Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

  “Three showers should do the trick,” I said.

  “Like three in a row?” he asked.

  I’ve heard about how homeless people resist showers because the high-pressure directional water feels like pins and needles. Had it been this long since Glose had actually bathed? “Maybe take one now,” I offered gently, “and then again tomorrow morning and the following morning too.”

  Equally gently he replied, “But I could use it more than three times, Francis. Just to be safe.”

  “Sure,” I said, noting how he’d affably feathered my name in there, practically childlike in its benevolence. “Just to be safe,” I echoed.

  Even more gently he said, “Like I’d be willing to do six or seven showers with this stuff.”

  “Probably a good plan,” I said.

  In this precise moment there seemed to be some tacit agreement cemented between us that Glose would be living with me indefinitely.

  Just to be safe, I took these pages, along with my Corona, down to the laundry room, where I hid them in a wooden box on top of the cupboard over the washer and dryer. I loathed the idea of Glose snooping around in this manuscript. I figured the last place he would go looking for anything would be a room where things were cleaned. I am tired already of writing longhand and will hope for some typing sessions, or at least transcription, in the basement.

  I was back on the stool once more, post–encircling exercise, as naked as a man on a stool can possibly be. Harriet Gumm was at the other end of the room this time, manning a different easel, focusing on my posterior side. At first it was strange being drawn from behind, Harriet as an unseen omnipotent presence, a disembodied voice, no doubt cringing at my bits of back hair, acne scars, and other imperfections.

  I’ve been on the penis-enlargement pills for four days. They don’t seem to be making a difference. I keep checking myself in the bathroom mirror after I urinate, which means I have to stand on the toilet, an act that makes the dick check oddly surgical, as it’s only my crotch framed in the medicine chest. Without the rest of my body as a proportional context, it’s not easy to assess progress. If anything, I think the pills are making my penis sort of, well, more brownish. Meaning the color brown. Like cooked-hot-dog brown. Or Buster-Brown-shoes brown. Maybe that’s the first step: a slight penile darkening, to be followed by incredible, rapid growth.

  Let’s hope so.

  For the first few minutes of the session I felt like prey to the huntress, but the trust exercise took the edge off and I was able to surrender to the new subject-artist relationship and connect to my breath, which smelled like way too much Dentyne Ice, a gum I’ve been chewing inordinate amounts of to ward off any bad odor my troubled molar might be releasing. And to ward off any possible Glose funk I might be absorbing, I’d showered so thoroughly that the soles of my feet were pruning.

  I could feel her gaze crawling on my spine like a slow, deliberate beetle. I was surprisingly unaware of my brown penis. Or my brown mole, for that matter.

  I think she went from chalk to charcoal or charcoal to chalk because the sound on the paper changed. Or maybe it was simply her technique that changed.

  I asked if she would show me what she was working on but she said no, which I found to be a double standard, seeing as Keith’s study was on the wall when he walked in, and I told her as much.

  “You can come to my thesis showing and see it all then.”

  “When’s that?” I asked.

  “Beginning of May. By that time maybe your back will be healed.” She told me it seemed like it was getting better.

  I replied that sitting on the stool didn’t seem to bother it so much.

  “Posing has medicinal effects,” she said.

  At this point, the beginning of May seemed like a year away. Would I still be faking a bad back? Or would I have to come up with a more elaborate physical affliction, like bursitis or some unexplained adult version of rickets? Worried about what I would look like as a purchased, bonded, freed, and educated slave, I asked if she was crafting me the same visual narrative as her other subjects.

  “No,” she said decisively. “Not at all.”

  “Will my story relate to theirs?”

  “Almost completely,” she answered obliquely.

  I was suddenly all too aware of my penis and my mole.

  The moon is full tonight. I have been watching it through my finial window. So bright you can actually see its shadowy depressions and fault lines. Its ghostly seabeds and phantom continents. The cloudless icy sky. Frozen winter stars. Astral penumbra. Endless glittering space.

