The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (13 page)

Inside the room there are crumpled food wrappers on the carpet like paper boats. A pizza box yawning and sweaty cups. But most of all there’s Emily, one step ahead of him because she didn’t stop and look in the parking lot. Who’s got the shower going before he can step out of his bathing suit, before Mother can finish saying, “Put them in the sink and run water on them. And rinse them out good.” Words that get lost in the clutter. So that when he steps behind the pink plastic curtain there is nothing but thunderous warmth and Emily with her hands above her head redirecting the spray into the flimsy metal walls. She twirls and dances and squeals. He wrenches the knobs so the water goes cold and hot and cold again until they are covered with goose bumps and giggling and collapsing against the rusty seams of the cabinet. They are twins. Sleek and brown as otters. Splashing and shoving. Thin glistening versions of the same person, except for the tight flesh between his legs and the smooth white cleft between hers.

It is the last few moments of their last afternoon as twins. The last secret telling and touching of their one life. In the aftermath of what happens next she will become Emily, and he will become Michael, and they will reenact this pain for years. Of course it is an accident. He simply slips. And in the instant between standing and falling, he steps onto the slotted metal grate that covers the drain, where the ragged edge of one corner slices through his sole like a filleting knife. Though at first it is only a warm hint of what is to come. Then, after he falls, a twisty stream of red begins running into the drain. It works its way from his foot, across the dimpling shower floor, and through the green-rusted slots. And then he screams.

There are hands that lift him, strong arms that scoop him up and wrap him in the one damp towel and plop him on the stranger’s lap. Their mother’s growing panic. Then the deep voice that settles their cold fear. “Better let me have a look at that, Chief. You might gonna need stitches.” His hand is as big as Michael’s shoe, and when he clamps the foot closed, there is only a thin trickle between his fingers—and after another minute only a dull ache. Even before their mother returns with more towels and antiseptic, even before they bundle him into the car and carry him into the emergency room, where the indifferent resident will set the stitches, he knows he is safe. That he has been gathered up by a man who can crush pain with one hand, and Michael knows without a doubt that this will be the best day of his life.

Though not for the sister who stands shivering.

She is small and cold, pale with the certainty that the blood will never stop. Even when their mother returns. Even when Michael begins to howl anew, she keeps her distance. Michael sees her step back to the wall, slide down into a squat, both hands between her legs. Her hair still streaming icy-clear rivulets. She is like an orphan lost in the snow. And he is like the boy in the warm cottage, looking out. At least that is what he remembers. Because it’s who he is today.

EMILY

Recites the same history to each new therapist, a narrative that has been reduced over time to formula, an incantation of sorts whose individual words mean nothing. “I was eleven or twelve,” she begins, “walking with a group of girls across an asphalt parking lot where I found the first one, a bright piece of broken glass, yellow and curved like a scythe, that a magpie might pick up, or a child. And that is the one that I used to draw the first red scream across my wrist. So they told their mothers that I had tried to commit suicide, as if anyone who wanted to kill herself would do that and laugh, though of course the cure was the same.

“And this is what I said to Michael the summer after he graduated from medical school. ‘What if you had bees inside of you? What if you had swallowed them somehow and they were carpenter bees working away inside the wooden you? What if you had soaked up poison like a sponge, so that it went flowing not through your veins but through the crooks and cavities of your flesh, all through your secret self? Would you try to get it out?’

“Because it’s not a matter of pain. There isn’t any. It is a relief. I can’t explain more than that. See? A crisscross of white lines. I can read them like a map.”

SAM

Swears a photographer told him this. That if you stare intently at the horizon during the last minutes of daylight you can see a brilliant flash of green just as the sun disappears. A green explosion, lasting for maybe a tenth of a second, right along the razor’s edge of earth and sky. He thinks about asking Emily, but Emily is still up at the church talking to the girl’s grandparents, something about giving her a ride home. And Sam decides to look for himself. It’s what he’s doing while he waits for Marla Ann Creecy.

From the rocky ledge where he is standing, the church looks like a small white storage shed in the midst of a pasture, and the view out over the valley is worth an entire book of photographs. For a moment Sam thinks that the Holiness people are not only fugitives from civilization but also profoundly wise. Then hears the clatter along the trail behind him. Someone calling attention to herself before she arrives. And stepping next to him as if they’d known each other all their lives.

