After two weeks he’d gone back to work. The columns of figures ran together, and then melted off the page. He wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed. Some days he would call in, telling them he was going to work at home that day, two days, that week. His excuse was the rain.
Some mornings he would get up and take the quickest shower possible. The spray would fill his muscles with an electrical charge, and although lulled by the sweet song of the water rushing out of the pipe, he’d force himself to cut it short, to get out of the shower before the new energy dissipated. Then he’d get dressed, grab his briefcase, and rush out into the rain.
But other days he’d spend long hours under the shower at low pressure, the nozzle adjusted until the stream was a soft probe that wore its way into his skin, spreading though his flesh until it became the thinnest of membranes, rubbing his skin away so softly that eventually he lost all sense of the border between his skin and the water. It took increased exposure to the water with each shower in order to achieve that effect. He wondered if he was developing an immunity.
The water on his head was a constant, gentle persistence. Softening his skull, pushing aside hair and scalp and bone to massage his brain directly, catching up anxiety and pain in its waves, washing them away. He wondered sometimes if what he felt when under the grace of the water was what Nancy, now, felt all the time. But he’d never believed. He continued to wonder, but without belief.
Dressing had become a slow, painful process. A friend at the gym had watched him one day, the slow way he slipped into pants and shirt, the fumbling with buttons, zippers, laces, and had given Brett the name and address of a psychiatrist who specialized in depression. But it wasn’t depression. It was just that his skin had become so raw and sensitive, so worn down by showers and rain that even the softest materials hurt on first contact. The dark, wet faces stared from his bedroom windows as he struggled into his clothes.
This would be his fifth dinner date with Ann from his grief group. He hadn’t wanted to join at first—he’d always thought there were just too many groups for everything—but both his brother and his boss had pushed him, and it seemed to make them feel better to know he was in the expected setting, dealing with the expected problems in the expected way. Making progress. Getting his life back together. He made a point of letting both of them know that he was “dating” again. And it hadn’t been all that bad. Ann was pleasant and a good listener. But he didn’t always like the words the others in the group tossed around so easily. Words like “mutual” and “support.” He’d discovered that he no longer believed in either concept.
The ground surrounding his house was like a soup, dead leaves and stems floating to the top, using the push of the underlying liquid to press past stones and roots. A few days ago the ground had reached its saturation point. The air itself looked full, heavy with cloud. Late afternoons, the ground turned to steam. As the clay soil drank more and more of the heavy shower, the air pockets shrank and the ground swelled. Vague earth forms shaped like heads, limbs, torsos pushed hazily out of the ground. Brett worried distractedly about the condition of the house’s concrete foundations. He was careful where he stepped as he left his house for the street. The car fishtailed as he turned onto the highway leading downtown.
Autumn rains were not common in this part of the country, and rain for a solid week or more was almost unheard of. Out on the sidewalks people walked quickly by, without looking up. The restaurant where Ann was waiting was somewhere in the thick of the downpour, near the center of the business district. Great gushes of water fell out of the sky, plunging past the tall buildings with tremendous speed. The pounding on concrete and metal was constant and numbing.
“I didn’t go out of the house for months after John died.” Ann was on her third margarita. It occurred to Brett that the longer he knew her the more she drank. She also talked quite a bit more about her deceased husband. “Things looked too strange to bear, you know? People … I don’t know, something looked different about them. I was too aware of the way they smelled, the sweat on their upper lips, the stains on their clothes, that sort of thing. All so dirty …”
“Like they were dying,” Brett said.
“That’s right!” She laid her hand over his. Her skin was wet and vaguely greasy, slightly repulsive to him. But he didn’t pull his hand away. She did, finally, in order to take another sip. But he could still feel the hand-shaped outline of damp on his skin, like a handprint of rain. He imagined he could feel everything she was in that handprint.
She finished her drink and smiled. “Well, it’s the little girl’s room for me. I do hope you can stay out a little later tonight than usual.” She gave a slightly crooked smile and left. Once she’d disappeared he thought about her eyes, how distant and unfocussed they’d looked, even before she’d started drinking. Maybe she wasn’t seeing him at all; maybe she couldn’t see past her own sense of the strangeness. Maybe in her eyes he was dying.
She’d left smudges of makeup on her napkin. White and gray cigarette ash powdered her plate, spread across a terrain of potato hills, gravied rivers. The stark white tablecloth was damp and fragrant with an earlier spilled drink.
Nancy’s hospital bed had been white, hard, and tight, but under the fluorescent lights the sheets looked streaked with gray, like bone ash, skin ash, his memories of her. He knew the hospital room was clean, but it didn’t look clean. You could scrub and scrub and it would never look clean to him. Two million dust mites in the average bed. Eating us one dead flake at a time.
Ann took him to her house after dinner. Somehow he couldn’t stand the idea of the damp faces staring from his bedroom windows while he had sex with her. He wasn’t attracted to her, but then he suspected she wasn’t particularly attracted to him either. Her house was cool and damp; she said she hadn’t bothered to turn the heat on yet this year, and she thought there might be a leak in the basement wall as well as several in the roof. But Brett came to view the damp smell as a kind of perfume, and didn’t mind it so much.
