Your Duck Is My Duck

by Deborah Eisenberg

  “I’m the poor,” he’d objected.

  “You actually are a psychopath!” she’d said.

  “Look, you’re entitled to your low opinion of me, and I understand why you’d feel this way, but it’s fundamentally unfair. Or it’s only temporarily fair. I just haven’t been in a position recently to exercise my potential for decency much. But listen, by the time you come back, I’ll . . .”

  Her stare seemed to have stopped his words. “By the time I come back you’ll what?” she’d said.

  He’d been sitting at the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. After a moment he spoke indistinctly. “I’ll what—good question. Yeah, what am I saying.”

  His father had destroyed whole harvests and swaths of villages—his father had sent people scurrying across the face of the earth, but this kid’s problem was that he’d been more or less kicked out of the guy’s apartment?

  She’d moved to the couch, where she’d spent the night. In the morning he packed his things and she gave him a pitiful little good-bye kiss—a little dried flake of affection—and then they were both on their way.

  * * *

  Even in her sleep she feels her way along the surface of the day’s banalities for some rough patch that indicates something hidden, something buried, a sealed door behind which, if she is alert, she will be able to hear Friedlander’s heartbeat. Even in her sleep she watches for the ephemeral shapes, rising above the dark horizon like iridescent soap bubbles, of the first words to be uttered on the planet.

  She’s all sticky with the juice of that fruit, but it has given her strength. Soon she’ll be able to get up, walk around, get on another bus to somewhere else. Somewhere that wants her to be there. It’s as if she’s attached to a cord that’s being reeled in from far away, no matter how much she wants to go home.

  Across from the bed where she lies, the pale light on the wall is turning rosy. That thing in her head begins again, and now the wall runs red. Illness has entered, beating its dirty wings as it devours the soul in the light, the wood, the doorknob.

  The women are pattering down the corridor in their bare feet, and time is passing rapidly in one direction or another. She has some postcards left. Where are they? The information hangs just outside her head. She lies still, to let it float in. Yes, the postcards are sitting right on the little table. If the quiet woman returns with water, Celeste can give her one to mail.

  11

  There’s no doodle on this one—just a sticky sort of splotch.

  * * *

  This city is crazy expensive! His money—his borrowed money—is disappearing fast. But his hours for Cordis, even given Moppet’s episodic requirements, are flexible, so he’s been able to fit some additional wage earning around them. And he’s had to.

  Any old job, people say. But what do they mean, “any old job?” It’s no joke, it turns out, to flip burgers or bus tables or stock shelves or move furniture, let alone clean toilets.

  Sorry, it’s not working out, he’s been told more than once.

  You bet it’s not working out! That stuff is incredibly boring, and it’s also, weirdly, hard to do it right. Who can stand doing it? And for what? You could hardly call that money—it’s no more than he’s making as Cordis’s PA!

  And now he’s tired all the time. Has he ever been tired before?

  Not this kind of tired. He’s been tired after skiing, he’s been tired after sailing, he’s been tired after excellent nights out. But with that kind of tired, he always had a feeling of accomplishment. This kind of tired comes with nothing good at all, no feeling of accomplishment, just the dread of how tired he’ll be again tomorrow. The dread of the endless exhausting, boring chores he has to perform to keep himself alive. Now walking Moppet is the high point of his day.

  * * *

  He no longer has the sensation that he’s being hunted by his father’s people, but neither does he hope any longer for a message from any of them—some indication that his father has forgiven him. It’s more as if he’s been forgotten—abandoned . . .

  “Heard anything from Celeste?” he asks Cordis—casually, he hopes.

  Cordis has not. Funny he should ask just now—she tried Celeste’s number just this morning, but wherever Celeste is, she’s apparently not getting phone service.

  * * *

  Cordis lets him use Celeste’s old laptop, so every once in a while he checks his e-mail from her IP address, but he checks it without hope. And thanks to the bounce back he put on it right before he left his father’s apartment (au revoir, love you guys!), his former friends have given up. All he gets is spam.

