She marched drunkenly out her front door, on stiff legs as if she didn't have knees, planning to get a lonely breakfast at the diner across the street, come up with reasons why he should stay with her, marry her, buy a house with her. She was so sad, head down, in such a rush across the sidewalk, she probably never saw the bus.
By the time Tom reached his eighties, he had trouble sleeping.
He'd get into a comfortable position, usually on his stomach, because if he slept on his back he'd wake up coughing, and think of his dream town, try to bring it near.
Lately, he imagined a mansion, evidently having come into some money, white columns and large double doors in front, but a mansion with a room at its center that had a steel trapdoor in the floor.
The trapdoor led down several flights of steel stairs to a subterranean box of a room, with an elevator. That elevator went down deep into the earth, one beaded globe on the control panel after the other popping red as the elevator descended, until it reached the bottom of its shaft.
When the elevator doors opened, it was onto a steel-lined corridor deep within the earth. His footsteps echoed down the planes of the corridor to a huge, circular door at its end, built like a bank vault door, taller than him.
He passed through the door, swung it closed behind him, put his hands on the wheel protruding from the interior side of the circular bank vault door, spoked like a ship's wheel, and grasping its spokes swung it left, until it locked.
Stepping away from the locked door, turning around, he looked down into the largest bomb shelter ever built.
Three stories high, with a two-story Queen Anne house to the left, a few cottages on the other side of the village green for guests, although there weren't any.
Immense steel-lined chambers beyond the village green held enough air, water, food, energy, medicine to last far beyond his lifetime.
He strolled across the green to the two-story Queen Anne house, walking up the path lined with potted pink and red geraniums, and let himself in.
The control center in the living room, large blue monitors showing satellite views from around the globe, confirmed a nuclear war had begun, atomic bombs blooming off the slow rotation of the earth. City after city signed off, slow God's eye pan across the tops of skyscrapers replaced by visual static, screech on the loudspeakers.
As he fell deeper asleep, he wondered if Claudia had survived the holocaust.
And just as he did wonder this, she came prancing down the stairs in the main hallway, just as he remembered her, young and vibrant, goofy face, sports jacket over a flowered dress.
"Is it bad, Dad?"
He took another sip of his Manhattan, depressing tiny buttons on his remote to pick up a signal. "It looks like it's pretty much complete."
She sat beside him on the sofa, straggly blonde hair, with a daughter's familiarity. He could smell her. It was the way she smelled when she was young. The smell of a kid, rather than the smell of a woman.
He tried to think how to phrase his question. He didn't want to say, Do you know you're dead? So instead he asked, Do you know this is a dream?
She tossed an arm over his bent shoulder, happy to be with her Dad, safe at home, despite the circumstances, both of them watching the bad news on the monitors, Mom in the windowless kitchen making chicken and dumplings. You could smell the carrots and onions everywhere within the fall-out shelter. A good smell. The smell of home. No place like it.
She gave him a loving smile with her green eyes. "Yeah. I know this is a dream."
SUDDENLY THE SUN APPEARED
A few weeks after he died, Maggie sat at their kitchen table, windows dark, ice maker rumbling behind her, dumping cubes, and wrote her husband a letter.
Half a letter. It was strange talking to him again, knowing he was no longer here. Like, but not like, when she talked to him in her head, whenever they were apart, at the beginning of their relationship.
As she started the third paragraph, her pretty, black-eyebrowed face tired and worn, she looked down at the sheet of paper, words puckered by tears. Put her palm on the paper, crumpled it, threw it away.
Went around their home, upstairs and downstairs, gathering up all the pills in the house.
Passing photographs on the walls. At one time, all the photographs had been of the living. Now, except for her, all the photographs were of the dead. Funny how that happens. The dead at a barbeque, around a birthday cake, at a petting zoo, at the seashore, hoisting glasses under bright paper lanterns, her arms around the deads' shoulders, one of the dead, ever so sly, holding two fingers up, behind her head.
It's amazing how many pills a couple collects over the years. She noted their names, like those of exotic assassins, as she added them to her hand. Aspirin, leftover pain killers and sedatives from when Carl had one of his wisdom teeth pulled, anti-biotics from the upper respiratory infection she had a few years ago, sleeping pills, the statin pills left in the little see-through orange plastic prescription bottle he hadn't finished at the time he died, five Viagra.
She had a dozen different pills in her palm, all sizes, shapes, cartoon colors, thirty pills in all, by the time she returned to the kitchen table.
She brought down the Canadian Club, what the hell, thought of making a Manhattan, settled for whiskey on the rocks.
Should she turn on the radio?
She decided to just listen to the music in her head.
Cupping her palm up to her lower lip, the one he used to kiss, the one she used to chew, she tilted all thirty pills into her mouth, biting down, crunching, grinding with her back molars, tasting varieties of bitterness, like eating bugs, washing the grainy sludge down with lots of ice-cold whiskey.
Sat still at the kitchen table, genuinely intrigued to see what would happen next.
At first, nothing.
Then, sitting by herself at the kitchen table, in the middle of the night, looking around, thinking nothing was going to happen, she farted.
Again, longer.
