Dunbar wandered into the kitchen, barefoot and bed-headed. He looked tired. “Hullo,” he said. “Early start for someone so restless.”
“Did I wake you last night?”
“Only a bit. It was in my dream, but all changed about, the way dreams are. You got out of bed, but what got back in wasn’t you. It wasn’t even a person. It was some other thing.” He blinked, hugging his elbows as though the room had gone cold.
Mason said uncertainly, “That sounds like a nightmare.”
“I suppose it was. I don’t really remember.” His gaze drifted.
Dread gripped Mason. “Come into the city with me,” he said suddenly. “I can drop you off at your university; you can go to the library while I’m working. Or see your advisor. Or anything.”
Dunbar laughed, surprised. “What’s brought this on?”
“Does it matter? We can get dinner. Something expensive. You choose.”
“I can cook dinner here,” Dunbar said. “Besides, I can’t. I have a chapter due by the end of the week; I’ve loads of work to do.”
“Friday, then,” Mason persisted. “You can come Friday. Even better: a late night.”
“Alright; I’ll think about it.” He grinned, obviously humouring Mason.
“Good,” Mason said.
Before he left for work he slipped the sharks’ teeth into his jacket pocket. He had an hour for lunch; perhaps he could run them by a museum. As he drove he was conscious of them, as though they had a sentient presence. He was glad to have gotten them out of the house. If I can’t get someone to take a look at them, he thought, I’ll throw them in the river. I can make up a story for Dunbar, say I left them at work or lost them. A hole in the pocket that they slipped through. He wondered if he would feel safer with them at the river bottom. Always, from here onwards, he would know that they were out there. No place seemed far enough away.
In his workshop he surveyed Ariel’s costume. It seemed to him the most important, the most intrinsic to the play. His original design had dressed the spirit as a drowned traveller, with a few addition: the beaded collar, and a set of thin bright chains that locked at wrist and ankle. Make-up would enlarge the actor’s eyes and give him a wild fey air. Yet somehow, looking at the assembled items—the ragged trousers, the glass jewellery, the shirt with its snarls of blackworked thread—he felt that he had failed to capture that in Ariel which was most beguiling: the sense that beneath his eagerness to please there lurked a nature not remotely human. Savage and indifferent, ungoverned as the sea. His clothes should seem foreign, rather like a cage he carried with him. But there was perhaps no way to convey this.
Mason sighed and closed his eyes. Next he had to oversee the costume for Caliban. It was a job that he had delayed. The design had come to him in a dream, but he did not like it. He didn’t think he could look at it now. There was something distasteful about the costume itself, which was dirty and sewn all about with stalks and leaves. He had intended it to be threatening, which the dream had been: a nightmare in which he was walking through a field and found that the wild grass all around him was in fact composed of frail and skeletal hands protruding from the earth, slowly waving. It had disturbed him more than any dream he could remember.
A thought came to him. He rose and walked to the table on which the costume in question was laid. There was an empty space about the collar, where it had been impractical to place leaves. Mason felt in his pocket and found the handful of teeth. He spread them along the collar, imagining that they were sewn there. They were menacing, redolent of magic. They would do nicely. More: he would always know where they were.
He wanted to believe that by incorporating the teeth into a costume he had in some manner disarmed them. But in fact they remained as alien, as frightening as they had been. When he looked at the costume he shuddered minutely. He wished he had forced Dunbar to come with him into the city. From time to time Mason would think of him alone, typing in his little office or—worse—at work in the garden, and a kind of panic would seize him. His hands would clench as though there were a physical threat against which he had to defend himself, or alternately a powerful emotion that he must at all costs keep in. Other people in the costume shop commented that he seemed unusually nervous. He considered calling home, but could not bear the idea of worrying Dunbar. Nor was there a specific fear that he could, with a phone call, assuage.
In the end he resolved to simply leave work as early as possible. He would escape traffic, arrive before the sun had finished setting. But when the time came, a kind of paralysis gripped him. A numb dread. He could see as though at a great distance the scene that would await him: the still street moody with twilight, the covert hints of life leaking from within the neighbouring houses, the disquiet he would feel even as he stood on the doorstep, hesitating with the key. The house was repellent, and he found to his shame that the force with which it drove him away was stronger than his desire to be with Dunbar. It was not strong enough to stop him returning, but strong enough, certainly, to slow and impede him. He found excuses to stay in the workshop. He conceived of an alteration to Ariel’s costume: the chains, he thought, should instead be silver ribbons that at the end of the play, upon Ariel’s release, would slither free.
When at last he left the city it was quite dark— so late, in fact, that he was surprised Dunbar had not called either the workshop or his mobile. The silence propelled him out of the office and homewards. As he crossed the river he looked from the car window and saw that under the yellow light of the municipal lanterns the water lay perfectly flat. It was motionless, like a large black snake.
