Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (14 page)

Half of Rumpelstiltskin pays the checkout attendant. He grasps his grocery sacks by their cutting plastic grips, hefts them over his shoulder, and hops through a set of yawning, automatic doors.

5:50 p.m. He cooks supper and dances a jig.

In his kitchen sits an outsize black cauldron, like a bubble blown by the mouth of the scullery floor. It is a few heads taller than Half of Rumpelstiltskin himself, and to see over its lip he must climb to the top tread of a stepladder propped against its side. From the brim of the cauldron spumes a thick, pallid yeast, and across its pitchy interior are layers of burnt and crusted food. Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands at the cutting board with a finely edged knife, dicing onions, potatoes, and peppers into small, palmate segments. He scrapes these into a tin basin, adds spices and a queer lumpish mass that he pulls from his freezer, and hops up the stepladder to dump them into the cauldron. The vegetables, pitched into the stew, churn beneath its surface, interrupting the reddish brown paste that thickens there into a skin.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin hops down to the kitchen floor. He washes his hand in the sink, then dries it on his slacks. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is pleased by the prospect of supper. He considers himself a true gourmand.

As is his custom prior to eating, Half of Rumpelstiltskin crooks himself from toe to palm and reels around his cauldron. Sometimes he holds his ankle in his hand and hoops his way through the kitchen; sometimes he cambers at the waist, bucking from head to toe like a seesaw. Half of Rumpelstiltskin dances, and hungers, and sings his dancing and hungering song—his voice ululating like that of a hound crying for its master:

Dancing dances, brewing feasts,
Won’t restore me in the least.
Brewing feasts and singing songs,
Nights are slow and days are long.
Lamentation! Drudgery!
Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s me.

10:35 p.m. He falls asleep watching The Dating Game.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin grows listless after heavy meals. In the bathroom, he rasps his mossy teeth with a fibrillar plastic brush until they feel smooth against his tongue. He gargles with his apple-green mouthwash, tilting his head there-side down so as not to dribble into the cavity of his body. Half of Rumpelstiltskin urinates, watching as a pale yellow fluid courses the length of his urethra into the toilet. Afterward he leaves the seat up.

On his way to the couch, Half of Rumpelstiltskin presses his palm against the pane of a window. It’s growing chilly outside. He retrieves an eiderdown quilt from the linen closet and settles in beneath it.

A man with brown hair—hair that rises above his forehead like a wave collapsing toward his crown—grins on the television. He speaks in sunny, urgent tones to a woman who looks to be about a half-bubble off-level. The woman is charged with the task of choosing a date from among three dapper men who introduce themselves as if there’s something inside them gone empty without her. She asks the men a question, and they answer to a swell of applause from the studio audience. Name one word that describes the sky, says the woman. It’s high, says one man. It’s wide, says another. It’s inevitable, says the third. Half of Rumpelstiltskin is rooting for the third.

The people on the television seem lost. Somewhere, at some point, they forgot who they were or how to be happy. They found themselves wandering around behind the haze of their fear and desire. They stumbled into his television. The lucky ones will walk off with one another, out of his television set and onto some beach beneath a soft and falling sun, heady with the confidence that they’ve found someone—another voice, a pair of arms—to be happy with. Half of Rumpelstiltskin wishes them the best, but he knows something they don’t—which perhaps they never will—something that may not even be true for them. He knows that it happens in this world that you can change in such a way as to never again be complete, that you can lose parts of who you once were—and sometimes you’ll get better, but sometimes you’ll never be anything more than fractional: than who you once were, a few parts hollow. He knows that sometimes what’s missing isn’t somebody else.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin sinks into sleep like a leaf subsiding to the floor of the moon. When next he opens his eye, the television will whisper behind a face of lambent snow.

The Ceiling

There was a sky that day, sun-rich and open and blue. A raft of silver clouds was floating along the horizon, and robins and sparrows were calling from the trees. It was my son Joshua’s seventh birthday and we were celebrating in our back yard. He and the children were playing on the swing set, and Melissa and I were sitting on the deck with the parents. Earlier that afternoon, a balloon and gondola had risen from the field at the end of our block, sailing past us with an exhalation of fire. Joshua told his friends that he knew the pilot. “His name is Mister Clifton,” he said, as they tilted their heads back and slowly revolved in place. “I met him at the park last year. He took me into the air with him and let me drop a soccer ball into a swimming pool. We almost hit a helicopter. He told me he’d come by on my birthday.” Joshua shielded his eyes against the sun. “Did you see him wave?” he asked. “He just waved at me.”

This was a story.

The balloon drifted lazily away, turning to expose each delta and crease of its fabric, and we listened to the children resuming their play. Mitch Nauman slipped his sunglasses into his shirt pocket. “Ever notice how kids their age will handle a toy?” he said. Mitch was our next-door neighbor. He was the single father of Bobby Nauman, Joshua’s strange best friend. His other best friend, Chris Boschetti, came from a family of cosmetics executives. My wife had taken to calling them “Rich and Strange.”

Mitch pinched the front of his shirt between his fingers and fanned himself with it. “The actual function of the toy is like some sort of obstacle,” he said. “They’ll dream up a new use for everything in the world.”

I looked across the yard at the swing set: Joshua was trying to shinny up one of the A-poles; Taylor Tugwell and Sam Yoo were standing on the teeter swing; Adam Smithee was tossing fistfuls of pebbles onto the slide and watching them rattle to the ground.

