Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

  After I handed him the check he continued to just sit there. I offered my cell phone.

  “Maybe call your mother,” I said.

  He nodded and accepted the phone.

  I told him to leave my cell phone on the table when he was done with it.

  He nodded again.

  I was too bitter and sleep-deprived to say good-bye, so I simply walked out. Before I shut the door, I said, “Please don’t take Kent’s bass.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  I went down to the laundry room intending to transcribe more of these pages but wound up sitting on the floor beside the Corona. I cried a little. Before I did so my body convulsed like I was going to vomit. It was more a series of whimpers than an arrangement of actual consistent-sounding crying. Whatever slim chance there had been of getting the band back together was totally fucked now. And no matter what I had told myself, no matter how truly awful things had been at the end, I knew I was always secretly hoping for a reunion.

  The truth is that we weren’t complete without Glose. Without his drums, his voice, his Kaoss Pad skills, and his lunatic senselessness, we were just another highbrow art band, a little full of shit and full of ourselves, pretentious even. Glose brought chaos and weirdness and, dare I say, a spirit of joy to the music. It was hard to admit, but he might have been the most important piece of the puzzle and now that was all over.

  The Third Policeman was truly over.

  Someone had dropped onto the laundry room floor a piece of Snuggle fabric softener, which I used to dab at my eyes and upper cheeks. I think it was the first time I had actually released tears into the full volume of my beard, which absorbed whatever wetness I didn’t catch with the fabric softener. My face smelled like bluebells and buttercups and black-eyed Susans.

  I grabbed my typewriter, along with the box containing this manuscript, and headed back upstairs, vowing to never again allow myself to be displaced from my writing sanctuary, where I now sit once more.

  When I got back to the attic, Glose and the bearskin were gone. He’d left my cell phone on the table and he hadn’t taken Kent’s bass.

  Three days later, on March 9, the teddy bear arrived in a small cardboard box. Inside, Mansard had left a note, which simply said:

  your bear

  Its other eye was now missing. I imagined Mansard’s hounds playing tug of war with it, trying to eat its face. Bethany Bunch’s bear was blind. I did put it in a shoe box lined with tissue—well, quilted toilet paper actually, but it gave the same effect. I was placing the shoe box beside my bookcase when there was a knock on my door.

  A wide-eyed, smiling Baylor Phebe greeted me when I opened the door. He was wearing a big orange T-shirt that said I’M THE GUY IN THE BIG ORANGE T-SHIRT.

  “I got the part!” Baylor boomed. “I got Willy Loman!”

  I congratulated him vigorously and we high-fived. It was maybe the third time in my life I had executed a sincere high five. Our right hands met squarely and made a fleshy thunderclap.

  “And you helped me,” he said. “I owe you.”

  I told him he owed me nothing but the monthly rent, and he said, “But I do, though. Rehearsals start next Monday, week from today, and then I’ll be busy. Come ice fishing with me this weekend.”

  I told him that I’d love to but couldn’t.

  “Oh,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m agoraphobic,” I replied. It was the first time I’d admitted this to anyone. It flew out of my mouth like some harmless biographical fact, as if I had said that I was a registered Democrat or a lover of Vermont cheddar cheese. I explained to Baylor that I hadn’t been able to leave the house in over two months.

  “Well, that’s awful, Francis. Have you tried talking to anyone about this?”

  I told him he was the first person. I told him that I had more problems than I cared to admit. “Not unlike Biff Loman,” I added.

  He said he was sorry to hear this and wanted to know if there was anything he could do.

  I told him that I hoped to eventually get over the condition, and related some inane bromides about time and wounds healing and letting scabs be scabs.

  “Scabs are scabs for a reason,” Baylor offered, gentle as a priest.

  I asked him not to tell anyone.

  He promised he wouldn’t, and then his face got stuck, meaning his upper lip got trapped on his upper gums so that his big blond horsey teeth looked skeletal and terrifyingly alien, but then his upper lip flipped back into place and he resumed being overjoyed. “You should see the woman playing Linda,” he said, thrilled as a Cub Scout on his first canoe trip. “What gorgeous arms on that one. I think her name is Roberta. She’s from Centralia.”