The rain clouds outside kept her bedroom dark. He couldn’t see her. Her body was unusually soft and buoyant. He rocked into her gently and almost immediately lost all sense of her borders or the borders of the bed as she melted away into the rhythm. When he came there was no sense of a change, just a continuation.
Sometimes everything is so gray under the rain. It’s as if everything is melting, the houses, the people, everything. And I want to know where we’re all running off to. The whispered voice didn’t sound much like Ann’s. He reached out his fingers in the darkness and could feel the damp oval of her face, slick and milky-feeling, as if she had been crying for a very long time. Then she turned away from him and for a frightening moment he could not feel her on the bed. The damp sheets stuck to his skin, and Brett could not feel the difference. You let me go, the moist whisper continued. I don’t want you hanging on to me forever.
Back in his own house early the next morning Brett stood under the shower for over four hours. Once again it had rained through the night and going from the outer damp and mist to the shower in his basement seemed like no transition at all. At first the shower made him feel better. He could imagine the microscopic layers of dirt and dried semen peeling off and flushing away. Then layer after layer of deadness, layer after layer of sadness and grief and desperation, so that he’d never have to feel those things again. After a time, after the constant exposure to water, he felt as if his body were absorbing it, becoming lighter, more spiritual. Life-giving rain. Rain everlasting. His body was slowly becoming as soft and pale as a cloud. When he touched himself with his warped fingertips, he could barely feel a thing.
But when he moved to step away from the shower he discovered that he could hardly walk. The basement hallway outside the bathroom was dark and close, and for a moment he wasn’t sure in which direction the staircase lay. He stopped and tried to orient himself, breathing deeply of the musty air, rubbing his arms and chest briskly to heighten circu
lation. He had difficulty finding his fingers and toes. Finally he became aware of a dim square of light down at one end, and he slowly headed in that direction. The wet footprints he left on the tile behind him seemed to have independent life, misty bodies growing up out of their roots.
He almost never thought about dying anymore. Or maybe he thought so much about it he’d gone right past it. It was like looking at a strange house and trying to imagine what the life inside was like. When he wasn’t thinking about anything else, speculations about Nancy rushed in to fill the gap. He wondered what she might be feeling at that moment, what she might be thinking, seeing, tasting. And do the dead dream? He didn’t believe, he’d never believed, and yet still he couldn’t shake these persistent speculations. He wondered if the place where she was now was the same one she’d expected, if she had names for any of the landmarks or the celestial bodies floating overhead, if the mountains were still mountains, and if there were mirrors what did she see in them? He did not believe but he still wondered about these things. He wondered if the weather there was constant, and if it were the same weather he was living in now.
He sat at the kitchen table drinking his morning juice. The citric acid burned the raw skin around his mouth, but he didn’t mind. The metal table was damp and cool against his skin. He stood and walked to the window. Rain had leaked in and ran down the pane. He pushed closer to the glass and stared outside at the storm, which seemed ancient by now. Rainy mists collapsed all around him. The dark clouds were a river flowing over the city. He’d come to understand that shadows were different in the rain. So much grey and grey-green, streaked with silver. The shadows, swollen with rainwater, had been pushed out of their usual resting places in the yard. They stood out three-dimensionally now, weaving and growing in the rain, their faces dull and watching the house.
Everything is melting, the houses, the people, everything. And I want to know where we’re all running off to. Our created world was just another lie.
The rain was the only thing in the city he could hear. It forced everything else to be quiet. Wind-driven branches clawed at the window, wanting to pull him to pieces. The rain poured from giant rips in the bellies of the clouds. And standing naked in his kitchen Brett could feel the outer layers of his skin beginning to dry. He went back down the basement stairs to take another shower.
There’d been a funeral for the sake of Nancy’s parents. They did believe in eternal life, “passing over,” and all that. Nancy never had. “You get used up, and then unfortunately the people closest to you have to do something with the discard.” Brett wondered how she would have felt about there being a minister and everything. It was still another lie, of course, but then Nancy always said that sometimes you have to lie to your parents. “That’s what makes us civilized,” she’d say, and grin.
When they lowered the coffin Brett thought about elaborate magic tricks. He could not believe Nancy wasn’t there so that he could share the insight. She would have scolded him for his irreverence, then laughed.
Burying day had been full of an uneasy mist. Maybe the sky trying to tell him something, but he didn’t believe in all that. In the distance he could hear some kids breaking up their ballgame because of the overhanging threat. As a kid he’d always have funerals—for birds and fish and once a dead hamster—during good weather because his parents wouldn’t let him go out when the weather was bad. The body would wait in a cigar box on his shelf until the time was right.