  * * *

  Always, now, as he takes in Cordis’s mail or goes in and out with Moppet, there are new people—people around his age, he judges, and even younger, certainly the youngest people in the building by far—squealing behind Celeste’s door or tumbling around in the hall, glorying in his loss. New renters, every few days—who-knows-who’s.

  He himself is a who-knows-who, renting by the week through the filthy little real estate office Celeste directed him to the first time they met. As he watches the agents smugly scrolling through the possibilities online, his head comes near exploding with rage. He could do so much better if he could only deal with the matter online himself.

  But he can’t deal with it online himself—thanks to his father, he’s powerless; he’s been forced to kill his online identity, he’s only a body now, a ghost.

  And the apartments that fit into the budget of the pittance he has left aren’t a tenth as nice as Celeste’s. When he turns on the kitchen lights, there are those roaches again—the cockroaches scattering like a hallucination.

  Kitchen! He’s lucky if he finds a place with a hot plate. All night long he’s awakened by scavengers crashing through the garbage out front. And if one more bug bites him, he’ll fall into shreds.

  Maybe it’s this heat—there hasn’t been heat like this ever in the summer, people keep saying. The streets are clogged with ambulances and fire trucks. Just yesterday there was shouting and then smoke was filling the apartment where he’s staying for a few days. Flames were shooting out the window of the building next door.

  By the time the fire trucks got through, the entire top story of the building was charred. And when he got to Cordis’s place an ambulance was blocking the entrance. They were carrying an old woman out on a stretcher. Cordis! he thought for a sickening second—but no, it was just one of the other old ladies who were still left in the building.

  So many sirens! Have there been so many sirens all along?

  * * *

  Where is Celeste! Where is Celeste! She was due back weeks ago. Why doesn’t she just come back? How could he possibly send for her? He doesn’t know where she is!

  * * *

  They had really a nice dinner together the night before she left. He had bought a bottle of wine, not the greatest, maybe, but wine. He made spaghetti. He washed and dried the dishes, and then they tumbled around together, listening to music.

  She lay with her head in his lap, and they mused, he remembers, about language. Language—what does it clarify, what does it obscure? Is a person a person without it? Is all that stuff inside your head there whether you have language or not? Do chimps have all that stuff inside their heads? Is the stuff you can figure out how to say the same as the stuff inside your head? Is the stuff inside your head the same as the stuff inside the world? And when you say something, why is there always extra stuff inside your head that doesn’t fit into the words at all?

  He made little braids in her hair. An idyll! He was free, elated, exhilarated, as if he had run away from home.

  “You did run away from home,” she said.

  And then—stupidly, stupidly!—he confided the precise circumstances in which he had.

  He hadn’t exactly intended to? But as he spoke, two things happened: he felt a great burden sliding up out of his body, a burden he hadn’t known he was hauling around with him—and almost right at the s
ame time he heard the story of borrowing that money in his own voice, just as she would have been hearing it. Yes, he had studied his father’s signature. Yes, he had gone into his father’s private things and violated his father’s trust.

  How could it have happened so fast? One moment he was one person, an instant later he was another. Was he only a set of reflections—pancake-like specters with shifting features—staring at one another from ghostly mirrors? He was choked with indignation and sorrow, as though his good qualities had been stripped from him by a rough hand, like medals.

  12

  Moppet stretches out in Cordis’s lap to watch the animal shows. Sometimes she leaps to her paws and barks with what seems to be an anguished longing. It’s the old cowboy movies that seem to affect her most—especially the shots of cattle. Something about those cows . . .

  She barks and barks, but the cows pay no attention. Poor lonely thing—she must miss Mrs. Munderson so much.