  I congratulated him again and we actually hugged, which was sort of hard to pull off physics-wise because of his enormous stomach. I had to stick my ass out and shift my weight onto the balls of my feet, which put a lot of stress on my lower back. For the briefest moment I thought how ironic it would be if a hug were to cause me to slip a disc in reality, to precipitate a nonfictitious back injury. What a funny story this would be for later in life, gathered around a hibachi, turning hot dogs with a barbecue fork while friends and family—whoever they might be—allowed me to regale them with the funny anecdotes of my pre-midlife life as a housebound landlord whose only friends were his tenants.

  That Friday, March 13, Baylor left a note on my door:

  Francis,

  Come visit me when you get a chance. I have a surprise for you.

  Your Friend,

  Baylor

  Saturday afternoon, following instant oatmeal and equally instant instant Folgers, I went down to Baylor Phebe’s apartment.

  He greeted me with his big yellow smile.

  To my surprise, he owned taxidermy. Mounted on one wall was a bear’s head, the fangs yellow. In the corner facing the door, a full coyote, stoic, with colorless glowing eyes, the pupils sickle-thin, rearing back on its hind legs, its front paws perched on a woodland stump. And the bust of some sort of big-game cat mounted over the entrance to the bathroom, with craven, amber eyes.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the cat.

  He said he’d found it at a flea market in Mississippi, while on a fishing trip at the Tunica Cutoff.

  “It’s a cougar,” he added. “Eighty-five years old.”

  There were also a pair of deer-hoof lamps on either side of his plaid love seat, a largemouth bass that looked like it might break into song mounted over the kitchen nook, and a little red fox on a shelf containing bowling trophies and framed fishing lures. Arranged on the wall opposite the love seat was a huge flat-screen high-def TV.

  Baylor was holding a remote. He pressed a button. “Check this out, Kemo Sabe.”

  The TV pulsed to life in vibrant high-def Technicolor. On the screen, an ice-fishing video game.

  Baylor handed me a controller. “Let’s fish!” he said.

  We Wii ice-fished for three hours.

  Baylor was having the time of his life and I have to admit it was pretty fun. Not normally a fan of video games, I gave myself over to it and things got pretty competitive. Baylor wound up out-ice-fishing me four to three in a best-of-seven series. After ice fishing we ordered pizza and bread sticks with marinara dipping sauce, which Baylor insisted on paying for.

  While eating the pizza I noticed an eight-by-ten photo of a woman, framed in gunmetal, set beside the bowling trophies. The woman was very pretty, with a high forehead and prominent cheekbones. “Is that your wife?” I asked.

  “That’s Ellen, yeah.”

  “Pretty,” I said.

  “She was a beauty,” he agreed. “Hard to believe she’s been gone three years,” he went on. “She died on June fifteenth.”

  I told him about my mother.

  “Was she ill?” he asked.

  I told him about her cancer, her long battle with it.

  “That’s a real shame,” Baylor said. “Ellen had a thrombotic stroke. Bl
ockage in her carotid artery. Didn’t even know it was there. A freak occurrence. She passed out while she was taking dishes out of the dishwasher. Fell to the floor like a coat off a coatrack. I rushed her to the emergency room. Her face turned this deep, strange blue in the truck. Three hours later she was dead. Nothing they could do. She was only fifty-four.”

  We ate pizza. Baylor made terrific masticating noises. There was something unconsciously savage about how he devoured each slice. This man was made to ingest large amounts of animal fat and survive in the Arctic.

  After a silence, Baylor asked me about Lyman. “Is your dad still alive?” he said.

  I said that he was and he asked me what he did for a living and I told him that he’d had his own accounting firm but that now he’s retired and living down in Florida. “After he remarried he gave me the house,” I added.

