Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

  “I can combine,” I answered.

  “I’m sorry,” Emily said, suddenly embarrassed. “I should have asked if you were married.”

  “I was,” I said. “She left me for someone else.” I did my best to say this without asking for pity, but I was starting to feel pretty stoned, so who knows how it came out.

  I also told her that I had written for the local alternative newspaper until it folded, and how after my mother had died, I inherited the house from my father when he remarried and moved down to Florida with his new wife, a big-boned, kind-as-a-Christian-missionary woman named Sissy Bisno.

  Neither of us acknowledged the fact that we shared the distinction of having dead mothers and widower fathers.

  I said that I was happy learning the landlord trade, that I’d accepted my fate of growing old and hunchbacked, lugging around an above-average Black & Decker toolbox, becoming somewhat adept at operating various power tools, joining the ranks of that strange fraternity of ageless troll-like men with undiagnosed gout and hairy ears. “That’s about it, I guess.”

  She asked me if she could see my ears. I showed her the left one.

  “Doesn’t look hairy to me,” she said.

  “You should see the other one,” I replied. I told her that that’s why I grew the beard, to pull focus.

  I felt as calm as I had since my night underneath the Radio Trees. I didn’t want to believe it, but maybe it was as simple as my out-of-house nervous system being somehow pacified by proximity to women.

  “What about you?” I said. Based on the letter to her father (whose violation of privacy was lodged deep in my viscera like a small cold coin), I already knew some stuff of course, but I asked Emily her story.

  She said she taught English at a prep school in Milwaukee and that she too had been married but that it hadn’t worked out, that her ex-husband, who ran his family’s construction company, left her for his secretary. She reported all of this very matter-of-factly, throwing away any hint of the pain or suffering it had caused.

  Another shared distinction: the cheating spouse and failed marriage.

  “A nymphomaniac with perfect skin and tiny little ankles,” she added.

  “Is that what men really want?” I asked. “Tiny ankles?”

  “Tiny ankles and tiny minds.”

  “I always thought it was supposed to be big tits and slim hips.”

  Emily said that the secretary had that going for her too. “The girl’s like some genetically perfect archetype,” she said. “Put on the earth to make all other women feel terrible about themselves.”

  “And help keep the self-loathing genre of the self-help mass-market paperback firmly ensconced on the bestseller list,” I offered, which I thought was a witty, if not downright erudite, thing to say.

  Emily ignored the remark. She pinched her lower lip with thumb and forefinger and said, “I’d like to break that girl’s ankles. Then she’d wind up bedridden and get fat and hormonally confused and grow a beard.”

  “Then your husband would leave her for another nymphomaniac,” I said.

  “With tiny ankles.”

  “And big boobs.”

  “And no waist.”

  “And then you’d have to break the new girl’s ankles,” I said.

  “Anklettes,” Emily said. “That’s what she has—anklettes. Is that a word?”

  “It is now.”

  We each took another hit from the joint.

  “You don’t have anything against beards, do you?” I said.

  “Not at all,” she replied. “I’m especially drawn to them when worn by fat nymphomaniacs with chronic ankle pain.”

  After a pause I said, “So we’re both a couple of marital rejects.” Though I was trying to make light of things, it was painful to say this and perhaps equally painful for Emily to hear.

  Her only response was a nod. She seemed suddenly to contract within herself. Her eyes went somewhere else and her mouth shrunk.

  I reached across the console and took her hand. I don’t think I was trying to express any commiserative, sloppy, sentimental Woe Is Us plea, and it wasn’t meant to be a sexual advance; I simply felt close to her.

  In any case, Emily didn’t resist.

  We were facing each other now, and it was my right hand joined with her left, awkwardly arranged over the manual parking brake, which she’d engaged in its maximum erectile position, even though my street is as level as Nebraska, and for some reason, at that precise moment, the fact that she was the kind of woman who would do that seemed to me wildly sexy.