“Emily says you all can give me a ride home in the Jeep.”

“Yeah. We’d just like to talk to you for a few minutes. If that’s okay.”

“Sure. She was up here a couple of years ago. Everybody knows her, and they don’t mind.”

“Good. Good, I, uh … I’m not the same guy she was with last time.”

“I know. I bet we seem pretty different to you, don’t we?”

“A little bit. Maybe we could talk about it. Get a hamburger or something.”

The sun sets, and he sees nothing. Only her green eyes that have been with him since the service. When he finally does turn around, Emily is still nowhere in sight, and Marla Ann is not the person he thought she was. She is far too old.

“I’ve got something you want to see,” she whispers; it is a new tone, low and conspiratorial. “Up at the church. In the basement.” And she is suddenly a child again who can’t keep a secret.

“Really? Where’s Emily?”

“Up there. Waiting for us.”

And so he follows, knowing already that the story has taken a new twist. That Emily isn’t just waiting. In fact is nowhere in sight. And the last car is disappearing down the misty road to town.

“Where’s your Jeep?” the girl asks.

“We parked it a little off the road. So the rest of you could get through.”

“Oh. You ever been to a Holiness church before?”

But since his lips are dry, he simply shakes his head.

The basement is like a shallow grave beneath the church, its door almost level with the ground because the slope is steep. They go down two steps, then down another as they cross the threshold into a damp well of earth.

There are cardboard boxes disintegrating into the floor. Tightly tied stacks of newspaper. A whole pew shoved up against sagging bookshelves. A lawn mower. And enough tools and paintbrushes, rolls of wire, to suggest the innocent accumulation of any barn or attic. Except for the broken gravestone and the expression on Marla Ann’s face. She glows with anticipation, knowing that there is a sweet secret only she can reveal, like a girl who sneaks her boyfriend into her bedroom for the first time. She steps back and invites him to look closer before showing the thing itself, the real reason she has brought him here. And
he is a man who cannot take his eyes away, even though he knows that there will not be a happy ending.

So he does as she wills him. He plays the game. Finding first a glass tea jar holding perhaps half a gallon of filthy, swamp-colored water and then beside it, on the same shelf, a hatchet and a can of gasoline. Higher up there is an old photograph album that, at first, he believes is what she wants him to find. But when he reaches, she is suddenly there beside him, murmuring, “No. Lower. Go back to where you were.” Squatting beside the shelves, chin on her knees now. Smiling. When he kneels, she draws in the long deep breath of calm certainty.

It is the jar she wants him to see. He looks. And the water moves.

It is a liquid thing inside the jar, but not the muddied water that he thought. It is coiled upon itself in multicolored brown and black and gold, breathing so subtly that it looks like the rocking of pond water after a pebble has been dropped in, its head submerged among the rippling scales. A body swelling and constricting in easy slumber.

“They just got him,” she says. “He’s never been in church before.”

Sam can’t move. “Why did you bring me here? Why would you …?”

But she reaches past him, brushing his cheek with her arm, and taps the side of the jar. Inside, the familiar shape rises up from the tight coils, black tongue flickering. “Shhh,” she says. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Lifting the jar now with both hands and holding it next to her own cheek, giving just the slightest shake until the tail stands up and makes the first tentative vibrations. “You’re safe with me,” she says. “You’re safe.” In hypnotic repetition. Until the open mouth of the vessel is before him, and she is saying, “Touch it.”

The words should come like an electric shock, but they are numb and distant.

“That’s what you have to do,” she says. “Touch it. If you want to feel what I feel.”

Sam’s hand moves through the thick air. Across the open mouth of the jar. And down, into the perfect moment, when it happens. There
is a flash of light, a whir of advancing film, and then an explosion of glass. His eyes blink shut, but not before he sees the green aurora at the edge of her world.

MICHAEL

Loves his sister. She will call him once or twice a year with her overpowering need. Can you meet me, she will ask, in the aftermath of a story about a shooting or a stabbing or a fire. Can you meet me in the parking lot of some cheap motel, her voice as faint as a child’s, and hold me, Michael, long enough to stop the shaking. Could you meet me? Michael? At the foot of a mountain where two highways cross. And bring your bag.

