She edged through the packed bodies, a bit more roughly than she would have expected from herself, until she came to the front of the ring of spectators, who stood back a few paces from the camouflaged pop-up tent.
Mr. Faun’s empty shoes stood outside the tent again, and his upper body protruded from between the front flaps like that of a half-born infant. One arm was flung ahead of him, as if he’d been reaching for something to grab onto, to pull himself the rest of the way out. His eyes were open, bulging, the bright blue gone milky gray. The O of his lips had bloated even more than the rest of his face, which had turned purplish. From his nostrils and open mouth leaked blackish streams of what pathologists called purge fluid, while his beard was caked thickly with dried vomit.
“Oh my God,” Jeannie gasped, clapping a hand over her own mouth and stifling a retch.
She had not only seen the bodies of dead clients at the nursing home, but on one occasion had been the first to discover one of them, an elderly man who had passed away during the night. So, although she was no pathologist herself, she had enough experience with death to know that Mr. Faun had been lying here dead for more than a day. More than several days—since, she guessed, shortly after her visit with Bobert.
Now she recalled the terrible cough that had come from down in his lungs. As someone who worked with people who often battled against pneumonia, she was ashamed of herself for not recognizing that cough before.
“Has anyone called the police?” she cried, her words muffled behind her hand. “Isn’t anyone coming?”
A woman turned to face her slowly, looking surprised by Jeannie’s attitude. “It’s Mr. Faun,” the woman said.
“I know it’s him! Someone . . . someone needs to call somebody!”
“It’s part of the exhibit, ” the woman replied, spacing out her words with wide gaps as if talking to a child. “It’s Mr. Faun .”
He looked artificial, like some kind of lurid horror movie prop. He no longer looked like a real person. That was how they could all stare, Jeannie thought; he wasn’t a human being to them. The leap of empathy was too great. But he was close enough to human, like a chimpanzee in a zoo, to entertain them.
She whipped this way and that helplessly, as if appealing to those who had overheard her agitation and had turned to look at her. “If you won’t do it, I will!” she exclaimed, scrabbling blindly inside her pocketbook for her cell phone.
A hand reached out from behind and took hold of her wrist, but not forcibly. Jeannie spun around to find herself looking into the face of the woman who years ago had dismissed her artwork as “pretty.” Diane Segler-Frost.
“They’re already on their way,” the Fine Arts Museum’s director told her. “I called them a little while ago. Please . . . don’t make a scene. Let these people appreciate the installation until they get here.”
Jeannie tore her hand out of the other woman’s fingers. She backed away, wagging her head. She wanted to flee and never come back to this once beloved museum again. Before she did so, she scorched Diane Segler-Frost with her glare. The museum director looked unhappily resigned. Not guilty . . . just regretful that the exhibition was at its end.
“Your installation,” Jeannie hissed at her, “lacks life .”
The Left-Hand Pool
How many times had he driven this road . . . back and forth, forth and back? How many drives to work, dreading each mile—each inch— his car covered, to get to that place where he didn’t want to be? How many rides home again, relieved that he was returning to his sanctuary? But a sanctuary within which there was only himself for company.
It was a rural road branching off from the highway. A long stretch through a tunnel of trees, trees crowding in from either side, as if they pressed forward to swallow up and unmake this manmade divide that kept them separated from their brethren across the way.
And then suddenly the trees opened up and there were two bodies of water, one to either side flanking the road, which crossed what was essentially an earthen bridge. But of course it had originally been one body of water until, again, humans had intervened to divide it into two estranged entities.
He didn’t know if this was technically a pond or a lake; he didn’t know the name by which it was called, if it had one. Or two. He thought of the bodies of water as the right-hand and left-hand pools. He had designated them thus based on the fact that the right-hand pool bordered the right-hand side of the road on his way to work. The left-hand pool was on the opposite side. On his ride home every evening, the left-hand pool bordered the right-hand side of the road. Come to think of it, he could easily have reversed their designations, but that was what he had decided on.
The right-hand pool was much more sizable: either a large pond or a small lake fringed by trees, with houses built close to its edge here and there, and little wharves and docked boats. But the water had to be fairly shallow, since big rocks broke the surface in places. The water here was a mirror of the sky, bright as a sheet of metal hammered into myriad fluid creases.
The left-hand pool, cut off like a severed limb and apparently ill-nourished, if not outright polluted, was an entirely different story. It was much smaller, with no houses peeking through the trees that thickly bordered it. Rocks broke the surface here, too, but in greater profusion; could the water level be a little lower on this side? The rocks looked slimy, like the humped backs of large animals. Large dead animals, rotting in the shallows. Close to shore the water was covered with fallen autumn leaves, like lily pads, and maybe their decomposition was the cause of the grayish scum that marred most of the pool’s surface, except for broken patches of darker clarity.
It was November. The clocks had been set back an hour, and so it was now darker on his ride home from work. The sky would be purplish, tinged with streaks of orange-pink like the last dregs of blood leaking from a sliced wrist, and the left-hand pool lay in gloom.
