See How Small

by Scott Blackwood

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  For Ava, Ellie & Tommi

  The first time I heard the voice I was terrified. It was noon, in summer, in my father’s garden.… I seldom heard the voice when it was not accompanied by a light. Usually it was very bright.

  —JOAN OF ARC, FROM THE TRANSCRIPT OF HER TRIAL

  Thomas Aquinas invented a third order of duration distinct from time and eternity, which he called aevum.… It co-exists with temporal events, at the moment of occurrence, being, as was said, like a stick in a river. Aevum, you might say, is the time order of novels.

  —FRANK KERMODE, THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

  It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because it hath no bottom.

  —NICK BOTTOM, IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM

  I

  1

  WE HAVE ALWAYS lived here, though we pretend we’ve just arrived. That’s the trick, to make forgetful shapes with your mouth so everything feels new and unremembered. But after a while we slip up. A careless word, an uninvited smell, a tip-of-the-tongue taste of something sweet, makes the room suddenly familiar—and we have to begin again. Like startled infants, we look to your face to tell us what comes next. You came into the fire.

  Take off your clothes, the men with guns said.

  Please, we said.

  Now, they said.

  Please let us go, we said. We won’t tell anyone.

  Not anyone? They smiled with their guns.

  Not anyone, we said. Please.

  Our jeans and boots and jackets and shirts were piled high in the middle of the floor, like a breaking wave.

  The tile was cold under our feet.

  Across the room, the stainless-steel ice cream case gleamed. On the floor beside it, the cash register drawer sprawled on its side.

  What a shame, our mothers said from somewhere, no time to tidy up.

  Before the men with guns bound and gagged us with our own bras and panties right after closing time, a few things happened: one of us hid inside her mouth the opal class ring her boyfriend had given her and remembered her mother singing “Sweet Baby James” and stroking her forehead when she had her migraines. The youngest of us, who always threw up before gym class because she was afraid of being naked, realized that this time she wouldn’t. Another remembered the pride she’d felt the day before, riding a horse no one in her family could ride, a horse that had thrown her older sister. He knows your true heart, her father had said. The horse’s shoulders were lathered with sweat. He had a salty, earthy smell she’d thought of as love.

  The men with guns did things to us.

  Afterward, our cheeks against the tile, we could smell something in the air like our own blood. Then lighter fluid. Burning plastic. Flames climbed the walls, flashed over the ceiling. Eventually the pipes above us burst.

  Our mothers wore disappointed faces.

  We waited for a voice.

  We waited for a light.

  Near the dumped-over register drawer, a bed-wetting nine-year-old boy we’d all babysat one time or another appeared. Nicholas. He smelled like sandalwood soap and pee. He would lie to us about brushing his teeth. He would walk in on us in the bathroom, where there wasn’t a lock. What are you doing here? we demanded. His stealthy blue eyes gazed back. You must be cold, he said to us on the floor. Where are your clothes? He pretended not to know they were burning. Nicholas. Some things never change.

  It grew hot, dark, and wet like first things.

  But then you came into the fire. Found us. In all that dark and smoke and water: a bright, bare foot. The hopeful turn of an ankle. You clothed us in light. Washed our hair.

  Instead of nothing, we have you.

  2

  KATE’S TWO DAUGHTERS are working behind the counter of the ice cream shop Kate and her ex-husband once owned. The girls wear robin’s-egg-blue polo shirts with SANDRA’S—Kate’s mother’s name—stitched in gold across their chests, their name tags just above. The girls are bird-breasted, Kate thinks, but not wispy, not fragile. Their hair—Elizabeth’s dark, Zadie’s coffee and milk—pulled back in ponytails, which makes the freckled slope of their foreheads and noses more pronounced, like Kate’s. The girls are talking to customers—wide-eyed, polite attentiveness for the adults; rolled-eyed smirking for the languid, horse-faced boys from their high school, shambling in line. Elizabeth, Kate’s younger daughter, at the front register, her face roiled with the first joys of being noticed and confusion over change amounts. Zadie, distant-eyed and aloof, at the drive-through window, leaning out into the shadowy late afternoon. Half swallowed up, Kate thinks, like an offering.

