“What there — you?” he asked from behind the marquee. He was blind by choice, just like my father.
“A couple of instructive loops. Some business about a fancy dress, a boating accident, Ibiza.”
“Clean?”
“So far.”
“So far, so far.”
It was a job that did what I wanted it to. It stayed wherever I put it. Where I lived, though, was massive and untenable, an emotional dumping ground — a house whose thin meniscus trembled and brimmed with discontent.
The relationship my wife and I kept taking stabs at didn’t slip through my fingers so much as level itself sloppily against them. We were still passing back and forth a virus I had picked up years before. It became part of what we did together — the life we fostered in lieu of a child of our own.
I was rarely satisfied with what I had heard in our house, so I continued on through the bedroom every morning, taking samples from anything that resonated. Each fragment of my wife’s memory left a hole where another one started. One by one they began to pull me along into the other side of her life, the part that happened before I had started greedily busting it up at every available opportunity. I’m not sure what I expected to find — probably some clear confirmation that the time in which she had known me was intense enough to invalidate her past experience. I did not know the people that had trespassed into her life before me, and was interested in what they had to say for themselves.
One morning, after a few cursory passes around the bedroom, I found exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. In one of her closets, wedged in behind a box of china, was a red plastic sandal. It resonated at a near perfect B-flat, though the signal was tainted by frequent, intense arpeggiated bursts of vibrato. The sound was my wife, before she was my wife or even a person I had ever known, sitting next to a baby pool, inside of which were the kid, Janet, and her father. I had met this man a few times in real life — he was the kind of thing you’d expect to see — underbaked, corn shaped, toothy. He made a lot of money in the city designing cloud advertisements, so that everything he said was either from a commercial or soon to be one. He was already into his twenties, and hadn’t yet been unwelcomed. My wife, this person she was, you could see she was trying to hold things together. She held Janet’s hand to keep her balance and poured water over her back with a small plastic cup.
I didn’t like what the sound was doing to my body — I went cold, and there was a spot in the center of me that glowed like a car lighter, but it didn’t stop me from listening. I held a finger over the teardrop-shaped mute button in case there was something I didn’t want to hear. There were lots of things that I might never want to hear. When I was a schoolboy I took this girl up to the city to make a dirty movie. Only I wanted it to be a silent film. I told her she wasn’t allowed to make a sound — not even the rustle and bond of her skirt and top as she peeled them slowly from her body, a noise that I can only refer to as “stez.” I put a belt around her neck and worked at her pasty, splotched body from behind. The headboard kept banging into the wall, so I had to stuff some pillows in the crevice between. She parried and lurched like an understudy for some lanky, newborn animal, skinny legs canted in the hideous lamplight. Watching that tape now, after about ten years, is a shameful and embarrassing procedure. Seeing myself swagger around in silence, holding my breath, cock dipped and pitted, my hands in places that hands shouldn’t go, is like having your own worst time in your life and someone else’s all at once.
The family sat in the pool for a long time. This father had a little squirt toy and started to use it on the child and my wife. “Honey, she seems thirsty,” my wife said to the father. He turned and squirted my wife’s upper thigh, marking a trail up toward her crotch. He stretched out his arm, holding the nozzle of the gun over her midriff, soaking the entire region. There was something sad and groping about the sound of the water splashing against her beige stove pants — a lostness, the collapsing wheeze of a flaccid and forgettable overture. My wife only looked at him. The father continued spraying her crotch, grinning like the wide, unseemly grille of a truck. I had never heard of someone so completely oblivious to his surroundings.
But I promised myself, there in the bedroom, sound machine in my lap, that I would not malign the father. I would keep my feelings to myself, where nobody has any business with them anyway. I don’t like it when people can tell what I’m feeling, and I don’t like it when they try. That is why I don’t say anything to anyone. My wife preferred it this way — she could get more done.
This business with the pool continued for some time, with these characters who had barnstormed the periphery of my life sitting around in the heat with pinched, dumbfounded expressions. I’d had enough, and put everything back the way I had found it.
The house I went to that day was loud, filled with the dull, inlaid memories of a hundred lives. The clients would be disappointed in the reels — none of these people were especially upstanding or even had anything of interest to contribute to a conversation. Light hit the walls and floor in strange, unanticipated waves of grief. The bedroom keened softly the whole time I was there. Ancient prints of bodies lolled and shifted in the adjoining hall. The tone of the place was marbly, clotted. This would drive the price down considerably, although the tub made an exquisite sound. It was the centerpiece of the whole place, probably because nobody had chosen to mark it with the indelible effluvium of her life.
The foreman asked me what I’d gotten.
“You know when people ask you to think of a bad thing and multiply it by ten?”
I handed him the envelope with the reels. He felt at it for a long, self-absorbed moment, speculating on the relative value of the contents.
“This fucks us.”
I told him that the house would never be sold, that the whole place was caked over. He filed away the envelope in one of the big diagnostic machines. I went out and had a cigarette. The day, with all its bitter, ridiculous interstices, had been killed.