*
How many times had he driven to work thinking today would be the day he would ask out his coworker? Even as he resented heading toward that building, that soulless box of despair, containing his cubicle like a box within a box, he would at the same time be filled with excitement—sickeningly alive in his belly like knotted eels—at the prospect of seeing her again. Desperate to see her again, but also weirdly dreading it, because of the tremor she inspired in him, a tremor like that which his car experienced if he drove it too fast on the highway. A tremor that threatened to shake him apart.
How many times had he driven home in the evening loathing himself because, once again, he hadn’t been able to summon the courage? Despising himself for his shyness and weakness. He would feel as powerless to interact with his surroundings as a ghost, helplessly observing mortals day after day after day.
She was an African-American woman who worked in another department. She was usually chewing gum when he saw her; maybe she had been a smoker or was concerned about her breath. She often said hi to him and had occasionally exchanged small talk, speaking as she chewed her gum, which he found endearing. Despite these exchanges she never addressed him by his name, so he didn’t think she knew it.
She was as tall as he was, and he had never seen her in anything but a smart black suit, which varied only in that sometimes she wore black slacks with her black jacket, other times a black skirt. Her hair was shoulder length and straight, and she had the most wonderful smile he thought he had ever seen: toothy and bright. A warm smile that made her eyes crinkle.
His other coworkers were less warm. Though no one had ever mocked or derided him to his face in the year he had worked this job, he had sensed their amusement and derision. He frequently heard whispers behind cubicle partitions, snickers and giggles, and his intuition told him these sounds pertained to him. He wondered if the woman’s friendly attitude toward him was because she was the only African-American in their office, someone different, who maybe felt like an outsider though she kept up a brave face, and she sensed something in him that made her relate to him.
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Imagining her lovely face and sunny smile, he stood at the right-hand side of his bed where he always laid out his clothes, knotting his tie, almost ready to set out for work again. As he stood there, a picture came to him of something that lay in the darkness under his bed like a child’s coffin in a crypt. This image briefly eclipsed his coworker’s face. But then he shut out the bedroom light and locked up his apartment.
As he left the house in which he had been renting the second floor for the same length of time he had worked at the office, he again determined that today would be the day he had long anticipated. Yes, it would be today.
*
He drove his car through the tunnel of trees again. This past year had been the first time since his childhood that he had lived in such a woodsy area, and it made him uncomfortable. It was too quiet out here, too isolated, the houses too far apart. Civilization seemed too tenuous, too fragile; this was mankind’s brittle edge.
When he was a boy, his father had taken him several times out into the woods hunting. On the last occasion they had gone out together, when he was twelve, his father had shot a four-point deer—a beautiful animal that had caused the boy to experience both fear and awe. The rifle bullet entered the deer’s shoulder on the right side, and in coming out the left tore off the deer’s left leg. The deer managed to rise and continue loping painfully away from them. They followed it deeper into the woods for over half an hour, until finally it fell exhausted from blood loss but still alive. His father had ordered him to stay back, and then had crept up on the deer carefully so as not to be kicked. He had unsheathed a long knife and stabbed the deer deeply to puncture its lungs. It had then struggled with greater urgency, kicking in the leaves and dirt, but not for very long.
He had cried, watching it die, and when he told his mother of the experience she ordered her husband never to take their son hunting again. To this day he recalled the hot, silent look his father had then turned on him. A disgusted kind of look, as if his child had failed some vital test and would never develop into the man he should be.
To this day, he disliked the woods.
*
The tunnel of dying November leaves opened up, and there was the earthen bridge that split the two pools. As he drove, he happened to glance toward the right-hand pool, perhaps because he caught a glimpse of peripheral movement. And there, basking on a large rock that broke the mirror surface of the pond a little ways off from shore, rested some kind of animal.
He saw it for only a second or two, and though he felt the impulse to stop his car abruptly and look more closely, he was traveling at a fair rate of speed with other work-bound vehicles proceeding close behind him. Therefore, he was left with only a quick and unsatisfying impression.
What struck him most was the animal’s size. It had a long body and short legs, like an otter, but it was too large to be an otter, and its sleek wet fur was black. Also, its head was not at all otter-like. To tell the truth, the head’s shape was more like that of a deer, but without antlers. A doe, then? But a doe with such short legs? With a solid black hide? Some freak doe resting on a rock out there in a pond?
In the brief instant he saw it, the creature plunged headfirst off the rock, slipping into the water smoothly and disappearing.
He tried to look back over his shoulder, yet already his car had taken him too far along and he was afraid to ram into the tail of the vehicle ahead of him.
He knew one thing, anyway. The animal had looked beautiful, graceful and peaceful, in profile showing a placid black eye.
*
He had memorized her routine. Her gum-chewing and wearing of black told him she was a creature of habit. He came up on her as she was making a cup of coffee in the little office kitchenette. The kitchenette divided her work area from his own. He began brewing his own cup while she added cream and sugar to hers. She started talking first, as she always did, for which he was grateful. He tried not to stammer. Because they had superficially discussed movies several times before and found they were both movie buffs, their conversation turned to a popular new film. He took this as a signal, an invitation from her. Finally—finally— he did it. Since neither of them had seen this new film, he asked her if she’d like to go see it with him this weekend.
