by Tod Wodicka
For a long while after napping, Howie thought about going downstairs and plugging the computer back in, seeing if Drew had posted any photographs from the surprise stone anniversary party to Facebook. But Emily might be watching from her window, waiting for him. Howie allowed himself to consider his daughter in the manner that Drew had urged him to consider his daughter. He considered telling Harri that he could no longer give her or New York City any more money, but, then, why couldn’t he? Certainly he could. He would. Should. Not only did he not need the majority of his monthly salary—the mortgage of the house was long since paid off, his car, everything—but in his cupboard Howie had his Folgers decaf can with well over ten thousand dollars. Really, what did Drew suppose him to do? Howie didn’t prove points. Points either were or they weren’t, no need proving them, and his boat savings was not nearly as important to Howie as his daughter’s happiness. Worse came to worst, couldn’t Howie get Harri to add a boat to her painting? That might suffice. Of course, he wanted to know why she had lied to her mother and Drew, and though the lie wasn’t serious, it was strange. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Frankly, part of him was pleased that his ex-wife thought that Harri spent so much quality time with him on Route 29. It was almost like it was true. There was a phone next to his bed. He could call Harri and ask her. The least he could do was thank her for the painting. Instead, he went downstairs to make sandwiches, two, both salami, which he brought upstairs and ate in bed.
In this manner, Howie spent nearly the entire day upstairs.
—
Close to nightfall, he heard something. Someone was knocking on his front door. Then that door opened. “Hello? Mr. Jeffries? Hello?”
Howie held his breath, began paging through Fishing the Adirondacks. Then he put that down, got up, and went to his bedroom door. He opened it. He said, “Hello.”
“It’s me, it’s Emily!”
Howie said, “It’s Howie.”
Fool, he thought.
He heard Emily laugh. “Can I come in?”
Howie walked to the top of the stairs. “OK,” he said.
“OK?”
Emily stood at the bottom of the stairs. She smiled; she had changed her clothing. She was holding a tray of what looked like brownies. “I’m sorry,” she said. Nervously, she looked behind her. “Well, I made these for you but…,” she continued. “You know, like a thank-you. But my oven is electric. No electricity. I thought maybe—?”
“Come in,” Howie said. Though Emily was already very obviously inside his house.
She looked behind her again. She laughed. She said, “Plus, the lights don’t work. My living room is kind of flooded.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So these are for you. I know it’s weird, but do you mind if I bake them in your oven?”
Howie said, “No.”
They stared at each other. Howie knew how ambiguous his no sounded, but he was too paralyzed to do anything but wait and hope that she understood. No, I do not mind if you bake brownies for me in my oven. She did not understand. She said, “Well, all right then.” She said, “Good-bye then,” waved, and walked back out the front door.
—
An hour later, Howie stood on Emily’s front porch. It was night. He saw through her window.
Halloween had been Howie’s least favorite holiday. His parents had forced him to dress up as something frightening, go out, get out, be a normal kid for once. Have a little fun. Little Howie, alone, standing before his neighbors’ doors, too terrified to make himself known, waiting sometimes ten, twenty minutes for some other rural monsters to come up behind him, ring the bell, shout, “Trick or treat!” He would silently mouth along, get his treats, go.
“Well, buddy, how’d you make out?” Howie’s father, Guy, sitting in front of the TV, in the dark. His father always made to get up when Howie entered the house; he would put his arms on the sofa’s cushions, rise slightly, maybe three inches, a show of intent, a full body nod, then he’d let himself plop back down. It was an acknowledgment of Howie’s presence, somewhere between a hello and a hug. “Are we good?” he would always ask.
“We’re OK,” Howie would say, and go to his room, putting his hard-earned treats in the drawer for later.
Howie knocked on Emily Phane’s door.
“Mr. Jeffries?” Emily said. But she didn’t open the door. She blew out the candles, which was probably the safest thing to do, considering. “Is that you, Mr. Jeffries?”
