Box Nine

by Jack O'Connell

  HOST: Okay, one of those nights. All right, dear, now listen to me closely. These young men shave their heads, they don’t lose their hair, they shave their heads. Voluntarily. You understand? They do it to themselves. It has nothing to do with any disease. It’s a way to identify themselves as part of a hate group. And I’ll take a moment to say that I wish people would listen just a little more carefully before they call in. Next caller.

  CALLER: Hello, Ray. It’s Johnny Z calling.

  HOST: Johnny, haven’t heard from you in quite a while.

  CALLER: You’re a popular man these days. Tough getting through those lines.

  HOST: And what does my friend Johnny have to say about tonight’s topic?

  CALLER: Clean and simple, Ray. Long as we’re castrated by the liberal courts in this state it’s up to each man to protect his family in whatever way necessary.

  HOST: Amen, brother. Amen to that.

  CALLER: These faggots are one more reason we got to protect our constitutional right to bear arms. I’ve got a beautiful double-pump Winchester I keep right on the back of the bedroom door, loaded and ready to go. I say, come on in, skinheads. Come on and visit. I’m all ready and waiting. Wouldn’t think twice.

  HOST: I hear you, Johnny.

  CALLER: Just wanted to say it.

  HOST: Thanks for calling. Next caller, you’re on the air.

  CALLER: Yes, Ray, just wondered if you people down at the station would like the real truth about all this?

  HOST: About all what, caller?

  CALLER: About how these skinheads are just one branch in Mayor Welby’s secret army and as we speak they’re mapping out the final details in their plan to round up all the blacks and Jews and—

  HOST: Next caller, you’re on the air.

  CALLER: Yeah, Ray, this is Vin from down San Remo. I thought this was going to be UFO night? What happened to UFO night?

  HOST: Next Wednesday, Vin. Next caller, you’re on City Soapbox.

  CALLER: Raymond, what’s gotten into you? You sound as bad as these skinhead people you’re complaining about. “Throw them in a pit and bulldoze the earth right over them.”

  HOST: This is Mrs. G, isn’t it?

  CALLER: You know my voice, Raymond.

  HOST: Poor Mrs. G, we’re never going to see eye-to-eye. But let me tell you, dear lady, when you’re out there, day after day, the way I am, and you see this constant erosion of everything that was once good and pure in our town, well, I’m sorry, you start to think that maybe drastic measures are called for before it’s just too late and we wake up one day and the whole thing has been taken away from us. History tells a sad story, Mrs. G, believe me, it’s happened before. And we’ll be back in a short minute after this word from your friend and guide in your darkest hour, Loftus Funeral Home over on Patterson Ave.

  Ike is dreaming an awful vision of his mother and father in the kitchen of the old family house. He’s standing in the center of the room, ashamed of something unclear. And his parents are walking in circles around him, equidistant from each other. They’re furious with him, berating him for this unstated failure or transgression. He’s sobbing, begging forgiveness, promising repentance, but it’s useless. Whatever he’s done is so heinous, they won’t even listen to his sorrow. Ike’s body trembles in his bed, the dream is so clear and real.

  Outside the green duplex, Eva looks at both entrances and finds Ike’s—91B. She moves first to his doormat, squats down, and lifts it, but there’s nothing underneath. She stands back up, steps to his mailbox, opens the lid, and looks inside to find it empty. Then she runs her hand along the underside of the box and pulls a key out of a small metal lip. She lets herself into the apartment and stands silent inside, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness.

  She moves through rooms, steering herself with her fingertips on the edge of furniture, walking in tiny, comical steps to avoid tripping. She finds her way to the back bedroom and stands in the doorway for a few minutes watching Ike’s body quake. It’s a horrible sight, like looking on a helpless child in the midst of a dangerous fever.

  Before she can rethink her actions, Eva walks into the bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed, and begins to stroke Ike’s forehead softly and whisper, “It’s okay, now, I’m here, it’s all right, Ike,” as if she were his dead mother come to life out of his nightmare, but bearing a radical change of heart.

  Ike’s eyelids flutter, flip open, and his whole body bolts backward on the bed as he lets out a scream of Ma, Ma, Jesus, loud enough to be heard three houses away.

