Threats (6 page)

“Did you two ever have any big arguments? Fights? Shouting, throwing objects at each other? Physical contact?”

“Not really, no.”

“It's a common phenomenon.”

“She threw a newspaper at me once, but she apologized.”

Chico turned the page and kept writing. “Did Franny enjoy her job?”

“It was half a newspaper, really. Less than half. Just the sports section.”

“Did she have many friends?”

“Of the Saturday paper, you know. We're talking eight sheets of paper here.”

“That sounds very minor, David.”

“I wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't knocked my glasses off. She messed up the center bar. I had to tape them up. They were never like they were before.”

“You wear glasses.”

“I've always worn glasses.” David touched his own face. “I'm wearing them now.”

Chico closed his notepad. “David,” he said. “What happened to your wife?”

“When?” asked David. “When?” He lay down on the floor, at Chico's feet. He saw a paper bag on a shelf. The ceiling was a strange thing to see, and David realized that he had never lain flat on the floor in his own home. The ceiling's surface was dusty and smooth, forming an angled plane with the wall. It looked like it was a cold surface, one he could press his face against. He thought about how no dust should rightly form on the ceiling and how strange it was that dust did somehow populate up there, the webbed pockets of dust texturing in the corners. David imagined that if one or two specks of dust impossibly clung to the minute crevices of the ceiling, then another piece of dust and another could attach to those first colonizers, and in the course of fifty years, that string of codependent detritus could make its own meaningful line, stretching toward but never reaching the floor, existing beyond the reach of brooms and rags. He remembered how his mother would dust the corners of that very room with a damp rag. She wore another damp rag tied over her mouth for the sake of her allergies. He thought of the individual path of one such piece of dust: into the rag and washed down the sink, affixed to the interior of a pipe for a few weeks or months, time becoming less relevant to the speck than time was before—which is to say not at all relevant or perhaps negatively relevant—the speck washed free after some time, proceeding through the mess of pipes and into an underground tank, sinking through sludge to become sludge yet remaining an individual speck, having no original qualities yet remaining unique, sinking or aloft, present in the world.

 

21.

DAVID AWOKE ON THE FLOOR. It was dark outside, and his shoulder was too stiff to move. He felt bruised. He didn't remember falling asleep. Over the hours that had passed, his bones had settled and pinned him down. When he moved his legs, he felt the blood coursing to his lower body. His sore shoulder flushed and tingled as he sat up.

It had been a long time since he had needed his heavy winter coat, and he hadn't looked for it in years. He tended to wear his robe for trips to the mailbox or a light jacket for walks around the neighborhood. He hadn't taken note of the temperature or what he was wearing on his recent trip to the post office.

The coat was not in the downstairs closet. He checked the closets upstairs, the bedroom closets, the linen closet, the closet in the bathroom. He found the extra towels and considered wrapping them around his hands and arms and face. He forgot what he was looking for and checked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He remembered and dug through his side of the bedroom dresser. He found long underwear, jeans, a sweatshirt, and a ballpoint pen. At the back of one drawer was a scarf his mother had mailed from the home for women. David removed his robe and pajamas and put on the clothes.

Under the bed, he found winter clothes that had been vacuum sealed in large plastic pouches. When he opened one, it expanded and released the odor of a wet stone. David put his face into the pouch and held it there. His face touched one of Franny's favorite coats from the previous winter, one she had worn nearly every day. The coat was sewn from a bronze-colored fabric and gathered at intervals, giving the wearer the look of having stacked multiple cast-metal hoops up the body.

Her black winter gloves were stuffed in the coat's pockets. His hand was like a child's in the glove. He imagined Franny putting the gloves there in her pockets to surprise herself for the next season. He kept the gloves on and counted five more sealed pouches under the bed, each holding pillows or duvet covers or more of Franny's coats and sweaters. He lowered his face to the bronze coat again and inhaled its scent before spreading it out over the bed. One of his old jackets was at the bottom of the pouch, a blue and ivory ski jacket with a red zipper, something he had worn in college. He put it on.