Felt nauseous.
Cold, clammy. Sweat across her scalp, her forehead, so profuse it rolled down to her dark eyebrows, then through them, getting into her eyes, stinging.
Trouble breathing.
She sat up, consciously sucking big gulps, in, out, right palm between her breasts.
Then, alarmingly, real trouble breathing. As if her throat were closing.
She stood up away from the table, chair falling over, scared.
Looked over at the black telephone on the far wall.
Her stomach felt queasy.
She farted.
Holding both hands across her swollen belly, she tilted forward, mouth opening, threw up on the kitchen table.
Bile and a bunch of half-digested geometric shapes, colors.
The back of the throat rawness of the vomit made her throw up again
And again.
She was on her hands and knees on the white carpet in the living room, slowly crawling she knew not where, every few crawls stopping, throwing up again, leaving pools of vomit behind her.
Still puking out her stomach, still crawling forward, head down, she realized she wasn't going to die, and that tomorrow morning, she'd have to clean up this mess.
That night, sleeping on her side of the king-sized bed, arms around his pillow, tight hug creating hips, she was spoken to by God.
God spoke in schematics. Carefully drawn screws, metal spirals shaded, lines slanting from the screws down to where they fit into a construction. Measurements in inches rather than metric, little elevens superscripted after numbers.
When she woke, the entire woodworking project was bright in her mind.
Maggie lugged her garbage to the curb, empty bottles clacking against each other in the two bags.
Across the road, her neighbor, Rico, lowered a single bag.
Rico walked across the quiet road to Maggie's side. "Haven't seen much of you." He looked Maggie up and down. "Have you gone back to work yet?"
She straight
ened up from her garbage bags, knowing she looked like a mess, grass-stained gardening pants, purple tee-shirt. "Huh? No, not yet. I'm still adjusting. It's hard. You know?"
"Are you getting enough sleep?"
"Well, I can't sleep at night, because I have these anxiety attacks? Yeah. So, I pretty much just lie in bed, or stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open, but I don't feel like eating anything. But, I get depressed during the day, and when you're depressed you tend to sleep a lot, so I catch up on my sleep then." She looked around at the rolling green hills. Swallowed. "So it all works out."
"You should drink coffee to stay awake during the day. That way you'll sleep at night."
"It hasn't worked for me. I thought about why, and I suspect it's because I put milk in the coffee, and the milk is heated, so I think what's happening is the sleep-inducing tryptophan effect in the milk cancels out the wakefulness effect of the coffee."
He gently lifted his shoulders. "Maggie, couldn't you–"
"I don't like to drink coffee black. It's too bitter."
Rico looked at her front lawn, covered with sheets of plywood, two-by-fours, long posts. "What's with all the wood?"
Maggie turned around to look at the lumber on her lawn. "I had a weird dream Sunday."
Rico stood with his arms by his sides, mild expression on his face. "Really."
"It was the type of dream where someone is talking to you, telling you to do something? Do you know what I mean?"
Rico's voice stayed mild. "No."
"He was giving me detailed instructions on how to build this…contraption." She gestured at the chaotic mess of wood on her green lawn, smiled. "Really detailed instructions. Like an engineer's exploding diagram of how everything fits in place? Like a Leonardo DaVinci drawing. Series of drawings. And I still remember it! I can close my eyes, I can see exactly how I'm supposed to put this thing together. He told me everything."
"Who's he?"
Maggie raised her dark eyebrows. "God."
"God spoke to you?"
She bent her head in concession. "I know it sounds nuts." Looked off, smiling. "But hey, I suddenly knew." She laughed to herself, shaking her head in wonderment. "You know how that happens sometimes, you get that certainty? I knew without any doubt whatsoever, this was God talking to me. I recognized the voice, from early childhood, and here He was, back again, telling me how to build this thing." She tried to think of what else to say. "I realized how much I missed him."
Rico nodded. Kept his voice calm. "How do you know it was God, Maggie? Maybe it was a demon."
"It was God. I just knew." She nodded several times. "Uh-huh. It was like I was living in darkness, and suddenly the sun appeared."
Rico looked back up the lawn at all the lumber. "You know, Consuela and I would love to have you over for dinner some night."
"No." She shook her head, raised herself erect in her ridiculous outfit. "I have to devote my time to this now, to building what God told me to build."
Even though Maggie had all of God's building instructions clear in her mind, it was still difficult to put the contraption together, much like it's difficult to construct anything from directions (all those times she and Carl sat on their living room carpet, trying to figure out how to put together the screws and planes of wood slid out of a cardboard box into a bookcase, desk).
More than once, Maggie sat on her lawn for over an hour, armpits sweaty from lugging heavy pieces of wood around, trying to visualize, for example, touching their rectangular ends together on her lap, exactly how three two-by-fours were meant to connect with each other. A few times, not experienced with carpentry, she cut a plywood sheet too short, sawdust on her face as she got back in her car, returned to Home Depot to buy a replacement sheet.
