As the hands reached toward that single point of color to extinguish it until all became whiteness, his head dropped forward with enough force to startle him fully awake.
“Shit,” he breathed. “Don’t you go all crazy on me, Payne-me-boy!”
He straightened away from the wall, which was now warm and damp with his sweat, and crossed the room in three strides. He pulled a glass from the shelf and filled it with tepid water straight from the faucet. He gulped the water down in one breath, refilled the glass, gulped again, and refilled until his stomach burned with the indefinable burn of tepid tap water confronting emptiness. He was sweating. He thought about pouring a bowl of cereal but decided against it and chewed absently on a rock-hard bagel instead, then went into the bathroom and relieved himself of at least one and a half glasses of water that was as tepid coming out as it had been going in.
By the time he returned to the kitchen, he felt better. Marginally. His head ached slightly. His ears buzzed. Not much, not a frantic mosquito’s BZZZZZ, not even a distant bee’s more ethereal bzzzz, but something less defined, more irritating because most of the time it remained subliminal. He shook his head and yawned widely to pop his ears. That helped a little.
What the hell’s going on.
He avoided speaking out loud.
First there was the utter stupidity of his panic last night, then that equally stupid memory of Grandpa and the outhouse monster, and now some half-assed daytime nightmare about the kitchen walls and ghostly hands sticky with sweat at handling worn-out undies left behind by a woman weeks in her grave.
“Shit,” he said again, but this time there was an undercurrent of humor in the word. He was going dotty or something.
Maybe it was something in the paint. Yeah, that was it. Some secret formula Great-Aunt Emilia concocted in a secret lab behind a secret door in the ramshackle garage. White paint to white-out the mind.
He grinned.
He wouldn’t put something like that past her, given what little he knew about her, but to give the old bitch her due there really wasn’t any room in the garage for a secret lab.
So—the whole thing is jitters and the best cure for that is to do something. Get off your ass and get something done.
But what?
He seriously considered washing the car. It was still coated with a layer of dust from its days in the LAX parking lot. He glanced through the window to where the car sat in the drive. The sun glinted sharply from the hood and top, glaring into the kitchen.
Nope, he decided without much hesitation. Too hot. And his eyes hurt when he stared too long at the glistening chrome. The car needed a wash but it would have to wait. Maybe tonight, more toward dusk.
Or he could check out the attic. It would be dark up there, easier on his eyes. The crawl hole was easily accessible, too, a cut-out in the ceiling at the far end of the hallway. He had noticed it before and thought that he should climb up some day and see what was there, what shape the place was in. And, after all, there was that single window beneath the eaves out front, the one that sometimes glowed in the sunset like a cyclopean eye, so there must be some sort of room overhead.
He went to the garage and returned a few moments later with a small, rickety stepladder copiously spattered with white paint. He set it up at the end of the hall. He tested the lowest rung with one foot.
It wobbled but felt like it would probably hold.
You should wait until tomorrow and check on a new ladder at Lumber City a mile or so down the main street, part of him argued. That would be the safe thing, the wise thing, the careful thing. After all, who knew how long this ladder had been sitting around, warping and decaying, its hinges rusting, its rungs loosening in their corroded steel grommets, its wood gradually turning to mush. One wrong step and....
But by the time he had reached that stage in his thinking, he had pushed the ceiling cover back and was boosting himself up onto the joists of the attic.
It was warm up there. He was glad that he was wearing cut-offs and no shirt. The air smelled stale—like at Grandma’s in some ways but essentially different. It was a generic staleness, blue-banded and plain-wrapped. He conjured an image of air trapped in a white bag, the sides rhythmically expanding and contracting like lungs, and blue letters marching boldly across the front reading “AIR: For Attic Use Only.” Probably stocked on the shelf next to “GRANDMA SMELLS” and “GRANDPA SMELLS.”
