In the Mean Time

by Tremblay, Paul

  ***Editor’s note:

  In the interest of authenticity, I did not add punctuation to the last entry. However, I decided to change fonts where the notes changed in its handwriting: the final part of the original 12/19 9:19 PM notes section was in block letters, as if written by a child. This child-scribble repeats itself (starting with “Mommy I’m so sorry” and ending with “I can’t remember Mom”) for 361 pages.

  Other points of note:

  Going back almost four hundred years, the Longesian’s employee-ledger has no record of a Nicholas Thomas having ever worked among the many book stacks.

  Neither Gwyneth Ann Thomas nor CUPress were willing to comment upon Nicholas Thomas’s notes, the pages of which were found the morning of December 20th, spread on the Longesian’s foyer floor, in the shape of a Balloon and Its string. DNA and handwriting tests proved inconclusive, and no one (other than Nicholas Thomas) has claimed ownership of the notes.

  The missing person file belonging to Gwyneth’s son, Nicholas Thomas, is entering its third decade as unsolved but still filed as active with Annotte’s police, presumably by request of Ms. Gwyneth Thomas (Annotte law allows for parents to petition the police to keep missing person files active indefinitely). While the police would not release the file numbers, they did confirm Nicholas and his father’s files had sequential numbers.

  I’m leaving this particular chapter of the Longesian’s history purposefully ambiguous. As a proud employee of the Longesian, I wouldn’t dream of crying hoax or debunking any of the mystery surrounding Nicholas Thomas—City’s legendary librarian. I will do as any good historian should do: present the findings, with little to no pontificating from my editorial soapbox, and let the reader come to their own conclusions. P.G.T.***

  Feeding the Machine

  It’s Friday. There are plans for this day, and after. So many things supposed to happen. But you aren’t doing anything to prepare. Instead, you linger in front of the refrigerator. It’s open, and you itemize: eggs, low-fat milk, her soy milk, orange juice, V8, caffeine-free Coke cans sharing space with bottled waters, assorted fruits and veggies in ragged plastic bags and containers, two-night’s-ago Lo mein and Kung Pao leftovers in those white cardboard cartons emanating their funky gone-bad-already smell, and three mystery-filled Tupperware cases you don’t want to open.

  Lower back aches. It’s been getting worse. You remember thinking morning sickness used to be bad, but now you’d trade in this back pain for a little AM vomit in a heartbeat.

  You’re still standing in front of the stocked fridge. You rub your back, then your pregnant belly, and you feel yourself detaching, fading out, going to that place you don’t want to go. But you can’t stop it. Just like you couldn’t stop yourself from reading her diary.

  Her diary: You didn’t know she had one, but it wasn’t a surprise. You made sure to put it back, exactly where you found it, which was on top of her dresser: alone, on display. You hate yourself for reading it, but a diary was a wink and a nudge. It had no lock, no key, no password; just flimsy leather and cardboard keeping the pages shut. A diary was a dare: daring you to choose between trust and the truth. And you read it. You wanted to read it again and again until you memorized it, until you chewed all her words to pulp, all those words of blame and guilt and sadness she no longer shares with you. All those words she should be saying to your face, those words she couldn’t say to you last night and for the past two months of last nights are in your head now, bouncing around, and you stretch and squeeze and roll them into a ball, trying to milk out all possible interpretations and meanings, but it’s getting messy. You’re already forgetting and mixing up what she wrote with what you thought about it.

  This was hard.

  This was being us. The new us. The somebody-went-and-got-pregnant us.

  The first time it had happened, my doctor said Pica is the craving or eating of items that aren’t food. He said Pica (which sounds like pie-kah) means “magpie” in Latin. Magpies were nature’s garbage disposals; they feed on everything they find. There was a fat joke in there somewhere.

  We’d got back from the hospital ten minutes before. I’d been sitting at the kitchen table watching Cassie make some tea. She was still in her work clothes. Dark blue skirt and light blue button-down shirt. It was her nicest skirt, but it looked a little tight on her. There were slight bulges at her hips and waistline that never used to be there, not that it mattered to me in any physical-attraction sense. I was still very much in love with and attracted to Cassie. No, I was not trying to convince myself. Since my first Pica-episode two months ago, Cassie had stopped jogging and stopped going to the gym. She had gained almost as much weight as I had, not that I pointed it out. I know the weight gain was bothering her, although she hadn’t said anything to me about it. She hadn’t said a lot of anything to me lately. But I wasn’t really being fair, laying all this (this was hard, this was being us, the new us. . . .) on her.

  Standing in front of the stove, her back turned to me, Cassie said, “You feel up to some tea? I think we have some honey left.”

