by Amity Gaige
“Milk,” she said.
The woman sighed. “I’ll be home soon. Very soon.”
“I miss you,” sighed Charlotte.
“I miss you too, sweetheart.”
“I used to think about you all the time,” said Charlotte. There was a wave of static in the connection. “But I don’t think about you anymore. I haven’t thought of any of it in years.”
Suddenly, over the sound of the machinery, came the long sounding of a horn.
“Mommy has to go sweetie.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Charlotte, clenching her fists. “Now hold on just one minute. Now that I’ve got you, I want to ask you some things. It’s only fair!”
“Please don’t make Mommy feel bad,” chastened the woman’s voice. “There’s nothing Mommy can do.”
“Wait!” cried Charlotte. “Hold on!”
“Mommy loves you too. Kisses.”
Just then the telephone slipped out of Charlotte’s wet fist. Gasping, she stooped down and pressed it back against her ear. There was no sound at all on the other end.
“Mama?” she said into the silence.
When she opened her eyes this time, there was nothing but a landscape of white fabric—the pillow, monumental to her eye. She raised her head. Tecumseh was assiduously licking her fingers. Moments before, she had pulled herself up the staircase—had she not?—strangers and faces and even a drunk lady in a clown suit making a crowded passage. Now she stared at the empty room, the empty doorway, listening. Aside from the dog’s retreating steps, the house was quiet. She lay there, heart pounding, the moon hovering outside the window. An hour passed before her heart quit pounding.
Finally, she got out of bed and walked down the hallway, looking into the rooms. Inside them, chairs sat empty, the curtains hung unstirred. There was no one. She was strangely, horribly disappointed. In the stark silence of the house, the floorboards groaned under her weight. Her wet nightgown clung to her legs. The fever had drained from her body. Were they all gone now? Down in the kitchen, just to be sure, she picked up the telephone.
“Hello?” she said.
She replaced the phone to the hook.
Upstairs, she turned on all the lights. The sky outside was pitch black, and a ghost town sort of wind was blowing through the silent neighborhood. The bathroom light fell backward over the damp, rumpled bed. Stopping before the opened medicine cabinet, she took down the bottle of sleeping pills and removed the cap. Her palm was wet, and the capsule clung to it as she tried to put it in her mouth. Swallowing, she shut the medicine cabinet and gazed at her face in the trisected mirror. Behind her reflection, infinite Charlottes multiplied in the distance. Was the last Charlotte, the one too far back to see, the child who sat on the bed? She removed her soaked nightgown and stood yellow blue and human before her numinous reflections. Then she got back into bed and stared out at the moon.
It was sad, she thought, all the lost moments. How moments are endlessly forgotten, and one’s life is a patchwork of holes. And love, a best guess. But your lost moments, perhaps they remember you. Perhaps they are caught in the eaves and the corners and the gutters of the lost houses. A tear rolled down the side of Charlotte’s cheek. Milk, she whispered. She looked at the bottle of pills she had brought with her to bed. The bottle glowed orange upon the bedside table.
Here was one she had not forgotten: looking through a telescope for the first time. Looking up at the planets, as if from the bottom of a well, into the circular eye, her first thought had been poor lonely God. She could remember Daddy Gagliardo standing beside her, with his bland good nature trying to explain the idea that the initial explosion that created the universe was still happening, and space ever-inflationary. But even as a child, she knew what this meant—that it would only become more difficult to locate what you had lost, for the galaxy was yet breaking apart, and the stars, in their brilliant independence, were burning for no one.
Charlotte reached for the bottle of pills, which she fancied had moved, in those minutes of thinking, half an inch further away. She thought of Clark, floating backward, arms outstretched, a garden of stars in the inky black behind him. She thought of her mother, floating backward, arms outstretched. You had to hold on so tightly. The grip slips. Poor old God, who never had anybody. Or was he the luckiest? God also floated backward. In the silence, Charlotte tried to sing to herself. But her voice, tremulous and off-key, was a rusty comfort. She held the pill bottle up to the light. The night was so silent. It was easy to ask Why, but the question Why not was perhaps the better question.
And indeed, she thought, trembling and naked and cold, Why not?
OPEN SEA
Clark sat staring at the blank movie screen. In the quiet, after everyone had left, the boy with the dustpan swept around him. It was his third time seeing the same film in a row, and by then the plot of it had become familiar to him: A young priest falls in love with a girl, and in his stupid selflessness the priest sets the girl up with his brother, who ends up beating her at whim with his shoe. Finally, maddened by guilt and sexual torment, the priest comes and steals the girl away from his brother, and they hide out in a cave, where she ends up starving to death, so that the priest has to grow old in exile and is forced to tell the story over and over and over to a bunch of strangers in the Clementine Triplex.
He looked around. It was dark in the theater and the air was lurid with smells—warmed-up, florid colognes, a hash of gardenia and cedar and methyl alcohol, human gassiness, false butter, breath, the generalized wake of excited people, plus, on his own fingers, the smell of chocolate. Clark bit the white candy jots out from his nails. Reaching blindly for his soda, he knocked it over. The ice slid under a chair. He looked around for the boy with the broom and dustpan, but except for the imperious eye of the projector behind him, he was alone.
