In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  He leans his head back against her. After a quiet moment she takes away the clay even though he’s not ready to stop, but once it’s out of his reach he is done, she was right. She gives him a wet towel, helps him clean his hands. Another nice moment between the two of them.

  Then she’s businesslike and bustling again. “I’m dropping your antibiotics into this nice tea, see? So they’re easier to take-—they don’t taste so bad this way. You’ve got to take all your medicine, honey, okay?” When has she ever called him honey? “Here’s your earphones. Just lean back against the pillow and sip your tea and listen to the nice music. I’ve put on something really soft-—you still like piano music, right? That New Age stuff? We always make fun, but it is relaxing. Dinner will be ready soon. I love you, sweetheart. You’ll be better before you know it.”

  Sweetheart sounds weird coming out of her mouth. But Xavier likes it. He may have even yearned for it, just a little.

  The music really is relaxing. It doesn’t demand anything of you. As he’s nodding off, Molly stands by the stereo, watching. Should he say something? Is that what she’s waiting for? The music changes somehow, but Xavier is so relaxed it’s like dropping into a deep hole, falling again but it’s okay, it feels good, a nice long swooping slide.

  When he wakes up he can’t seem to open his eyes. He feels a soundless buzzing in his head. His head pulses like a too-full balloon, his hands and feet are tingling. He’s done enough shit to know a drug hangover when he’s got one. His thoughts are jumbled but finally he’s thinking the stereo must have malfunctioned because there’s just this buzzing, nothing remotely musical about it. Does Molly know? He needs to find Molly and tell her the piece-of-crap stereo’s jacked up again. But why can’t he open his eyes?

  Light comes through his closed lids so at least, thank god, he isn’t blind.

  When he brings his hands up to rub his face, his eyelids start coming loose like they’ve been glued. On his fingertips is an amazing amount of what they used to call “eye boogers.” He finds the dried mucous on his lips and chin, too.

  He’s starving. Did he eat dinner? He doesn’t think so.

  He looks around the room, sees the long cord snaking toward the stereo, realizes he still has the earphones on. He looks at the stereo, at the indicators flashing red, at the long bars pulsing. He looks back at the window, and sees it is half-open, the curtain blowing in. But he can’t hear the wind, or the traffic noises outside, or anything else.

  He reaches up to the ear cups. They’re both vibrating hard. But he hears nothing.

  He stares at the stereo, the indicators swinging, pulsing. Maximum volume. For how many days? Three? Five? A week? It would have been terrible for those expensive speakers. Shredding them internally. Good thing, he thinks, the sound had been diverted into the headphones.

  And his ears? How many days?

  He tears the headphones off and throws back his head to scream her name, so loud in his head but so silent. He rushes through the house. Where is she? Until he’s thinking I can’t kill her if I can’t find her, he didn’t know he wanted to kill her. She did this on purpose. She’s done all this on purpose. What, exactly, has she done? Deliberately he bangs against something, tips something over, stops and waits for the sound to come to him delayed, but it never does.

  In the studio a blank canvas is up on the easel. Did he put it there or did she? He wrestles the lids off jars of acrylic he’s never used, sticks his fingers in, and throws gob after colorful gob at the expanse of pure white. In no time at all he fills it. He steps closer. The painting is telling him something, but what? He really wants to hear what it has to say.

  Movement in the corner of his eye. He glances over. Molly is walking his way briskly, a notebook wedged under her arm, a pen in her fist. In her other hand a recorder pushed toward him like a weapon. She’s speaking. What the fuck is she doing? She’s babbling on. Suddenly she stops, laughing silently. She opens her mouth wide and speaks slowly, with serious exaggeration. Does she want him to read her lips? She’s repeating it, again and again.

  (say what you feel)

  Is that it? He can still speak, so why wouldn’t he be able to say what he feels?

  He rips his mouth wide and screams, lunging for her. Noiselessly she stumbles backward, noiselessly scatters paint jars and brushes and equipment. He falls onto her and they both go down. She is a hysterical silent film heroine, struggling to get out from under him.