My wife tipped one of her sandals onto the grass with the ball of her foot. “Playing as you should isn’t Fun,” she said: “it’s Design.” She parted her toes around the front leg of Mitch’s lawn chair. He leaned back into the sunlight, and her calf muscles tautened.

My son was something of a disciple of flying things. On his bedroom wall were posters of fighter planes and wild birds. A model of a helicopter was chandeliered to his ceiling. His birthday cake, which sat before me on the picnic table, was decorated with a picture of a rocket ship—a silver white missile with discharging thrusters. I had been hoping that the baker would place a few stars in the frosting as well (the cake in the catalog was dotted with yellow candy sequins), but when I opened the box I found that they were missing. So this is what I did: as Joshua stood beneath the swing set, fishing for something in his pocket, I planted his birthday candles deep in the cake. I pushed them in until each wick was surrounded by only a shallow bracelet of wax. Then I called the children over from the swing set. They came tearing up divots in the grass.

We sang happy birthday as I held a match to the candles.

Joshua closed his eyes.

“Blow out the stars,” I said, and his cheeks rounded with air.

That night, after the last of the children had gone home, my wife and I sat outside drinking, each of us wrapped in a separate silence. The city lights were burning, and Joshua was sleeping in his room. A nightjar gave one long trill after another from somewhere above us.

Melissa added an ice cube to her glass, shaking it against the others until it whistled and cracked. I watched a strand of cloud break apart in the sky. The moon that night was bright and full, but after a while it began to seem damaged to me, marked by some small inaccuracy. It took me a moment to realize why this was: against its blank white surface was a square of perfect darkness. The square was without blemish or flaw, no larger than a child’s tooth, and I could not tell whether it rested on the moon itself or hovered above it like a cloud. It looked as if a window had been opened clean through the floor of the rock, presenting to view a stretch of empty space. I had never seen such a thing before.

“What
is
that?” I said.

Melissa made a sudden noise, a deep, defeated little
oh.

“My life is a mess,” she said.

Within a week, the object in the night sky had grown perceptibly larger. It would appear at sunset, when the air was dimming to purple, as a faint granular blur, a certain filminess at the high point of the sky, and would remain there through the night. It blotted out the light of passing stars and seemed to travel across the face of the moon, but it did not move. The people of my town were uncertain as to whether the object was spreading or approaching—we could see only that it was getting bigger—and this matter gave rise to much speculation. Gleason the butcher insisted that it wasn’t there at all, that it was only an illusion. “It all has to do with the satellites,” he said. “They’re bending the light from that place like a lens. It just
looks
like something’s there.” But though his manner was relaxed and he spoke with conviction, he would not look up from his cutting board.

The object was not yet visible during the day, but we could feel it above us as we woke to the sunlight each morning: there was a tension and strain to the air, a shift in its customary balance. When we stepped from our houses to go to work, it was as if we were walking through a new sort of gravity, harder and stronger, not so yielding.

As for Melissa, she spent several weeks pacing the house from room to room. I watched her fall into a deep abstraction. She had cried into her pillow the night of Joshua’s birthday, shrinking away from me beneath the blankets. “I just need to sleep,” she said, as I sat above her and rested my hand on her side. “Please. Lie down. Stop hovering.” I soaked a washcloth for her in the cold water of the bathroom sink, folding it into quarters and leaving it on her night stand in a porcelain bowl.

The next morning, when I found her in the kitchen, she was gathering a coffee filter into a little wet sachet. “Are you feeling better?” I asked.

“I’m fine.” She pressed the foot lever of the trash can, and its lid popped open with a rustle of plastic.

“Is it Joshua?”

Melissa stopped short, holding the pouch of coffee in her outstretched hand. “What’s wrong with Joshua?” she said. There was a note of concern in her voice.

“He’s seven now,” I told her. When she didn’t respond, I continued with, “You don’t look a day older than when we met, honey. You know that, don’t you?”

She gave a puff of air through her nose—this was a laugh, but I couldn’t tell what she meant to express by it, bitterness or judgment or some kind of easy cheer. “It’s not Joshua,” she said, and dumped the coffee into the trash can. “But thanks all the same.”

It was the beginning of July before she began to ease back into the life of our family. By this time, the object in the sky was large enough to eclipse the full moon. Our friends insisted that they had never been able to see any change in my wife at all, that she had the same style of speaking, the same habits and twists and eccentricities as ever. This was, in a certain sense, true. I noticed the difference chiefly when we were alone together. After we had put Joshua to bed, we would sit with one another in the living room, and when I asked her a question, or when the telephone rang, there was always a certain brittleness to her, a hesitancy of manner that suggested she was hearing the world from across a divide. It was clear to me at such times that she had taken herself elsewhere, that she had constructed a shelter from the wood and clay and stone of her most intimate thoughts and stepped inside, shutting the door. The only question was whether the person I saw tinkering at the window was opening the latches or sealing the cracks.

One Saturday morning, Joshua asked me to take him to the library for a story reading. It was almost noon, and the sun was just beginning to darken at its zenith. Each day, the shadows of our bodies would shrink toward us from the west, vanish briefly in the midday soot, and stretch away into the east, falling off the edge of the world. I wondered sometimes if I would ever see my reflection pooled at my feet again. “Can Bobby come, too?” Joshua asked as I tightened my shoes.

I nodded, pulling the laces up in a series of butterfly loops. “Why don’t you run over and get him,” I said, and he sprinted off down the hallway.