Mystery Men by Katie Cortese

This was back when I was dating Ziggy, when I didn’t know any better, about anything. He had this leather jacket—vintage, according to him, and handmade from the most venerable bull on his grandfather’s ranch—that he wore all the time, rain or shine, hot or cold, and I loved being able to pick him out in a crowd or a photo or an old, pixelated video of him playing bass in 10,000 Merrimacks, the tribute band he’d formed during college. Even five years out from graduation and a bona fide Texan after a failed master’s in psychology, he still flew back to Massachusetts a couple times a year to limp through “Because the Night” and rehash stories of falling into Mendel Pond on 148-proof absinthe their lead singer had smuggled into the U.S. from her study abroad in Prague. His Insta pic was an inset from one of those concerts that had caught him mid-head-toss over his instrument, bangs curtaining his face and little flying balls of sweat ringing his head like a bunch of watery moons. 

Ziggy was always saying that we needed to drink absinthe together sometime and that I shouldn’t believe anyone who said it couldn’t make you trip because he’d visited Europa, one of Jupiter’s Galilean Satellites with a vast under-surface ocean, after just four shots, and he’d seen creatures in those off-world waters that looked just like silvery octopuses with great, grinning mouths. I’d let him go on about them just to see his eyes flash like chips of mica and catch a contact buzz from his frenzy. Ziggy swore up and down that aliens were real as you and me and that we’d meet some of them as soon as the scientists got their colonies up and running on Mars and Titan and Proxima Centauri B, and we could all get off this dying rock. 

Anyway, this was all a few years back before my dad died. We had a combo retirement/birthday party for him at this local park where my parents used to walk with their incontinent schnauzer, and I invited Ziggy. The park wasn’t much more than a field around a manmade lake that smelled like an aquarium, and it was March, so it all still looked like straw with a buzzcut. We had the same stuff growing in our lawn; my dad always called it our “Lubbock Special,” the medley of Bermuda, thistle, water weed, and clover that locals liked to pretend was grass. My father spent too many of his Saturdays trying to uproot those native opportunists from our yard the same way my mother still tries to dye her gray roots into oblivion, but like someone famous once said, the truth will out. Always. Sometimes it just hibernates first. 

Me and Zig had been together for two years by that point, and he’d been clear about his parent trauma, which was that his dad died young in a freak accident involving a camp stove, and his mom was blame-y because the whole thing happened at a Boy Scout jamboree Ziggy had begged to attend. I got why he stayed away from parents, and even why he said that he never wanted kids, though I hoped he’d change his mind about that, but I told him if we were going to last, he had to meet my parents, who were mild-mannered and progressive, and big music lovers to boot. He could even bring his bass and play a riff or two for his present, I told him, but Ziggy said his fingers locked up when he got nervous, so that was a no go. I’d only ever heard him play on those grainy videos, and I figured he just had reverse stage fright—like he was good up on stage but fell apart in person—or else that he just wasn’t very good, so I told him not to worry about a present, and I ignored the little voice that had started alerting me to Ziggy’s weird relationship with the truth. 

It’s not just that he lied, sometimes about the most random things, like whether he’d ever been to France (he claimed Customs just forgot to stamp his passport) or whether he was allergic to cats (yes, according to him, though he never failed to pet a stray), but he’d always double and triple down whenever I caught him in the act. Like, he’d tell me that the reason his hair was wet after work was that he’d fallen asleep on a park bench in the rain when it hadn’t rained, and then he’d say it had only rained on the west side of town, where the restaurant we worked at was, and not on the east, where my apartment was, and of course I wouldn’t have known because it was my day off. He would make it sound pretty reasonable, but I’d look up the weather and see with my own eyes that the whole of our West Texas city had been dry as a bleached bone all day. He’d really been hanging out with the kitchen staff, I figured, maybe at Haley’s apartment where we’d both been to swim in the murky complex pool and drink too many cans of Tecate. Every time I’d been dragged along, I swore it would be the last, and I figured he must have just wanted to do a line or two of coke without getting a lecture from me, so I pretended to believe.

