I kept the door open with my foot and dragged the other containers full of melting ice in by ones and twos then let the door close and slid the bolt.
I heard the groaning again and went into the bathroom through the open door. The boy was still in the bathtub but he took off his blankets because he didn’t want to be warm. The ice under him was mostly melted and the water was pink. He was indecent.
I told the boy I’m sorry but you would have plenty of ice if you had responded to the commands of your leader. I told him now the ice I got for you is almost as melted as the ice you already have but not as pink. I told him now I’m going to have to go get ice all over again and it will take a long time and you will probably just keep groaning and not cooperating because that’s all you have done and not done.
There was a knock at the door. It was you but I didn’t know it yet. I don’t know you.
I went to the door and peeped through the peephole and saw you. You couldn’t see me but you said to let you in.
I didn’t know if it was a trick. I didn’t know if you were the new leader or if we would lead the boy together. But then I thought that you might ask my name which I can’t remember. I’m not supposed to remember. And I decided to be quiet.
I walked away from the door and into the bathroom through the open door and told the boy in the bathtub to be quiet but he groaned.
You knocked again. Louder now.
I did a pros and cons and told him shut up. I told him I can’t get anymore ice because someone. It was you. Was at the door.
You knocked. He groaned. You tried to turn the doorknob but it was locked. I told him to shut up. He groaned. You tried to unlock the door with a key. Was it the maid’s key. I think it was the maid’s. The door unlocked and the handle turned but the door didn’t open because I had slid the bolt and you can’t unlock the bolt from where you were. The boy groaned.
I said you’ve left me no choice. If you refuse to obey the commands of your leader. And you were at the door. I have to put you to sleep.
The needle was empty but I thought there might be a drop or something in it. Enough to put the boy to sleep since he was weak from the sex. I pulled back the button and poked the needle through his balloon and into his meat and pushed down on the button.
I heard you kicking the whole time. You were kicking and kicking and then you took a break to go get the axe you came in with and then you were axing. The boy jerked around for a little while but then he stopped groaning and went back to sleep.
I could hear you axing still and I had just enough time to get the sheets and blankets and comforters back on the bed. They might look made but they are not.
And then your axe came through the door. Then you. And you started pounding on the boy saying what did you do to him and somebody get an ambulance and I’m sorry I cut you with my scalpel but all I wanted to know was am I still the leader of me and the boy in the bathtub and who is the leader of me and you and did I pass the test.
wake up body!
Sometimes we like to imagine that our bodies know what’s best for us, big cuddly shells about the thumb-sized selves located in the intangible crevices between the gullets and the spleens, like the earth, which dares not wobble on its axis or stray from its orbit about the sun, for the sake of our bodies for the sake of our selves.
If we’re thinking straight, then what is this man thinking.
What is this man thinking when we imagine that our bodies know what’s best for ourselves. What is his body thinking as his self slips softly to sleep. What are his eyes thinking as his lashes interlock and lids meet across four lanes of highway, as his wheels slip to snowy shoulder.
Better shoulder than we, we like to think. But if we’re really so smart, then why don’t we speed past this accident patiently waiting to happen. If the body knows best, why does the foot not push the pedal to the floor and lead our bodies to a place where they need not concern ourselves with windshields, asphalt, and insurance claims. Or are these concerns diverting our attention from the matter at hand.
See his tail lights shimmering on the horizon like a man-made mirage. Mirages are for daylight. This is more like a fireworks display. We are feeling that child-like anticipation, awaiting the finale, the spark of side-panel against guard-rail. But we aren’t children, and these sparks spark conscience, the spark of why are we trailing this man at twenty-five miles per hour from half a mile back, this man whose body does not know what’s best for him.
This is the sound of the hand on the horn, as of a man wailing on a continuous loop until the wail becomes a chorus of wails, until the ear can not differentiate between sound and sound from one moment to the next. In the car ahead of us, the sound of the horn increases as we accelerate, in volume and in pitch. The horn wails, Wake up body! Wake up and tell your man to save himself.
Either the body does not hear or its man is not listening. We know this from a distance of less than a car length, our own ears ringing with the wail of the horn. The finale is but a tease, because these sparks will spark for miles, a cacophony of horns, rumble strips, and guard rails that can only end in a whimper. One of our bodies whimpers, and we understand this to be a prophecy.
Which is not to say that our faith in the body is not a bit shaken. There is a tension in the air, a sense of the impending failure of everything. We’re driving on eggshells. And the bodies are not exempt. Your upper lip is dotted with sweat. As I fidget, my ass sticks and re-sticks to the seat. There is a smell, a mingling of smells, a mingling of smells of uncomfortable bodies, sticking and sweating and tensing on eggshells.
Our own horn sounds closer with the window rolled down. The air sounds louder, more immediate, like the place where thunder happens. Our hair whips wildly about the cold dark night pouring into the car. And above all of this, the screech of side against rail flits about the smog of sound competing for the bodies’ attention.