  Her hand was warm and it felt smaller than it looked. She was a nail biter, it was clear, though that’s something which has never bothered me. (Lyman always said that a woman with bad nails is likely a bad cook, just one of the many bits of folk wisdom he’s come up with over the years.)

  “I’m really stoned,” Emily said after a silence.

  I told her that I was too. And then I suggested that we go in and check on her father.

  She nodded but we kept holding hands. For maybe thirty minutes. We didn’t say much. We remained crouched low in our seats with my forearm and upper wrist draped over the parking brake. Some of that time we spent looking at each other, but mostly we just looked into ourselves or at the various surfaces and cubbies and dashboard circles and entertainment knobs of the car. Once, for a few minutes, we infinitesimally brushed our thumbs against each other, but that was so subtle—like an eyelash on a pillowcase—that I might even be imagining it. Finally we looked at each other and nodded and took our hands back and got out of the car and made our way to the front porch.

  Emily woke her father up, and we manned either side of him and eased him down the stairs to the basement and into his bed, which was like moving some kind of undulating, soft-bodied refrigerator filled with an impossibly heavy liquid. Emily removed his suit jacket and shoes and his tie and put a pillow under his head, and I left to retrieve his blanket from the front porch. When I got back, the apartment door was closed.

  I knocked.

  Emily answered. She was brushing her teeth and wearing a long-sleeved Marquette University T-shirt. She looked beautiful with her scrubbed face and foamy mouth and tired eyes.

  I handed her the blanket, and with her mouth full of toothpaste she said that maybe next time we could take an actual drive.

  I offered my hand and we shook on it, but not in a businesslike way. It was as if we were holding the same warm stick that we’d stolen from a once-important but now extinguished fire.

  I said good night and went upstairs, and here I sit at my desk, praying to the God of Idiots and Suckers for sleep, thinking of Baylor Phebe’s daughter in ways I shouldn’t, feeling swept up in something that will likely kill another part of me.

  The next day, around lunchtime, I called Mansard.

  “Francis Falbo,” he said. “Newfangled detective. Seer of troubled snowmen. What can the City of Pollard do for one of its brightest, most creative sons?”

  I asked him if his dogs had found anything.

  To which he replied, “Not an eye-ota.”

  “Still no leads?”

  “For all we know the little circus girl’s turned to mist.”

  “My mother wrote a story,” I told him. “I found it hidden in a box. It concerns a little girl who gets abducted.”

  “I’m still here,” Mansard said. “You’re talking and I’m eating a tuna salad sandwich on multigrain and I’m still holding the phone.”

  Just as I was about to launch into it, the Pollard tornado horn blared, a hellish note-bending siren that sounded as if it were being broadcast from some invisible south-central Illinois mountain. It was a common occurrence during the summer months, especially when mosquitoes were thick and the humidity insufferable, but this was too early for that.

  “That’s the twister horn,” Mansard said. “Talk soon.”

  I sat at my desk, waiting for the siren to stop. It didn’t. I opened my laptop and went to the local news s
ite, which had a weather banner flashing on the home page. Apparently an entire family of tornadoes was heading directly for Pollard. They had started in Nebraska, cut through southeastern Iowa, and were now barreling into Illinois at some unfathomable speed. There was a terrifying photo. Four dark twisting tendrils, descending from the belly of the same beast, plowing through an empty field, the sky brown and bruised, a forest of lightning touching down. Apocalyptic to say the least. The website had a flashing band of text warning that the tornado family was twenty minutes away.

  The horn continued.

  I looked out my attic window. The sky was as blue as Easter. The whole thing seemed improbable.

  I went down to the basement and into the storage room, where I pulled aside the rope rug and unlocked the shelter door. When I grasped the handle I felt a pain in my right hand, a reminder of the punch I’d thrown into Glose’s face.

  I turned the lights on and headed back up.

  I knocked on everyone’s door. Bob Blubaugh and Baylor Phebe and Emily were the only ones on the premises. Baylor was so hungover he looked like he’d been poured from cement and he moved as though he’d been struck by a car.

