Know Your Beholder

by Adam Rapp

  She was again wearing her veil. With rehearsed sincerity she said, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Outside, Staley ambled along exhaustedly, as if her thin pale frame were fighting off a virus. When she spoke, I recognized now that there was something of Sheila Anne in her voice. It was pitched at the same register; there was the same slow melody in her vowels. From somewhere on campus came the sound of turf sprinklers spritzing. We passed some fine small-college landscaping, a rampart of well-groomed hedges, and a manicured lawn featuring several abstract corroded iron sculptures that easily could have been mistaken for scrap metal tossed about by the tornadoes. Three baseball players in their uniforms walked by us, lazy as old Southern landowners.

  When we reached the Olds we turned and faced each other.

  Staley with the pink hair was suddenly flirty, almost coquettish. With an index finger, she pushed me, lightly, in the middle of my chest. “How old are you?” she asked.

  “Thirty-six,” I replied matter-of-factly. “Why?”

  “You’re fuckin’ old,” she joked.

  For some reason I thought of Emily Phebe. Her round brown eyes, their warmth and depth. Only days before I had looked once more at her note and sent her a simple e-mail, writing, “Hey, thinking of you,” leaving my cell phone number and wishing her well. She’d quickly written back, telling me that I’d been on her mind too and suggesting that we talk on the phone sometime soon. Outside of this e-mail exchange we hadn’t been in touch, and yet here she was, on my mind again.

  “I dig your beard, though,” Staley said. “Can I touch it?”

  I let her touch it and she dug her hands into it briefly. She tugged it the way Sheila Anne had only weeks before. Something went cold in me. It was as if she were tugging not at my beard but at some tired worn space in the center of my chest. Not quite my heart, but perhaps the hardened tissue around it.

  I reached up and placed both hands around Staley’s neck. My fingers were interlaced at the knobs of her cervical vertebrae. My thumbs met below the faint knot of her Adam’s apple, at the soft recess there. I squeezed ever so gently. Her pulse throbbed against my thumbs. Her skin was so fragile, so pale, almost translucent. She simply looked at me. Our pupils seemed to be locked into the four inevitable points of a perfect universe. Just as I could feel the blood rushing to my hands I let go.

  She didn’t step back. She actually sort of smiled. “Kinky,” pink-haired Staley said, her face a bit flushed.

  I just continued staring at her.

  She kissed me on the cheek, just above my beard, on the left side, and moved away. She walked backward for a few feet, still smiling, with a playful knowing in her eyes that sickened me, then pivoted and jogged back to the gallery.

  During the drive home I was struck by the deep cobalt blue that dusk seems to thrive on, by the beauty of small-town streetlamps, by the sound of evening crickets—that hypnotic cresting throb—by the tucked-in quiet of the middle part of an evening in Pollard, Illinois.

  When I turned onto my street there was a family barbecuing on a hibachi. I assumed they were new to the neighborhood, as I’d never seen them before. A man I guessed to be around my age with short black hair and a clean shave was turning hamburgers on a grill. His wife, a somewhat heavyset woman of mixed race, sat at a picnic table in their front yard, as their child, a little boy, maybe three, ran around a small mulberry tree.

  Their modest ranch house used to belong to the Dabadudas, a family of staunch, bloodless, entitled Lutherans who rarely said hello to anybody. Their only child, Lawrence, was mostly known for getting punched in the face at the bus stop and mostly deserving it. (One time Kent put Lawrence Dabaduda in a headlock because he wouldn’t give up his seat at the front of the bus to a boy who’d just broken his leg.) Mr. Dabaduda—I believe his first name was also Lawrence—often would mow his front lawn on a John Deere rider, which was totally unnecessary, as the lawn was about as large as a badminton court. Kent and I used to plant rocks in their yard and listen for the sound of the mower blades crunching them.

  The house was now bandaged in blue plastic. Half the roof had been torn off and was temporarily patched over with long sections of tarpaulin. Despite the wreckage, they were making the best of things, enjoying their front yard.