Driving at night in the area just northwards of the city, he often felt that he was flying through darkness. It was the way he felt now. Any light—a traffic signal, the neon sign of a roadside café—was shallow and glancing. The headlights of his car shone no further than six feet ahead. When he reached the house he was surprised to find the porch light gleaming. It was wan and pale but so present, like an island picked out by the sun on its sand.
For a moment he stood at the door. His impulse was to knock: unconscionably, strangely. He leant his forehead against the glass panel that was set like a window into the wood. The key was in his pocket. He had only to use it. Close to the cool surface of the door his lips moved, forming a word. He did not know what the word was. It was a sigh, an exhalation. After a moment he took the key from his pocket and entered into the front hall.
Most of the lights in the house were burning. He could hear the noise of water running in the kitchen, and of dishes being washed, and the noise, too, of Dunbar humming: a beautiful but somehow melancholy tune. Mason walked just to the doorway of the room and watched Dunbar drying a glass with a damp towel. The glass gleamed in his hands. He wore an absent and undeveloped smile, as though he were almost thinking of something pleasant.
“I’ve come home,” Mason said.
Dunbar lifted his eyes. “I was beginning to think you’d left me,” he commented.
“Never,” Mason said.
“There’s dinner in the fridge. I didn’t know if you’d eaten.”
“I haven’t. I ought to have called.”
“It’s alright,” Dunbar said, sounding surprised. “I’m not angry.”
“Perhaps you ought to be.” Mason stripped off his jacket and laid it on the kitchen table. He walked to where Dunbar was leant against the stove and kissed his forehead lightly. He rested his hands against Dunbar’s hips. There was a faint foreign smell to him, something like a pine forest, remote and wild.
“I didn’t have time to be angry,” Dunbar said. “I’ve had the most remarkable day. You won’t believe what I found out in the garden.”
Mason closed his eyes. “Worse than the last time?”
“Better,” Dunbar said. His eyes were very bright, almost febrile. He tugged Mason’s hand as he made for the back door. Outside the porch light was burning with a low and sullen glow. The wolf’s skull looked yellow in the semi-darkness. The
air was oddly cold. Mason tasted something sour in his mouth, like old wine gone slightly off. He did not want to move any further into the garden.
Dunbar bent at the edge of the porch, towards the outer radius of the light, and picked up a shoebox lid. He carried it, careful to keep it flat, to where Mason was standing. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said.
Mason looked. Lying on the cardboard were the bones of a hand, complete and perfectly arranged. At first glance the hand appeared human; when he looked again, Mason was not sure this was the case. The proportions were subtly incorrect, the finger bones a little too long. They seemed to curl in claws. A fine grey dust covered them. Mason thought, If only it were human. It would be so much easier to explain.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit strange?” he asked Dunbar, trying not to betray his horror.
Dunbar shrugged. He looked down at the lid. “I thought so at first,” he said. “But then the strangeness sort of went away. I’m not frightened. I think it’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Mason resisted the urge to knock the lid from his hands and send the finger bones flying. He knew it would not change what was happening; he knew that it would have no effect at all. He put his hand against Dunbar’s cheek. Dunbar’s skin was cool, dry; below it the bones were so fragile. When he smiled Mason could feel the muscles of his face move.
“I’m going to go and see if the neighbours know anything about this,” Mason said, as calmly and gently as he could. He backed away from Dunbar and made it inside the house before his stomach rebelled and he was sick, once, in the kitchen sink. All that came up was a bitter and colourless liquid. His nausea did not abate. He wiped his mouth. His hand was not shaking—which surprised him. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it is because I know what I have to do.
He collected his jacket from the table and left the house, leaving the front door unlocked behind him. All up and down the street the houses of his neighbours were silent and utterly still, though here and there he could see a hint of light behind a window. He walked determinedly up to the house next door. The porch light was not on, and shadows seemed to breed in the flowerbeds. Beside the door was an electronic doorbell, which he pressed. He could hear the chime sound, hollow and resonant, through the high ceilings of the house’s front hall. But though he waited for a minute, then another, and finally pushed the doorbell again, there was no hint of answering footsteps.
He proceeded to the next house. Here the porch light was lit. A large brass knocker was affixed to the door. Mason slammed it three or four times in his urgency before noticing that there existed an old, crooked doorbell as well. He rang the bell. It sounded odd, slightly tinny, as though it had not been rung in years. At the sudden noise he thought he saw a curtain twitch in the window, as though someone or something were standing just behind it. He waited, but no one came to the door.
The third and fourth houses were the same. Mason knocked against the door, against the front window, but it seemed that no one was at home. He leant against the doorbell of the fourth house in his desperation, listening to it ring on and on its flat unmusical peal. He was sure that the noise could be heard out in the street, yet no dog barked nor irate door slammed. No one stirred in any of the houses. They sat quietly as the dead.
