Plow the Bones (16 page)

In the worst of my imaginings, the breeze takes her high and to the left, and my fingers are never long enough to reach hers. As she floats past, I sight the envelope (I am never crying in the imagined scene, although the real me, the one of flesh and regret, weeps in the act of fantasizing), and I fire. I reload. I fire again. I reload. I fire again. And eventually the envelope collapses, and she plummets toward a patch of ground I can’t see. I have never, since the sores burnt my feet in the Carschton cell, spent a moment of awareness not hating myself for this fantasy. For the desire to steal from her the only transcendence she ever knew, to end her long experiment with happiness by reintroducing her to gravity, and to merciless impact. My only comfort is that, in this least–loved dream, this is not an act of malice. It’s an act of necessity. My girl, please, you’ve got to believe me. I don’t want to do this. But I have to. I’ll never die while you still float. And if I can’t join you up there… well…

Would she forgive me while she fell? Would she know that she could? Would it occur to her that I would need her to?

But. But there are other fantasies. When the wind is my collaborator, and it sends her to me, and I reach to check the anchors in my shoulders and find them sturdy. I throw my rifle down. And I reach for her fingertips.

SHE SAT INDIAN–STYLE BEFORE THEM in the Sudden Room. Her face ached. She’d been sitting there with her shoulders slumped and her neck craned, chewing on the insides of her cheeks. She could feel the rough nasty texture of the unsanded, unpainted planks in the floor through her jeans. It smelled like age and dampness in here, and with each breath, some paranoid part of her brain screamed out that she was probably inhaling a floating miasma of old wallpaper and crumbling plaster and prehistoric mold, a chemical buffet. She didn’t want to be here, but she knew that if she left, she would just want to come back. Nothing in the Sudden Room was comfortable.

The Sudden Room. Oh, the bastard Sudden Room, the nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up and from which some part of her, the self–pitying masochist recently awoke, never wanted to. It had existed in the corner of her eye, a cancer of the periphery, a door at the end of a hallway that didn’t exist. For years, she passed it and never saw it. For years, she stumbled like a sleepwalker from her bed to the bathroom, tracing the wall of the second–floor corridor with her fingers, and still she never noticed the branching hallway, or the door at the end. But once she saw it, like an optical illusion, like a filmic continuity error, she couldn’t unsee it. It was always there, the door to the Sudden Room. As were the things that lived inside.

She couldn’t figure them out. She wanted to know them, to understand them, to catalogue them and toss them behind a partition in her brain where she filed the vast and forgettable species of stimuli called “normal.” But they weren’t normal. They were shaped like people, but they stared at her through eyelids fused shut, their skin thin and jaundiced and divided into uneven puzzle–pieces by a lattice of thick black veins. They sniffed the air, ticking and twitching and shivering the same way she’d seen tiny dogs shiver in the arms of women blonder and more successful than her. They were hairless, or were almost so, and their not–quite–hairlessness (patches of thin white wires that seemed to quiver like insect antennae) was worse than pure baldness. They opened their mouths and made thin, wordless, bubbling noises, and even when their mouths were closed, their long sharp teeth hung over their chins like stalactites, rotten, yellow at the ends and black at the roots, the teeth of tigers in the mouths of meth addicts. And all of them were fused together, a shared carcinoma of a body from which jutted their terrible hungry heads and twitching toes and waving, spasmodic arms.

God, she wanted a cigarette.

They couldn’t touch her. Not if she sat far enough away. The far wall, framed by the sliver of light from the hallway beyond the door, consisted entirely of
them
. From floor to ceiling, a wall of flesh. There were twenty–six of them that she could see (or twenty–six heads, anyway), and sometimes she thought there must be more, that the Sudden Room must stretch backward for a thousand miles of cramped conjoined bodies. The wall of monsters in the Sudden Room. In college, when she had been an optimist, she wrote a paper on Rodin’s
Gates of Hell
. She spent weeks staring at the sculpture, analyzing the cramped faces and bodies of the damned, lost in thought or twisted by misery, reaching, climbing, curled into fetal clumps and crammed into alcoves. The things in the Sudden Room with their terrible teeth and their weak, reaching fingers brought her back to those Gates, a breathing representation of Rodin’s masterpiece, hungry and blind. And before them, a supplicant engaged in perplexed and petrified prayer, sat Abigail Quatro, queen of failure.

