by Jon Cohen
Sphincters tightened, lips were bitten, fingers dug into palms, but no one uttered a sound.
“Louis, how you been?” He waved again.
Louis slowly reached his arm out the window and waved back. Yank no longer sat at the graveside—he stood in the middle aisle of the hardware store. Yank waved hello, and Louis returned the wave, hello, hello. It was Saturday morning, a June morning, and the hardware store was the best place in the world to be. This was their secret. The roofing nails came in, said Yank, and he held one up, the prize roofing nail of all roofing nails anywhere. And then Yank, who was slow, but never slow in the store, put the boxes in exactly the right place. He looked over at Louis and smiled. This is what I can do, the smile said. And though Louis knew the store as thoroughly as Yank, knew it right down to the dust on the planks of the wooden floor, at least once a day Louis said to him, Yank, where is it we keep the quarter-inch staples? Yank, could you help me find the glazing compound? Yank would look at Louis like he was kind of sorry for him, even shake his head, but Louis could see him trembling slightly, so happy was he to perform. They spent the day going up and down the three aisles, helping the men who came in the store, one by one. And Yank, who was slow, but also wise, said, You see, we help them with their dreams. They come into the store with a dream: If I can just find this spring, my back door will be fixed, and if my back door is fixed then all will be right in the world. A man will want an extension hose for his wife’s washing machine. If I get the extension hose, I can fix the washing machine, and if I can fix the washing machine, then my wife will love me, and if she loves me, then all will be right with the world. You see how it works? We’re part of it, Louis. Everything that comes out right, the dreams that come true, we make it all happen. See how happy they all are when they walk out of here? That’s the look of dreams coming true. At the end of the day, Yank would put on his hat and coat and stand for a moment in the doorway, the sun lighting him from behind. He’d take a last look around, and then inhale deeply, as if drawing in an essence that would sustain him through the hours away from the store. He’d say, Good night, Atlas, and shake Atlas’s hand like it was good-bye forever, and Atlas would go along with it, and then Yank would give Louis a look, the look of the shared dream, and lift his hand, and wave farewell. Louis reached his arm out the car window and waved to Yank, and they waved back and forth as all the funeral guests watched silently, transfixed.
Ben and Sam quieted Yank down and Reverend Plant cleared his throat a few times, and gradually, after much shifting and whispering, the guests returned their attention to the matter at hand. Louis listened to the reverend’s words and then lost the sound of his voice among the summer drone of insects and the noise of birds. Once upon a time, he thought, there was a man in a casket, a woman in black, and their son wrapped in purple and hidden from all eyes. Once upon a time, a young man and his bride lay on a bed in Atlantic City and dreamed of a beautiful son they would call Louis. Once upon a time, Atlas, Louis, and Gracie had a picnic out in the backyard. Louis listened to the drone of insects and stared at the distant casket.
“Atlas?” he said. “Are you there?”
“Yes,” said Atlas. “I’m here.”
Once upon a time, a boy whose face was swathed in white dressings called out to his father.
“Atlas,” he said again.
“I’m here.”
“Flames,” he whimpered, and squeezed Atlas’s hand. Louis smelled the smoke that had worked its way into his flesh and felt the heat of his blackened skin.
“No flames,” whispered Atlas. “The fire’s out. They put the fire out.”
Louis had squeezed his hand harder, as if reassured, and then fainted. But no, Louis was trying to tell him the fire wasn’t out, that it crackled still beneath his dressings. In the daytime the nurses changed the dressings. They would not allow Atlas and Gracie to stand outside the door, but took them to a room at the far end of the hall. Each time the nurses worked on his face, they stirred the glowing embers and reignited the flames, and Louis cried out. At the end of the hall his parents wept. To help him fall asleep at night, the nurse with the green voice—he could not see the nurses so he gave color to their voices—turned on the faucet at the bedside sink. Do you feel that? she said. A cool waterfall, the ocean on the shores of Maine, the bluest lake in Colorado. But Louis imagined the Waverly Volunteer Fire Department pumping water out of Waverly Lake, Bernie Stratton manning the hose, dousing his face, for hours, for days. When they pumped the lake dry, Louis would finally fall asleep.
“Atlas,” he said, one day. “The store?”
