A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

He said, “My,” and smiled. He put out his hand to me, drew me to him. I lay next to him, and I reached up, took off his glasses. I said, “We don’t need these now, do we?” and I turned and placed them on the nightstand.

  I turned back to him, and there was his face, his fine nose and soft brunette hair, his cheeks and chin rough with a day’s growth. He was nearsighted, and wore his glasses all day long, so that whenever I looked at him without them I was astonished, surprised at the face familiar yet new, eyes warm and deep brown, pupils nearly lost in that dark color. I looked at him, and he smiled, said, “Now I can see you,” and he kissed me, his lips warm and soft on mine. He pulled back. He said, “Shall we begin?”

  I said, “Let’s.”

  Finally, me walking on a cold street at night, my steps hard, my toes growing colder, my feet heavier, I saw his face again the day we had stopped at the barn, saw his twisted and quivering mouth, saw the pain in the color of his cheeks, and I ended with seeing his face that night, just a couple of hours before, the engine ticking, the windows fogged over.

  I reached Sunset, turned and headed down the hill to the intersection. The cold wind I’d felt up on the railroad tracks had begun to pick up now, my hands burrowed deep into my coat pockets, the leaf still there. Home wasn’t far away anymore, just across the intersection and under the railroad overpass, then right and then left. I would be on our street, and I would be home.

  And suddenly it didn’t matter that we had fought, that we had had fights before, that we would fight again. It didn’t matter, either, that I had left, had walked these streets to think about things for a while. None of that mattered, because there were years behind us, I saw, and years ahead of us, and tomorrow I would wake up, and there would be his face, I hoped, that same face. The only constant I knew.

  Then I knew the fear I’d felt at the foot of the driveway, knew that it was a fear he would be gone with his steps up the stairs, the kitchen door being pulled closed, the hand descending inside the curtain, and I nearly ran under the overpass, a train now passing overhead, tearing across the metal, screaming above me; before the train was gone I was on our street, then mounting the stairs, the wind suddenly hard, a strong autumn wind that shook through limbs already bare, and I shuddered, opened the kitchen door, closed it behind me, my breathing hard and loud.

  Tom was at the kitchen table, all the lights in the house off except for the fixture above him.

  Library books were spread out over the table. They were how-to books, do-it-yourself books, each opened to specific details about rebuilding a house that we would have to face once we started in on ours. One book lay open to a chapter on sanding and staining hardwood floors, another to chimney repairs, another to clapboards.

  I pulled my hands from my pockets, took deep breaths, and leaned back against the door. I closed my eyes a moment, opened them and let my head fall. My hands were in fists, my knuckles and fingers white, the scar still there on my left hand. I turned the hand over, and opened it. The leaf, an even duller green than I’d thought it would be, lay crumpled in my palm, stiff.

  Tom looked up at me, then back at the book he was reading. One elbow was on the table, his forehead in his hand, the other arm flat on the tabletop. His glasses were off, lay on one of the other books. He leaned closer to the page, peering into it.

  I said, “You’re here,” and started to the table, my steps slow and deliberate, though my breath hadn’t yet come back.

  He looked up at me again, squinting, trying to see me. “Where else would I be?” he said. “Where would I go?”

  I stood at the table, pulled one of the books over to me and started looking at it. It was the chapter on chimneys. I hadn’t yet taken off my coat, didn’t, in fact, know if I had the strength.

  I said, “Nowhere. You wouldn’t go anywhere.” I looked in the book at different chimneys in differing stages of decay. One picture was of a chimney top, the little lip of bricks around the top edge—what the book called “corbeling”—falling apart, the mortar between them all gone, two or three bricks missing; another picture was of a hearth, the bricks before the fireplace itself sunken an inch or so below the wood floor. I turned the page, wondering precisely how much work would have to be done on our own fireplace, but there were no pictures on this new page, only words. I looked at the words, studied them, but I could not put them together into any real sentences I understood. I turned back to the pictures of the chimney top, the fireplace. Pictures I could just look at, not think about.

