Fish Tacos

by Nick Chrastil 

I think we were all being crushed in one way or another by what we thought of as our unrealized greatness (except for Yaz, who didn’t concern herself with those sorts of things), and I think that when we took our shots, and when Stevie’s forehead hit the bar, and when Forest started slowly moving his hand up the back of the Virginia Woolf scholar’s shirt, and the way that she was drinking cranberry juice instead of whiskey, how she was helping out her pregnant sister for a month but didn’t seem too happy about it, and how I said, Talk about a fucking truism after Forest said something, I think all of that had a lot to do with something else that none of us could quite reach, something like trying to ward off hunger by eating air. 

When we left the bar it was still light out. There was a truck outside that said Grease Monkey Oil Removal and it was pumping the grease out of the fried chicken place next to the bar. The grease had gotten all mixed up in the air and it was like we were on a different planet, and I thought maybe it was the sort of planet that Yaz came from, where things were slower. But then I thought that was probably the opposite of where she was from, that she was probably from somewhere where the air was tight, so that it stung the outside of your skin if you stood still for too long. Then I thought again and thought that she was probably actually from somewhere altogether different, somewhere that I could never imagine, and so I stopped thinking about it. 

* * * 

Nine in the morning in a hotel room in Washington D.C., Forest drank whiskey and watched the Virginia Woolf Scholar sleep. He thought he saw some smoke coming out of one of her ears. Too many cigarettes, he thought. It must be what she’s dreaming, he thought, or maybe reject dreams being exiled out of her head. He looked at the smoke and took out his notebook. He thought he saw (he saw) a subway car filled with people who were on the verge of tears. They were all wet and the car was cold, no one was talking to each other. It must have been raining outside, thought Forest. There was one middle aged Latino man, his face covered in rain (not sweat or tears, Forest thought), in a dark red shirt. Forest looked at him (what was he looking at?) and thought he must have lost it all. Forest wrote it down in his notebook. Then he thought, no, maybe he has it all. Maybe only half the people were on the verge of tears and the others were feeling regret for making the others cry. 

Forest went down to the hotel restaurant. They were serving breakfast, and a few people sat around eating eggs and toast. Forest went to the bar and ordered a beer. The hotel had a nostalgic feel to it. Forest couldn’t remember if he had liked the aesthetic when he booked the room. He didn’t now—he hated it. He imagine himself seated on the hard dirt ground near a lake with pine needles mixed in with the dirt, but it wasn’t right, like putting on the wrong song, so he imagined being in space. He hated it. He closed his eyes and took a drink of his beer. When he opened them he felt a little better. He looked around the restaurant and noticed that everyone was being quiet enough. There was no music on. There are no kids, at least, he thought. No families. It would have given him pleasure to punch anyone between the ages of eight and fifteen in the face, but one boy in particular, red-faced and pulling at his fathers sleeve. 

* * * 

The next morning I went to the bike shop to try and get my bike fixed. 

When I got back to the apartment some of the family from the first floor was outside. The fire hydrant was spraying water, and the kids were running through it like a sprinkler and shooting each other with water guns. I was holding the phone to my ear talking to my mom about my ingrown toenail or when I was going to come home to visit, and with the other hand I was trying to ward off water gun fire. One of the kids’ fathers, always with headphones in his ears, said to me, as his daughter rode through the fire hydrant on her tricycle, You know the answer to the riddle yet? And I told my mom to hang on a second, but she couldn’t hear me. 

He told me the riddle the night before, when I got home from the bar and he was sitting on his chair on the stairs, smoking a cigarette with headphones in and drinking out of a styrofoam cup. Maybe he was a little drunk, or maybe he just wanted to talk because living in a small apartment with all those kids and his mom too it can be hard to have a real conversation. The riddle he told was this: What came before God, is greater than God, poor people have it, rich people don’t need it, and if you eat it you will die? Don’t google it, he told me, and then he repeated himself, in case I didn’t remember all the pieces, and maybe I didn’t. 

I headed in the door of the building and got hit with the spray from a water gun. Hold on one second, I told my mom, but she still didn’t hear me. Just hold on I yelled into the phone. I got hit again with water, but it was hot out and I didn’t care. Nothing, yelled the girl’s dad. You get it? 

* * * 

Yaz was definitely from the past, or the future, from a different planet, where she was almost definitely either a slave who had been mistaken for a princess, or a queen acting as a peasant, or something altogether different, I can’t be sure what exactly it was. 

* * *

The first time we got off the train was at Union Square because Stevie thought she was going to be sick. She leaned over the garbage can and spit a few times, but that was all. We got back on the train and when we woke up we were twelve stops past our stop. We got off. It was two-thirty in the morning and raining. We sat on the bench and waited for the next train. Before she fell asleep again Stevie kept muttering things like “New Lots… what the fuck ’append…took the train all the way to fucking Canarsie.” I walked up and down the platform to stay awake and make sure we didn’t miss another train. 

I sat back down next to Stevie on the platform. A couple of girls, they looked about twelve years old, came up the stairs onto the platform. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing there. Stevie lifted her head up from my lap and looked at the girls. Fucking adorable, she said. Same age as my brother. 

We went back to her apartment because her roommate was gone. I made myself a salami sandwich and she smoked a cigarette. Then I lay down on the futon and she sat there. She said she wanted to smoke some weed and asked if I was falling asleep. I told her I was, but she kept talking to me. I don’t know if she rolled a joint. I think she did. When I woke up in the morning she was there laying next to me. I wondered how she got there, or why she was still there. 

* * * 

I sat at the bar drinking a can of beer and watching Shaw play some guy in a vest. When he missed a shot and it was the other guy’s turn Shaw would lean on his cue and get my attention. Then from across the table he would mouth to me: “Nick. I’m fucked up.” He had these weird murky eyes, like a blind man. Maybe they only got that way when he was drunk, I thought, or maybe slowly, as he got older. Shaw lost and went outside to smoke. I played the guy in the vest, and I lost somehow. I don’t know what happened. I hit the eight ball in the wrong pocket. 

When I got outside Shaw was sitting on a fire hydrant talking to someone. 

Victor, he told me, but some people call me Victoria. 

You know what I call him? Shaw asked. 

What? 

He leaned his head back and looked at the sky and said Bioooooootch. 

I looked at Victor. That doesn’t bother you? 

I’ve known that biotch since before he fuckin’ had a name, said Shaw. I was in his kitchen eatin’ cereal when his mom brought him home from the hospital. With his left hand he held an imaginary bowl of cereal and started shoveling it into his mouth with his right. He kept doing it for a while, like he forgot what he was doing, or thought he was actually back in the kitchen waiting for Victor to get home.