As in the celebrations of our youth, the finale becomes the tease and the tedium long before the pop hiss whimper, and our bodies abandon us to imagination of bodies closer to the action, in peril, sacrificing limbs and skins for an evening’s entertainment. What force of mind, of will must it take to hold an explosion in your hand. How much more to sit inside the explosion itself.
That’s what this man is doing. Worse, his body seems to be allowing, even encouraging it. I think it’s you who can’t accept this. I think I’m slower than you just now, still stuck in awe, not of the display, but of the body’s place within the display. There’s an aura hanging over you, an aura of unwillingness to accept it, to accept that this body doesn’t know what’s best for itself, and I can smell it, even as I smell the cold black air that has driven our body smells out the window or into the back seat. I can smell your resistance. And don’t imagine that it isn’t pulling me in its direction, up and over, once again beside the accident patiently happening.
I suppose it’s possible that the man is simply dead, that his body has given up its ghost, soul from tailpipe slushing freshly fallen snow. From my angle, behind the wheel, I can’t see his angle behind his wheel, but I can picture him slumped over it, his self somewhere else, a dead man driving.
If we were thinking straight, this is where we would leave it. Not him, but it. Death behind the wheel does not implicate the body any more than any other death. The body cannot be guilty of death if the body is not guilty of death, a reflexive thought if I’ve ever had one, but reflexes are the domain of the body. The body doesn’t leave the hand on the hot stove. The body doesn’t sleep against guard rails at speeds above no speed, and if it did, it would still be yearning for the warmth of its bed.
I feel like weeping. I feel like bawling on your shoulder. I feel like rolling up the windows and taking my hand off the horn. I feel like falling back and following this dead man, against this guard rail, along this exit ramp, your screams an affirmation of all that we have thought, heard and felt together, a confirmation of the body’s best intentions.
An
d loud, too. Louder than the sound of the hand on the horn, louder than the air in the window, louder than the screech of side panel, his or ours now that we have joined him in explosion, against guard rail, louder than anything I’ve heard tonight. Your screams are overwhelming, overpowering, overjoying, a syllogism proving that this man is dead.
At least in a vacuum.
There is no sound here. No guard rails, no horns, no screams, though I’m sure that if I looked your way I would see you hiccuping the way that you do when the cry is out. But no sound. Just this claustrophobic calm, as though the sky were not a sky but some sort of planetarium, the neighborhood its own little hemisphere, as sterile and dead as the man in the car ahead of us.
He’s moving along slowly now. His foot has slipped from the pedal, the car carrying him forward out of habit. And our car has come to a stop. Our doors have opened.
This is the feeling of the air in your lungs, an icicle crammed down your throat. Your still-moist cheeks are burning below zero, and it isn’t long before you’re falling behind.
Pause for breath. Yes. I can’t imagine what you hope to accomplish with this late night jog. I can’t imagine what I hope to accomplish either.
As I overtake the car, I am overtaken by the impossible. Behind the wheel, a man who looks exactly as I’ve been imagining him, with one exception: he isn’t slumped over the wheel, dead, but sitting straight up, hands at ten and two o’clock, precisely as prescribed, eyes watching the road so intensely that the belated blinks cause his whole face to wrinkle when they finally arrive.
And I am staring, with equal intensity, at him. I don’t notice the enormous snow bank until we both slam into it as the road ends dead.
Maybe slam is not the word. Fall works better, falling into fluffy snow, floating like a boat pushed from gravel into water. We fell into the snow, and feeling returned, a feeling of complacency.
Stand up, says my body.
But I don’t stand up. Why would I stand up when I can lie here in this snow bank.
Stand up, says my body, or you’ll die here in this snow bank.
I still can’t hear. I can hear but I’m not listening. I am listening without believing. I don’t believe in bodies, but I stand up.
As I stand up, the man opens his car door and falls again into the snow bank. I run over to make sure that he’s all right, asking him if he’s all right, looking him over for signs of injury, asking him again if he’s all right. He’s breathing, his breath forms clouds in the still clear night, but still he does not respond.
Why don’t you stand up? I say.
The clouds of breath begin to thin a foot from his face, but leave no evidence of answer.
Look, I say, there’s a house behind this snow bank.
It’s true, there is a house behind the snow bank, a big brick house with central heating and a fireplace, with beds and sofas and overstuffed armchairs everywhere you look. Inside.
One cloud replaces another at an even rate, and the sound of them is almost no sound.
It’s not a very long walk to the house, and it’s sure to be unlocked.
Also true. This is a safe neighborhood, out in the middle of nowhere, and people aren’t afraid to leave their doors unlocked.
The man’s face is less informative than his breath, his breath informing me only that he is breathing.
If the door is locked, I say, you can break the window.
