Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

  I turned the light on. The overhead fixture in the living room, also covered in string, glowed softly.

  I went into the bathroom. Same story. Every surface, every cubic inch of wall space, every corner, the shower curtain, the showerhead, the bathtub, the drain, the towel rack, the actual towel, the sink, the faucet, the hot and cold knobs, the medicine chest mirror, the doorknobs.

  Incredible unending rows of carefully glued string. The painstaking care was unbelievable. Each row appeared to be perfectly straight, creating an even, complete hide. Its raw commitment took my breath away. I started making that clucking noise again. I just stood there clucking, staring at all the string. I might have clucked for a solid minute.

  And then I walked across a short hallway of perfectly upholstered string and went into the bedroom, where Bradley lay on his back, on his string-covered bed, under his string-covered ceiling, surrounded by string-covered walls.

  There he was, lying very still, his hands at his sides, arms extended, his feet pointed up, completely mummified in string.

  The Sun.

  Oh the Sun, the Sun, the Magnificent Sun, that Holy Ball of Fire, that Great Gilded Orb of Hope.

  It’s finally April and only now, alas, has the center of our solar system decided to make a meaningful appearance. There is still snow, but it’s melting, little by little, sending rivulets of dirty slush along the curbsides, an endless trickling score of meltwater. The minor music of neighborhood thaw.

  In truth, the temperature has barely started to creep over forty degrees. It’s not like sundials are lighting up south-central Illinois. The one thing I notice is the sound of cars starting with greater ease. The jumper cables have gone away, as has the cyclonic whine of spinning tires and the endless early-morning windshield chipping.

  During the past few days I’ve effected one major change: I’ve reduced from two layers of thermals to one, which gives the false impression that I’ve lost weight.

  After the bizarre double whammy of Glose’s deportation and Bradley Farnham’s string installation, things at the house have pretty much returned to normal. From behind my attic window I live out my days with classic rock (lots of Pink Floyd the past few days), good books (last week The Wind in the Willows, this week Bukowski’s Hot Water Music), and enough hand lotion to make Internet porn feel just a tad friendlier.

  The one thing I can say about the penis-enlargement pills is this:

  Taking them makes you realize how often you look at your penis. I couldn’t tell you with what frequency I used to examine the all-important reproductive organ, but I know that I now tug, measure, fiddle, coax, touch, chide, applaud, and just plain stare down at my Johnson at least twelve times a day. I’ve considered keeping a log of these activities, jotting down the minutiae like some obsessed horticulturalist studying a rare flower, but I opt not to out of fear of someone finding it. Francis Falbo: An Almanac of His Penis and Other Scintillating Errata.

  I have not heard from or received any sign of Glose. I think of him as a vibrating killer bee that’s been shooed from a stately room containing a comfortable chair. He’s still somewhere in the chateau, buzzing down the hallway, plying his finely haired tarsi along a gallery table, or poised on a piece of crystal in a palatial chandelier, but here I rest in said comfortable chair, in profound, luxuriant denial that he might return, making a beeline (literally) for me and sinking his deadly barbed stinger into the side of my neck.

  The thing with Bradley and the string was obviously pretty unsettling. I flash back to the moment I found him. I could still feel his warm, sour breath on my cheek coming through the openings at his nostrils, but he wasn’t conscious. I poked and prodded him. I called out his name. I seized his shoulders and shook him, but he simply flopped around like a CPR dummy, so I phoned the paramedics and he was taken to Pollard Memorial Hospital to be examined. I gave the paramedics Sheila Anne’s phone number, and through arrangements with her, Bradley was admitted to Decatur Manor, a mental-health facility where he’s been for the past week or so.

  I learned all of this from none other than Sheila Anne, who called to update me on her brother’s situation and to tell me that she was flying in from New York.

  She asked if she could see me.

  Of course I said that that would be okay, but overplayed the cool—nonchalant as a jazz drummer wearing a Moroccan djellaba. I was so cool she thought I wasn’t interested.

