shoulders and I’ll never forget that. I’ll walk with him on the beach every night if he wants me to, and I’ll listen to him splash the waves with his tirades and I’ll even nod in sympathy on occasion, but still, he must be suffering. If he really loved Naomi, why would he spend so much time in the musty cave of his basement tapping blog entries destined to be read by no one? Why would he spend exponentially more effort digging his fingers through sand and lakebed than right there in his own bed, his exploring the lips, the lush earwells, the landscape of his wife? Why don’t they have any children? Why does he do nothing to save their house from dying? Why, after dinner each night, does he walk in one direction and she run in the other?
The voice on my father’s answering machine is a whip. It lashes across my chest and I finish quick and spit out the breast and go rigid yet still limp on the couch. Outside, a siren sounds from a fire-truck blocks away and it’s probably not symbolic but it reminds me of my responsibility to get moving, and I half-jog the still-dressing woman back to the dance club and I return to my silly apartment in condo-town, pack a bag and toss it in my car—a hybrid, thank you, Old Goat, don’t fucking go crazy because I actually utilize the ingenuity of the automobile industry to drive places—and then I head east around the bottom of the lake for a couple hours, and then turn north toward Naomi.
When I knock on their door, gently so I don’t cause the house to topple over the bluff, they are surprised to see me. “I had a dream,” I say, “a vision of your house tumbling down the hillside, rolling end over end like a wooden avalanche and finally it crashed against the beach and broke into a billion pieces and a lot of those pieces killed turtles and birds and spread particulate of lead paint through the sand and the debris engendered a murderous effect for decades. Let me live here with you guys. Let me stay here and fix things. Give me six months. I’ll shore up the foundation, re-joist the walls and floors, plant some new beach-grass—native species, of course—to slow the erosion of the cliff. Give me six months. I’ll give your house another fifty years.”
Old Goat looks like he wants to kill me for wasting gasoline driving here and for imagining the possibility that his house does not have to fall down, that it’s thinkable to somehow stave off disaster, while Naomi, beautiful Naomi, arches a beautiful eyebrow, and at last, they nod, and I’m in.
Naomi holds a damp blouse to the breeze so it fills like an airport windsock and she is standing on the side of the porch that’s still not too dangerous to stand on—the boards are only partially rotted—and she is not drying the shirt in the dryer in the basement because that appliance that no longer functions and she didn’t pin it to the clothesline because there’s no room. The blouse is of a turquoise and shimmering material and I imagine her thinking how in the morning she will mount her five-speed bicycle and soldier off to the kindergarten with renewed determination to save a generation of five-year-olds from falling prey to the wiles of SpongeBob and touchphones and it seems to me that it is not the wind but her spirit filling the contours of the blouse, puffing and rippling it in the sun.
Naomi toasts marshmallows around a fire-pit in the yard by the front door and Old Goat doesn’t eat marshmallows because marshmallows can only be purchased in plastic but Naomi likes them and every once in a while she’ll find a stick of appropriate length, pierce a marshmallow as if she’s stabbing a vampire’s tiny heart, and then wave it over the hot coals and hold it there long enough for the sides to crisp. “If they catch fire, they remind me of the Olympic Torch,” she tells me. “I don’t exactly get off on it, but there’s a thrill there, I won’t deny it."
Naomi helping me carry two-by-fours while Old Goat rummages for balloons on the beach. Naomi mixes strawberries, blueberries and bananas in a blender and hands me a Phillips-head screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. At the market she catches lemons when I lob them to her. When she naps on the side of the porch she can still nap on, her breasts rise and fall like buoys on the lake. She dances in the kitchen, those legs sugar-filled pistons, and when the radio plays Belinda Carlisle, she tosses the thick mane of her hair and says, “When I was little, I wanted to be a Go-Go. Sometimes I still think about it.”
“What’s a Go-Go?” asks Old Goat.
One Sunday afternoon, tired after hours in the basement watching Old Goat flail at his keyboard, nodding in support of his outbursts, I tiptoe gingerly up the ancient, claustrophobic stairs and find Naomi taping drawings made by her students to her refrigerator, instead of drawings made by the kids she doesn’t have. She bites her lip as she presses the tape to the corners until the pictures stick. Later, she escorts me to the ice cream parlor near a park that has an abandoned railroad track running through it. She orders what I order, two scoops of Michigan Cherry. Old Goat remains at home blogging. In the morning, showered and fresh for work in a flowered-print dress that drapes nearly to her ankles, a crumb of toast on her lips, she kisses her husband’s beard and waves and winks at me. “By the time you get home this afternoon,” I tell her, “it will be safe to stand on both sides of the porch.”
