The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  “Are you sleepwalking? Or high?”

  “No.”

  He looks at the flowers, then back at me. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Let me ask my question first,” he says patiently, nodding to acknowledge what I said. “It’ll be quick.”

  “Please, Greg. I’m trying.”

  “What goes through someone’s mind as he’s, I don’t know, kicking out the tail lights in his brother-in-law’s car over a real-estate dispute in the game of Monopoly? Because I’ve been wondering for a while. Ever since…” He trails off, looking up toward the sky, lips pursed with extreme irony. “Oh, I’m not sure.”

  “I apologize,” I say. “Again.”

  “This is the first apology.”

  “I apologize, then.”

  “Of course you apologize now. How about back then? Or how about not doing it at all?”

  “I’m begging you.”

  “You didn’t answer the question.”

  I stare at him. It could be, I realize, that this, really, is my trigger. Whenever anyone asks my why. Why are there incidents? Why are you so angry? I can’t even conceive of an answer. I can mumble about reality, but that’s no answer. All I would like is to be able to produce an answer.

  I try one.

  “I just want somebody,” I say, “to understand what I’ve done.”

  Greg is a deep, calm guy. He’s a teacher. I’m afraid of him for all of these reasons. He stands there, arms crossed, thinking about it. He’s guessing that he’ll never be able to understand what I’ve done, and he’s wondering about whether his sister will be able to, and probably doubting it. Of course he’s right to worry about the future and wonder what will come of all this. Behind him I see his little daughter run down the hall, screaming happily, dragging a blanket behind her. I catch a glimpse of Justin, too, all the way back in the kitchen. He’s at the table, eating cereal. He’s not looking our way. Greg’s little girl runs around and keeps screaming. Greg doesn’t even flinch. Instead he adjusts his glasses and says, “She went back to your house.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I urged her to divorce you.”

  “I understand.”

  “She still might.”

  “That’s okay. She probably should. I would if I were her.”

  “So would I,” Greg says. “Lucky she’s her.”

  I turn to go.

  “Aaron,” he says.

  I turn back.

  “The flowers are pretty.”

  Wes’s Suburban is parked in my driveway when I get home.

  When I run into the kitchen, he looks up, bright-eyed, and says, “Hey, man! I already got the flowers, remember? Norman told me what a cornball you were being.”

  Lanie is there at the kitchen table with them. I am prepared to go berserk if I have to. There are four grenades stashed in the oven and I could get to them in roughly four seconds. The uzi is up behind the pots and pans. I could turn this house into a fucking inferno. I could destroy everything. All of us. If that’s what Wes wants, that’s what I’ll give him.

  I wait for a hint.

  She does not seem to have been tortured. In fact, she smiles at me, then gives me a little wave from the table.

  Norman nods at me, holds up a glass of yellow liquid.

  “Your own urine?” I say.

  He says, “It turns out you did have lemonade. You didn’t look hard enough. It was behind the milk.”

  “Leave,” I say to them. “Get out.”

  “We were just getting to know—”

  “Get out.” It would be impossible to describe to you just how much I want to scream it. But I’m not going to. You can’t scream your way through these people. You can’t be angry. If you are you’ll be stuck.

  Lanie, thankfully, looks like she doesn’t care one way or the other. Later, as she’s pulling Wes’s flowers from the vase and replacing them with mine, she will tell me that Wes came in and started telling her some rather sensitive things, work-wise. It will make sense to me. That’s the last card to play if you’re in Wes’s position—Chuck at his throat, a world of shit all around him, orders to pull people back into it because no one, really, wants to be doing it at all. Yes, Wes, I can see you. You told the woman I love about the horrible things I have done. She listened and absorbed it. Contrary to your plans and expectations, she did not cease to love me, because you’ve failed to understand something crucial, at the core of love, which is neither good nor bad but simply your story so far, and I was not made into the nihilist you needed me to be to get me back. Don’t you see that since I’ve been back, since she’s been gone, all I’ve wanted to do is confess? Wes? To lie down in her lap, cry, and tell her about the evil I’ve personally added to the world? Wes: Do you see how you helped me? Thank you. I cannot help you, but thank you.