  The ice cream shop smells of waffle cones. After their late shifts, the girls bring home this smell pleated in their clothes and hair—how they hate it, this baked-in dark sweetness. Conefication, they call it. Before bed, the girls will try scrubbing it from their skin. But to Kate—lying fitfully in the dark alongside her sleeping then-husband Ray—it’s the smell of gratefulness. All day, she’s fasted on the girls’ absence. And now the thick, sugary smell of them is everywhere. Slowly, slowly, she cautions herself. The starved can only take in so much at once.

  Some of Kate’s friends think the girls are standoffish, too much in their own heads, troubled. Those Ulrich girls, they say. Kate knows this. There are whispers about her permissiveness, about drive-through window bartering of wine coolers and rum for sundaes and shakes. Grass-fire rumors about older boys and mushrooms in Zilker Park (conjured up, she suspects, by Sarah Haven, whose son was hauled off to alternative school and whose husband sleeps with men). The girls have tested Kate, it’s true. There was the time Zadie was caught shoplifting cosmetics. Pink coral lipstick. Or was it condoms? Kate decides it was both for continuity’s sake.

  Now out in the ice cream shop parking lot, the last of the sun flares off car hoods. A chill is settling in. Some of the dropouts and hangers-on clown and take photos in front of Hollis Finger’s beat-up art car, its roof and hood tattooed with a mosaic of seashells, buttons, beads, metal army men, and hairless dolls. Hollis Finger, who because of a wartime head injury can’t find the mental thread on which to string the everyday beads of his life, looks out with indigestion at the scene from one of the shop’s cramped tables.

  Meredith—Mare, the girls call her, because of her horse riding and sometimes, it’s true, because of her incisors, which jut at odd angles—walks in through the front door fifteen minutes late. Zadie looks over from the drive-through. Elizabeth smirks. Meredith—her mind in full gallop—has forgotten her SANDRA’S shirt. She makes wide eyes at the girls, meaning, of course, that she has a secret. Maneuvers through the line, then around the end of the counter, ties an apron around her waist. Zadie says, I hope it was worth it, and slams the drive-through register drawer closed as if Meredith’s finger is inside.

  Then, for some reason, most likely because Kate Ulrich is embellishing, revising even as she reimagines it, the parking lot goes dark. Days are shorter now, Kate thinks. Winter closing in. The girls’ summery arms and sunshine feet growing paler. Soon everyone in line will rush off to day-care pickup, soccer practice, dinner, or dates. Kate knows many of them, knows they weren’t really gathered here on this day, at this early-evening hour
, but it seems right somehow. Meredith’s father, who owns a horse ranch west of town and a real estate agency that Kate will later work for, waves at Meredith from the front. He holds up the SANDRA’S shirt she left behind on the kitchen table at home. Beside him, Rosa Heller, a newspaper reporter, hunches her shoulders to hide her six-foot height. Nearby, twirling her hair with her fingers, Margo Farbrother, who has discovered—against all odds—a child hidden in the folds of her fibroid-filled uterus. Jack Dewey, a firefighter who lives in Kate’s neighborhood, whose daughter, Sam, has gone missing. Jack will soon be tethered to Kate by an invisible cord and anchored to this very spot.

  There is a young man in line Kate doesn’t know. Smooth-shaven, his face pale and round, hands jammed in the pockets of an elegant gray wool overcoat. Something vintage. Later, he’ll be described as secretive and nervous, but this won’t be right. The young man insists that others go ahead of him, says that he’s undecided. The wool overcoat is too big in the shoulders, oversize in the cuffs, so the young man seems smaller than he is. Maybe even younger than he is. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have an age. His skin is creaseless but you can see the adult in his eyes. Who’s in there? Kate wonders. I’m undecided, he says again, and gestures toward the counter as if he were an usher showing them to seats at a performance. There is something gallant about the coat and gesture, Kate thinks. Something ageless and chivalrous that pleases her, but also leaves her cold. Maybe his eyes.

  I’m undecided.

  Aren’t we all, she thinks.