Why did I stay with a liar? Well, I lied sometimes myself. I’d told him that my father lost his arm at the elbow because he was a Vietnam vet, not because he’d had bone cancer before I was born. Ziggy had a horror of disease, something that had stuck with him since he was a kid and watched his grandfather shrivel down to nearly nothing over half a dozen years from emphysema. It sounded truly terrible, bearing the rattle of his Papaw’s cough, taking in the smell of death emanating from that beloved master of checkers and whittling and competitive deep-sea fishing. In the end, his Papaw had shrunk and hollowed like one of his own carved whistles. 

Ziggy was smart enough about most things, but logic has nothing on true fear, the bone-deep kind, and I just knew that if he found out the truth about my father, he’d worry the mutated cells that had caused my dad’s cancer were in my blood, somehow, waiting to go off like little time bombs, and that if he stayed with me, someday he’d either be called upon to lie about how my eventual disfigurement made me even more beautiful to him, or else that I’d spread it, somehow, to him, so he’d lose an arm and with it the ability to play the bass he never took out of its case, and he’d lose his spot at the fancy steakhouse where I was a server and he’d risen to Assistant Sous Chef, which is how he learned to make all kinds of souffles and complicated sauces and stews with fancy names. He did love to cook for me. I still think that part’s true.

I’d forgotten to warn my parents about my lie, and about Ziggy’s phobia, so it made perfect sense that when Ziggy told my dad at his party that he came from military stock and asked about Vietnam, Dad told him all about how he’d been in college for most of it and then had to take a leave for chemo and radiation, during which time he met my mom, who was the sassiest nurse on the cancer ward. After the amputation and his recovery, the war was nearly over, and he’d have been 4-F if his number had come up, which it didn’t. I’d been keeping my distance at the party to let them have a heart to heart that I hoped might include some discussion of future plans since at the time Ziggy’s depths still seemed endlessly fascinating, lies notwithstanding, and I couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t want to plumb them, maybe alongside a few mini-Ziggies paddling around in their Puddle Jumpers learning to keep four-four time as we sorted out who would play what in our family band. There were mysteries there, tantalizing in the deep, and I hoped we’d have a lifetime to solve them. Well, I saw Ziggy looking at me funny from across the big, white, rented tent, so I hightailed it from the dessert table to the grill where he and my dad both held green bottles of Heineken Light. 

Here’s the main difference between me and Ziggy. I owned up as soon as I saw that my dad, rest his soul, had busted open my lie, and then my dad got to go on his tangent about how he could still do everything with just one and a half arms, flipping a burger with a flourish just to show off. He said cancer wasn’t contagious, and my mom had come over by then to size up Ziggy who’d been avoiding her because of his mommy issues, and Ziggy started to go all sweaty just from hearing the word cancer so many times in quick succession. 

“Sit,” my mom ordered, pulling a literal glass tube of smelling salts from her fanny pack of wonders and necessities, an appendage that had improbably come right back around into style since its initial purchase in the late 1900s. She waved the bottle beneath Ziggy’s nose, clucking, “Keep it together, cowboy,” like she’d never retired from UMC.

Well, Ziggy sniffed and blinked and sweated, taking off his jacket and handing it to me, soft and still warm from his body. His white t-shirt had big sweat stains at the pits, and he reached out for the plastic bottle of water I extended, holding it to his forehead while my mother fanned him with a paper plate. While he concentrated on breathing with his head between his knees, I shifted the jacket from one arm to another and happened to see the label, somehow for the first time. I didn’t even have time to worry about whether a handmade leather jacket by a family friend would have a tag—I mean, maybe, if the tanner or tailor had a regular booth at the Farmer’s Market or a cutesy little storefront on Etsy—because I was struck into a full and terrible understanding by the words “Pleather” and “Made in Indonesia” clearly printed there in black and white. 

