Glass (Small Press Distribution (All Titles)) (15 page)

Looking in both closets and in all the drawers in the bedroom and kitchen, I found the stapler, two pairs of earrings, sunglasses, the little porcelain frog, a topaz bracelet, a hairbrush, a wool scarf, a pair of leather gloves, and a small silver pocketknife. In the bottom drawer of my dresser I discovered a ream of typing paper that I took from work a long time ago, when I was still imagining that I might start typing again, and then forgot about, but I didn’t add that to the pile. The jacket was hanging in the bedroom closet, and I put it with the rest. I stuffed everything in a plastic trash bag and tied the bag shut, and then I carried the bag down to the street and walked two blocks south and one east to where DeLugia Construction Inc., says the sign, is working on a building that many years ago housed a bakery where I used to buy a warm breakfast roll every morning on my way to the bus, when I worked in the grocery store. By then it was well past midnight, and there was no one else in the street. They have placed a large dumpster against the curb in front of the building, where cars would be parked otherwise, and the building itself is walled off from the sidewalk by a tall plywood fence with yellow warning signs on it. The sidewalk narrows to a dark canyon where it passes between the fence and the dumpster, and midway through that I reached up and tipped the bag in. The dumpster must have been empty, the bag sending back a sharp metallic thud when it struck the bottom. A split-second after, as if in response, a sudden brilliant flashbulb-white effulgence lit up the horizon east of the Connector. Dumpster, street signs, the buildings across the street leaped into lurid view, then instantly collapsed into blackness, followed a moment later by a massive concussive boom. I felt something like a gust of wind against my body, but there was no wind. The windows in the building behind me rattled. I looked up and saw that a large sheet of clear plastic hanging from the scaffolding at the top of the building had billowed inward. I watched it settle back, rustling faintly. Walking back to my place I noticed a handful of lighted windows, but most of the buildings remained dark, and I did not turn on the lights in my place but went straight to the window and looked out across the roof of the ice cream factory in the direction of the flash. Except for the usual glow from the sodium lights on the Connector, nothing was there. And then I heard the first sirens, warbling and wailing, from several directions, joined by the impatient honking of fire engines. I glimpsed an ambulance, and later a police car and another ambulance, sirens wailing hysterically, going extremely fast across an intersection just three blocks to the south, but none came down my street, and they have all stopped now. Two men were shouting in the street, but they have stopped also. I listen, and all I hear now is typing—the sound of someone typing “the sound of someone typing.”

Nothing yesterday. I slept until noon. I woke up late again this morning and was heating water for coffee when I remembered I had forgotten to buy milk on my way back from the park, forgotten because of the man standing on the sidewalk, I thought. The rat was moving about. Its food tray was empty. I pushed some pellets through the wire and refilled the water bottle, which was empty as well, and it rushed over and began to drink frantically, clutching the metal tube in its forepaws. I went around to the diner for breakfast. Walking by the ice cream factory, along the chain-link fence that closes off the parking lot, I passed a group of workers standing on the other side in unzipped snowsuits, smoking, and I smelled the smoke from their cigarettes. I sat in a booth next to the window. I had coffee, a fried egg, and toast. The diner was nearly empty, so I stayed on, watching people going by on the other side of the glass. I thought of the rat looking out through the glass of its tank, the fish looking out through theirs. I thought of eyes, the vitreous humor, the mind looking out through that. I drank four cups of coffee. The waitress told me her husband had won two hundred dollars in the lottery. She did not charge for refills. I was still there when a man at the counter got up and went outside and bought a newspaper. He came back in, walking and reading, and spread the paper open on the counter. The waitress scolded him for putting it on top of his plate. She pulled the plate out and held the paper up with one hand while she wiped beneath it. She put the paper back down, and the man and the waitress and another man stood looking down at it, resting the flats of their hands on the counter, the waitress, who was on the other side of the counter, twisting her head to see the paper right side up, and they talked about the explosion. An accidental gas explosion, just two blocks on the other side of the Connector, has blown a house to pieces, “blew it all to shit” the waitress marveled, exclaiming down at the paper. One of the men, a large man whose white shirt cradled rolls of fat slung from his waist, settled back on a stool. Standing at the register to pay I looked over the mound of his shoulder at the photograph: a rectangular hole surrounded by rubble, a wide scattering of shattered boards, a jagged hunk of mortared brick (most of a chimney, it looked like) on the roof of a small car, crushing it flat. Firemen in long black coats stood around in clusters, while more firemen and other people not in fire dress were climbing on the wreckage. Back on the sidewalk I fed my breakfast change to the paper rack and got my own copy, which now lies, picture up, on the table next to me. “The explosion,” it says, “caused significant damage to adjacent houses, the shock waves knocking the windows out of several buildings on the block.” Of course they mean knocking the windows
in,
the glass would have flown inward when the windows exploded—imploded, in fact—the shock waves coming from outside, obviously. A woman living across the street claimed to have been tossed from her bed by the blast, but I don’t find that plausible. She thought the world was ending. Her husband rushed to the window (shattered) while debris was still “falling like hail” on the roof, and he thought an airplane had crashed. Only one person lived in the house according to neighbors, a man named Henry Poole, whose whereabouts are “unknown at present.” I have a clear mental picture of a manila tag dangling from a pale-green IBM Selectric typewriter, one that I couldn’t imagine carrying up my stairs, and I can see the penciled name: the initial
H
leans like a broken goalpost, the joined
o
’s look like lenses in a pair of spectacles. In a book with chapters, I might call this one “A Shocking Coincidence.”

