Layman's Report

by Eugene Marten

  “Something smells funny Orville,” he says. “Think I mighta had a accident I tell you I was in an accident? My whole life flashed before my ears.” His mouth keeps moving but I don’t hear anything. His face is red now, tight and shiny, head shaking as if in refusal. I move the dial, push my fucking buttons. You can feel the charge build, rising through.

  The windows fog. I switch on the defrost. Sweat runs down his face and into his mouth. He spits it out: “Ma’am where’s your mom, you can’t be lady of the house. If I could have just five minutes of your ten’s even better it’ll make the rest of your Coffee grease ketchup mustard vomit feces crayon ink paint catpiss mud blood lipstick Works on carpetvinylap-pliances, most painted surfaces and counter tops Dirty undies too Comes in a bottle, spray or you can squeeze it out of a tube.” He makes a sound like mud bubbling in his throat: “Squeezeitoutofatube…”

  The computer counts up, not down: volts, amps, coulombs, farads. I have capacitors big as garbage cans, high flux density, a dump switch—some things you don’t want to point and click. Some things you want to pull the trigger.

  If his eyes worked they’d be looking in mine. “You hear something? Stinks something awful in here take a whiff Citrus that’s what makes it green Childproof too Tastesjust-asgood a swig before bedtime keeps me reg You won’t find this shit on the shelf ma’am this ain’t Procter Gamble little jew makes it in his base If I could see him I’d sue Better yet an eye for an eye Ready for a demo? What’s for supper? Better yet spaghetti tell you what if I can’t clean it I’ll eat it off the floor Tell you what else is the manathehouse home? How about me you make a stain of our own us two? Two birds with one tablespoon and then just let it set A minute Clean cloth and it’s like nothing ever I’ll never tell. Help yourself—what do you think I meant childproof?

  “Ma’am?” he says.

  “Ma’am?

  “Ma’am?

  “Ma’am.”

  “Roger that, Edison,” he says. “We there yet? Let me know if you find my teeth.”

  Almost. Then the numbers stop. I have a green light. No countdown, no fail-safe, just one more button. I ask him if he has any more last words.

  “Varsity my freshman year,” he says. “All-Conference, AP, UPI, Jim Parker. Farm boy from Wisconsin chopped my knee and it was all downhill from there. They grow em in rows out there, it’s a fact. Blood on the carpet, gravy on the couch. See my scar? I was no cherry picker either. Put em on the ceiling, then scrape em off and make a deal. I wouldn’t shit you you’re my best turd. We there yet? Jesus, one small step. How’s it go? Went into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t allow dogs in here.’ I tell him, ‘But I’m blind,’ and he says he says says…” but he doesn’t say what he says and I dump it.

  A sound like a steel beam snapping, so loud it hurts your heart. The lights go out. Maybe the lights went out first. The hardware already cycling down, a sinking sound, a long drop. A smell like air burnt by lightning; plasma, charred components. The smell of failure. The punchline. I hear rain.

  Obviously a major malfunction. Going to look very carefully into the situation.

  I say his name. He says mine back.

  Muffled. Stone cold sober.

  There’s a flashlight around here somewhere. Going to look very carefully. Going to find it by feel.

  “I’m right here,” I say.

  “Orville,” he says. “I can see.”

  * * *

  I believe that acquiring a work ethic and a sense of integrity in craft is the path to character development and inner discovery. We start with workshop safety, the proper care and handling of tools. I make him wear goggles. He wants to use the table saw; I want him to learn to do things without pushing buttons. He’s all about the pushing of buttons.

  She’s at the end of her rope with him.

  So the hand saw, the coping saw, the brace and bit. The framing square to square the corners. I rule it out for him and notch the first piece but let him do all the cutting. One-inch white pine. He keeps looking around the garage, into the back corners, and I tell him to keep his eyes on the blade. He finds a rhythm. Halfway through he’s breathing hard and shows me his hand.

  “That means you’re doing it right,” I say, and toss him a pair. He thanks me for the gloves; I tell him someday he may thank me for the blisters.

  “Yeah, and then I’ll brush off your headstone,” he says, and I show him how to countersink the entrance hole so the rain doesn’t get in. How to miter the back edge of the roof. We put it all together with galvanized screws, putty, two long roofing nails so the front panel pivots out.

  “For cleaning,” I say.

  He makes a face. “That’s her job. Let’s build a model rocket.”

  One thing at a time. I have him sand it smooth for painting. Twelve-grit. He turns it in his hands without speaking. He’s not his brother but it’s a passable job. He is himself.

  “Is it big enough?” he says.

  Big enough for bluebirds, I tell him. Bluebirds are all I know.

  “What color should it be?”

  I leave it up to him, “but nothing too bright or loud,” I say. “Something that blends in—and don’t paint the inside.”

  I tell him use a brush and not a spray can. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

  We mount it on a fence post with a couple of carriage screws, grease the top of the post to keep out predators. A week later one of them gets in anyway and blows it apart with an M-80. He swears he has no idea.

  We drop him off at the Administrative Offices, across the lot from Ikea. The Expedition Coordinator is already there. So are the other truants, bipolars, online gaming addicts, Reactive Attachments, Oppositional Defiants. At least none of them is in dog cages. (You hear things.) When everyone in the Challenge Group is accounted for, the Expedition Coordinator will drive them to base camp, to the Orientation/Introspection Phase.