“It’s okay, son. You got to it in time. There was only a little damage in the back room.”
And Louis squeezed Atlas’s hand harder, in relief Atlas believed, but he was wrong. Louis felt regret and sorrow, not for himself, because he did not know yet what lay beneath the dressings, but for the store, that any harm should come to it, even to the back room.
He had returned to the store after dinner, because he needed a jar of rubber cement to finish his senior high school art project. He had his own key, which Atlas had presented to him long ago. He valued it above all his possessions, and he kept it on a chain hooked to the belt loop of whatever pants he wore. The key had barely touched the lock when Louis knew something was wrong. He opened the door and stood by the cash register. The evening glow coming through the front windows turned everything in the store to gold—golden hammers, golden wire, golden pliers. He smelled smoke then, sharp and dangerous, and saw a gray haze seeping from beneath the door to the back room. He ran down the middle aisle, touched the door first to feel for heat, and then opened it. They mixed the paints there, and fixed lawn mowers and storm windows. The old cord to the paint mixer had started the fire, Louis knew—it was spring and they’d been using the machine all day long. A box of oily rags had been jostled too close to the frayed cord, and now the fire spread from there, sending flames curling up the wall in two or three places. Louis opened the door to the alley and yelled, Fire! Fire! Fire! Bob Madison poked his head out from the back of his store and Louis yelled, Fire! again. Then he grabbed a big piece of burlap and brought it down over the box of burning rags. Sparks flew everywhere, and the largest one, the one Louis watched as it moved across the room like a shooting star, landed on the edge of a glass jar half-filled with used paint thinner, teetered there, and then fell in. Louis heard a small explosion, and something bathed his face. That’s all he felt, as if he had dipped his hands in the coldest stream in the universe and bathed his face. He opened his eyes once after that and saw Bernie Stratton in his firemen’s hat, holding a fire hose. Louis closed his eyes then, and felt the heat beyond heat, the flames that all the firemen in the world could not begin to extinguish.
Over the weeks of healing, the nurses began to leave areas of Louis’s face uncovered. Gracie could stand it, could move beyond it, but not Atlas. Each time a little more of Louis emerged, he’d turn his head, or avert his eyes, some imperceptible distance away. Louis refused to look at himself while he was in the hospital.
On his first day home, he went straight up to his room, pulled down the window shade, then slowly turned and faced the mirror above his chest of drawers. He stared straight into his eyes, and only his eyes, because the eyes were a part of himself he recognized. Yes, Louis, it’s you. Then he began to move slowly outward, taking in the new terrain of his face. The eyelids, scorched and askew. The eyebrows, the left one burned away completely, the right one half gone and veering crookedly like the broken wing of a bird. The forehead, smeared and waxy, some of it a violent red, some a sickening pale yellow. Down to the nose, what had been the nose. They had tried to fix his left nostril with a strange skin flap that partially covered a moist black hole. When he breathed, the flap jiggled and made a whistling noise. His right nostril was intact. His cheeks seemed to be covered with bunched-up chicken skin, parts of it that terrible red. The fire had burned deep craters into the fat and muscle, and the skin grafts had left lumpy scars
. His lips had been drawn taut by the flame, pulled into a grimace that revealed several teeth. He could hardly bear the pain of bringing his lips together to say even the smallest word.
He said a word, finally, after the hour he spent staring at himself in the mirror. “Boo,” he whispered.
Louis returned to the hospital one final time. The plastic surgeon spoke proudly to him and Gracie and Atlas about what had been accomplished. “You’ve been through a lot of operations, Louis, and we have, for the most part, reconstructed your face. Of course, over the years, there will be little things we can do.”
Louis stopped him with a question. “You believe you reconstructed my face?”
The surgeon hesitated, then said, “You’ve come a long way.”
“But not all the way?”
“No, not exactly, son.”
“Can you return me to what I was?”
The surgeon said quietly, “No. Only God could do that.”
Louis stood up and brought a hand to his face. “Well, God did this, don’t you think, and maybe we shouldn’t tamper any more with his work.” And then he left the room and returned home, where he knew he’d stay forever.