  “Should I not have asked?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s get together…” The only thing missing from my response was the word back, which would have fit nicely between get and together. Because still, two full years after her departure, that’s all I’ve been able to think about:

  Us.

  And the far-fetched possibility of our reunion.

  I told her that she would have to come to the house to see me, that I was nursing a strained lower back. (Yes, my fictitious ailment has become more specifically located in the sacral area. I’ve been boning up on my spinal vernacular. The disc between L5 and S1 is now bulging onto my sciatic node, though I didn’t share these details with Sheila Anne.) Stairs were off-limits, I told her, strict doctor’s orders.

  She asked me how I had hurt my back.

  “I sort of broke it getting over you,” I joked.

  Our digital cellular airspace all but went dead. I imagined her biting the inside of her cheek, which she always did when she was uncomfortable or disgusted with me.

  I told her about what I’d done to the house, listing the various renovations, etc., how I was now living in the attic, and how, despite what might sound like a depressing garret life, I was a bona fide landlord.

  “Lord Francis,” she said.

  We decided on seven p.m. for dinner. I said we could order sushi and drink Maker’s neat, just like old times.

  She said that she couldn’t do sushi.

  I asked her why and she said, “I’m sort of watching what I eat.”

  After the phone call I fended off a panic attack by punching myself in the thigh several times. Then I combed my beard and contemplated shaving it off, but ultimately came to the conclusion that fuck it, she should see me as I am now: messy-haired, thermalized, bathrobed, slippered, and wildly bearded.

  I called Haggis and asked him if he wouldn’t mind bringing me a new pair of slippers—they could be cheap. I didn’t want Sheila Anne to have the satisfaction of knowing I was hanging on to vestiges of our marriage. The wool ergonomic Norwegian slippers were a gift from her after all. That night Haggis brought me a pair of fur-lined pleather slippers that looked like a pair of overstuffed carnival dogs.

  When Sheila Anne was a few blocks away she texted me and I met her at the front porch. I had decided to put on actual clothes, which consisted of a pair of gray corduroys, a plaid flannel shirt with a navy-blue cardigan over it, and the slippers Haggis had brought me. I even wore a belt.

  Sheila Anne arrived at dusk and parked her rental car out front. Her walk to the porch felt interminable. For a moment I thought I was dreaming. “Don’t start sucking,” I said aloud, and punched myself in the thigh.

  Sheila Anne was wearing casual clothes, jeans and a sweater underneath a man’s gray wool overcoat. On her feet, a pair of off-white Chuck Taylor low-tops. On her head, a wool hat, cornflower blue. She was dressed similarly to the days when I first met her when she was still living in Louisville. There was a careless, random logic to her style back then, as if she kept things in muddled piles and pulled her outfits out of them with little or no thought. I guess I’d been expecting the pharmaceutical sales rep. The corporate dealmaker. A pantsuit with heels. Bleached teeth and salon-fresh hair. An expensive scarf.

  We hugged hello. She smelled citrusy, clean. She wore no makeup. There was still a faint blue vein on the wing of her left nostril. She appeared not to have aged a single day since she’d walked out, two years earlier.

  She said, “You have a beard.”

  “I do,” I said. “It’s getting co
wlicks.” I showed her one and she tugged on it and I forced a smile.

  “Just making sure it’s real,” she said.

  I took her down to the basement, moving gingerly, feigning the bad back, and showed her all the renovations: the laundry room, the dropped gypsum ceiling, the storage space, the paneling along the hallway, the two apartments. She seemed impressed. Then we went upstairs to look at the pair of apartments on the second floor. When we reached Bradley’s unit she placed her hand on the door.

  “I want to see it,” she said.

  I keyed in and turned on the light. I hadn’t touched the string. Everything was exactly as it had been. You could see the indentations of the gurney wheels and the shoe prints from the paramedics.

