by Ben Marcus
When they brought his father into the hallway, the child did not recognize him at first. His father was missing his hair on his head and his eyebrows were gone and his beard had melted into little black knots on his skin. He had been the only one left, they said. They told his mother in the hall that it was as if the father had refused to burn when everyone else they found had turned into short, black, shriveled roasts of people. The child’s father was wearing just a ladies’ raincoat that was clear plastic and wouldn’t stick to the burns you could see that were red and raw and black on the father’s back and arms. The father’s hands were packed in grease and wrapped in gauze and the child wondered if those hands would even be able to hold a hammer to nail a rock-throwing hand to the shed wall. The child stood over his parents’ bed for a long time, watching his father sleep in the room that smelled like a curing barn.
On Sunday on their way to the shed the father gathered his tools and showed the child his reckoning, his little column of figures, his carryovers, his paperwork. The white papers were windows and windshield. The yellow paper was the doctor. The little green stub was what they paid the father for keeping the fire from coming into town. By the father’s figuring, he didn’t think he could afford to keep the child, could not keep him in glass at least. It had been two weeks, but there were to be no more trips to Doctor Duck, the Quack, he called him. The rock-throwing hand had finally costed the father more than he had earned.
Sorry, said the father.
At the shed the father opened his toolbox and told the child it would be all right to holler if it hurt, that the child’s hollering probably wouldn’t bother anybody. It was Sunday and the mother had gone to church. The father rattled the tools around in his toolbox, poking around with his clawed fingers. The child had closed his eyes and when he smelled his father standing beside him, he lifted up his rock-throwing hand.
Here we go, said the father, and with his shears and his pliers the father set to work on the child’s head, snipping and tugging at the black silky thread that had bound together the torn flesh of his only son.
THE GIRL IN THE FLAMMABLE SKIRT
AIMEE BENDER
When I came home from school for lunch my father was wearing a backpack made of stone.
Take that off, I told him, that’s far too heavy for you.
So he gave it to me.
It was solid rock. And dense, pushed out to its limit, gray and cold to the touch. Even the little zipper handle was made of stone and weighed a ton. I hunched over the bulk and couldn’t sit down because it didn’t work with chairs very well so I stood, bent, in a corner, while my father whistled, wheeling about the house, relaxed and light and lovely now.
What’s in this? I said, but he didn’t hear me, he was changing channels.
I went into the TV room.
What’s in this? I asked. This is so heavy. Why is it stone? Where did you get it?
He looked up at me. It’s this thing I own, he said.
Can’t we just put it down somewhere, I asked, can’t we just sit it in the corner?
No, he said, the backpack must be worn. That’s the law.
I squatted on the floor to even out the weight. What law? I asked. I never heard of this law before.
Trust me, he said, I know what I’m talking about. He did a few shoulder rolls and turned to look at me. Aren’t you supposed to be in school? he asked.
I slogged back to school with it on and smushed myself and the backpack into a desk and the teacher sat down beside me while the other kids were doing their math.
It’s so heavy, I said, everything feels very heavy right now.
She brought me a Kleenex.
I’m not crying, I told her.
I know, she said, touching my wrist. I just wanted to show you something light.
Here’s something I picked up:
Two rats are hanging out in a labyrinth.
One rat is holding his belly. Man, he says, I am in so much pain. I ate all those sweet little sugar piles they gave us and now I have a bump on my stomach the size of my head. He turns on his side and shows the other rat the bulge.
The other rat nods sympathetically. Ow, she says.
The first rat cocks his head and squints a little. Hey, he says, did you eat that sweet stuff too?
The second rat nods.
The first rat twitches his nose. I don’t get it, he says, look at you. You look robust and aglow, you don’t look sick at all, you look bump-free and gorgeous, you look swinging and sleek. You look plain great! And you say you ate it too?
The second rat nods again.
Then how did you stay so fine? asks the first rat, touching his distended belly with a tiny claw.
I didn’t, says the second rat. I’m the dog.
* * *
My hands were sweating. I wiped them flat on my thighs.
Then, ahem, I cleared my throat in front of my father. He looked up from his salad. I love you more than salt, I said.
He seemed touched, but he was a heart attack man and had given up salt two years before. It didn’t mean that much to him, this ranking of mine. In fact, “Bland is a state of mind” was a favorite motto of his these days. Maybe you should give it up too, he said. No more french fries.
But I didn’t have the heart attack, I said. Remember? That was you.
In addition to his weak heart my father also has weak legs so he uses a wheelchair to get around. He asked me to sit in a chair with him once, to try it out for a day.
But my chair doesn’t have wheels, I told him. My chair just sits here.
That’s true, he said, doing wheelies around the living room, that makes me feel really swift.
I sat in the chair for an entire afternoon. I started to get jittery. I started to do that thing I do with my hands, that knocking-on-wood thing. I was knocking against the chair leg for at least an hour, protecting the world that way, superhero me, saving the world from all my horrible and dangerous thoughts when my dad glared at me.
