Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [42]
I dragged a dining room chair to the hall, climbed on top, and pressed the red button on the smoke detector.
A high-pitched ring pierced the silence. I released my finger, but the alarm did not stop. As I scrambled to remove the battery from the machine, Eli ran to my side. He pulled me down off the chair, climbed up in my place and expertly popped the battery out of its plastic cradle. The siren stopped. Zoë had stumbled from her room, stark terror on her face. Seeing me, her fear turned to exasperation.
“Well that was exciting,” Eli said. He set the batteries in my hand.
“Just take the steak knife to my heart the next time you want to kill me,” Zoë said. “It would be less traumatizing.”
Despite her irritation, relief washed over me, as if the cry of the alarm had frightened away any possibility of danger.
8
Once we’d all grown accustomed to the idea that Eli’s stay was temporarily permanent, he wasted no time getting famous.
Leaving the coffee shop with Zoë and Eli one afternoon, we were stopped by a middle-aged woman in a full-body sweat suit who let Zoë pet her new puppy while she asked Eli what to name him. “You’re so good with that kind of thing,” the woman gushed.
Without pause he said, “Name him Fargo.”
“Who was that?” Zoë asked when the woman had safely powerwalked out of earshot.
He stroked the growing beard that now covered his chin. Whether it was purposeful or the result of neglect was anybody’s guess. “I have no idea,” he said.
People began showing up at our apartment asking for him. Several were Jillian’s friends, who knew Eli from his previous job at Juxtapose. There was Diedre with dreadlocks the exact frayed blond of old ropes softened by use; she had somehow talked Eli into helping her collate two hundred handmade chapbooks she planned to scatter across the country. For a week they lay scattered across our living room. Amber and Lynn, Jillian’s housemates, liked to sit with him on the roof, chain-smoking and gossiping, even though Eli declined to participate in either activity. Kevin McCormick was the most frequent guest. He was a graduate student working on his MFA in sculpture, a painfully shy man who began every conversation with a comment about the weather. He and Eli spent whole days scavenging at junkyards and welding found objects. Because he was helping Kevin, because he worked after course hours, and because he was so amiable, no one bothered to ask Eli whether or not he had jurisdiction to use or even be in the campus studios. He returned to our apartment late at night, carrying freshly fired ceramic pieces and newly printed lithographs in ink-splattered hands.
He had a creative energy that would have been medicated with Ritalin in someone half his age. His hand trembled when he drew, from excitement or from caffeine. He drew on his jeans or his hands if he couldn’t find paper. He didn’t eat at home if he could find someone who would go out, and just about anyone would do: He handed out his friendship indiscriminately.
The Volkswagen was partly to blame for his notoriety. The van looked innocent and playful crowded between the bullying SUVs the students favored that year, a clown car infiltrating military camp. It bounced through Copenhagen’s narrow old streets like Mr. Rogers’ cheerful trolley. People honked and waved.
His new and many friendships, however, were a direct result of his job at the coffee shop. He hosted poetry night, introducing each artist with one-minute bios he’d drafted from brief interviews conducted beforehand. The menu marker board featured quirky Morretti illustrations. Because Jimmy, The Brewery’s owner, had created Eli’s position, assigning him to shifts that did not need a third barista, Eli was essentially paid to sit at The Brewery six hours a day hopped up on espresso and practicing Foam Art: the delicate making of patterns in people’s lattes. He could make a branch of delicate