M31

by Stephen Wright

  Inside this room, nestled at the center, was a large black dot, hard and round and compact as a seed. To keep it from growing you watered it with Bud.

  I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.

  Suddenly all the trees lost their leaves and didn’t know where to find them.

  “Stupid,” Dallas mumbled.

  The air was alive, swarming with bright wormy shapes, larvae of the gods.

  On the shingled roof of a doghouse abandoned for so long there wasn’t even a trace of doggie scent stood an old Heineken bottle they took turns throwing rocks at. It was a smart bottle, sidestepping each time just enough to avoid getting hit. Gwen wiped her sweaty face on the sleeve of her T-shirt. Dallas opened his fly and, bending backward, one upraised fist pumping madly above his head, the other gripping his cock like the saddle pommel on a rodeo bull, shot a streaming arc of warm piss flashing toward the target. Inspired, Gwen undid her buttons, hopping precariously from one bloodied foot to the other, freeing herself with difficulty from the harsh fabric of her jeans. Together they’d extinguish that damn green flame. She spread her legs and let go in fair imitation of Dallas who whooped and applauded. Then all the clothes were gone and they were romping through a sunny field of flowering goldenrod, feathery yellow clusters tickling her breasts. She could see the sky, a high dusty blue, sliding around behind the seething plants, and realized she was on the ground, a hard shape defining itself through the pain in her back. It was a beer can, of course, empty and lost, trying to find its way back to the party. Dallas sprawled across her, his exploring mouth nibbling at the tight edges of what no one had ever been permitted to know. Then his eyes found her and she let herself tumble all the way in, it was a pressurized cabin actually with protective padding and conveniently located handholds and weightlessness not at all as frightening as she might have supposed, exhilarating free fall through neuronic fire, the vapor of dreams. “Tie me up,” she ordered in a raspy, unfamiliar voice. He drew back, suspicious, scrutinizing her flushed face. “It’s what Beale used to do.” She pointed to the neglected clothesline drooping from one corner of the shack to a withered limb of the sycamore tree. “Yeah, sure,” he agreed, astounded by his luck. She followed him into the yard.

  Worried by the seasons, the rope kept breaking, the knots coming apart, which Gwen found hilarious, and him and his ridiculously throbbing tube scrambling around her in typical male haste, pinching and tugging at her until somehow her outflung arms were strung to the trunk of the tree, legs spread in wishbone fashion between a pair of railless fence posts, a human star with points of flesh. She was hypnotized by the perfect black fly clinging in immutable equanimity to the slope of his shoulder, and when he settled down against her she recognized that the odor on his skin and hair—she sucked in deeply—was of the plant, eau de Green Farms.

  “Ow!” she cried.

  He pulled away, lubricated himself with a handful of spit, and tried again.

  “It hurts.”

  “I’ll be right back.” He dashed inside, emerging seconds later clutching a glass jar with a corroded lid.

  “Peanut butter?”

  “It was all I could find.”

  She stared at the jaunty emerald elfin figure on the label and thought of reindeer, thought of snow, thought of flying off you go. But what was going on down there? It felt so gritty. Chunky style? He wouldn’t dare. As bad as Beale, all this huffing and puffing, poking and grunting—whoops! he was in. She closed her eyes. The darkness behind them was incredibly soft, tactile, the down on the skin of a peach. Her body felt pleasantly elongated, like warm taffy. Now let the world go shuddering as it would, she was fastened down, she couldn’t be thrown. Arousal was building, block by block, a luminous pyramid of electrified stone. Out of the budding darkness cords of light drew near, curving inward, embraced by her magnetized body. Wind strong and sure shook at the struts of her heart. Dallas was gone, a figure forgotten at the terminal, stale newspapers and yellow candy wrappers blowing away down wooden rows of varnished benches barren as pews. Something was coming and she struggled in her bonds to receive it, hardly aware of the sudden accompaniment of distracting pops and bursts as if a hidden camera quite near were stealing snapshots of her back rooms, across the white flaring a distorted glimpse of the black-nostriled mask of Dash’s face, an immense parking lot ominously vacant of all cars but one, a deserted beach at low tide, fat gulls riding the gray swells, important scenes perhaps, but it was too late to linger because right now she was undergoing illumination, right now she was fully Occupied.

