Shadow Traffic

by Richard Burgin

  She was standing in front of him in her “playmate pose” awaiting his next move, but all he did was kiss her half-heartedly. Not even his usual “playful” spanking. He suspects something, she thought, turning to get him a drink.

  “You want the usual?” she said.

  “Make it a double.”

  She saw Jaime’s face again while she fixed his Scotch, and shuddered. She waited till it ended before she handed Eric his drink because she could never be sure he couldn’t “see through” whatever expression she’d put on her face and know what she was really thinking—as easily as he’d read the headlines in Variety.

  “Tough day?” she said, forcing herself to make eye contact, lest he wonder why she wasn’t.

  “Don’t even ask,” he said, turning away from her. He looked tired. It would be another night when he wouldn’t want her, and even though everything indicated it was her best day to get pregnant, she wouldn’t say anything more about wanting a baby tonight, that was for sure.

  She told him she needed to clean up some things. After all, they were going to L.A. tomorrow—and he bought it, or was too tired to care. She puttered around the living room and kitchen and in less than ten minutes heard him snoring. She knew she was supposed to go to bed herself then but drifted toward the picture window instead. She looked down at the soft, lemony-looking cars, as quiet as plants, as they moved along Park Avenue. She couldn’t believe Jaime had rejected her. She felt she could have gotten pregnant for sure with him and with Eric’s ego, he’d never question it.

  She looked at the cars again. It would be quite a disruption if she jumped and landed among them. It would probably make her immortal—Eric always said death was the ultimate publicity stunt for anyone under thirty (which she still was, or at least looked like).

  She closed her eyes to picture her jump of death, but when she did, she saw herself jumping again, as a little girl, from the tractor into the hay below—a happy prisoner once more of her yellow world.

  Single-Occupant House

  I would have stayed in the other place longer but the false teeth in the bathroom upset me. It was like walking along a beach looking for shells and suddenly seeing a dead lobster. A bad sign, a bad omen, so I knew I had to quit the house and go to the other I’d been considering on Silver Place. I couldn’t even remember now why I hadn’t gone there before and wondered what that said about me.

  The outdoors was full of scares. Tried to keep my eyes closed as much as possible and find my way to Silver Place like a bat. It had taken weeks to learn about the house—its locks and security system—(I used to be a locksmith years ago). I even posed as a sewer worker, which was a risk since I lived nearby, but it worked! Found out it was a single-occupant house, the best kind for me, and that the lady of the house was planning an out-of-state trip to visit her daughter. Managed to find that out by chatting her up a bit. I also saw how I could get in from the cellar. Then one day I noticed her car was gone—twenty-four hours and counting—making her garage look like an enormous, empty mouth. It was time. I was on the main floor and it was as if I’d climbed to the main floor of my memory, too. I saw the cab again, heard the conversation.

  “Why are you driving so fast?” he said from the back seat. I could hear and see him again so clearly it was more like watching a movie, than a memory. I didn’t answer him at first but he repeated himself.

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need to think.”

  “Could you just slow down a little? I don’t want your ‘thoughts’ to kill me, OK?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking about,” I said.

  I shudder now, as I should have then. It’s odd—most bad memories are about the start of something or the end of something but this one was both. It was the end of my driving for Sun Cab Company and the start of my visit to this house and it was all decided that day. Because I certainly couldn’t stay in my apartment after what happened with the passenger, who I knew would call about me. I thought that after I stopped answering the phone they would come to my home and so decided I had to go to others, which I’d been doing more and more often anyway.

  I walked through the first-floor rooms quickly. It was like moving under water, with small life forms floating around me. Went into the family room and saw a blue reclining chair, a La-Z-Boy. I stared at it as if it might dissolve at any moment into a shattered reef of blue dots. Eventually I sat on it, turned on TV, watched it too until I saw an ad for Plavix. “Plavix saves lives,” the ad said. “If you save lives, why aren’t you free?” I said to the TV. Then I shut it off.

  When I’m in people’s houses I don’t steal or eat their food and rarely use their bathrooms, much less ever hurt anyone. I thought this and then I said it to myself on my La-Z-Boy, or her La-Z-Boy, to be more precise. Of course it’d give her an awful scare if she came home suddenly and saw me, but I’m very careful about that. That’s never happened either. I’ve developed a sixth sense about when I should leave a house, almost as if the house warns me in advance. I’m really not a person who dreams of doing harm to anyone. Yet I’ve been told otherwise.

  “OK, just stop and let me out now,” he said.

  I heard him again in my mind movie.

  “We’re on a highway,” I reminded him.

  “Just slow down right now, OK? Slow down or I’ll call the police. I mean it,” he said, brandishing his cell phone like a little spear.

  I lightened my pressure on the pedal, reducing the speed. But that only seemed to make him angrier.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s my thoughts … what I’m thinking.”

  “Your thoughts? What about your goddamn thoughts?”

  “They upset me. I told you.”

  “What thoughts? You didn’t tell me your thoughts. Why should you?”

  “I told you about my apartment. How it’s turned on me.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “I told you in great detail.”