“Hello,” Howie said. He waited.
“Mr. Jeffries?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m right here.”
“I know you are. What do you want, Mr. Jeffries?”
“Hello,” he said again.
The door opened. Emily’s house smelled of smolder, dog, chemical melt. “Hello,” she said.
“I think it might be unsafe for you,” Howie began.
“What, how?”
“I mean to say,” Howie said. “I mean, if you like, you can stay at my house until your house is fixed. The electricity and water damage. You can stay in Harri’s room.”
Emily, suddenly a little freaked out, said, “Who is Harry?” Oh my God did he think that he lived with someone named Harry?
“My daughter,” Howie explained. Then, “She doesn’t live with me anymore.”
“Yeah, oh,” Emily said. She shook her head, almost laughed. She stepped out of her house. “You really don’t mind, Mr. Jeffries?”
“I don’t.”
“Just for a night or two.”
“OK.”
Emily did not know how much she wanted out of her house until that moment. Her eyes filled with tears. The summer air was perfect.
They walked to his house. Down her driveway, side-by-side, silently, a right on Route 29, and another right up his driveway to his front door, which Howie knocked upon.
“Mr. Jeffries,” Emily said. “I don’t think that you’re home.”
Howie covered his face with his hand, trying to push his own smile, laugh, whatever it was, back down inside his mouth. Emily Phane opened the front door and he followed her into his living room.
19
Emily took her spot on the sofa. She cuddled in, stretching out into a full body yawn. The entire sofa, apparently, was Emily’s spot.
Howie stood in his hallway, lodged halfway between the living room and the kitchen. He said, “Do you want some—?”
The word he gagged on was supper. The empty shape of it slid down his throat, taking Howie with it.
Emily said, “What?”
“Eggs,” Howie remembered. “Something to eat. Supper.”
Emily nodded even though eggs were technically breakfast and gross. But being here was technically insane, so fine, whatever you say. Eggs. She turned on the TV. She needed the television for continuity, balance.
“Good. So I can make you eggs,” Howie continued. “While you watch.”
Emily turned to the strange man looming in the strange, bone-dry version of her hallway. She said, “You want me to watch you make eggs?”
Howie meant TV. It was like trying to pedal a bicycle with its handlebar. “I also have ginger ale,” he said. Harri loved ginger ale. He always kept a few cans of it around in case his daughter visited, even though his daughter never visited. “Bye now,” Howie concluded.
“What, wait, where are you going?”
“The kitchen.” Howie pointed over his shoulder, behind him. “It’s just there.”
“Mine too,” she said.
Howie covered what felt like another smile with what felt like a clenched fist, and Emily, noting this, smiled too. She said, “Hey, Mr. Jeffries?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry. This is great. Thank you.”
“I’ll make fried eggs.”
“I’m glad.”
—
Howie sat in his ex-wife’s tufted Rhapsody chair. This was his on-special-occasions spot—like when Harri last stayed the night, years ago despite what Drew
said, and they’d watched that movie about black and white Europeans, or whenever Howie used to talk to his daughter on the phone, or even with the texting, Howie would sit in the tufted Rhapsody chair while typing a telephone text, and waiting for his Nokia to buzz buzz in response—MISS U 2 DAD—or the morning a couple summers back when his Oldsmobile’s cough went terminal and, to be safe, Mike Ed Walker and his doppelganger of a spouse, the drowsy, unsettling Shirley “Ed” Walker (as some called her), came over for decaf and ginger ale before taking Howie up Tongue Mountain for a hike to Deer Leap Lake and an afternoon of fishing.
Sitting in the tufted Rhapsody chair made Howie feel like his ex-wife. She felt aggrieved mostly, Howie supposed, like what was she still doing here in this boring freaking chair in this boring freaking house? Howie, when he began to feel like his ex-wife, reassured them both, his ex-wife and himself. Leave anytime you want. Nothing holding you, he thought. Don’t be sad.
