Turn to page.
“Oh, I'm wasting my life all right,” you answer. “I'm just not wasting it that way.”
What is it about her voice that allows you to hear that she is smiling? There is a tightness to it, a pleasing elasticity, not the same kind of tightness you can hear when she is angry, but not entirely dissimilar. “And how are you wasting it?” she asks.
“You know. The usual. Mooning and nostalgia.”
“Mooning? You're wasting your life mooning?”
“Not that kind of mooning. Mooning as in ‘mooning away.’ ‘I'm mooning away for the hills of old Virginia.’ You know what I meant. Pervert.”
The two of you fill the next ten minutes talking about nothing of any real importance—a song with lyrics you can only half remember, the movies you have both been waiting to see, whether she should buy a new computer, and if so, whether it should be a laptop or a desktop. It is the best, most intimate kind of conversation, its true subject nothing more than how proficient the two of you are in your friendship, but it's interrupted when a call comes in on her other line. “Can you give me a second?”
“Of course.”
You hear your clock ticking and then your wristwatch, slightly out of time with each other. You hear the keening of a fire engine. Unconsciously, you have been scratching out a drawing on the back cover of a magazine, and you hold it up to the sunlight to examine it.
It looks like a flying saucer, you think, or maybe a chandelier—an umbrella of lines branching out from the tip, flaring wider and wider, then converging suddenly at a common point, with a little window to nowhere floating in the center.
Susannah clicks back over. “Hey, I'm going to need to take this call. We'll talk later, okay?”
“Okay. Later.”
The phone settles neatly into its cradle. You pivot your head around in a long, low-swinging circle, trying to work a tight spot out of your neck, and when you yawn, there is a rush of wind in your ear. It happens just as unexpectedly as it always does: some membrane of fluid breaks open, and everything is twice as loud.
If you would like to go out and test the air,
turn to page.
If you are comfortable where you are,
turn to page.
McDonald's is nearly empty. The early-morning coffee drinkers have already come and gone, and the late-morning breakfast crowd has yet to arrive. There is only an old man standing at the condiment shelf, a woman feeding cookies to a small boy in a booster seat, and a man in a jogging suit talking loudly to himself by the trash bins—or so you think, until you see the headset curled around his ear like the shell of a mollusk. It is a testament to the restaurant's indomitable spirit of mechanism that you can feel such anonymity in so sparse a gathering.
You order a Coke and sink it at the counter, then order a refill and take it to a booth in the back corner. The bubbles seem to spark and leap against your tongue, leaving a pins-and-needles feeling behind them. The cold travels through you in isolated pulses.
After you have drained the cup, you slip a chunk of crushed ice between your lips, holding it against the roof of your mouth while it melts, as your mother used to do. She used to be young, wearing her hair in a long, limp curtain that fell halfway down her back. She used to clip UPC symbols from cereal boxes and send them in to sweepstakes contests. She used to sing Olivia Newton-John songs in the car and watch Dallas on Friday nights. It all seems like such a long time ago now.
You remember visiting the McDonald's down the street from your house with her when you were growing up: the burgers that came in Styrofoam clamshells and the fries that came in white paper sleeves. The walls in the restaurant were decorated with representations of all the McDonaldland characters—Ronald, Captain Crook, the Fry Guys—but you were a peculiar child, overanxious about the littlest things, and for some reason you were never truly happy unless you got to sit beneath the picture of the Grimace.
You think about the drinking straw dispensers that used to fascinate you when you were that age, the way the straws fell so neatly into the stainless-steel rack, like coins dropping into a piggy bank. You think about the fat sound of raindrops smacking against a canvas tarp.
You cannot name the feeling that passes through you. It is a pale, nimble thing that floats out of the corner of your mind and disappears into the darkness again, fading away like a wisp of fog, but it leaves you weak in the knees, as if you have taken a fast-rising elevator to the top of a tall building where the door opens directly onto the starlight. You wipe the moisture from your hands with a napkin. You swallow a mouthful of ice.
Do you throw your cup away and leave?
If so, turn to page.
Do you stop to buy another Coke?
If so, turn to page.
One of the bathrooms at Sufficient Grounds was damaged by vandals a few weeks ago—the mirror shattered, the paper towel dispenser ripped off the wall, and the toilet fractured into two large pieces as oddly and neatly divided as the halves of a peanut—and for the time being, the other bathroom has been converted into a unisex.
There is an emblem on the door of a straight-lined man holding hands with a triangular woman. The lock is broken, so you knock and call out hello, then slowly open the door to make sure the room is empty. More than once you have been only half-finished with what you were doing when someone came bulling into the bathroom and you had to arrest the door with your foot, offering a disconcerted “I'm in here,” and waiting for whoever it was to go away.
The light flickers on automatically. You go to the sink to wash your hands. The soap spurts out of a silver nozzle on the counter. It is a pale red foam that smells like cherries, or at least that is meant to remind you of the smell of cherries, that smells like some chemist in a design lab must suppose cherries smell. On the lip of the sink is a hardened white powder that looks like the crust you find every so often in the battery well of a flashlight when it has been left running too long. You avoid touching it.
