Glass Shatters (3 page)

August 1, 2004

Age Twenty-Six

A
beautiful young man and a beautiful young woman sit in the living room, their limbs intertwined around one another. Their smiles are doused with light from the setting sun. The young man has brilliant blue eyes and thick sandy hair cropped close to his head. He wears a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, a white-collared shirt, and a pair of light-washed blue jeans that should’ve been thrown out last year. The woman has round hazel eyes and high cheekbones like apples. Dark hair pours over her shoulders. She wears a dress flowing down to her ankles and a necklace with heavy beads around her neck.

The young woman pecks the young man on the cheek and then stands, bending over the old leather trunk beside her and brushing the dust off the top. The latch has rusted over. The woman attempts to lift the latch. No luck. But then she puts her foot against the trunk and heaves backward, and the chest rattles open. The woman pulls out three wooden marionettes. They are simple, painted by hand—a woman, a man, and a child. Their hair and clothes are sewn from scraps of flannel, frayed pieces of denim, squares of cotton. The lack of uniformity in their outfits somehow makes them seem more alive.

“Do you remember? My mom used to tell us stories with these when we were kids,” the woman says. She works at unknotting the marionettes’ strings.

“Yes, I remember. But don’t you think it’s kind of disconcerting? I mean, the way they resemble us now?” the young man says.

“Oh, I don’t know, I think that’s just coincidence.” The woman finishes with the strings and stands the male marionette and the female marionette next to one another. They look almost identical to the man and the woman. The child marionette lies immobile by the trunk.

“Now, let’s see,” the woman says, and she sits the male marionette and the female marionette next to one another on the couch. She positions their small painted hands so that they’re touching, just slightly. Their faces are turned toward one another and their posture is relaxed, casual and comfortable.

“May I?” the man asks. The woman pauses, then hands over the marionettes.

“My favorite story was the one that began on a rainy night in December,” the man starts.

“A man and a woman are curled next to each other, soaking wet, gazing up at the stars from the dry depths of a cave. They’ve admitted they love each other for the first time that night, even though they’ve known each other for years and years.”

The man stops. He looks into the woman’s eyes and plants a small kiss on her forehead. “And they’re happy,” he says, more quietly now. “They are happier than they’ve ever been.”

I’
M BACK IN THE ENTRYWAY, MY NECK CRINKLED BACK
. I can’t tell how long I’ve been in this alternate state. An hour? A day? But as I breathe out the claustrophobic air stuck inside of me, I can tell it’s only been a few seconds, a minute at most. I take my face in my hands and rub at the heaviness that’s still in my eyes. It was something like a memory. That’s certainly the word I would use to describe the experience. And yet, if it was a memory, it didn’t feel like my own. It didn’t feel like something I lived but instead almost like a video recording. I could see the time and date imprinted, and it was as if I were an observer, watching someone else’s home movies on a television screen. Except who else would the young man have
been if not me? And who else would the woman have been if not Julie?

I look up above me, searching for the male and female marionettes from the story. They seem like they might be important, like maybe there’s some sort of implicit knowledge stored in their wooden bodies. The marionettes are organized in rows of ten each, at least fifty altogether, their strings tied around the splintering rafters. I take a solid wooden chair from beside a bookshelf and balance myself on top of it, my head in among the marionettes. A layer of dust coats each one of them. The tips of my fingers are black within moments, my nose tickled, on the verge of a sneeze. I discover that the marionettes are, for the most part, different permutations of the same three figures—woman, man, and child—dressed up for different occasions, wearing different expressions. Some of the marionettes seem very happy—red grins are carved into their faces and their glass eyes gleam green and blue. Others are nearly destroyed. Pieces of their arms and legs have gone missing, their expressions scraped clear away. I move the chair back and forth among the rows, examining each of the marionettes. Eventually I realize that the ones I’m looking for, the male and female marionettes who confessed their love on a rainy night in December, no longer exist.

Back in the living room, Einstein greets me with a hair ball false alarm, hacking and coughing and then ultimately burping. I sit down on the couch and pick up a pen from the coffee table. I tear out a piece of paper from the blank photo album, writing in an unsure, chicken-scratch scrawl.

THINGS THAT APPEAR TO BE TRUE

1. My name is Charles Lang.

2. I’m thirty-four years old.

3. I’m a famous scientist.

4. I have a wife named Julie and a daughter named Jess who have disappeared.

5. I’m living in my childhood home.

6. I disappeared from my house six months ago and this is the first time I’ve been back.

7. I’m friends with Iris and Ava down the street.

QUESTIONS I HAVE

1. How did I lose my memory?

2. Where did I disappear to six months ago? And why didn’t I tell anybody?

3. What happened to Julie and Jess?

4. Are the memories I’m experiencing in fact my own? Or could they actually be somebody else’s?

5. Why am I living in the house I grew up in? What happened to my parents?

The walls creak around me as I write. I imagine that they’re sympathizing with my frustration and exhaustion. I think for a moment, then add another question to the list:

6. What has happened to all of the photographs?

I don’t know that I would’ve even noticed the absence of photographs if it weren’t for all the empty frames scattered
around the living room. All the paintings have been left behind, or at least the sorts of bland pastorals one might find in a doctor’s waiting room. There are landscapes of beach sunsets and French villas in the countryside, watercolors of hot air balloons and white horses traipsing through Central Park. But there are no photographs, only tilted frames, cracked glass, and fingerprint smudges left behind as detritus in an otherwise clean house. Whatever was previously placed lovingly and thoughtfully into these frames has since been torn away and ripped apart in a hurry.