She had been beaming that warm, white smile, but in the instant he asked her out he saw the smile falter and crumble. It was like watching something beautiful, say the Taj Mahal, vaporized in a nuclear blast.
She regained the smile quickly, but it wasn’t as wide, and it looked uneasy and maybe even wary. Her eyes no longer crinkled. The woman apologized for having to decline, informing him she had a boyfriend. But she appreciated his offer.
He smiled and told her it was no problem, and they parted for their respective work areas carrying their respective coffees.
He sank down into his cubicle, reflecting on how his months of anticipation had culminated in an ending lasting mere moments. Like a car plunging off a bridge into cold drowning water.
On the other side of his cubicle’s partition, he heard soft tittering. Had the person on that side overheard him ask out his coworker? Yes, they must have.
He stared at the partition for a long time.
*
On the drive home that evening, he turned his head to look toward the left-hand pool, with the intuition that he would see that odd black animal again. He was correct and yet wrong at the same time. It was apparently the same animal, but not as it had been when he had seen it that morning in the larger pool flanking the other side of the road.
It was crawling up out of the water onto the jagged, rocky shore, with dead leaves plastered wetly to its black body. He wondered now if that morning its four legs hadn’t truly been short, but instead folded up tightly or telescoped somehow, because now the black creature had very long arms, very long legs, unnaturally long and slender and multiply jointed. Furthermore, the creature walked upright like a human being. The rest of the body and head were the same as this morning, but the eyes in the deer-like head no longer struck him as being placid. They rolled wildly, showing the rim of white sclera around them, as if the animal were terrified or maddened with rabies. This time the animal didn’t strike him as beautiful, but rather as something demonic.
As he slowed his car to a crawl to watch, unmindful of the other cars behind him—the drivers of which apparently didn’t see the creature themselves, too busy honking their horns at him impatiently—the bipedal creature stalked up through the underbrush that grew along the edge of the left-hand pool, stepped into the murky woods, and disappeared from view.
*
The next morning, as he knotted his tie, in a break of routine he stood at the left-hand side of his bed. And when he had finished he crouched down to drag something out from under the bed into view. It was a long box, looking like a child’s coffin, and it contained an object that had once belonged to his late father.
Lifting the lid off the box, he determined that today would be the day he had long anticipated. Yes, it would be today.
riaH gnoL
Nanette’s nametag reads Nan and she works at the Magicade arcade, on the mall’s ground floor. She is required to substitute for her coworker Janet sometimes at the customer services counter, where children redeem their tickets for the colorful but small and cheap toys that fill the glass bins, which might as well represent the reward for all of life’s strivings. Mostly, though, she goes to various stations where people require assistance. (Not the mini bobsled ride; she hasn’t learned that one yet. She suspects her boss doesn’t trust her to operate it.) She’s a backup for the snack bar, though there is a person dedicated to that area. The two attractions she herself is the dedicated worker for are miniature golf and laser tag.
When players pass their Magicade membership card through the reader at the miniature golf station, a ball of their preferred color drops from a chute and this is presented to Nan, who gives the player a golf club, determining its length by the child’s height. The m
ini-golf area has an aquatic theme, on its walls phantasmal octopi and eels glowing purple and green under the black lights.
For laser tag, if they need assistance with it Nan helps the players don and buckle their vests (with chest and back plates flashing either red or blue, depending on the chosen team), then runs the short video of instructions and rules if this is the player’s first time. She activates the ten-minute game program, then sends the players into the dark maze to hunt one another down, firing spots of red light from the guns they clasp. She is supposed to watch the players on four CCTV monitors above the computer, the action on the screens in black and white and the darting figures glowing as if through military night-vision goggles. She barely glances up at the screens, though; everyone else she saw tend to the game before she became the primary laser tag attendant did the same, even walking away to tend to another function or to chat with a coworker until an electronic horn blast and a recorded voice announced the ten-minute battle was over.
After staring into space for a while, she looks up at a middle-aged man standing a few steps from her, on the other side of the security tape she’s pulled across as if to cordon off a crime scene. This man, at least, is following the action on the monitors as best he can make it out. He’s smiling; his two young sons are inside, pursuing each other through the labyrinth, fighting a miniature Civil War of brother against brother. Nan’s formerly distant gaze locks onto the father’s chest. He’s wearing a T-shirt with artwork—it looks like a Victorian steel engraving—that portrays a skeleton bartender offering a variety of poisons, skull and crossbones on their labels.
Nan asks the man, “What’s that on your shirt?”
The man glances down at himself as if he’s forgotten what he put on today, then looks up at Nan and smiles with blooming interest; like all men, he thinks that if a strange woman instigates a conversation with him she must be attracted to him. Nan is not particularly pretty but she’s young. She wears glasses with thick dark frames and a black beanie pulled down over her ears and almost to her eyebrows.
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