Stop that knocking! he said. That is really annoying.
I have to go to the bathroom, I said, glued to my seat.
Go right ahead, he said, what’s keeping you. He rolled forward and turned on the TV.
I stood up. My knees felt shaky. The bathroom smelled very clean and the tile sparkled and I considered making it into my new bedroom. There is nothing soft in the bathroom. Everything in the bathroom is hard. It’s shiny and new; it’s scrubbed down and whited out; it’s a palace of bleach and all you need is one fierce sponge and you can rub all the dirt away.
I washed my hands with a little duck soap and peered out the bathroom window. We live in a high-rise apartment building and I often wonder what would happen if there was a fire, no elevator allowed, and we had to evacuate. Who would carry him? Would I? Once I imagined taking him to the turning stairway and just dropping him down the middle chute, my mother at the bottom with her arms spread wide to catch his whistling body. Hey, I’d yell, catch Dad! Then I’d trip down the stairs like a little pony and find them both splayed out like car-accident victims at the bottom and that’s where the fantasy ends and usually where my knocking-on-wood hand starts to act up.
Paul’s parents are alcoholics and drunk all the time so they don’t notice that he’s never home. Perhaps they conjure him up, visions of Paul, through their bleary whiskey eyes. But Paul is with me. I have locked Paul in my closet. Paul is my loverboy, sweet Paul is my olive.
I open the closet door a crack and pass him food. He slips the dirty plates from the last meal back to me and I stack them on the floor next to my T-shirts. Crouched outside the closet, I listen to him crunch and swallow.
How is it? I ask. What do you think of the salt-free meatball?
Paul says he loves sitting in the dark. He says my house is so quiet and smells so sober. The reason it’s so quiet is because my father feels awful and is resting in his bedroom. Tiptoe, tiptoe round the sick papa. The reason it smells sober is because it is so sober. I haven�
��t made a joke in this house in ten years at least. Ten years ago, I tried a Helen Keller joke on my parents and they sent me to my room for my terrible insensitivity to suffering.
I imagine in Paul’s house everyone is running around in their underwear, and the air is so thick with bourbon your skin tans from it. He says no; he says the truth is his house is quiet also. But it’s a more pointy silence, he says. A lighter one with sharper pricks. I nod and listen. He says too that in his house there are moisture rings making Olympian patterns on every possible wooden surface.
Once instead of food I pass my hand through the crack. He holds it for at least a half hour, brushing his fingers over my fingers and tracing the lines in my palm.
You have a long lifeline, he says.
Shut up, I tell him, I do not.
He doesn’t let go of my hand, even then. Any dessert?
I produce a cookie out of my front shirt pocket.
He pulls my hand closer. My shoulder crashes against the closet frame.
Come inside, he says, come join me.
I can’t, I say, I need to stay out here.
Why? He is kissing my hand now. His lips are very soft and a little bit crumby.
I just do, I say, in case of emergency. I think: because now I’ve learned my lesson and I’m terribly sensitive to suffering. Poor poor Helen K, blind-and-deaf-and-dumb. Because now I’m so sensitive I can hardly move.
Paul puts down his plate and brings his face up close to mine. He is looking right at me and I’m rustling inside. I don’t look away. I want to cut off my head.
It is hard to kiss. As soon as I turn my head to kiss deeper, the closet door gets in the way.
After a minute Paul shoves the door open and pulls me inside with him. He closes the door back and now it is pitch black. I can feel his breath near mine, I can feel the air thickening between us.
I start shaking all over.
It’s okay, he says, kissing my neck and my shoulder and my chin and more. He lets me out when I start to cry.
My father is in the hospital on his deathbed.
Darling, he says, you are my only child, my only heir.
To what? I ask. Is there a secret fortune?
No, he says, but you will carry on my genes.
I imagine several bedridden, wheelchaired children. I imagine throwing all my children in the garbage can because they don’t work. I imagine a few more bad things and then I’m knocking on his nightstand and he’s annoyed again.
Stop that noise, he says, I’m a dying man.
He grimaces in agony. He doesn’t die though. This has happened a few times before and he never dies. The whole deathbed scene gets a little confusing when you play it out more than twice. It gets a bit hard to be sincere. At the hospital, I pray a lot, each time I pray with gusto, but my prayers are getting very strained; lately I have to grit my teeth. I picture his smiling face when I pray. I push that face into my head. Three times now when I picture this smiling face it explodes. Then I have to pray twice as hard. In the little hospital church I am the only one praying with my jaw clenched and my hands in fists knocking on the pew. Maybe they think I’m knocking on God’s door, tap tap tap. Maybe I am.
