Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (12 page)

9:05 a.m. He goes to work.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin works three hours every morning, until noon, standing in for missing or vandalized mannequins at a department store in a nearby strip mall. Until recently he worked in the warehouse, processing orders, cataloging merchandise, and inspecting enormous cardboard boxes with rusted staples the size of his pinkie finger. Lately, however, a spate of mannequin thefts—the result, police suspect, of a gang initiation ritual—has left local shopping centers dispossessed of display models, and Half of Rumpelstiltskin has been transferred in to fill the void. He considers this ironic.

—You’re five minutes late, his boss tells him when he arrives. Don’t let it happen again.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s boss smells of cigar smoke and seafood.

—And from now on, I expect to see you clean-shaven when you come in, he says gruffly. Nobody likes a hairy mannequin. Now get changed and get to work.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin nods in reply. Cod, he thinks.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin soon emerges from the wardrobe wearing a junior-size vinyl jumpsuit with a zippered front and a designer label. Around his head is swathed a stocking cap several sizes too large for him. It rests heavy on his eyebrow and plunges to the small of his back in broad, rambling folds. His jumpsuit, on its right side, is as flaccid as the inner tube of a flat tire. Half of Rumpelstiltskin takes his place between two cold, trendy mannequins—one slate gray with both arms halved at the elbow, its head severed as if by a huntsman’s ax from right ear to left jawbone, and the other a metal figure composed of flat geometric shapes with a polished black sheen, jointed together with transparent rods to resemble the human form. Half of Rumpelstiltskin feels himself a true and vital part of the society of mannequins. With them, he fits right in.

An adolescent with close-cropped hair, a pierced eyebrow, and a scar extending like a smile from the corner of his lip to the prominence of his cheek approaches Half of Rumpelstiltskin near the end of his shift. Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands as still as a tree in the hope that the boy will walk past, but instead he circles and draws closer, like a dog bound to him by a chain. Upon reaching the platform where Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands, the boy threads his arm through the jumpsuit’s empty leg and takes hold of Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s spleen. He appears surprised. He removes his hand—spleenless—and sniffs it. Shrugging, he reaches again for the jumpsuit’s empty cuff.

I wouldn’t do that if I were you,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin, and the boy backs calmly away. He stops, crooks his neck, and looks quizzically into Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s eye. Then he brushes his fingers along the underside of his jaw and flicks them past the nub of his chin. His eyes glare scornfully at Half of Rumpelstiltskin. He strides confidently away, as if nothing at all has happened. Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches him exit the building through a pair of sliding glass doors. His boss steps out from behind a carousel hung with heavy flannel shirts.

—What was that all about? he asks.

Nothing,
responds Half of Rumpelstiltskin.

—No fraternization with the customers. You should know better than that.

Okay,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.

His boss shakes his head disapprovingly and, turning to leave, mutters under his breath.

—Fool, he whispers. Meathead. Hayseed. Half-wit.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin checks his wristwatch. It’s quitting time.

12:15 p.m. He eats lunch in the park.

Beside the wooden bench on which he sits is a tree stump, its hollow banked with wood pulp and a few faded soda cans. Half of Rumpelstiltskin can’t help but wonder what has become of the tree itself. A year ago it rose within the park, housing the sky, a thousand tatters of blue, within its overspread branches. Now it is gone, and this bench is here in its place. Possibly the bench itself was once a part of the tree—hewn, perhaps, from its thickset trunk—but if so, what has become of the rest? The only certainty is that it fell, releasing from its branches a host of harried birds and vagrant squirrels, galaxies and planets and the sure and vaulting sky. With so much restless weight between its leaves, it could just as well have burst like a balloon.
When
you’re trying to hold the sky inside you,
thinks Half of Rumpelstiltskin,
something is bound to fail. The sky is inevitable. The sky is a foregone conclusion.
Overhead, the sun pulses behind swells of heat, wobbling like an egg yolk. The jet trail has dispersed, blown ragged by the winds of early March.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin watches as, in the distance, a kite mounts its way into the air. Beneath it, a man stands in a meadow of dry yellow grass, unspooling a length of string. He tugs at the kite and the kite tugs back, yanking the man in fits and starts through the field and toward a playground. Half of Rumpelstiltskin sees children loosed from the plate of a restless, wheeling merry-go-round, holding to its metal bars with both arms, their bodies like streamers in the air. He sees swings arcing up and down and supine parents reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes. Beside the playground, a sandwich stand sprouts from the ground like a toadstool. Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s stomach churns at the sight of it, rumbling like sneakers caught in a spin cycle. He places his hand against its interior lining, finds it dry and clean and webbed like ceiling insulation. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is hungry.

At the sandwich stand, he asks for peanut butter and jelly on wheat. Eating and hopping, he unwittingly lights on an anthill. It goes scattering ahead of him in a fine particulate brume. Half of Rumpelstiltskin lowers himself to the ground and sits with his haunch on his heel. He watches as ants swarm from the razed hill: they broadcast themselves in all directions, like bursting fireworks or ink on water. Within a matter of minutes, the tiny, volatile creatures have built a protective ring of dirt around the bore above their home. Half of Rumpelstiltskin finds the sight of creatures working as a collective a strange and unfamiliar one. It’s spooky and—for some reason—a little bit sad. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has trouble enough comprehending the nature of individuality without throwing inter-subjectivity into the pot. Although he has unmade anthills on many, many occasions, Half of Rumpelstiltskin has never stayed to watch the ants rebuild. As a gesture of good will, he leaves them that portion of his sandwich he has not yet swallowed. If they can’t eat it, he thinks, perhaps they can build with it.

An abundance of drugstores line the walk between the park and Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s home, and he stops at one along the way. There he purchases a chocolate bar, a bottle of apple-green mouthwash, and a newspaper from the metroplex across the river, the headlines of which affirm what he has long held to be true—that the world tumbles its way through political conventions, economic treaties, televised sporting events, and invasive military tactics in starving third-world nations with utter indifference to the inglorious fact of his half-existence. The stock market columns report that gold is down— straw way, way down.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin has poor depth perception. Hopping home, he trips over a concrete parking block.

1:25 p.m. He receives a Mad-Libs letter from his other Half.

3 March — (y—ear—)

Half of Rumpelstiltskin:

Not much new here in
.The
Queen has decided once again to levy a whole new batch of taxes— and guess who the
victims are this time around: homunculi. That’s right. Miss
has decided that the time is ripe to tax
and homunculi. And who’s the only homunculus on this whole
? Me! Rumpel
stiltskin ... Sorry. Just need to vent some of my
and frustration. I should learn to control my temper—if there’s a moral to this whole affair, that must be it—but you know how it gets.
at least we’re not as bad as