  Then waffle cone batter is burning on the griddle. Black smoke billows where the vegetable oil has spilled. The customer in the wool overcoat, now sipping a shake, asks in his gallant, undecided way if something is burning. Jack Dewey, our firefighter, leaps over the counter and grabs wet rags, smothers the smoldering acrid sweetness. The girls use spatulas to toss the blackened mass into the sink, but burn their fingertips anyway. Zadie, who’s worked here the longest, has several small crescent-shaped burn scars on the heel of her palm and wrist.

  Now, because of the smoke, it’s dark inside and out. The young man in the wool overcoat throws open the receiving doors in back; another customer props open the front. Smoke dissipates. Everyone laughs nervously. Someone claps Jack on the back. The girls fidget behind the counter, as if they’ve been caught at a failed imitation of adults, as if they’d gotten drunk on the fumes, being so close. They imagine being spoken about in the crowd. Shame washes over them momentarily. Something surges in Kate. She longs for the girls to steal kisses, to drink just a little to quiet their nerves, to seize whatever they can of this life, to feel they are bound for something bigger, something beyond what everyone imagines they’re bound for.

  Then the girls reenter their bodies, those unpredictable inventions, and with still-summery arms they wipe down the front counters and ask who is next.

  3

  WHAT IS JACK Dewey thinking before he goes into the fire?

  1. Of his nylon search rope, which is five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and two hundred feet long and attached to a snap hook on his belt. How Neftali Rodriguez and Henry Soto will expect him to deploy it, given the ice cream shop’s mazelike conditions and intense smoke.

  2. That they will not need the rope because he knows this is likely an arson fire to collect the insurance money—like so many others lately—and there will be no one in the building to search for.

  3. That he’s forgotten to tie the knots in the nylon search rope at fifteen-foot intervals, which tell you how far you have to go to exit the building. How much shit he will catch for this will depend on Neftali’s and Henry’s moods. But there will be significant shit to catch.

  4. He thinks—even as he and Henry Soto pull open the blackened double front doors of the ice cream shop and the smoke and heat hit them like a blow to the chest and then coils upward—of his failure as a father. Thinks of his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sam, running away three weeks ago and how he hasn’t been able to find her, despite the missing persons report, despite his several friends on the police force. He sees Sam barefoot in her capris in some strange kitchen, frying catfish in a pan, like they sometimes did on Fridays. One of the traditions he’d carried on after his wife died. He tries not to think of the prick of a boyfriend she’s likely with, who smells pungently moist like bong smoke and carries around a little metal tackle box of harmonicas in different keys and can’t play a lick.

  5. Heading into the fire, the safety rope trailing behind, he thinks instead: Friday night. If Sam were back, she might even have come by here for an ice cream cone, then out with friends to a movie or the improv comedy club downtown. She’d call him from the lobby and say in a deflated voice that plans had changed, that she really needed a ride home. Please? He’d know that she was near tears. A tightness would rise up in his chest and he’d say, without exasperation or fear, I’m on my way.

  4

  HOLLIS FINGER, SITTING at a back table in the ice cream shop, can tell before he looks up from his crossword that the man is hideous.

  But that’s a little later.

  At the moment, Hollis is watching one of the dropout boys out in the parking lot pry loose a medium-size conch shell—a Strombus gigas he prizes for its depth of color—from the hood of his art car. Hollis wants to twist off a table leg and beat the boy. Around him, at the other tables, heads swivel. He suspects he’s yelled an obscenity, maybe even a threat. He removes his hand from the table leg. Tries to smile to put everyone at ease, but he can taste the bile at the back of his throat. He focuses on his chocolate-dipped cone. Licks it tentatively. The whole shop smells of his anxiety. He closes his eyes a moment to calm himself. Sees the boy’s limp body on the pavement, his splayed, upturned palm. The conch. Its rosy insides like last light. But one of its horns is broken off. There’s a roaring in Hollis’s ears.

  Sir? Someone touches his shoulder. He flinches, fumbles his dipped cone to the floor. It’s a hideous ruin on the tile. Separated into three parts. Incompatible. A fringed spatter of chocolate outlines the body.

  Sir? It’s one of the counter girls. He’s noticed her before. She wears a flesh-colored hearing aid in her right ear, though you can barely see it. He wonders if she hears the same roaring he does. She has a large nose. Healthy nostrils. Elastic skin. She smells of high school hallways.

