by Ted Sanders
I’m cold. My thighs ache. I leave the path and wander along the property line behind the pigshack, at the edge of the cornfield, heading back toward the house and the road. The corn whispers, shedding its own dim woven light. My line takes me back by the fire. People are still around it. There’s a guitar. I don’t see or hear Dorlene. I leave it again, passing beyond the glow. I imagine that some animal could come and drag me off into the corn, something angular and entomological, something I couldn’t or wouldn’t fight. I feel cold and wet and loose in my pants.
Up at the house, the kitchen lights still burn, the porch. Triti must still be up after all. Maybe I will see her through a kitchen window, any second now as I move, as my view of the room opens up. I walk and watch and wonder how much longer I can continue to believe it, when I’m jolted: far up ahead in the road, the screech of a car jamming to a halt, the blurt of horn. A muted thump.
I swing into a sloppy trot. Behind me, the guitar cuts off and gentle interrogations rise. I hear Dorlene’s voice ahead, piercing. I cross the driveway, into the yard proper, stumbling loose up the slope beside the house. I can’t see the ground, but I’m heady with momentum and not worried—almost curious—about falling.
As I pass the porch, the front door bangs open and Triti barrels out. She is wearing a thin-strapped top and pajama bottoms. Her breasts swing. She takes the stairs in one heavy step, landing right in my path. I cry out and veer aside. She glances over at me, half-lit by porchlight, dark-eyed, her lips parted. There is no hint of recognition in her at all. For me, I mean. Her gaze swings over me the way it might swing over a stranger, or a wall. I witness this. I’ve no idea what look I give her in return, but I do know it isn’t that.
She pulls easily ahead, her thick legs pumping. The textured whisk of her pantlegs brushing together, the feathered thump of her bare feet in the grass, so purposeful and sure.
I round the house. In the unlaned road out front, a collage of light hangs. A stopped car, brake and headlights blaring, dome light on. The engine idles sleepily and exhaust billows red out the back. Through the windows and the open passenger door, the interior glows warm and yellow, empty as a coffin. In the dirty white light washing over the road ahead, a ragged unmoving shape hunches. The dog is lying in the road. As I draw nearer, an element of that shape shifts and becomes new: Dorlene’s face, grotesque and gaping and maudlin, made of dots. Her lower half is lost in the dog’s white mass.
I slow. Triti pulls away. She churns up the embankment and out into the pouring light like she has stepped into a photograph, or onto a stage. I see now that Ernest is there, too, that the car is his, that he has been standing there all along perfectly still, so close to the bumper of his car that he’s lit only to his knees. His flat hands cross over his mouth like a bandage. Triti speaks to him and drops to the road.
I climb the berm and stop beside the car, my toes just into the gravel shoulder. I can’t tell if I am seen. In the car, an undigestible sight: a crinkly white mass pouring from the dash onto the passenger seat. A bundled sheet, or a trash bag. A fungus. It’s not until I see another one sprouting from the steering wheel that I understand—the airbags have blown.
Triti sits cross-legged in front of the car, draped in the stark light, her hands hanging into her open lap. She has her head cocked slightly to her right. Dorlene holds the dog; his limp, wrecking ball head overspills her. Her tiny arms wrap around his neck and jaw, as though she’s wrestled him here. Her cardigan is gone. Her shoulders gleam. She looks from him to Triti, her face stricken, her mouth working, her eyes nothing but color. Threads of Jim’s fur rise through the light. I step out into the road then. I think I want to see. I come up beside Triti, right over the scene. Dorlene tips her head back.
The dog is dead. His torn and bloodied face shines—torn away, really, along his muzzle. The wound bares his teeth, his strange wide molars the whitest thing in my eyes, far whiter than his coat. The gaping flesh gives him a hideous snarl, makes him seem savagely angry, and Dorlene appears to be restraining him, an exquisite sight—one of her forearms is cinched tightly around the dog’s snout. On Jim’s shoulder and the buckle of his jaw, rude patches of his fur have been ripped from him, his pink flesh exposed, seeping blood like sweat. He is bleeding on Dorlene. She has blood on her arms, her face.