  Tom closed his book, and brought his hand to his face, rubbed his eyes, the bridge of his nose. He squinted, looked across the table for his glasses. My blind husband.

  He found the glasses, put them on, and leaned back in the chair, his hands behind his head. The apartment was still, and I looked through the doorway into the living room. It was dark in there, black. I could see nothing beyond what was in this room: the brown-and-white gingham curtains on the kitchen door and windows, the gray radiator, the shelf and the plants above it, the old white enamel gas stove, the table, the books. Books that showed us how much work it was going to be.

  Later, the house completely dark, we lay in bed side by side. As every other night, there was with us the moment of silence once the sheets had been pulled up, the light turned out, our bodies settled. We lay there, and I heard the wind lift and fall, the windows give with the sudden push against frame, the wash of sound from leafless trees.

  “Oh,” Tom whispered, breaking the moment of no talk between us, bringing us into that time when we would whisper until all the small things we’d forgotten to say, little incidents we’d wanted to relate, were through; whispering, as if there were guests in the house who might overhear us. Whispering, I thought, as if we had a baby in a crib at the foot of the bed.

  “Oh?” I whispered.

  “Nothing,” he whispered. “Something I wanted to tell you about, but I don’t need to. It can wait.”

  My eyes were closed, and I could feel him move his arm, could hear the shift of sheets.

  I opened my eyes, and in the darkness I could see his profile, his hands clasped on his chest.

  “Just say it,” I whispered. I closed my eyes again.

  “Okay,” he whispered, and he took a deep breath. “This press release comes across my desk today. From some group called the Women’s Union for Self-Reliance and Perpetuation. I’m not joking. That was the name. You ever heard of it?”

  Another of his stories. “Nope,” I said. My eyes were still closed.

  “Well,” he went on, “neither has anybody else at the office. But this press release comes to my desk. Judy hands it to me and tells me she’d gotten it in the mail. It was on good quality bond letterhead, with a printed envelope, too. They even had their own logo, this double-edged ax, behind it, this stylized flame, and beneath it was printed ‘Founded 1979.’”

  “And?” I whispered.

  “No,” he said, “it’s nothing.” He rolled over away from me. “I shouldn’t have even started. Good night.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” I said, my words even louder than his had been. I sat up in bed. “You can’t do that to me. You tell me. You started this. Now I want to know.”

  He lay still for a moment, then moved onto his back. He let out a breath.

  “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay.” He paused. “So we get this press release. And it’s on this impressive paper, this nice letterhead. Across the top it reads in caps FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, and beneath it is this headline, VALLEY COUPLE’S TRIUMPH COMPLETE. And then I go on and read it, and it reads something like, ‘Amherst—Linda Schulbred and Sky Winter found they were victorious last week when they were told they were indeed pregnant, this after months of emotionally debilitating efforts—”

  “I gather this is two women,” I cut in.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, “there’s more. And it is. Two women.” In the dark I couldn’t see his mouth move, only felt his words rise from somewhere next to me. “This release goes
on and on, the first paragraph using all these words like ‘strife’ and ‘glorious’ and ‘success.’ Then the second paragraph, and the rest of them—this thing went on for four pages—went on to tell about exactly what happened. Turns out that one of them got her brother up here from New York and got him to hand over some semen. Then she took the semen and used a turkey baster to get the other one pregnant. And they got pregnant.”

  I said, “A turkey baster? Are you serious?”

  He said, “I am.” He paused. “But it’s okay. Their having a baby is kosher, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” he whispered, “for one thing this Schulbred and Winter are married. And because this press release quoted the happy mother and mother as saying they would, quote, ‘assure this child, whether female or otherwise, of a strong familial home-structure.’ Unquote.”

  Whether female or otherwise, I thought, and I wondered who these people were that they could become pregnant in this plastic way and then discount the possible results, a boy merely referred to as “otherwise.” Whether a boy or a girl, it would be a life. A life.