He sat on the edge of the opening and pulled his legs through. Someone had done some work up here long ago. Thick dust carpeted everything, but the spaces between most of the ceiling joists had been covered with half-inch unfinished plywood paneling to make a rough floor. At the far end, the window diffused light through dust and layers of flyspecks. He walked toward it.
He knelt in the thick dust. It puffed out beneath his knee, then settled down to cake on the upper surface of his thighs. Kneeling in the hot, stale air made his ears buzz again, louder this time and more insistently. He peered through the rippled glass. He could see nothing. He looked around. Behind him was thin stack of old newspapers. He grabbed the top one and rubbed a clean circle in the middle of the window. Through it, he could make out the sidewalk, a portion of the street, most of the house across the way. He hadn’t met the people who lived there, but Nick said they were an old couple.
He looked down at the sill, heavily layered with dust as if all of the dryness in the house were funneled up here to lie undisturbed as a motionless record of passing years. Embedded in it, like fossils stratified in gray opaque amber, lay bluebottle flies, small black kernels of death. In an upper corner of the window, one live fly buzzed an unending monotone—a “blue uncertain buzz,” he remembered from somewhere. It matched the buzzing in his ears and for a moment there was only one sound; then his ears kicked up to a higher pitch and hummmed an irritating duet with the fly.
Aunt Emilia’s attic was smaller and darker and dustier, he decided, but it still could have been Grandma’s. The papers at his feet were yellowed and torn. He picked one up and squinted at it in the dim light. The date was unreadable. He tried a second sheet: March 28, 1953. Over fifty-five years old.
He duck-walked through the dust to three cardboard boxes huddled like frightened orphans where the roof angled down to touch the rafters. One by one, he pulled back the flaps on the boxes. There was nothing in any of them except a couple of inches of excelsior. He pushed his hand through the stuff but found nothing. Only after he finished with the third box did he stop to think what might have been there instead of old artifacts: spiders, rats, mice, maybe nests of vermin, their droppings at the least.
He glanced around. There was no sign of rodents. Not right here where he was kneeling and apparently not anywhere in the attic. The dust was undisturbed except for where he had walked and for occasional indentations of nearly obscured footprints that might have been months or years old. There was no sign of scurrying little things hiding in the darkness.
He moved to another pile of boxes a few feet away. These too were empty. That left only the last cluster, half a dozen stacked on the other side of the drop-way into the hall, near the back of the attic.
He went to the opening and sat on the edge, dangling his legs through the drop-way until his toes just missed the last rung on the ladder.
The light was paradoxically dimmer and harsher back here, well away from the dusty window at the front of the house. The light from the hallway cast heavy shadows upward that made it difficult to see inside the boxes, but they were close enough for him to tip them back and look. As with the others, most were empty except for occasional bits of packing materials. It was as if something had been delivered, then the boxes were simply tucked out of sight. Waste not, want not. He peered at the nearest label. It was stamped electronics but he couldn’t make out anything more.
He lifted each of the remaining boxes and tossed them to the center of the attic, enjoying the swirls of dust that rose as each thudded onto the plywood floor. Finally he tugged at t
he last one to slide it closer. The cardboard ripped noisily, tearing from top to base.
The box was heavy, obviously not empty.
Curious, he pulled with both hands, trying to slide the box without ripping it further.
The box refused to slide.
He drew his legs up and moved over to the box, pushing back the remaining three flaps.
It was apparently full of magazines. He couldn’t read parts of the top title because the fine print in typewriter font was obscured by dust and age, but he thought that it had something to do with electronics. What else would one expect from Aunt Emilia, he asked himself, rather more disappointed than he quite understood.
His ears were buzzing again. Or at least he noticed again that they were still buzzing. He felt a little flushed, too. Time to get out of here and back into the fresh air. He decided to climb down and finish up here another day, pick a cool cloudy fall day when there was a crispness in the air and attic would be chilly rather than stuffy and his ears would settle down and let him hear.