The next morning that unnamable sense, the thing that made me take out the microphone the day before, was back. My wife was up again, in the bathroom, preparing her face for work. The girl had wandered in during the night and was sleeping cross-wise on the bed. I held my stomach, thinking about the father, that place she had made in the world that was now gone. Where was I, then, on the morning they squatted in that cheap pool? How would my own life appear on that day from someone else’s perspective, from his perspective? How did I tick away those hours, useless and alone in South City? Could I have those gestures, that day, back again?
I got in my car and circled the neighborhood a few times, waiting for my wife to leave. Everything was curiously dead in the sharp streets. When I was sure the house was empty, I went back and turned on the machine. There was a narrow crack in one of the floorboards, from which I extracted the yellowed flap of an envelope, glue and all. Something about the offhand way it had been discarded drew me to it. Under the slim trowel of the microphone’s horn it seemed to shimmy and buck. It took longer than usual to draw out a signal — what did come was brittle and insubstantial. I was hard-pressed for detail and clarity. By interpolating the middle C with a B-flat, though, I was able to conjure up the sound of the father. He stood naked to his socks in a dim, brownish room, talking to a couple of people sitting on the couch. It came at me fiercely, out of the late morning. His body, barely distinguishable from the washed-out, underlit background, was thin and frail, and the way he moved suggested the palsied antics of a small boy. I couldn’t follow the thread of his talk — he said things like “The greatest fucking year I’d like to fuck.” Occasionally the noise would list toward the couch, where the other couple was laid out, shamefully distended and half dressed. The father danced by the empty cavity of a fireplace, the bowed tine of his dick swaying, half erect.
I listened, cradling the lozenge-shaped recording deck like a tender football. Forgive me for saying that it was something that couldn’t not be heard.
It flickered before me, monstrous and immense, the realization of some deep, long-choked fear. Here was the soft, purloined limb that had held my wife’s time and energy hostage for nine years, braying at the entrance to her unwitting, shadowy womb. Something inside me broke like a glass vial. I got it all over myself.
I sat there in the same fashion as, probably, my wife had when she was taking in this particular sound. And what about her life? What was she doing in this scene — how could she have stood for it, any of it? Is this what they did back then, night after night, squirming nakedly in each other’s spaced-up Western Coastal apartments?
Predictably enough, my wife showed up then, having forgotten the kid’s day-care bag. We regarded each other for some time, the silence of the room interrupted only by the inane, periodic bursts of the child’s father. She made a series of high-pitched, desultory sounds, on the pretext of making language. I had nothing to apologize for, never having promised her anything by way of personal consideration. She took a step forward. I put the machine on the bed and grabbed my jacket. She assumed, I think, that we would have something to say, but I pushed past her in the narrow hall and took the stairs all the way down.
Outside, it was bright, unforgivably so. I could hardly see to my car. And what then? Should I say that I got in and drove off, smoking one cigarette after another, lining them up end on end until I was all of the way out of that life? Because what happened was that I stayed there, with those people, for another three and a half dreadful, thoroughly forgettable years in the way that we best know how to make ourselves feel welcome wherever we’d least like to be.
Year 51
Fragment
Did you pack your ointment, dear?” I called across the hood of the car.
The Child Harvesting counselor had just called to confirm our slot at 15:30. It was conception day.
Chu Su gave me a look, so I went and got the ointment myself. The drive took half a day. “The second half will be better,” I told her. She just looked straight ahead at the road, her face blank as chalk.
The building that housed the Ministry of Child Harvesting had just recently been converted from the Ministry of Adhesives and Wood. The whole place smelled like pine sap. Good, though. A fresh scent.
The counselors guided us down a long hallway to a white room with glittering, quilted walls. At the center of the room was a small vehicle for two. The seats faced each other, one with a recessed area for the man and the other with a single curved prong for the woman. Rising from the center of the vehicle was a steel post from which branched two sets of handlebars, and where the handlebars joined the post there were two monitors.
This was a conception simulator, the counselors told us. They told us to disrobe and promptly left the room.
“I didn’t think it would be quite so — I just feel a bit empty,” Chu Su said. We knew little about the procedures involved beforehand, only that a child would be legally assigned to us at the end of the third trimester.
“Let’s just get it done quickly. If the brochure is correct, the rest is much easier and more pleasant.”
We got naked. She was gorgeous when dressed, but without clothes she was like a packet of sugar with toothpicks for limbs. Thin, but in the wrong way. I wondered how the trimestral simulation vests would even fit on her. Probably they’d have to sew a custom model.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she said. “Your body is nothing exceptional, either, Mr. Fake Foot.”
Yes, the fake foot. The real one I’d lost in War 5. I’d gotten it caught between two rocks during a decisive retreat. “Either we cut off the foot or you die,” the captain said, and before I could respond they’d severed the foot at the ankle with a pair of bone-cutting shears. I went back to the spot some months later, after we’d retaken the stretch of land, but the foot was gone.
We got into the vehicle. When our genitals had warmed the receptacles sufficiently, the monitors clicked on and the vehicle started to drift across the floor on a cushion of air.
