Someone was speaking his name.
He knew his wife was not with him, knew without even touching that she was absent from her place beside him in the bed. He was not sure if she actually no longer lived with him; he had intended to divorce her many times, over a span of years. But something had always stopped him. Had he finally gone through with it? She had intended to divorce him as well, from time to time. She was fed up with his coldness, his distance, his lack of deep affection, she had said. Had she finally left him?
He did not know. He could not remember.
Someone was speaking his name.
He imagined he could hear the voice, but for some reason thought perhaps he was merely thinking the words. But he could not picture the words. He could not remember his name.
Nor could he remember what he had been doing the previous day, the previous week, the month. He could not remember what he had been doing the past several years. He had not been happy, he thought. Perhaps that had been his condition. He felt that almost assuredly he had been alone.
Someone was speaking his name.
No, perhaps they were merely writing it. Yes, that was it! At last he could be sure of something! Someone was writing his name.
But why so loudly? Why was the process of writing his name so loud? Each stroke was a thundering inside his head. That was the source of his migraine—someone writing his name in this loud, pounding, thunderous way.
But yet, what had happened? He felt sure the previous day had been normal. He had got up, washed, dressed … Or perhaps he had not dressed, perhaps he had stayed in bed that day to read. Perhaps he had stayed in bed every day for several years, reading, sleeping …
No, he told himself, yesterday had been a normal day. It must have been a normal day. But now someone was writing his name. So loudly it was giving him a headache. And so severe a headache he could not see. Everything was black.
What had happened to all his children? He could not remember. He knew he had not seen any of them in a long time; such a long time that he had, in fact, forgotten how many children there had been. Ungrateful lot, all of them—of that he was sure. But he could not remember their faces, could not remember the names. His memory had turned to stone.
Someone was pounding his name.
Of that, too, he was sure. His head quaked with each beat, each metronomic slam of his name, his signature. He could not feel his hands—was it he himself doing the pounding? He had signed checks, letters, so many checks for ungrateful children, an unfaithful wife. A wonder he had not written his signature permanently into his desk, etched it in. Perhaps it was his own hand, making his own signature, beating it, pounding each stroke of his signature into the ancient wood.
Someone was beating his name.
Bam! Bam! Bam! But it wasn’t quite wood, was it? The surface he could hear was not wood, not ancient wood, not hard wood. Maybe metal … his wife pounding on the motel bathroom door he’d locked himself behind. Nagging, nagging, pound, pound, pound. His son … he had a son, working on that trashy car, pound, pound, pound. He thought his head would split. He could barely hear his own thoughts beneath the drumming.
Someone was cutting his name.
He could feel it on his arms, his thighs, his buttocks. The knife carving his initials. One of his daughters, painted to her wrists in his blood. Yes, yes, he knew the beat, beat, of her cutting, cut, cut, his initials, his initials. He tried to read his initials through his pain. But could not, could not …
Someone is chiseling his name.
… could not because it wasn’t on his arms, his buttocks, at all. But beat, beat, beating into his forehead. His head again! Someone actually beating on his head, dulling his thinking, making it hard to live. He had no life! They didn’t care!
Someone is chiseling his name. Someone is beating his name. Someone is chiseling his name.
His thoughts turn to stone. His memory turns to stone. There is no one. He has lost them all. He does not know how long ago they left. But there is no one. His thoughts are stone. His feelings are stone.
Someone is chiseling his name.
Someone is chiseling his name.
Into his forehead. Into his brain. At last he thinks he sees something: the name, his name, in front of him. On his forehead. His name is being written onto his forehead and yet he can see it, see up through his stone brain into his transparent forehead. Head stone. Where someone is chiseling his name. Someone is chiseling his name.
Someone is chiseling his name.
And the stonecutter is beautiful. The man has powerful arms. The stonecutter’s chisel is silver, a sliver of moon.
Someone is chiseling his name.
As he sinks into the hole, as his arms grasp the sides of the hole and he begins to drift beneath the earth. As he looks into his forehead and sees his name being chiseled on the expanse of cool, white stone…
Someone is speaking his name.
Mirror Man
Jeff liked to think of the white hairs in his ears as signs of maturity, although he suspected they were really the first outcroppings of old age. He hadn’t even noticed them until they were a half-inch or more long; that bothered him. They were pale and looked slightly rubbery, like the hairs on some mutant onion. Once he knew they were there he spent hours examining himself for any new phenomena. Sometimes he would use Liz’s magnified makeup mirror. He was convinced that his face was changing every day, but other than the somewhat dramatic ear hairs he had found nothing to confirm this.
In the mirror silvered fog turned to beads, then rivulets that bent his flesh and attempted to drag his face into the sink. He wondered if Susan would still love him if he were deformed. Adults were mutants—he could think of no better way to define the accretion of distortions as children grew into adults.
He remembered his embarrassment over his own father—the man’s appearance, his views about race and nationality. During his teen years he had sought a theory to explain his father’s condition—the brain parasite, the secret society, his father’s hidden lizard face.
Someday Susan would find him hideously embarrassing—that was why he had to take her on this trip with him. The time when she was uncompromisingly proud of him was fast approaching an end.