  His hands are around her throat, squeezing the sound out of her. Even trade! But he doesn’t know if he’s saying it or just thinking it. Then her pen comes up and up, in slow motion, and then in the jagged speeded-up motion of a silent film. He didn’t think about her pen.

  So now he is blind.

  Now he is deaf, too.

  Now he is deaf and he is blind, too.

  Scratchy bandages bind his eyes, but loose enough he can still move the lids. No dim light. No shadows. Nothing but the deepest, darkest well of despair, and he has all the time in the world to stare down into it, to swim in it, to drink everything it holds.

  Something squeezes his right hand. Again and again. How long has that been going on? Squeeze and squeeze again, regular, or irregular, as a heartbeat.

  “Jillian?” he means to say. He can’t hear the word or see it or smell it or taste it. For a while he gets lost in all this sensory confusion, and then realizing it could just as well be Molly squeezing his hand almost makes him black out, and he grabs wildly and flails and finds the hand with the ring. He’s afraid to be relieved, to feel even momentarily safe, because Molly could be wearing a ring just to trick him. But it does feel like Jillian’s ring. He isn’t used to using his sense of touch like this—the only sense he has left—so he could be wrong, but it feels like the star sapphire ring with the ridged setting and the etched design on the band. He actually thinks he can feel the star in the sapphire, and he knows that isn’t possible, and so he must be going crazy. A person can only take so much.

  Squeeze again, then pressure, skin on skin, dampness, blood or tears? He thinks tears, but it could be blood. Not so long ago he wouldn’t have thought about blood, but everything’s changed.

  “Squeeze once for yes if it’s you, twice for no.” There’s a single, long squeeze. That means it’s Jillian. But Molly could say “yes” that way, squeeze once for yes it’s Jillian when it isn’t. It doesn’t tell him anything.

  He hopes he says, “Okay, just a test. Squeeze twice for no.”

  Two hesitant, shaky squeezes. More tears. Or blood. Or piss or jiz. Or it’s raining. Or there’s a gigantic dog drooling on him. Or he’s hallucinating, crazy-creating, filling in this sensory emptiness with any shit his frantic brain can make up. But it’s probably tears. Tears make sense.

  Whatever it is, Xavier is drowning.

  Hands grab his. A man’s. His right hand turned over and fingers unfolded, then movement across his palm, it tickles, it scares him, and he tries to close his fist and jerk his hand away but his arm is held still it hurts he panics, fights, the movement on his palm keeps on and on and he can’t fuckin’ stand it can’t stand any of this and then he realizes it’s writing. Like with that chick in that sappy movie what’s-her-name Ellen something. Writing. A message.

  With great struggle Xavier calms himself down enough to concentrate. He feels tiny scratching that must be the nails, roughness here on the skin and smoothness here, the trail of warmth on his own skin that fades so fast, his fingers wanting to close, the pulses in the fingertips and in his own wrist. He has to work really hard to bring his attention to the marks—he knows they’re invisible, but everything’s invisible to him now and he’s goddamn going to think of them as marks—the lines and arcs being laid down on his hand. D. A. D again. He feels himself say, “Dad?” and he’s drenched with his own and everybody else’s tears. M. O. He likes the circle; do that again. M. “Mom.”

  One strong squeeze. Yes.

  He fits his lips together and says, “Bee.” There�
�s a pause and then the letter B is traced on his palm. No way he can explain about the damn bees still going out from the hive to bring stuff back for him to make what he can out of it, honey and wax and shit. Persistent little fuckers. He’s had enough of them. He just wants them to stop. He can’t make anybody but Molly understand that. So he moves his mouth, lips, tongue, teeth, to say, “Where’s Molly?”

  D. E. A. D.

  “Dad?” He knows that’s not what was spelled, but he can’t take in—

  A long curve is traced on his cheek, a J, probably for Jillian. Then two fast squeezes on his hand, “no,” and the terrible, beautiful word “DEAD” outlined again.

  “Dead? Molly’s dead?”

  One squeeze and then lots of stuff written fast on his hand though he thinks he tries to pull it away, too many letters, too many words, too much stimulation. He clenches his fist over all that stimulation, imagining he’s squashing the goddamn bees.

