What Comes Next

By Jonathan Baumbach

Baumbach describes our grip on both the present and the future with What Comes Next. He brings alive the public and private faces of hostility and anxiety through Chris Steiner, a university student on the verge of losing everything, starting with his mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dzanc Books
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781938604041

Jonathan Baumbach

Jonathan Baumbach is the author of seventeen books of fiction, including Pavilion of Former Wives, Dreams of Molly, Flight of Brothers, You, or The Invention of Memory; On The Way To My Father’s Funeral: New and Selected Stories; B: A Novel; D-Tours; Separate Hours; Chez Charlotte and Emily; The Life and Times of Major Fiction; Reruns; Babble; and A Man to Conjure With. He has also published over ninety stories published in such places as Esquire, Open City, and Boulevard. Baumbach, co-founder of the Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America, has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best of TriQuarterly. The New York Times Book Review referred to him in 2004 as “an underappreciated writer. He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair.”

Book preview

ONE

MY FATHER PASSES. I am sinking in some gelatinous substance. What do you plan to do with your freedom? he asks. What can I do? Up to my chin in the stuff. You can choose to stand or fall, Christopher, huh? But I’m falling, for God’s sake. A tooth wriggles loose. It’s a fact. Can’t you see that I’m falling? It’s your choice, son. His voice barely a whisper, fading. What have I taught you? You must make your own choice.

I’ve stopped leaving the house except for food and sometimes—when the strain gets too great—for air. Where is there to go? Too much violence in the street. Sex, bombing, suffocation, rape. Too much madness. I have what I need—books, a chess set, slide rule, TV, a bathroom, a mirror, windows, a phone. Nothing. I need nothing. It is a final equity. I bargain with God. A nothing for a nothing. You keep out of my way, I’ll keep out of yours. It is a fair and clean exchange. Still there are times I feel cheated. My mother used to say, Christopher, you’re a boy with so much to give to others. The fact is, I feel like a thief.

She is sitting in the bathtub, blissful, drinking champagne. He, smiling—the man (Parks with his arm around the girl), refilling her glass. Her eyes float in her skull, lustful as a cat. She is lovingly high. Her eyes are bubbles. His hands on her shoulders (Parks whispers something to the girl), he slides her forward. Her head in the water, floating. She smiles at him, her breath coming in bubbles, her eyes panic. Some dim message of danger flickers on and off. As remote as the moment of her birth. Gritting teeth, sweating, he holds her under. She struggles briefly, but it is easier to give in. Her eyes float. The centers gone. The water ripples, then stops. But she knows what it is, it is over.

I can barely breathe. Hard to watch a movie while trying to keep track of someone. Curtis Parks, Instructor of History, peace marcher—he sits five rows in front of me. I know his movements better than he knows them himself.

Before the movie is over, he and the girl are up. I cover my face as they pass.

They get into a taxi. It is two-thirty. They will go to the girl’s house and screw—or whatever it is they do. (Maybe he lectures her about war.) It’s not possible to hear anything in the hall. At four-fifteen or so, pretending innocence, Parks comes out of the building. Looks around to see if he’s been seen. Then over to Broadway to the subway. His head up. His left hand shakes a little, gives him away. To his wife and child. His home in the Grand Army Plaza section in Brooklyn. Parks married eight years. (I have a dossier on the peace marcher which is almost complete.) He is thirty-two. Thirty-three on August 4. Blond hair. A bald spot the size of a quarter in back. I could even tell you how much rent he pays.

Parks’ girl is Rosemary Byrd. Five foot seven, brown eyes, a hundred twenty-two pounds. I don’t know her age. Only that she graduates from college in June. (She is more my age than his.) Her breasts like globes.

WOMAN EATS OWN CHILD—headline in the National Enquirer.

I took the subway to the girl’s place and waited for Parks on a bench across the street until five. Smoked four cigarettes. He never came out, the bastard. (Did he go in?) I should have followed their taxi. It was dumb of me not to. Things should be done right or not at all. While I was waiting, some old woman got knocked down, her purse snatched. I started to help her up but she cursed me like I was the one who slugged her. So I put her back where I found her. I was very polite. Never once lost my temper. My mother would have been pleased with my manners. It pleases her to know she’s done a good job.