I have sunk all my money into this house over seven months, every dollar I got from the sale of my characterless condo. The house is now durable. It will stand for another half-century. There is nothing more for me to do, and when I leave I will have nowhere to live and no job. I don’t often think about the bleakness of those prospects; neither Old Goat nor Naomi brings up my future. She is grateful I saved her house. The Mylar Man is consumed with balloons. Now, with no more work to do, I walk the beach every night with him and help gather garbage. We don’t bring any trashbags down because there are no plastic bags in the house except on the rare occasions Naomi buys marshmallows and we use the bags we find down there anyway, or we’ll find a mylar balloon we can rip a hole in and turn into a bag. We walk in one direction, Naomi runs in the other. I turn around ever now and then to see if I can spot her in the distance.
“Look at this one,” the Mylar Man says.
It’s a Happy Birthday balloon, a balloon with the faded images of other balloons on it. The Mylar Man says again what I have heard him say many times, “Happy Death Day is more like it.”
I have heard all the Mylar Man’s stories and statistics on numerous occasions; how an elementary school class gathered over 500 balloons in just one half-hour of combing through the sand on the Jersey shore, how in late 2006 a Celebration 2000 balloon was found still intact on a beach in Cape Cod, how approximately 51,000 balloons are collected annually from the shores of Lake Michigan. “Listen,” he tells me, for perhaps the three-hundredth time, “if you studied the chemical composition of this beach, you would find traces of plastic in every single grain of sand. Every single one.”
Whether what my brother says is true or not, I have options. My arms, back and hands have been transformed by the work on the house. I am steel and strong. There is no one else on this beach except for Naomi who is far away, and I can plaster one of these balloons across Old Goat’s nose and mouth and suffocate him, twist the ribbon around his neck and pull. Or, I can shove him face-down into the lake and hold him underwater until he drowns. There are dunes where I can bury him and he won’t be found for decades. He would decompose, unlike mylar. After a period of mourning, Naomi and I could settle down in the newly reconditioned house.
But I won’t murder my brother. He is a martyr in his own mind and I won’t give him the satisfaction of becoming a public one. Naomi looks often at the new floorboards, the window-screens, the sturdy rails on her porch, and the day is nearing when she will no longer kiss her husband in the mornings when she leaves the house. She will wave and wink at me still, and there will be a day when her leaving will be my leaving too. The Old Goat can remain, in a house that will give him a good many years as he scours the beach. We will not feel guilty when we are gone. This day is near. Already Naomi walks close to me now in the narrow kitchen, brushes her hips against mine, reaches out to touch my sleeve. There is a tide drifting our skins toward each other, but I must be patient and float with the rhythms of the lake. It is nearly unbearable but I can’t let my desire grow into a storm that overwhelms. I must be a calm body, a tide that waits. And when our skins finally meet, we will not separate.
There is a story about mylar balloons I have been waiting to tell my brother. I have known it for a long time but kept it from him. It’s a story I read in The New Yorker a couple years ago, when I thought having a magazine like that in my living room would encourage Rachel to straddle me while her son played with Hot Wheels. It’s a story about how administrators in Grand Central Station grew frustrated about the number of mylars that had been loosed from the hands of kids in the lobby and journeyed to the ceiling. How the balloons lingered there for months, congregated into a veritable convention, obscuring the stately and magnificent starscape that had been painted when the building was first erected. The administrators didn’t know how to get the balloons down and contacted some spiritual doppelgangers of my brother, a couple guys who nearly wrecked their marriages when they became obsessed with rescuing plastic bags--“bag-snatching” they called it--from tree-branches. Guys who spent entire weekends combing the city with twelve-foot-long aluminum dowels with coat-hooks they’d duct-taped to the ends so they could collect thousands of bags that had been discarded after holding cosmetics or take-out. “Want to know what these guys came up with?” I ask. “Want to know how they finally got the balloons down?”
The Mylar Man is interested. He tugs shreds of red latex from the sand, a balloon remnant that’s been torn to sharp oblong triangles, like dragon fangs, and he looks at me. “How’d they do it?” he says.
