by Ann Hood
“How are you?” I asked him.
“He’s great,” said Edgar.
“He’d have to be, on a day like this,” I said, whistling. “What a stunner.”
“What are you doing?” the professor whispered.
“Yes siree, he’s feeling great,” Edgar continued. “He’s blessed with so much. A high-class job. Summers off. A loving wife.”
Professor K——’s expression clouded. He pulled back on our arms, but of course we did not give him any slack.
“Our car is just over there,” I said. “Don’t worry. It’s not far.”
“He doesn’t think it’s far,” said Edgar. “He’s happy to walk. On a day like this. He knows how lucky he is. And look at his shoes. Comfortable. European.”
“Viennese,” I said.
“He doesn’t look Vietnamese,” said Edgar.
“Oh poo,” I said.
“You cannot,” said the professor. “You cannot—”
Edgar opened the door to his Charger, arm still hooked through Professor K——’s, whose mouth was opening and closing in disbelief.
“We can’t?” Edgar smiled at me tenderly. “What was Obama’s slogan, honey?”
I smiled at Edgar. We were going to heal ourselves. “Yes we can.”
* * *
Plans had been laid and abandoned for the Armory building numerous times. Given up by the National Guard due to upkeep, it functioned, for a time, as a soundstage for a couple Hollywood movies. In 2004, a proposed bond issue to finance renovation was placed on the ballot; it did not pass. Standing inside of it, feeling the dank, perpetually wet air, one realizes that it will never be renovated because there is something wrong about it, something dark and un-American. It brings to mind torture. It reminds me in design of the Stasi building in Stuttgart, a building on which I’d written a paper for—who else?—Professor K——.
Had he ever been inside before? I asked him, when we were settled.
He did not answer me. He was sitting on a folding chair with his hands clasped together, looking at his shoes. He hadn’t said anything in a while, and looked a little pathetic, so small in that grand space, storage containers stacked to the windows on either side, with only a camp light to see by in the falling light. Edgar approached and stood behind him. I winced, but all he did was cup the professor’s neck lightly with one hand. He bent down and whispered, “Are you all right?”
Professor K—— laughed shortly. “No,” he said. “No, I am not.”
“Okay, okay.” Edgar began to rub his shoulders. “It’s okay.”
Edgar looked at me and smiled sympathetically. I alone knew what this smile meant. It meant it was time to go forward, to live. Before I knew it, he’d led the professor over to an old industrial desk—some remnant from the National Guard—and softly instructed him to grab onto it.
Did I want to watch? No.
I just wanted to listen.
There were no words at all, of course, only the shuffling of feet, the friction of clothing, the occasional sound of Edgar’s murmur, and a cry or two—the professor—something like the cry of a person stumbling upon an unspeakable vision. Watching the last of the sun fade through the western windows, I thought about what the professor had really taught me: he’d taught me that the body was a design. A brilliant design, a very tidy machine, a collaboration of limbs and joints, all working together to get itself down the street, or to raise a glass to its lips, or to crouch in a corner and hide. No need to get too emotional about it or march around campuses and in general take things too much to heart. A belt buckle clattered to the floor. The desk juddered as it was pushed a little further. The professor cried out again, a warble of pain. I wondered how Edgar and I would speak of this later, on the mattress, under the streetlight.
We drove the professor back to College Hill. Up onto Benefit Street, left at the Athaneaum, arriving at the back gates of the main quad, where graduates egress with diplomas each May. He sat in the back, not saying a word.
When we pulled in front of the professor’s building on George Street, Edgar turned and put his hand over the seat bench.
“Which one’s your car, honey?” he asked Professor K——.
Professor K—— stayed silent.
“Hey,” Edgar said, swatting his leg.
The professor jumped. He looked at me. “I don’t understand this,” he said, and started to cry.
“I know you don’t,” I said. “I know you don’t.”
“Which one is your car?” growled Edgar.
The professor looked around. He started shivering. “That one,” he said.
“Good,” said Edgar, leaning over the backseat and opening the professor’s door for him. “See you next week.”
“What?” said the professor.
“We’d like to see you again,” said Edgar. “Does next week work for you?”