Closer to me, Triti sits at the dog’s feet. Jim’s front leg is shattered—it looks counterfeit, bent at a repugnant angle and broken open like candy. And I see now that Triti strokes the paw of this wrecked leg with a single finger, as light as breath, a gesture that looks mindless but that I know is torrid.
Dorlene’s little mouth opens and closes. She is keening almost inaudibly, a noise like the squeal of wet wood on fire, threaded through the rumble of the engine.
“Who was driving?” I say out into this, and my voice is a sacrilege but I don’t stop. I look over at Ernest. “Was it you?”
Ernest slides his hands through his hair and into his pockets. “I didn’t see him. He ran right out.” Dorlene looks up at him.
“It was both of you,” I tell the two of them. “You were doing the thing—the steering and the brakes.” I can’t say it right, but I know they understand. Dorlene shakes her head. I say to her, “You were driving but he was under you, doing the brakes, the gas. The dog ran out—or maybe he was here already—”
“That’s not how it happened,” says Ernest.
“—and the airbags went off,” I say, not to anyone in particular, to the dog maybe, lying there. I can’t make any picture besides the one I’ve already conjured: Dorlene standing at the wheel and calling out shrill directions. Ernest, bent eagerly with the pedals in his hands, the two of them laughing clever until the moment Dorlene spots the dog. Ernest has stepped back out of the light, all but vanishing. I realize the blood on Dorlene’s face is coming from her own nose, from the corner of one of her own eyes.
I want to not be standing. I go around the dog, to where his great back curves across the road, putting him between me and Triti. I sit on the pavement. I tell Ernest to turn off the car, the lights, and I think someone will tell me no but no one does. The car goes dead and dark. We plunge into black. We sit there quiet. Cricketsong rises like a pulse.
As my eyes adjust, the scene before us—the scene we are in—slides and becomes new, over and over, the slow arrival of a print in a darkroom. I can’t tell if Jim’s ghostly body is fading or growing brighter. I’m spending almost all my sight on Triti anyhow; I have to. She’s made no sound, the only one of all of us. She hasn’t moved except for the single finger stroking slow. I begin to gather the expression poured like stone into her face: she doesn’t even look at the dog, not directly, her eyes set on a point further away along the ground, just beside where I now sit, so that the dog seems to be lying under her gaze, contained—and so that her attention to him is an almost unwitnessable act. And I can’t call her face sad, not really, but rather perfectly sculpted by this consequence, flawlessly full of whatever this moment means to Triti and to no one else, and her face hasn’t troubled itself with knowing even this fact about itself. And because she is taking in or reaching out to no one right now she is as calmly and thoroughly alive as a forest. I could sit here all night and watch her, getting lost in my absence from her stare—my absence just for instance—and envy her. Because, I’ll be honest, I can’t seem to measure any of this stuff against myself, not any of it—not this night at all, not my arrival in this place, the sight of Triti being river-still, the fact of Dorlene even existing, the dog getting out and into the road, Lisa in our house alone or not alone, the smells of burnt wood and wet dog, the sound of this deed being done, the spent airbags hanging loose like just more corpses—none of it, none of it.
We sit in silence a while longer, all of us. I feel like I ought to do something that none of us has thought of yet. Triti’s hand just hangs there between her knees, beside the dog’s paw. She gives nothing away. She goes on moving that one finger so slightly that I know—I honestly do—
that I am the only one who sees it.
And then Dorlene pipes up, setting that voice loose in the air. She tilts her head from one to another of us. “I don’t know what to say, I’m serious to god. What is there to even say? David—David?”
The blood trickling from the corner of her eye has carved an arc across her delicate cheek, a black curve rendered in a trembling hand. She kneads her fingers like worms through the dog’s rough fur. Her mouth is a pleading ring. I lean toward her, take her tiny arm. “Tell me it’s true you could’ve died,” I say.
Assembly
PETER LUMLEY ASSEMBLES THE MACHINE.
