by Amelia Gray
“Who are you working for?”
“Nobody.”
“Why did you want me to ask you who you’re working for?”
“I’m wandering around your neighborhood, I give some idiot excuse about looking for a house to buy. We look exactly the same, down to a level of detail that could not possibly be coincidental. The question seems apparent.”
David saw that the man also kept frayed ends on his shoestrings. “But you’re not working for anybody,” David said.
The man shrugged. “I should ask you who you’re working for.”
David took a bite of toast. The man took a bite of toast. They chewed and regarded each other. David could see the man packing the bread into his left cheek with his tongue.
“Who are you working for?” asked the man.
“This is ridiculous,” David said. “This is not some kind of spy game. I’m taking the bus to see my mother in a home for women, where she has lived now for many years.”
“My mother doesn’t live at a home for women. Close,” the other man said, advancing a step. “You might call it that. But that’s not where she lives.”
The man had the same deep wrinkle between the eyes, the same mark of a mole at his left temple, matching David’s right. The man was a mirror image. He continued to advance.
“I’m not working for anybody,” David said. “I am unemployed.”
The man stopped advancing. “I have no way to believe you.”
“I have no way to believe you, either.”
“This is not some kind of spy game,” the man said.
A woman bumped into David, and he realized that the bus had arrived. The driver was leaning forward in his seat, watching the two men.
David moved to get on the bus, but the other man stood still. “I’m on the next one,” the man said. “I am on the next instance of this bus.”
“I think it would be for the best if we avoided seeing each other,” the man said to David.
“Any day you want this to happen,” said the driver.
“But you know where I live,” said David. “You’re a visitor here.”
“I know the general area. I don’t know exactly where you live. Are you worried about your safety? I don’t think you need to be worried.”
“Come on, twinsies,” said the driver.
David stepped onto the bus and leaned his head back. “Neither of us should be worried,” he said. He dropped his quarters into the coin slot. Outside, the man finished the piece of toast and shook out the napkin. He folded it once and placed it in his front pocket. David thought he saw words written on the napkin, but the bus door closed between them before he could get a better look.
54.
EVERYONE working at the home for women seemed too young to be there, employed or otherwise. A clean-faced young woman at the reception desk handed David a clipboard and asked him who he was there to see. David pointed toward the meeting area beyond the wire mesh window, where he could see his mother sitting in her wheelchair by herself. The young woman began to speak of a billing dispute. David found a credit card in his wallet and told the young woman to keep it. The young woman seemed satisfied. In return, she gave David a nametag. He affixed it to his shirt, and the woman buzzed him in.
His mother had a blanket over her lap and faced a table on which playing cards were spread facedown. One by one she turned over each card, touched it, and placed it back on the table. At another table, a group of ladies even older than David’s mother drank instant coffee and compared miniature figurines from their collections. Workers were taking down tinsel and cardboard cutouts of trees and placing them in boxes by the front door.
“Mom.” He settled into a chair across from his mother.
She tipped her face up at the sound, smiling in recognition, holding the king of spades. The crevices of her spotted face sunk farther under the light. She was wearing her heavy-framed glasses, as she had for years, despite the blindness.
“Hello, my love. What brings you to paradise?”
“I wanted to check up on you.”
“I’m fairly busy today. I should have some time open up in the afternoon.”
“I brought you something.” David produced an Apollonia medal from his pocket and slid it across the table. She placed the king of spades lightly down and reached toward the sound. Her hands found the medal and she touched it with care. “Now isn’t that sweet,” she said. Drawing her hands back, she picked another card from the table, running her fingers along the edges. “Two hearts,” she said.
David ducked his head to see the card’s face. “How did you know?”
“It’s an old trick, my darling. An old trick on an old deck. There are slight discrepancies in each card. One edge of the two hearts waves a bit. Someone may have dipped it in their tea.” She picked up another card and touched the edges, then the face and the back. “Seven clubs,” she said, turning it twice for David to confirm. “There’s a mark on one side, in the center. A hairline scratch. That’s the interesting thing about seven clubs. Seven diamonds has a scratch on the far side, closer to the edge.”
“How do you know all this?”
“One of the nurses helped. The girls said I could play bridge with them, and I’m going to give them one hell of a surprise.”
“Here I was thinking you had some use for those glasses.”
She touched them. “The weight is a comfort.”
“I’m glad you’re doing well, Mom. A lot has been happening.”
“I’m doing so well.” She palmed another card. “Slight bow, ace spades.”
He looked. “Ace of hearts.”
“Darn, ace hearts. Ancillary bow.” She tugged on a blanket wedged under her in the chair and pulled a corner of it over the blanket on her lap. “The girls have been teasing me,” she said.
A group of ladies on the other side of the room were passing around a small crystal horse. Each woman in turn lifted the piece up and shifted it slowly to catch the light. She murmured her approval and sent the trinket on to the next woman.
“A lot has happened in the past few weeks,” David said.
His mother placed the card on the table and felt with four fingers the way it bent back. “How is your dear wife?” she asked. “Is she keeping up with the housework? You sound a bit tousled.”