Using the handle of a broom I prodded the phone book out from under the sofa. I keep it there because it tends to flop over and fall out of the bookcase. I swatted the dust off with my hand. I sat in the armchair, the book in my lap, and went down the list of Pooles. There are more of them than I would have thought, having never met a Poole personally and not considering it to be a common name at all. The print in phone books is extremely small, and my crossword glasses were in the kitchen, so I thought I would just use a pencil to tick off the names, so as not to skip any. I had ticked off three or four when I noticed the pencil quivering. It was jerking, actually, a minute convulsion at the point that was quite obvious at the eraser end, due to the multiplier effect of the pencil shaft—it was an almost-new full-length pencil—a predictable perturbation, I suppose, considering the coffee. To still the tremors I gripped the pencil tighter and made it hop like a tiny pogo stick. Irritated, I clasped it in my fist instead, like an infant holding a spoon, and continued ticking off names, and at the seventh or eighth tick jabbed a hole in the page, ripping the forename off one of the Pooles. At that point I was extremely bothered, to use a phrase Mama liked. “I am extremely bothered,” she would say, violently ripping pages out of a magazine. Ripping things—magazines, clothes, Papa’s newspaper when she thought he was not listening to her, foliage she tore off plants and shredded—was one of the ways Mama expressed herself, expressed frustration, people would say today, though I find it difficult to think of her as frustrated, since nothing stood in her way. Like mother like daughter, I suppose. I tore the page out of the phone book, intending to carry it over to the window where I could see better. Nigel had come out of his tube and was standing with his front paws up against the glass, head cocked, watching me.
“What?”
I shouted, ”
What?”
And before I knew it, even though I had decided I was not going to do that again, I had balled up the page and hurled it at him. It landed gently on the wire lid. I did not actually shout this time, I am almost sure I did not shout. It was more that when I looked at him I felt my thoughts shouting. I felt, I want to say, that they were about to explode. I have no idea what an exploding thought would be like. A scream, possibly. “Little Edna filled the house with exploding thoughts.” And in fact that was exactly how it used to feel, now that I have said it. I sat there, bolt upright, or as upright as one can possibly sit in a chair of that sort—it is, as I think I mentioned, the overstuffed sort of chair one naturally sinks deep into—and stared at the tank. I think my eyeballs were popping out the way Nigel’s sometimes do, but I was not chattering my teeth. They were clenched tight, I imagine. Nigel had retreated into his tube. I got up and went over to the sofa and shoved everything off onto the floor, making a great clatter and breaking the glass of another picture frame, and lay down. After a while it passed, whatever it was—being extremely bothered—passed. Looking up, I noticed cobwebs on the ceiling. Odd that I hadn’t noticed them before, thick dust-clustered strands moving faintly. I sat up. Nigel was spinning his wheel again. I retrieved the balled-up page of the phone book. I got my glasses from the kitchen table. I uncrumpled the page and smoothed it against the tabletop. There is only one Henry Poole, on a street just over the Connector. I was already thinking of him as
the
Henry Poole.

It strikes me as odd that I find this interesting. I feel a personal connection, I suppose, is the reason: I saw his typewriter, and then weeks later I heard his explosion. And of course I did not just
see
his typewriter—I contemplated it from several angles, as I recall. Contemplated it mentally, that is—I saw it, physically speaking, only from the front. He is (or was, possibly) a fellow typist. Henry Poole and his typewriter have impinged on my thoughts (invaded, actually) as something weirdly unusual. The coincidence impresses me as deeply, deeply meaningful, though I cannot for the life of me imagine what the meaning might be. I cannot, of course, entirely rule out the possible existence of other Henry Pooles, ones not listed in the phone book, though I think there are not likely to be many of those—not listed, perhaps, because he is impoverished and cannot afford a telephone or has a phone but under his wife’s name or is disabled in some way and his wife or maybe his mother takes care of him, bringing him food and paying the phone bill, while he lies in bed and types. An IBM Selectric is a big machine to use in bed, though one could manage it, I suppose, by means of a large bed tray with feet, if the weight of it didn’t drive the feet into the mattress. One would need a very firm mattress if one wanted to do that. This is not helpful.