  Are you okay? She asks this softly. She looks him over. Some of the people around him are still glancing his way, interested. Maybe protective.

  He looks down at the ruin of his cone. Out to the parking lot, his car, the boy, the conch. Shadows falling. I’m just dandy, he says, near tears.

  The girl, after some discussions with her associates, replaces his cone with a double. When she comes by and presents it to him—Voila, monsieur, she says—he notices a series of curved shapes, raised hieroglyphics along the inside of her wrist. He gently touches her there, the smooth elasticity of her skin. I will not forget you, he thinks. I’ve carved you on the palm of my hand.

  She smiles at him as if she knows Isaiah by heart.

  What did this hideous man look like? the detectives ask him later (how much later Hollis can’t say). He tries to describe him to the well-groomed sketch artist they’ve brought in, just the basics, the feel of the hideous man’s presence. He thinks of the disquieting sheen of the black buttons on the man’s coat. The man’s older companion tapping out a song on a table with a plastic spoon.

  The light in the little room gives everything a greenish tint, like the air before a storm. Hollis can’t get it right. The detectives sigh and bully him. One throws a pencil at the wall and it makes a ka-tic sound. They send the sketch artist away. Finally, Hollis says something—not about the hideous man, but about the boy and the conch in the parking lot, the grievous injury to his car—and the detectives’ eyes grow bright. They ask him to concentrate. Can you draw the man in the long coat, the one who stood in line? Can you do that for us, Mr. Finger?

  The hideous man, Hollis says.

  Yes, the h
ideous man.

  Hollis can hear yelling in another small room somewhere. A silverfish flits at the edge of his vision. He shuffles the drawing paper. One of the detectives picks up the pencil off the floor. When Hollis has finished the drawing, the detectives lean over him, block the light with their bodies. Finally they say, Look, Mr. Finger, what you’ve drawn here is a nostril, and here you’ve depicted in detail the skin flap of an eyelid.

  There’s no pleasing some people, Hollis thinks.

  5

  MICHAEL GREER IS seventeen. He’s sitting in an idling Volvo wagon behind the ice cream shop with the headlights off. He’s the lookout and driver. The car is stolen and they’ve switched the plates. It’s cold out, but the windows are down because he’s sweating. His mouth is dry. He popped two tabs of Vicodin a little while ago to calm his nerves. The night presses close but drifts away at the edges. A pecan tree looms above the car. Every time the wind picks up, a few pecans plunk loudly off the roof.

  The two men inside the shop are calmly purposeful. Michael hates the older one already for his cracks about Michael’s clothes and hygiene. The two men will torch the place. Someone somewhere gets the insurance payout. Michael gets a small cut. Nothing too complicated. No one gets hurt. His job earlier was to watch from across the street: the shop girls turning up chairs on tabletops, the shop girls counting the register drawers, the shop girls mopping the floor. Then the lights went down; a little later, the front door opened and he thought he could hear their singsong voices. Much later, it will occur to Michael that he should have seen in the two men’s measured strides, in their coiled energy, even in their acceptance of him, something else.

  He doesn’t know the two men’s names. They don’t know his. That’s one of the rules. He knows he’s on the bottom rung of this thing. But he senses that for the first time he’s working with real adults who mean something in the world, who know what risk is and how to manage it. So can we count on you? the younger man in the gray wool overcoat asked over dinner at Fran’s Hamburgers the night before. He said it as if it was hardly worth the asking. A formality. He was kind and attentive, even if the clothes he wore were out of date. A funny slender tie, a wool overcoat in a style Michael had seen in old movies. The younger man’s face was smooth and pale, and Michael thought he’d probably never had acne but could understand the trials of those who had. He’d asked if Michael was working on his GED and Michael lied. The older man, whose hair was thinning, laughed ruefully and said, Sure, that’s you. Overachiever. The younger man tilted his head in a disappointed way as if a favorite uncle said something racist at the dinner table. Then the younger man had asked the girl bussing tables about the photographs of local celebrities on the wall as if it meant the world to him to know all about them. The girl had a nice smile and Michael realized that it was the young man’s guileless face that drew the smile out of her. His undivided attention. His voice, a gentle plumbing of her depths.