Liz had stopped loving him years ago. There must have been a final day when she’d passed beyond her love for him, into whatever indifference or resentment she felt now, but he’d been unable to trace the exact day. They didn’t speak of it—there was a kind of unspoken pact between them that they not speak of it, perhaps the ultimate in the series of unspoken pacts which had characterized their marriage—but it had been so obvious, so stupid and banal. He’d continued to love her even after that, in that youthful lovesick and inarticulate way he always had, until that too was gone one day, maybe the same lost day he’d first become the adult mutant, when he’d started growing hair in his ears.
An area of cleared mirror containing a section of his left jaw and earlobe fogged over again beneath his breath. His face had fractured in the mirror, broken out into a collage. Some of the layers of his face were as young as his first memories (his lost tricycle half-buried in a pile of coal behind the house, his mother’s breath smelling like warm bread), and others were far older than he was. In fact some of the layers of the mirrored face, he was convinced, didn’t even belong to him.
“Are we ever going, Daddy?” He saw Susan in one corner of the mirror, dolled up in her party dress, ready for the trip out. Liz had done up her hair in a mass of tight curls—it must have taken hours. “Well, are we?”
“Just give me a few more minutes, honey. I want to look good for the reunion, haven’t seen some of these people in a very long time.” He couldn’t make himself turn around. The mirror was much safer. If he looked at his daughter directly he would want to hold her all the time, until that day she stopped breathing. Sometimes she made him want to cry—out of some strange sadness because he was growing older every day or because he loved her so much or because
he’d recently realized she was the only person in the world he really did love, and even there he wasn’t sure he was very effective at it—as he’d grown older he seemed so frightened and suspicious, so inept at loving. So he contented himself with staring at her reflection, admiring the light she cast. “We’ll be leaving real soon, honey. I promise.”
Liz was waiting in the bedroom when he walked in. “She’ll be bored to tears, Jeff. I really don’t understand this.”
Her shadow rippled across the wall as she paced the room. That flicker of grey reminded him of a small bird that had been trapped in the house one night—they couldn’t quite see it, they were just aware of its grey wings beating and beating against the light’s reflection on the glossy wallpaper. In the morning they had found torn feathers, spots of blood on the bed. He spoke to Liz’s shadow as it moved across the wall. “None of my old classmates or teachers have ever met my daughter. I want to show her off. I have a right—I’m proud of her.”
“Providence is a long way to drag an eleven-year-old. Just to stroke your vanity.”
Her shadow danced a graceful ballet across the wall. It was a terrible irony that adult mutants cast the delicate shadows of children. He’d always believed that saying things more than once was pointless. And during the course of an unusually verbal marriage he’d said about everything possible. It was like looking in the mirror every day: if things did change it was too gradual to notice. But if he didn’t say something, she’d embrace him with silence until he’d left the house. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what I’m doing.” The words cracked in his mouth from all the years of repetition. One day they’d degenerate into another, far more primitive language. Some sort of eldritch, decadent phrasing. If he didn’t do something. If he was still capable.
There was the expected pause while she decided whether there was going to be an argument this morning. Jeff found himself holding his breath in anticipation of her decision, and that made him angry and resentful. Some mornings that would be enough to make him say the little more which would guarantee an argument, but not today. Today he was going to take his beautiful daughter down to Rhode Island for that ten-year reunion. Everyone from the graduate school was going to know that he’d had it in him to have a family, a normal family like other people. With a beautiful daughter, a daughter who depended on him, who called him Daddy.
He heard the agitated beating of grey wings in his head, but he tried to ignore it, moving about the bedroom getting dressed as quickly as he could, waiting for Liz to say whatever it was she was going to say. He wanted to ask her what ties he should take, if his grey corduroy jacket with the elbow patches would take one more important wearing, but first he had to know if there was going to be an argument or not. If there was going to be an argument he thought he might never be able to ask such questions of her again.
He caught her reflection in the dresser mirror as she sat on the bed, staring at his half-full suitcase on the other end. She looked so unhappy he wanted to go over and sit beside her, take her in his arms, but then she would tell him all that he had done to make her feel the way she did, and that would start the argument he could not have this morning.
In the mirror he saw the silvering in her long black hair. He’d never noticed it before, looking at her every day, watching her eat breakfast before she left for the university. Again the mirror provided him with secret, arcane knowledge. But then she always wore her hair up for work, and she was usually in good humor—she actually enjoyed the work she was forced to do. Sadness brought out the silver in her hair. Not for the first time, Jeff realized how difficult he must be for her to live with.
“You used to be so impressive,” she began softly. “You were the only person I’d ever met who early on decided what kind of person he was going to be, and then became that person. You used to make me feel so good about myself.”