Your image is kinked in the mirror, and you put your hand to it to probe for a flaw. The sight of your fingers approaching themselves from the other side of the glass makes you feel dizzy again, and you reach out to steady yourself against the wall. For just a moment, you imagine that the mirror is a gate to some other world, that the kink in the glass is a keyhole and, were the tumblers to turn, your reflection would wheel open in a spray of silver light.
This was one of your favorite fantasies when you were growing up: you would enter some small, ordinary-looking room—a closet or an attic, a coat room or a pantry—and inside you would find a door to a place where your life would be utterly transformed, like Alice in Through the Looking-Glass or the Pevensie children in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
You close your eyes and try to catch your breath. Your head is spinning. Your left arm has gone numb. You hear someone knocking on the door. “I'll be done in just a minute,” you mean to say, but you can't find your voice to answer.
The taste of copper fills your mouth.
Your heart stops short.
The door opens.
Turn to page.
You spray the glass with Windex, then wipe it dry, taking special care with the white dots of toothpaste foam above the sink, the dust beneath the light fixtures, and the fingerprints on the handle to the medicine cabinet. The overlapping circles of the washcloth leave moisture trails that look like the fossils of trilobites for the few seconds until they evaporate. The scent of ammonia blasts your sinuses clear.
You have always disliked meeting your gaze in the mirror. You avoid it as a cat will, and probably for the same reason: you are too proud, or too meek, to accept that the creature inside it is you.
This morning is no different. You manage to clean the entire mirror without once looking into your eyes. The process takes no more than ten minutes, but when you are finished and set out to return the Windex to the kitchen, you find that you have to sit down at the top of the stairs and catch your breath.
A picture surfaces in your mind of a tattered coat draped over the back of a chair. Although it seems familiar to you, you do not know where it comes from. A painting, maybe, or a photograph. You hold on to it for a moment and then let it go.
You become a little dizzy when you stand up, and, bracing your hand against the wall to keep yourself from stumbling, you accidentally bite the inside of your cheek. You probe it to see if you have punctured the skin. A small, ragged flap meets the tip of your tongue. For the past few years, you have had to endure a series of mouth ulcers, some of them as large around as a thumbtack, and often as piercing, and you have learned how opportunistic they can be. Any time you aggravate your gums or your cheeks, your tongue or the roof of your mouth, wounding the flesh in any way, you know that the tissue will ulcerate and for a week or more you will feel as if you are holding a hornet inside your mouth. You will find it painful to eat, sing, talk, or even smile. The hornet will sting you if you twitch so much as a muscle.
As a child, you could never have anticipated how careful you would one day have to become with yourself. You are like a climber scaling the broad face of a rock, testing every mole and furrow to see if it will hold your weight. There are times when your whole life seems to bend itself to the worst instincts of your imagination.
You imagine your stomach is burning, and you clutch your abdomen, dropping the Windex bottle onto the stairs. You imagine your legs have lost feeling, and you sink to the floor. You imagine your blood has stopped pumping, and your heart turns to concrete.
Turn to page.
You are three-quarters of the way through a novel called The Baron in the Trees. It tells the story of an eighteenth-century Italian nobleman—Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo—who spends the whole of his adult life in the trees surrounding his village, never once setting foot on the ground. From the branches of the various oaks, elms, and ilexes, he is able to hunt and travel, conduct love affairs and educate himself, as well as engage in a series of duels with a creed-bound Spanish Jesuit. Your favorite passages are the ones that detail Cosimo's encounters with the outlaw Gian dei Brughi, whose book addiction he first initiates and later feeds, but you also find yourself lingering over the paragraphs that describe his long romance with his childhood neighbor Violante.
You settle into the couch and continue reading the novel, holding the pages up to a patch of sunlight. A fire truck begins whirring its siren somewhere, but you barely notice it. What most amazes you about the book is how rich it is, how sensitive to the constitution of its characters' souls, how beautiful and moving without being anguished or hopeless. It is certainly not blind to human suffering, featuring poverty, loss, aging, and death, but its mood is overwhelmingly one of celebration. There is a tenderness and a brio to the story. The writer extends his sympathies so widely that even the trees and the hills seem to sing with the joy of existence.
You bought a copy of the novel after you heard an interview with a Pulitzer Prize winner who described its author, Italo Calvino, as the finest writer of the twentieth century and this book, in particular, as the best one he had ever read. You were skeptical of such a lavish claim—who wouldn't be?—but damned if it might not be the best book you have ever read: a short, crystalline novel with all the grace and poetry of The Great Gatsby, but fantastic rather than realistic, and joyful in its elegies rather than plaintive. At one point, you are so touched and delighted by something you read that you actually laugh and kiss the page—a completely unself-conscious gesture that you don't even notice yourself performing at first, and which, when you do, strikes you as both ridiculous and somehow wonderful.