  I stopped the car and let my window down. I said hello to the husband and introduced myself. “Francis Falbo,” I said, and told him I lived down the street in the old Victorian with the wraparound porch.

  He reluctantly offered his name—Scott King—but didn’t acknowledge his wife and son. He barely stepped out from behind his hibachi.

  I told him I was sorry about his house.

  He said, “Bad luck, I guess.”

  “Anyway, welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.

  He nodded and I powered the window back up. In the rearview mirror I could see his wife still seated at the picnic table, pulling her son close.

  Was Scott King distant because he knew I was one of the lucky few? Or had someone from the neighborhood tipped off him and his wife about my being the person who had harbored the child-killing Bunches? Or was he simply tired after a long day at the office, only to return home to a half-ruined house?

  With regard to my “condition,” it wasn’t until I had parked the car in the garage and turned the headlights off that I had a problem. Sitting there in the driver’s seat, I was suddenly aware that my feet were stuck. I grew short of breath. I groped the Olds’s leather upholstery. My tongue contracted, my lips went numb, my lower back stiffened. Paralysis was rushing up my calves and soon would be at my femurs, my hip sockets, my spine.

  I cried out for help but no one heard me. Where was Bob Blubaugh when you needed him? Or Baylor Phebe?

  I started to hyperventilate. My lungs turned to paper, my jaw tightened, my hands became claws. Why now, when I was so close to being safely home? The agoraphobia gods were truly fucking with me, batting me around like a stunned mouse.

  I managed to wrest my cell phone from my front pocket and selected the first number I recognized. It was Kent’s. I waited for it to ring. But it went straight to voice mail:

  This is Kent Orzolek, he said. I am not here. No, don’t be fooled. This is merely my vocal instrument. Please leave a message. Don’t be afraid.

  Despite the many years in which we haven’t spoken, something about hearing my best friend’s voice helped.

  Don’t be afraid…

  Almost immediately the panic faded, the paralysis lifted. My pulse slowed, my jaw released, my hands relaxed.

  After the beep I simply said that it had been a while and that I hoped he was all right, that the winter hadn’t been too rough in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I told him that I missed him and to please give me a call. I probably sounded a little desperate, but it felt good to leave him a message.

  After that I was able to get out of the car and wade through the garage in the dark and make it across the backyard, onto the porch, and into the house.

  The following morning I was determined to go back out into the world. I walked down the street, weaving through the various teams of volunteers, construction barges, and municipal vehicles, and knocked on the Kings’ makeshift door, which was a piece of plywood bolted to a long two-by-four, enshrouded in blue plastic.

  Moments later, Scott King’s wife answered.

  “Mrs. King?” I said.

  “Yes?” she replied.

  Up close I realized she was Indian, meaning South Asian, perhaps Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi. There’s something about a South Asian woman trapped in the middle of Illinois that feels wrong. She should be wearing a sari and relaxing under a banyan tree, eating figs and breathing the silky air, not stuck in a tornado-beaten house wrapped in industrial plastic, waiting for her clean-cut husband to come home.

  I offered my name and told her I lived in the neighborhood, that I had spoken with her husband the night before. “You guys were barbecuing,” I added. “I was in my car. I rolled the window d
own.”

  She said nothing.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Deepa,” she said.

  “Deepa King?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “Deepa King.” She didn’t speak with an accent of any kind. There wasn’t a single note of exotic music in her voice and she was dressed like Oprah Winfrey.

  Her little boy was suddenly standing beside her, hugging her leg, his dark head of curly hair vast and incredible.

  I said hello to him and he just stared up at me with eyes so large and brown they might have been appropriated from a doe. “What’s your name?” I asked the boy.

  He didn’t answer, just kept staring up at me.

  “He’s shy,” his mother said.

  I told Deepa King that I was sad to see her and her family so put out, and that my house, which was one of the lucky few in the neighborhood that hadn’t been damaged by the tornadoes, was a converted apartment building and that my first-floor tenants had recently moved out without proper notice, and also I had an unexpected vacant unit that I would be more than happy to donate to her and her family until they got back on their feet. I wouldn’t charge them anything, I said, not even for utilities.