And downstairs, the doorbell rang.

§

Downstairs, the doorbell rang, and Jim resisted the training that compelled him to answer. On the couch with the old wooden metronome in his hands, running his thumb along the pyramid angle, watching the arm tick back and forth, trying to hypnotize himself. He wanted to fill a syringe with something dark and thick, something that could numb and blind and fuzz–out, and he wanted to jam it into his brain and push the plunger down and force the whole operation into blankness for a while. Hence, the metronome. The insignificant rhythm.

The bell again, belligerent and obsequious.

There’s no rule
, he thought.
There’s no law against ignoring a doorbell. Nobody can force you to answer it.
But the imperative to answer tugged at him. It was funny how much power people had over you. They didn’t even need to know you, and they could command your attention with a pointed index finger and a tiny fucking button mounted to the left of your front door. To be in your house was to be powerless.

The doorbell shrieked again, and Jim bit down on his tongue. With the pain, the world swam back. The truth resolved, focused, became sharp. And there didn’t seem to be any reason to ignore the door anymore. So (groaning, growling, glaring at the frosted glass window set into the front door and wishing sudden death upon the person behind it), he went to the door and opened it.

“Hello, homeowner,” said the doorbell man. He offered Jim his hand and, not wanting to, Jim shook it. It was a thin hand, delicate, a pianist’s hand with long fingers and short, clean fingernails. He wore a grey suit and a green tie and a black overcoat. He wore a fedora and a pair of circular sunglasses. He carried an umbrella, for which Jim immediately and irrationally hated him.
Affectation
, he thought.
A stupid affectation. Sun’s shining. What are you trying to prove?

They stood there shaking hands for too many empty moments. Jim’s chest tightened, his shoulders clenched. He ground his teeth together. The doorbell man smiled silently.

Jim’s brain rolled through its lexicon of pleasantries and settled on, “Can I help you with something?”

“Homeowner,” the doorbell man said, “I understand you have a pest problem.”

§

They sometimes said things that sounded like words. She had a little moleskin in which she took notes of what they said, time–stamped and dated, a little book of nonsense quotations.

Theremin forest — 11:35 PM October 28
^th
.

Stinking nest — 4:14 PM November 1
^st
.

Regards — 1:21 AM November 10
^th
.

When she started taking notes, she told herself that she was trying to piece together the quotes, solve the mystery of the Sudden Room. But as the months wore on into nearly a year of sitting and writing, she abandoned that goal. They were mindless words, the kind of thing dementia patients said as their brains broke down, and she was sure that she was imagining at least half of them. Still, she wrote. Because she’d already started, and she needed the habit.

They were excellent listeners, the bound–together cave–fish things. She could talk to them for hours, in a low monotone gone creaky, dry, and uneven from nicotine withdrawal and depression. She could tell them all sorts of things. She could eviscerate the girl she’d been before her life fell out from underneath her, the girl who had decorated the ceiling of her college apartment with glow–in–the–dark stars and moons and planets, who sipped wine and imagined herself to be an adult, the girl who forgot that someday you had to get a job and grow old and die, and that manic optimism and bright–pink hair dye didn’t change any of that. She could talk about how, by thirty, she had expected so much more than this.

Argument fish assembly — 10:10 AM December 3
^rd
.

Paramount — 3:33 AM January 9
^th
.

An aimless, and apparently ownerless, arm swung rhythmically. A blind and hungry head snapped its jaws at it. The whole party hissed like vipers.

“I just wish,” said Abigail, “That this wasn’t the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.”

Hungry hungry hungry — 6:01 AM January 13
^th
.

Seed eating parable — 1:12 PM February 20
^th
.

Portcullis — 12:30 PM February 21
^st
.

Someone downstairs laughed like a radio announcer, and then was silent.

§

The doorbell man, sitting on the sofa next to Jim and holding his coffee cup without drinking from it, laughed like a radio announcer, and then was silent.