A featureless head came up on the monitor. “Welcome. Thank you for investing in the future of our great nation. We have successfully determined your racial makeup. You may now select an egg cluster from one of the following regions: Pusan, Seoul, Cheju, Pyongyang.”
I looked up. Chu Su was weeping, streaming silent tears.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, reaching out to touch her arm over the handlebars. The voice on the monitor said, “Please do not remove your hands from the handgrips at any time during this simulation.”
The vehicle did slow doughnuts in the center of the concrete floor.
“No,” she said. “I can’t feel anything at all.”
Joy of Eating
The Tins
They have taken the joy of eating from us, and so we sit at table, hands folded in prayer, each in personal cardboard food booths. At the beginning of our meal, the signal is given. Elaine inserts the corn cob. William, with half-palsied face, picks at his beefsteak. “No more of that,” cries Mother. “No more — we will have no more of that,” she calls from her booth. Father, having come to us by means of a remote-control device, slouches in his chair, head in hands. Perhaps he does not belong to us. The twins feed each other dense gray portions of mashed potato, pasting the material to each other’s face and forehead. “No more of that — children.” Mother will use the wooden spoon, she warns them. The portions, delicately and lovingly arranged on every plate, will taste no different than on other nights. Meals arrive at our doorstep in heavy tins. Instructions are that each family member assist in the meal. William will help stir. Elaine needs a phone book to stand on. I will sift flour from a metal can with a trigger. Look, a tasty dip can be made with sour cream and onion soup. Mother tucks the meat, garnishing it with cherries and pineapple rings.
Novelty of Heat
The joy of eating taken from us, we are allowed to play in the yard. William, this time, is the German. We each break into a rapid, awkward gait, scattering across the lawn. Elaine crouches behind the hedge. The twins have not learned the rules. William is gaining on them. I have climbed into the high branches of the sycamore tree, where the animal qualities of children are most apparent. This section of the yard is made up entirely of smells. William falls ass-backwards, wheezing, the wind knocked out of him. A truck rolls down the street, selling cupped ice. Summer will pass in this way, each night progressively longer, more dissonant, objects lurching in the sky overhead.
The Hard Candies
The joy of eating is gone. Mother, having taken the Germans for a walk, washes her face and hair in the kitchen sink. We are not to look. Father works alone in the forbidden room. It is conjectured that he has been to war. Elaine shows me her secret, a cache of brightly colored hard candies she hides behind the porch steps. She sucks on one and begins to cry. Everything is about as useful as water now.
Into Her Mouth
Eating, that joy in which we have taken part for as long as we can remember, has been revoked. Father is outside, wielding the lawn mower in concentric squares. William, who has been punished, sits alone in his room in a chair by the window, diagramming the behavior of birds. Elaine is out with friends. I am sitting down to a bowl of ice and a fresh comic book. It is cool here in the dark kitchen. Summer, as reported, has been the worst season for food. Dirt has a taste, it is reported. The suggestion is that one mix small amounts of dirt into one’s meal. Mother, in her garden, gingerly inserts a finger into her mouth.
Joust
Each of us, in turn, recalls the joy of eating, now lost to us. William has been fighting with the other boys. They wear cloth helmets and carry long wooden poles for jousting. The goal is emasculation. They can be heard in the streets before dark, charging at one another fiercely. An ice cone truck passes. Mother sets her magazine down, neck craned in the direction of the window. On television, hands hold up black holes where food was once inserted. Elaine has locked herself in an upstairs closet, where she says there is “another kind of air.�
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Joy of Sleep, Interrupted
Because the joy of eating has been lost, we are huddlers. We are loitering in our own lives. William’s bed-wetting incidents have increased in number and intensity. Father finds tiny holes bored into the mattress and inserts a diode into the head of William’s penis to shock him awake next time.
The Back of Abraham
Eating, the joy of which has been wrested from us, becomes difficult. Out behind the pond Peter has found a can with something in it. Half of us are wearing ornate Indian headgear. Jill shakes the can, putting it to her ear. “I can hear the heart of it moving.” There is a box with mason jars filled with dark, pulpy objects soaking in their own fluids. Abraham opens a jar and picks out a wedge of something that looks like a small lung. “It is softer than you would expect,” he says. “Less substantial. Messy, like a wet genital.” He holds it to his mouth. For a long moment nobody says anything. “No,” he says, lips slick and red from handling, “I’m afraid not.” Some pioneer from the other side of town shoots an arrow from over the hill, which pierces Abraham’s shoulder. Those of us who do not run don’t know what to do, either. Abraham hunches over, the arrow quivering in his back.
Joy of Eating, v. 2
Hot fresh-baked corn cakes! Spoonfuls of homemade apple-sauce!
For the Memory of Food
They fly over us in great planes and drop pamphlets: “For the Memory of Food.” Some people in the town have fled over the hill and off into another town. The houses where they lived stick out like buck teeth along the street, busted into and painted over in red. Peter has left with his family, all of them taking only what they could carry. Those of us who remain have satisfied ourselves with the carving of immense, ornate ice sculptures, displayed in our front yards for the children to come and lick. One morning, by cosmic fluke, everyone makes swans.
Super Flat Times Page 6