When he turned very fast from the door he saw again a flicker of motion: this time in an upstairs window across the street. The white and filmy cloth of the curtain shook slightly. Mason thought he perceived a black shape moving behind it. But it might have been a trick of the breeze. Surely it was the breeze, too, that moved through the leaves of the small bushes and mulberry trees, producing a sound like a low whispering.
Suddenly paranoid, he stood at the edge of the pavement and shouted, “I know you’re there! I know you’re in there! Why won’t you help me?”
There was no reply, and for the first time it occurred to him that they were not hiding, that no one was home in any of the houses, nor had anyone ever been. The curtains, the lights, the cars that came and went were all an elaborate trick or illusion. He was alone with Dunbar. All round them was only the indifferent darkness, for miles. He could get into the car and start driving, but he did not know how long it would be before he found some sign of life, another human being. He knew that if he left the neighbourhood he would not have the courage to return to it. Even now terror was seeping through him like a cold flood. He could not walk into the house where Dunbar waited, if what waited was still Dunbar.
Mason dropped to his knees on the damp asphalt. It seemed to him that the weakness in his heart diseased his body; he no longer had the strength to stand. Around him moonlight turned the streaks of tar in the road to silver ribbons. Something moved in the darkness, prowling the neat low grass where Mason could not quite see. He did not want to see it. He thrust his hand into the pocket of his jacket and found there, like an amulet, the car keys.
Four Poems by Sarah Heller
After the Apocalypse
I’ll regret cashing in all my silver
down at the Associated Supermarket.
It’s not silver. Those nickels
are probably made of nickel.
I saved them up for years
and they made $47, for United Way,
or Red Cross. It might seem like more
after the apocalypse, when I live,
suddenly in a desert shack—
surrounded by tumbleweed,
and small glass bottles—
rose colored, sea glass green,
lining the screened windows,
and rusty bells, and cans of rattlesnake meat,
which I won’t eat til the last,
and spider webs covering all of it.
The spiders will have survived
the virus, or nuclear war, or alien attack,
or poison rain, or ultra ultraviolet rays,
or reproductive breakdown, or whathaveyou.
There will be dusty white cotton sheets on the bed,
and dusty white cotton curtains blowing around
over the screened-in vast space,
and I’ll wear a dusty white cotton nightgown
walk around barefoot, reading the classics,
reading midrashim, paperback, or photocopies.
How will I wind up in the desert?
Maybe it’s NYC, after the apocalypse, desert-like
and solitary, the wax hands at Madame Tussaud’s
melting in the sun, taxi cabs covered in sand except for a
yellow corner of a door,
thousands of remnants of the city,
buried like a thousand artistic
representations of the ruined city,
also buried. I can’t go far or I’ll
lose my way back to the desert shack,
this view of lonely spaciousness,
the corridors of sand in sandstorms,
disappearing, reappearing, in the
corners of my eyes, just barely out of sight.
Self-Storage
The long aisles of goods in the pre-life.
Our dazzling souls drift along them:
we get 1000 tokens, the rest is
chance. We can pick bodies, or
circumstances, or settings, or ultimates:
and each is potential. Not guaranteed.
You get a certain shopping-status
according to actions from your
past lives. You might
be able to choose anything
with a green label, say. Let’s say,
a tall cool drink of water of a body, 100 points.
But then—truly kind, or very funny, 400 points.
Run into a soul mate, 1000 points.
It goes so fast.
Athletic, for example, or musical—
both are 800 points, so you only have 200
to play with.
Take a break to choose your parents,
or your language,
Then back to shopping.
Strong willed, light hearted, 200.
Abundance, 300. Simplicity, 350.
So easy to make mistakes,
and you have to go into one room and spend
a mandatory 300 on qualities you don’t want:
Jealousy, cries easily, never satisfied.
What am I saying? I think today I’m saying that
I’m sitting staring at a window full of plants—begonias mostly—
out into the street full of trees—London Planes I think—
and beyond. Glancing between the leaves.
The Possible World
In this kind of mood I can only read books
about boy wizards or young hobbits
or the Maud Dib, or Hasids playing baseball.
This is better than your voice in my head,
your eyes watering at me.
Pine needles, fir needles. I place them on
pressure points all over my body.
In the bonnie garden across the earth.
You are hunched over in a black down coat,
cupping your hands around your mouth
to light a cigarette.
I pull weeds
under the ancient fern trees.
You must have come by.
Did you come by?
I can feel you
in the foyer like a mist.
You left your card
but no message.
You must hate me to treat me so.
Please don’t go.
The door hangs nearly off its whitened hinges.
The landlord’s father mutters
in another language, or he’s off his rocker,
or both. The mailbox has no lock or key.
Your terse message seems to say
you knew I’d be gone but came to leave a few words.
They peck at me like hungry birds.
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