In the beginning, he would stare at himself in the mirror and think, There was the Louis before, and he’s gone, the Louis who stopped at sixteen. And now there’s me, Louis who is not quite Louis. My name is Louis, he said over and over, relearning himself. My name is Louis and I’m almost human. My name is Louis and I’m not quite human. My name is Louis, he thought one day, and I am a monster, the beast with the soul of a man. Imagine. I lived all these years and never knew a monster lurked beneath my skin, that in a flash of heat and light it would open its eyes and live. Maybe I should wear a sign around my neck and go out into the world: BEWARE. IF THE MONSTER LIVES IN ME, IT MAY LIVE IN YOU.
These were the thoughts that came to a sixteen-year-old boy staring into his mirror. Not mundane and lovely thoughts of spring, or games of baseball, or high school friends; but visions of dark creatures and burnt monstrous things.
And so they began their life again. Gracie, Atlas, and their son, Louis, who was Louis, but not Louis. They would talk to him, from time to time, about doctors and operations, and he would listen quietly until they finished. Each time he gently put them off. No more, he said. If you don’t mind me the way I am, then I don’t mind either. But, Louis, there’s a world out there you’re missing. Louis said, That was a world elsewhere. And I don’t miss it exactly. It’s just available to me in a different way now. In smaller but stronger doses, you might say.
It was available to Louis through the windows of his house. He received bits of the world, its small beauties revealed to him in hidden glances. The unimaginable beauty of the dogwood, the red dogwood Atlas planted on the day he was born, as Louis watched it season after season from his bedroom window. The beauty of the front lawn, as he peered down on it from the attic dormer, not just green, but shades of green, textures of green, even temperatures and moods of green, as the sun arced across the sky, then disappeared at the end of each day. The beauty of the street, the jet-black tar glistening on hot days, the beauty of the garage roof, its peaked angles against a clear blue sky, the beauty, even, of the chain-link fence two backyards away, and of the red doghouse in the Lindstroms’ yard, and of the arrangement of the patio stones, and of the rose trellis in any season of the year, whether the roses were in bloom, or it was merely the anticipation of roses to come, or the memories of roses that had been, or no roses at all, simply the trellis itself, or the garage door itself, or the white lawn chair—all of it was lifted into rarity. Because that was his world, everything that he could see from his windows.
Sometimes he entered the world at night, or thought he entered it, because he was never sure whether he dreamed of the hidden backyards and dark driveways on his block, or actually opened his bedroom window and crept out into the night air. He’d do it, or dream it, once or twice a year, be compelled through his window, to move silently to a spot in his yard, or someone else’s, that he had watched day after day. Often it was some little thing, or place, he wanted to touch and smell and be near. The bird fountain in Kitty Wilson’s yard, a particular root on his own horse chestnut tree, the elephant and bear bushes in front of Bev and Bert Howard’s. Once, he watched the elephants and bears play in the new snow, and when they were done he smoothed their tracks with his mittened hands so no one would know.
In time Louis didn’t mind that he was a monster. He knew he was a monster without claws, or dangerous teeth, or murder in his heart. I am as harmless as the wind on your cheek, he’d whisper from behind his window shade to the little girl who feared to chase the red ball that had rolled into his yard. I am as harmless as the smell of leaves, he’d say, the words leaving a vapor on the windowpane, when the paperboy on his bicycle gave the house a wide berth. And when Atlas, who could not help himself, looked his imperceptible distance away, Louis would think, Don’t be afraid, I am as harmless as the Louis who came before me, and I carry his key. Back in his room, he would lift the key to the hardware store that Atlas had entrusted to him long ago and touch it softly to what remained of his lips.
Each night before he went to bed, Atlas would knock very lightly on Louis’s bedroom door. “Louis,” he’d say. “Are you there?”
Louis lay in the dark listening to his father’s words. He thought it such a funny thing to say, and very sweet. He was the Waverly recluse—of course he was there. He’d answer back. “Yes, Atlas, I’m here.”
Atlas wouldn’t open the door, not because he was afraid of Louis, not then at least, but because the words he was about to say made him shy. “I love you, son. Goodnight, and I’ll see you in the morning.”
The words that came to him in the dark were so sweet Louis almost forgot that Atlas could not look at him.
Once upon a time, Atlas knocked on Louis’s door and whispered, “Louis, are you there?”