At dinner that night Nancy’s folks had stuffed themselves. Some of the neighbors and a few more distant relatives came over. Food had been arriving all day—about half-and-half covered dishes and plates bought from the grocery deli counter down the street. Far too many desserts. Nancy’s mother had already made a list of what Brett would keep to sustain him for the next week (“After that you might want to try restaurants for a while,” she’d advised. “You won’t be able to cook at first.”) and what the relatives would take home. Brett ate more than he’d expected, though the food seemed more bulk than taste. There was a need to be solid that night. He’d never before experienced a meal quite like that—that particular mix of foods and company, and everyone talking about the food and not much else—it was the kind of meal, he suspected, that’s served only after a funeral. And they all ate a little shame with each bite, knowing that someone they had loved desperately had died, had slipped into mud, and yet they could still eat, in fact had to eat if they were to remain human. It was a need for weight and substance and everyday living. And it was a terrible thing.
The vision of that meal disappeared as he raised his face into the full force of the shower; he thought the water was going to rip his eyelids away. He wondered what things he might see if he could never close his eyes. But if he stayed under the shower too long, the water dripping down his back felt like a line of spiders suddenly breaking rank and spreading across his skin.
“I haven’t seen you in days.” Ann’s voice on the telephone was soft and moist, but accusing. Brett thought he detected a throaty quality, as if she’d been crying. He pictured her naked, her hair wringing wet. “I called your work but they said you never come in anymore.” He stared at the handset. Tiny drops of cloudy water were oozing from the speaker holes. Already he was beginning to pull away from the reality of her, pretending she was gone, barely looking at her. She’d never know. He stared at his face mirrored in the fogged window. Damp smears for eyes, but no mouth.
“If you need me I’ll come,” he told her. But there was so much rain on the line he couldn’t hear her reply. He hung up the dripping phone and went to put his clothes on. They rubbed his raw skin and he gasped. He had to spread Vaseline over his body before he could put most of his clothes on. He expected a lot of blood, but there was just the redness, and occasional trails of salty, milky water issuing from invisible rents in his flesh.
With each stride toward his car parked at the curb the rain made him heavier. His feet became part mud. The rain shook its long hair and twirled its dresses, repeating the same hard endearments over and over. It swept over him and pushed him into the ground. Finally he gave up and just lay there while the rain soaked into his clothes and the mud oozed into his open cuffs. Eventually he felt as if his clothes were dissolving, and he struggled to stand up but found that he could not. The rain was a collection of individual currents picking at his clothes, his skin, his bones. After an hour of this his bones felt like rocks, his muscle and skin waves breaking against them.
A neighbor finally dragged him inside. The man was massive, an ex-steelworker, and yet he still obviously had trouble carrying Brett. Brett had become too soft and pliable, too insubstantial to hold onto. The neighbor’s hands kept slipping off.
The neighbor insisted that Brett take a long hot bath. “You won’t find anything left of me if I do,” he told the man. The neighbor helped Brett into the tub, even though Brett continued to complain that the individual fibers of his flesh were beginning to unravel.
The rain crashed against the glass of the bathroom window in waves. There was a definite rhythm to it. Brett rocked back and forth in the tub, humming along. Finally losing consciousness, he dreamed of climbing the buildings to get above the raining clouds.
Ann came once to visit him. She sat at the edge of his bed, leaning over, watching his face. Her skin looked pale and colorless, shriveled. Brett wondered if he looked the same way. She talked a great deal about her dead husband, but if he heard any of these things specifically he could not remember them. Rain clouded the windows. Faces pushed against the glass. After a time he looked up and Ann wasn’t there anymore. He leaned over the side of the bed and examined the floor for damp. The windows still shook with water. Invisible fingers streaked the panes.
Brett took an umbrella with him to the cemetery but didn’t use it. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it, unless it was to give his cab driver a reassuring picture of normalcy.
He’d never really looked at the place during the funeral. It was much like
any suburb or development, careful plantings and wide, straight walks. Only the houses were squat and disturbingly solid. He felt at home here, particularly with the ongoing presence of the rain. The rain was thick silver threads hanging from a sky that couldn’t be seen anymore. The ground here was the same soup he had at home, only with different ingredients: aches and fears, cold hands and discarded moments. Glistening flesh, thunderous hair, and damp-chilled nipples he used to love to touch. But the rain swept all these up and took them beyond desire. The wet marble looked oddly comfortable. If he stretched out on it, he might sink in.
Brett began stripping off his clothes, far beyond modesty in the face of such a cloudburst. His shirt, pants, and underwear seemed to dissolve in the raining gray as quickly as he was able to remove them.
The shadows moved forward with their dark oval faces. He tried to look between the falling lines of rain as the too solid stones became less substantial and the balance between liquid and solid began to tip. The shower poured into his face and the mists closed in.
As he felt on the verge of liquefying he thought about how once someone so close to you dies, you will always wonder what it’s like, even when you don’t believe. As much as it terrifies you, you will always seek the rains.
At one time, he knew, a close member of the family would have bathed the body of the dead. He would have done that if she’d asked him; he could have forced himself.
When her shadow stepped into the shower with him he began to bathe her, although he could not touch her. The eyes, the shoulders, the breasts and thighs. He told her about the rains, even though she already knew. She brought her wetness closer, and burning damp reached under the edges of his skin.
I want you to let me go, she’d said. You have to have a life, she’d promised. As her terrible rain began removing his flesh, he knew that she had lied.
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