“Hey,” he said, waving up at the eye. “Anybody up there?”
He thought he saw a furtive shadow in the booth.
“Hey,” he called, smiling. “Some help please. I just spilled my soda.”
Nobody answered, but he felt that he was being listened to. He waved. The eye blinked, seemed to calcify, and a brightness—a mechanic consciousness—came to its iris.
“Hey up there!” called Clark.
He stood and waved until he noticed a short couple, melting snow in their haircuts, each holding a tub of popcorn, hesitating in the dark aisle. Clark froze. There hadn’t been more than one or two stragglers in the theater all day. The man, without taking his eyes off Clark, took a kernel from his tub and ate it.
Clark put his hands in his pockets. “Hi,” he said.
The couple said nothing.
“Well, have a seat,” said Clark. “We’ve got the place to ourselves.”
“You’re from the last show, aren’t you,” the woman said.
Clark sat down. Quietly he answered, “You’re allowed to see the movie as many times as you want.”
The couple settled in the middle section, half a dozen rows back.
“Crazy weather,” Clark called over his shoulder. “Still snowing out there?”
“Yes and no,” said the man.
After a while, he could hear them chewing.
“Was it good?” asked the man behind him.
“What?”
“The movie. Was it any good?”
Gratefully, Clark turned around in his seat. “There’s this priest who falls in love with a girl—”
“Uh-huh,” said the man, from the darkness.
“And of course he can’t do anything about it—”
“No.”
“Because he’s got to be chaste. So he sets the girl up with his brother, who—” He stopped. They chewed. Did they want to hear the entire story? They both wore eyeglasses that glinted in the dark, obscuring their eyes. Up behind their heads, the eye of the camera was alert, divine.
“Anyway, the brother’s a jackass, and he beats her with a shoe whenever she looks at him wrong. Finally, the pr
iest, who’s still in love with her, starts to feel so tormented, he—” again, Clark waited. How difficult, in the end, to speak with strangers! He never really knew it. He felt that he was rendezvousing with a second ship on the open sea, in a world made purely of water, and this skinny couple was on deck, inquiring of him, Do you know where the land went? What did they have in common, Clark wondered, other than the fact that they were all three alive at once?
“Finally he what?” asked the man.
All of a sudden, he wanted to get out of there. The ugliness came crashing down on him so hard he felt his shoulders ache. What had he done? What in the world had he done? How long had he been in the theater? What does “yes and no” really mean? There, in the dark, alone and attached to nothing, he wondered if his own inconsequence would make him light enough to fall off the earth. His heart dropped, then just before hitting the ground recovered itself and saw that regret was a trick, that if he was going to do this—leave—he would have to steel himself. He shoved her pale, tear-stained face aside.
“Hey kid,” he called to the boy with the broom and the dustpan who’d begun sweeping in the back. “You, kid. Did you see me up there?”
The boy walked up to the last row of seats and put his hand to his ear. His white shirt glowed in the seamy darkness. “What say?”
“Are you the projectionist?”
“No sir.”
“Could I talk to him maybe?”
“What do you want? You want to talk to the projectionist?”
“Well,” Clark confessed, “I was actually just curious. If there was anybody up there or not. Just curious, really.”
“What does it matter as long as it works?” crowed the woman.
“Well,” Clark continued, glancing at the woman, “doesn’t he have to go to projectionist school, the projectionist? You know, like a barber or a chef?”
The boy laughed.
“What’s so funny?” Clark said, smiling.
The boy laughed. Then the couple began to laugh. They laughed like their throats were full of butter. Gluga gluga. In the velveteen empire of the Triplex, the laughter seemed both huge and muted, like the battle sounds of the war movie already in process next door.
“You know,” said the boy, recovering, “they don’t do it like they used to. You don’t have some guy up there changing reels. Somebody, sometimes even the manager, sets it up at the very beginning to make sure it’s in focus. Then he pushes a button.” The boy was now leaning sportingly against his broom. “It’s all pretty much mechanized. So there’s really no need for someone up there. Give it a year or so, it’ll be entirely digital. No room at all for human error. We’ll just program the house and sit back all day, drinking lemonade.”
Clark kicked at the ice cubes underfoot. His body was still producing a sound like laughter when, just then, as if in a gesture of encouragement to him, the eye exploded, and an enormous cone of light came out of it, with manic shapes inside and the encrypted flashings of words and numbers, too fast to believe, the scratchy, needle-on-vinyl sound, and the stark, declarative green of the screen. Later, when the lovely, unobtainable girl first appeared to the priest, carrying a bunch of wildflowers out of the vestry, even though he had seen it three times already, Clark’s heart was beating hard, because there was, he was sure of it—there had to be a projectionist, an author, a system, an overseer, a fate, someone accountable and sorry about it, sorry about all this, this tragedy, this unanticipated complication, this saying of words with someone else’s mouth, the cruelty of good people—somebody not Jesus but like Jesus, trapped inside his immortal circumstances, looking out over the world with long sadness, wishing for the good old days when men and women were simple and he himself walked undistinguished among them.
