by Paul Harding
At a certain point in my calculations I realized that I could no longer merely draw symbols on the wall, that to catch Kate on the wing, to contrive a machine that could hold something like a part of her absence, I had to bring the figures I was making out into the space of the room.
It was night by then. Daylight had drained from the house. I tossed the piece of chalk in my hand into the bucket and switched on the three lamps in the living room. Their light seemed not bright enough, so I removed their shades. Still their light did not seem bright enough for me to get a proper look at my drawings on the wall, so I moved them closer. Still there was not enough light, so I brought in four other lamps from other parts of the house and plugged them all into a power strip, and the light was not enough still. I stood back from the wall and looked at my drawings. They began on the upper left part of the wall as straight lines of equations and veered downward in anticline toward the center of the wall into primitive-looking pictures and icons. It seemed almost as if the characters were being pulled by some force toward the middle of the wall, and as the strata of letters and numbers drew closer to the center they spontaneously turned into the little animals and stars and bottles of cough syrup that they really were, right before they were vacuumed into a black hole.
There was no hole in the middle of the wall, though. There was nowhere for the drawings to be pulled into, no crucible, no alembic inside of which they could properly react. I could see the dead center of the wall, where it was still white and unmarked, right where a hole needed to be made to break the plane to allow the numbers and letters and animals and people to spin, move, whirl into the hole, be transformed, and possibly reemerge.
I need the hole saw, I thought.
“You are a ragpicker,” a voice said.
My grandfather’s toolbox was in the garage. I stepped outside. The hurricane loomed, bearing down toward Enon, out over the dark ocean, where fire-breathing whales plunged into valleys and breached from the peaks of the mountains of water it raised and overturned within the eons of each moment. The heavy wind sounded like waterfalls cascading in the trees. I opened the bay door of the garage. The streetlamp across the road projected pendulums of light through the trees in front of it and against the back wall of the garage, where they swung in an arc, in a steady rhythm. The wind on the serrated edge of the hurricane spun for the moment in strict tempo, and I thought that if the storm stopped traveling, and just remained, hung high above the village, spinning in place, and if it were fed the same diet of pressure and water and temperature, at a constant rate, it would be like a great, single-geared clock turning above us in the sky. We could set our watches to it. We might learn to make little hurricanes ourselves, to wear on our wrists to tell time.
“Doesn’t it sound like waterfalls, Kate?” I said. I stood before the open bay of the garage. I pretended Kate was standing just behind me, to my right.
“Some of the first clocks made were powered by water. Clepsydras, they were called. Water clocks were called clepsydras. Grampy told me that.”
I carted the toolbox into the living room. I plugged my grandfather’s drill into an outlet and fitted the drill with the hole saw. I measured the exact center of the wall with a tape measure and marked the spot with a pencil. I pressed the drill against the wall and pulled the trigger and leaned into the drill and the drill opened a hole in the middle of the wall. It felt like a seal breaking when the hole opened and I stopped panting and drew a deep breath. It felt as if the air in the room were being vacuumed into the hole. I stepped back and surveyed the wall. The hole was too raw, too inelegant, too small. I traced a larger circle around the hole, using the mouth of a mop bucket from the basement. The house moaned and sighed under the weight of the gathering wind. I cut the larger circle out of the wall with my grandfather’s reciprocating saw. The air filled with plaster dust that rippled and turned like liquid. It made paste in the back of my throat and glue in my nose. Standing back, I thought it looked like the hole gaped and gulped down everything I’d drawn, with blind, deaf, and dumb appetite. It simply devoured. So I yanked out a couple yards of aluminum foil from the roll in one of the kitchen drawers and tore it into long strips and folded the strips over three times each and pressed them flat and stapled them around the rim of the hole in the wall. That looked funny and ham-fisted, too. I wanted a whirlwind, a vortex, the eye of a storm, the crater of a volcano. I wanted the hole to spin and churn and vomit light and gulp it back up again and transform it into something I’d never seen and the light to have a voice and to speak a word that said Kate was okay and showed her well and transfigured and became the heart in my chest and the love welling up behind my ribs and the anger seizing my throat and the murder churning in my eyes and the sulfur burning in my nose and the hurricane howling in my ears and the fury in my cup and I wanted the hole to be the rent veil and even in my stupor I could see that the machine I was dumbly improvising out of candles and copper wire and brass leaf and teakwood and tiger’s teeth and heavy coins and blue pearls was a grotesque demolition of my own home and not the beautiful altar I intended.
The paste in the freezer had crystallized. I put it in a coffee filter and squeezed the liquid from the filter into another ramekin and drew it up with an old children’s medicine syringe I’d found in a plastic food container in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, among old inhalers and droppers and thermometers. I had given Kate medicine with the syringe when she’d been too young to take it from a spoon. I stood at the kitchen counter and stuck the syringe into my mouth and pushed the plunger about halfway down the barrel. The liquid was cold and acrid. Before any time elapsed for my better self to argue with my lesser self, I pushed the plunger another quarter down the barrel. Just to make sure because that first squirt wasn’t quite halfway, I thought.