Parks’ girl and a friend are walking ahead of me. I slow down, match the rhythm of their steps. Keep the safety of my distance. They turn at the next corner. They are lost to me, out of sight, though not for long. Two blocks later there is only one of them, the taller one. Something about the movement of her walk, the way it denies my existence (the hard fact of me), carries me along. It is the third time I have followed her. She stops at the corner for a red light. I stop behind her, a man and woman between us. The light changes. I am alongside her. My hand brushes the sleeve of her coat. Without looking at me, as if I’m too unimportant to notice (as if I’m not there), she moves away.

NORTH IS SHELLED

BY U.S. ARTILLERY

FOR THE FIRST TIME

President says: Step Up War, Speed Peace

NEW BLOWS SEEK

TO SHORTEN WAR

To find out who one is, Parks says, one has to discover what one is capable of. All action is a test of the real self against the impossible ideal.

He pulled her down in the grass, his hand over her dry mouth. The sounds silent. She seems hardly to resist. Hardly. I (not myself) touch her face (disguised as someone else), my fingers clumsy, untrained. Shadows. Lifting her thick flag of a skirt. Don’t, she whispers; we share her secret. Don’t. A breath without sound. I remember her hands at her sides, her hands quivering like birds’ wings. Her eyes closed. Her legs … The knees come up and apart like a flower. The night encloses me. OUTBREAK OF FIGHTING IN ENEMY STRONGHOLD. 365 DEAD OR DESTROYED. The sound of birds, her breath. What am I doing? It is being done. I look on, watch myself. Watch. Her eyes are closed, they stare. We share the time. My palms press the ground, twigs and small stones impress themselves. Her silence judges me. I’ve not reached her yet. Not touched her. I let myself kiss the membranous lids of her eyes. Rosemary, he whispers. The lids like petals. She moans. Her nails tear through his mask. My face. She screams at him. Several times. He is up, pants open, running. She keeps screaming. I run, the park gets darker, the enclosure like a jungle now. I turn, go the other way. There is no way to go. There is no longer a path. In a field of tall grass. Running clumsily. Toward lights. They fade. The sky arches, cloudless, gray-black. The field becomes a hill, becomes a woods. There are sounds. Voices. The words foreign, Chinese or Russian. The buzz of voices. Three of them playing in the grass between two trees. Three children. Two boys and a girl. It is hard to tell what they are doing. It is hard to see them clearly without letting myself be seen. The smaller of the two boys seems to be kneeling behind the girl’s head while the other is straddling the girl’s legs. His head is down. His body bent forward from the waist. I can barely see the girl’s face. The smaller of the boys has his hand over her mouth.

I yell at them to let her up.

Grabbing the two of them and banging their heads together. Without moving, eyes closed, it is done. They are bruised and swollen. The mask bunched in my hand, I move off in a hurry, delicately balanced as if walking across a ledge.

A head comes out of the grass, voices haunt the woods. Sorry, I yell back. Someone laughs. A voice calls something unintelligible to me. Something else.

The thing slips from my hand. Underfoot like a stone. With the toe of my shoe, I dig it under.

A low-hanging branch knocks me down, tears the side of my face. The grass is moist, marshlike. It is easy not to get up, not to move; the damp chills me. I stand, clutching myself to get warm, shivering. Plunge, hands shielding my face, through heavy brush, through shadows. The limbs of trees, claws, reaching for me, leaves, thorns. I think what it would be like to be surrounded by the enemy. Point some dream carbine pressed into my shoulder. The piece kicks back. A siren. Shadows like silhouettes fall. Like quicksilver. The way to get through is to keep my head down, as far down as I can without falling. After a while I find a black scarf on the ground (perhaps the one the girl was wearing), pick it up. Slip it into my pants pocket. I run now, just run, without direction in mind. I go across a bridge. There are lights ahead … and perhaps I am running toward them, toward the lights. At the edge of the park two policemen stop me, ask me where I’ve been, where I’m going, who I am. They block my way. I say something about having gone for a walk and gotten lost. I wipe the blood from my face to show my good faith. They stare blankly at me. One asks me to repeat my story. I try but it is hard to keep details straight. I hear myself saying things that contradict what I’ve said. They listen, don’t listen; one concentrates, his forehead wrinkled, on something: the lights of cars, boredom. I keep talking, unable to stop, compelled to break through the blankness, convince them of my presence. The eyes of one, his forehead creased in the labor of comprehension, like the eyes of a wax dummy or a corpse. I keep talking, I have no longer any sense of what I say. What I say. What I am saying. The policemen look at each other, look at me, look at each other again, a complicity of misunderstanding. I am tempted to run, sorely tempted, watch myself as in a movie, running. When I look up I am still where I am, the two policemen in front of me.