He shoved the box to the opening, climbed down the ladder several steps, and started pulling the box out. For one bad moment he almost lost his balance. The ladder swayed beneath him, threatening to pitch him off backward, but then he was back in control and his right foot touched the floor. A minute later, he dropped the box onto the kitchen table.
Dust billowed from it, thick and acrid. He waved his hand to dissipate the cloud. His hands were caked with dust. He looked down. His chest and shorts and legs were gray, more like antique, decaying flesh than glowing with Southern California health. He clapped his hands against his thighs, intrigued as the dust clouded in tiny spurts. The attic had been far dirtier than he had thought.
So—a shower first. He walked toward the bathroom, kicking off his shoes and stepping out of his pants as he went. But inside, just as his hand reached to pull back the shower curtain and turn on the old-fashioned faucets, he stopped.
He yawned to pop his ears and shook his head again. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of his underwear, then paused once more.
Why would Aunt Emilia stuff magazines into the attic when everything else relating to electronics was neatly catalogue and stored in the Master Control Room? What was so unimportant about the stuff that she would store it up in the attic but so important that she would not have it boxed up with the other junk and sent on to charities?
Still dirty, he walked out of the bathroom. What was a little dust, anyway? The shower could wait.
He returned to the kitchen. He leaned against the doorjamb to study the box on the table across the room from him. It seemed definitely out of place, the only blot of dust and filth in the pristine kitchen. He scanned it for labels. It was plain. No packing label. No name stenciled on the side. Just a plain brown box. The magazine on top was frosted with dust that made it look like the fading ghost of a magazine. He padded to the table and picked up the magazine, leaning over to blow away the coating of dust.
And froze.
The buzzing In his ears spiraled into a scream. He screamed. High-pitched and thin, like a woman in final terror.
A second magazine, lying neatly underneath the first one, glowed clean, fresh, vividly colored, without a speck of dust.
It showed a fully, frontally nude male.
Payne dropped the electronics magazine. It fluttered to the floor and lay half open, squashed on the tile like a wounded bird whose fragile wings had failed.
He stared, his mouth dry and aching, his right arm throbbing.
He saw a naked man erect and grinning up at him.
With a shaking hand, Payne lifted the magazine out of the box, handling it as gingerly as if it were a poisonous snake. The picture on the cover of the magazine beneath was like the first—worse even, if that was possible, with two men twined around each other like perverted summer vines. And the next, and the next. To the bottom of the box.
By the time he had finished, male nudes littered the tabletop. Payne was sweating, the drops mixing with dust and streaking his arms and sides and chest.
When the box was empty, he picked up one of the magazines and flipped through it. More of the same as on the covers, but worse and worse. More graphic. More explicit.
He licked his lips. Aunt Emilia apparently had strange taste in art. All of the magazines dated after 1998. No one else he knew of could have put them in the attic. He glanced over the scattered pile, noting the general sequentiality of the things, oldest on top of the table, most recent hidden or half-hidden. The reverse order from the way they had been inside the box.
Probably she put them up in that box, one by one, month after month.
He picked up one and thumbed through it, the pages rippling past like images from nightmares. Suddenly he stopped turning pages and stared at one of the photographs.
“My god,” he whispered barely above a breath, as if afraid someone might overhear and come into the kitchen to investigate.
The photograph had been defaced. It was scratched and gouged and scored exactly over the model’s genitals.
Payne shuddered.
The next page was the same. He flipped toward the front of the magazine. He hadn’t noticed it before, but almost every photograph was mutilated. Only the genitals, but with a precise violence that left him shattered.
His hand trembled, his arm ached. He dropped the magazine and massaged his sore muscles.
Aunt Emilia, he thought wildly. These are hers. She liked this kind of thing. She liked looking at pictures of naked men.
But it was worse than that, he knew intuitively. Far worse.