  “It’s time to get out of my house,” I say again.

  Now I point to the door with the flowers, which are somehow in my hand. Lanie is looking at me. Is she proud? Wes’s skeleton looks saddened. Norman’s looks old and bulky and worn, like it has carried too much weight for too long, committed too many atrocities, even for a Pro. Yes, Norman, I can see you as well. I hope there’s a limit to the havoc one human frame can wreak during a lifetime, for your sake. The skull of Norman has long scratches and one bigger crack down the side. Was he once hit in the head with a hammer? We can only guess.

  Lanie’s skeleton is small and elegant. I can see her bad posture clearly. I can see the miniature architecture of rib and vertebrae and shoulder. I can see the interlocking of bones in my own wrist and hand as I continue to point at the door. I can see the flowers have no skeleton, and remain flowers. They have chlorophyll. I can see we are motionless in this death-frieze for some time.

  Then Wes’s skeleton stands up, and Norman’s does, too, and I follow them both to the door.

  “Apparently you don’t want to work for us anymore,” Wes says cheerfully. Norman is down on the ground, putting on his shoes again. “You win!”

  “Go.”

  “Twenty years from now, Aaron,” he says. “Twenty years from now you’ll think of this moment.”

  I don’t respond to that. Then there are skeletons walking through the snow, adorned in winter clothing, lords of doom, those privy to the lifting of the veil, and this is the end of this day. I’m not healed, nor are they vanquished.

  I retreat to the kitchen.

  Lanie’s at the sink, cleaning Norman’s lemonade glass. Did she see any of it? The hidden world?

  When she turns and sees me in the doorway with the flowers, she says, “Those are great. It’s really clean in here.” I help her finish in the kitchen and then take her down into the basement to show her what work I’ve done since she’s been gone. I show her the new carpet.

  She says, “I’m not necessarily back. I came to have coffee. We should talk it through, Aaron. We need to talk.”

  I say, “That’s fine. That’s good.”

  But now I can see the skin taut on her cheekbone. I can see the two freckles below her temple. I can see her earlobe and the empty holes of her old and angry teenage piercings.

  Nothing’s there anymore. Her skin still shines youth. I know this person well, I think. I really do know her.

  The Son

  I feel the knife go in and of all the things you’d think it’d make you feel, I feel sadness. Mind just skips the surprise and skips the pain and goes right to knowing that I’ve come to the end and more than anything, it’s too sad to believe, but you believe it, though, because there’s the knife sticking in your side. Crazy. I mean of all the things. There’s also relief, like at least I’m allowed to stop pretending, not even sure what exactly, but the real feeling is the feeling of sadness. That’s all it is.

  I’ll back up—the situation is strange. All I’m doing is walking down the street. I’m up north near the triangle but I gotta get down to class. Last night was crazy but I made it a thing now to nev
er miss class because something gets crazy. And I’ve got my hands in my pockets and I’m listening to some pretty backwards Dr. Octagon I got from this old stoner in my building and out of nowhere now on the sidewalk some dude grabs my shoulder from behind and twists me. Here’s what Octagon is saying even though he’s not up too loud: “Astronauts get played, tough like the ukulele, as I move in rockets, overriding levels, nothing’s aware, same data, same system.” But since he’s not loud I can hear what Colonel Sanders says at the same time (dude who stabs me looks like Colonel Sanders) right before he pushes his big-ass kitchen knife or whatever right into my side, right under my ribs on the left: “I am loving you and I am sending you off, my brother.” Which is hilarious, if you think about the dude in charge of Kentucky Fried Chicken calling me his brother, saying he loves me, and killing me. I stare in his eyes. So it goes in and at first it’s not too far from what it’s like getting a shot, just real focused on one spot and this weird panic coming up from your body saying some shit like, “Not supposed to be going in like that’s going in,” but as he really pushed and his blade’s all the way in there, into my stomach, him kinda hugging me and I don’t think anyone on the sidewalk even knows what’s happening, everything pretty much shuts off and that’s when I’m sad, like I started. So then time is real off from here forward and I’m living like a month every time he pulls it out and sticks it back in. I think then people start to notice. And it’s like another year later by the time I’m on the ground.