  Eva jumps up into a crouched position on her feet, her hands and arms balanced on the mattress. She’s yelling back at him, “It’s Eva, it’s Eva, stop it, it’s me.”

  Ike knocks a glass off the nightstand, then manages to turn on a lamp.

  “For God sake,” he chokes, hand on his chest, then up over his mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” Eva says, backing up. “Are you all right? I’m sorry.”

  Ike takes a second to breathe and look around the room. “How’d you get in here?”

  “I looked until I found a key. There’s usually a key.”

  “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry, Ike. I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

  “You always go breaking into people’s homes?”

  “Really sorry. It was a stupid thing to do—”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to talk to you, Ike.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say. I don’t want to talk to anyone. Just dock me for today. Whole day.”

  Eva comes forward again and sits back down on the edge of the bed.

  “Why did you run out today, Ike? What happened?”

  “I just wasn’t feeling well. I think I’m getting the flu. I’m probably contagious right now.”

  “Did something happen while you were sorting, Ike?”

  “My God, I’m having chest pains, I’m having actual chest pains.”

  “Now, take it easy. Calm down.”

  “Calm down. Calm down. This is it. I’m having chest pains.”

  “What kind of pains? Should I call an ambulance?”

  “I don’t believe this. I’m thirty years old. This is unbelievable.”

  “Oh, Ike, what have I done? Should I get on the phone? Should I call?”

  “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hold on.”

  Ike sits up in the bed, leans forward, tilts his head to the side. His cheeks balloon out a couple of times. He makes a fist with his right hand and very lightly thumps his mid-chest. It’s possible that he belches, though Eva hears nothing. Then he comes upright and takes a breath and says, a little sheepishly, “I think it’s okay now,” as if he were speaking about something other than himself, “I think it’s all right.”

  Eva sighs her relief and shakes her head. “Please forgive me, Ike. I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

  “It’s just, you wake up, someone’s standing in your room.”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I just had no idea who it was. It could have been anyone. I had no idea.”

  “It’s just that things feel like they’re on the verge of getting out of control.”

  “Listen, Eva—”

  “And I don’t feel like I can trust anyone else.”

  “I’m not sure I want to talk about this anymore.”

  “I know that something happened today.”

  “I’m starting to think that maybe you should go home.”

  “I think you should tell me what happened at the station, Ike. You were sorting and then something happened.”

  “I don’t want any problems here, Eva.”

  “At the bookstore you were all for going to the authorities. What happened, Ike? What changed your mind?”

  “Forget the bookstore, Eva.”

  “I thought we were going to talk to your sister.”

  “Forget my sister. Forget everything.”

&nb
sp; “What did you find in the mail, Ike?”

  “Would you please get out?”

  “Where did you put it, whatever it was?”

  They stare at each other. The room fills up with the sound of the talk-show host lecturing:

  HOST: All right now, I’ve had enough of the stupidity. I’ve had enough of the inarticulate talk. Very simply, I’m asking you to frame your questions before you dial the number. There is no need for this. But what it does display for me, in crystal clarity, is the depths that this once-great country has descended to. By allowing Marxism in our schoolrooms, by allowing unchecked immigration across our borders, by allowing a blatant, flagrant abuse of a welfare state designed to propagate lives of drug dependency and casual sexuality, by allowing, allowing, allowing would be the key word here, my friends. Where has discipline gone? Where has consistency escaped to? In what dark bowels does respect for law and order and our unique system of democracy now reside? Let me mention a phrase here, people, a phrase that blazed a fire in the minds of men like Washington, like Jefferson. That phrase is new world, my people. A world that once, long ago, was untouched by the decadence of the Continent, of a Europe so in love with itself that it fell, as long-told prophecy said it would. This very land, the soil, the physical earth that stretched in a rich and wild run from Atlantic to Pacific, was once the last bastion, the refuge, the last possible paradise on an orb gone sick. It was a pure and final chance to forget the past and try again, start anew, build a civilization based on a consensus of values and good family morals. And what did we do in this damnable century of blinding technological advancement? We spit on it. We balled it up and tossed it down like a piece of festering garbage. We said NO! We shall not be pure! We shall not fulfill the dream! We handed the promises of this green land over to a satanic horror with many names: Liberal Humanism. Moral Relativity. Leftist Ideology. Castrating Feminism. Darwinistic Thought. Socialistic Atheism. New Age Heathenism. I could go on. Believe me, I could continue all night and into tomorrow. But I need no further proof of the futility of my cries than your phone calls. The pathetic ramblings of my audience tell me to throw in the towel, abandon the good fight. How much further can our intelligence be eroded? Will we move back into the caves of our forebears, draw on the walls, live with the wild dogs, eat with our fingers? [There’s a small breath of dead air, and then:] While you ponder the answer to those questions, I’ll take a short break for a word from tonight’s sponsor, the Loftus Funeral Home, specialists in your prepaid burial needs. Remember, there’s no need to burden those left with your final duty.