I stand up again and lurch forward, grabbing the arm of the couch. My skin feels dull and clammy, stars bursting across my field of vision. I smell pancakes, fresh blueberry pancakes sopping in yellow butter and maple syrup, and I see Julie again, perched by the windowsill in the kitchen, wiping her hands on a flowery apron, her shadow slowly seeping into the hardwood floor. The smell disappears. My stomach gurgles. I feel like I haven’t eaten in days.

The door to the kitchen is cracked open and when I step inside, the first thing my eyes are drawn to is the cast iron stove, heavy against the wall. Initially I imagine that the stove is just an artifact, a relic of the past, but when I touch the surface, it’s warm, recently used. Strange. The china in the cupboards looks like something out of the early twentieth century, handcrafted and chipped, the enamel worn beige in places. A faded daisy pattern winds around the rim of the ceiling. There’s also a sleek metal refrigerator humming with electricity, though, and the hardwood floor looks like it’s been refinished sometime in the past year. A series of cobwebs haunts the windowsill.

I open the refrigerator, expecting everything to be spoiled, the milk sour, the cheese moldy, a few cucumbers limp and rotting in their own juices. Instead, the refrigerator is fully stocked with fresh produce, lettuce and tomatoes and an enormous bunch of green grapes. There’s a Tupperware of spaghetti sauce and another Tupperware filled with beef stew. I take out the carton of milk and give it a sniff. Nothing. I check the expiration date. It doesn’t expire for another week. Meanwhile, Einstein stalks into the kitchen, his sleepy yellow eyes gazing up at me expectantly. He then turns around the edge of the counter and disappears, and when I follow him, I discover that he’s gorging from a can of tuna. I nudge Einstein aside, much to his displeasure, and touch the tuna with the tip of my pinky. It’s still wet. Has somebody has just opened it? For a moment I wonder if maybe Iris bought groceries for me, but that would make no sense. She hadn’t known I was coming back.

I check the cupboards next, pulling them open one at a time. Every possible inch of shelf space is full, and I can’t help thinking that this house would be well-prepared for an apocalypse. There are hundreds of cans of beans, soup, meats, and vegetables, their bright, bombastic labels perfectly aligned with one another. The cupboard adjacent to the stove is filled with plastic water tanks. A thought occurs to me. Before I left six months ago, when was the last time I’d left the house? Was I a recluse? Could I have been some sort of danger to myself?

Next I open the door to the freezer, curious and slightly frightened to see what else I might find, but the freezer is nearly empty except for a tray of ice cubes and a plate wrapped in tin foil. I unwrap the parcel, and it takes me a moment to
realize what it is. But then I see the figurines on top, a little man in a tuxedo, a little woman in a wedding dress. This is a slice from my wedding cake. The ripples in the white icing are still perfectly preserved, a single pink flower swirling across the top. I hold the slice out in front of me, studying the spongy yellow cake, the buttercream icing, and most of all, the figurines, forever dancing together atop this slice of cake. This was me once. I was once the man in a tuxedo. I was once married to the woman in the wedding dress. I once ate a bite from this very same cake.

Suddenly I have an urge to throw the cake to the ground, to stomp on it, again and again, until the cake is nothing more than a few thick smears against the sole of my foot. If I could just remember what exactly Julie looked like, what exactly it felt like when she put her hand against my cheek … but instead, I have nothing more than a stupid slice of cake.

My stomach protests, acidic and foul, and I set the cake down to make a sandwich for myself. But even though the bread is fresh and the tomatoes are crisp and there’s more than enough cheddar cheese, I can’t take more than a couple bites before setting the sandwich down, tired and disheartened. Einstein leaps onto the countertop, nibbling on a slice of cheese that’s hanging over the side of the bread. As I’m scratching him behind the ears, I hear something from the other room. Laughter. Deep, throaty, trundling laughs. Old timey music plays from the television, followed by more laughter. I scoop up Einstein with one hand and grab a steak knife with the other.

“Hello?” I call out, inching toward the doorframe.

The laughter continues.

“I have a knife. I could hurt you.”

The laughter continues.

“I’m coming out, on the count of three.”

Music and more laughter.

“One, two—”

I step into the living room, feeling a bit ridiculous, and find an old man sitting on the couch, slapping his hand against his knee as he watches a clip from
Casablanca.

“Play it again, Sam!” he howls. He doesn’t even notice me come into the room, his attention so focused on the television. I can’t understand what’s so funny. The man wears a dingy blue bathrobe, and his thin, clumping hair looks like the result of a chemical treatment gone wrong. His skin is purple, bruised and blotchy, his right forearm dense and creviced with scar tissue. A ratty scarf curls around his neck. Einstein jumps out of my arms and immediately hunkers into the old man’s lap. I set down the knife and touch the man on the shoulder to get his attention. He turns, staring up at me, his big, blank eyes looking bewildered in spite of all the laughter. The old man doesn’t seem fully alive, an echo of a human being.