Emily slept on the sofa. She’d fallen asleep while he was preparing her eggs. He’d eaten the eggs himself, in the kitchen, standing up watching his new fish.
Howie reached over and took the remote from Emily’s sofa. He started flipping through the channels. A Red Lobster commercial. Lawmakers say. Sports. Nine out of ten dentists agree…
Sports.
Sports.
Come test-drive the all new…
Tomorrow, Howie decided. He didn’t have a single thing to attach the decision of tomorrow onto, not yet, not even a Thursday or a Friday, and certainly not the all-new Buick Verano. But sitting there in his ex-wife’s chair, he had a feeling that tomorrow was a decision as well as a place, and it felt different. Howie’s eyes grew heavy. The colors on the TV grew hair.
Enough.
He enjoyed the satisfying gasp the TV made when you killed it.
He listened to the TV-less room, like a beach after a retreating wave or a disappointed wife, standing next to the bed, in the dark, soundlessly putting her pajamas back on. And Howie yawned.
He looked at Emily Phane.
The girl was in trouble. Not just in general, but, he realized, in there. Right now. She was ringing again. The person on the other end of the line was having an emergency. She hadn’t changed her position or moved, but Howie sensed it.
He became intensely alert to the forest beyond the windows. Pine trees in the warm night wind; deer stopping, ears popped, listening. Howie heard the sound of a thousand pine trees massively waiting, gathering like clouds.
—
Emily knew the minute she’d reappropriated Mr. Jeffries’s sofa that she was going to fall asleep. She had not been afraid. Despite everything, or, rather, despite the tree-faced man with the sad, effeminate voice, Emily had felt safe enough to let go. For once, her hallucinatory exhaustion was not interchangeable with desperation or hopelessness. It felt hazy, good, watched-over. So she’d closed her eyes the second Mr. Jeffries, after apparently torturous deliberation, had, with her encouragement, established a course of action that involved the kitchen behind him and, inexplicably, ginger ale. Mr. Jeffries’s discomfort made Emily feel more in control. She listened to the insectoid song of the frying eggs, along with an unaccountably bald woman sobbing into a phone on TV. The woman had a dog that she loved. The woman was on the run from the FBI. She was bald because it was the future. Put the phone down, they’re coming to get you. Leave the dog. Run.
Emily fell asleep.
Then she was back, repeating on herself. She hadn’t been anywhere, anything, and here was her consciousness gurgling up from wherever, flooding sleep and pinning her down, locking her into herself first, into memory, and then into the impossibly dense stillness of her paralyzed body. Welcome home. She tried to move. She tried to move. She tried to move.
Toes. Fingers. Tongue. Emily tried to locate and flex the muscles in her legs. She could feel everything, the sofa and the scratchy afghan, her chest rising, falling, the air passing through her lips; her heart beating; her tiny tongue inside her open mouth. The tongue was just as important as her two hands—it was one of the primary controls, where her consciousness resided, balanced itself, made her body go. Her tongue was always one of the first places she tried to be.
There was nothing that could help her.
Emily tried to move.
Because why should anything care enough to help her? Emily didn’t care if a single cell on her fingertip died, and so what was Emily to the horrific, infinite reality of time and space and matter and…
She could not fucking move.
Focus on objects: sofa, afghan, Mr. Jeffries, carpet, TV. Driftwood she could cling to now that her ship had smashed apart on the rocks. But it was meaningless and too late and she couldn’t hold on for much longer anyway. Emily screamed inside herself.
She thought about her grandfather, groped for Peppy inside herself again and found nothing, as usual, less than nothing, actually, more like the cold truth that she never knew him either, whatever he’d been. He was just another more insidious part of the absurd illusion of her waking life, and the love that she still felt for him was possibly the most evil part of that reality, love was the unthinking, grasping animal thing, the glue that the waking world used to keep everyone in place, playing along, invested, and not sitting in the corner babbling at the fucking horror of it all.