  All is quiet in the house. Only the heat turning itself on and off. The occasional toilet flushing, sending a rush of water through pipes; that distant, mysterious sluicing sound.

  I am writing longhand again tonight, unable to leave the attic.

  Glose is asleep on the bearskin. He sleeps so much and so unfathomably deeply it makes me jealous. Since the three consecutive showers, I’ve rarely seen him get up, even to use the bathroom, eat, or drink a glass of water. I get the sense that he’s in the throes of some essential restorative process. A kind of half-conscious hibernation. In recent days, the few times he’s been conscious, he’s been pretty quiet, if not a little dazed, occasionally emitting a faint sigh that sounds like a release of air from some unseen anatomical valve. At some point I will enter the attic apartment and he will have transformed into a jungle cat.

  Or just a big plate of ham.

  There is still an odor, an almost blinding halitosis, which I worried at first was from my molar, but realized, almost with relief, was emanating from Glose, even after the third shower. While working at my desk I’ve taken to blowing a small fan in his direction. A fan in the winter (it’s early March, but still winter in this part of Illinois) is absurd, I know, but it seems to organize his breath into a kind of rectangular mass that lives with him on his side of the room.

  Yes, I now find myself in a my-side/your-side situation. I offer him Dentyne Ice, which he refuses. I even left a new toothbrush, still in its plastic, propped on the second shelf of my bookcase, within his direct line of sight, but he either hasn’t seen it or doesn’t care.

  It’s like we’re at summer camp. Or in prison.

  The Bunches purchased a new DVD player, and earlier, when I went down to check on them, they were watching one of the many George Clooney movies in which he is hapless and noble and charming and a lothario and sort of athletic and sort of unathletic and brilliant and self-effacing and chiseled of jaw and emotionally moving and larky and alpha and beta male and a good maker-of-pasta-sauce and coordinated and uncoordinated and doggedly moral yet in spurts totally Machiavellian and cutthroat and a good listener and a naturally talented masseur of the shoulder and neck areas belonging to women half his age (who would’ve thought!) and not bad with a hammer and good and funny in bed and not half-bad in a batting cage and maybe a secret genius with shy, reluctant borderline-autistic children—he is miraculously all of these things! The characters he portrays always seem to be fated (or is it blessed?) to float through a comic, prelapsarian world of mild conflict and even milder resolution, and one populated mostly by girls with great legs.

  I guess I’m just jealous.

  I will never have a life that resembles a George Clooney movie and I will never look like George Clooney. I will forever be an averagely handsome guy who looks slightly better while playing the electric guitar. That only gets you so far. And when you stop playing your guitar in front of people that doesn’t really get you anywhere.

  Anyway, Todd answered the door. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with matching bottoms, and hiking boots, the laces undone. His horrent red hair looked like a mass to be sanded, not barbered. He resembled a Sears catalog model clutching a garage-door opener. An odor of Mexican takeout wafted warmly toward me. Todd was holding an open two-liter bottle of Citrus Drop, whose off-brand label seems somehow more suited to dishwashing detergent than lemon-lime refreshment. The only lig
ht in their apartment—the spill from the living room TV—played over Mary’s legs, bare and silvery, extended from the calico sofa. George Clooney’s unmistakable voice—that finely tuned Instrument of a Nation—soothed and sedated their home with its sterling, mellifluous baritone.

  Todd said, “Hello, Francis.”

  “Todd,” I replied.

  He was squinting at the glow from the back porch light behind me, which they’ve been leaving on lately. Half of me believes they keep it on in case Bethany miraculously appears in the backyard, as if deposited there by a flying saucer, and so I allow them to leave it on.

  “Clooney,” I said, referring to the movie.

  “He’s the real deal,” Todd replied.

  I have recently gotten into the habit of combing my beard and I was suddenly paranoid that Todd knew, and that in his mind it made me sort of gay.

