Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  The room was in a gloom worse than the Bronx Zoo’s World of Darkness. I could see only because light came through a pane of one-way glass in the wall to my left. We could see out, but the people on the other side didn’t have to look in.

  There was space for twenty normal-sized people, but ten of us filled the room to capacity. I thought there were nine big ladies with me but as my eyes adjusted I realized there were only five. The rest were men like me, curvaceous.

  A high-pitched groan played in the room. When I shut the metal door the notes bounced around, above and beneath me. Eventually I recognized it as whale song. I suppose it was meant to be soothing, but did it have to be so loud? I thought the damn mammals were floating inside this tiny room.

  I pushed past hefty legs, but there wasn’t much room so people had to stand or shift in their seats. This is when I realized that wasn’t whale music cooing from ceiling to floor, but nine poor metal chairs groaning. When I settled in I added a tenth.

  For ventilation there was only a grill the size of a steel wool pad in the ceiling; every person was sweating over his clothes. I undid my tie then the top two buttons of my shirt.

  Our freight-entrance door was locked from outside.

  We faced the glass.

  There were two rooms, ours and the other. Where this one was cramped, in shadows, theirs had floor space and an enormous skylight. A column of sun came down as one thick finger of an approving god.

  My mother was with him.

  I walked right to the large pane and pressed my face against it. Envy was the climate in our room.

  Lorraine’s friend Ahmed Abdel was a Japanese man who’d converted to Islam while incarcerated. He was supported by black and Latino college students; also white celebrities. I thought of his romantically gaunt figure from his pamphlet photograph as I mashed myself against the one-way mirror. Each day that it became clearer she wasn’t going to call me I read that nattering tract because it was all I had. Pathetically, yes, I thought that if I got into his struggle, joined that righteous rigamarole, I’d find my way back to her as an attractively conscientious man. I looked at his photo ten times a day, jealous that it stirred the blood of spoon-eyed revolutionaries like Lorraine. Envy.

  – You’re hurting our eyes with that glow-in-the-dark suit so sit down!

  – Who said that? I asked.

  Nothing’s uglier than unattractive dieters. Even if they lose the weight their faces are still half-Wookie. The grim little pudge who’d yelled at me pointed toward the back of the room. When I returned to my seat it made the whimper of a humpback whale again.

  – Oh shut up, I told it.

  In the other room seven trim women and men were doing routine tasks while we watched them. Opening letters. A pair danced in a friendly way. One tall man climbed a seven-foot ladder and then came back down. After thirty seconds he went up again.

  My mother sat on a wooden footstool lacing up her sneakers. When the right and left foot were done she pulled both strings out to start again.

  – See, they don’t need food every minute of the day.

  To my right the outline of a man’s large head shifted as he spoke to me. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the mound of his face, but not the features.

  –Thanks, I said, because I’d been confused as to what the hell we were doing.

  His stomach was even bigger than mine. That was comforting. He wasn’t actually short, but because his thighs were so thick his feet didn’t touch the ground while sitting. When he introduced himself I repeated the name three times because I couldn’t believe it.

  – Ledric?

  – Ledric.

  – Ledric!

  – Yes! he yelled at last. Ledric Mayo, he said.

  I thought of a war chest of jokes, but before submitting the first one the beetle-faced man who’d mocked my bright green suit yelled, – I can’t concentrate with that jibber-jabber going on back there!

  This was an isolation tank, not a meeting room.

  – How long does it take to get on that other side? I asked.

  – You’ve got some time, Ledric said.

  Yeah.

  After an hour the seven fetching men and women over there had gone through so many different tasks I forgot my own name. Besides those lacing boots and climbing a ladder there were others filling out credit card applications. They’d actually fill in the name, address, home-phone-number business and press the completed paper against the glass. There weren’t any subliminal messages playing. It was a hard sell with a soft touch.

  For sixty minutes.

  Without any other stimulus.

  One hundred twenty minutes and my big pink walnut of a brain kept wandering no matter how much I agreed with their weight loss training. I marveled as the others in the room nodded like they were learning something new; as if it had never occurred to them that they could play catch without hot dogs in their mouths.