It does not take you long to read the last few chapters. You finish the novel, above all else, with an impression of a robust and loving comic energy. You feel as if you have been immersed in life—both your own life and the particular lives of the book's characters—and that life, for all its misfortunes, is a pretty good place to be.
If you find a place for the novel on your bookcase,
go on to page.
If you leave it sitting on the arm of the couch for now,
turn to page.
“I'm sure somebody has,” you say. “There are just too many of us walking around.”
Outside the man who strolls up and down the plaza selling yoyos stops at a bench to tighten his shoes. He is your city's version of the dandy in the double-breasted suit who roots through the garbage scavenging for recyclables, or the old couple with sombreros and ukeleles who sit in the park singing songs about their sex life—recognized by everybody, the object of a thousand jokes, but so lasting a feature of the landscape that they inspire as much affection as anyone you could mention. You watch as he finishes tying his shoes, loops a pair of yo-yos around each of his index fingers and another pair around each of his ring fingers, then sets them spinning in an elaborate Gordian whirl.
“There,” you say, pointing to the man. “He has. There's a man who's been happy his whole life.”
David gives you a yeah-well-about-that grimace. “I hate to break it to you, but the guy comes in here for a steamer sometimes, and he sounds pretty miserable. He's always complaining about his wrists. He's worried he might have carpal tunnel. Uh-oh, she's about to unleash one of her whistles on me.”
This swerve in his comments perplexes you until you spot his manager eyeballing him from behind the dessert counter.
“Believe me,” he says, “you don't want her to whistle. You could be dead twenty years and that thing would wake you up. I'd better get back to work. Take it easy.”
David glides away balancing a tray of empty plates on his palm, sheering around the banister of the staircase and using his free hand to bump the kitchen door open. You collect the last sip of chai on your spoon. You hear a few chirps of noise, followed by a seesawlike ululating sound, and look up to see an ambulance racing away from the corner. It vanishes behind a cluster of red gums, but for a long minute the siren continues to cut through the air, howling like some great beast fleeing a terrible calamity. You listen as the sound gradually fades away, then you get up and pay your check.
The pleasant weather has brought a surprising number of people out this morning, and by the time you reach the cash register, your chair has already been taken. After the cashier runs your credit card, you have to weave your way through a clutch of power walkers in nylon tracksuits to get to the door. Outside, the sunlight is sending shards of glass off the bike racks and parking meters. The chestnut leaves are ticking against one another like fingernails. You feel a touch of heartburn coming on. You give your chest a thump. It would do you good, you imagine, to take a little walk.
If you decide to go left,
turn to page.
If you decide to go right,
turn to page.
THE LADY WITH THE PET TRIBBLE
for Justin Turner
I.
On Sirius all the days seemed to melt together in a single formless three o'clock. The Keptin had been at the resort for the better part of two weeks, and in all that time he had acquired only one memory to speak of: an image of himself sitting in a chair at the edge of the plaza, sipping sapphire wine and basking in the light of the multiple suns. As soon as he had drained his glass, one of the drink girls would arrive to fill it back up for him, bending at the waist as she poured. He knew that if he brushed her wrist with the backs of his fingers, she would sink toward him like a blade of grass pooling over with water and forget to charge him for it. The Keptin was fully aware of the effect he had on women. Ever since boyhood, he had been blessed with a certain carelessly sensual charm, though he had never used it for anything other than to be charming.
It was late in the afternoon when he saw an unfamiliar person walking beneath the trees: a lady with a pet tribble. The light picked her out as she stopped to slide her fingers through the grass and then moved s
lowly across the plaza toward the public fountain. She was a vision—her long skirt belling out in the breeze, the tribble nestled delicately between her palm and her stomach. The Keptin had been sitting in his chair for so long that the blood rushed to his head when he stood. Thousands of exploding white holes appeared in the air around him, and by the time his eyesight cleared, the lady was gone. This was Sirius, though. He was certain he would see her again. He made up his mind that he would introduce himself to her at the first opportunity.
That opportunity came the very next evening, while he was dining in the open-air Sandorian restaurant by the Oxbow Lake. The lady with the pet tribble took a bench on the far side of the patio. After the Keptin had settled his bill, he approached her and asked if she would mind some company. She was no longer wearing the skirt he had seen her in the day before, but a bright yellow dress—something like a pinafore—that bared her arms and shoulders.
“Please,” she said, gesturing at the bench, and he sat down. The lady put her hands together on her knees and asked him, “What's your name?”
“I'm James,” the Keptin said.
“I'm Raïssa.”
She had yet to meet his eyes. He watched her without speaking until she looked at him. A smile stole over one corner of her lips, making a comma-shaped dimple in her cheek, and though the expression vanished almost immediately, he knew right away that she would say yes to him when the time came. At the beginning of any relationship, there was a moment of flirtation when a woman either gave her assent or barred the door. The Keptin had become skillful at predicting which sort of woman was likely to be which. He could barely remember the last time he had heard a lock clicking.
“Are you here alone?” he asked.
The View From the Seventh Layer Page 15