“She’s fine.” David watched her stroke the playing card. “She’s doing fine. I actually was thinking about the house.”
“My sweet child.”
“I keep finding things I wouldn’t expect to find.”
His mother shook her head so slowly that David followed the direction of her eyes toward the corner of the room, where a worker was sweeping tinsel from a countertop into a paper bag. “That darn house gave us trouble from the first day we bought it,” his mother said. “You know that foundation problem didn’t turn up in the inspection? That was a major issue. We could have sued the city, but I was too busy taking care of you and your dad. And then your poor sister,” she said.
“You did a good job.”
“I was among the busiest women on the planet. Did you know? They wanted to give me an award for how busy I always was. They invited me to a reception, but would you believe I was too busy to go? Those were different times. I would have had to buy your father a suit and one of those bow ties. Cuff links too. I already had one nice dress. Nice enough, you know.”
“You did everything you could do,” David said.
“The doctor begged me to take medicine for my sleep. I didn’t want to, because I got so much work done at night, but he practically got down on his knees. Of course, I was obedient. It was that time for women.” His mother touched another card but didn’t pick it up. She turned her head toward the ladies. “They’re playing hide-and-go-seek,” she said. “Hide until someone dies. Everybody. Don’t you think?” One of the ladies heard her and glared.
“Mom.”
“Would you believe I was too busy to go to my own ceremony?” She coughed, gripping
the legs of the chair. “For the award. Your father would have required a different type of shirt than the type of shirt he owned. I don’t require you to believe it, but I suggest you do.”
“I believe it.”
“Of course you do, my sweet.” She placed her hand flat on the table in David’s direction and then picked it up and put it on the cards again. “You were always a good boy, even when you were a little difficult.”
One of the other women across the room cleared her throat. David touched the arm of his mother’s wheelchair to turn her away from them. The foreign movement caused his mother to murmur, both hands held still in her lap. David leaned in. “The interesting thing about one hundred forty-three,” she said, “is that it is the lowest quasi-Carmichael integer you will find in base eight.”
The blanket had fallen off his mother’s lap and David adjusted it, tucking it at her side.
“The interesting thing about seventy-eight,” she said, “is that it is the smallest integer you can write in three different ways as the sum of four squares.”
David crouched closer to his mother’s face. “I know it seems like a bad time to talk, Mom. I wanted to ask you a few questions about the house. It’s important.”
She paused and lifted her face. David saw the full constellation of broken capillaries. Her glasses caught a piece of fluorescent light and illuminated a square on her cheek. “The interesting thing about one hundred seven,” she said, leisurely drawing a hand up to scratch the side of her face, “is that it happens to be the exponent of a Mersenne prime.”
“I’ll come back later,” David said.
His mother’s murmuring voice was barely audible. “The interesting thing about seventy-six—” she said as he stood to go.
He peeled his nametag off and crumpled it over the trashed tinsel.
55.
IT ALL DEPENDS on the conditions of the wash. On the twentieth wash in hot water with a strong detergent, a delicate shirt is known to split at the seams. However, mix the same shirt in with cool water and the proper cycle, and the shirt can last five times as long. A miracle of modern fabric technology. And to think, women used to blanch their hands with lye.
Shelly picked the pills from a sweatshirt she had washed five times that morning. She didn’t look at the back of the shirt, which had three slashes across the upper part that almost looked like they could have come from aggressive moths. The fabric felt slick, as if there had been too much detergent building up. She made a note to run it through a cold-water wash without chemicals, to clear everything out.
The regular crowd worked silently in the laundromat. A young woman corralled kids out of rolling baskets and toward the pinball machine. Two college kids, a boy and a girl, paged through thick anatomy texts while waiting on their individual spin cycles. Shelly had a sock full of quarters tied around the belt on her waist. The sock was so heavy it caused her to lean. She untied the sock and fished four quarters out with the tips of her fingers.
The college boy was watching her feed clothes back into the machine. “You already did that,” he said. “Ma’am?”
Reluctantly, she looked at him.
“Those are all messed up. Those clothes,” he said.
She saw that he had a terrible haircut. “Do you ever get the feeling that something isn’t quite right?” Shelly asked.
The boy shrugged and looked back at his book.
“I’m serious,” Shelly said, waiting until she had his attention again. “Do you ever get the feeling?”
“Those pants have a big hole in them,” he said, pointing.
“Have you never, not ever stood in the center of a room and looked at the people looking at one another and gotten the feeling that something was badly wrong?”
“You should throw those socks out. My grandmom says red wine stays.”
“Listen,” Shelly said. “Think about the way a group of people can look at one another. Think about just a pair of people, how they can sit in a room and stare. These are not strangers to each other. They have spent nights sharing their secrets. They see each other and think of those complexities, yet there is nothing that can truly draw them together. It’s a primary flaw of human distance. And what causes it? It’s not from a lack of desire for closeness. For most of us, closeness is a major life goal. No, there’s some additional factor causing this separation. Could it be what we eat for breakfast in the morning? Could it be the mechanism of the human eye? Who’s to say that it’s not the condition of cleanliness in our clothing? My hypothesis is built on the concept that there is an element of comfort inherent in our dress that contributes to our closeness.”