  Nine

  ARE THESE CANDIED YAMS or what?”

  “Doesn’t the aroma of fresh bread remind you of a nursery?”

  “It’s Romaine, dear, not Roman.”

  “If there aren’t any lumps, they’re not authentic.”

  “That’s my spoon she has in her mouth.”

  “It is so what Popeye eats, look it up.”

  “Corn on the cob hurts my teeth.”

  “Stop throwing grapes at your sister.”

  “But the pork is pink in the middle.”

  “No one leaves the table until all this…whatever it is, is gone.”

  “Pass the ketchup.”

  Dinner: the day’s centerpiece, The Unit in full cry about the groaning board.

  “Mashed turnips, again?”

  “Get her grubby fingers out of the Jell-O, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Is Thousand Island supposed to be orange?”

  “Let it ring, let it ring, we do not accept telephonic communications during mealtime.”

  “No, radishes won’t keep away vampires.”

  “I am, of course, referring to Major Mantell, the first casualty of The War of the Worlds.”

  “The check is in the mail.”

  “Look at her makeup, it’s like eating with a dead person.”

  “Not another tornado watch.”

  “I’ve been to forty-six states, twelve countries, and four planets.”

  “I just love this…this creamed stuff.”

  “More salt, please.”

  She saw him at breakfast, of course, often in the same bloodied clothes he had worn the day before and sometimes the day before that, nudging bits of congealed egg onto his fork with an auto mechanic’s perpetually grimy finger and smiling secretly to himself but not at her. Beale had rarely smiled; he was serious; the world was serious—we are here to be eaten, he said, dreaming of living on air beyond air among creatures you could trust. She had thought of Caspar and Cheshire cats, but now, during the long, lonely hours when Dallas was at work, the tang of his scent, a sheltering sac, fluttered invisibly about her as she moved in aimless unrest through these last hot days, fag ends of an unusually warm summer, waiting for him (the physical touch of him) to return.

  She sat in the humid dark of the locked bathroom amid the drip of thick clear fluid off the bowing tips of imagined leaves, broad elephant’s ears, symmetrically latticed, greenly green, his lean body flashing across the spaces between obscure trunks of ? and Doric columns, her concentration breaking up into a mental static so prevailing here it seemed to emanate from the charged foundation of the house itself.

  The hole at eye level in the wall before her was the exact size a bullet might make. Each time she leaned into it she somehow expected this tiny circular field to explode with event and surprise and was always disappointed by the same boring view of the same insignificant grass and the corn and the more corn. Around the corner in the shade on the side of the house she couldn’t see was the cemetery she was learning to know through her skin, spine all shivery, buttocks flattening against the cool plane of solid stone, their bodies shaped by the moon, fluorescent limbs brushing against the night’s velvet, discovering she liked to fuck on mortuary marble before a hushed audience of the attentive dead. Once he strung her with rope between the stones, and when he moved into her, his large dark head, momentarily eclipsing the moon, bristled with the rays and spikes of an angel’s a
ureole. She thought that probably she was in love.

  “Butter beans, anyone?”

  “The rice is all sticky.”

  “Zoe, honey, let Mommy smell your hair.”

  “That was a hospital, not an asylum, Grandpa Warden was sent to.”

  “Oh, I get it, your dream quotient’s like your batting average.”

  “Tofu, stupid, not toe food.”

  “So what is your point?”

  “If I ever find cigarette butts in my frying pan again…”

  “Toss me one of them hush puppies.”

  “Stuffed what?”