“Three-quarters of eight pills; that’s, what? Jesus, it’s like five pills—no, six. Wait, is that right? And those four others. Charlie, you’re going on a ride.”
I shuffled back to the living room. The floor was strewn with tools. The couch was covered in plaster and dust. I tried to read what I’d written on the wall and to follow the equations and improvised ideograms as they drained toward the hole in the plaster which looked pathetic now, fringed in aluminum like a kid’s attempt at a special effect for a homemade science-fiction movie. The first wave of the drugs swelled over my brain and I cursed myself for making such a wreck of the living room, especially the couch, where I wanted to lie down and float away.
“Ha, you just signed up for some housecleaning, Charlie Crosby,” I said. “Ah, Kate, your dad’s as big a jackass as he ever was. Bigger, in fact. Your dad’s a big, stubborn, born-and-bred chump.” I smiled. Kate loved the word “chump.” I used it once to describe someone I’d done a job for and when she heard it she clapped her hands and threw her head back and laughed out loud. “Chump! What’s that?”
“Kind of a jerk,” I said. “Kind of a numbskull. You should look it up in the dictionary.” Kate hauled out the dictionary I kept in the living room next to the couch.
“It’s the sawed-off end of a log,” she said, holding the dictionary up to her face and squinting. Why don’t I get my act together and make an appointment for her at the eye doctor’s? I thought. “It’s like ‘chunk’ and ‘stump’ stuck together! Like a block of wood.”
“A blockhead,” I said. “A block of wood for a head.”
Now I dragged the vacuum cleaner out of the closet and plugged it in and turned it on and yanked the hose from the body and began to drag it back and forth across the top of the couch and the cushions. The white dust was so heavy and fine that the hose just made lines in the fabric.
“Attaboy; make it worse. Good show, old boy,” I said. I teased myself in the cheerful tone of voice I’d used when I was mad at myself but trying to contain my anger in front of Kate.
“Your daughter’s dead, old boy—you stupid shit,” I said. “And you are a wreck of a man with a block for a head.” I sighed and tipped
over onto the couch and lay there with the metal vacuum cleaner wand across my chest, listening to the motor whine, feeling its revolutions through the wand. “A block of a head soaked in ether, a stump soaked in turpentine.”
The wind roared and buffeted the house, the vacuum motor whining harmony over it. Somewhere upstairs a storm window rattled in its frame. I felt as if I were spinning head over heels. At some point, I lost consciousness, with the vacuum still running and the storm rolling over Enon like a great, kingdom-sized turbine, tilling up its trees and hedges and fences, toppling tombstones and tearing shutters from their hinges and weather vanes off barn roofs, all while I dreamed my opium dreams.
I came to the next day at noon, already bolting dizzily off the couch, nearly stumbling over the books and bottles. The vacuum cleaner was still running from the night before and its canister burning hot to the touch. I switched it off and the sudden silence made me aware that the noise from its motor had been driving me mad in my sleep for hours. My ears rang in the quiet and it seemed as if I could still hear the vacuum the way that you still see the sun in front of you when you blink after you’ve turned away from it. A bitter, cooked smell wafted up out of the machine.
From what I could see outside the living room window, the yard was strewn with fallen branches and leaves and shingles from the roof. Something like the actual world began to resolve itself out of the oneiric morass in my skull and I made my way to the kitchen. I put on an old pair of sneakers that sat on top of a pile of old newspapers and mail and opened the back door and stuck my head out. The cupola from the garage roof lay splintered on its side in the yard. The trotting-horse weather vane that had been set on top of the cupola was speared upside down in the grass a few yards away. Four of the windows in the garage doors were broken. Glass and bricks and shingles and tree limbs were scattered across the driveway. I stepped outside and walked around the back of the house. Pillars of sunlight burst down from between the speeding clouds, swept across the landscape, and swung back up into their billowy bays. The wind ran smooth and strong behind the storm and smelled clean and sweet and invigorating, as if it were cleaning up in the hurricane’s wake and not the tail of the hurricane itself, or as if it were a signal that the hurricane trailed behind itself that said the violence was over and calm and safety and order were spreading back over the world. One of the maple trees had toppled and glanced off the back corner of the house, where Kate’s room was. I stepped back from the house into the yard to get a look at the roof. Half of the shingles had been blown off. A dozen bricks had broken loose from the top of the chimney, giving it the look of a crenellated castle tower. The yard smelled rich and earthy. Sparrows flew around and chirped and found food and grass and twigs to repair their nests with. The stark blue sky and the churning, retreating clouds and the cascading sun and the bright green grass and livid blond pith wood gleaming from the broken ends of fallen limbs and the wounds in the sides of the maple trees and the silvery-gray clear rainwater collected into a wide pool in the middle of the backyard corrugating in the wind were all overwhelmingly beautiful and I smiled at it all and sat down in the soaking muddy grass and wept.