  Todd said, “Did you want to talk to Mary?”

  “No,” I replied, “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay down here.”

  “We’re fine,” he said.

  “The new door giving you any problems?”

  “No problems, no.”

  I told him that the Home Depot guy could come back if it needed adjusting.

  “Door’s perfect,” Todd said, neutral as the door itself.

  My real purpose for the visit was to delicately broach the subject of their having changed the locks. I figured enough time had passed since the staged burglary and for the life of me I just couldn’t let it slide. The landlord-tenant collusion was making me feel cowardly and small-balled. I was about to ease into the issue when I noticed that a black video camera had been installed in their ceiling, just beyond the threshold of the rear entrance, maybe six inches in length.

  “Surveillance,” I said, pointing to the camera. Again, the first thing that came to mind was lease infraction. Were they allowed to drill into the ceiling? Was unapproved surveillance permitted?

  Todd simply nodded and said, “There’s one above the front entrance too.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Was that expensive?”

  “More than we can afford right now, but it makes Mary feel a lot safer.”

  “Good investment” is all I could come up with. So in a matter of days, they’d replaced their DVD player and installed a hi-tech surveillance apparatus. What had happened to their so-called low-income pressures?

  “Yesterday at the bank,” Todd said, “a woman walked up to Mary and told her we were going to rot in hell for murdering our daughter.”

  That was stunning to hear and I told him as much.

  He said, “People, you know?”

  “Fucking. People,” I echoed.

  He asked me please not to swear and I apologized.

  “This detective keeps calling too. Wants something of Bethany’s for some dog to sniff.”

  “Do you have anything you can give him?” I said, picturing the teddy bear.

  Todd replied, “We don’t want dogs sniffin’ on her stuff.”

  At this point I had forgotten why I’d knocked on their door.

  “I better get back to the movie,” Todd said.

  “Of course,” I said. “Have a good night.”

  So yes, the full moon in all of its ancient glory…

  After my visit with Todd Bunch I received an incoming call on my cell phone from an unfamiliar number. For a moment I thought my grandma Ania, Cornelia’s mother, had finally died. I had always thought it to be a turn of ugly poetry that she was forced to outlive her daughter, to bide her time in a North Shore rest home that Lyman generously pays for. Grandma Ania’s husband, Grandpa Radek, died in his sleep only a year before his daughter. So Grandma Ania is no stranger to the indifferent machinations of her Catholic God. Her grief has become a kind of unrelenting season of cold wind. The few times I’ve visited her at the nursing home she was withdrawn, virtually wordless. We ate microwaved tomato soup and Ritz crackers while she sat before a book of crosswords, a rosary wrapped around her left hand, not being used for any prayer ritual but seeming to function as a kind of apotropaic talisman, to fend off whatever badness is left for her in the world. The rosary might as well have been a fork or a steak knife.

  I let the call go to voice mail, but it wasn’t from Grandma Ania’s nursing home—it was from Sheila Anne.

  At the sound of her voice my kidneys lightened, my lungs tingled, my heart wobbled. A sudden and serious hyperawake feeling took hold of me. A feeling so potent it made me think I’ve been living as the revenant version of Francis Carl Falbo, a mere shade of who he was. Hearing her recorded voice made me whole again, albeit briefly, and my organs were inspired to manufacture something other than insulin and bile. Nerve endings fluttered. I think I felt the thrill of positive adrenaline for the first time in untold months.

  On the message Sheila Anne said she’d been trying to reach Bradley to no avail. She wondered if I might be so kind as to go knock on his door, just to make sure he was okay. She also said she hoped I was doing well and that if it wasn’t too much trouble would I mind calling her back.

  I played the message maybe sixteen times, not even really dealing with its content but letting the music of her voice wash over me while I desperately searched for signs that I was still taking up space in her head, little clues scattered in between the vowels and consonants. She sounded healthy, present. Dare I say amazing?

  I almost vomited.