“Again?”
I turned around. George Street was behind us, leading gently uphill to the heart of the campus, a bower of aged trees, a vision of New England worthiness.
I said, “If you don’t show up here again this same time next week, I will tell your wife what you did to me, and I will tell the chair of your department what you did to me.”
Professor K—— looked at me without recognition.
“He understands,” said Edgar. “He understands the terms. After all, he’s a very smart man. He’s an expert. He’s a professor.”
* * *
Not unfrequently, in these relationships-that-are-not-relationships, there can be very graceful victims. That is, people who can smile and appear happy and even grateful, even when there’s a metaphorical gun to their ribs. I used to think these people were all women. But recently I have come to think, no, men can do it too, men can be graceful victims, and it has made me feel more warmly toward them, actually. Every time Edgar and I pick up Professor K——, I feel a rush of sympathy for him, the way he stands with one hand cinching his coat together against the cold, or when he troubles to bring an umbrella, and as we pull up in front of his office on George Street, he looks off into the treetops, almost politely, as if he is writing poetry in his head, as if things are going precisely as he planned.
FEMUR
BY HESTER KAPLAN
Butler Hospital
Gordon, down on his knees in the dirt and muck, wind shrieking at his neck, the pose of disgrace. His father would definitely approve—his only child ordered to the Siberian task of clearing the slope of its brambles. There was zero point to it; no one ever stepped foot here. Behind him, past the leafless trees where men cruised men in the camouflaged months, was the Seekonk River, a smudgy gray this November afternoon, and the jaws of the railroad bridge frozen in a wide gape. In front of him, on the far side of the parking lot, was the psychiatric hospital. That was what he was supposed to call it, but to him it would always be the loony bin. He looked to the upper floors but saw no one behind the dark, captive panes.
Maybe none of the windows actually opened, not a terrible thing since it meant that his sketches on the cafeteria panes with a black marker would stick around for a while. Two weeks ago he’d drawn a man with a noose around his neck, a girl jamming her fingers down her throat, another guy screwing a sheep that ended up looking more like a poodle. Late at night, the cafeteria had been closed and black inside until the flashlight of a security guard had pinned him to the glass and made shadows shiver and dart inside. Gordon’s friends, who’d come to watch him, had gone for their bikes and sped away, while he couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t fleeing too. The guard, a young Dominican guy, recognized his last name.
“Yeah, my father’s a shrink here,” Gordon had admitted. He was vaguely insulted that the guard didn’t find him threatening, worth calling for backup. He would always be too small, too delicate looking, like his father.
The guard swept his flashlight over the drawings. The ink had a phosphorescent quality; the figures throbbed. “Shit. Really? Doing this where your old man work
s? That’s harsh.”
“He’s an asshole,” Gordon had said.
The guard laughed and put up his hands. “Hey, that’s between you and him. Not my business.”
Gordon’s punishment had been worked out privately between his father and Mr. Baranek—Fat John, head of facilities management. No police, no charges, just forty hours of outdoor clearing, cleaning, the worst shit work, penance in the cold dreamed up by the two colluding men. Only sixteen more hours to go. They could make him do it, but they couldn’t make him feel guilty or even regretful, and he held on to his crime like it was his last supper.
He gathered a fistful of hard red berries from the bramble. If they happened to be poisonous, he could coat them with chocolate and serve them to his father, one each day, a gradual sickening, a drawn-out misery. When he threw them over his shoulder instead, he lost his footing, slid backward down the slope, grabbing for anything that would stop him. His tailbone skimmed a rock and nausea ticked through his body. He was almost at the bottom by then and the river’s edge; he stood uncertainly to watch the rowers and listen to the lonely slurp of their lifting oars. Maybe, if he was very lucky, he’d see Ellen, his father’s last girlfriend, out rowing on the water again—but he also knew that was impossible. She’d left Providence three months ago, though he didn’t know where she’d gone or why; today she’d be only a mirage of his missing her.