  The second time it had happened my doctor said Pica is prevalent in animals. He said for some animals eating dirt is a weapon in the battle between plants and animals. Yes, he said weapon. He said animals use Pica as a weapon against plant reproduction strategy. I was still not sure why he told me that, or even what it meant. But I did know I was getting sick of him comparing me to magpies and animals.

  You shake the fading embers of her lost, never-spoken words from your head and dive back into the fridge. Food is again priority number-one. Everything else can wait. You’re elbow-deep, pushing aside the standard food items, looking for that one thing your body craves and by proxy, the baby craves. Your doctor and all those baby magazines and the What to Expect When You’re Expecting books have been less than subtle in hammering home the point that what you eat is what the baby eats. But what they didn’t tell you was that you have about as much choice in choosing your fuel as a car does. You-the-machine wants what it wants. And it needs what it needs.

  Jars of barbeque and spaghetti and soy sauces, salad dressing, cream cheese, ketchup, mustard, maple syrup, relish, mayo, grated parmesan cheese, butter, jam, baking soda, and an empty jar of honey. You don’t think about why she left an empty jar in the refrigerator. You don’t think about what it means, or if there is any meaning.

  Your thoughts are becoming objective, antiseptic. You are detaching, watching two hands pick up and reject all the jars and bottles and containers. You are the machine.

  I said, probably too loud, exaggerating my enthusiasm, “I’d like some tea, Cassie. Not too much though. I’m still feeling . . .” and then I paused, and even after living with Pica for two months, I wasn’t sure how to describe what I was feeling. “. . . all blocked up, if that makes sense.” But that wasn’t exactly right, either.

  Cassie said, “I bet,” and disappeared into the pantry.

  We had to talk, but there were so many things to say. It was overwhelming. Both of us afraid if we said the wrong thing there’d be no way to fix it. And saying the wrong thing would blow up into the wrong conversation: one wrong word leading to the next and the next and the next in some predetermined, logical chain that must be followed, like the code to a computer virus, one misstatement permanently infecting and crashing our hard drives, crashing us. We had been like this since the day we decided to keep the baby and each day that passed made everything worse. Like a pair of cowards, we ran away from each other, or worse, stood hand-in-hand with our other hands covering our mouths or our ears. We were walking hear-n’-speak-no-evil monkeys.

  Jesus. Now I was comparing us to animals.

  Cassie emerged from the pantry with the little, yellow jar of honey. “There’s not much left.”

  I said, “That’s okay, then. You take it. I don’t need it.”

  Cassie loved her honey. I
was stunned there wasn’t another full jar or two in the pantry already. There being no honey left was disturbing. She was really losing herself.

  Cassie put honey on bread, on her salads, in summer she made her own honey-bbq sauce, and she put honey in tea and an assortment of other drinks. My first time at a bar with her, she’d had a little bottle inside her jacket and she kept pouring dollops into her draft IPA. She didn’t stir it in though. I watched the little blob of honey sink, keeping its droplet-shape and then resting on the bottom of the glass. When she brought the pint to her mouth the honey-blob rolled up the glass but stopped short of her lips. I asked her if she could even taste it. She said she could and then offered me a sip. I gulped, trying to suck in the honey-blob but couldn’t catch it. After, I wiped my mouth on my sleeve, flashed my most petite and demure smile, and told her I couldn’t taste the honey and that it looked like the bartender had hocked a loogie at the bottom of her glass. She laughed, shaking our uneven, glass-topped table for two. I loved her laugh. So loud. So out of control. I imagined when other people heard her laughing, they might think she was faking, or crying hysterically, or going nuts. Still laughing, she told me she wished all her dates would work loogie into conversation. She downed the rest of her beer, and insisted you could taste the honey, only you had to be paying attention to do so. She winked, ordered another round, and eventually took me home and poured what was left of the honey all over me.

  Cassie scraped the jar’s sides with a spoon and then dunked it into my teacup. She said, “Don’t be silly. You can have the last of it.”

  I wished fixing us was as easy as another loogie joke. And maybe it was, and we were just too stubborn to see it.

  The next time it had happened my doctor said that Pica was a misunderstood problem and there were many reasons why people ate dirt or other non-food items. He said to be diagnosed a person must have symptoms for about a month. He said there was no diagnostic or medical test for Pica and usually it was only caught when the eating complications force the person to seek medical attention. Well, at least he’d stopped comparing me to animals.

  Closing the refrigerator door, you turn. There’s the mica countertop with the breadbox you’ve already poked around in, four times to be exact but who’s counting. There’s a yellow beam of sunlight trapping dust like prehistoric bugs in amber. There’s the dishwasher with its full load but you won’t put the dishes away. Even if you wanted to, Cassie would be bullshit at your token foray into manual labour; she’s so rabid with preggo-support it’s depressing, depressing because you learned in those diary pages that it’s all a show.