His shoes felt strange on his feet, and he saw that he had forgotten his socks. The sock drawer was empty save for the velvet box containing a rare coin given to him by his uncle when he was ten years old. David hadn't opened the drawer in at least a year. He couldn't think of a more intuitive place to store socks beyond the sock drawer, but Franny made judgment calls that he tended not to understand immediately. Dust lined the drawer. David opened the velvet box and touched the surface of the coin with the tips of his gloved fingers. There was a pattern of stars ringing the relief sculpture, circling a woman with either a clutch of arrows or an antique tooth extractor held to her chest. He put the coin back in its velvet box and put the velvet box back in the drawer.

Franny's sock drawer was empty as well. She usually kept soft cloth bags of lavender with her socks and undergarments, but they were gone. Her drawer looked as if it had been scrubbed. David wondered if the police had taken the socks, if the firefighters had, the workers, the girls from the salon. He opened other drawers to find the clothes folded neatly.

He found one pair of Franny's socks wrapped around a pipe in the linen closet. They were distended as a result of their insulation duty. They were kneesocks, cold as the water that flowed through the pipe they had insulated for years, pulled tightly around the exposed pipe and knotted twice each. The knots were difficult to loosen and the act chilled his hands. They smelled like rusting metal. The socks featured orange rust at the points where the fabric stretched the farthest. David sat on the floor and put the socks on, then the shoes. He wiped the gloves on his jeans and stood.

 

22.

DAVID AND FRANNY went camping together only once, at a campground that allowed cars and firewood and coolers. The cars bellied up to the individual camping spots, protecting the rock-lined fire pits like steely animal flanks. They heard a generator powering a television. Franny observed the activity and light and said that she had always thought of camping as strapping one's provisions to one's back and walking into the woods. David had never camped before, but he imagined others walking, feet falling uncertainly on new territory, eyes scanning the ground ahead, stopping occasionally to drink water from a jug and lean back to look at the canopied trees above. At the car campground, Franny and David walked to the edge of a lake. The water shifted to cover and uncover rocks and shells on the beach. They decided that if the lake was a magic trick, the trick was that there were shells despite the fact that they were standing a long day's worth of driving from any ocean, ten hours of driving, weeks of walking. He put his arm around her, and she sang a quiet song about a man who takes a journey.

Day trips were more their style. There was a high concentration of antique shops in the area, and the two spent most of their time exploring, flanked by retirees. Franny would leave David at the boxes of tin saints' medals and return to show him photos and postcards she had found in the shop's recesses.

Despite never experiencing organized religion beyond his mother's plastic rosaries, he had an abiding reverence for Saint Apollonia, who, around the year 249, suffered the indignity of having every single one of her teeth bashed in by persecutors of Christians. Apollonia was supposed to be burned toothless at the stake but instead launched herself into the fire, an act pardoned by Saint Augustine, who noted the suicidal action of Apollonia's leap and forgave her and similar martyred individuals, for they acted on God's command. “Not through human caprice but on the command of God, not erroneously but through obedience,” Augustine wrote. The classical image of Apollonia was of a beautiful girl holding antique extractors in which a tooth was delicately grasped. She was the patron saint of dentistry, and David collected her prayer cards and medals the way he had collected coins as a kid. Adding to a collection always seemed to have a larger point, which could be appreciated even when he was the only one handing over the cash for the rounds of silver and tin stamped with the saint's calm face, extractors aloft as her symbol of martyrdom.

When he found an Apollonia charm, he would bring it home in a folded brown bag and leave it on the kitchen table. Franny liked to examine them on her own. She would thread a piece of ribbon through the hoop at the top as if it was a necklace for display, holding it up to the light. Then she would place it back inside its paper bag for David to find later. He stored them on a high bookshelf in the living room.