  I went back up and left a note for Harriet Gumm, as well as one for the Bunches. It seemed odd that Todd and Mary were both gone. I figured Todd was at the firehouse and Mary out on one of her runs. Briefly I imagined her having to outrun one of the four tornadoes, tapping into some innate circus magic, bounding over parked cars, somersaulting through the air to beat the twisters.

  The siren continued.

  My fellow tenants and I were arranged around the bomb shelter like strangers forced to board a pontoon boat. There was a general feeling of dispersal, a drift toward the corners.

  Hoping to bring everyone together, I offered the option of entertainment, showcasing the selection of VCR tapes. “Tootsie? Kramer vs. Kramer? Prizzi’s Honor?” I said, but nobody bit.

  Above us, the sound of low-end booms cut through the higher frequencies of the siren. I imagined entire houses flying through the air, compact cars lifting into the sky, garage doors slicing into the neighborhood tree line. I envisioned pedestrians running through the air with their arms windmilling, dogs and cats flung into chimneys, bicycles landing on rooftops, the Our Lady of Snows shrine spinning high above the city limits, Pollardians and bored motorists being spat into the stratosphere, Eugenia Groom’s wig skittering across a barren cornfield on the outskirts of town.

  Bob Blubaugh, who wore flip-flops, jeans, and a sweater, sat on the floor in one corner, Indian-style, reading a hardcover book, his eyes mysterious behind his amber-tinted lenses, his hair perfectly parted, not a single strand out of place. Abstruse as ever, he’d removed the book’s dust jacket and was holding the book so that the title couldn’t be seen on the spine.

  Opposite him, clad in a black peasant frock, was Harriet Gumm, who’d run the entire way back to the house from the Willis Clay student gallery—some two miles—where she’d been working on the hang for her thesis showing. She claimed she’d sprinted through the streets of Pollard just as the tornadoes were hitting the city limits. The sky had turned a sickly dark green, she said, and there was a heavy taste in the air like iron, along with a terrifying quiet stillness in the trees underneath the sound of the tornado horn. Harriet had an aura of the possessed about her. She’d been forced to leave all of her hung pieces in the gallery, but had hoofed it back to the house to make sure the last of them wouldn’t get swept away by the storm. Beside her was a large black cylinder, no doubt containing those remaining pieces, which I could only assume included the study of me. She guarded the cylinder as if it were filled with thousands of dollars of unmarked cash. After she spewed to us the things she’d seen and felt, she inserted earbuds and listened to legendary soul queen music on her smartphone, her large spooked eyes peering out from beneath a fringe of black bangs.

  Baylor spent most of his time in the bathroom, shitting and puking and hocking loogies, by the sound of it. I have no idea how he’d managed to negotiate his mass into that cramped space. He would periodically emerge and apologize to the group, his voice hoarse and somehow deeper than its usual baritone. The hangover seemed to have shaken him in some existential way, as if he’d glimpsed his own mortality for the first time in years.

  Emily sat on the sofa, a worried expression on her face. She managed to exchange a few texts with the assistant stage manager of the play, which had been canceled for that evening.

  I sat on the bunk underneath which I’d discovered my mother’s manuscript and spent the first hour or so rereading Cornelia’s novella while the tornado siren continued.

  Again, I was stunned by the storytelling, impressed with the prose, and convinced that my mother had spent a long time working on it. Nothing this good could be done quickly or impulsively. I imagined her hoarding her private thoughts, walking slowly around the house, working out the narrative complexities in her head, daydreaming about the two characters for years. Had she ever told anyone about it? Had she ever had hopes of publishing it or was the pure act of writing it enough?

  Occasionally, in between paragraphs, I would glance over at Emily. I wondered if she remembered our time in the car or if getting high had erased it. I found myself searching her eyes, craving that flicker of recognition, but Emily was clearly preoccupied with her ailing father, a stitch of worry knitting her brows together.

  The Bunches had yet to make an appearance and I was worried that they’d been swallowed by a funnel, their bodies divulsed, their skeletons cartwheeling through the apocalyptic skies.