He wasn’t going to climb back up the same way he’d come down, so he walked far along the dimming bank of the river to where the woods came down to the shore and blocked his path. The rowers had all gone in by then, and high above him the loony bin glowed over the tangled trees. He clawed his way through the chaotic density, ankles torn by thorns, his hands on fire, freezing, and sorry now that he hadn’t taken the gloves Fat John had told him he was going to need, sorry now that he mostly knew what was right but he always did the wrong thing anyway, sorry that he’d been kicked out of two schools, that his mother didn’t like him enough to live on this continent or talk to him, that even Ellen was gone, gone, gone. Oh, he missed her; he didn’t understand why she’d left him too. He was crying, being a seventeen-year-old pussy, he scolded himself, but he couldn’t help it. Everything hurt. Sometimes—sometimes, he felt like nothing more than someone’s careless exhale. He jammed his hands into the earth to stop his idiot tears.
His fingers found warmer purchase, something faintly textured, almost silky, and he dug further, still sniffling at his sorry-ass self, and pulled out a bone. His eyes stuttered and he dropped it. The thing was about eighteen inches long, knobbed at both ends, a silvery, porous white. This was no chicken bone, no bird bone—but maybe a dog bone, or a coyote’s? The loony bin campus was full of them, he’d been warned, animals that howled through the grounds performing their nightly soundtrack. He catalogued the possibilities to quiet his mind, but he knew this was a human bone. Not because he knew what it was called or which part of the body it came from, but because it lay there with the certainty of something wicked and secretive. He considered taking a picture of it for his friends, but he was too spooked. The whole place creeped him out enough already—and always had.
He picked up the bone with his sweatshirt and made his way back to the grounds. In the long shed of the maintenance building, Fat John was at his desk, his chair surrounded by soft flesh, as if the furniture had sunk into his quicksand body and not the other way around. A few of the maintenance guys were getting ready to go home, banging lockers, swinging lunchboxes, calling Gordon mijo and smacking him too hard on the back.
Fat John smirked at him, the pink lower lids of his eyes pulled down by the weight of his florid cheeks. “Ah, the little artist returns,” he said, “the little felon. What’s up?”
“I have to show you something,” Gordon said breathlessly when the others had finally cleared out. He unswaddled the bone on the desk and took a step back. His pulse thundered in his ears.
Fat John shot up and the bone fell to the floor. “Jesus Christ. Where the hell did you find this?” The man’s face had gone gray-white.
“On the slope,” Gordon said, and added, to bolster his minor untruth: “Where you sent me to clear those brambles.”
“On the slope,” the man repeated.
“Weird, right?” Salt flooded Gordon’s mouth. He wondered why he hadn’t just left the bone where he’d found it. “Do you think maybe someone was murdered?”
Fat John didn’t respond but wheezed as he bent over to hastily reswaddle the bone. He threw it in a locker, which he secured with a padlock.
“Hey, what about my sweatshirt?” Gordon said.
“Forget your fucking sweatshirt. And forget this.” Fat John gripped the padlock and wouldn’t look at Gordon. “It’s a deer bone. We’ve found them before. Now go home.”
“Are you serious? I think it could be human.”
“Do I seem like I’m joking? Get the hell out of here and keep your mouth shut.”
The man was usually playful, always in a slightly menacing way, but now something rank rose off him, the contagious musk of fucking up, of being afraid. Gordon was both assured and alarmed by how familiar the smell was; it was his own too often. He felt robbed of some information he wasn’t sure he really wanted to know in the first place. He was sorry he’d found the bone at all because he wouldn’t be able to forget about it now, especially after Fat John’s evasion, his mind drawn to everything that was trouble and troubling.
And his sweatshirt was a total loss—he wasn’t going to get that back. He biked home through the hospital’s vast and winding campus designed by someone famous and dreamy—a man who’d ended up in a loony bin himself, he’d heard—past heavy strokes of black winter green and low, badly lit brick buildings, the wood houses with their frenzied details like torn nightgowns, the clapboard barn, the stone walls like a million knuckles. He’d known kids who had ended up here for a stay, parents too, teachers. Every neighborhood should have a nuthouse down the street, like a 7-Eleven, for emergencies. If he were ever put in here, he knew that all he’d want would be to sleep for a long time, for days or maybe years. He’d give in to giving up for a bit. He’d force his mind to be a room where the windows didn’t open. He swerved around a dead squirrel fallen from a wire, its tail bristling in the wind.
