Short People (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Furst

  They made me sad. I mixed their formula. I stuck thermometers into their armpits. On my rounds I tried to treat them tenderly, but I felt like a fraud; with every kind act I promised a lie, set an impossible precedent. What happened after they were taken home was out of my control. The temperature would no longer be fixed at a constant 65°. The length of the day would no longer be decided by the rheostat. The institutional stability of the hospital would be replaced by messier, less controllable circumstances.

  For a stretch there, Sabrina refused to eat. She had constant colic, screaming and squirming and shaking, her whole body quivering, skin blushing with so much blood it looked like it might pop. Her parents were frightened. She lost weight and they worried that she would suffer irreversible damage if she didn’t start to eat again soon. She might die of malnutrition. I think she was frightened, too. I think she was disappointed by what she’d encountered on this side of the birth canal and was refusing to grow. I think she was looking for mercy. As she howled, she turned to face the sun and raising her palms, she begged for deliverance, for release, for eternal returns.

  Some nights, when I was restless and done with my chores, I trolled the aisles between bassinets and watched the babies sleep. I paused over each child, prayed for him or her. I was all that stood between them and the wild and I was not enough. Within a few days they’d be out in the world. They’d be on their own, at their parents’ mercy, and forever after they’d have to struggle for the simple things I provided them with. Two arms around them. A purr in the ear. The nudge of a nose on the cheek. Undivided attention.

  On one of these nights, I found myself returning over and over to a particularly frail, small, dark-skinned boy. He was marked with a nevus high on his left cheek. His face twitched as he slept and he kept waking up. I held him on my lap, bouncing and rocking him for most of the night, but it didn’t help.

  I was on with Kim that night, and the noise annoyed her. “I don’t know why we can’t sedate them when they get like this,” she said.

  “Why don’t you go smoke a cigarette?” I snapped.

  On her way out, she rubbed the boy’s head. “Poor baby,” she said and he started to wail. She waved him off and kept walking. “Fine, be like that,” she said.

  When she was gone, he calmed down. He gazed at me— oddly, urgently. I kissed his forehead. We were sitting in the shadows of the unlit nursery, and I saw something dance in the space between his face and mine. A darkness on top of the darkness. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I had a sense of what I couldn’t see. The arc of his life. Any happiness it contained would be secondhand, stories he’d tell himself after the fact. Happiness is what he would call those moments that, when he remembered them, seemed less sad in contrast to the rest. I grabbed a blank chart and jotted down some notes.

  Jones, BB

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  He will be miserable most of his life, and when he’s an old man he’ll curse having ever been happy.

  I knew what I’d written was true. I wished there was some way to cure him of it.

  I managed to get him back to sleep before Kim returned, and I laid him gently into his bassinet.

  “All better?”

  I nodded, averting my eyes, and busied myself disinfecting bottles as she lingered, hoping for small talk.

  “You don’t have to do that right now,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “You want anything from the candy machine?”

  I shrugged and she left again.

  The scalding water focused my mind. Why hadn’t the Jones boy, like little Michael, chosen to flee from his future? I tried to work out the metaphysics. As long as he was in his mother’s womb, his body was controlled by hers. Michael had a choice because, as a preemie, the normal birth process had been disrupted; his mother had relinquished his body before the groundbreaking due date at which he would have begun to forget the life of which he’d seen the outlines; in this window of time, he’d had the chance to abort the project. The Jones boy did not have this option. Now that he was out, the process of forgetting was in full swing. His urgent gaze had been a plea for help, a last look around before he succumbed to the tedium of time, the inevitable life ahead of him.

  I was off the next night, but stopped by anyway just to check in. It was early, around nine-thirty, and Kim was on dinner break.

  Cheryl, alone in the nurses’ station, hovered over the study guide she worked on every night at about that time. “You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.

  “Just picking up my pay stub.”

  “Payday was yesterday.”

  “Yeah, I forgot.”

  She peered at me skeptically, as if over glasses, though she didn’t wear any.

  I rubbed my knuckle in circles along the long table mounted into the wall. I was tired. I hadn’t slept well that morning—thinking about the Jones boy—and didn’t have the energy to bulwark myself against her prodding. “How are you?” I asked, looking her directly in the eye, something I almost never did.

  “Um . . .” She weighed her answer and for a second her eyes lost their ferocity. “Okay.”

  I’d never before seen her show any weakness. “You sure?”

  She readjusted her perfect posture. “I’m well, yourself?”

  I shrugged.

  “Listen, are you going to be here for a second? I’ve got to make a phone call.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. I . . . I should call my son, though.”

  I agreed to cover for her and she ran down the hall to the pay phone. It rattled me to think that not even Cheryl could shut the turbulence out of her life.

  While she was gone, I trolled the aisles and found the Jones boy. It pleased me that he was still there. He was the reason I’d come, really. I picked him up. I put him down. He was sleeping peacefully, finally.

  I stared at my reflection in the window of the nurses’ station while waiting for Cheryl to return. I looked gaunt. I could see my skull through my skin. I wondered how many years I had left to live.