The parts of the machine gleam silver and smooth. Their edges run sharp and clean. When Peter Lumley holds any one of them in his hand, its weight surprises him. They assume the size of chestnuts, fingers, pushpins, peas.
Peter Lumley builds a machine that utters his name. It speaks like a metronome, in a voice like a woman’s or a child’s, talking his name over and over. An element of the machine rocks back and forth calmly, like the needle of a metronome, but through a horizontal plane. The machine does not produce the tock of a metronome, only the sound of Peter Lumley’s name, and beneath the sound of his name, the soft complex slide of perfect gears. The machine does not slow or stop. Peter Lumley sleeps to the sound of the machine for several nights.
Peter Lumley disassembles the parts of the machine. He reassembles them, building a lilting machine with an animal’s shape: a long-footed, top-heavy, thin-ankled animal—like a baby kangaroo, he realizes, long after he has finished, though he has never seen a baby kangaroo. The machine rocks lightly on the toes of the machine, cylindrical bearings in its ankles working noiselessly, the hunched crescent of its body floating, like the crown of a tree, and the spindled legs are so thin—so close, Peter Lumley realizes, to the lowest limit necessary to bear the weight of the machine—that the machine does not seem to be borne. He sets a dish of water out for the machine. He draws a kitchen chair to the table where the machine rocks over the water. He sleeps in the chair near the table. He dreams of fantastic thirst.
Peter Lumley slices carrots on the counter near the sink. Peter Lumley makes stew. He washes the stewpot, the water dish, the knife.
Peter Lumley, in a practical state of mind, builds a machine that produces, detects, and obscures unpleasant smells. The machine is shaped like a dense, loafish bed of earnest and ornate flowers, neatly arranged. Peter Lumley appreciates this machine but becomes quickly bored with it, because the machine lacks visible moving parts. He notes the importance of this to himself, takes the machine apart hours after assembling it.
Peter Lumley builds a breathing machine. A finely whirring machine, splendidly humming, producing an invisible cloud the same humidity and temperature as the air in the room. Peter Lumley bends over the machine each morning and breathes, breathes.
Peter Lumley gets nosebleeds. He undertakes the studious application of ice. He watches television obliquely, his head thrown over the back of his chair.
Peter Lumley builds a silent machine that is adept at staying out of Peter Lumley’s sight. He becomes very fond of this machine. He imagines its exact appearance. He thinks of the machine often. Often, he talks to the machine—or for no audience in particular, but in such a way that the machine would be able to hear him. He feels that the machine trusts him. He lives with it without incident for over a month, until one evening, stepping backward away from the sink, he treads on the machine, hears it fall intricately to pieces on the tile.
Peter Lumley arranges the parts of the machine on his bed. He arranges them according to extravagance of form, beginning with the smallest pins and spheres and ending with the shape that reminds him of the alphabet bent turbulently into a bow. He acknowledges arbitrary choices he makes at certain small levels of the array but pleases himself with the gradient of the whole. He then selects every sixth piece, beginning in the upper right-hand corner of the bed. He builds a small thoughtful machine using these parts—every sixth piece from the arrangement of the whole—and then the thoughtful machine trolls over the bed, selecting additional parts from the parts that remain. The thoughtful machine devises a complex system of selection. Peter Lumley understands that the complexity of the system escapes him; he recognizes only that a system exists. Belatedly, he suspects that a series of images could have been detected in the arrangements of the parts left behind by the thoughtful machine. After the thoughtful machine completes its work, Peter Lumley finds himself unable to build anything from the parts it has selected. He considers this a failure on his part. He sits on the floor for some time, within the crescent of the chosen parts strewn about him on the floor. Eventually, he becomes witness instead to the increasingly arcane act of the thoughtful machine disassembling itself.
Peter Lumley eschews every light in his room except for a bent-neck, drooping lamp with a deeply pink glass shade. He considers the light cast by the shade, wonders if it is womblike, frees the lamp with an extension cord, carries the lamp with him from corner to corner at night for a week.
Peter Lumley spends over a month attempting to build a perfectly spherical machine. He does not know for certain whether the parts in his possession will allow him to accomplish this.
