Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  “Kunstler. Her name is Inez Kunstler.”

  “Her again?” The guard had spoken without thinking about it. He regretted it right away, too, because right away the little man became agitated.

  “You know her?” the little man said.

  “I’m starting to think she must be the most popular cleaning lady in New Jersey. I had a gang of hippies in here an hour ago asking for her.”

  “Did you let them in?” the little man asked anxiously. “Did he see her?”

  “No,” the guard said carefully. “Nobody saw her.” The man nodded, and seemed maybe to relax a little. “And they were a lot more polite about it than you’ve been, I got to say. So I tell you what. I’ll let you do what they did: you can write her a note. That’s fair, right? But after that you have to leave or I’m getting the cops in here. This is trespassing, and if someone has to shoot you over it, I’d rather it be them.”

  He walked the little man back, a hand held up between them, the two facing each other as if they were sharing a dance. The little man was still tense enough that his agitation was in the air. When they reached the desk the guard glanced quickly over at the weekday log and the open drawer. The only paper he could reach without having to stretch too far was the note the kids had left, held down by the lunch box. He pulled it free and held it out at arm’s length. The little man put a hand out and for the first time the guard noticed the strange melted nubs of skin that were his two first fingers. “You can write it here on the back of the other one, okay?” he said.

  The guy grabbed it, but instead of flipping it over, opened it while backing away. The guard had let himself get distracted thinking about where he had put his pen, and angry at himself as much as at the little guy, he barked, “Hey!” He rushed after the retreating little man, whose eyes were locked on what he was reading. The guard finally grabbed the paper away, but didn’t get a good grip on it, so it fluttered to the floor. The little man looked at the guard briefly with his curious blank eyes, then down at the note. His lips were moving as if he were reciting something. The guard tried to think of what to say or do, but by then the little man was already heading for the door. The moment he reached the sidewalk, he began to run.

  The guard waited for a minute, still on edge, in case he might come back. He walked to the front doors and looked through them at the street, then leaned down, took a ring of keys from his belt, and turned the lock that bolted to the floor. He wasn’t supposed to lock up except for when he went to the dentist’s office to use the toilet, but he needed it, at least for a while. He started back towards his chair. The note was still open on the floor. It was slightly twisted from being yanked around, shuddering sideways a little where it felt the underbelly of the fans’ swinging wind. When the guard reached it he picked it up, smoothed it out, and read it. It said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t home last night I have to talk to you Can you meet me when you’re done?” There was an address. The guard folded it again and put it back in its place on the desk, under the same corner of the lunch box as before. He retrieved his book and sat down, but it was a while before he started reading.

  From the moment he opened the scrap of paper and saw what was written there Kunstler repeated the address as once he had repeated to himself his own name, the drawn-out baptism of chanted repetition—Abe Kunstler, Abe Kunstler, Abe Kunstler. It carried with it the same edgeless hole of panic that had fallen through his rib cage when, a prelude to his life, he had answered the help Wanted sign and so was forced at last to become himself. Now it was the address that held both fear and the future, and he carved the same channel for it in his mind and body, made it the same function of his breathing. Asking a cabbie for directions had meant allowing the litany to rise up momentarily through his throat to his lips, and he worried briefly that by sharing it he might lose it, let it slip through his teeth into the world and escape. Kunstler listened and nodded as the cabbie waved his hands and chopped at the air: this many lefts and rights, that many blocks straight on—but he never let go of the words.

  That was why after he had run with the sound coiled in his stitched and heaving chest through the streets from the office building, after he had rehearsed it across the cracked, sun-lashed sidewalk, driving one leg past the other in a torrent of ankle-twisting pain, he believed he could meet his body’s command to stop at the bar. He could stand at the long wooden haven, he could fill himself with liquor, he could drink until his joints were loose; he would not forget. The lights flopping red and blue in the window were already like a promise of healing. Just to see them, just to step through the door and hear their neon buzz, was to feel the coming relief.

  He knew then that there hadn’t been any choice. He needed to retrieve his thinking, which was wrapped in a constricting dry gauze, unable to discern anything clearly. He almost counted on his fingers: the time minus the hours it would take Inez to get there. It didn’t matter. He needed to take his drink and hope it unrolled in him a blueprint for deliverance.

  The place was filling up, but Kunstler barely noticed anything, not the people or the space. In a kind of blindness he walked to a line of tall, fixed stools at the bar, climbed one, and asked the barman for whiskey. When the heavy little glass arrived he filled himself with the whole thing, a long thread of burning relief. As he waved for another his vision had already begun to clear, and he wondered if this was what it felt like the first time a man put on glasses, retooled to a crisper world.

  The thoughts he needed didn’t come, though. In the past somehow he had always known what to do: the name and the story that were the shape and image of the person he might become, the job giving that shape momentum and solidity, the girl Inez who was the light he shined blindingly in the eyes of anyone who might think to look at him twice. Hadn’t he unerringly chosen the furnace and the knife, the short hair, the collared shirt? It was wanting the child that had been the problem. He had given in to the urge for something not needed. He had sold his safety to desire.