  The advertisement begins with the whine of maudlin violins and Ike looks at Eva and says, “Listen to me. There was a box in today’s mail. Just like last time. It was addressed to box nine. It was wrapped in plain brown paper. There was no return address. I cut it open.”

  He pauses. A voice from the radio is saying something about when the time comes, we’ll be ready.

  Ike takes a breath. “Now listen to me. It was a box full of human fingers and blood.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Eva says, hands going up to her mouth.

  “The sight of it made me faint. I was on the floor for a few minutes, I guess. When I woke up, the box was gone. And there was no one else in the room.”

  “Why didn’t you come and get me?”

  Ike stares at her.

  “You think I took the box?”

  He doesn’t say a word.

  “You think I sent the box? You think I’m involved in this?”

  He sinks down slightly into the bed.

  “For God’s sake, Ike, how can you suspect me? Don’t do this, Ike. I can’t be alone on this.”

  “I’m going to try to sleep now,” Ike says, drawing the covers up to the fold between his neck and shoulder.

  Eva stares down at him. The ad on the radio finishes and the host comes back on, his voice sounding refreshed.

  HOST: We are back and our caller is Lois.

  LOIS: Yes, hello, Ray. Let me tell you a little story about how these skinheads accosted my mother downtown last week, right on the common, near the reflecting pool …

  Eva eases her shoes off her feet. She stands and begins to undress. She quickly folds each item as it falls away from her body and places it in a neat pile on the floor. When she’s naked, she takes a corner of the sheet and quilt and yanks it back from the bed.

  Ike’s eyes snap open and she lets him take a long look at her. She drops hold of the bedclothes, places her hands lightly on her hips, model-like, and does a very small twist from side to side, to indicate she’s on display, to give him a full chance at observation.

  “Eva,” is the only thing he can manage to say and it comes out as a stunted question.

  She raises an index finger to her lips and gives the ancient quiet sign.

  “You don’t want to talk,” she whispers, “we won’t talk.”

  She climbs into the bed and advances at once, pulls her body across the mattress until its full length is parallel with his. Then she puts her arms around him, cradles him, pulls their chests together, flattening herself. She intermingles their legs and can already feel him growing against a thigh. She’s pleased, bordering on being something like proud, comforted by the fact that he’s getting hard in spite of his shock and depression and paranoia and confusion and terror.

  They fumble, pull him free from sweatpants, T-shirt, underwear, all the while kissing, wet, breathless, tongue-crazy.

  The only noise beyond their breathing and muted, guttural groans is the talk-show host, Ray, starting up again, voice rising in both pitch and volume, building another ranting theory, preaching his endless warnings of decay.

  Lenore sits in the Barracuda for a few minutes. She’s parked across the street from Rollie’s Grill. It surprises her how much she can see through the front windows of the diner. It’s like a little diorama, a small scene enclosed in a porcelain-framed case. An intricate picture of dozens of interacting parts becomes clearer the longer you look. She can see that half the booths are filled. She notices an enormous customer in mechanic’s coveralls perched on a counter stool. She spots one of Harry’s cousins, possibly Lon, clearing the empty tables. She can see Isabelle behind the counter stirring the contents of the big kettle. And Harry is next to her, his mouth moving, jabbering a story as he chops peppers.