  “Whether you did or not is beside the point. Whether you did or not doesn’t give you the right to drive so fast you could kill me.”

  I heard him, but said nothing. Soon he was yelling at me again.

  I’ve left the La-Z-Boy and am walking through the first floor more slowly this time. When you’re in someone’s house it’s like being in their mind. A house can hide its secrets, for a while anyway, but it can’t hide its mind. Not that its mind is everywhere, but you’ll find it in one of its rooms. When you find it, it’s strangely satisfying—you’re no longer alone then.

  I think the mind of this house is in the living room. There’s a row of knick-knacks on a wooden panel above the fireplace there. I look at them and see a blue glass horse with one leg raised, a three-inch bronze head and some of its upper body, a wooden hand, a carved statue of an oriental woman, and a small white marble elephant. I’m not an art expert, but these are magical things. So much time in them, so much hope. They were meant to save memories, and what could be more magical than that? Without our memory we’d be like a giant flock of crazed bats. We wouldn’t be human, I don’t think. In my apartment I have nothing like those mementos. In my home I can’t feel myself. That’s why I spend so much time in other people’s.

  I don’t envy other people’s houses, even though they’re always nicer than mine. Just the opposite, I feel grateful to them (although they don’t know it) for the time I spend there. I’ve seen many lovely things but have never taken any. (Besides, once you stay in someone else’s home, even if it’s only for an hour, it becomes like one of your homes, and to take something from it would be like stealing from yourself.) Not that I haven’t been tempted. Once I saw a photograph on the refrigerator of a lovely little girl with yellow, sun-like hair. She was in her bathing suit and had been digging in the sand, in her sandbox looking up, on cue, just in time for the picture to be taken. There’s a little bit of surprise in her eyes that’s heartbreaking. I’d rather own it
than the most precious jewels, and I’ve seen quite a collection of those too, in jewelry boxes during my house visits. Still, I’d rather have that little girl’s picture and some others that I’ve seen. But I never took anything, like I said, jewels or photographs alike. I touched both but I never took either.

  Don’t touch me, I heard myself say to myself. Don’t touch me or I’ll crash the cab.

  “You’re still going almost as fast as you were before. Don’t you realize you’re gonna die too if we crash?”

  “I haven’t decided if that’s what I want.”

  “You decide? What about me? I’ve got a wife and kid to come home to.”

  I saw him again in the cab mirror. If he were an animal he’d be part wolf, part fox. So I started to think of him as wolf/fox.

  The veins were out in his forehead; his eyes extended too, like bug eyes. I noticed that his eyes were silver blue, his hair streaked with silver too.

  “Look, I’m sorry that I yelled at you, OK? I’m sorry if I wasn’t listening as well as I should have. Why don’t you slow down a bit and I promise I’ll listen this time.”

  I was silent. There were conflicting thoughts in my head so I said nothing, but I slowed down. We were still on the highway.

  “I remember you had an interesting theory about the secret purpose of the Internet. Had something to do with aliens. You could tell me now, couldn’t you? You could even pull over to the soft shoulder and tell me there, where it would be quieter.”

  He had misrepresented me and I told him that.

  “What I said was the Internet makes us more connected and so more tolerant of other people around the world. I said that maybe that was God’s plan to prepare us, through the Internet, to tolerate the aliens we’re going to meet when we start exploring other planets. That’s what I said.”

  “That’s a really interesting idea,” he said. “You should write an article about it.”

  “But I don’t believe that anymore. I told you that. Now, I don’t think God has any interest in developing us.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s stayed away too long or was never there at all.”

  I hear a noise and the next thing I know the blue horse explodes in my hands. A few of the pieces fall on the floor, like chips of blue ice. The rest is in my hand. The noise goes away but it was enough to make me squeeze the horse that I hadn’t realized had even been in my hand. It’s the first time I’ve ever broken anything during one of my house visits. Now they’ll know someone was there, I thought.

  I was upset after I broke the horse and thought about going down to the cellar to isolate myself for a while, but instead I went back to the La-Z-Boy to think.

  When I was a kid I went to the cellar in my house almost everyday. It was cool and dark even in summer and it was a good place to hide. In that cellar is also where I became a man. It’s where I pleasured myself until it erupted and my fluid fell all over the floor. I nearly fainted from the pleasure. Then the next thing, I imagined how furious my father would be if he knew. My mother would be shocked too, but my father would be furious. It seemed to take forever to clean it all up.

  I stopped going to the cellar after that except when I was told to bring up the laundry from the clothesline. And I’ve never lived in a place where I had a cellar again. Also, in all my house visits I’ve only gone to the cellar once. Saw a huge black spider down there when I did. A bad sign, a bad omen, and I’ve stayed away from cellars since. So even though I deserved some punishment for breaking the horse, time in the cellar seemed too severe.

  I thought of the attic next, though I wasn’t sure that this house had one. When I was afraid my father would find me in the cellar, I sometimes hid in the attic. Heavy and weighted down with alcohol as he usually was, I knew he couldn’t bring himself to look for me upstairs.