  Cordis often leaves a movie playing for Moppet to watch on her own, but she has to admit that she likes the animal shows, herself. All these years, with no screen of any sort whatsoever, and now this wealth of animals for herself and Moppet. Well, she does have to thank her dog walker for that.

  Though she still isn’t accustomed to having this diabolical machine around. Obviously she knew—probably before the dog walker, Keith, was born—that it’s possible to read the news on a computer. But why would she want to do that? Even the sight of Celeste’s laptop sitting there quietly all closed up is a bit ghoulish. All that idiocy, all that violence, all that confusion coursing through its tiny electronic veins—whether you happen to be looking at it or not. Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang. Why bother to have four walls around you?

  It’s irritating to be considered a curiosity, even by someone as young as Keith, and it’s hard for Cordis not to be impatient with the boy. At first, whenever Cordis tried talking to him, things seemed to contort somewhere between her brain and her larynx. Was that what she meant? she wondered as she spoke.

  Even to herself she seemed like the crazy old lady he believed himself to be gawking at. And when it was his turn to talk, she couldn’t understand him any better than he had seemed to understand her—it was all a bit wrong, as if she’d left her head out in the rain.

  At first she was mystified that a woman like darling Celeste would have taken up with that kid. Though he is very attractive, she recognizes, in a sort of formulaic way. What would Ernst have made of the boy? Oh, dear—she can just imagine!

  But heaven knows, Celeste has never been able to resist a challenge. And clearly, it’s a seller’s market in this city for men these days.

  In any event, he’s been looking tired—exhausted, really. She knows that he’s taken on a few other, very undemanding little jobs, but that can’t entirely account for his fatigue, let alone his haunted look. He seems to be engaged in some profound internal struggle. Her heart goes out to him, at least partway.

  Just yesterday he seemed so tired that she offered to let him take a nap while she went out with Moppet, but to her surprise, he drew himself up gallantly, gave her a wan, reassuring little smile, and soldiered on to the door, clutching Moppet and her leash.

  Hopeless, the poor boy, really. The pity in the little smiles he sometimes wrings from her must be all too discernable.

  * * *

  An odd consequence of having him around is that she finds herself thinking about Ernst all the time. Not that there was ever a time when she didn’t think about Ernst—after the early, annihilating pain, the clock simply stopped, and he has been with her at every moment, though muffled—neither receding nor clamoring.

  But it’s as if this clueless young person has let time slip in through the door of the apartment, turning her well and truly old in an instant, turning to dust all the beautiful things Ernst brought back—the remarkable carvings and adornments—letting light and air decompose all her precious photographs of the two of them, the boy’s fingerprints on their decades together. Leaving Ernst stranded, far, far—just about twenty years—away.

  Oh, shouldn’t Celeste be back by now? Celeste is a grown woman, she doesn’t need somebody fussing over her—but still, Cordis hasn’t been able to restrain herself from trying Celeste’s number a few times recently.

  Because Celeste is still the infant in Miriam’s arms, the child down the hall, the small visitor perched in an armchair, chomping her way seriously through a cookie as they all discussed the metaphysical matters that preoccupy children: Does the color we call blue look the same to all of us? If God created the world, who created God? How do I know that you’re real? Or that I am? Ernst had almost as much an appetite for Celeste’s questions as she had for his answers . . .

  Cordis has a sudden memory of a caressing summer evening. They all—she and Ernst and Miriam and Celeste—went out to some grimy, festive little fair for children. Celeste would have been scarcely two. They stood in line for the merry-go-round, and Celeste gazed, intent and puzzled. Suddenly she turned around to them. “Horsey!” she shouted, and they had laughed, elated as if at a major scientific discovery. “Horsey!” they echoed.

  The tool that doesn’t work, Ernst called language. Or at least it worked to further comprehension and communication in only the most restricted ways. An extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed—humanity’s most consistent attributes—providing individuals with the means, through lies, boasts, propaganda, fearmongering, advertising, derision, and outright threats, to subjugate others. If that’s what you want to call intelligence, go right ahead, he said; how proud we were to be able to articulate our misconceptions, our limited, distorted views and visions!

