Everything Solid has a Shadow

by Michael Antman

  There, next to the heating grate, was a chipmunk, on its side, on top of a glue trap—really, just a sheet of thick paper coated in a heavy glue. In its struggles to free itself, the chipmunk had partially ripped off its fur, and bits of fur and flesh, flecked with blood, spotted the trap.

  The dab of peanut butter that Alisa had used for bait was still visible at one end of the trap.

  “Holy fuck, Alisa! Why the hell did you use a glue trap? Are you insane? The poor guy’s skinned himself alive trying to get off!”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know how to use one of those cage traps and this was cheaper, and besides someone told me about garlic powder repelling chipmunks so I sprinkled some down the heating grate, so I really wasn’t expecting any anyway, but this guy must’ve gotten past it.”

  “When did you put out the glue trap?”

  “Last night, before I went to bed.”

  So the chipmunk could have been suffering all night and through the morning. I saw, next to the heating grate, a plastic bottle of McCormick garlic powder. I looked at it and at the struggling chipmunk. And then I strode into the kitchen, pulled out a white garbage bag, and then picked up the glue trap by one corner, with the chipmunk dangling sidewise from it by a strip of ravaged skin, and dumped it into the bag, where—surrounded suddenly by a world of whiteness it couldn’t understand or interpret—the chipmunk began to struggle even more. Then I marched out Alisa’s back door into the condo’s little backyard and dropped the bag onto the grass. I felt more horrified with every second the chipmunk suffered, but something came over me and I set my jaw in the same way I’d seen Alisa do so many times when she was angry, except I wasn’t really angry, just, suddenly, decisive. I pried up a loose paving stone from the little walkway that led from the condo’s back door out to the alley—the stone was a big one, at least five or six pounds—and I threw it, hard, at the scrambling shadow in the bag. Instantly, the animal exploded, and in place of what was a life a second ago now there was only what appeared to be a bright blotch of raspberry jam with little black flecks that could have been seeds. I tied up the bag at the neck and tossed the mess into the garbage and wondered if the chipmunk, seeing nothing but whiteness for its last moments, had understood that it was already dead.

  I came back into the living room. Alisa was seated now.

  “Thanks for taking care of that.”

  “No problem. You know, I can show you how to set the trap. It’s really easy.”

  “Thanks. So did Gilbert let you know this morning?”

  “Well, no, actually, I just found out on the curb outside your place. He called me and told me in a kind of roundabout way.”

  “Shit, that sucks, sweetie.”

  “And no severance or anything. He’s just giving me two weeks to use my office and job hunt. Two paid weeks, I guess, so maybe that counts as severance, I don’t know.”

  “Thanks for coming over.”

  “You mean the chipmunk?”

  “Yeah, no, I mean, thanks for thinking of me when you’re down. I mean, after Hawaii and everything, it’s, I don’t know, good to know that we’ve still got this connection when either one of us is in trouble.”

  “Well, no, I agree, it’s just that as I mentioned, Gilbert called me just now when I was on your curb.”

  “Oh, so why did you come then?”

  “Alisa, how long were you going to let that animal suffer? I mean, if I hadn’t come?”

  “Enough with the fucking chipmunk, okay? I’ve got my own problems. Frank.”

  “Yeah, what about him?”

  “Your buddy Frank and I just split up.”

  “My buddy, huh? He was your buddy up until just about now.”

  “Yeah, well, Diane is all broken up about the whole thing. You should call her.”

  “You mean, comfort her because her husband was having an affair with my girlfriend? I guess she should be comforting me, too. Seems like the only one who comes out ahead in this whole deal is the Professor himself.”

  “I thought we handled our situation without a lot of rancor, Charlie.”

  “Rancor? Ire? Is that how you’d describe it? I felt humiliated in Hawaii, but I kept the whole thing low-key because I didn’t want to make the end of the trip awkward. And now I’m out of a job, and you’re asking me to go and comfort Diane?” And yet, as I carefully omitted, I had lain on my turquoise beach towel with Willa within hours of my humiliation and kissed her on her soft pink lips, and I also had to acknowledge that talking to Diane was something I actually was looking forward to.

