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Cimarron
a short story by
Amy Sun
Michael’s dog, Oscar Meyer, was sick. Michael received the call from his father
on Friday afternoon.
“Michael,” his father said. “I need to share something with you. It’s not good.”
His father’s voice was cloudy. “Oscar hasn’t been able to stand for a couple days. We
took him to the vet. He said that Oscar is probably in a lot of pain.”
There was a long pause. His father made a quiet, sob-like sound and continued.
“Your mother and I have decided to put Oscar down. We’re going to take him in
tomorrow. I thought you might want to say something to him.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay.” Michael heard suppressed shuffling noises for several seconds and then a
gentle, rumbling breath. He recognized the breath immediately as Oscar’s.
“Hey Oscar,” Michael said. “Hey.” Oscar had been deaf for over five years, but
Michael continued. “You’re a good dog, buddy. The best.” Michael paused. He felt a
little stupid and quickly added, “I love you.” Oscar continued to breathe, and Michael
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tried to hear if he could distinguish a change in the breath, anything that might indicate
Oscar had responded to his words. After several moments, Michael whispered, “Dad?
Dad? I’m done talking to Oscar. Dad?” There was no answer, only Oscar’s slow
inhalations and exhalations of air. Michael waited another full minute, and ended the call.
It was 4:31 PM. Michael needed to be at work for another 29 minutes. There were
several projects he could have started in that time, but instead he stared at his e-mail
inbox and waited for messages to filter in. Michael didn’t dislike his job, but he didn’t
like it either. He felt absolutely apathetic toward his job. ShoeShop was the entire reason
Michael now lived in Las Vegas. ShoeShop had offered him a $119,000 starting salary to
work as one of their Java developers. As a recent college graduate, the offer seemed
unbelievably generous. Michael had never been to Las Vegas. He had spent his whole life
on the east coast, and all he knew of the desert was what he had seen in movies and
television shows: hot sun, yellow sand, saguaro cactus. He accepted the job. Now, nine
months later, Michael was stranded here in Nevada, in a land that was frighteningly vast
and isolated, a land which faced its bleak existence by imploding with distraction – with
girls, girls, girls! with slot machines and blackjack and alcohol and any drug you want,
cocaine, marijuana, acid, meth, and EDM and larger-than-life water fountains and fire
shows and trained tigers and circus acrobats and UFC fighters and all-you-can-eat
buffets.
Michael had not been prepared for the dust and the dry heat. Every night, after he
showered, he would peel off salty layers of skin. He was darkening and cracking. Every
cell in his body was being parched dry by the unquenchable desert. He’d find dust in the
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cracks of his eyes, under his fingernails, inside his socks. He could not tell if he was
becoming a part of the dust, or if the dust was becoming a part of him.
Yet as much as he hated the dry clime, Michael also felt, in a strange sense, as
though he belonged here. He observed the delicate, opulent flowers of the cactus, their
various shapes, sizes, thorns, the infinitely different kinds of sand, the rock formations,
the openness of the sky, like someone had cracked the great eggshell of the world apart
and you could almost see into the heavens. The unexpected animals, low to the ground,
quick and scurrying, flashes of tail and scale. He never thought he could know so many
shades of brown, browns that looked almost white, browns that were almost yellow,
browns that were almost green.
When the clock on his computer hit 5:00 PM, Michael diverted his office phone
to voicemail, shut down the computer, picked up his laptop bag, and left the office.
The drive home took another 26 minutes. As usual, none of Michael’s housemates
were there. Michael prepared dinner for himself: a pre-packaged salad, grilled salmon,
and boiled potatoes. He finished a bottle of merlot as he ate. After dinner Michael took a
quick shower and changed into a simple white button-down, a pair of dark-wash jeans,
and black leather shoes. He ran a comb through his damp hair and brushed his teeth. He
admired himself in the mirror. Michael was frequently told that he was good-looking. His
mother often compared him to Paul Newman, though Michael had only a vague sense of
what Newman looked like. Michael accepted the fact that he was attractive with an easy
familiarity. He knew that most women liked his wide shoulders, his height, and his nose,
which was slightly ridged from an early boxing injury. Even so, Michael understood that
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while he was attractive, he was not so attractive that he could simply stop trying. He
observed his slightly receding hairline with irritation and anxiety.
Finally satisfied with his appearance, Michael got into his car and drove to his
favorite nightclub on the strip. The bouncers all knew him. It took him less than five
minutes to get inside. Once he was in, he’d bypass the cavernous dance floor and make
his way up to the third floor, where there was a lounge. It was dark up there, with a few
pool tables and a long bar. He sat at the bar and ordered a drink. While drinking his first
and second drink he wondered why he was there, why he was spending his Friday night
alone in a nightclub, a place where everyone arrived already surrounded by other people.
His third or fourth drink in he glanced up from his glass and observed the groups around
him, the men and the women and the way they leaned toward and away from each other,
the way they smiled at each other, pulling their mouths back to reveal rows of teeth,
white teeth and pink tongues. He felt almost disgusted, sick.