  “Did I kill her?”

  Two firm squeezes.

  “Did she kill herself?”

  A long pause, maybe he didn’t say it out loud, he starts to say it again when somebody squeezes his fist once.

  Molly is dead. She killed herself. She’s freed herself from all sensory input. All he has is touch. He doesn’t want touch. He’s had enough to last a lifetime. He wants to know what Molly knows, after all this time.

  He puts his mind to it. His mind focuses and slows like it never has before. He goes inside to meet God or the universe or whatever it is. To meet Molly. Who knows what happens, or when.

  He stops being aware of the feel of air or a blanket or tears on his skin.

  The sensations of food and liquid entering his body by mouth or IV are muted, then disappear altogether. Whatever passes out of his body is senseless, too. Xavier chuckles inside himself. Puns are the highest form of humor.

  Stuff is written on his knuckles, the inside of his arms, his face. It’s like insects crawling. Meaning goes away when he doesn’t try to understand, doesn’t answer, doesn’t engage at all. Finally the touch goes away, too, whether they’ve stopped touching him or he just isn’t taking it in anymore.

  No sense of where he is in space. Or if he’s in space at all. No sound, not even heartbeat or breath or the little plates of his skull clicking together. No smell or even memory of smell. No taste in his mouth or anywhere else. No light or shadow or shape or dull glow on the backs of his eyelids. And nothing tactile, nothing felt. He might as well not be living in his body anymore. Maybe he isn’t. That’s the point.

  It’s peaceful here.

  It’s lonely here.

  God comes to him, or he comes to God, or he sinks into the universe, or he rises into nothing.

  Molly almost died lots of times, before she was born and all through her life. Molly’s really dead now. Molly knows this place. She brought him here.

  Xavier loves Molly.

  THE MAN ON THE CEILING

  Everything we’re about to tell you is true.

  Don’t ask me if I mean that “literally.” I know about the literal. The literal has failed miserably to explain the things I’ve really needed explanations for. The things in your dreams, the things in your head, don’t know from literal. And yet that’s where most of us live: in our dreams, in our heads. The stories there, those fables and fairytales, are our lives.

  Ever since I was a little boy I wanted to find out the names of the mysterious characters who lived in those stories. The heroes, the demons, and the angels. Once I named them, I would be one step closer to understanding them. Once I named them, they would be real.

  When Melanie and I got married, we chose this name, TEM. A gypsy word meaning “country,” and also the name of an ancient Egyptian deity who created the world and everything in it by naming the world and everything in it, who created its own divine self by naming itself, part by part. Tem became the name for our relationship, that undiscovered country which had always existed inside us both, but had never been real until we met.

  Much of our life together has been concerned with this naming. Naming of things, places, and mysterious, shadowy characters. Naming of each other and of what is between us. Making it real.

  The most disturbing thing about the figures of horror fiction for me is a particular kind of vagueness in their form. However clearly an author might paint some terrifying figure, if this character truly resonates, if it reflects some essential terror within the human animal, then our minds refuse to fix it into a form. The faces of our real terrors shift and warp the closer they come to us: the werewolf becomes an elderly man on our block becomes the local butcher becomes an uncle we remember coming down for the Christmas holidays when we were five. The face of horror freezes but briefly, and as quickly as we jot down its details, it is something else again.

  Melanie used to wake me in the middle of the night to tell me there was a man in our bedroom window, or a man on the ceiling.

  I had my doubts, but being a good husband I checked the windows and I checked the ceiling and I attempted to reassure. We had been through this enough times that I had plenty of reason to believe she would not be reassured no matter what I said. Still I made the attempt each time, giving her overly reasonable explanations concerning the way the light had been broken up by windblown branches outside, or how the ceiling light fixture might be mistaken for a man’s head by a person waking suddenly from a restless sleep or an intense dream. Sometimes my careful explanations irritated her enormously. Still mostly asleep, she would wonder aloud why I couldn’t see the man on the ceiling. Was I playing games with her? Trying to placate her when I knew the awful truth?

  In fact, despite my attempts at reason, I believed in the man on the ceiling. I always had.