  “Charlie, just stop. Okay? Just stop. You still haven’t told me why you showed up here.”

  “I guess to pick up a few of my things.”

  “You guess? A few of your things? How about just ‘picking up my things?’ All of ’em? I was expecting you a few days ago. Look, no offense, but at this stage, I’d rather not have them around anyway.”

  “Then it’s a deal,” I said, and with the same abruptness as before, I marched into the kitchen and pulled another white trash bag out of its dispenser. I performed a little tour of the condo, retracing steps I had taken a thousand times before; picked up a cell phone charger, a couple of dirty shirts, a can of shaving cream, and a cylinder of deodorant; and tossed them into the bag.

  Alisa called out from the couch, “You’ve got some clean laundry in the basement.”

  So I left the lumpy, bottom-heavy garbage bag on the floor of the kitchen and walked down to the basement. Sure enough, Alisa had washed and folded a big pile of my underwear, no doubt in anticipation of my imminent arrival and departure. With my arms in a forklift pose, I scooped up the fresh laundry and then noticed the light switch above the aluminum laundry table, the one that had only once and never again appeared in one of my dreams. It was in the down position. I didn’t want to put the laundry back on the table, but I was just able to extend my forefinger enough from underneath the pile of fresh and fragrant laundry that my ex-girlfriend had cleaned for me as a parting gift, and I used it to flip the switch up and then down again, and then up and down several more times, and each time I said out loud, “Fuck. You. Fuck. You. Fuck. You.”

  Then I stomped back upstairs and stuffed my laundry into the garbage bag. I picked up the little plastic bottle of garlic powder and threw it in on top of everything else, and then I noticed the unused cage trap shoved behind a bookcase and kicked it over to the heating grate where it belonged. I went back into the living room, put the white garbage bag down, and kissed Alisa goodbye.

  “Listen, I’m not quite sure if we’re fighting or not, or if we hate each other or not right now, but I just lost my job and you just lost someone important to you. Or I don’t know, maybe two people important to you.”

  This would have been the ideal moment for her to acknowledge that I was one of those two, but she only smiled weakly. I grabbed the garbage bag and walked out. As I left, she shouted out, “You know, I really didn’t appreciate your calling me insane.”

  7

  I was feeling a little bit shaky after that encounter, so I pulled into a Walgreen’s to pick up a six-pack of beer. As I was waiting in line, I smelled, somewhere behind me, an odor that could best be described as roasted peanut butter with rodent hairs. So I turned around and there, in line behind me, was Dr. Nemerov.

  He must have recognized me ahead of him in line, because he just smiled and said, “Hello, Charlie.” He was carrying a hairnet, a can of shaving cream, a bag of sugar-free Australian licorice, a bottle of zinc supplements, and a collapsible rubber colander.

  “Dr. Nemerov! What a funny thing to see you! Is it, you know, okay to talk to you in public?”

  “It’s your reputation, Carlos. All is well, I trust?”

  “Well, I have some other issues…”

  “Which, of course, I cannot
discuss with you in line at a Walgreen’s. Make an appointment with me.”

  “I will. I just feel kind of weird running into you because I just murdered a chipmunk.”

  “Murder, self-defense or euthanasia?”

  “Actually, more like euthanasia.”

  “Glad to hear it. Make an appointment and we’ll talk soon.”

  As I paid for my beer, I could hear Dr. Nemerov behind me murmuring, “Your honor, I didn’t murder that chipmunk!”

  Later that evening, I used 20,000 points from my United frequent flier program to buy a round-trip ticket to Seattle, departing Friday morning, returning Sunday evening. I figured I might as well; I had no job and no girlfriend and nothing else on my agenda except my next appointment with Dr. Nemerov, and those 20,000 points had been earned in the course of many long and exhausting business trips on behalf of Gilbert and his children’s futures. I called Bowen before I left to see if he could book me a gig while I was there, but he just laughed and said, “Hey, man, we got lucky once. Let’s keep it at that.”