That’s when I knew. It took a few weeks to look it fully in the face, and another to text Haley for confirmation, but after she gave me the courtesy of an honest answer, I let him stay for a night that I knew would be our last, memorizing his slack face content in the afterglow. His hair hadn’t been wet because he fell asleep in the rain, or because he’d used that last hundred he’d bummed off me to join a gym where he was playing pickup water polo, or even because he was sneaking after-hours eight balls with the line cooks. Clearly: he’d showered at Haley’s because he’d gone to Haley’s to be with Haley. He’d fed me the most pedestrian flavor of betrayal, and I’d swallowed it all. 

When he woke up that final morning, I made him coffee and buttery raisin toast and told him I knew everything. He tried to tell me she was tutoring him in Japanese, and then that she’d needed some pipes cleared, but we both knew he was clueless with a plunger. After we split, he switched restaurants, and I went to nursing school like my mom, and then my dad died, but not before he attended my wedding in a wheelchair to see me marry the guy who manages the local tractor supply and loves to grill, just like my dad, and who’s never heard of 10,000 Maniacs. 

Haley was at the wedding, too. She’s a paralegal but still works catering under the table. She gave me a big hug in her stiff black apron and told me I looked stunning. According to her, Ziggy’s parents run a B&B back in New England, which is where he moved after they broke up. He’d left behind his bass, and she still had it. Apparently, he’d picked it up for ten bucks at the ACB Thrift Store on 34th but never learned to play. 

It’s too hard to parse the lies now, and there’s little point since the biggest joke’s on me. After my dad died, my mom told me they’d used a sperm donor to conceive me because the chemo had depleted his supply of little soldiers. That’s how she put it. A battalion of tiny troops all shooting blanks. My dad hadn’t wanted me to know. You’d think with all the science we’ve got, I could track the donor down, but all I’ve found so far are third cousins. Dozens of strangers with strange-to-me last names like Marshall and Winthrop and Fliss, names nothing like anyone I’ve ever loved or split a roll with at Thanksgiving. So it turns out I never had any of my dad’s cells at all, never mind the ones that became his cancer, but I don’t know whose cells I got instead, or how much of that mystery man ended up in the baby that’s inside me right at this minute. The one that could have been Ziggy’s in another lifetime, but isn’t, and thank the probably imaginary heavens for that. 

Sometimes, though, I dream about those alien octopuses Ziggy swore he saw. For some reason, I don’t think he was lying about that. Those aliens have no way to know about us, and even if our scientists do confirm their existence someday, we’ll always be too far away to introduce ourselves. Maybe they’re happier never knowing we exist, or guessing that we might but never being able to prove it, but I bet we’d learn a lot about each other if we met sometime. Probably we’d have a lot in common just on a basic level, and if we could sit down and trade stories, those creatures could answer a bunch of questions us earthlings have had forever. Like where life began and what it all means and what happens when we transition out of our corporeal forms. At the very least, we’d both have had childhoods and family and favorite foods, and we could trade stories back and forth, getting to know each other like people do.

Today I felt the baby move for the very first time, a slippery fist knocking at my ribs, like “Hey, Mom, that you?” Her dad’s what my own dad would call a straight-shooter and an Honest Abe to boot. He never lies, not to me, not to the government, not to telemarketers or customers when they ask if they can find cheaper de-wormer on Amazon. And it’s not that I’m not grateful for that, for him; it’s not that I miss Ziggy or wish we’d worked things out, but when my baby gets here, I’m going to tell her all about those silvery, tentacled Europan cephalopods. I’m going to tell her I believe they’re out there, just waiting to be found, and there’s no one alive who knows different.

Katie Cortese is the author of Make Way for Her and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky, 2018) and Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories (ELJ Editions, 2015). She teaches at Texas Tech University and serves as the Faculty Director for Texas Tech University Press.

12 July 2024