  There are glossy and cheesy entertainment magazines on the kitchen table and you think about lining your stomach with all those photos of toothy and plastic and unreal women, like that would be a suitable revenge for what life has done to you, for what you’ve done to yourself, for what you’ve done to Cassie, but you’re not so far gone to know you don’t want to eat the magazines, at least not yet. There are the cabinets underneath the sink and all those poisons contained within, and you think about how you probably need to put some sort of safety lock on those to protect the baby. You tighten your white bathrobe and you’re still hungry. There’s the sunbeam again, its wattage weakening, and now the spotlighted dust is plankton floating at the ocean surface, just waiting to kick-start the food chain. You try to avoid the beam on the way to the cupboard, but it hits your leg and you feel its weak heat, and you know there’s no stopping this. And there’s the walk-in cupboard across from the L-shaped mica counter, and you go through the sliding doors, and your robot-hands walk over boxes of pasta, crouton bags, cans of peas and corn and soup, rice, cereal, and a canister of bread crumbs, and then onto the non-food items, and it’s here that the hands hesitate and study the olive oil and flour, and you eye the tarragon and crushed oregano and the little vanilla extract bottle like a hawk eyeing a field of mice.

  Sipping my tea like it was medicine I didn’t want to take, the proverbial bitter pill, I said, “Thank you, Cassie.” I tasted the honey this time, but it tasted old somehow. I wondered if she knew that pregnant women weren’t supposed to eat honey. If I told her that, would it have sounded like some terrible joke, or a really good one? I didn’t know. I noticed how everything meant something when we weren’t talking.

  She said, “So Phil will be here on Friday night.”

  Right. Her brother Phil. I’d seen pictures but I’d never met him. He was to be my new babysitter. I’d got him a fill-in job at a small and local private boys high school, teaching math for a month. The job ended when I was to go on maternity leave so he could help me take care of the house, and help me take care of me. But there was still that month we all had to get through.

  “Lots of stuff happening this Friday,” I said and then laughed, but Cassie didn’t join in.

  Friday: Valentine’s Day (no matter how much we said the Hallmark-holiday meant nothing, it meant something, probably more this year than any other), the math department at UVM was throwing me a good-luck-on-preggo-leave party, even though I wasn’t scheduled to leave until mid-March. And, Friday was Phil’s arrival day.

  I said, “You’re okay with me going to my party by myself, right?” I knew what her answer would be, even if she didn’t mean it. Wasn’t I just a drama preggo-lesbo-queen? But did I mention that the Daddy would be at the party? It was all Cassie was thinking about.

  The next time it had happened my doctor said the non-food items that are typically ingested are dirt, clay, chalk, sand, potting soil, cigarette or fireplace ashes, paint, starch, plaster, gravel, and rocks. Then he said the person suffering from Pica might eat just about anything.

  The Daddy used to be my best friend. Carlos Greene. He and I had gone through college, then the UVM master’s program, then had earned PhDs together. We had both been offered tenure-tracked teaching jobs. Last year we had joint-published our first research project: Matrices, Hyperbolic Curves, and Mars’ Gravitational Effects on the Human Brain. Yeah, I was wicked smart. Except six months ago, while Cassie was away on business, I got piss-drunk at our school’s beginning of the year party, blacked out, and woke up next to a naked (and appallingly hairy) Carlos. That wasn’t wicked smart.

  While staring at the bottom of her un-honeyed cup, Cassie said, “I’m okay with it. You don’t have to keep asking me. I trust you.”

  I put my cup down and looked at her. I stared, waiting for her to pick up her eyes and send them down her sharp and elegant nose at me. And I wanted to scream at her, make her tell me what she really felt, to make her say I’m okay with the party because I know at least this time you’re already pregnant and probably won’t get sloppy-drunk and then fuck Carlos. I would’ve been okay if she said that.

  The next time it had happened my doctor said complications of Pica can include malnutrition, intestinal obstruction or infections or soil-borne parasites, anaemia, mercury or lead poisoning, liver and kidney damage, constipation and abdominal problems. He said Pica can be harmless, but obviously, eating certain material could lead to death. Just so much to look forward to.

  In this final, tenuous moment before surrendering to the machine, you want to blame Cassie and her diary for starting this. You want to blame her for your emptiness even though you know you’ve been complicit, a full-fledged partner in adding to the empty. Losing yourself now and forgiving yourself after would be so much easier if you could blame someone else. But you can’t do that and be fair. So you’ll feel guilt. Oh yeah, you’ll double that order, but it won’t fill you.