  Once a week The Unit squeezed into the battered VW for its regular run to the mall, a magical kingdom of mirrors, chrome, escalators, and the phantasmagoria of mass production cunningly housed inside a low windowless I-shaped structure embodying the contemporary architectural ideals of corporate chicanery and state detention. Each family member was permitted two hours and one purchase. Outside, the parking lots were vast solitary tracts of black asphalt. Gwen declined the trip. They understood.

  One day Edsel demanded to stay home, too. Why? his mother asked. I hate you, he replied. My head hurts, he confided to Gwen after the others had left, there’s too much talking here. So they sat quietly together on the warm steps, sharing an apple, watching the corn thrash in the dry wind, the high uncluttered sky playing variations in blue, blackbirds on the telephone wire shifting nervously about like beads on a busy abacus string. A nice meditative day of surges and flux, openings too vague and elusive to be named with any accuracy—soft, summery sensations out in the country, a pleasant straw-headed boy at your side, and for a moment the thought: this is what it’s like to be a mother, bound forever to a body that had come out of your body, life preserver, maker of worlds. And what of him? Was the feeling reciprocal, or did he always assume the attitude of a son in the presence of any reasonable adult?

  “What’s that?” she asked, catching a glimpse of silver between his restless bitten fingers.

  He opened his hand. It was a flat, star-shaped disk of metal with sharp, ugly-looking points. “Here’s what ninja do,” he said, standing quickly and hurling the thing across the lawn right at the orange cat daintily high-stepping her way through the uncut grass. The disk whistled. Gwen screamed. The cat bolted over the road into the field. Edsel laughed. “I was just kidding.”

  “That was awfully close.”

  “Not even.” He retrieved the weapon and motioned her away from the steps. “Watch this.” He leaned back and pitched the star like a fastball. It made a terrible whirring sound and slammed against the side of the house, burying itself halfway into the peeling wood. Gwen watched him. “Do your parents know you have one of these?”

  “Shuriken,” he said. “All the kids have ’em.” He wiped the star carefully on his pants. “They’re not my parents.”

  She didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m an orphan.” He slipped the weapon back into his pocket. “Want to see where the monster lives?”

  “Wait a minute,” she said, following the whorl of fine hair on the back of his head into the house. “Dash and Dot are not your mom and dad?”

  “I live with them now,” he explained, leading her past the table piled with dirty breakfast dishes, the dusty gray eye of the television set, the slowly oxidizing surface of The Object, right up to the green door, mysterious threshold to the “parents’” room. “My real mother and father are going to send for me as soon as they get jobs.” The door was locked, but he produced a key and escorted her in. Red tubing on the ceiling bathed the interior in the plush warm light of the nocturnal mammal house at the zoo. Twin sets of simple furniture had been arranged identically on either side of the room in a failed attempt at symmetry, one half clean, trim, precisely ordered; the other a funhouse mirror image, the bed unmade, the table a mess of books, magazines, paper, amber vials of prescription medicine, and an assortment of variously sized half-filled drinking glasses. On the floor between the beds was a white circular rug decorated with strange geometric designs. Against the wall rested a giant glass thermometer that glowed with a soft, snowy radiance when Edsel turned it on and emitted a low electronic hum that changed tone periodically. Up on the wall in an enclosed frame of thorns was a stylized portrait of a Caucasian Jesus displaying the holes in his palms, the sad face askance yet oddly distanced as if the bloody hands were not his own. He was also wearing a clear round space helmet.

  “So where’s this monster?”

  Edsel yanked the rug away, revealing a trapdoor set into the floor. “Down there.”

  Gwen stared at the brass ring embedded in the wood. “What is that—a fruit cellar of some kind?”

  “We don’t eat fruit.”

  “What do your parents—I mean, Dot and Dash—what do they keep down there?”

  “A monster,” Edsel repeated with emphatic impatience. “I already told you that.” He stood well back from the trap. “You can hear it sometimes at night. It cries a lot. It wants to get out.”

  “Have you ever seen this monster?”

  He turned away toward the dark closet, its door ajar and hung with wrinkled pants and shirts. “I only saw it once.”

  “Well, what did it look like?”

  “Something you weren’t supposed to see,” he said. “A monster.”