The cafeteria at Potopotawoc closed at the end of September, stayed closed the whole winter, and I cooked for myself in my cabin. It was not a cabin in the sense of something pleasant and rustic; it was a hovel, actually—the roof leaked, I had to place cans and buckets on the floor, and sometimes I banged into them in the dark. On damp days in summer large snails crawled out of the woods and climbed up the walls inside, leaving behind them a film that glistened eerily in the lamplight. Sometimes I heard crunching on the porch at night and in the morning found little piles of crushed shell—the crunching was the raccoons eating them. The few perms who stayed the winter assumed I was connected to staff, and staff, I suppose, took me for a special guest. No one ever asked me what I was doing there. I sometimes walked up to the Shed to play checkers. There was almost always someone there to play with me. If it snowed I did not go out, but on sunny days I sometimes walked the whole way to the village. There was a filling station on the outskirts that was also a grocery store and a flag stop for the Greyhound, and I went there for groceries in winter and for ice cream in summer. The Greyhound came by every afternoon, tearing past me on the road to the village, trailing a gale of dust and gravel, and sometimes I thought of leaving on it—no one would have stopped me had I done that, I believe. I wore earmuffs the first winter there, because of the cold, and again the next summer to shut out the chatter in the cafeteria. I put them on too when staff organized games in the meadow, touch football, as I mentioned, and Frisbee, to shut out the shouting, cheers, and arguing, inevitably—staff had always to be on the lookout for arguments and fistfights. I was sometimes afraid, walking to the village, that I would be attacked, as that had happened before, people said, because of the homosexuals at Potopotawoc. No one seemed to know for sure whether someone had actually been lynched or only been threatened with lynching. I am not homosexual, but I was not sure they would know this. Nothing ever happened, and after a while I stopped feeling frightened walking to the village. The rat is thumping again. If it isn’t thumping, it is whirring. In the middle of the afternoon. You would think it would get its fill of that during the night. Unless it is sleeping at night and staying awake in the day just to annoy me. I am not going to stand for it much longer.

I bought a newspaper at the grocery and walked to the park. An elderly man followed me into the park and sat down on a bench opposite mine. He took seeds from a tin box on his lap and sprinkled them on the seat beside him and on the ground at his feet. He was wearing brown work shoes speckled with blue and yellow paint, and no socks. His ankles were thin and varicosed. The writing on the box was in French: it said
Crêpes à Dentelles.
I wondered if he was an artist of some sort, prompted by the paint speckles, the writing in French, I suppose, and his indifference to socks, but he was probably just painting his room. I had several painter friends in New York, and they all wore white tennis shoes without socks. In summer of course; in winter they dressed like everyone else. They have found Henry Poole lying facedown on the floor of the basement a few feet from an open gas valve. He died of asphyxiation, was already dead when the house exploded. Dead by his own hand, they are saying, though they have not found a note. “The blast took pretty much everything with it, including anything Mr. Poole might have confided to paper,” they said. I like that phrase: confided to paper. Henry Poole, 52, a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, repaired televisions for a living. A longtime Northside resident, he was, the paper said, “a familiar figure in the neighborhood, yet nearly a stranger to the folks next door.” People reported seeing him walking a little brown dog at all hours of the night. A neighbor described him as “standoffish and kind of weird.” The dog was discovered unscathed three blocks away in what the Humane Society calls a true miracle. I glanced up from the article to watch the pigeons arriving, crowding and bobbing around the paint-splattered shoes of the man on the bench, who was tossing handfuls of seeds. Poole had let his mail pile up on his front porch for the past several months; people saw him kicking it aside on his way in and out. This, according to the paper, was “a telling sign.” What other kinds of signs are there? One night a windstorm blew a lot of the mail into the yard next door, and Poole went over in the morning, gathered it all up in his arms, and dumped it back on the porch. From there it continued blowing around the neighborhood in the days that followed, until finally one of the neighbors went up on the porch and stuffed it all in plastic bags. Tiny bits of debris, flakes of what some who touched them think was kapok from the upholstery, along with bits of paper and fiberglass insulation, “like pink snow,” someone said, continued falling on the neighborhood for several hours after the explosion. I folded the paper and got up to leave. The man looked up at me, smiling. I was opening my mouth to say something pertaining to the birds, when they rose all together and he disappeared in a blizzard of clattering wings. I had been about to say, “I always forget to bring breadcrumbs when I come here,” but I said “Good evening” instead. If this becomes a book I will want to take extraneous things out. Ditto for trivial remarks and pointless asides. Had he left a note it would have been typed on the IBM Selectric I saw in the shop. More pages on the floor. The photo of Clarence and the lions that I taped to the window has come unstuck as well. I watched it flutter down, and my typing did not falter.