ON FIRE BUT NOT BURNING
The Clementine Motor Inn stood alone between the arcade and the freeway, awash in a pool of floodlights. Clark hesitated at the plate-glass doors, knee-high in a snowdrift. A young woman in a cheap blue suit was playing solitaire on the front desk. Behind her, a janitor leaned on a mop and stared outside.
He stepped back into the night’s shadows and swore at himself. How could everything have possibly gone more wrong? His car was stuck in a ditch outside the Triplex. He was so cold that the top half of his head felt numb, and he was afraid to pass his hand over his hair in case he came across his exposed brain. Clenching and unclenching his frozen hands, he looked back toward the dim downtown with accusation. He hated the place now. Just as soon as he could, he was going to leave it for good—leave everything, for real this time, leave everything behind.
But walking back from the Triplex through the deserted streets, the town had looked so damned pretty in the snow. The traffic lights had clicked so softly in the night air. The glowing yellow umbrella of the Mini Mart was like a warm earthly star. As Clark strode across the quiet intersection, the clerk inside the Mini Mart waved him in. Clark demurred, even though he didn’t even have a hat or gloves on, just the upturned collar of his coat and a pair of snow-soaked Tall Man corduroys.
But just then, arms full of candy bars, a girl had emerged, wearing a light blue parka. Clark watched her walk gingerly across the icy lot, until he realized who it was.
“Hey!” he called from the street.
Judy looked up. A candy bar slid to the ground. She began walking quickly away from him.
“Wait a minute,” said Clark, striding toward her across the slipperiness. “Hold on, there. Hey, listen. I’m not mad. Let’s just talk about this for a minute…”
But by then Judy was moving at a dead run toward a dark blue beat-up town car by the gas pump, on her face the expression of a gymnast barreling toward her vault. She threw open the car door on the passenger side, and just then a man’s head emerged from the driver’s side.
Clark stopped. The snow dribbled from the streetlights overhead, falling into his eyes. He smeared his eyes clear. The man stood up, put his fist on the hood of the car, and turned around, saying nothing. His eyes were two shadows, but the expression on his small, protuberant mouth was one of defiance, and complete fearlessness. Clark recognized this expression. He had seen it on the face of James and Judy.
Mr. Nye, sliding his fist off the hood, gave Clark a vague salute. Then, almost casually, he looked up at the sky. “Some night,” the man said. Then he gathered his wide, compact shoulders back into the car.
Snowflakes collecting on his shoulders, Clark had watched them go. The car lurched forward and disappeared into the night, spraying clotted snow behind it. He could see two heads in the front seat and a little head in the back, craning around to look, with the same flat but politely concerned expression, getting further away, pulsing under the streetlights as they made for the highway.
The clerk in the blue suit informed him that he would have to pay extra: this was the last room left in town. Everybody was stuck on account of the snow. There was no going in or out of Clementine. The room was supposed to be special in some way. But once Clark settled into the room, which was rather drab except for a canopy bed hung with a limp red swag, and stripped to his underwear, he made an unpleasant discovery. He could see Quail Hollow Road from the window. There it was, those lights on the hill. He pictured her drying dishes languidly at the sink, lank golden hair damp with kitchen steam, and he nearly called out for her. But in that instant his vision shifted and he saw only his face reflected in the glass—his big maw, his suspiciously blue and foolish eyes.
For a Tall Man he went down pretty quickly. He rarely drank, nothing but a little brandy, and the glass bottles seemed small and dainty as potions in a doll’s house. One by one, he took them out of the cabinet and drained them. He drank a blue one and a white one and a white one and a brown one and a green one. At first he could tell the difference between them, but soon the flavors blended into one oily swill and he skidded off into an opinion-free intoxication. He watched his hands as the sense drained out. After that, wood felt like nothing, hair, like nothing.
“My God!” said Clark to the wall. “I got the Royal Suite. Ha! What’s yours called?”
Aww for Christsake, said the voice. Listen, these walls are paper thin.
Clark sat down heavily on the bed. “It’s just so damned pathetic, you know? How’d I end up in this pathetic town in such a dumb lifetime? I was supposed to be something. My mother thought I was the goddamned crown prince.”
The voice in the wall did not respond. Clark rummaged inside the wicker basket, which kept swinging around in his vision, but it was all wrappers and empties. This sobered him a little.
“She’s dead, by the way,” he told the wall. He slapped his hands over his face. “Jesus Christ!” Then he laughed and fell backward on the bed, thinking of Charlotte’s cool white body. “The reason she’s so skinny,” he said, raising one finger to the ceiling, “the reason is because of her skinny soul.” But then he saw her running up and down the stairs laughing, being It, and he had to stand and lean against the wall to steel himself against this sweet image. After a moment the anger came back to him. He liked the strength of it. “She thinks I’m a child? And she thinks I’m a fool?”
Who cares? said the voice in the wall. Maybe she’s right.
Clark glowered at the wall. Then after a while he slumped over on the bed.
“At least I’m trying,” he said. “I’m trying I’m trying I’m trying.”
Hey listen. My girl and me are trying to sleep. Do you want me to come over there and beat the shit out of you?