Peter Lumley builds an undulating machine that prevents shadows from being cast. He stands in front of this machine and does not see his shadow, even when he makes shapes with his hands. He begins to blame his hands for this, to develop a distaste for his hands. He washes his hands, repeatedly, in very hot water. He lets them redden. He stands in front of the machine for over a day, turning the pink lamp on and off, on and off.
Peter Lumley builds a flying machine that does not fly. Instead, it lumbers across the floor like a crumple-winged moth. Peter Lumley, watching, momentarily considers crushing the machine, but before he can begin to accurately imagine such a thing, the machine whirs and unfolds, erupts absurdly into the briefest fluorescence, a tumescent shape like a toadstool, then collapses swiftly into a wide and smooth shallow bowl, shimmering, and then back into the lumbering winged thing again. Peter Lumley stays up deep into the night, watching the machine.
Peter Lumley mails a piece of the machine. He selects a piece at random, a piece that looks like a triangle from one direction, the shell of a nautilus from another. Peter Lumley mails the piece to himself. He includes his return address. He uses insufficient postage. The piece of the machine settles naturally into a lower corner of the envelope, buckles the paper, weighs the envelope down uneasily.
Peter Lumley builds an almost perfectly spherical machine. He had not known this could be done. The surface teems with the inner workings of the machine, not an unbroken plane at all but the exposed points and protrusions of rods, gears, pistons, flywheels, mesh—only the smallest of parts, but all so tightly packed together, so keenly aligned, that the nearly spherical machine feels textureless in the hand. He drops the machine into his pocket. He understands that he had known he would be able to. It works against his thigh.
Peter Lumley begins to notice discolorations beneath certain of his nails: finger and toe. He cannot recall what this might mean, though he believes it means something misfortunate. The discolorations are purple-black, white, cadaveric.
Peter Lumley begins to wonder if he has been parting his hair on the wrong side. He aspires to build a mirrored machine that will reflect an unreversed image of himself, but instead he dreams he builds—purely by accident—a dull, throbbing disc that is only visible if Peter Lumley is in motion.
Peter Lumley takes to keeping single, small pieces of the machine in his mouth. He does this for hours at a time. They taste exquisitely bitter, almost sweet. He cups them with his tongue, keeps them—mostly—from his teeth. He salivates profusely over them. He rinses them in the sink. They each possess, in his mouth, the faint tingle of batteries.
Peter Lumley begins to build a machine in which each part connects to exactly three others. The machine quickly becomes large and improbably cornered,
but it only slowly grows large enough. At regular intervals, he takes apart sections of the machine, puts them back together. He carefully never takes apart the entire machine, but he intends that when the machine is finished, there will be no section still intact that has remained intact throughout. He works on the machine for days in a row, fusses through many layers of assembly, disassembly, reassembly. As the machine nears completion, Peter Lumley becomes suspicious. He begins to suspect that the work progresses with an intent he had not foreseen, although he can name neither the intent nor its symptoms. He blames the machine, works deep into the night.
Peter Lumley sleeps.
Peter Lumley wakes and works on the machine.
When it is complete, the machine assumes the precise size and shape and color and texture of Peter Lumley’s room. This confirms the suspicion that has been growing in Peter Lumley, and he knows what has happened the moment he finishes, because he loses sight of the machine. He searches for the machine. He uses his hands. He lifts pillows from his bed, but he knows that certain elements of the machine are meant to be pillow-like. He opens the window onto the street, but the machine has been built with such features in mind. He runs water in the sink. The machine provides this amenity. Peter Lumley fingers and palms his hair. He considers his surroundings. He examines the surface of a mirror.
Peter Lumley sits on a kitchen chair until long after it becomes too dark to see.
Peter Lumley packs his belongings. Peter Lumley leaves certain things behind, does not know for certain what this means. He packs toothpaste, underwear, soaps, mail, his toolkit, the pendulous pink lamp. Peter Lumley leaves certain things behind.
Peter Lumley lives elsewhere. He subscribes to magazines full of deeply shining pictures. He reads up on the unfamiliar. He pays to have food delivered to him. He walks in the early mornings.