For one thing, these were not just pictures of naked men engaged in activities Aunt Emilia probably should not have even known about.
There were the gouges. He ran one finger over the roughened paper.
She had loved and hated. Lusted, perhaps, and felt repulsed.
Lifting his hand, he saw a dark smudge across the glossy finish of the photograph. He looked at his finger, at the back of his hand where the dust was damp and caking, then at his stomach, bare and streaked with dirt, the only clean skin a narrow band between where his shorts had been and the crisp blue elastic of his underwear. He was filthy, standing almost naked in the kitchen, filthy and dusty and dirty.
He went to the bathroom and stripped, staring for a long moment at the solid line of dust at his waist.
What the hell was going on here?
Payne stepped into the shower, welcoming the cold water that gradually warmed then grew almost uncomfortably hot before he adjusted the faucets. The heat washed away layers of grime and dust and tiredness and fear. White lather from his shampoo spilled over his face, stinging his eyes but cleansing cheeks and neck and shoulders.
He stood under the spray for what seemed hours. When he was finished, toweled and dried, hair combed, dressed in jeans and jogging shoes and a long-sleeved chambray shirt buttoned tightly at the cuffs, he returned to the kitchen and stacked the magazines carefully into the box, oldest on the bottom, newest on the top.
He set the electronics magazine over that one, centering it to make sure nothing showed of the magazine underneath it. He taped the torn side with silver duct tape from the utility drawer, folded down the flaps and tucked them inside each other to keep them folded, then taped over each of them.
There was an old metal drum In the back yard. He would take them right out and burn them. Right now. This minute. He might have to live with a dirty attic, but that kind of dust you could get rid of if you wanted to. This kind of filth was something different.
He slid a hand under the box to lift it. There was a sharp bzzzz like a wasp about to attack. He flinched, just as the kitchen light blew with a flash of light and a shattering ping! A splinter of glass sliced across his knuckles, drawing a bead of blood.
Damn, he thought, now I’ll have to change the bulb.
Lucky thing the ladder was handy. He shoved the table to one side and pulled the ladder into the middle of the room, th
en rummaged through a corner cabinet for the replacement bulbs he had seen there several days before. It only took a couple of minutes to replace the bulb. The wires inside had disintegrated; the bulb had cracked from the metal base to the imprinted wattage statement at the top.
When he finished tightening the last screw on the milky globe covering the bulb, he rinsed the blood off his hand, deciding against applying a bandage. He left the kitchen and walked through the front of the house and out the door and onto the porch. He did not slide the table back beneath the light fixture. He did not touch the box that day or the next or the next.
Finally, nearly a week later, he simply shoved the box back up into the attic, not particularly thinking about what he was doing, just getting it out of the way. It sat near the opening, just as Aunt Emilia had done. He left.
He never consciously noted that on the day the light bulb blew, he had not turned the kitchen light on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Two days after he returned the box to the attic, Payne called Cathy for a date. She arrived at six and stayed until a little after midnight. They ate, talked, did the dishes, watched a film Cathy had missed never heard of, Somewhere in Time, a box-office bomb that the critics had hated, but Cathy fell in love with Christopher Reeve and the hotel and the nostalgia and the sense of loss. Afterward she cried. They talked and had a drink or two and she left. She kissed Payne goodnight and then she left.
The next night, he went to her apartment. She shared a couple of rooms in a decaying part of town with another girl who was fortunately on vacation for two weeks and currently camping out somewhere between Ogallala, Nebraska and the Mississippi River. They had the place to themselves.
After a dinner of thick steak and fresh salad, they listened to quiet music on Cathy’s CD player and talked some more. It was silent except for the music, something subdued and harmonious and romantic, especially in dimmed lighting, especially in an apartment with a beautiful woman who curls on a couch and watches you move across the room to pour another drink, her eyes misty, her smile tender. Whose breasts press invitingly against the fragile linen of her blouse. Whose smile is invitation.
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