  “Have you signed the consent forms?” he asks. We have, online, but now there are hard copies on a clipboard. With the pen provided she consents again to backpacking, canoeing, caving, whitewater, rock climbing, a solo challenge, a minimum of six showers; to the Wisdom Phase, the Courage Phase, the Illumination Phase, which will involve a life-changing Rite of Passage. We’re not sure what that will be but she consents to it.

  “I don’t see the Picking Up His Underwear Phase,” she says, and consents to the use of reasonable restraint.

  We’ve qualified for financial aid.

  Parents are not encouraged to stick around. He won’t say goodbye and the Expedition Coordinator, a bearded, sunburnt man who is the grandson of a lumberjack, has a degree in theology with a minor in psychology, tells us this is not unusual.

  “See you in two months,” we say. At the Parent Workshop Weekend.

  “Eight weeks,” the Expedition Coordinator says.

  He gets to keep the sleeping bag.

  A three-hour drive back. She isn’t talking, so I try to think of something to say. I could remind her they have a ninety-seven percent completion rate (they all do), that we’re low on toilet paper, that she shouldn’t worry about layoffs until it happens. I could tell her I have some money coming—they can’t do anything with just half (and they gave me their word as legitimate representatives of their government). Consulting, I could say, which isn’t a lie; it is as much of the truth as you can see through a blindfold.

  I go with the two-ply.

  When we pull in I’m still trying to think of something else, but it’s light enough to see it doesn’t matter anymore. We carry the bags into the house and while she’s putting things away I go back outside to shut the trunk and burn one. It’s still light enough to see the marks. Double tread, a truck. I don’t light the cigarette. I go to the garage. Just a formality—I already know what I’m going to find, and what I’m not. Like the hole in the door where the lock cylinder isn’t. The knob is still there but you can push the door open with your toe. I flip up the switch, and that is a formality too.

 
; I light the cigarette. Look at the rusty squares in the floor where they used to be (there’s iron in cement). All six of them—they even took the blankets. I wonder if the neighbors heard anything. Sometimes people just aren’t nosy enough.

  I go back out to the driveway and smoke and look across the street. An empty house with a sign out front—people get in over their heads. I look at the tracks. She comes out and asks me what I’m looking at.

  “Driveway’s a mess,” I say.

  She looks. “How do we get them out?”

  “Pressure washer,” I say.

  “I don’t think we have one of those.”

  I shake my head. “We’ll have to rent one.”

  Why buy the milk when you can steal the cow? Something like that.

  The guy next door pulls up, waves. He’s in uniform—a tournament, probably. He’s got with him his wife, baby, the dog who replaced the cat. They are replaced by a flash of white light. There are squatters in the area—maybe they’re selling them for scrap. Or just some kids. The younger one’s gone but he has friends.

  The white light recedes.

  “Maybe he’s got one,” she says.

  “Maybe he does,” I say. Going to take some serious psi if it’s in the sealer. Something gas-powered, professional grade.

  You hate to ask, but it wouldn’t hurt.

  Evenings I pick her up from work, after the final program. I park outside and wait. It is not a dome but a big metal cylinder with a chamfered roof, slanted to point at Polaris. At night it glows—fiber optics, calibrated so as not to obscure the light of the real show. But it’s not yet dark and I sit in the car while the last audience get in theirs, on their way home or maybe to dinner, or twilight drives to nowhere in particular. This is her last night.

  She is always last to leave. Turns off the lights, makes sure the doors are locked. Usually she comes out through the museum, but tonight I watch the emergency exit on the far side of the facility. It’s alarmed but she knows the code. I watch the door. When it opens she stands there and waves and I get out of the car, lock up, cross the grass, and enter the planetarium.

  The door shuts behind us. The emptiness is ours.

  The stage is over our heads.

  “Save me a seat,” she says, “I’ll be right there,” but I always wait while she gets in the booth. She knows how to drive it, but this show pretty much runs itself. It’s all coming down to one button anyway.

  The lights dim. Five thousand stars come out and in their glow we find our way: middle row, aisle, though they say there are no bad seats. We sit and recline and look up, and James Earl Jones says, “Welcome to everything.”

  There is music.

  There is Acrux. Aldebaran. Alpha Centauri. Planets, galaxies, pulsars, quasars.

  Welcome to the whirlpool, Hoag’s Object, black holes, blue suns (courtesy of Sky-Skan DigitalSky 2).

  It has been around a long time, James Earl Jones says. Thirteen billion years, they figure, maybe fifteen. Fifteen billion years is a long time, but it’s not forever. What we see above us, says James Earl Jones, has not always been there, and, one by one, the stars go out.

  “Everything has to start somewhere,” he says. “Even time and space.”

  The music fades, uninventing itself. The stars continue to disappear, and the darkness becomes so absolute we are just doubts in the virtual void. One hand looking for another.

  There is something. In the middle of man-made nothing. Not a star but a point, a singularity, a dot not of light but of slightly more dark. Not even a particle because particles do not yet exist.

  Once upon a time, James Earl Jones says, there was no time. Then he waits to be born.

  All this and less, everything we know and know we don’t; you and me and the shoes in the trees and the guy in the bleachers with the big bass drum. Contained in a single point that isn’t one, a region of impossibility, of zero volume and infinite density. The little black egg. Before that there is no story; the teller holds his tongue.

  This is how this one starts. Waiting. One hand looking for the other. Before the beginning and after the last show.

  We hear something. Not breathing. Wait for the next big bang.