  Now in his panic he would give it away again, this time to a swift parade of drinks, at the end of which he would lose control and the room spin around him as if he were a spindle, throw him roughly off his stool and against a wall of bare brick. Through the spinning he made out two men who held him by the arms as the bartender felt around for his pockets. Kunstler thought to himself, I could have told them that the money’s gone, but then he realized that of course he already had. That was why they were checking: he had more liquor in him than he could pay for. He started to yell and then to struggle, but it was almost with a sense of obligation, because somehow his thoughts moved slowly, almost calmly, telling him, Soon this will be over, since there’s only so much pay they can get in blood and fighting. It didn’t surprise him that someone just as calmly said, “Heads up,” when Kunstler’s forearm came briefly loose and jerked like a piston in the emptiness. If you can even call it a fight, he corrected himself, kicking his legs and working his fist uselessly. He had to get the barman’s hand out of his pockets, and even drunk he could calculate it was better they beat him than search him. At the instant in which his hand found a target, something soft and belly-like, Kunstler made out clearly his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar, a worn and dirty face nearly expressionless between two bottle necks. Someone hit the face and the reflection disappeared.

  Then he was outside, where the sun was nearly gone but the heat still nestled in the pavement. He was facedown, and had to drag himself into some sort of consciousness through a head ringing and distant, a mind that floated softly within a far room of his own thinking. He tried to look around but his eyes crossed and swam. Over them was pressed a second image, shallow but indelible like a welder’s spark, so that it was impossible to look away from it. It lingered even behind closed lids. Although he saw the buildings and the fading summer daylight and the cars, from deep inside the cage of his pain he found he was looking everywhere at a kitchen in a basement, at a light swinging violently, at a spreading lake of blood. The sha
rp knife from the kitchen was so near he could almost touch it, and the furnace door, and he had to fight to keep himself from reaching for what he knew he couldn’t have. No amount of blinking would dissolve it.

  It’s him, Kunstler thought, meaning the man, a spirit come because after all this time his death was suddenly to have been for nothing, betrayed by the failure of the years between, by Kunstler’s failure to make true the plan. He had promised and sworn to re-create the fallen husband, who had been lost already three times. He knew the man was lost every day again when not re-created in the boy, usurping and untrue. The boy: it was through his birth it had all been lost. All the nights and bars and drinks, all the men enticed, the hopes raised, the plans on which he had constructed his future, they had all disappeared like water gripped in a fist because of the boy. Now it seemed the man would be lost one final, irretrievable time when Kunstler, the vessel in which whatever remained of the man resided, was cracked open and emptied by the boy’s disgusting words. The sharp knife from the kitchen, Kunstler kept thinking, his head oppressed by heat and fatigue and pain, spinning with the invitation of a blissful, thoughtless sleep—but in his far-off thoughts he still heard the sound of his own voice repeating silently the address, the words tattooed on his breath, and carried by the sound he made his way through the street towards the place, limping sightlessly, braced for the unknown task as he had braced himself long ago outside the door to the basement apartment, anticipating as then with a kind of relieved horror the dullness that he hoped would follow.

  Then he was in front of the building on melting knees, making his way up the stoop even as he thought, First in the war when his spirit was taken and his shell left empty but alive, then when the habit of living left across the slow dark kitchen floor, and last his body, part by part, the heat and blasting dust. His right eye and cheekbone still shuddered from the punch he’d taken and now his eye was almost swollen shut. It stung with sweat but he didn’t dare touch it. With a finger he tested the huge bump where the force of the blow had cracked his skull against the bar’s brick wall. He thought of a head hitting a sink and of a head retreating from a thrown fist abruptly to a wall, and punching that head again now in his vision Kunstler was confused to see that the man he hit was himself. The sun was gone and in the dark the building seemed dead. The only lights he could see, faint, unfriendly, came from the top floor.

  I’m too late, he thought. She’ll be there and I’m too goddamn late. He could think of no other path, however, and now he was inside the building’s narrow, unlit entryway, the smell of mold and summer garbage. Then he was on the stairs, and they creaked under him. He was suddenly so weak that he had to use his hands to pull himself up the steps. Even my walk wants to give me away, he told himself—although he could suddenly find no reason why he should sneak when they would see him soon enough. As he climbed he shook his throbbing head to clear from his eyes the kitchen and the furnace, the swinging bulb and the knife, but they wouldn’t go. It was through them that he looked up towards the pale light at the top of the stairwell, and through them that he moved across the top-floor landing towards a door which nearly fell on him when he took the knob because it leaned loose against the wall. Beside it was an empty doorway.

  Through that was a narrow hall. One end was brighter, and there was some kind of music. Kunstler passed more open doorways, but only one was lit, and he made his way there through the unmoving ghostly kitchen that rested behind his eye, the sharp knife always just beyond his hand. Then he could see a girl, a hippie girl. He could see her long and heavy hair, her thin shirt touched with sweat beneath the arms, her dirty bare feet, but he saw as well the spectral light that swung wildly over a half-remembered kitchen table after a final grab at life, and the pivoting shadows it threw across a lost room. Behind the girl a curly-haired boy looked out a dark window at the dark city, and over him spread the slow lake, fuel released from a uselessly spinning engine. The hippie girl was sitting at a table over which no bare light swung, and Kunstler knew this was wrong. Sitting with her were his wife and his child. Around them all the room rippled as if in water. One by one they all turned to look at him, the strangers first—her eyes calm, his dark and furtive—then the boy with his twisted face, and finally Inez.

