I imagined Brooklyn downstairs, playing a game with her baby. Popping him up on a handstand, flicking his back with her fingernails, screaming, “Do you want to go to Vegas!?” at his tiny little head and waiting for him to fall like that disgusting child in Trainspotting (which I heard meant paying attention to useless stuff—worshiping throwaway information like it’s your god)—I pictured us all coming off of coke, which everyone says is easy compared to heroin (of course alcohol is the only drug that can kill you when you stop using) but whatever it was (heroin or coke) Little Baby Faulkner will be there with us crawling upside down on the ceiling, head turning back à la Linda Blair in The Exorcist except our baby wouldn’t even have a stunt double or special effects to help him make that move. I mean that’s what I was picturing, in my film student soul, when Charisma and I were about to kiss (a thing we hadn’t done since high school) we heard Brooklyn’s shrill voice coming up the stairs like an apparition on some long-ago video whose authenticity you could neither confirm nor deny—except ours was real, clear, and all the scarier for it.
“Baaabeeeyy! Oh baaaby!! Come here Little Baby Faulkner and catch me if you caaan!!! You freak—you odd toddler, you can’t even speak but you know the rules of the game, don’t you?? Lover, genius, madman! You were given to me and to this house for a reason. Embrace it. Kiss me, little one..”
“You think we should go down there?” Charisma said.
“Yeah,” I said.
At the bottom of the stars Charisma’s grammy was half-standing out of her chair, shaking her cane at Brooklyn saying: “Girl, I may be old for you but I will beat your ass with all 82 years of this cane if you do not put that baby down right now. That’s justice, to you, to get hit with a cane—is it not? I bet that’s the kind of love Rambuncto gives you, ain’t it girl?”
“Grammy,” Wendy said. “Put your cane down—sit your ass down or I’m gonna beat you with it.”
“You’re on their side,” shrieked the 82-year-old—who was someone’s grammy but not Wendy’s.
“Get your hands off me!” Grammy used her cane like a sword 🗡, knocking Wendy to the side. She hobbled toward the stairs and Charisma and I came all the way into the living room.
“Brooklyn,” Charisma stomped. “Hand over Little Baby Faulkner. Now!”
Charisma took delivery of the baby.
Brooklyn plopped down on the couch—she plopped as much as a skinny girl can.
Grammy struggled up the stairs with Wendy behind her, pushing. As someone who has done this many times before, Wendy didn’t even make a show of pushing by the old woman’s back—she knelt and pushed on her butt and via her butt the young woman helped the grammy onto the second floor.
“I need some coke,” I said.
“I think we have some,” Brooklyn said. “Before you got here me and Charisma bought another eight ball and stashed it somewhere. Problem is: we don’t know where we stashed it!”
“You’re kidding me,” I say.
“Nope.” Both she and Charisma shake their heads.
“It’s not in the dishwasher?” I ask. “It’s not in the wall? How many places could it be?! Fuck! I bought all the coke for this weekend and now I find out you guys bought some but the coke you guys bought is mysteriously unavailable!! That really is a some goddamn miracle. Really. Like a miracle of the bad kind. And this:” (Charisma rocks Baby Faulkner and sings to him softly.) “I can’t even! As far as I can tell, you two have lost one baby each and now you’re holding onto this one like your lives depend on it. Why is he called Faulkner again?”
Brooklyn speaks. She and Charisma make eye contact as her speech unfolds. “Faulkner. I always liked the sound of it, from when I was little to now. It sounds like a smart man. Someone singular. You know, like, how there’s only one—”
“Tell me the short version.”
“There’s a book by him. It’s under the crib.”
My eyebrows raise. “The crib upstairs?”
“Yes, it’s called Furious Sound—it’s been kept under that crib starting at our last house. I brought it here to read but it got packed with the baby stuff and I kicked it under that crib and left it there. I’ve been meaning to read it but I haven’t had time due to all the baby care acts I keep knocking off my list.”
“Have either of you ever read a word of Faulkner?”
“No.” “No.”
“Get me the book.”
Brooklyn’s eyes shoot forward. “Right now?”
“Yes! Get me the book!!”
Brooklyn chomps up the stairs. I hear rumbling in the crib room. When she comes back down (three at a time) she trips on the carpet, falling, barely able to catch herself due to holding the book to her chest with one hand.
I take it from her and read.
When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
I drop the book to the floor like I’m dropping a mic.
“And that is called The Sound and the Fury and that’s who your baby is named after and that is a man who none of us will ever become.”
Brooklyn asks Charisma if she can have her baby back.
“Are you gonna be good?”
“What do you care if I’m gonna be good. Yes! I’ll be good. I will. Ok? Work with me here.”
Charisma gently gives the baby back.
“You know what that reminds me of?” Brooklyn says, pretending to suckle Little Baby Faulkner through her shirt.
“What,” I say.
“The Christopher Walken speech in Pulp Fiction. The Gold Watch. Doesn’t it remind you of that?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“No, your ‘I guess.’ Doesn’t it remind you?” Brooklyn says.
“I guess! I’m mean: yes, I do guess. I guess so. It does remind me a little bit. I guess it does. It has a watch—was it gold? But it’s about passing on values from generation to generation—I guess that makes them similar. They’re each appropriate for their times. Tarantino’s is..”
“Matthew,” Brooklyn interrupts. “What did Charisma tell you about my previous baby?”
Charisma’s eyes are deep into Faulkner.
“She didn’t tell me much.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Not much. She told me he died.”
“How did she say that he died?”
“I can’t remember. Uh.. I forgot. But it sounds like a terrible loss that I’m sure you’ll never forget. I’m so sorry.”
“Bullshit,” Brooklyn says. She stands from the couch and approaches me. She gets in my face. “Rambuncto is coming back today and if you’re still bullshitting me I’m gonna have him kick your ass. Don’t think he won’t do it ‘cause I know he hates film school students and I know he likes to fight—”
“Brooklyn, don’t even start with me. Rambuncto doesn’t want to fight me—”
“Yes he does!” she’s screaming.
“Even if he does,” I snap at her, “he’ll never get a hand on me—know why?”
“Why motherfucker?”
“Because I’m smarter than him. And I’m smarter than you. You and Rambuncto couldn’t plan your way out of a tennis court. By the time Rambuncto gets here I’ll be gone. On a plane. Back to what you call ‘my prestigious life’ that you never listened to my description of or else you’d know that it’s not privileged. You dumbass. You total freaking dumbass. You and Rambuncto can move to California if you want. A car—which you have outside. Money for gas—about the same amount we all spent on cocaine this weekend. That’s all it would take, is you wanting to go. And you’d be there! Unless you want to throw a punch up here without your man by your side.”
I can see her considering it. But she doesn’t move.
Charisma looks up from Little Baby Faulkner. She says: “It’s Sunday.”
“Ok.”
“It’s noon.”
“Ok.”
“Your flight’s in two hours.”
“Oh!”
“Right,” she says. “I’d like to get some time with you..alone..if possible.”
Charisma heads up the stairs and I’m following behind, watching her ass creak in those jeans.
Brooklyn mutters: “That’s right. You go and fuck her. I know you’ll think of me when your cock slips in. You’ve been thinking of me all weekend and we know what that says about you. Typical guy. With such base desires. Nothing to be envied there.”
Charisma says over her shoulder: “Brooklyn. When I get home, I’m kicking your ass. Matthew, tell her that.”
But I look on the couch and Brooklyn holds up two middle fingers with the baby in her lap.
“I think she heard you.”