  Halfway through my mother’s manuscript I was seized by the terrible thought that I could murder someone. Even with all the infuriating things I’d gone through with Glose, I’d never been visited by a homicidal impulse. I’m not sure if it was my mother’s story working on me, the madness of close quarters, my erratic anxiety about the outside world, the sound of Baylor’s intestinal suffering in the small bathroom, the chaos above us, the general downward spiral in which I had been engulfed, or the combination of all of it. But like the character whose name I shared in my mother’s story, I could feel a murder in my hands, the thrill of it pulsing at my wrists.

  The tornado siren seemed to be in cahoots with these thoughts. Like the Francis in the story, I imagined using a hammer. A classic iron carpenter’s hammer, well balanced, with a long hardwood handle. But whom would I kill? And why—to what end?

  Nevertheless, there I was, sitting with my mother’s manuscript, actually seeing myself staving in some faceless person’s head, the nauseating pleasure it would unlock. It made me sick to my stomach and I lurched toward the toilet, spilling my mother’s pages to the floor.

  Baylor was just emerging from the bathroom, having left a terrible smell in his wake, which I endured as I vomited into the toilet. Not much came out, mostly bile and air and a foul bitter taste. I flushed the toilet, vomited again, flushed once more, then just stood over the commode with my elbows on my knees.

  I felt a hand on my back and turned.

  It was Emily. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her warm, soft hand radiated between my shoulder blades. “You’re shaking,” she said.

  The winding note of the siren keened above us, faint but certain. You could also hear the distant sounds of things cracking, like old ships tossed around in some epic sea storm. Perhaps houses on our street. Trees being ripped out by their roots. The pavement being halved.

  I told Emily that I’d probably eaten something that didn’t agree with me. I rinsed my mouth in the sink and wiped my beard.

  “Here,” she said, offering a cup of water from the cooler.

  I drank the whole thing and thanked her. The space between us was charged with desperation. Our faces were so close that I could feel the heat of her sweet breath.

  “Thank you for last night,” she said. “I had a nice time talking to you.”

  Her throat looked so vulnerable, the skin above her collarbone soft and marked with a small dark
mole. I raised my hand to touch it, placed my fingers beside her Adam’s apple, where I felt her pulse. She placed her hand over my fingers. I felt intoxicated—both confused and enlivened by my dark thoughts of a few minutes before.

  “Me too,” I replied.

  When we emerged from the bathroom, Baylor was sitting on the floor beside the water cooler.

  Emily led me to the sofa and then got me some more water. When she handed me the cup, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind bringing me my mother’s scattered pages, which she was kind enough to do. Because they weren’t numbered, I spent the next hour or so getting them back in order. Emily sat beside me on the sofa, trying to use her phone to field any news about the tornadoes. But the Wi-Fi had been down since the storm began and cellular networks were sketchy at best.

  Though I’d never actually seen him cross to the other side of the room, Bob Blubaugh was now sitting near Baylor, fiddling with the ham radio. After a few minutes, he was able to tune in to a report that said the family of tornadoes—four in total—had moved some twenty miles south, toward Jefferson and Franklin Counties, but regardless, the siren continued.

  “We should stay put,” Bob suggested calmly, and we all agreed that it would be wisest to wait until the siren ceased. He was the most poised after all, and even though I was perhaps the only one who knew of his Olympic background, there was something about his vibe—the calm confidence—that suggested a quiet heroism.

  Baylor’s face had gone so gray it was practically green. We met eyes for the first time. It was strange that we were both throwing up, albeit for very different reasons.

  “I think I damn near poisoned myself last night,” he said, his back against the cinder-block wall, stomach spilling out in front of him. His sweatshirt now had several stains on it. “I hope I wasn’t too much of an idiot,” he added.

  I congratulated him on opening the play and told him that his performance was already being called legendary.

  “I probably killed so many brain cells I’ll be lucky if I remember my lines.”