  When Cheryl got back, she was again impenetrable and stern. “Everything quiet?”

  “Yeah, it’s quiet,” I said, and I left.

  One night, Sabrina and her mother didn’t come home at all. They didn’t come home the next night, either. Nor the next, nor the next. They never came home again. I have no idea where they went. Her father did nothing to find them. He just let them go.

  It was almost a year before another child showed himself to me. In that time, Kim married her problem boyfriend. Cheryl tried to convert me and, having failed, she now kept her distance. I had attempted to reach a variety of children the way I’d reached Michael and the Jones boy, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t respond. My only thought was that it wasn’t up to me. I was merely their receptacle. All I could do was be ready, poised and present, the next time one of them needed me.

  And I was. When the little girl with the twitching feet gazed up at me from the changing table, when I saw those urgent eyes, I grabbed the chart I’d reserved for this moment and scribbled down what they were saying. It was like taking dictation:

  Swenson, BG

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  One week, her fear will reach such a pitch that it will keep her awake for one hundred and twenty straight hours. Nights, she’ll lie on the cot, beneath the thin moth-eaten blanket and contemplate the signs and symbols that seem to be rushing not through her mind but through the room itself. She’ll be convinced that if she can discern the exact meaning of her visions, she will not only have uncovered an essential truth, but will also be allowed to exit this place, to return to her mom and dad, return to the girl she once was— the one whose smile alarmed people with its sincerity, whose precocious mind made connections that widened the eyes of the adults around her, whose heart was so immense and trusting that every day, even long after she should’ve known better, she willingly gave her bag lunch away to the school bully, happy to help make him happ
y. Her visions—bright lights that murmur words she can’t make out, the Book of Isaiah burning, as she reads from the thin pages of her Bible, the wounds only she can see on the other innocents locked with their wild imaginations into the ward—will slowly begin to accumulate resonance. She’ll begin to understand. She’ll search for words that might explain what she’s uncovered, words the doctors won’t be able to dismiss or twist, as they’re wont to do, into mocking, damning questions. Late on the night of her fifth day without sleep, she’ll find it, a single word, all that the world needs to hear: Mercy. She’ll sob quietly, and when she peeks over the edge of the blanket she will see that three men dressed in white are climbing silently into the room through the barred sixthfloor window. For a moment she will believe they have come to let her out, but when they lean over her, she’ll see the punishing threat in the downward cast of their lips. She’ll be so afraid that her body will cramp. She’ll open her mouth to scream, but she will have no voice. The men will watch over her, just for a moment, and then fly back out the window. In the morning she’ll remember, Mercy, but she will have forgotten its meaning.

  Then I returned to wiping her bottom and pinning her up. I kissed her forehead as I placed her in her bassinet. I prayed with her.

  Over the next few years others searched me out—not often, once every nine or ten months or so. They always waited until Cheryl or Kim was on break. I did what they asked, recorded their futures, and prayed with them. I won’t list them here, but I’ve kept all the charts on which I logged their futures at home in a three-ring binder. You can read them if that’s what you want.

  The most recent one found me yesterday. She had a tiny, dime-shaped mouth, her lips pursed as if they were made for kissing. She reminded me of Sabrina when she was first born. Large, big hands and feet, but a small mouth. I cried as I wrote down the things she showed me.

  Imbrodicci, BG

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  He’ll never look her up but she will have a photo she’s secretly lifted from the album her mother keeps hidden behind the hatboxes and shoe boxes and all the other boxes filled with less meaningful junk under the bed. On days when her mother seems happy, the girl will venture to ask what he was like. Please tell me something about the good times before I was born. She’ll take mental notes on her mother’s tales: the sheepish turn of his smile after some unusual, loving words had slipped out of his mouth; his adoration of certain paintings and films, the way he talked about them so late into the night that Mom’s eyes did loop-de-loops just to stay open, but he’d keep going, as if the works of art were his lovers and he needed to examine every single one of their astounding traits, staring off at some wide arcadia and then kissing her like she herself was profound. Other times, her mother will evoke a more cunning man, calling him That bastard who wrecked my life, leading the girl to see herself as a burden. And there will be worse times, her mother ranting so virulently that the girl locks herself into her bedroom and stares at the photo, imagining a truth her mother’s too bitter to see. At these times she’ll be Daddy’s girl, and nothing will ever compare to his love.

  I kissed the girl on the forehead and prayed with her. Then I looked up and saw Kim. She must’ve forgotten her Walkman there in the room. She was screaming, Don’t! Don’t! Get away from that child! But she wasn’t trying to stop me. Instead, she called security.

  Later, I reread what I’d written about the girl and realized what must have happened. I’d lost my empathy. I had grown selfish. The children would never trust me again, and my career was over. This is why Kim had walked in at that moment. I couldn’t see the girl in what I’d written, only Sabrina—and not even Sabrina, really, her mother and father, and me, all of us, failing to thrive.