  She thinks that Harry and Isabelle have always struck her as an odd but instantly appealing and attractive couple. And now it dawns on her why. At first glance, their glaring disparateness, most obviously, but not limited to, their racial difference, makes them seem like such separate entities. But then, constantly on the heels of that observation, there’s the indisputable fact of their togetherness, this plain happiness of their mutual attraction and love, and it burns away the separateness and acts as a billboard for the possibility of family, wholeness, belonging.

  An image forms in Lenore’s mind. She hates it, instinctively, but like an annoying and persistent daydream, she can neither eliminate it nor alter it. She’s stuck with it: herself as Isabelle tending a pot filled with an exotic stew. And here’s the tough part: Woo as Harry, dicing up vegetables and babbling the pleasant fables of his grandfather.

  A fact becomes apparent that’s so bizarre it makes her dizzy. She could love Woo. There’s the genuine possibility that she could care for, pledge herself to, undertake a life with this odd Oriental linguistics professor. The Barracuda is full of the smell of him. And she knows this is why she lingers, why she doesn’t want to get out.

  He had suggested that they shower together. That she call Miskewitz, tell him she needed some sleep in order to keep going. That they push book piles aside and have a postcoital picnic on the floor of his library. He’d said he could make a huge gourmet omelette for two, something special, a surprise. He’d stroked her forehead and said she had to sleep soon, that it had been days since she’d really slept and that something could happen to her, emphasizing the word so that it conveyed a childlike fear, a dread o
f inconceivable monsters.

  She’d lain in his arms and listened to him speak, kissed his chest, run her fingers over his bony cheeks. But she’d left the loft, still wet, her legs a little unindependable, her nervous system shorting out slightly, sending small blue flashes before her eyes as she found her way back to her car.

  She knows she should have gone back to the green duplex, searched for a Valium, called in to the lieutenant for a break, collapsed into bed, and crashed. But instead she drove to Rollie’s Grill, intent on black coffee and overspiced food. And something else. Now, staring through the boxy, rectangular windows, she’s intent on studying Harry and Isabelle, on paying attention to their gestures, their mannerisms, the number of times they touch one another. She wonders about the sound of their voices as they speak to one another. She wonders if there’s a signal that two people give off when they’re bound together, committed in some old-time, superstitious way. Do they learn some difficult, shared language, some bizarre and insulated code only understood by the two bound parties? At night, in bed, at the end of the once-endless day, do they dispense with language entirely, fall into a lazy, sleepy telepathy? Do they utter sounds on a frequency that outsiders can’t hear? Do their inner organs vibrate when their mate comes within a certain perimeter? Like some birds, do they have an ability to will their own death when a spouse dies? Like swans? Like her parents?

  There has never been anyone that Lenore felt this way about. She’s been involved with a number of boys and men over the past fifteen years. She has never felt rejected. Normally, she was the one who decided to sever a relationship. But even when she wasn’t the one who called it off, she always felt relief, never rejection. It was always like a great weight had been lifted.

  But now images she can’t eliminate or adapt to are coming into her head, stuff so alien that she doesn’t know what to do with it: She sees herself moving into Woo’s cavernous loft, preparing to bake bread on his gleaming black counters, folding her freshly washed sweaters on the couch as he works at his ridiculous desk, instructing burly, ethnic moving men on where to put down the new bed. She sees herself and Woo hosting a small dinner, a homey, old-fashioned casserole of some kind, dense with noodles, cheese, multicolored vegetables. Woo sits at one end of the new teak table—we’ve got to lighten this place up a little, honey—and Ike, their sole guest this evening, sweet Ike, still having trouble renting out the empty half of the green duplex, sitting at the other end. And Lenore in the middle, equidistant from each, closest to the kitchen area so she can run the show, pull things from the oven and refrigerator, grab a new bottle from the wine rack. She sees her own mouth opening. Words come: Fred, honey, you should really take Ike up to the new courts with you next week. Ike, they’ve built some beautiful new racquetball courts up on the hill. Fred could show you the basics. It would really do you a world of good …