  “Has he told you?” Kunstler asked her. His voice was like a crushed tin can.

  Inez stared at him, and began to rise from her chair. She said, “Abe, what are you…” The boy spoke, too, but Kunstler was already advancing on them, unlistening, in a body completely beyond his control, which moved and screamed demands, shook and clenched its fists and raised its arms in every gesture of violence, a body lashing out as it called again and again for an answer and then was pulled back and down by the others, the two strangers, their hands around him where for years no hands but only bandages had been, and he felt the ribbon of consciousness slipping from him, holding on to it just long enough to look up at the girl Inez a brief last time. He saw her as if from miles off.

  She again now and no longer the he that once was, the he that had been presumed solid, had even at times seemed impenetrable, but was then torn open like a door to reveal beneath it the irrevocable, the treacherous and negating bones, the parts that were too deep for alteration to reach, that could never be exchanged. Hers was a body stripped bare even by the people who claimed they would save her, doctors and nurses who didn’t understand that there were things to lose more important than the simple mechanics of life. She had been too weak to stop them from reducing her to a floating nameless thing, lost on an icy sea, and try as she might no haven would come to mind unless it was the dark and silent room where half a century before her father had called her “my girl” and finally breathed his life out.

  How different it had been from the room where she was going to die, pastels and plastics and the endless vibrating half noise of the machines. And yet although here she would not find the dignity of silence, because there could be no dignity at all amid the chattering of the nurses and the doctors, the antiseptic they used to keep the stench away, this was where she would wait. She had awoken into an anticipation of the boy, a knowledge found in the air and nothing else: that wherever she was he would come. He couldn’t fail her in that, at least. Where else was there to go, for any of them? They had no home any more, for by now they knew the secret that in fact was many secrets folded in upon themselves and fused, and their knowledge destroyed the unspoken thing that had been no less than her person, the one and indivisible fact of her, now dissolved like a snowflake caught and considered on the tip of a finger, so that she was destroyed, too, undone—and yet still the woman revealed was not the same she as had disappeared long ago, who now was and was not Kunstler, no longer and yet still the man who had never allowed himself the thought of comfort, who had put aside the hope of removing from his ear the years-long scream of fear that filled and isolated him.

  She floated in an unmeasured waiting, knowing that time and the hospital sounds were nothing. The tubes and the bed and the machines, the metal trees that for fruit bore bags of blood: all these were nothing, as unimportant as the vanished name that once had been hers but was now forgotten, irretrievable. Their meeting would be as if they were in an empty room in an empty building, maybe on an empty earth, where this disappointment would peel everything else away and in the emptiness it left bring them together, and like the passage of the man her husband across the slow, dark lake, her own passage would have meaning because it, too, would somehow give life to a man, thinking, This is my body, but I will give it up for you.

  How strange it was to learn only after all these years that it was at the moment of submission the man had been strongest, that he had been most what she admired when he appeared least like himself. Of course it was only in following the terrible road of his experience to its farthest post that she understood the distinguished, the majestic burden of transformation: a strength that abides in an acquiescence that is also a rebellion, a refusal to find value in the valued thin
g. That was true strength: to cast aside an average man’s fortune of reduced potential in order to seize sovereignty over the future. She knew that she would give herself up to death and the boy not just so another could have what she had been gifted, but because in doing it she would demonstrate the immense power that came with her choice.

  Suddenly the hospital was around her again. It was impossible to tell how long she had been there. She often went away from it into sleep, into the old wicked dream come again of the man her husband in his many parts waiting to be assembled but refusing assembly, and she unwilling to follow him, too afraid to sail after him across the lake of his death—until suddenly for once and for all time to come she wasn’t, and at that moment she felt herself fly above his ruined body, rising finally into the moment of waking to the dark of the drawn curtain and the humming and buzzing of the hospital machines.

  Someone was there. It had happened before, but this time she was sure: this time at last it would be the boy. It had to be, if only because she knew he would come, knew that he had to come before it was too late. She would rise when he came, closing her fists so he would have no choice but to fight when both would know that in her present weakness to fight would be her end, her release. So she started to raise her hand, because still she believed there was hope, and hoping she thought: if I am not a real man at least maybe in this last moment I will create one in the boy, offer him that strength of purpose that was not his other father’s doing but mine, made by me and the tools of my hand, made as a machine is tooled. In that way maybe he will finally be my son, blood or no blood. I will raise my hand to deliver that weak blow that will bring about my own end, because underneath the long hair and flowered clothes, the stupid beads and feathers, maybe beneath that I have constructed a thing so solid that not even these distorted days of excess and confusion will take it from me.