  “Okay, sorry, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try.”

  “So spill about Hawaii.”

  “You know, I’m not sure what to say yet. I’ll let you know when I get back from Seattle.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll let you know why when I’m back from Seattle, too.”

  “Man, I don’t know about you. Okay, I’ll leave it alone. Anyway, I talked to Reese, the manager at Palmyra, and he said you kicked some serious ass there. You should e-mail him and maybe he’ll invite you back, who knows? Anyway, you owe me a nice dinner.”

  “I will. I promise. Listen, have you gotten a call from Gilbert?”

  “No, have you?”

  “Yeah, I got fired. I think he’s trying to cut overhead to make the agency more attractive to Glennis.”

  “Holy shit. You sure you don’t want to talk before you leave?”

  “Thanks, Bowen. But I wanna go to Seattle with a clear head, you know? I’m just glad you survived, I mean, unless Gilbert’s doing it in waves or saving some people for Glennis to fire instead. Hang in there, and we’ll talk when I get back.”

  So I went with nothing on my mind at all except for having a good time. I packed my double-handled, calfskin carry-on bag with three fresh shirts, an extra pair of slacks, my shaving kit, a couple of paperbacks, a small gift for Willa (an expensive snow globe, depicting North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, that ended up being confiscated at airport security), some socks, an extra pair of loafers, and some of the clean underwear that Alisa had laundered for me. Just before I left the house, I sent Reese “the Knack” Nakamura a brief e-mail telling him how much I’d enjoyed my gig and thanking Don and all the guys, and I asked if he’d be interested in having me back.

  As the United flight rolled away from the gate, I started thinking, had Willa actually invited me? Well, of course she had, and before the flight attendant had told everyone to shut down their electronic devices, I had read through my text messages with her; she would be meeting me at the Seattle airport and driving us back to her apartment. Had Willa and I actually kissed on the beach in Honolulu, two days in a row? We must have; and we must have had some sort of connection, or I wouldn’t be visiting her now—and I could still remember how soft her lips had been. But I had an odd feeling that I was forgetting something important, though I had no idea what it might be. I patted my back pocket for my wallet, which was there, then took the wallet out and checked to see if my driver’s license was there, or if I had lost it as I’d wended my way through security.

  It was, of course, there.

  Whenever a plane takes off, the sudden change in angle creates in me a moment of light-headedness that forces me to put down whatever I’m reading and look at the far horizon. It lasts only three or four seconds, and then the feeling passes. But this time, I couldn’t shake the light-headedness even an hour into the flight. It was like that walk I’d taken in midtown Manhattan, but now there were no faces, no other lives, to distract me, only the backs of people’s heads.

  There was something very wrong, but I might as well have been a chipmunk in a white plastic bag, for all the capacity I had to understand what it was.

  When I arrived at baggage claim, where we’d agreed to meet, the feeling that I’d forgotten something important and that I wasn’t supposed to be there began to throb like my eye had throbbed in Hawaii. Maybe it was just that I was jobless and had no business taking a pleasure trip, and that made me relax a little bit, because while being financially irresponsible was a stupid thing for me to do, at least it was humanly stupid, and hence, for me, a most familiar feeling, whereas the odd, light-headed sensation I’d had on the plane had been something I’d never felt before.

  After about ten minutes or so, I saw Willa and, at first glance, my heart sank. She was so short and slight—on the beach the high-cut white bikini had created an illusion that she was taller and leggier than she actually was—and she was wearing her hair in a ponytail, emphasizing the puffy, childlike curvature of her cheeks. Her round, wide-set eyes made her look, even more than before, like an illustration from a fairy-tale book, especially because, like an illustration, she seemed not to blink. Who was this young woman, and why was I here with her now, except that we’d shared something dark once upon a time, and a much briefer moment of brightness on the beach?