  My mother. That’s who he’s really killing. I saw her at my sister’s funeral and that was some shit so strange, speaking of strange, it wasn’t even sad anymore. I read this book that had Irish women swooning when they found out their dudes had been killed in battle or whatever but I thought that shit was just made up for the story, to be honest. But there’s something in women—maybe not just women, okay—but you push a person far enough and give them something that’s so sad they gather up this power they have and they blow up, they just blow up. They blow up. It’s a big blow up of a person.

  My mother didn’t just throw herself down on my sister’s coffin at that place. No. She started shrieking in this way I’d just never heard. I saw this word, this Lord of the Flies word: ululations. That’s what I thought when I heard the sound of my mother screaming at my sister’s body, when I saw her leaning over, grabbing at her, knocking over flowers and the portrait, just straight-up out of her mind. Ululation. We got animals inside of us, man. We’ve got all this power.

  And so there I am, standing there in my suit, watching my mom do this. It scares me and I can’t even move, I can’t do nothing. But all the old folks, it was like they weren’t even surprised. Not even the old folks, actually—just everyone who wasn’t a kid, maybe. But all these people there, it was like it was normal to see someone turn into this screaming beast, and a couple of the old-timers just kind of went up and held her there while she was screaming. They held her up. She didn’t fight them, really, but still, she kept struggling, because she was fighting something, it just wasn’t there in front of us.

  So this is when I realize what I’m seeing.

  What I’m seeing is my mother actually making one more last try to change the world.

  Put it like this: right then at the moment, while she’s ululating, my mother on some level believes, believes completely, that she’s gonna say, Ah hell no loud enough, to time, and what’s happened, and not just that, but that shit’s gonna work. It’s really gonna work. Not even like a story about how the metaphor of it worked, I mean it’s gonna work work, and Nicole’s gonna rise up from that coffin, and she’s gonna be alive again. If my mother screams loud enough—so she’s thinking—and strange enough—if she empties herself—enough—she’s gonna change what has happened.

  Does it work?

  It doesn’t work.

  But for a second, it seems like it might.

  Back to this. So then I’m at the hospital and I’ve got no idea what I’m doing and still all it really is is sad. I don’t know. I’m lying there and I’ve got no shirt, someone cut it off. Some doctor’s leaning down towards me, talking to me. All I think is: Who was that dude? Colonel Sanders? What did he say? No idea. Why? No idea. Fuck if I want to die, man—I want to live—but still it’s like my mind, it knows, even though I don’t want to admit it.

  I’m doing my wailing as well, even though I’m only half-here for it. Funny to find yourself screaming because it makes you think that all along, you’re not the one who’s been in control of anything, that being alive is someone else is running you and you’re just hooked up to a bunch of dummy instruments like a fake steering wheel.

  But either way, I’m doing my ululating.

  Time’s slow. I’ve got time to say all my goodbyes. Who knows how it comes out. Here I am dying. You’re watching it. I do have time to say all my goodbyes, in my way. I mean the right people are here. But you’re right here, so I’ll say them to you.

  The Machine of Understanding Other People

  1

  THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL

  The situation is not so good on the morning Tom Sanderson receives the telegram. The man who brings it looks to be about ten years younger than him and has an impressive wave of black hair cresting just above bushy, caterpillar eyebrows. He’s handsome; he’s wearing a blue suit and blue tie and very professionally hands over the cream-white envelope, unsealed, perhaps even perfumed, and Tom, surprisingly awake from the night before, wearing only bathrobe, suit-pants, vomit-stained undershirt, and really big bomber hat, standing ankle-deep in a small sea of his own unread mail, thinks to himself that yes, it makes perfect sense that I am receiving a telegram, considering what an important figure I am in the world. He reaches out and takes it from the stranger with a squint and—accidentally—a burning liquid burp.