  “I guess I should watch out, then,” said Gwen. “I think I’ve seen it, too.”

  He looked at her for a moment, then quickly nodded his head. She was a funny lady.

  “That’s not hair, that’s sprouts.”

  “I don’t like food from France.”

  “What difference does it make whether his teeth have come in or not, you never feed him anything he needs to chew.”

  “Who broke my curtain rod?”

  “Then pick out the raisins, for Christ’s sakes, you’d think they were goddamn rabbit turds or something.”

  “Money only comes to those who act like they don’t really need it.”

  “Quiet everybody, Edsel’s about to do his Elvis impression.”

  “Too bad your friend Beetle isn’t here to defend himself.”

  “Does the tablecloth stink or is it me?”

  “It’s the glop inside the shell you’re supposed to eat.”

  “I think it needs more thyme.”

  Alone in the house she stretched out on the hard naked wood of the long room, bare legs warming in a trapezoid of sun, attentive eyes fastened on the astonishing array of silver stars above. Must have needed a big ladder to ornament that plaster heaven. A lot of patience. Much devotion. She had dreamed of Dash again. He had come to her abruptly, materializing out of the dark, a figure in black the night had stitched together and sent on to her bed. He had lain down beside her, gently, as if he belonged there, and once more she had been unable to move or to speak, her body rigid and detached with no more will or sense than the hollow limbs of a child’s doll, enduring his bloodless touch, cold as the spaces between the real stars, while beneath her embalmed skin the shrinking heart of her, no larger than a tissue specimen in a test tube, writhed helplessly as if prodded with a needle. When she woke, drenched in the lather and scent of fear, the house was as dark as a mine and as empty. What commentary this dream might provoke at the breakfast table: that Dash was an obvious double of her father, haunting her sleep in a guise that rendered horror to permissible levels; or that he must be an earthly stand-in for one of The Occupants, a masked clue to what really happened that long-ago evening in the California parking lot. But what if Dash were simply Dash? The unblinking stars stared down upon her, mute as stone. Scalded by light, drowned in darkness, the twin halves of a single experience. Nausea she thought she had successfully suppressed hours earlier billowed through her like a damp green cloud. Flu? Food poisoning? Bad thoughts? She couldn’t remember the date of her last period, life on the road too frantic and improvisational to keep track. Last month? The month before? She tried to imagine growing a baby, Mother Nature working a basket
ball pump on her thin body. No, it wasn’t a game she wanted to play. Her arms were extended wide as wings in a block of light the color of unvarnished pine. The house was a different place emptied of its inhabitants, a theater after hours, hushed, expectant, the props ready to assist in new roles. In this space larger than the claustrophobic confines of the gurgling bathroom her mind expanded, moods flowing easily one into the other, thought a gas filling up a vacuum. She pictured the congregations of the past, that succession of believers who had once occupied this very room, bewhiskered and bonneted faces lifted up from their hymnals, alert as flowers, drinking in the light of the Word. All plowed under now. What would they think of their church (raised with their own callused hands out of wood carted miles from places where there were trees) today? Now she too was a part of the history of this place. She glanced away for a moment at the chalky blue coating the flawed glaze of the window, and when she turned her head back again the curious puzzle of the constellations was abruptly solved. The stars on the ceiling were a connect-the-dots version of the family itself. She could see the father, the mother, towering above a galaxy of silhouetted children, at their feet a modest gathering of suns representing a little dog, a cocker spaniel, she imagined. What had happened to that animal? And in back, where the flecks of paint were fading into vapor, the hint of a shape, something taking form and approaching the others. She knew at once that that must be her.

  “Beets?!”

  “But all the vitamins are in the skin.”

  “The roast is burnt.”

  “No, I won’t speak any louder, I refuse to compete with the goddamn television set.”

  “Quit doing that, that’s disgusting.”

  “The rest of us have opinions, too, you know.”

  “This broccoli smells like old tennis shoes.”

  “Can I have twenty dollars?”