  This is what I will say in my defense:

  Each individual child arrived into a unique set of circumstances with unique characteristics that I was able to survey. Their minds were already searching for meaning in the world around them—the sweet ammonia smell, the nubby cotton blankets, the cool Plexiglas of the bassinets, the mass-produced, disposable tools of the health-care industry. Still, they lacked so much, wanted so much, needed so much more than their lives would yield, that these few hours with me in the nursery were as good as their lives were going to get. Life is a long rope of crises that yanks at your neck until you’re airborne. At the other end of each child’s rope, the platitudes Happiness, Peace and Well-being were waiting to mock and badger them, to spit in their faces, to stand always just out of reach. They’d learn this soon, or maybe they wouldn’t; some good things might happen to them, but these good things would be the exceptions. Mostly they would endure, they’d cope, they’d muddle through and, if they were lucky, they’d learn not to cry.

  Their lives would begin diminishing soon. They’d never again be as safe as they were here, three or four hours old, in the maternity ward. I wanted what was lacking in life—in their lives as well as in mine—to present itself to them, to become more real than the alloys and plastics that surrounded them here. I wanted to bring them closer to God.

  This is why—with more tenderness, more love than their lives were prepared to offer them—I held these children in my arms. I ran my fingers across their soft skulls. I kissed them on the forehead. I mixed their formula and heated their bottles, testing each one on my wrist. I fed them, watching their sweet faces suck at the nipple and flush with contentment and warmth. They were safe with me. I gave them what all children need: empathy, shelter, something warm to eat. Then, when they were full and falling asleep in their cribs, I gave the worst off among them, the one, every few months, with eyes that foretold the most hopeless future, a greater gift. Lifting the chosen one’s head from the pillow and again kissing him on the forehead, I let my hand slide over his nose and mouth. I pinched his nostrils. I stopped his breath. I smuggled the child away from the rubble and handed him back to Heaven, where I knew he’d be treated well.

  Sometimes, of course, it was a baby girl. After the last breath fled from her body, I lifted my hand from her nostrils and closed her eyes. I knelt beside the crib and prayed for her. I know what I did was right and just, that what I did was kind.

  I saved fourteen in all. Each one died smiling. Their sadness was gone, replaced by this expression of thanks.

  THE AGE OF MAN

  Jason and Billy discovering everything out there: fossils and physics, the layers of history under the ground, the light-years of space in the sky, the past and the future, embedded between them, the present—Jason’s and Billy’s two separate presents, which no longer contain each other.

  The elephant stands all alone at the edge of the pool. It’s two in the morning, cloudy and dark, and the surface doesn’t glisten. The elephant can’t see itself in the water. “Jason won’t come back, and Billy can’t find me without him.” The water is a darker spot in the darkness. The elephant dives in and can’t get back out. It struggles and, struggling, sinks deeper.

  Jason and Billy discovering summer, until with a backfire, a puff of smoke, it’s gone.

  The elephant drowns without leaving a trace.

  Dragons are pests. They eat the strawberries.

  When a human being throws a rock and that rock hits a duckling, the duckling’s mother has no choice. People are dangerous. Ducks are our prey. She must kill her maimed child and keep her flock strong. She must do what has to be done. But she needn’t mourn. Ducks know no emotion; they live their lives purely on instinct.

  Jason’s a grown-up now, being one thing and another, thinking of Billy sometimes with a smile, wondering “What ever happened to Billy?” imagining him holed up in a museum, or out in the scorching sun, swatting mosquitoes, shoveling dirt, searching for the missing link. Jason’s close to the truth, but he doesn’t quite have it right. In his early twenties, Billy, for reasons that have little to do with Jason but a lot to do with magic, remembered a time when he’d been impressed by what he found embedded in the lower strata. He dug deep into the past and tried to retriev
e the sensations buried there. He knew no one else had taken them, but when he arrived, they were missing and he felt he couldn’t return home without them. Instead, he crossed the highway—a different highway than Jason had crossed. Jason is still here. When Billy reached the other side, he disappeared.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Richard Abate, Betsy O’Brien, Kate Lee, Gary Fisketjon and Amber Qureshi for help in the publication of this book; to Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, Alice Turner at Playboy and David Knowles at Ledig House; to Connie, Deb and Jan in the office; to Mike Heppner, Hanvey Hsiung, Oscar Casares, Tommy O’Malley, Nick Arvin, Jeremy Mullem, John Murray, Nick Fracaro and Gabrielle Schaffer, Shelley Stenhouse, Meredith Goldburg, Alice Gordon and Rob Casper for support, both moral and otherwise, in the writing of these stories; to Frank Conroy, the James Michener Foundation and the Copernicus Society of America for their generous sponsorship by way of a James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship, and to others too numerous to mention here.

  Thanks especially to James Alan McPherson, Jodi, Papa Mike, Mom and Dad, for reasons I can’t begin to describe.

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Joshua Furst

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and

  Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  The following stories were originally published in slightly different form:

  “Red Lobster” in the Chicago Tribune and

  “She Rented Manhattan” in the Crab Orchard Review.