When I’m done, I go out a side door into the day. The sky is very hot and the hospital looks dingy in the sunlight and there is an outdoor janitorial supply closet with a hole in the bottom, and two rats are poking out of the hole and all I can see are their moving noses and I want to kick them but they’re tucked behind the door. I think of bubonic plague. I think about rabies. I have half a bagel in my pocket from the hospital cafeteria and the rats can probably smell it; their little noses keep moving up and down frantically; I can tell they’re hungry. I put my hand in my pocket and bring out the bagel but I just hold it there, in the air. It’s cinnamon raisin. It smells like pocket lint. The rats don’t come forward. They are trying to be polite. No one is around and I’m by the side of the hospital and it’s late afternoon and I’m scot-free and young in the world. I am as breezy and light as a wing made from tissue paper. I don’t know what to do with myself so I keep holding on tight to the bagel and sit down by the closet door. Where is my father already? I want him to come rolling out and hand over that knapsack of his; my back is breaking without it.
I think of that girl I read about in the paper—the one with the flammable skirt. She’d bought a rayon chiffon skirt, purple with wavy lines all over it. She wore it to a party and was dancing, too close to the vanilla-smelling candles, and suddenly she lit up like a pine needle torch. When the boy dancing next to her felt the heat and smelled the plasticky smell, he screamed and rolled the burning girl up in the carpet. She got third-degree burns up and down her thighs. But what I keep wondering about is this: That first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was the candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
THE CARETAKER
ANTHONY DOERR
For his first thirty-five years, Joseph Saleeby’s mother makes his bed and each of his meals; each morning she makes him read a column of the English dictionary, selected at random, before he is allowed to set foot outside. They live in a small collapsing house in the hills outside Monrovia in Liberia, West Africa. Joseph is tall and quiet and often sick; beneath the lenses of his oversized eyeglasses, the whites of his eyes are a pale yellow. His mother is tiny and vigorous; twice a week she stacks two baskets of vegetables on her head and hikes six miles to sell them in her stall at the market in Mazien Town. When the neighbors come to compliment her garden, she smiles and offers them Coca-Cola. “Joseph is resting,” she tells them, and they sip their Cokes, and gaze over her shoulder at the dark shuttered windows of the house, behind which, they imagine, the boy lies sweating and delirious on his cot.
Joseph clerks for the Liberian National Cement Company, transcribing invoices and purchase orders into a thick leather-bound ledger. Every few months he pays one more invoice than he should, and writes the check to himself. He tells his mother the extra money is part of his salary, a lie he grows comfortable making.She stops by the office every noon to bring him rice—the cayenne she heaps onto it will keep illness at bay, she reminds him, and watches him eat at his desk. “You’re doing so well,” she says. “You’re helping make Liberia strong.”
In 1989 Liberia descends into a civil war that will last seven years. The cement plant is sabotaged, then transformed into a guerrilla armory, and Joseph finds himself out of a job. He begins to traffic in goods—sneakers, radios, calculators, calendars—stolen from downtown businesses. It is harmless, he tells himself, everybody is looting. We need the money. He keeps it in the cellar, tells his mother he’s storing boxes for a friend. While his mother is at the market, a truck comes and carries the merchandise away. At night he pays a pair of boys to roam the townships, bending window bars, unhinging doors, depositing what they steal in the yard behind Joseph’s house.
He spends most of his time squatting on the front step watching his mother tend her garden. Her fingers pry weeds from the soil or cull spent vines or harvest snap beans, the beans plunking regularly into a metal bowl, and he listens to her diatribes on the hardships of war, the importance of maintaining a structured lifestyle. “We cannot stop living because of conflict, Joseph,” she says. “We must persevere.”
Spurts of gunfire flash on the hills; airplanes roar over the roof of the house. The neighbors stop coming by; the hills are bombed, and bombed again. Trees burn in the night like warnings of worse evil to come. Policemen splash past the house in stolen vans, the barrels of their guns resting on the sills, their eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. Come and get me, Joseph wants to yell at them, at their tinted windows and chrome tailpipes. Just you try. But he does not; he keeps his head down and pretends to busy himself among the rosebushes.
In October of 1994 Joseph’s mother
goes to the market in the morning with three baskets of sweet potatoes and does not return. He paces the rows of her garden, listening to the far-off thump-thump of artillery, the keening of sirens, the interminable silences between. When finally the last hem of light drops behind the hills, he goes to the neighbors. They peer at him through the rape gate across the doorway to their bedroom and issue warnings: “The police have been killed. Taylor’s guerrillas will be here any minute.”
“My mother …”
“Save yourself,” they say and slam the door. Joseph hears chains clatter, a bolt slide home. He leaves their house and stands in the dusty street. At the horizon columns of smoke rise into a red sky. After a moment he walks to the end of the paved road and turns up a muddy track, the way to Mazien Town, the way his mother traveled that morning. At the market he sees what he expected: fires, a smoldering truck, crates hacked open, teenagers plundering stalls. On a cart he finds three corpses; none is his mother’s, none is familiar.