The houses are breathing, too. Above our heads, the houses breathe evenly so we know they’re alive.
Go ahead, I say, break the window. Break the window without even checking to see if the door is locked.
Still, he doesn’t move. I can’t understand why he doesn’t move. Doesn’t he know that desperate times have been calling for desperate measures. Does he believe in times and measures. Does he believe me when I tell him that the door is unlocked. Does he believe me when I tell him that no one will mind if he breaks the window. He should believe me. He should listen to me when I tell him that he can break the window, that I won’t mind, because I live in this house, and even now, my only hope is that his body knows what’s best for him.
took and lost
“Help!” he screamed. “Help! Police!”
The man was already walking away. The man who had taken something from him.
“That man just took something from me!” he screamed, pointing at the man who was walking away.
No one paid them any attention—the man who lost something or the man who took something—but the man who lost something continued screaming. It was a crowded city and the sky was a dark gray and the people were rushing to finish their various errands before the rain began.
“He’s getting away!”
Even in casual conversation, the man who lost something had a high-pitched voice, but when he screamed, his voice was positively shrill, high enough to shatter glass, so high that the average human ear couldn’t detect it. But that’s hyperbole, and hyperbole doesn’t suit the purpose here, which is a relation of how the man who lost something reacted to losing something, an important something.
It was a passive loss, as opposed to an active one. He didn’t drop something on the ground or leave it beneath a discarded newspaper in a restaurant or even never have something at all. Someone had taken something of his against his will. The man who was walking away.
And the people could hear him. They just weren’t listening.
He screamed again, or he had never stopped screaming in the first place, “That man! That man! Stop that man!” and though he was pointing his finger and screaming in the same direction as he had been all along, he was by then no longer pointing at a man, but at the crowd of men and women and children into which the man who took something had disappeared.
Yes, disappeared. However, this disappearance is not the real concern. The real concern is how the man who lost something reacted to this disappearance, this subtraction, this loss, and he reacted by following the man who took something into the crowd, where he himself didn’t disappear.
He found himself surrounded by the crowd, and not by the man who took something, who couldn’t have surrounded him. One man could have stood beside him or in his field of vision. One man could have attempted to surround him by putting his arms and legs about his body, but this would have been an embrace, not a surrounding, and why would a man who had just taken something embrace a man who had just lost something when this taking and this loss are linked by necessity?
He wouldn’t, because not only was the man who took something not a stupid man, he was a brilliant man. When he isn’t taking something and disappearing, he is definitely not surrounding people who have lost something as a result of his taking something. No, he’s sitting at a table, penning poems with his left hand and novels with his right, while beautiful and scandalous arias drip from his tongue.
Which is more than we can say for the man who lost something. Nothing dripping from his tongue—he’d stopped screaming. It wasn’t so much a decision as a reflex reaction—you don’t scream in the middle of a crowd that doesn’t seem to care what you’re screaming about, or even that you’re screaming, if you still have any hope of getting their attention otherwise.
For example: “Excuse me.”
It was all he could manage. He said excuse me and paused, waiting to be excused. It was a long pause. So long that if you didn’t know the meaning of excuse me, or if you were unaware of the context, you might have thought excuse me was all he meant to say, as though he’d spoken it into oblivion and was observing its effect in another dimension, because in this dimension, the men and women and children didn’t excuse the man who lost something. They didn’t even stop to consider that he might want to be excused. In fact, many men and women and children in the crowd were saying excuse me, excuse me too, and none of them were excusing any of them.
The man who lost something wasn’t as brilliant as the man who took something, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d known before he said it that excuse me woul
dn’t work. It was a matter of manners. It was a stalling tactic.
It was with a clean conscience and less hope than he’d hoped for that the man who lost something surveyed the crowd again, this time in search of someone who might have noticed the man who took something lurking among the men and women and children.
You’re not as brilliant as the man who took something either, but you don’t have to be brilliant to suspect that the man who lost something wasn’t ready to confront a grown man or woman about the man who took something. He was looking for children in the crowd, children with smiling, curious faces and bright eyes that absorbed everything, children who might have noticed a man who took something lurking about in the crowd, children who might be coerced into revealing what they might have noticed.
There were many bright-eyed children in the crowd, but one little boy seemed to be more bright-eyed than the rest. A very little boy, practically a toddler. Too little a boy, in any case, to be standing alone in a crowd. No one around him seemed to be his mother or father or sister or brother, and no one, save the man who lost something, seemed to be aware of the little boy’s presence. The man who lost something moved closer to him and affected an air of jolliness, what he thought was an air of jolliness.
“Hey there, big fella,” he said, like a grown man who’s never spoken to a child—he’d never spoken to a child—and then he waited for the little boy to respond, comforted by the jolly nature of the man who lost something, the jolly man who spoke to the little boy.
The Awful Possibilities Page 5