THE HOUSE AND THE yard were such messes from my abuse and neglect and from the hurricane that I could not stand the idea of them remaining in that state while all of the other homes and yards of Enon were cleaned and repaired and brought back to their properly cared for conditions; nor could I bear the idea of following along in order not to be noticed and cleaning and repairing the house and yard myself. There was some irony in the fact that I felt certain I could not do the work because I actually knew how to do it and so I knew how much energy it would take, energy I knew I did not have anymore, in my condition. The idea that I neither could leave the house as it was nor fix it made me feel more hopeless than ever. On top of that, I imagined Kate standing at my side, surveying the damage, looking to me for resolve and optimism. Had she been alive, I’d have put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me a couple times and said something like “Piece of cake, babe. We’ll have the farm up and running again in no time flat.” As it was, I sighed and said, “Ah, the hell with it, all of it.” I grabbed a backpack from the front hall and filled an old plastic soda bottle with tap water and started away from the house. When I was almost to the Red Orchard store, I took the backpack off and scratched around in the bottom to see if there was any money. I thought I might buy a pack of cigarettes or a candy bar if there was only a little change. I wanted to see how the store had weathered the hurricane and to say hi to Manny. I hadn’t been to the store in several weeks, maybe a couple months even—longer, in fact, I realized, not since I’d met Manny the first time, or talked with him anyway. I had a spontaneous hope of maybe helping him tape up a broken window and mop up the flooded floor and afterward sitting on milk crates and sipping cold colas and commiserating about all the work we’d accomplished. The store looked fine from the outside, so I stuck my head in the door to say hi and ask Manny how his kids were and to apologize for not having dropped in for a while, although in truth I was sure he couldn’t have cared less that I hadn’t been back in, and might have been glad for it, given the state I’d been in. There was a guy I didn’t recognize at the register, a tall kid with long hair and a bad slouch.
“Oh, hey,” I said.
“Hey,” the kid said.
“Sorry. Is Manny around?”
“Who?”
“Manny. The guy—” I almost said, with the kids. “His full name is Manprasad, I think. Works here every day.”
“Oh, that dude. He split.”
“Split?”
“Moved back to China or something. Couple months ago.”
“No kidding. Well, um, thanks.”
“No thing, man.”
Manny having moved back to India felt tragic, like the end of a sad movie, with me the guy walking away, dismayed and crushed as the credits roll. Damn, crummy little village, I thought. Crummy little footpaths and crummy little sanctuary. It’s all such a bunch of bullshit, and I’m its sorry-ass mascot. The Idiot of Enon. Fuck it.
I walked around for the rest of the day and late into the evening. It seemed I had no possible place left on this earth to go. I could not go back to the house. I did not want to spend the night in the wet, storm-tangled woods. A hotel was out of the question. I stopped walking and looked around. I was near the road across from Mrs. Hale’s estate, where I had spent summer nights stalking through her meadows with Peter Lord and my other friends, and where Kate and I had rested on our way home at dusk and watched the sun set and the beautiful, grand house settle into the dark, and where my grandfather and I had seen the amazing and for all purposes apocryphal orrery, with its ivory planets and moons and brass sun, and I had turned the wooden-handled crank and made the entire arrangement of spheres spin on their axes and around one another and the sun in perfect symphony.
I decided to break into Mrs. Hale’s house and find the orrery. Nothing in the world seemed more important suddenly than turning the crank and feeling the perfectly machined resistance it offered and the perfect ratio of force applied and degrees that the crank turned to the various periods of the celestial bodies, from the almost imperceptible orbits of the outer planets to the smallest little moons, which spun as quickly and neatly as tops. I walked in a straight line across the road and across her meadow, right toward the few lights on in her gigantic house. I made no attempt to conceal myself or to be quiet. I did not think about looking for any drugs. She’s an old Yankee nanny goat anyway, I thought. I bet she’s never even swallowed an aspirin.
“Your old pop may be headed for a stretch in the joint, kid,” I said. “But it’s time, way past time. There’re some things in this place you just have to see.” I thought about the James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson gangster movies we’d watched together, which, unlike the old westerns we’d seen, she had genuinely loved. I drew a deep breath and shook my head and smiled in disgust at myself and said, “Made it, Kate—top o
f the world. Anyway, what I’m about to show you is something else.”
I walked up to Mrs. Hale’s broad, oak front door, the one my grandfather and I had stood before, what, I thought, twenty years ago, waiting for Mrs. Hale to let us in. I grabbed the brass door handle and pushed down on the leaf-shaped lever with my thumb and it went down all the way and I pushed on the door and it swung open inward and I walked into her front hall. The hall was lit by a single, dim, candle-shaped bulb set in a wall sconce. It was wide and deep and receded into the darkened depths of the house. Dark paintings in gold frames lined the hall. All were portraits of men and women I took to be Mrs. Hale’s ancestors. The floorboards creaked and echoed as I walked down the hall. It turned left at the back of the house and continued lengthwise. I came to a large stairway that rose eight steps to a landing on which stood the Simon Willard tall clock I’d fixed with my grandfather. I peered up at its austere dial.