The college boy thought about it. Not everyone did. Shelly wanted to give him some credit for that. She dug into her sock for a quarter and placed it in the boy’s hand. “Thank you for thinking about it,” she said.
The boy smiled and said nothing, which made her want to give him credit again, but she stopped herself and turned to finish loading the rest of the wash instead. As she moved shirts and jeans into the wash bin, she thought about the young man as he might appear later that day, standing in a room and doubting the motives of his closest friends. The thought filled her with such joy that her heart welled up, and two small tears dropped into the wash at such a perfect moment that she felt certain it was the end of the world’s connected problems.
56.
THE HOUSE shifted in the dark. Drifts of dust gathered in the corners of the windows and thickened with the moisture in the air into a damp sludge. On one west-facing window ledge David found a dry layer of dead flies. He wrapped them up in a few squares of toilet paper and threw them into the trash, their bodies crushed together between his fingers, forming a new kind of body.
He had to dig the television out of the basement. He knew it was under the workbench, which itself was pinned under stacks of documents that had once, in theory, been essential. He burrowed into the top stratum of utility bills and found a layer of patient X-rays he’d brought home after cleaning out his office at work, when he rented a van and had everything moved out within six hours, the girls standing in a silent line watching him, snapping their sugar-free gum. He had loaded the last of the supplies and applauded the girls before loading himself into the van’s cab. He clapped for them wildly, with genuine feeling. One of the hygienists curtsied, but the rest stared, arms crossed. They had just lost their jobs, after all.
It was not legal to keep patient records at his private residence, particularly considering the manner in which he left the practice, but the X-rays had been too meaningful to leave to the industrial shredder. He thought of them as art objects, blue-tinged, individually flawed. He had known all the teeth in his collection, thousands of teeth, enough to fill a bathtub or pave a road. He thought of an ivory paved road leading to some foreign city. Franny’s cooking magazines made a glossy layer under them. Under that, delicate pages from years prior, Franny’s mother’s old recipes, their ink blanked with time. They tore like tissue paper when he moved them. The television was underneath.
David brought the television set upstairs and placed it on the coffee table next to the package of cremains. He plugged it in and adjusted the bent antenna until he got a picture. A game show was on, and he watched a family clutching one another and calling something out toward a screen. The volume dial on the set was missing, and he couldn’t figure out the rules of the game. He watched the family hold one another and weep. The evening news came on, and he watched spectators walking around a plane crash. The scene changed to one of a horse being brushed by a woman with long hair. The horse was beautiful and the woman was all right. He watched the weather, where more snow seemed to be suggested by a tired-looking man wearing a red blazer. The picture changed again, this time to a dark screen, and David leaned forward to adjust the contrast and then realized that it was his house, filmed at night. The caption read “Police Question Husband.” He used his fingernails to turn the knob where the volume dial had once been, but the speaker had
been crushed by the pressure of the elements that had been stored above it, and all that emerged was a low buzzing sound. He watched as, exactly as Aileen had described, the camera pulled in to reveal his own shadowy figure moving behind the curtain of one of the illuminated front windows.
“I’ll be,” David said. He watched himself standing, watching the road. He imagined the newscasters speculating on what he might be thinking at that moment by the window, which had stretched to include all moments. He would need to do something to hinder the intrusion of the world outside his home. He thought of Franny’s security plans above the dresser, then of the plywood in the garage. He thought of Marie in the garage.
The old television had markings on the sides, where David as an eight-year-old had carved into it with a penknife. David’s father found the vandalism, smacked his son’s bottom with a newspaper, took the knife, and hid it. This was right after his mother left for a week and right before she left for good. The marks were glyphs dug into the side, pictographs transcribed from top to bottom, which David had made while his father was in the basement and David was in the living room, watching cartoons designed to fully occupy his brain.
David touched the incised grooves with the tips of his fingers and then the palm of his hand. He tipped the television to its other side to see if he could read more of the old markings but instead saw a deep inscription that must have been made with a professional engraving tool:
I COULD DEVOUR YOU.
The threat was carved vertically, letters stacked over one another like a totem display. Each carved letter featured individual flaws yet seemed perfectly uniform in relation to the others, as if the engraver had made light pencil marks and later wiped them clean with a rag.
It was immediately important to David that he leave the room. In the kitchen he ate a pear. It occurred to him that, though he had eaten hundreds of pears in the past, if not thousands, this pear was different from every single one he had ever eaten, wholly unique, and, in fact, as he ate it, he was opening parts of the pear that had never been experienced by anyone, human or animal. When his maxillary incisors pierced the skin, which first protected the fruit as it had against rain and sun and then yielded to the invasion, he was oxygenating particles that had never even been open to oxygen. The wet fruit and seeds had existed in darkness for their entire lives until he tore them out with his teeth.