  There is a moment of tentative eye contact after the burp. Then both men stand in silence as Tom studies the envelope for a long time and the odor of partially-digested Jameson, which is the only thing in Tom’s stomach at the moment, expands in an invisible cloud between their faces, mixing with the envelope’s musk.

  Tom says, “Like a real telegram?”

  “Yes.”

  “But a real one?” Tom says again, looking up at the messenger. “It says STOP.” He holds up the envelope, one eyebrow raised, Sherlockian gambit.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” says the messenger.

  “What is that accent you have?” Tom asks the man, changing tone, cocking his head. “Where are you from? What is that? Dutch?”

  “My accent is totally standard American, sir,” says the messenger, whose name is (unfortunately) Dick Ball and who is now feeling uncomfortable about this delivery.

  Tom Sanderson, despite the veneer of aristocratic, disheveled confidence, something he’s always had about him and now really only keeps when he’s within his apartment, feels self-conscious, too; it’s about the stains on his v-neck and having said anything about the accent to this man because it’s true, now that he thinks about it, this handsome messenger in the blue suit has no accent at all, actually, just a weird eye-contact thing. So this is awkward. Tom frowns meaningfully and turns his attention back to the envelope. It occurs to him that he could open and read the message as a way of making the messenger go away, but he also realizes he can just sort of drift backwards with a creepy goodbye-smile on his face and nod a little and mumble a thank-you as he closes the door in the guy’s face. And this is what he does, and it works: after the latch clicks Tom finds himself again alone in his foyer, just like before, only now he is holding a telegram.

  Tom is pretty far down a downward spiral at the moment, which he knows full well, but he also isn’t quite sure where the bottom of the spiral is or whether it even has a bottom, which he sometimes finds sort of funny, say early in the evenings, when he’s sipping his first whiskey, but later on, into the night, when he sits alone in his too-big apartment, absolutely toasted, usually watching DVR’d reality television but some
times puttering around in order to waste time and avoid going to bed, where he will probably lie drunk and awake for hours, he catches glimpses of a whole new landscape of life’s secret horrors, grotesque sights, really, things that make previous selves seem like naïve children attending only the kindergarten of human desperation; the feeling is pure but only lasts a second or two: it’s the human mind trapped by itself in a vacuum, but there’s a very small window somehow within this empty and airless prison, he’s not unlike Steve McQueen looking out through his small wired window in the side of his cell in The Great Escape, how he has to jump up to do it, and through that window the only visible thing is another forty or fifty years of life’s slow and efficient meat-grinder tractor chewing away at some field that is the soul until the grand, totally anticlimactic finale of death, about which no one will really care, which is itself represented in the metaphor by the tractor just totally blowing up.

  The drinking got serious a few years back, at around the same time the feeling began, and his wife Sherry left because of the drinking, ostensibly, but she knew he was broken, like he knew he was broken, maybe even all done. He never really tried to tell her about the feeling specifically, in part because it was embarrassing to admit how afraid he had become of walking around in the regular world after having been so confident and comfortable in his own skin for decades, an absurd thought, to be agoraphobic or whatever it is he’s become, but also because it all seemed so scripted, so predictable. It was the sort of thing he’d read about in college English classes, the most boring ones with the most asinine and pompous rich students on campus…a special kind of contemporary numbness of the spirit, they always said, ennui, Zooey Glassinitis, angst, dread, nothing, a dearth of Existenz, and back then he didn’t think much of it, as it was so utterly unrelatable, such a privileged condition, like someone had just made it up because there weren’t any interesting wars to write about at the time. Now, actually feeling that feeling…well, it is apparently a real thing and not a good feeling. Not at all. But is there a bottom to the spiral? Tom used to pride himself on his financial successes, investments and whatnot, which, until lately, had been impressive. Then came Great Depression 2. He was born poor and had made himself rich. That is impressive. Not so much now, as the entire American economy is dead. He’s still pretty rich, mind you, but being pretty rich doesn’t feel quite like it used to.