After about a week, working outside each day pretty much from early morning to late evening, dogs trotting by occasionally, sniffing that fragrant wood smell, sitting with their tails behind them, watching her, she had all the wooden components of the contraption in place. All she needed now was to slide in the metal parts that fit into the hollowed-out grooves in the wood, not as easy to do, since most of the metal would have to be custom-built.
She finally found a metal worker, Eric, who worked out of a garage one town over, big, burly guy with long red hair, bushy red beard, denim overalls. Maggie watched nervously as Eric's blue eyes, within his strawberry eyelashes, looked over her sketches.
"What are you building?" Eric sat back on his purple metal folding chair, freckles on his forehead. "There's no problem with me bending iron to these specifications, I can bang in the gears and teeth where you want them, but I don't see how it fits together."
"It fits into wood."
"It fits into wood?"
"Yeah."
"For what purpose?"
"I don't know."
Eric looked at her. "So where'd you get the design?"
She made a self-deprecating face. "God."
"God designed this?"
"Yeah."
Eric looked back down at the specifications on his lap. "Is this His handwriting?"
"No." She closed her eyes, opened them. "It's my handwriting. He spoke to me in a dream."
"What'd he sound like?"
She studied the big man in his chair for a moment, trying to figure out if he were serious, or making fun of her, then realized that for the first time in her life, she didn't care what someone else thought of her. She was free to say or do anything she wanted, regardless of whether others approved or disapproved. She felt light-headed. "He sang the instructions to me, actually."
Eric's eyebrows drew together.
"Really." She nodded. "I couldn't tell what sex He or She was. It was one of those gender-vague voices, like a castrati. It could have been a young boy, or a woman."
Eric kept staring at her. "Seriously?"
"Also, the instructions that he sang? They rhymed." She let out a laugh of genuine wonderment. "They fucking rhymed."
"You're spending a lot of time on this."
Maggie looked up from screwing together metal joints under her contraption.
"Hey, Rico."
Rico walked up Maggie's driveway, crossing over onto the grass, to where her trousered legs stuck out under the contraption, chunks of wood, metal rods, squares of styrofoam, knocked-over sawhorses across the lawn. "Kind of a mess."
"I'm almost finished." Maggie slid out from under the wood, hand holding a wrench.
"So what is it?"
She rose to her feet, brushing grass blades off the knees of her pants. "I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"No."
"You've been working out here for…three weeks? And you don't know what it is you're building?"
Maggie's blue eyes met Rico's stare. "I honestly don't. Is that a problem?"
Rico took a step back. "It's not a problem, Maggie, except it's a little embarrassing to have my family come by, or business associates, and they see my lawn, which is always neatly mowed, then they see your lawn, which is covered with shit."
Maggie looked at the twelve foot by twelve foot wooden square on her lawn, thick metal rod sticking up from its center, large caster under each corner. "Tell them you live across the road from someone who is in communication with God."
"If God were truly communicating with you, Maggie, I think he might ask you to comfort the dying, or feed the hungry, but I don't think he would ask you to build a huge, fucking square on wheels."
"That's what he asked me to do. His ways are mysterious."
"So now what?"
"Now I'm going to go inside, do some laundry, have dinner, watch a little TV, go to bed, pull the blanket up over my shoulder, and await further instructions."
Except God didn't talk to Maggie that night.
Or the next.
Maggie picked up all the wooden scraps from the lawn, putting them into thirty-gallon garbage bags. She mowed the front lawn, except, of course, under the twelve foot by twelve foot s
quare she had constructed, where the blades were getting tall and yellow like waxed beans from lack of sunlight.
Part of the problem with being spoken to by God is that God rarely gives you enough information. He tells you to do something, you do it, but then He doesn't come back to explain what you're supposed to do next.
So Maggie sat outside on her front lawn for a few days, in a blue canvas chair, drinking beer, staring at her huge wooden square on wheels.
God, what do you want me to do?
The square was on canisters, so obviously, it was meant to move. To roll. But where?
The road outside her home continued level for about a hundred feet, then slanted down at a twenty degree grade. Maggie already knew what was at the bottom of the grade. The Hollister's farmhouse. Was that what God wanted her to do? Roll the square down to the Hollister's? Talk to them, make sure they were all right? But couldn't she have just walked down the slope, or driven? Or used the phone?
The next morning, wearing her gardening pants and one of Carl's plaid shirts, she brought her cup of coffee out onto the front lawn.
As was usual the past few days, most of the neighborhood kids were hanging around out front, talking about her large square.
She put her steaming cup down on the lowest concrete step leading to her front door, got behind the large square, pushed it across the lawn, sneakers digging in, onto the road.
The kids stood back, giving her room. "Whaddaya gonna do, Mrs. Pearson?"
The sun was just starting to rise, birds calling in the artichoke green of the trees.
Maggie bent over beside her square in the road, chest huffing, getting her breath back. "I'm going to take it for a test drive."
She twisted left the spigot of the outside faucet, green hose lying across the lawn lifting its length, as water flowed through.
She sprayed the top of the large square, silver water sliding off sawdust and brown leaves.
By now, some adults had gathered on the opposite side of the road.
Mr. Swanberg from down the road, widowed ten years, cleared his throat. "How you gonna steer it, Maggie?"
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