  As a child I was a persistent liar. I lied slyly, I lied innocently, and I lied enthusiastically. I lied out of confusion and I lied out of a profound disappointment. One of my more elaborate lies took shape during the 1960 presidential election. While the rest of the country was debating the relative merits of Kennedy and Nixon, I was explaining to my friends how I had been half of a pair of Siamese twins, and how my brother had tragically died during the separation.

  This was, perhaps, my most heartfelt lie to date, because in telling this tale I found myself grieving over the loss of my brother, my twin. I had created my first believable character, and my character had hurt me.

  Later I came to recognize that about that time (I was ten), the self I had been was dying, and that I was slowly becoming the twin who had died and gone off to some other, better fiction.

  Many of my lies since then, the ones I have been paid for, have been about such secret, tragic twins and their other lives. The lives we dream about, and only half-remember after the first shock of day.

  So how could I, of all people, doubt the existence of the man on the ceiling?

  My first husband did not believe in the man on the ceiling.

  At least, he said he didn’t. He said he never saw him. Never had night terrors. Never saw the molecules moving in the trunks of trees and felt the distances among the pieces of himself.

  I think he did, though, and was too afraid to name what he saw. I think he believed that if he didn’t name it, it wouldn’t be real. And so, I think, the man on the ceiling got him a long time ago.

  Back then, it was usually a snake I’d see, crawling across the ceiling, dropping to loop around my bed. I’d wake up and there would still be a snake—huge, vivid, sinuous, utterly mesmerizing. I’d cry out. I’d call for help. After my first husband had grudgingly come in a few times and hadn’t been able to reassure me that there was no snake on the ceiling, he just quit coming.

  Steve always comes. Usually, he’s already there beside me.

  One night a man really did climb in my bedroom window. Really did sit on the edge of my bed, really did mutter incoherently and fumble in the bedclothes, really did look surprised and confused when I sat up and screamed. I guess he thought I was someone else. He left, stum
bling, by the same second-story window. I chased him across the room, had the tail of his denim jacket in my hands. But I let him go because I couldn’t imagine what I’d do next if I caught him.

  By the time I went downstairs and told my first husband, there was no sign of the intruder. By the time the police came, there was no evidence, and I certainly could never have identified him. I couldn’t even describe him in any useful way: dark, featureless. Muttering nonsense. As confused as I was. Clearly not meaning me any harm, or any good, either. Not meaning me anything. He thought I was someone else. I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t change my life. He wasn’t the man on the ceiling.

  I don’t think anybody then believed that a man had come in my window in the middle of the night and gone away again. Steve would have believed me.

  Yes, I would have believed her. I’ve come to believe in the reality of all of Melanie’s characters. And I believe in the man on the ceiling with all my heart.

  For one evening this man on the ceiling climbed slowly down out of the darkness and out of the dream of our marriage and took one of our children away. And changed our lives forever.

  Awake.

  Someone in the room.

  Asleep. Dreaming.

  Someone in the room.

  Someone in the room. Someone by the bed. Reaching to touch me but not touching me yet.

  I put out my hand and Steve is beside me, solid, breathing steadily. I press myself to him, not wanting to wake him but needing enough to be close to him that I’m selfishly willing to risk it. I can feel his heartbeat through the blanket and sheet, through both our pajamas and both our flesh, through the waking or the dream. He’s very warm. If he were dead, if he were the ghostly figure standing by the bed trying to touch me but not touching me, his body heat wouldn’t radiate into me like this, wouldn’t comfort me. It comforts me intensely.

  Someone calls me. I hear only the voice, the tone of voice, and not the name it uses.

  Awake. Painful tingling of nerve endings, heart pumping so wildly it hurts. Our golden cat Cinnabar—who often sleeps on my chest and eases some of the fear away by her purring, her small weight, her small radiant body heat, by the sheer miraculous contact with some other living creature who remains fundamentally alien while we touch so surely—moves away now. Moves first onto the mound of Steve’s hip, but he doesn’t like her on top of him and in his sleep he makes an irritable stirring motion that tips her off. Cinnabar gives an answering irritable trill and jumps off the bed.