  “Don’t be going up to the attic, boy, whatever you do,” he’d say to me. “The attic is where hornets have their heaven.”

  He didn’t say that just to scare me either. He didn’t lie about that as he had so many other things. There were always three of four large hornets buzzing around up there. We didn’t know why they kept coming. When my father was drinking once he said they must have smelled something sweet on my mother. Then he stared at her down there and started laughing while her face turned red. She never told him not to say such things (and he said a lot worse) in public. She was more scared of him than I was, I think.

  You can’t choose your parents the way you can your house. It would be a different world if you could. But when you stay in someone else’s house you sometimes can imagine you’ve had a different life, which can be sweet for a while.

  I get up from the La-Z-Boy realizing suddenly that I still had some of the broken horse chips in my hand while the rest were still on the floor. If I swept it up with the broom in the kitchen and emptied those pieces on the floor along with the pieces in my hand in one of their wastebaskets, they’d know for sure that someone was there while they were gone. Once they saw that, they’d install a security system, or worse, and it would become another place I could never visit again. A better solution would be to hide the pieces in some remote part of the house they might not visit or at the least not for a long time. Ironically, I thought of the attic then as a good burial place for the blue horse. But did they even have one?

  I was up from the La-Z-Boy, next thing I knew, in search of the attic. Didn’t think they had one but they did. It was small but large enough to stay in. Immediately, I emptied the blue horse chips in a wastebasket in the corner, all the while looking around for hornets, but I didn’t see any. Saw no other bugs there either and so sat down on the one straight-back chair in the room.

  The thing about attics is while they’re the best place to hide because no one wants to climb the stairs (except as a last resort) they’re also the hardest place to escape from. The benefits and disadvantages make going there a wash. If I stayed in the attic, even in a hornet-free attic like this one in Silver Place, could I hear the lady of the house if she returned? Or if I did hear, say, the key turning in the lock, would I have time to go down a flight of stairs to find a better place to hide? It would be a foolish risk—a kind of suicide. I’d have to stay in the attic till she fell asleep. Then I’d have to overcome my fear of the dark and of the hornets and wait till I thought she was asleep—an almost inhumane torture. Thank God she didn’t have a dog, unlike so many other single women her age. The younger ones had roommates, for the most part, but the ones her age had dogs.

  There must be a part of me that likes danger (or at least a manageable amount of it) because I decided to stay in the attic. I knew there was nothing much to see there—just some board games of Monopoly and Parcheesi and a collection of old dolls in various stages of decay, but I thought I could sit there in the chair by the small circular window, which let in the gray, cracked light—sit there and maybe sleep a few minutes. Why didn’t I try to sleep on the bed in one of her bedrooms? Because I’m one of those with unpredictable sleeping habits. One time, not in this town but in a neighboring one, I fell asleep too long on one of the beds. When I woke up, I heard the downstairs door open. Worse still, I heard the voices of a man and woman. I’d wanted to smooth out the bedspread, and check for any silver or black hairs of mine (at thirty-five, alas, my hair is both graying and slowly falling out), but there was no time. Fortunately it was summer and the bedroom window had no screen. I was able to sliver snake-like through the window. I thought I heard the man shout as I ran through his backyard. Then I found an alley where I was soon able to get out to the street and run to my car I’d parked a quarter mile away.

  The lesson I drew from what happened was: When you’re doing a house visit, never lie down on a bed. They’re too comfortable, too easy to fall deeply asleep on, whereas no one could sleep more than five or ten minutes on an attic chair. I sat down on it with that in mind and shut my eyes.

  But the cab memory opened them. It was like the voices and visio
ns were hiding in me waiting for the right chance to pounce and once I settled in the attic they saw their chance to come out.

  “What’s really the matter?” wolf/fox said, once more trying his kind tone with me. I was still on the highway, though he kept trying to persuade me to get onto the soft shoulder and talk there.

  I didn’t answer him. I was going fast—lights flashed by. Then I realized it was snowing—the snowflakes were huge too, some of them the size of eyes.

  “Look how big the snowflakes are,” I said, or meant to. It was like I was on another planet, where it was snowing white eyes. But it was still earth, I knew that, it’s more like sometimes this planet seems like another one.

  “You can tell me about what’s bothering you,” he said. “I’ll really listen this time,” he said, still not talking about snow but about what he wanted to.

  I said nothing. I couldn’t understand why the snow made no impression on him. But that’s often happened to me. The things that impressed me didn’t impress others and vice versa. Another reason why I like to visit houses—there is no one there to impress but me, and I can always find something to be impressed by.

  “What’s the matter? You’re speeding again. You said you’d slow down.”

  Did I? I didn’t remember saying that.

  “Come on, slow down and tell me what happened. Can’t you see I’m trying to help you?”

  “You’re trying to help yourself, I think.”

  “What’s wrong with trying to help both of us? Really, tell me what’s wrong with that? Come on, it’s the only way.”

  “I did something bad to someone,” I finally said. “And now I don’t know what to do about it,” I blurted.