Jim disliked most people he met these days. Just standing within breathing distance of the debris of his ambitions could turn him against a person. He knew that it was all bullshit, that he was lashing out, taking out his disappointment on the people around him. But he was starting to think that this polite little doorbell man whose every expression and action seemed to be rehearsed, was legitimately deserving. He carried an umbrella on sunny days. He had absolutely no hair beneath the fedora, absolutely no eyebrows either. And he had just laughed at absolutely nothing. It was as though he had read, without context or explanation, that people sometimes laugh when they sit with one another.

“What’s funny?” Jim asked.

“Nothing, homeowner. Now, back to it.”

The doorbell man had asked for coffee, and for information. He wanted to know about their life together, Abby and he. Were they happy? Were they really in love? Where was she from? What did she do for a living? What did he do? How often did they make love?

And you know what the fucking terrible part was? Jim was telling him. Jim had lined up their photo albums on the coffee table and he was telling him all of it because this delicate little grub worm of a man knew — he
knew!
— about the Sudden Room and its residents, and that had to mean… something.

“Okay,” Jim said. And again, “Okay.” He took a deep breath, and he told the man everything. He told him how he met Abby, in a Women’s Studies class in which he was one of four men, and in which they shouted at one another from across the room, Abby passionately championing Steinem, Jim aligning himself with Paglia despite not knowing the first thing about feminist theory. “I just thought,” he said, “that she was fascinating to look at when she got worked up.”

The doorbell man nodded and hmm–d and hrr–d and picked up a pencil from the coffee table and tapped it against his lips.

He told him how they’d dated, at first like silly high school kids despite being in their twenties, sneaking away from every social engagement to make out in closets or cars or behind the high hedges in the park, and then later like ancient friends, sharing stories with brief glances, holding between them a thousand esoteric punch lines and secret passwords. “Turkey–fingers,” he said. “I used to… This is so stupid, but in college I used to wrap my hands in sliced turkey, like sandwich turkey. And I used to chase her around the apartment. Kind of, you know… warbling. ‘Turkey–fingers! Turkey–fingers are coming for you! Turkey fingers!’ Like a ghost. Like, I don’t know, it was like a half–cocked Boris Karloff impression. You know? You know.”

The doorbell man chewed off a hangnail. He said, “I know.”

He told him how they’d forgone the vows and quoted Wilco songs at each other, because it was silly and irreverent and somehow more meaningful than somebody else’s old promises. He told him they’d come to live in the big house in the nice neighborhood. “My dad,” he said, “My dad is… was… an attorney. It was a wedding present. The house, I mean. God.”

The doorbell man took off his hat and scratched his scalp.

He told him of the fall, the gradual slope away from ambition and hope toward debt and joblessness. Useless degrees, an absence of marketable skills, property taxes and student loans they couldn’t afford. The miscarriage, and the money they’d spent on a baby that never came. How they slept back to back, or sometimes in different places, he in the bedroom and she in the Sudden Room where she didn’t actually sleep at all. How they couldn’t afford cigarettes anymore, and how neither of them wanted to leave home even to find a smoker from whom to bum. How they could go days without saying much to one another. How when he said, “I love you,” it sounded like a plea, like a desperate dive toward her, and how he wasn’t really sure he was capable of loving anyone anymore. He said, “Things were supposed to be different for us.”

The doorbell man said, “I see.”

§

Her back hurt. She had gone into the room around seven o’clock this morning, and it must have been after four by now. Her entire life story had fallen out from between her lips for the thousandth time, unheard by the slit–eared fungus of skin and limbs and teeth. She said, “Last night, Jim tried to cheer me up. I was falling asleep on the couch and he came in with, ah, the, uh…” she sighed, snapped her fingers together. “The shirt he wore at our wedding. It was…” a smile, weak and noncommittal, something to which she couldn’t devote any patience or energy. “It was just way too small for him. He’s put on some weight. We both have. His gut was pushing out the fabric, like, putting these great big gaps between the buttons, and he looked at me and he said… he said, ‘Enjoying the view?’ ”