Louis looked out of the car window at all the mourners seated in the distance. Reverend Plant’s words were lost among the sound of birds and the buzzing of insects. Behind the reverend lay Atlas’s casket, the brown wood gleaming in the sun. Louis stared at it for a long time and then he said, “Atlas, are you there?”
He heard a soft beating of wings and felt the car jostle slightly on its springs, then a voice said, “Yes, I’m here.” Louis turned toward the other side of the car, the side not facing the funeral ceremony, and saw Atlas in his corduroy pants and his old Hush Puppies. Out of the back of his flannel shirt, a pair of magnificent pearly wings with gold-tipped feathers swayed in a gentle breeze.
Atlas spoke, but his lips did not move. “Come to the window, son.”
Louis slid across the car seat. He thought of all the time he’d spent at his windows. This was a different window with a different view.
“You believe what you see?” Atlas said, touching the car door.
“I always believe what I see,” said Louis.
“Then remember, Louis, that on this day you saw your loving father.” And with those words lingering in the air, Atlas reached slowly into the car with both hands and removed Louis’s hat and unwrapped the purple scarf from his face. Then he leaned forward, just inside the car, and kissed the scorched skin of Louis’s cheek. Louis closed his eyes and felt the kiss.
When he opened them again, Atlas had disappeared, and a figure in white, leaving the sidewalk and approaching the parking lot, walked toward his car. Louis looked anxiously around for his scarf and hat, and then realized the hat was on his head and the scarf still hid his face. Atlas…
The figure in white was a nurse, a short squat nurse, and she walked right up to the car. “Excuse me,” she said. “Pardon me. But do you know whose funeral this is?”
Louis looked at her looking at him. She didn’t seem to find it the least bit odd talking to a man who was invisible except for his eyes. Clearly, she had seen stranger things. She waited for him to answer.
“Um,” said Louis. He w
as out of practice talking to people. “Atlas Malone’s,” he said. “This is Atlas Malone’s funeral.”
The nurse pondered this. Then she said, “Nope. I don’t think he was ever a patient of mine. Don’t remember seeing him at the hospital.”
“No. He was pretty healthy. He just… went.”
The nurse said, “He was a relation of yours?”
“My father.”
The nurse looked at him some more. “I’m sorry. You knew that it was bound to happen, though?” She spoke the words without sounding unkind.
Louis said, “Yes. Bound to.”
“I have to go, my shift’s starting soon. I’ll be seeing you.”
I doubt it, thought the recluse of Waverly, thought the man who was never seen.
The nurse turned away, took some steps with her short legs, then turned back again. “There are worse things than death, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Louis, pulling his hat a little lower and his scarf a little closer, as the nurse moved across the parking lot and away.
PART TWO
THE MAN IN THE WINDOW
CHAPTER ONE
WHEN IRIS Shula, the nurse, said there were worse things than death, she knew what she was talking about. She looked over her shoulder at the funeral just ending and the mourners heading for their cars and thought, Death—now, that’s the good news. The bad news was Mr. Brenner in bed 12 of the Intensive Care Unit of Barnum Memorial Hospital. Mr. Brenner, or the Tube Man, as the nurses called him, had been in a coma for five months, or as the nurses put it, he’d been dead for five months but didn’t know it yet. The nurses, Iris included, were not a mean lot—they just called them as they saw them, and over the years they’d seen a lot of them. The Tube Man looked dead, felt dead, and smelled dead, but despite all that accumulated deadness, once a month on the full moon, the night-shift nurses swore the Tube Man spoke. Iris raised a silent eyebrow because everyone knew that the night shift, due to sleep deprivation or boredom, often stretched the facts. A sigh, maybe, or a groan—comatose patients did that—but a word, from someone with a tracheotomy who was on a ventilator? The first word, according to the night shift, was the. The what? said Iris, who didn’t believe it was the, but maybe thhh or uhhh, some kind of neutral mouthy sort of sound. The next month the night shift reported another word. Man, they said. The following full moon, the Tube Man spoke again. In. The nurses put all the words together, made a sentence out of them, or the beginning of a sentence, because they figured the Tube Man was making a sentence at the rate of one word a month, which was damn good for a comatose patient. Even Iris was hooked. The next month she said, Well? to the night nurses, when she came in for her morning shift, what did he say? The, he said the again. That made it “The man in the.”