  When my family came to get me from Cornell I tried to act like I was fine. After we’d packed my essential books and clothes I took them for a tour of the campus. For ten seconds I pretended that they were wrong, I was still going to school and doing fine. They would have humored me if I’d wished, but being patronized is worse than straight failing. I showed them Olin Library, where I could have studied. Potential classrooms in Uris Hall. They were happy to see such tidy facilities.

  I was an English major before leaving school. One of those squishy guys who make up a third of any college campus. Weasels in glasses. I took my family past Day Hall to the Arts and Sciences quad; even inside Goldwin Smith because it was left open on the weekends. Up to the second floor; the English Department’s locked wooden doors; we posed for twenty pictures in front of them. That evening I rented two movies, Camera Furio and Chilly Grave. I thought they’d want to see how I passed my free time in Ithaca, but horror films were too depressing considering their mood. I enjoyed the pictures when they slept.

  I’d stayed in Ithaca for two years after getting expelled because off-campus rooms were cheap. I worked a lot. Cleaning houses and offices, mostly. They were satisfying jobs; I feel calm once I put messes in order. When snow packed onto Ithaca’s hills during the long winters I pretended my apartment was a ski chalet. This time was so much fun for me that I hardly slept. I didn’t want a moment to pass without me. My living room clogged with Arthur Machen, Joe R. Lansdale and the Dictionary of the Supernatural. Twenty Years of Congress by James G. Blaine just because I thought the title was a funny fucking pun. The most uninspired life can seem charming to a twenty-one year old. Sitting next to Beebe Lake on Cornell’s North Campus, reading Lord Dunsany’s awfully overblown prose, I had a laughing fit because I was so blessed.

  Without a warning Ledric opened a plastic container that emitted a smell bad as bunion paste. To my right, there he was, with the plastic container balanced on his serving tray of a stomach. His face was so greasy that it reflected light.

  – What are you doing? I asked him. What is that?

  Ledric breathed heavier than lust. –There’s salmon and some perch in here. Pike too.

  –That’s fish?

  It looked too old to be fish. Maybe the rumor of fish. A fable of fish.

  – Not that bad, Ledric answered. I let this sit out for twenty-three days, he said.

  The salmon wasn’t even that appealing bright pink anymore. Just a gray custard saturated with orange oil.

  – I’ll go get you some KFC, I offered. Anything’s got to be better than that.

  He shook his head. – You don’t understand.

  – Just put the fish down and I’ll take you out for some pizza.

  Instead he mashed the stuff around with his spoon. Some delicate grayish-white bones stuck out of the meat. The food made squelching sounds when he touched it.

  Ledric looked at me. – I can’t wait ten years to get skinny. I can’t do it. Not no more.

  –That’s diet food? I think you could find better stuff through Weight Watchers.

>   But Ledric would not be stopped.

  The guy who’d given me lip before started banging on our metal door.

  A woman stood so fast that the chair stuck to her ass while she went to the glass and yelled.

  Ever see that film The Thing? John Carpenter’s version. The people in here were like the dogs that had been shut off in a cage with the alien. The canines scratched, yelped, barked to get out because they were encountering an unnatural terror. A creature so hideous that it would destroy them. A Magogdamn terrible sight.

  –There’s cestodes in here, Anthony. Ledric enjoyed the drama. He dug two fingers into the pulp then pulled out a wad of chaw. He swabbed a dollop of rotten fish between his lower lip and gum, then chewed.

  A guy at the door begged. – I need some air! I need some air.

  – Cestodiasis, Ledric said to me.

  – Why did they lock us in here? I yelled as the thin people ran from their section.

  – Whenever we get a new guy they block the door so you can’t leave, Ledric explained.

  I heard the key go in and twist.

  – What are you doing?! I screamed at Ledric.

  –Tapeworms, he said.