  “You two close?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. When I was a kid we might’ve been. He used to take me bowling. He was an excellent bowler. Probably could’ve gone pro. So we’d bowl. And there was a period we’d go metal-detecting up in Starved Rock State Park, but that didn’t last for very long. When I got older, we didn’t have many common interests and sort of drifted apart.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Baylor said. “Were you close with your mom?”

  “Pretty close, yeah,” I said. “Especially toward the end when she was in hospice.”

  Baylor nodded respectfully.

  All the things we must survive. The list just keeps growing. The deaths of others and heartbreak and taxes and the slow, deliberate failure of the body. I realized that Baylor Phebe might be eating himself to death, pound by doleful pound. Perhaps he thought that soon he would be with Ellen, their ghost selves reunited in the spirit world. Or is the truth more plainly stated in Baylor’s taxidermy? We are beings who simply expire. Creatures who are killed or die freakishly, without warning, and become blue-faced objects. Things. The only remains our skulls, our teeth, our bones. Calcium and marrow. Some two hundred interlocked artifacts. Left to clatter in a casket or to be anonymously fed to a conflagration, transformed into gray silt, and flung into a dull, disinterested wind.

  Hopefully those left behind memorialize us by mounting our bust on a piece of thick, sturdy wood, by keeping an eight-by-ten photograph next to the bowling trophies, by visiting the hunk of chiseled marble marking our grave, by lightly grazing a brass urn with their fingertips.

  The following afternoon, Bob Blubaugh knocked on my door.

  “Bob,” I said.

  He told me that morning there had been a strange man sleeping on the floor of the laundry room, in front of the washing machines. He said that the man told him he knew me. “He seemed nice enough, but I thought I should tell you,” Bob added.

  “Was he sort of hairy?” I asked.

  Bob said that he was wrapped in some kind of animal skin.

  I went down to the laundry room. Glose wasn’t there but I could smell that he had been. I checked the storage room, then the boiler room. No sign. I went up to the porch, half-expecting to find him sprawled on the wicker furniture. But he was nowhere to be found.

  The next day, Monday, a piece of Baylor Phebe’s mail was accidentally placed in my mailbox. The return address said it was from Emily Phebe, who I assumed was his daughter in Milwaukee.

  I went down to the basement and knocked on Baylor’s door, through which I could hear the ice-fishing video game music.

  Glose answered the door. He was holding a Wii controller, and the game was on pause in the background.

  “Glose,” I said.

  “Hey, Francis.”

  I asked him what he was doing in Baylor’s apartment.

  “Just hangin’ out,” he replied.

  “Just hangin’ out,” I echoed.

  “Yeah, just hangin’ out,” he echoed my echo.

  I asked him if Baylor knew he was there.

  “Uh-huh,” Glose answered. His mouth was a wolflike rictus, his tongue a chalky gray lump. He spoke through soft, lazy consonants.

  I asked Glose where Baylor was, and he said, “Rehearsal. First day. You want me to give him a message?”

  “No,” I said. “No message.”

  Finally, he closed his mouth.

  “How did this happen?” I said.

  “What?” Glose asked indignantly, almost naively.

  “You cohabiting with Baylor.”

  “He likes me,” Glose replied.

  “Did you knock on his door?”

  “He saw me under the tree.”

  “What tree?”

  “The one in the backyard.”

  “The copper beech?” I said.

  “Yeah, that big tree. He saw me sleeping under it and invited me in.”

  “And then one thing led to another,” I said.

  “One thing led to another,” Glose confirmed, “yep.”

  I decided against leaving the letter from Baylor’s daughter with Glose. I considered calling the police and pressing charges, but for what? He wasn’t loitering. And Baylor clearly trusted him enough to leave him to his own devices. Technically there was no lease infraction.

  “Do you want to do some ice fishing?” Glose asked.

  “No,” I said. “No thanks.”

  He told me that Baylor said I was pretty good at it.

  Before I turned to leave, I noticed the bearskin perfectly centered on the floor, in front of Baylor’s flat-screen.

  Glose clocked me looking at it. “Blends in pretty well, don’t it?” he said.

  I was furious.