Let me see your driver’s license, one says.

I wasn’t driving.

Don’t be wise, the other says. Let’s see some identification. You must have something that has your name on it.

I shake my head.

You know, your face is bleeding, the first one, who has a softer face, says. Were you in some kind of fight? Did you have a fight with someone?

I didn’t. No.

You got something with your name on it? the other says.

Get your wallet up.

Tell me why you want to see it.

Would you rather come down to the station or would you rather show it to me here? There is a pleasure in his eyes, a secret rage, a kind of love.

First tell me why you want to see it.

Because. Look, don’t give us a hard time. Why do you want to make things hard for yourself? All I’m asking is for you to take out your wallet and show me some identification.

I’ll show it to you, I say. I just want to know why you want to see it.

Just get it up.

I am taking my wallet out of my pocket, careful not to reveal the scarf, when a police car pulls up to the curb, honks its horn at us. The policemen hurry over to it. The first one sticks his head inside the car. The second stands behind him, listening, glancing back at me. (I pull the pin of a grenade and roll it toward them. Heads, hair in flame, fly. Sightless birds.) No chance to run, I go through my wallet. I have no driver’s license. My name, misspelled, on an old dry-cleaning slip. There are some cards—discount tickets for plays which have already closed. My draft registration card (which I don’t like to think about) is in one of the pockets. I have two cards with Parks’s name on them, which is a tempting alternative—a fine joke. What would he do in my position? There is a bird cry from somewhere. A jet overhead, its whistle touching the brain like the point of a pin. When I look up, my head aching, the police car is gone. And the policemen nowhere. I look around, up and down both sides of the street. I have the sense that they’re hiding somewhere. Waiting for me to do something suspicious. I stay where I am a few minutes more, then walk to the subway. In no hurry. The soot in the air burns the lungs. Hard to breathe. I cover my nose with my hand. She, whatever she is, is on my fingers.

I don’t go home. After getting off the subway, I wander the streets. A guy not much older than me, supporting himself on a crutch, comes up, asks for a dime. I shake my head, try to go on, but he stands in my way. I’m only asking for one thin dime, Scout, he says, his face almost touching mine. His breath sour.

Ordinarily I would pass him. Now it seems less trouble to give him what he asks for. I come up with a few pennies—the only change I have. His face, frozen into a smile, mocks me. I show him that I have no change. The smile remains fixed as if it had been stamped by a machine. Pasted over some gaping hole of a mouth. His face flushed, feverish. He moves to go on. In trying to get out of his way, I move back into it. You can’t get away from me, Scout, he says, and laughs drunkenly. His eyes wet. I take out my wallet, the scarf falling to the ground (it is the mask), and offer him a dollar. He accepts it, head turned as if taking a bribe. The mouth in the fix of its smile bent down at one side. Our shoulders brush as he passes. His weight jolts me off balance. I stumble into the side of a building. He goes on, without apologizing, without thanking me for the dollar. I watch him jog away, using the crutch under his arm as a kind of catapult. A police car, lights flashing, turns the corner coming toward me. I keep my foot over the thing, whatever it is. Pretend to look for something in my wallet.

Move along. The voice like a blow. I nod, walk slowly ahead. I imagine the mask floating behind me, the wind blowing it against my legs. The cop car stays with me for two blocks before turning off.

Looking for the mask, I retrace my steps. Go back and forth. The cripple ahead of me. I follow him for a block. He stops at a bar, stands for a moment in front. (What is he waiting for?) I can’t stop. He turns. We face each other. It takes a moment for him to recognize me—his eyes tiny red fish which come to life. It’s you, he says, crossing himself, grinning. Have you come for my blessing, Scout? For five dollars I have a charm which wards away beggars.

I warn him to stay out of my way.

June 12

I stayed home from school today, which was dumb, waiting for the police, who didn’t come.

What’s happening? Nothing about it in the papers yesterday or today—not even in the News. She either didn’t tell anyone or it was not important enough to be reported. (Did she recognize me? Why