  5

  I quit my moving job after falling down a flight of stairs. We were taking an old Quaker woman from Brooklyn to Pennsylvania so she’d be closer to her friends. Books were already boxed when we got there, with categories written on the side. History, Literature, Geography, Religion-West, Religion-East.

  A framed letter from Lyndon Johnson was still on the wall. In it the departed President thanked the Quaker’s deceased husband for his speechwriting work. I told her I didn’t know why Kennedy got sole credit for helping out black people when it was Johnson who signed the Civil Rights Act.

  – He was a locomotive with a little boy at the engine, she said.

  Holding an armful of books I walked from the third floor of her house to the second when this asscrack of a man, another mover, dropped his box on top of mine. Said he needed water but before I could tell him to set his load at the top of the stairs he laid it on me; I shut my mouth to get the work done faster.

  Four hundred and fifteen pounds going down makes more noise than a subway car derailing. Three hundred and fifteen pounds of me lay on the landing next to one box called ‘Architecture’ and the other, ‘Divine.’

  I tried not to vomit while the Quaker woman did what Quakers apparently do best. She brought me a cool cloth compress for my forehead; she brought Band-Aids though I wasn’t bleeding. She disappeared.

  Moving furniture wasn’t for me. For days I’d been pretending my chest didn’t hurt dramatically at the end of each strenuous job. That everyone gets light-headed from taking a small lamp up two flights of stairs. I liked the idea of being a mover more than the work. Cleaning houses had calmed me, but really I was only washing dishes, rearranging the living room: small acts of tidiness. I’d thought that packing, lifting, moving whole homes would be exponentially easeful. Instead it felt like I’d flattened a few disks in my spine.

  The Armenian foreman, who was also the driver of our truck, asked me if I was going to be okay, but as he asked lifted ‘Architecture,’ and his question trailed off down the stairs toward the sidewalk. Leaving me sweating, staring at the box of ‘Divine.’

  Later the foreman butted one chubby forearm into my gut as a friendly gesture. He spoke a melted English; only half of each word was actually spoken. – You’re not so bad, right? he asked. You’re a big guy, shake it up.

  How could I ask to go to the hospital when the company didn’t have insurance? Their business sign at the main office on 138th Street and Amsterdam was written on posterboard in black marker. Every two weeks they discarded one company name then made up something new. No paychecks, always bills, none larger than a twenty.

  I was compensated for the seven-hour shift, $42. Then the Armenian put me in a cab to Rosedale which cost as much as I did for a whole day. My only regret about leaving early was the tip the Quaker would give. Probably $20 a man if the foreman didn’t pocket much.

  Better to go home, though, because I couldn’t think properly the rest of the afternoon. I poured soda in a soup bowl. Grandma rubbed mentholated cream on my back and made me rest in bed all evening.

  It was Grandma who woke me the next morning because Mom and Nabisase had left for work and school. If they fought that morning I didn’t know it. I tried to go get some bandages Mom kept in her room, but she had actually installed a new lock on the door, as threatened. One that used a key. I twisted the knob for a few minutes, strenuously. Stubborn sturdy mechanism. I pressed my nose to the door crack trying to smell my mother’s secrets. I listened patiently, but her room offered no sound.

  I was actually doing well enough that standing, bending, working was possible and I would have felt childish pretending with my grandmother. She expected people to act maturely. She was glad I woke up early. She rubbed the mentholated cream on my back again and gave me a card for a job advertised on the posterboard over in the Associated Supermarket on 228th Street.

  The company was nearby. Twenty-minute walk; ten minutes on the Q85. Just past Green Acres Mall, which meant that it was actually in Long Island. The mall and the company were on Sunrise Highway, the expressway that started near my home at the ass end of Queens, then ran like a long intestine to the tip of Long Island where, seasonally, waste was stored in the great colon known as the Hamptons. (Thus I strike a blow for the masses! How’s that Ahmed Abdel? Lorraine?)

  They hired semi-temporary laborers. Do badly and get fired the same day. Do better and they’d keep you on. It was a husband and wife from Baldwin, Long Island. Men so rarely applied that the office manager thought I’d read the ad wrong. Clean Houses— Get Paid, that’s easy. The owners were a middle-aged couple who, like most people, never left the era of their bloom. Curtis Mayfield on the office stereo. Otis Redding, like that. And they called the business Sparkle.