Her reflection stared at him, talked to him. Liz had learned where to look if she wanted to look into his eyes. Her image in the mirror was so clear, so direct, that Jeff thought he might be loving her again, if he had ever in fact stopped loving her. The room’s reflection around her image looked vaguely warped, shimmering with distortion. The contrast between the room’s distortion and Liz’s clear image brought a tremor of anxiety into his hands struggling with the tie, and he wondered vaguely at the physics involved. There appeared to be dark pockets where the vertical lines of the room’s image warped or broke. There appeared to be distant movement behind Liz where the reflected colors of the room bled. Liz’s face was singular and unwavering, her eyes fixed on him, even as the rest of the world appeared chaotic with layers, the room about to dissolve around her, peel away revealing … what? He could see in the mirror that she was silently crying now. But if he didn’t turn to look at her directly she was not crying at all. If she was sad only in his mirror, he had not made her sad at all. In the mirror her eyes begged him for the first time in years. Jeff looked away, embarrassed, and fumbled again with his tie, trying to imagine it tied.
“I’ll … talk to you about it just as soon as we get back tomorrow. I promise.”
“Okay, Jeff. Whatever. Whatever you say.” When Jeff looked back up at the mirror she had left it. The lines of the room moved jaggedly, the furniture blending with increasing speed, as if the world of the mirror was being heated.
Susan was good in the car. It made him proud when Susan was good. “Am I going to meet your friends?” she asked.
“Old friends,” he said.
“But are they still your friends?”
He didn’t know what to say. He pretended to busy himself with the rear-view mirror, adjusting it in order to view as much of the landscape behind him as possible. Early in their marriage Liz would kid him about his habit of fiddling with the mirror, as if something was following him. He had never laughed, and eventually she dropped the joke. “I don’t know, honey,” he said now. “Adults don’t always know who their friends are, I guess. It’s simpler at your age. Friendships get complicated when you’re an adult. You get set in your ways, and then you forget how to make friends.”
Liz nodded solemnly in his rear-view mirror. Jeff stared at the mirror until his wife’s face vanished and Susan’s reappeared. He adjusted the mirror both to expose the maximum amount of receding landscape and to see as much of Susan as he could, while limiting her view of his own mutating expressions. He had to keep an eye on her, he had to keep her safe—that was his responsibility as a father—and yet he didn’t want her to feel like he was spying on her.
“Why won’t you look at me, Daddy?” Obviously he had the mirror adjusted correctly. She hadn’t asked the question in a long time.
He licked his lips. But he couldn’t see himself in the mirror now, so he had to wonder if he was in fact licking his lips. “I’m driving, honey. I can’t look at you and drive at the same time.”
She nodded again. “That’s why I can’t sit in the front seat with you. That’s the rule.”
Every few months she seemed compelled to check out his expectations. He hated it when she called them rules. He preferred to think of them as guidelines, mini-strictures which held reality in place. Mutants needed as many of these guidelines as they could generate, just to get through the day. Jeff didn’t bother to tell Susan about all of them, thinking that if she knew them all it would hasten her evolution into mutantcy. So he had always told her strictly on a need-to-know basis. “When you sit in the front seat, it distracts me, honey. And when that happens things aren’t so safe anymore. I guess you distract me because you’re so pretty.” He laughed but Susan did not laugh with him. “Driving is serious business,” he continued. “Daddy has to concentrate.”
“Someday I still want to sit in the front seat, Daddy.”
“I know.” And someday soon, he knew, she would no longer accept his interpretations of what was safe.
They passed through Attleboro on Highway 123 before connecting with I-95 which would take them south out of Ma
ssachusetts and down into the heart of Providence. Jeff had taken the long way out of New Hampshire, avoiding Concord, Portsmouth, the entire Boston area. He hadn’t exactly planned it that way. He drove as he always drove, allowing himself plenty of time, constantly referring to the map so he would have some vague idea where the roads led. Vague because maps lied—he’d discovered this a long time ago—taking you into all manner of locales not even hinted at by the pale colors and wandering veins etched into the paper.
He never chose the shortest route. You couldn’t tell anyway because traffic and road conditions were never indicated, and the nature of the driving experience itself was beyond the scope of any map. He avoided the interstates as much as possible—he was scared of not seeing those hidden taints in the bypassed towns.
He preferred to feel his way through the landscape, watching not only the road but also the ambient architecture and the local residents, constantly checking his mirrors for the backward look that often revealed all—the secret faces, the unconscious expressions.
Then he would find the next road on the map, and, if the drive had been pleasant, he would choose routes which he sensed would somehow maintain the experience. But if the look of the buildings or the people or even the particular rake or curvature of the road disturbed him, he would search the map for the quickest, most likely release.
But the indigenous inhabitants were most important. They were the ones who built and maintained the buildings, who landscaped the environment. Even the most neutral of settings would reveal some sort of signature.
They stopped for gas in a small New England town which had somehow escaped the urban sprawl. Perhaps no one had ever noticed it was there. It was tucked away beneath one edge of the highway, a faded green sign hanging askew on rusted bolts pointing to a narrow exit lane. Jeff took the lane past a row of dilapidated houses to a one-pump station.
The boy appeared suddenly at the driver’s side window. His dark skin was mottled by patches of pink and grey peeling away beneath his eyes, like poorly-applied makeup. His eyes were narrow and dark. The phrase melting pot came to mind. Jeff’s father used to talk a great deal about a “melting pot” when Jeff was a child. The phrase had filled him with unease.
Absent Company Page 6