  When I got up to the attic I reconsidered calling the police. I even dialed Mansard but hung up, figuring it was a lost cause. Glose was clearly taking advantage of the KINDEST MAN ON EARTH, but until I spoke with Baylor about it, there was really nothing to be done.

  I poured two fingers of bourbon and downed it.

  And then two more.

  And then two more.

  Once I was good and silly drunk, for some reason I became overwhelmed with the desire to read Emily Phebe’s letter to her father. I had never opened another person’s mail before and I was well aware of the consequences—mail theft is a federal crime, after all—but the bourbon had obviously gotten my courage up. Why a piece of Baylor Phebe’s familial correspondence was so intriguing to me is anyone’s guess. The man had just opened up to me about his wife, and I’d reciprocated, telling him about my relationship with Lyman and my mother. There was nothing sneaky or duplicitous about Baylor. As far as I could tell he was about as mysterious as a box of baking soda. Perhaps breaking into the Bunches’ unit had unlocked some creepy need to collect more secrets about my tenants.

  I steam-opened Emily Phebe’s letter to her father. It was handwritten, maybe four pages, front and back. She had composed it in blue ink and her penmanship was a thing of cursive beauty. I typed it out, adding it to these pages.

  Hi, Daddy…

  Is Pollard as cold as Milwaukee? I thought global warming was supposed to heat the planet up, not extend these bitter winters. It still feels like the middle of January here, with not much hope in sight. I think we’ve cracked forty degrees only once so far. I wish the spring would come already; it might help me shake this awful mood.

  School is good. My sophomores are reading The Catcher in the Rye, which always makes for stimulating conversation. It’s the only book on the syllabus that rivals all the vampire and wizard literature. And I’m always surprised at how many kids don’t like Holden Caulfield. The class debate about his attitude toward life is enough to warrant a documentary film. And you’d think Holden would have all the boys on his side, but it’s completely unpredictable. This semester, his most staunch supporter is an African-American girl from West Allis named Chiney, who hardly ever talks in class. I think Salinger would be happy. Next up is Of Mice and Men, which you know I Love Love Love. It’s a short one, so we’re able to read it aloud in class. I keep trying to lobby the English chair, Dr. Lowry, to sta
rt allowing me to add some newer, fresher YA titles to the syllabus, but he always brings up parental concerns and permission slips and possible problems with the board, etc.

  It really irks me that we can’t be a little more risky with regard to materials selections. I mean, we’re one of the top private progressive-minded schools in the state! We should be able to feel confident in offering cutting-edge literature to our first- and second-year high school students! It’s not a parochial school! This isn’t the 1950s!

  Okay, I’ll gracefully step down from my soapbox now.

  So I have a week off for spring break. They scheduled it late this year, for the week of April 14, and I was hoping to come down to see you. I’m happy to sleep on your sofa, but if it’s too cramped I can stay at a hotel. I looked into some of the local places in and around Pollard and they all seem affordable.

  Speaking of Pollard, it seems like you’re pretty fond of it, and your new place too. I’m glad you had the good sense to finally move out of that weird truck drivers’ motel, which was costing you way too much money.

  Were you able to get any of your taxidermy in there? I hope you at least decided to mount your cougar head—you know how much I love that piece.

  I’m so glad you’re enjoying being back in school. That acting class sounds really interesting. What’s this “sense memory” stuff about? Sounds a little like psychotherapy. I’m anxious to hear more. I wonder what Mom would think of this newfound passion of yours? She’d probably get a kick out of it. She always had a flair for the dramatic.

  So now the sad stuff:

  I’m not going to lie—it’s hard living alone. As much as I hate Cole for what he did—and I do hate the selfish goat—I miss his companionship. I think he’s going to marry that girl he’s with now, Jillian or Gillian or whatever her elfin name is. I found out that she’s only twenty-three. Cole turns forty next month. He’s old enough to be her father. I imagine him taking her to ice-skating lessons and then out for hot chocolate afterward. And then for a winter pony ride at the petting zoo. His little daughter-bride…