Out on Blackstone Boulevard amid the roaring buses, and then up the hill to his house, his lungs froze with the cold, but his ears burned with Fat John’s weird warning. As usual, his father wasn’t home, but there was a supermarket roast chicken in the fridge for his dinner (the second time that week), a note reminding him to work on his college applications and to feed the half-dead dog his mother had left them a decade ago. He didn’t like the pooch with its dirty white fur and its trails of pink tears. He ate cereal from the box, sipped some of his father’s scotch, did not touch the chicken in its plastic coffin, or his homework, or his applications, his father’s delusion of his future fanned out on the dining room table. He fell asleep on the couch.
* * *
He woke to his father standing over him. “You were supposed to walk the dog earlier. She defecated in the kitchen.” He handed Gordon the dejected animal on the leash.
“Defecated? Do you mean shit, by any chance?”
His father blinked wearily. His face was lined but stony. “I spoke with Baranek earlier. He says you aren’t doing what he tells you to do, says you fool around. Is this true?”
“What? That’s so not true.” Fucking Baranek, a fink, definitely not on his side. Gordon had an instant flash of Fat John raking leaves in the backyard into piles the wind kept blowing apart, his father watching, nodding. Master and servant. He shook it out of his head, a strange misfiring of his memory.
“Gordon, listen to me. I am—we are—cutting you a break here.” His father was still in his suit, though he’d taken off his tie. He radiated a disheartening stink: something cheap and sweet, like soap from a gas station bathroom. His eyes were womanish, long-lashed and a deep, cold blue. “It’s important yo
u hold up your end of the deal you made.”
“I didn’t make the deal,” Gordon said. “You made the deal, remember? You and Fat John. I’m doing everything I’m told. And anyway, why are you checking up on me?”
“Checking in, not checking up. Baranek claims you went where you weren’t supposed to be this afternoon.”
Gordon stood and nudged the dog with his foot. He hesitated. “Is this about the bone?” He felt its textured life against his fingertips again.
His father’s expression shuttled between neutrality and accusation. “I don’t know anything about a bone. This is about you.”
Gordon opened the front door and let the cold air stampede in. “I stopped by the river to watch the rowers for a minute, okay? I wanted to see if Ellen was out on the water.” He hoped to hear his father’s breath catch at her name, like a hangnail on his heart, but there was nothing.
“But you knew that wasn’t going to happen,” his father said, his expression blank.
“How would I know? How would I know anything?”
And maybe I did know, but I still wanted, Gordon told himself, and slammed the door behind him. Didn’t his father understand what longing was about, that it was not always about something real? From the sidewalk, he saw his father’s bedroom light go on, saw the man’s fastidious closing of the curtains. He didn’t know how patients or even the idiot Baranek could stand the man; his mother clearly couldn’t. Ellen couldn’t either, finally. No woman could. But his father kept souvenirs from the one’s he’d screwed, as though this was all he could keep of them; Gordon had found their panties, some with tiny bows or hearts, neatly rolled like pastel cigars and lined up behind his father’s socks. He was ashamed to have evidence of his father’s hidden desires and small crimes.
He dragged the dog around the neighborhood. Didn’t his father worry about him getting jumped at this hour? He passed the house where a wife had supposedly shot and killed her husband years before, though she never went to prison. The bushes creaked in front, the dog tiptoed and whined as though it knew to hurry past. Gordon recalled the sound of the rowers’ oars moving in and out of the water earlier, the sound of Ellen’s dipping oars on the days she’d taken him down to the river so he could watch her train. He’d been happy then, squinting at the sun sliding along her boat. Sleek-haired, athletic Ellen with her spandex rowing outfits and long legs. One day she was there in the house, teasing Gordon and letting him fall in love with her, letting her bare arm fall across his shoulders, letting him relax into her affection, a consolation for his motherless self for the first time, and the next she and her almond milk were gone. His father had offered no explanation. Ellen had left his father—that made sense, because who wouldn’t?—but she’d left Gordon as well, and that he would never understand. With her around, he’d thought he might actually survive.