  I took her into the bathroom. She opened the medicine chest. Even his toiletries were covered in string. A tube of toothpaste. A cylinder of shaving gel. A rectangle of deodorant stick.

  Next was the bedroom. Sheila Anne was stunned, to say the least. At one point she lost her balance and had to use the wall to steady herself, obviously creeped out by the strange world her brother had created, the relentlessness of it, the actual texture of the string, the meticulous care.

  She said that Bradley had told the psychiatrist at Decatur Manor that he was trying to become Nothing. That if he became string in a box of string he would become Nothing.

  I asked her where he would even come across a concept like that and she simply shook her head. I told her about my few encounters with La-Trez, who seemed to have some vague romantic connection to Bradley, but that beyond this, he’d been mostly an enigma, hard to reach, remote even when talking face-to-face.

  “He looks really thin,” she said. “He was undernourished and dehydrated. They’re feeding him intravenously.”

  Up in the attic we ordered burritos and chips and guacamole from Uribe’s, a local Mexican restaurant owned by a former Chicago White Sox infielder. While waiting for the food, I offered a mug of Maker’s neat but she declined.

  “Water’s fine,” she said.

  We sat together at my kitchen island. I asked her about New York. She spoke of the energy on the street, the sheer volume of pedestrians, the subway cars, the old Ukrainian Hall just outside her apartment on Second Avenue.

  “So you don’t live in a high-rise?”

  “We live in a third-floor walk-up,” she said. “Our living room floor tilts east to west. You should see how much speed a tennis ball can gain from one corner of the room to the other. But it has its charms.”

  Although her office was in Midtown, she said she was there only a few times a week and spent most of her time on the road or in an airplane, making sales calls. Her region was Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State. She didn’t mind the travel but wasn’t crazy about the hours. “There’s lots of entertaining,” she said. “Dinners, cocktails, schmoozing. It’s a far cry from working at a south-central Illinois hospital.”

  “And Dennis?” I asked.

  He covered New York City exclusively; he was the envy of all the other reps.

  “But he’s earned it,” she added. She got up and looked out the window, gazing down at the street for a long time.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

  “Your mother,” she said. “Her last few days. I was thinking about how quiet things were. It was like the house was waiting too, like it had its own thoughts. It was so peaceful.”

  It was true—there had been a rare graceful silence during those last few days. Grandma Ania had come down from Chicago. My aunts and uncles and a few Polish cousins were there too. Some people read. Sheila Anne and I played gin. Nobody talked on their cell phones. If a call came in, the person took it to the back porch. It was strange having such a full house overcome with respectful quiet.

  When my mother finally went, she did so serenely. I was in her hospice room with Sheila Anne, who sat next to me on an old love seat we’d moved in there. Lyman was asleep on the living room sofa. He’d been watching The Money Pit, Cornelia’s favorite movie, with the sound turned down. My young cousin Bronia was asleep beside him, her head on his shoulder. Bronia’s little sister, Halina, was next to her, also asleep.

  The moment of death was barely discernible, like a patch of snow dissolving into a stream. The hospice nurse on duty, a fair, willowy man named Chad, had to tell us.

  “That’s it,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  I went out to the living room and put my hand on Lyman’s shoulder. Somehow he knew from my touch. He simply looked up and nodded.

  “You were so good with her,” I told Sheila Anne, who was still looking out the window. “Lyman could barely go in her room. He was such a coward.”

  “I was just more comfortable around someone in decline. Don’t be so hard on your father,” she added. “He does the best he can.”

  I told Sheila Anne that I dream about my mother. That I often wake up with an ache. I didn’t tell her that she, Sheila Anne, was involved in that ache too. I didn’t need to. I’m convinced that part of leaving someone is carefully arranging the pain that will be left behind. Like gluing a broken dinner plate to the wall.

  While we ate she said she liked what I’d done with the attic. “It’s cozy,” she offered.