  Even after opening her front door to me the woman was suspicious, because I wasn’t wearing my uniform. I wore the Bing cherry red baseball cap with ten thousand glitter bits spelling Sparkle on the brim, so who needs the jumpsuit? It didn’t fit me anyway. She only opened the door a stitch.

  – Sparkle ma’am. I’m here to make your home shine.

  If I didn’t say the motto then, according to our rules, she didn’t have to tip me. Not that she was going to anyway. Blacks and old Jews were cheaper than Chinese food when it came to gratuities. I don’t want to complain. The money could be better, but I liked the work.

  The woman at the front door of this Rochdale Village home finally let me inside and I followed her down the hall. She wore the dark slacks, jacket and belly of a bus driver. There were no photos on the walls, but prayer plaques.

  She said, – My husband is going to stay here today, he’s sick. I wrote a list for you so leave him alone. He’s going to be in bed.

  There were four gold rings on three fat fingers of her right hand.

  She took me around, but her house was weak; it could barely hold me up. The tiled floor dipped in the middle of the kitchen, moaned when I walked across it.

  – Under the sink we keep the cleaners, and this closet has mops. Do you need gloves?

  I tapped my coat pocket. – I’ve got.

  Outside, in one of the company’s K cars, I had my own vacuum, towels, cleaning chemicals, sponges. But homeowners took issue with the equipment. This was true at nearly every cleaning job I had. And Sparkle’s was as raggedy as the rest; the vacuum only worked if run for twenty minutes first.

  Her list was under a magnet shaped like a fridge that was stuck to their fridge.

  –This is what needs doing on one floor and the rest on the second.

  – No basement?

  She grabbed my arm. – We couldn’t pay you enough to fix that place up.

  That made me like her because few of the homes I’d cleaned had owners with any objective sense. This lady was the first in a while to adm
it her family had made too big a mess to ask for help. I considered going down there and doing the job for free.

  She called upstairs before leaving.

  No answer, so I thought he was still asleep. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wash out bedpans.

  The front door shut then maybe eleven seconds passed and I heard the husband’s feet on the stairs. They were faint footsteps pattering above my head. Then this skinny guy comes down dressed sharp enough to cut. Wearing a gray, thin suit as cheap as one of my own. The lapels looked about as thick as wax paper. He was breathing heavy from running.

  – You’re not no girl, he pointed out.

  He stood in the living room watching me at the kitchen sink. I’d been planning to sit a moment, but washed dishes to seem busy.

  – No I’m not.

  – I thought they was going to send some girl.

  The man was crestfallen; he was dressed for a funeral and now he had the proper face. He came into the kitchen and poured a drink while I finished the breakfast dishes.

  – You got to do the laundry.

  –That’s not on her list, I said.

  – Well it’s on mine.

  – Yes.

  – We got machines in the basement. You can turn them on and go back to the rest.

  I walked into the living room and he followed me. He sat on the couch because I was about to move it. Instead I pulled their big round table to a corner after I unplugged a lamp.

  Finished with the orange juice, the master of the house put his cup down on the carpet.

  – You could put that in the kitchen now. He pointed below him.

  He retied his dress shoes by pulling the black laces hard. A young boy ready for chapel.

  I took up the cup into the kitchen where the floor announced its weakness for me with another moan. – Oh shut up, I muttered.

  This house would have been silent if not for the oven clock, light bulbs. The rechargeable battery case worked constantly. Three hundred years earlier the background noise would have been wind through the crops, Jameco Indians in the dirt. I lifted the blind from one kitchen window where Englishmen in frock coats and breeches once walked. In the back slaves collected salt hay to feed the animals. Three centuries and now I stood in a kitchen filling a bucket with hot water. It was hard to imagine I was even the same species as any of them. Their lives must have been so difficult and now mine was easy. I know some people long for bygone days, but not me.