I wait. The sun is setting over the lake in a swirl of blues, salmons and oranges. I understand what my brother’s trying to save. He is beautiful and altruistic and a treasure, but he’s nevertheless a lunatic. Ahead of us is the lighthouse, striped like a barber’s pole. Because there have been a lot of balloons today, a lot of digging and clawing, we won’t reach it tonight. We’ll reverse course and head back home. Naomi will turn around too and we will journey toward each other. She will grow larger and larger as we approach, but she’ll still be small, never taller than five feet.
“They clumped a group of them together, a half-dozen or so. Tied the clump to a long string like a giant kite. Then they slathered each balloon with industrial adhesives, buttered their surfaces sticky and sent them to the ceiling. Used the gummy clump like a monstrous fishing rod and, one by one, caught the renegade balloons and pulled them down.”
“That’s genius,” my brother says. “Like the family setting out to recapture the prodigal sons and return them to the fold. I gotta meet these guys.”
My brother never wants to meet anyone.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he tells me as he squints toward the vanishing sun. “I’ve enjoyed these walks with you.”
I’m tempted to pick up a rock and stone him with it. He is a gorgeous Poseidon, shirtless and rippled with the sunset behind him and I don’t want to listen to his rants anymore and I don’t want him to appreciate me. I am a shitty brother. The temptation to pick up a rock is quivering, the sound of the thunk against his temple would be a gift, an inheritance. I want it. I reach downward into the sand. Dig with my fingers and encounter some latex. Blue with a yellow ribbon. I claw it from the beach. Give it to the Mylar Man. He bags it.
Tonight Naomi will not run. Last night, she twisted her ankle. A misstep in the sand, a skitter off an upturned rock. She limped back and iced it for twenty minutes with the cubes leaking through a cloth napkin. She will ice the ankle again tonight instead of running. I have volunteered to keep her company. Old Goat is on the beach. We are watching him from the rebuilt porch as he works his way toward the lighthouse. He is a human combine reaping a harvest of latex and mylar. I imagine he is looking up periodically, missing me, wanting to say, “Look at this one,” but tonight there is no one for him to show and tell.
Naomi sits on a wicker chair, her ankle propped on a throw pillow on a matching chair two feet away. She leans over with a napkin full of ice cubes and applies it to the swelling. The ice melts and leaks in streams down her leg and she fidgets and twists and tries to refold napkin corners to contain the leaking. The Mylar Man is far down the beach now, barely visible, a slowly moving dot, smaller, smaller, and gone.
“I can’t bear to watch him,” Naomi says. “That’s why I run in the opposite direction.”
“Pretty pathetic, isn’t he?” I wonder if I’ve offended her because she forgets about fussing with the napkin, lets the melting water stream across her shin. She spends a long minute gazing at the beach, as if she can still see her husband, even though she can’t.
“You’re making a joke,” she says. “You’re saying his obsession is ridiculous, that he lacks dignity. But he is pathetic. And it’s not funny. It’s sad. He can’t clean the whole planet. He can’t even clean this stretch of beach.”
Naomi’s back curves as she presses the leaking ice to her ankle, and all the fire has gone out of her shoulders. She is uncomfortable, twisting more and fidgeting. What she’s telling me is that my brother is also too big of a beach to clean. She can’t save him and she’s ready to give up. She wants someone who will take on tasks that aren’t hopeless. A ribbon of hair falls across her face and brushes her cheek. She can’t do anything about it because her hands are holding the ice, and I reach toward her. I lift the hair and when she looks at me her eyes are full. We know how long her husband will be gone, two hours at least.
She is all heat now, still gazing at me, the ice running a river over her shin. If our skins touch, we will not separate. “My back aches,” she says.
I know what she wants.
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Jeff Kass is a teacher of English and Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and also works as the Poet-in-Residence for Ann Arbor Public Schools. He additionally directs the Creative Writing Program at Ann Arbor’s Teen Center, The Neutral Zone. His poems, stories and essays have been published in several literary journals, newspapers, magazines and anthologies including The Ann Arbor News, The Georgetown Review, The Wayne Literary Review, Anderbo, Writecorner, and The Spoken Word Revolution Redux. He is pursuing his MFA in Creative Writing through the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine and his one-man performance poetry show Wrestle the Great Fear will debut in in Ann Arbor on April, 29, 2009. "Mylar Man" will be featured in his short story collection, Knuckleheads, forthcoming from Dzanc Books.
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