  Tom sat up next to me, put his arms around me. He whispered, “I wonder what kind of press release we’ll receive if they get an otherwise child,” and I smiled, and then I laughed, something, some pressure in me broken, a laughter that was deep in me and that was caught up by Tom, so that the two of us were laughing in the darkness, holding each other, the sound of our laughter like some foreign language in our room.

  With the scalpel I gently cut into Chesterfield’s head, the scalpel so sharp it was as if I’d only let it touch the pink skin, barely pulled it across to find a line of red chasing after the blade. Once the cut was finished, a four-inch incision across the top of the skull from just above and between the eyes to immediately behind the ears, I drew back the skin with three hemostats so that the bleeding would stop, and to expose the skull.

  Here was the next step in running the rabbits, this surgery. Chesterfield hadn’t suspected anything, only settled right into the Gormezano box as if it were a second home, ready for the black of the filing cabinet Instead, I’d taken him upstairs to the operating room, just another ex-dorm room, and given him the injection of Thorazine to mellow him out, a few minutes after that the Nembutal. Twenty minutes later I pinched his hind foot, got no reaction, then gently tapped his eyeball. Nothing happened, no jerk, not even a groggy flinch. He was out.

  I’d slipped the box into place on the surgery table, and moved into place the stereotaxic frame, the system of bars and joints and clamps that would hold the drill and, later, the electrode in perfect, measured place, allowing three-dimensional coordinates that would ensure I entered the brain at precisely the right point

  I’d done this enough times now so that I figured I’d feel nothing, but today was different somehow. I thought about it as I bent over the exposed skull, the bone covered with the thin fascia, the tissue that was to protect the skull but which was useless now. I scraped away the tissue with my scalpel.

  Perhaps this odd feeling was because of Chesterfield, my pet now, a rabbit who had taken to eating out of my hand; sometimes I carried him around in my arms like a big cat. But it wasn’t him, I knew. A particular sadness came over me whenever I operated on the rabbit I’d named, a childlike sadness, a sadness I indeed felt just then, the scalpel in hand, the tissue pushed back to the hemostats. But there was another feeling in me, a different, darker, more penetrating one.

  Finally before me lay the scraped and clean pink of the skull itself, the midline fissure like a thin fault, the anterior bregma and posterior lambda fissures crossing over the midline like thin, red wires meandering across and perpendicular to the midline. These crossings were my landmarks, simple lines on a skull that signaled where to begin measurements: 8 mm posterior the bregma along the midline, 1 to 1½ mm left lateral the midline, that point marked with the tip of a pencil. That feeling, the scratch of graphite across hard, dull bone to leave a small gray x, was at once awful and exciting to me, entry into the brain only moments away now.

  I moved into place the drill and small-bore bit, the whining piece of machinery that reminded me always of visits to the dentist, of buffing and polishing, of grit in the mouth and friction against bone, my bones, my teeth; a sound that sent chills into me in a moment. I brought the bit down into place, the tip poised a fraction of an inch above the skull, and I switched on the power, heard the high-pitched whirr. With the calibrated dial at the base of the frame, I lowered the bit even farther, touched bone, sent small grains of it into the air. Here came the grinding sound again, and those same chills went right into me. I gave the dial a moment’s more pressure, and I was through the bone. I retracted the bit.

  For a moment the dark feeling in me had left, gone with the whine of the drill, the disintegration of bone. I took the drill from the clamp on the frame and replaced it with the electrode carrier assembly, its needle insulated with Epoxylite everywhere but at the tip; the exposed metal, that portion that in a few moments would be in the midst of the Red Nucleus, would bum only the brain cells immediately around it. Burn them into extinction, we hoped, so that the conditioned response, the blink before shock, back inside the file cabinet, would disappear.

  The feeling was gone, but as I fixed the alligator clip first to Chesterfield’s right ear, then attached the opposite end to the lesion maker, and as I attached the second clip to the top of the electrode carrier and the appropriate end to its own post on the lesion maker, that strange feeling came back, with it a notion as to why I had the feeling, this feeling of dread. That was it, I knew: dread, a dread deeper than that caused by what I knew I was doing to Chesterfield, my pet: destroying brain cells, wiping them out in the Red Nucleus in the hopes that what little he’d been taught would be forgotten, that pieces of whatever small thought the animal could muster would be exterminated.

