Whoever Called It A
(Phantom Limb)

Matthew Chabe

Oil pastel sketchbook page by Luana Góes, @wxarpaint on twitter. Used with permission.

OK so I want you to imagine a hurricane in a long canyon, Peter’s screaming and the sunroof is open, all the windows are down, and the little bit of hair on his forehead, the bit he lets grow long, is flying like floss. He reaches down and twists the dial and inexplicably, infuriatingly, “This Love” leaps from the speakers. There are beer cans rolling around at my feet. Some of them are empty and some of them are full, but they’re all rolling, Adam Levine is too loud, and all I can think is holy shit I am going to die in this fucking Camaro and this is it, it really is it.

“Maybe you should slow down!” I yell, but it’s nothing, it’s to no avail. The trees fly by like slats in a prison, the car lurches onward, and we’re falling down a deep, dark well with no bottom.

“Peter,” I say. Then I say, “Peter!” and he looks at me, and I wonder if his eyes can see. They seem to look straight through me to the dark forest, and all I can say after that is “Put in that Interpol album,” but he doesn’t do it. He just smiles and it’s all teeth and out the window we’re tumbling further and further into the hole. Two tons of raw American power pinwheeling through the night.

Peter reaches past my thighs to grab a beer. He lets go of the wheel as he pops it and I freak out when the broad red plane of the Camaro’s hood slips from its trajectory. It’s an errant mathematical equation—a number has been misplaced, it’s fucked the entire thing up and now we are careening toward the edge of the world. Just as the tires hit the dirt, his fists piston and he grips the wheel and the whole thing rights again for at least this moment.

“Hey, check this out!” Peter yells, and all of a sudden the headlights are gone, there’s nothing except the glow of the moon against the grey asphalt. His fingers move against the radio and the music swells, it’s still Maroon 5 except now it’s “She Will Be Loved” at maximum velocity, and Peter yells—

“Go topside!”

and I know what he means. He wants me to stand up through the sunroof. Maybe this is not a bad thing, I think. Maybe it’s not so terrible, possibly fun. My chest is heavy and I stand up, then I’m outside and my breath is gone. It’s beautiful—this moonlit, crystalline world lodged in the throat of a bellowing dragon. I am astride a team of groaning, thrusting horses. I’m piloting the Millennium Falcon to Alderaan and I am going to shit my pants. My stomach is sour and now the thing in my chest is dry as though a ball of energy has been removed. This is the stupidest thing I have ever done. Yet from below me Peter is yelling, he’s screaming actually:

“Hey man, you ever heard of a phantom limb?!”

I slip down through the sunroof. Peter has lit a cigarette. The ember bobs like an insect and he pulls a knob on the dashboard and the world ahead of us erupts. We are doing 80 miles an hour on this rural byway and in the lights of the dash his face is like a ghost. It’s been three years since I’ve seen this man, and now he’s back, he has returned with his wife and his kids but now the wife is gone and the kids are his, he has a shitty house on a shitty street and he’s not really the same person anymore. I mean, he retains the same corporeal being but also, something is not the same.

“What did you say?”

“I gotta take a piss!” he says. The tires crunch over gravel and the Camaro rattles to a stop just inches from the guardrail of a bridge. Something in the engine sighs as its components settle, relieved to have been unburdened of a terrible chore. There’s a construction zone here lit with orange flashing lights. Peter leaps out of the car; he doesn’t even shut it off, he just gets out and then he’s running, stumbling, around the front of it. He’s got a beer in his hand, and in the headlights I see him kick at one of the lamps. He staggers but the kick connects; it sends the lamp to the ground and Peter grabs it and runs back to the Camaro and throws it in the back seat and the cabin is bathed in blinking orange light like a lighthouse in the end times. Who does it flash for? This rural stretch is empty, we’re in the middle of nowhere, and past the nowhere, farms, forest, small brochure homes trimmed with desire, modest dreams, warm beds, and it is so early in the morning and I wonder what it is I’m doing here at all.

Peter disappears over the bank and I step out of the car and follow him. It’s darker away from the car’s headlights and I’m sliding down the embankment and I run right into him. He pushes a fresh beer into my chest, holds another one aloft, and says—

“Watch this shit.”

He drives a hole in the bottom of the can with a rock and pops the top and pours the whole thing into his throat, and it’s impressive, I think, or at least cool.

“Learned that in Mexico,” he says. “Went down there once with my crew after this job. One of these guys, he was missing an arm. Like, the whole thing. Shoulder to fingertips, man. Just gone. Said he could still feel it, though. Told me to poke it with my smoke. I told him to use his dick.”

“What the fuck?”

Peter laughs and pulls a smoke out of his cargo shorts. He lights it and says:

“Man, we went to this strip club. You’d a loved it. Fully nude, no pasties or nothin’. The girl, she pulls this dude onstage and he’s up there waving his one lone arm, pretty polite all things considered, and I’m wondering if what’s happening is he’s feeling her up with his invisible arm, right? Anyway, I ask him about it later, and you know what he says? He says yeah. Shit yeah. He does it all the time. Then he says, ‘Don’t ask what I’ve done to your wife with this thing.’ ”

He laughs again, and it sounds like bleach. He laughs again. It sounds like steel wool against a cast-iron pan.

“But wait,” I say—"How’d he show you that beer trick with one hand?”

“Right! Shit. So afterwards, we all go to this bar down past Revolution Ave. Place was dark. Looked like a real murder hole. But one of the guys from work, he says it’s all cool, he’s banging this chick from there. The bartender showed us the beer trick. It’s cool, right? I had to keep the whole thing secret from Candace. She hated that shit. I showed her the beer thing, once. She said it was stupid.” He shakes his head. “You know what I think’s stupid?” But he doesn’t say anything else. He just bobs in the orange glow and sucks his smoke.

“Hey man, you got a shitty deal,” I say. “With Candace.”

“Best thing could’a happened to me,” he says, and looks at his beer can. “No room for quitters. When I found out about—”

Then he stops. He slaps my shoulder, and his mouth pulls tight and he says, “Ah, Jesus. You know, she was puttin’ out all over the place. Who knows—maybe you were fucking her, too.”

He laughs again, but my stomach is sour and tight, not because I was (because I wasn’t, and I wouldn’t) but for some other reason. It was weird he even said it. But before I could say “Hell no, man, not me,” Peter starts sliding down the embankment, farther into the darkness.

“Where are you going?”

He looks up at me with blank eyes and says, “I gotta piss.”

“So piss.”

“I can’t do it if anyone’s watching,” he says, and then he’s gone into the black quilt of the forest. I hear him rustling around down there like he’s looking for something, then it stops and the only sound is the Camaro’s engine rumbling above me and the faint click-click-click of the flashers and suddenly, for some reason, I get this feeling in my guts like I’m alone, like I’ve been hollowed out but I’m also excited by the prospect of it, the idea, and I don’t know what else to do so I drop my fly and do my business, too. I’m halfway done when there’s the sound of tires slowing on gravel, there’s a white light sweeping the forest, there are voices and the squawk of a radio, and my heart’s pounding, it really is, but all I can think about is that guy’s ghost arm.

🍺💪