Breaker

So many times it seems eternal. She whines. I lie. It’s our fate. We’ll be bound to each other in hell by tangled telephone lines, except this time she reaches me through the air, across an entire ocean, inside an airport terminal. It’s like a wasp buzzing in my briefcase, and I extract it with the tips of my fingers, holding the sound as close to my face as I can bear. When I hear her voice, I realize that she can reach me anywhere.

She says, without greeting, “Charles, I need a favor.”

“You’ll have to speak up,” I tell her. “I don’t think we have a good connection.”

“Charles, don’t start. I need you to take Eric this weekend.”

“Narissa? Is that you?”

“Anthony and I are doing a wedding upstate. I need you to take Eric. Camping or something, you’re always promising to take him camping.”

“Gee, Nariss, I’d love to help you, but I’m sort of tied up at the moment.”

“Where are you?”

“Where am I?”

“Yes, Charles. Where. Are. You.”

“You mean right now? Right this minute?”

“Charles, for God’s sake!”

“Oh. Yeah, well, right now I’m in Marseilles. Might not be back for a while.”

“You’re in Marseilles?”

“Yeah. I do international maritime law, Narissa. You know, boats and water. This is a very logical place. You and Anthony ought to try it sometime.”

“You’re lying.”

“You dialed the number.”

I have a talent for finding the argument-stopper. It’s a gift—knowing that she had got the maid to call my office and then dial this number before touching the phone herself. And also knowing she would never admit it.

The truth is that I was in Marseilles yesterday, where they sell cold medication at the airport shops. Today I am here, with a sinus infection, at another airport on an island whose name I have forgotten, just off the coast of Liberia. Barely able to breathe. Right now I am waiting for a man named Robert N’mburo, who is a local chieftain, or whatever they call them over here, hoping that he will be able to write his own name. He isn’t really required to write his own name, but it would make this whole charade easier. So I pinch my nose. Take sips of air through my mouth. Then finally, at some point, look down and see that I really am fondling a cigarette.

Waiting, after I get rid of the phone call, the way you do in this section of Africa.

And what a dump.

I can say that because my employer—International Filth, Human Misery, and Contamination, Incorporated—owns everything in sight. Really. We own the airstrip, the island itself, approximately two hundred ships in various stages of disassembly, the trucks, the cables, the acetylene torches, the infirmary such as it is, the dead fish, the twenty-four miles of shoreline, and mineral rights. It’s all in my briefcase, printed on 8½ × 14 legal sheets. We own the dump and most of the human beings who live here. On the island at the end of the earth,
whose name I cannot at present remember. And we own the terminal building in which I am sitting. And of course we own me, down to the pinstripes and New Orleans accent—slightly adulterated by the necessity of living in Manhattan for the past fourteen years and representing said ironies in federal district court from time to time.

So I’ll say it again because these little moments don’t last. And because I like saying it. We own this part of the world. We
are
the government. We are the parent, the tribal elder, the proprietor, and savior of this island. We are God, and this is our Earth. It is our lump of dirt until it outlasts its usefulness, a moment which, unfortunately, arrived about six weeks into our last business quarter. Paradise is still profitable, but when your legal liabilities—not to say the closing arguments of several lawsuits—begin to creep into the accounting…. Well, that’s why I’m here. To shut it all down.

This particular building reminds me of a subway station, except that it has an oily teakwood floor and a few windows the size of portholes. Nevertheless, the air is subway air. I know it when I see it. And there’s rust blossoming on the walls, like the mineral gardens in caves. I’ve never seen anything quite like it—great cankerous rust flowers, as crenellated as carnations, growing on the walls of a building. It’s unnatural. Someone should pass an ordinance. The place smells like a fish market and echoes like a cathedral. I keep expecting someone to walk by and use the word
aeroplane
. That’s the sort of thing that pops into my mind when I’m not thinking about the fact that I am seven hundred miles from the nearest aspirin. And the fact that no one in this room has ever heard of Robert N’mburo. And the further fact that my wristwatch is missing.