Franny grew up with religion and occasionally observed its traditions. One cold evening, the two of them walked to a church down the hill and received the sign of the cross on their foreheads with ashes. She scrubbed hers off the next morning before work, but David could feel his own mark as if it was still a flame. He left it on for days, until it smudged and buried itself in the individual pores on his forehead, sinking grease in the furrows between his eyes, giving him the brindled pallor of a man carved from stone.

 

23.

DAVID PREFERRED to brew a pot of coffee and leave it to fill the house with its scent, but such a move required that he find the coffeemaker and the filters and then the coffee itself. The police officer had left the instant grounds out, and David put them away. The coffeemaker was under the counter by the sink, and the filters were behind a line of cans in the pantry. He found the coffee in the freezer, rolled into a fist-size brick and secured with rubber bands. He had trouble gripping the coffee spoon with gloves on, so he removed one glove and pressed his bare hand on the countertop. His bruised body and brain were confused by the darkness outside and the smell of coffee. It had felt as if it was still evening until he started making the coffee, when it began to feel like morning. He didn't have a clock to check.

Regardless, it made no sense to leave the house, whatever hour it was. He tried to rationalize his way back into bed with the fact that he could rest underneath Franny's coat, which smelled strongly of a wet rock, though the scent surely had already mixed and diluted on the bed with David's own scents from the previous days. It seemed important to take a shower, or sleep and wait for the sun. The coffee brewed and dripped, and he thought about drinking it in the shower or pouring it into a pouch so he could have it while lying in bed. The temptations occurred as he blew the steam from his first cup.

In the days when he would get up early and go to work, he took his coffee to enjoy in the shower, a wet warm surrounded by warm wet. Sometimes he sat down on the tiled floor, his back against the shower's glass door. Drops of water would splash the surface of the coffee. It had been a secret pleasure.

David missed the smell of sanitized dental tools mingling with coffee. He would have his hygienist come in an hour before him each day and prepare the place, laying the clean tools out on metal trays at each station, covering each tray with a sanitized plastic bib. The smell was of new metal and smooth plastic, the opposite of the ground teeth and dry socket rot that would drift through the office throughout the day.

He had enjoyed his peaceful half hour before patients arrived. The front desk assistant would put on the easy-listening station and David walked through his office, sipping coffee from a thermos and observing each room, enjoying its spotless smell. Sometimes he sat in the examination chair and visualized himself as one of his own patients. He reclined the chair fully and saw the patterns within the ceiling tile. He listened in on the receptionist talking to one of the hygienists about college football.

It was hard to admit that those days were over, but it was hard to admit that any days were over, that the days themselves didn't stretch like pulled taffy and sag to the floor.

He wiped a layer of dust from the old coffeemaker. The machine had been a wedding gift and was the type with a removable top portion for easy cleaning. When David was dumping the filter in the trash, he saw a piece of paper taped on the back of the reservoir. The paper was half the size of an index card and featured typewritten words:

YOUR FATE IS SEALED WITH GLUE I HAVE BOILED IN A VAT. I SLOPPED IT ON AN ENVELOPE AND MAILED IT TO YOUR MOTHER'S WOMB.

David pulled the taped card off the coffeemaker and turned it over. The card bore no other marks, besides a lightened patch on the upper edge where the Scotch tape made contact with the paper. The card seemed old enough to have been sold with the appliance, but its condition could also have been attributed to resting on the hot surface. The edges of the card were crisp, without even a rounded darkening suggesting that they had been used to excavate underneath a fingernail.

David thought about calling the police, but then he imagined handing them the piece of paper, explaining that he had found it while making coffee. He decided that such a discovery would be best dealt with privately. Likely the threat had been stuck on by whoever gave them the gift, as a joke or not as a joke, but still beyond David's concern years after the fact. He could not begin to think about the number of things that were truly beyond his concern, the hundreds of thousands of things.

The house was a void. Its dark hallway beckoned. Curtains in the living room stood like sentry ghosts. Each room featured an obvious kind of silence that suggested invisible occupants holding their collective breath. He folded the tape over on the card and pressed the adhesive to the paper surface. He placed the card facedown on the counter, put his glove back on, and opened the door.