Out of this sense of revulsion rose a kind of recklessness. Michael felt himself
submit to the hum of alcohol. He turned to the closest woman beside him. She had dark
hair and dark eyes and he asked her if she was Mexican. She pretended to be offended
and told him she was Colombian. “Oh, what’s the difference anyway,” Michael said,
hoping for an argument but instead she laughed and he knew that it wouldn’t take much
effort to take her home with him.
Less than thirty minutes later Michael was driving back to his house with the
Colombian girl. She kept asking him if he was okay to drive, and he kept responding yes,
though he knew that he probably wasn’t. He had, however, driven drunkenly down I-95
so many times that he was confident he could do it again. And he did. They arrived at his
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house and went upstairs to his room and the girl kept saying “I never do this” but she did
do it and when Michael finally came he felt, for a moment, that there could be potential
for something more than just sex. But then the girl curled beside him and gave a long,
theatrical moan and said, “That was incredible.” Michael felt repulsed. It was as though a
chasm opened up between the two of them. Michael turned away from her and closed his
eyes. He could feel her touching his back. She whispered his name a few times, but he
did not respond.
The next morning the girl was gone. The sun was bleary and rising from the
ground. Michael pulled on a pair of gym shorts and went for a run. He hated everything
about running – the exposure, the vulnerability, the slow burn inside his lungs, the
contraction of his muscles, the action potentials firing through his body at lightening
speeds. It was a sort of penance he did, a punishment for the sins of the past day, for his
torpidity in everything else in his life. As he ran, he berated himself for having
unprotected sex, for forgetting to go to the cleaner’s again, for eating McDonald’s drivethru so often, for being impatient with the Alice, the receptionist with stage-one
Parkinson’s, for ignoring e-mails from certain people, for always agreeing to have lunch
with Jenny, who he knew liked him, but whom he was not even remotely attracted to,
with her oily forehead and her tacky rhinestone-studded watch which was missing several
rhinestones. He berated himself and resolved to be better, to be bolder, to stop wasting his
own fucking life. And then he went home and cooked four eggs and sat in the La-Z Boy
in front of the TV for the next five hours watching a show called Gangland.
Michael got up from the La-Z Boy when he could feel his stomach contract with
hunger. When he stood, he felt as though his left eye was going to explode. A vein
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throbbed powerfully, and every time he allowed his eyelid to slide down, he saw great
blobs of florescent color that swam angrily in the darkness of his non-vision. He drove
himself to the ER and sat next to a man who was bleeding from the head.
The man chewed vigorously on something in his mouth. When he saw Michael sit
down, he made a low gurgling sound and almost stood up, but then quickly sat back
down. One of his hands was holding a soiled rag to his forehead. There were streaks of
blood on the rag and on the man’s hand. The man put his free hand to his mouth and spit
a large wad of gum into it. The gum was gray—it had the same color and ridged surface
of a brain—and roughly the size of a ping-pong ball. The man turned to Michael and
began speaking.
“I was kicked in the head, man, a man, a man he kicked me as I was . . . I was just
sitting just sitting by the Nugget and I had a couple dollars, maybe eight or nine, and you
know all these coins in my box this plastic box here see my box it’s not even a big box
not in nobody’s way and this man comes over and he says hey . . he says hey he calls me
a thief. He calls me! He calls me! Me! a thief and a liar and and he kicks my box and all
my money goes flying and I just . . . I just just scramblin just tryin to get my money and
then he kicks me. He kicks me in the head and he kicks me again and I’m just tryin to get
you know, just get my money and he kicks me and then I feel somethin wet and I know
I’m bleedin and he’s still kickin and I think maybe I’m gonna die maybe this is it and
then I hear some girls comin by and the man he runs and the girls they sorta scream a
little and then one of them is gonna call the police and I say no, don’t call the police, and
then . . . and he kicked me, you know? He kicked me! when I was just sittin there, you
know, but the police, who they gonna believe so I just keep goin and now I’m here and
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I’m tellin you, I was just sitting there, just sitting and he kicked me man, he kicked me . .
.”
The man put the gum back in his mouth and stared off at a distant wall.
The doctor asked Michael several questions about his symptoms. He then shined a
light at Michael’s eyes and had Michael follow his fingers with his eyes. The doctor
concluded that nothing serious was going on and sent Michael home.
When Michael arrived back at home he glanced at his cell phone, which had been
on silent, and saw that he had one missed call from his father and one voicemail. He
listened to the voicemail, in which his father explained how Oscar had died naturally
during the night. It was a blessing, his father said, that they hadn’t had to put him down.
Michael considered calling his father back. He did not. Instead, he left his cell
phone in his room and got into his car. It was dark out again. Michael rolled down his
window and felt the hot air crush against his skin. He drove down West Ann Road. There
was a green light on the intersection at Rainbow, green on Rio Vista, green on Drexel.
Red on Oran K. Gragson. Yellow on Cimarron.