  I told her about all the stuff I’d had to clear away before the renovation. There had been boxes of clothes, an entire library of children’s books, a baby crib full of cookbooks, endless stacks of telephone books, decades’ worth of Lyman’s Sports Illustrated and Golf magazines. Footlockers filled with old sheets—seemingly hundreds of perfectly folded sheets in nearly a dozen footlockers.

  “I never would’ve thought your parents were hoarders.”

  I told her there’d been a family of raccoons, that I’d had to call the ASPCA and have them come down from Urbana so the raccoons could be removed “humanely.” Which basically meant they were fed canned dog food laced with tranquilizers and then put in cages and flung in the back of a van so banged up it looked like it could have belonged to someone who’d acquired multiple DUIs.

  “And now you have yourself a little bachelor pad,” Sheila Anne said. She asked if I was seeing anyone.

  “No,” I said. “No one.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  I offered something about the local slim pickings.

  “Do you have to stay in Pollard? Couldn’t you hire a super to be on-site here?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland. Anywhere. The women would line up.”

  A cold blade turned in my stomach. To change the subject and avoid the slide into self-pity, I asked her about Bradley, about what the mental hospital was planning for him.

  They’d immediately started a round of psychoactive medication, she said. The diagnosis was mild schizophrenia with paranoid tendencies. He’d apparently tried to attack the nurses when they started removing the string he’d glued to his body. “He went at their eyes,” she said. “He’s in restraints.”

  I asked her what drug they had him on.

  “Thorazine,” she said, “the great affect eliminator. They theorize it’ll be good for the paranoia and delusional stuff.”

  I imagined Bradley shuffling around in a hospital garment, blank-faced and drooling, with stunned koala-bear eyes, clutching an empty Dixie cup.

  “I don’t know where it comes from,” she added. “Major mental illnesses don’t exactly run in our family.” She added that she’d always assumed Bradley’s problems were far subtler than delusions of grandeur.

  Then she asked me about my tenants and I went down the list. The Bunches and their missing daughter. Harriet Gumm, the artist college student. Bob Blubaugh, the Most Neutral Man in the World. And Baylor Phebe, the sixty-two-year-old former-junior-high-school-teacher-turned-actor. I told her that he was a widower, that he’d been cast in the Arthur Miller play, that he had an amazingly large stomach and surprisingly light feet.

  She asked about the band, where everybody was, if I’d been in
contact with anyone.

  “No,” I said. “Everyone’s doing other things.”

  I had no interest in bringing up the recent appearance of Glose and what I’d done.

  Then she asked me if I was writing any music.

  “I noodle around on the guitar, but that’s about it.”

  “You’re through with it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’d like to think that I’ll get hungry for it again at some point.” I didn’t dare tell her that the simple thought of being in public almost caused a panic attack.

  After we ate I put on one of our favorite records, Steely Dan’s Aja. Sheila Anne and I have always loved Donald Fagen’s voice, but it’s the band’s arrangements, their studio work, and their overall songwriting that have consistently blown my mind.

  As soon as I showed her the album cover, a certain sweetness passed over her face.

  During the bass-line intro to “Black Cow,” she laughed. Back in our marriage we’d endlessly talked about how the beginning of that track inspires an inexplicable silly feeling. It always made Sheila Anne imagine someone in a black turtleneck and handlebar mustache, carrying a banana cream pie topped off with loads of Cool Whip, mischievously sneaking around to the beat in some totally choreographed tippy-toes way, looking for a face to victimize.

  The sound of her laugh alone cured me of all my woes for at least the next ten minutes. She had to know that by playing Aja I was pushing old sentimental buttons, but how could I not?

  She said, “You know the guitar part in this is the background music on a commercial for a top-selling erectile dysfunction pill?”

  “That’s amazing,” I said. “Good for Steely Dan.”

  “The important things you learn on the job.” Then she told me she liked my beard, that it somehow brought out my eyes.