  It was my dream that was causing the feeling, I thought, the dream I’d had again last night: children and wind and black holes. The dream had changed, I realized. In some minute way a detail had been added, something that might mean nothing. But my dream was different now.

  I sat with the needle suspended over the hole I’d just drilled, but I did nothing. I did nothing, except try to remember the dream.

  And then there it was, the small thing, the insignificant: the boy, my oldest, the child who stood in the middle of my three, had lifted his hand up from the edge of the bed. He’d lifted it up, and had started moving it toward me as if, I saw, he’d wanted me to take it. His hand had been milk-white in the moonlight, a young boy’s hand, soft and unwrinkled and dimpled at the wrist. He’d held it out to me, but in my dream my hands were stumps, useless. I could not have taken his hand even if I had tried.

  The dream had gone on as usual after that, the wind picking up, the children swirling round the room, disappearing, me waking up with my eyes wide open to the alarm clock, to my husband snoring quietly next to me. To this day, and my job entering brains.

  I felt a touch on my shoulder, and I realized I’d heard my name.

  I turned. It was Sandra.

  She said, “Who were you talking to in here?”

  “What?” I said, and I tried to smile, to look as if I hadn’t blinked out in the middle of surgery.

  “Who were you talking to in here?” she said again, the same puzzled look on her face as the first time she had asked. “I was in the staining room blocking brains, and I could even hear you over the radio in there. It sounded like you were saying the same word again and again.” She paused, waiting for me to say something. “Come on,” she said, “you know what I’m talking about.”

  I didn’t. I said, “You’re kidding me. Jack put you up to this, or Paige or Wendy. I’m in here working, and you guys are trying to give me a hard time.”

  She was quiet, her mouth open, and for a moment I didn’t recognize her, didn’t know the woman before me. Her skin had gone pale somehow, the color lost, and her hair, usually up in
a clean bun or perfect braids, had been only clipped back with barrettes, the ends shaggy, wisps of hair down over her forehead. Her eyes, too, seemed smaller, the skin around them a little darker than the rest of her face, a pale blue I hadn’t seen before.

  “Claire,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  I said, “Nothing,” and adjusted myself on the stool, shook my head. “Nothing. If I was talking in here, I didn’t know it.” I smiled, put my hands together in front of me. “Maybe I was just goofing around in here, singing or something, and didn’t even know it.” I paused, and looked in her eyes, trying to turn this conversation away from me and back to her, because the idea of me talking in here by myself frightened me. I couldn’t remember anything. Just the dream.

  I said, “You’re asking me if I’m okay, when it should be the other way around. You don’t look very well. Are you okay?”

  Suddenly she changed, became animated, took her hand from where she’d had it on the door frame and touched it to her hair, looked down, smiled. She stood straighter, put her other hand in her lab coat pocket and fished around for something.

  She said, “My hair. It’s just my hair. I got tired of wearing it back and tight and worrying about a hair being out of place.” She stopped, seemed to have found what it was she was looking for in her pocket. She pulled out a pencil, examined it and, without looking at me, said, “You’re in the middle of things, though. You’ve got surgery going on, so I’m getting out of here.” She looked up at me, gave a faint smile. “You just keep on frying brains in here.”

  She turned, started out the door, but stopped and leaned back in. She said, “Who’s Martin, anyway?”

  I swallowed too fast, and coughed hard, felt my face going over into the heat of red, the blood rushing there as I coughed. She came to me and patted my back. “Settle down,” she said, “settle down.”

  When I got my breath, I said, “How do you know Martin?”

  Again she gave that puzzled look, her eyes focused on me as if I were some stranger. She said, “That’s what you were saying in here. At least that’s what it sounded like to me. That name over and over.”