  Then, with an ultrastern expression, she said, “What’s that?”

  She was referring to Bethany Bunch’s teddy bear, which I’d brought along with the intention of giving it to her son, who stared up at me. It felt like I’d known the boy for years.

  “Here,” I said, offering the teddy bear to him.

  He didn’t reach out to take it. He just kept staring. I felt myself falling into his brown, cervine irises.

  “It doesn’t have any eyes,” Deepa King said.

  The boy was frozen, clutching his mother’s leg.

  “Don’t you want it?” I asked him.

  “No thank you,” Deepa King answered, adding, “I’ll speak to my husband about your generous offer.”

  Before I could give her my phone number she closed the makeshift door in my face. Moments later the sound of a Master Lock clicking.

  That evening it rained. A long, heavy, opiate rain. You could hear it detonating on the Grooms’ tarpaulin roof, drumming on the eaves.

  I went downstairs and walked around to the back porch. Beneath the copper beech the new birdbath had filled to the brim and was flooding over. I kept expecting to see dead birds spilling out of it. Little thrushes and blue jays and swallows.

  The rain pattered melodically through the new leaves of the copper beech. It released the metal in the air. The back porch was cool and smelled like an ancient stone well that you happen upon in a field.

  I went into the Bunches’ unit and sat on their living room floor. They’d left behind their TV, their new DVD player, their TiVo. Their corduroy cat throw pillow was within arm’s reach. I had an impulse to take it back up to the attic with me—I thought it would go well with the similar hide on my reading chair—but stopped myself. I had the crystalline thought that these items should be left alone. A kind of archaeological respect had to be paid.

  I felt a terrible ache. An emptiness was expanding. An earwig skittered across the carpeting and crawled over the cable remote, then disappeared.

  I could smell something sour, something decaying. I got off the living room floor and went into the kitchen, where I opened the Bunches’ refrigerator, which they had turned off, perhaps a last-second bit of energy-saving generosity. Inside was a curdled half-gallon of milk with the top off, a cantaloupe turning bad, a bottle of Thousand Island salad dressing, and in the crisper a damp, putrefying head of romaine lettuce, floating in a film of brown water.

  Was it in fact a gesture of energy-saving generosity or a final act of bitterness? I pondered whether they always left the cap off their milk, or whether perhaps, beyond their clothes and other soft goods, that little blue disc had been the one thing they’d taken with them, a souvenir to mark this terrible chapter in their lives. A thing for Todd Bunch to carry around in his pocket, to forever remind him of that fucked-up Illinois town where his daughter disappeared and the people called him and his wife murderers, where all he wanted was to live a normal life with a regular job and reside in a furnished home with no circus animals. An object whose dull plastic edge can be occasionally stroked with the pad of the thumb so he will never forget the awful inhuman capabilities of the neighbors and store clerks and coffee baristas and local news anchors of Pollard, Illinois.

  I cleaned out their refrigerator, sprayed down the interior with a bleach-based disinfectant, and left the door open so it could air out.

  When I got back upstairs I called Mansard’s cell phone.

  He said hello like he’d fallen asleep with his mouth full of Kleenex. He coughed and sputtered, cleared his throat. “Who is this?” he growled.

  “Francis Falbo,” I replied.

  “They found her…,” he said.

  My legs gave out. I fell into my bookcase and sent a row of paperbacks tumbling to the floor.

  Mansard told me that Bethany Bunch had been found at a high school track meet in Manteno, Illinois. A young father had come upon her stranded in the grandstand of the small high school football stadium. According to the local authorities, there was no evidence of abuse. She wasn’t malnourished and she seemed perfectly fine. She was wearing a new cotton tank dress, robin’s-egg blue, with little white daisies. The dress had been purchased from a Target in Merrillville, Indiana, and the tags were still on it.

  “What about her parents?” I asked.

  “I spoke with the sheriff’s office up in Manteno about an hour ago,” Mansard said. “The Bunches are with their daughter now.”

  I asked if he knew where they’d been.