  But I didn’t puke. Because I still have pride. Which gives me hope.

  I swallowed hard several times and forced myself to stop replaying her message by putting my cell phone in my minifridge and closing the door.

  Glose.

  Day 6.

  We were listening to the Alan Parsons Project’s Eye in the Sky, whose first two songs, “Sirius” and the title track, are prog-rock masterpieces. The rest of the album has a hard time measuring up.

  Glose was still sporting his kelly-green Girl Scouts of America T-shirt but had degenerated to wearing nothing from the waist down. Meaning he was half-naked and it was the wrong half. And the bottom of his T-shirt was rolling up, so his fleshy, simian stomach was sort of spilling out indiscriminately, his navel an unseen, unsolved mystery. I have no idea what became of his corduroys. Perhaps they were so threadbare they simply dissolved.

  Unbeknownst to me, Glose and I were about to embark on our first full-fledged conversation since his arrival.

  From out of nowhere, with Alan Parsons’s rueful voice singing in the background, Glose said, “I do think about doing stuff.”

  Out of respect for the rarity of the Third Policeman’s drummer actually sharing a thought approaching the complexity of self-examination, I let a few measures play. “Like what?” I eventually asked.

  But he drifted off like he was on Vicodin and Blue Nun wine, which used to be his favorite little post-gig cocktail.

  “Like getting a job?” I tried again.

  “Maybe,” he replied, drifting back.

  I told him that gainful employment is never a bad thing.

  He said that his skill set was sort of limited.

  Beyond the drums, I tried to make a mental list of Glose’s various abilities. One thing he can do is foretell the future, mostly bad stuff that’s between people. Like who will stop loving whom and who will cheat on whom first, that sort of thing. Or on a less dramatic, smaller scale, who will forget their cell phone during the load out or who has enough money to buy him breakfast at the nearest Denny’s. It goes without saying that he’s an incredibly talented parasite, but in terms of one’s skill set that would be useful only on like some new reality TV series about competitive mooching.

  “I like plants,” he said, somewhat proactively. “I could work with plants.”

  “Like at a nursery,” I offered.

  “Or at a floral shop.”

  He seemed to follow the thought around the few feet of airspace between him and my bookcase as if it were a pulsating firefly…but then something short-circuited and his head
returned to rest.

  I asked him if he’d consider asking for his job back at the stand-up MRI clinic.

  He said he couldn’t go back there.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because they caught me peeing on the ficus tree,” he answered.

  Clearly, nontoilet urination is a thing with Glose. Is this why he liked plants? So he could have a place to go to the bathroom?

  I said, “You could teach drums.”

  But he said he’d sold his kit in Morgantown, West Virginia, for five hundred dollars, which meant he’d no doubt sold it for two-fifty.

  “That kit was worth a grand, Rodney. You sold your cymbals too?”

  “I sold everything.”

  “Those cymbals were artifacts,” I said. He could’ve gotten five hundred for the cymbals alone. They were incredible—warped and cracked, producing sounds that any drummer would give an eye for. Whenever we played a gig, the drummer of the band following us was inevitably in awe of those cymbals. They were legendary. Turned out he’d sold his drums to some college kid who’d let him crash on his sofa for a few weeks.

  I asked Glose where else he’d been.

  “Pittsburgh,” he said. “Portland, Maine, New York.”

  I asked him what he was doing in New York City.

  “Not a lot,” he replied.

  Which meant he’d probably been mostly drinking other people’s beer and getting into fights. He said he was there for around a month. He’d answered an ad to do some session work with a band, taken the train out, auditioned, and landed the job in a matter of two or three days. The band was called Scherzando, “a sporty gay jam band,” according to Glose. “Sporty” because they dressed in tennis whites, and “gay” because he didn’t like their gimmicky music, which he said sounded a lot like the Three’s Company theme song from the famed American TV show of our youth. Although they did pay Glose several hundred dollars for his session work, he didn’t last with Scherzando beyond a gig.