Arcadia by Michael K Meyers

Listen to a podcast of Michael K Meyers’ “Arcadia.”

I make more than my brother, but because I don’t spend like him, I know I will owe the government the bundle our tax guy is trying to save me. Spend a lot, he says, and, tick-tock, spend fast. Pay yourself, he reminds, or pay the government. Bottom line, after taxes, my brother will make more than me, again, this year. Leaving tax guy’s office, in the elevator, my brother on his cell sets plans in motion to build a new home. Sluggish acquisitional imagination topped the list of significant character flaws my ex-wife wished read aloud in court.

    My brother’s new house is massive; a squared-off rusticated stone triple-layer cake of a place. Although he is agnostic, there is a grotto. No saints stand in the dimly lit space, but to me it still feels religious, and wandering down there my glasses fog up. The grotto is thick with lush, broadleaved, tropical foliage, kept alive by grow-lights hidden in the stone ceiling and programmed to come on at night. It’s attached to the heated outdoor swimming pool. You can get to the grotto either by walking down a few steps located just off the living room or, if you’re in the outdoor pool, by holding your breath and swimming through a tunnel.
    His place sits atop a berm in the otherwise flattened landscape of exurbs. Trees mark his particular exurb—Arcadia Woods, a new gated community of curving lanes studded with widely-spaced mini mansions—lines of mature trees that appear weirdly out of place alongside new houses. When I mention the trees, my brother’s face lights up. Trucking all those trees from South America, he explains, had cost the builder and, thus, my brother a bundle. Bottom line, tax-wise, it’s going to save him.
    Every time I bring over a new girlfriend, my brother manages to work in his story about the hardships and dangers experienced getting those trees across the Panama Canal. In the grotto, my new girlfriend stands between us and sips her wine, and once again and with no segue, my brother launches into the tree story. My new girlfriend is terrific looking so I figure he’s trying to impress her because this time he adds first-hand type details: perspiration, bandito danger stuff I hadn’t heard before. In the rental car on the way home, my new girlfriend tells me she thinks my brother is really a brave guy, what with him personally bringing those mature trees all the way to Arcadia from South America. The Panama Canal part, my brother manually opening and closing those huge water gates, impressed her most. I glance over at her and decided, with her looking so desirable and all, to forgo the truth and find myself guilty of allowing yet another falsehood to go unchallenged. Instead, I gaze at clouds. As hard as I try, and I try hard, I cannot imagine what, besides clouds, the clouds look like.
    Every time I visit my brother, during each retelling of the tree story, my new girlfriend sits on the edge of her chair, chin cupped in her hands, leaning forward. When he gets to the part where, in Honduras, the road narrowed to one lane and the truck, heavily burdened as it was by trees, teetered dangerously and seemed about to fall into that deep-deep ravine at the bottom of which ran that wild-wild river, she gasps and applauds.
    Eventually, in the car, I tell her all the mean stuff my brother did to me when we were kids and also how he tries to take my girlfriends away from me. She comments of the Lalique wine glasses and the fact that it was the first time she’d ever eaten foie gras. There is a glow to her cheeks that I have not noticed before. I explain to my girlfriend that when my brother does manage to pry a girlfriend away from me, he talks badly about me to them in bed. My new girlfriend is unconvinced, and laughs a laugh that I am unfamiliar with. She wants to know how, exactly, I know this. I tell her I just know, although I don’t really, not for sure. What I know for sure is sleeping with my girlfriends and saying bad things about me is the mean kind of stuff my brother would like to do even if he doesn’t actually do it.
    My new girlfriend, besides being a looker, is sweet, perhaps too sweet. After I tell her all that stuff about my brother, she turns to me and says, pish-posh. What do you do with a girlfriend who condenses serious matters into a pish-posh? Then I think, if I split with her, the day my brother finds out—I know this, feel sure of it—he’ll call her, go after her, and so for the foreseeable, I decide to stay with her.

    My new shrink is a nice gal with a great office: water view, leather couch, an entire wall devoted to houseplants. She tells me to take my shoes off, put my feet on the coffee table. When I go there I don’t talk much. She talks a lot because she’s that kind of shrink. At the end of each session she never requires I paraphrase her commentary, which is good because I get so relaxed that I don’t really listen. Most of the hour I spend daydreaming about television shows, and leaving her office I do for a couple of minutes feel perked up, and until the feeling fades I don’t mind having just blown another 250 bucks on daydreaming. When the feeling fades, I go back to thinking about what a shit my brother is and this makes me want to buy something. Heading out of her office the shrink says, “If not things, why not places. Go places, acquire memories, live.”
    On the sidewalk not far from my shrink’s office, while peering through inch-thick glass at a jewellery display of high-end wristwatches tick-tocking, unable to think of where I should go to collect memories, feeling queasy and disconnected, I call my new girlfriend. She’s got a great looking apartment with a walk-in closet filled with clothes and stuff, and for sure she will want me to buy her something. I punch her number on the speed dial. Waiting for her to pick up, I feel positively convinced she will need something and that what she needs could turn out to be exotic and hard to find. We might have to spend a week or more shopping for it, perhaps be required to travel to Alaska. When the phone finally stops ringing my brother picks up. I ask him to put my girlfriend on. He says, “Hold on a sec.”

    At 15,000 feet, crawling across a steeply slanted scree field, Annapurna’s base camp over the next crest, it begins to sleet. I slip, my head impacting numerous rocks numerous times, the world turning silvery. Kumar, my Sherpa, moving carefully works his way toward me

About the author:

Fiction/Audio & Video: Quick Fiction, Nano, Fringe(audio), Mad Hatters’ Review (audio), Ninth Letter (video), Chicago Noir, Word Riot, 2River (text & audio), The New Yorker, Fiction, Chelsea, Bound Off (forthcoming).
As a performance artist: MOMA; Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum: Warsaw Institute of Contemporary Art: The Fringe of the Edinburgh Festival, others. An audio piece; “The Audio Encyclopedia of Personal Knowledge,” included in, “The Best From The First Ten Years of ATC.” Recently (’08 & ’09) parts of “The Audio Encyclopedia” presented at the Getty & Whitney. I teach in the graduate writing program of The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Visit michaelkmeyers.com.