  “I figured they’d gone back to the circus,” he said. “But apparently they’d just been driving around.”

  I got to my feet and adrenaline hurtled from my kidneys to my throat. My body was moving at breakneck speed. I was careening down the aft staircase, heedless of the unsuitability of wool slippers for sprinting on stairs. I found myself in the basement, pounding on Baylor Phebe’s door. The thrill of Mansard’s news tingled in my wrists, my fists, the tips of my fingers. There was no answer and I pounded more.

  Moments later Bob Blubaugh opened his door and peered into the hall. “Everything okay?” he said.

  “They found her!” I exclaimed.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Bethany Bunch!” I cried. “She’s alive!”

  He said that was great news and before I knew it I was rushing toward him. I hugged him with all my might, lifting him off the floor. I don’t even recall setting him down. All I know is I was running up the stairs to the second floor.

  “They found her!” I shouted down the hall. “Bethany Bunch is alive!”

  And then I was coursing headlong down the stairs. I burst through the front door and scampered across the street. The rain was coming down hard—cold and aggressive—and the air was thick with ozone. On my way across the Grooms’ lawn I almost knocked over their ancient ceramic deer, the one that had miraculously survived the tornadoes, as well as its new companion, a wide-eyed stone rabbit. My shin connected squarely with the rabbit, but at this point, pain meant nothing. I pounded on their door and in a matter of seconds, Eugenia stood on the other side, staring at me through its rectangular glass mullions. Her wig was a tad lopsided and she wore a yellow velour jogging suit top. Her folded arms made it clear that she wasn’t going to open the door.

  “They found Bethany!” I shouted over the din of the rain. “Bethany Bunch!”

  She just kept standing there, staring at me, unblinking.

  “She’s ALIVE,” I exulted. “They found her up in Manteno!”

  Eugenia Groom’s eyes scanned me, top to bottom. In her reserved, even manner she said something, but I couldn’t make it out.

  “What?” I squawked.

  “You’re bleeding!” she called out, loud this time, and pointed toward my lower leg.

  I looked down,
and indeed, blood was blossoming through a long white tube sock. And I realized that, underneath my bathrobe, my only covering was a pair of old fraying briefs and mismatched tube socks. I must have looked crazy with excitement, my shin gushing blood, my hair and beard soaked from the rain, bare-chested under my robe.

  “Isn’t that great about Bethany?” I shouted.

  Eugenia made a face that was almost a smile. Her lips went flat against her teeth.

  I turned and ran back across their yard, careful to avoid the deer and rabbit this time. When I got to the attic, I lowered my sock and cleaned the gash in my shin with peroxide. It stung but I didn’t care.

  It wasn’t until after I applied the Band-Aid and put on a new pair of socks that I began to cry. When they came the sobs were unbearable groans, like great sopping wads of grief being pulled out of my throat, one after the other. I sat on the floor, with my back against the kitchen island, as these unfathomable sounds escaped my body.

  The rain continued long into the night. Thunder gently bellowed. An occasional car sluiced by on the wet street below. I fought the urge to start wandering around my house again. Sometime near dawn, when the rain finally ceased, I pulled myself off the floor, moved over to my bed, and fell asleep.

  The following afternoon I received an e-mail from Morris. We hadn’t been in touch since September, when he said his teaching load was starting to get hairy. The family of tornadoes now known as “the Midwest Marauders” had made national news, and he wrote that he was worried about me. He’d heard about the devastation in Missouri and south-central Illinois, Pollard in particular, had seen the footage on CNN, and kept looking for my house. Naturally it held meaning for him as well, since we’d spent so much time recording in the basement during the early months of the Third Policeman, and then, later, had written all that dirgelike stuff during my mother’s decline.

  Morris is still teaching, composing stuff on his guitar at night. “I’ve been using an old Fostex multitracker,” he wrote. “Recording on cassette tapes just like I did when I was in high school. I’m loving all the care this requires. The Ping-Ponging. The weird, imperfect limitations of quarter-inch tape. The manual mixing down. Getting back to the analog ways.”