  Conversation? She had reminded him—poetry? By-products, he said. In his view, language was mainly for bullies.

  The other day she went out for the first time in weeks, and just outside the door of Celeste’s apartment was a heap of old food wrappers and some discarded drug paraphernalia. It looked like a murder scene.

  Out on the street the people seemed to be emanations from a grainy silent movie of long ago. Is she getting sick? What will happen to poor Moppet if they come for her, too?

  * * *

  She pours herself a glass of vodka and stands at the window, as if she were watching for Ernst and Celeste approaching, hand in hand. Apparently it has suddenly become late. Or maybe there was to have been a big storm today. Or an eclipse. She’s forgotten, but the sky is an occluded gray . . .

  Is she waiting for a great catastrophe, or only the minor personal one?

  13

  The sun is at its zenith when Celeste gets off the bus, but it’s surprisingly mild. And the trail through the jungle glides along underfoot.

  Apparently no humans have hunted or harmed the animals here, because they observe Celeste placidly as they go about their business. Large striped and spotted cats flow down from their perches in trees and pad by, close enough to touch. Their jewel eyes gleam through the foliage. Bright parrots flash into the sky.

  How nice it would be to sit down on one of these big, gnarled roots and watch the animals, but there’s no time to spare. In fact, it’s already late afternoon when she arrives at the council. She seems to be the last, but that’s probably all right, as the others seem in no great hurry to start up.

  A preoccupied-looking orangutan is brachiating nervously through the vine-laden trees encircling the clearing, but all the other hominids are just milling around or lounging on the rocks that appear to have been designated for them, grooming one another, as Celeste slips quietly into the circle and assumes her seat.

  She notes with interest that there is a significant representation of humans. She spots a few she recognizes, mostly among the younger members of the crowd. There are some mild-mannered Neanderthals, she sees, and an absolutely adorable Homo floresiensis. Oh! And there’s a rather alarming Homo heidelbergensis! She’s glad she hasn’t been seate
d next to him!

  There are so many others, though, much older and looking rather the worse for wear—all kinds of australopithecines, she conjectures. All in all, there’s an absolutely bewildering variety. Who knew?

  Naturally chimps and bonobos have turned out for the event, as well as gorillas, and things must be starting up, because an anticipatory rustling and gibbering ripples through the crowd. The participants frown with concentration—empty conveyances form in their heads and line up, preparing to receive their cargo of mental plasma. Word, Celeste thinks, encouraging—word, and the Homo floresiensis scowls, fluttering a hairy hand, as if batting away a swarm of pests.

  One of the chimps is dragging out some large placards. They keep getting stuck on a root, but eventually the chimp gets them propped up against a tree in a stack, in such a way that everyone can see the top one clearly.

  Rays of the setting sun come slashing through the vegetation—it’s impossible to make out what is written on the placard. Celeste squints. It just looks like gibberish.

  A couple of other chimps run up and fuss with the placard—oh, it was upside down. And although the handwriting is a bit shaky, now Celeste can see that it says, INTRODUCING.

  One of the chimps pulls the placard away with a flourish, as if it were a flash card, to reveal the next one, on which is written, OUR.

  The maneuver is repeated, and the third card is revealed: FIRST.

  And then—the final card: SPEAKER!!!!!!!!!

  There’s another expectant ripple through the crowd, as a man appears and takes his place at the podium, smiling and nodding magisterially. He looks familiar to Celeste . . . She knows the face from somewhere or other . . .

  Oh, yes, that’s Keith’s father, isn’t it? He clears his throat and glances irritably around. One of the Neanderthals is wandering around the assembly holding a glass of water. Keith’s father clears his throat again, snatches at the glass of water, opens his mouth, and shouts, “Hey you, that’s mine!”