  But she immediately hooked her arm beneath mine and started chatting about the Seahawks and the Mariners, and how much trouble she always had finding her car in an airport parking lot. But she’d tied a bright green scarf to the antenna of her bug-green Kia, so we found it right away.

  Instead of going back to her apartment, she took us directly to a Mexican restaurant called Fernando’s, and I was a little puzzled because it was only 4:30 and I wasn’t especially hungry. But the place was already half full, and it smelled pleasantly of steamed corn and salsa.

  She called the waiter right over and said, “We’ll have a couple of margaritas.” Though drinking was, at that moment, the last thing on my mind, I decided to just go with the flow, but I somehow managed to assert myself by saying, “No salt on mine.”

  We ended up drinking two margaritas each and sharing a bowl of chips and guacamole, and by the time we got back to her tidy little apartment in the University District, I was feeling a little bit loopy, but on the other hand I’d forgotten whatever it was I’d forgotten, so that was good.

  She directed me to my bed—a fold-out couch in the living room—and had me park my double-handled leather bag behind the couch. And just as I was thinking that this would be a sexless visit (and feeling oddly relieved at this prospect), she backed me up against the front door and we began to kiss again, as if we had never left that turquoise towel in Hawaii.

  She stepped back for a moment and I was expecting her to say “slow down,” or words to that effect, but instead she pulled off her baby blue sweater and a silky-looking blue bra and kissed me some more as I groped for her breasts. Suddenly I understood that our two-margarita stopover at Fernando’s had been solely for the purpose of lubricating this encounter, and I laughed to myself at how easily I could ignore the obvious.

  I was tremendously excited by her compact little body and her eagerness and we kind of waddled together toward her bedroom where she frantically pulled at her jeans and my slacks at the same time, and within seconds, I was on top of her and then I was inside of her. I cried out with excitement and delight, because it was all so unexpected—and yet what else should I have been expecting when a woman invites me halfway across the country to visit her?—and my exclamation made her laugh, too.

  I slowed down for a second and said, “I need to put on a condom, okay?”

  “I’ve got an IUD. I want you to come inside of me.”

  “I can’t do that, Willa. I just can’t.”

  “You can trust me,
Charlie, it’s okay.”

  Her eyes were so calm that I started to feel my fear fading away, or rather that I was less afraid of that fear than ever before. I felt like a mountain climber eschewing ropes on the Matterhorn, both calm and excited. I began moving inside of her again slowly.

  She repeated, “Come inside of me. But not for a long time.”

  She squirmed out from under me and stretched out on top, supporting herself with her arms, so that I could see the full length of her body. Suddenly, again, she seemed to me as she had in Hawaii, long and leggy, and it was her appearance at the airport that began to seem an illusion.

  After a few minutes, she sat up on top of me, and I grabbed at her very round and bouncy little breasts. I pinched one of her nipples, and she seemed to like that because she moaned deeply, so I pinched a little bit harder and she leaned forward and murmured, “Oh, good, you like to play rough.”

  Well, actually, I didn’t, so I felt a brief moment of panic because I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but I reached around and grabbed her ponytail and pulled, and she reared back on me and moaned even more heavily. I guess it was the right thing to do, but there was something odd going on in my body. I didn’t feel light-headed any more, as I’d felt on the flight, and I wasn’t that drunk from the two margaritas, either. What I was feeling, instead, was a kind of numbness, almost as if there were a sheet of plastic wrap between Willa and me as we fucked. My cock was hard and that part of me felt good, but the rest of me felt nothing.

  She said, “So I’m a ‘bunny wabbit,’ huh?”

  “What?”

  She ground her hips in a circular motion. “That’s what you and the other kids used to call me.”

  “I remember Nilla.”

  “No, bunny wabbit. ’Cause of the way I’d twitch my lips.” She leaned forward and kissed me. “Well this bunny likes to fuck.” She leaned backward again. “Pinch my nipples again.”