Because Emily knew.
She knew, she knew. She knew that there was no such thing as death, for starters. She knew that evil existed like fire or the moon. She knew that it wasn’t a choice; it was another frequency that was also a thing. She knew that everything was connected, but not in the way that Bob Marley thought. Love was not one. But she knew that she still loved her grandfather, and she knew that she’d loved Ethan even though, in the end, she couldn’t actually believe in him either. Poor Ethan Caldwell. She knew that this made her love him even more. She knew that love was animal and dumb and no different from hatred. She knew that being here, stuck and suffering, meant she couldn’t believe in anything in the waking world. She couldn’t suspend her disbelief. She couldn’t enjoy the puppet show after having seen the strings, smelled the booze on the puppeteers’ breath, counted the nicks and calluses on their hands. She knew she was only happy now among the plants and she knew that she was killing herself slowly and that this, of course, would solve nothing: that she would still be trapped and that it would be worse, losing this body, these senses, but she knew that she couldn’t handle the previews anymore, the anxiety of waiting for them, the nightly, daily, constant sleep visions of being in this hell, with and without a body, stuck with herself forever, and she knew that she’d rather just be here, finally, and dead and in the shit, the Main Event, than living, as she was now, in both worlds. No more of this suspended fear of both worlds. Time to pick a team. She knew that demons existed. Call them whatever. Ghosts. Spirits. Presences. She knew that words were as much of an illusion as the other senses her body came up with: the smelling, seeing, touching. She knew what it was like to think without words, like a plant, and she knew it was like seeing the color of a brand-new color. She knew it was total bullshit but she still wanted to eat delicious Boston food, lobster in melted butter, tofu burritos, cilantro, freezing cold Riesling, Bukhara’s killer lunch buffet, and she knew she still craved brainless animal fucking just as she still loved watching stories on TV about attractive people who surmounted hardships. People who made the bad guys pay for what they’d done. She knew it was a puppet show put on by the puppets, but she liked a good mystery as much as the next girl. She knew that they were always around her, the evil spirits, but she knew that there were good ones, too, probably, somewhere, but they didn’t seem to bother with her, and why should they? She knew that a lot of religions made a lot of sense but none of them made enough sense and all of them were too infected by braying human hatred and money and politics and ignorance and tribal storybook feel-good crap. She knew that none of what she knew made much sense in words. She knew that contradiction was at the heart of everything: that five
things both could and couldn’t exist in the same place at the same time. She knew that she couldn’t explain this to anyone and that she didn’t want to either, not anymore, that she didn’t give a shit, because she knew that it’d do no good. She knew that she wasn’t crazy. She knew that she was totally fucking bonkers. Madness was reality without the human brain pretending to make sense of it. It was slipping outside linguistic understanding. She knew that sometimes she didn’t even know all this stuff, that sometimes she just let herself live and worry about the crashing, comforting mystery of all the people around her, their own motivating dramas and desires, like Ethan, money, playing games to win, the nice clothes and how she looked, her hair, boobs, celebrity gossip, the distracting wonders of science and history and sex and what she wanted to do when she grew up. But she knew that she had grown up. She’d already grown up and blown it. I’m so sorry, Peppy. She’d left Boston. She’d left science and Ethan. She’d left the internet. She knew that she’d gone too far—but not far enough—and now there was no way back. She knew that Route 29 was as good as any place if you aspired to be a tree. She knew she still had her sense of humor and she knew that this was actually her last line of defense, the only thing keeping her human, alive, on this sofa in this sleepwalking weirdo’s house. She knew sleep wasn’t what people thought it was. She knew she was doomed, and not just on a human level but on a level that was eternal. She knew what it was like to be upside down in her own body. She knew that she started that fire as a cry for help. Smoke signals. She knew the wedding ring hadn’t belonged to her mother. She knew that she would never, ever know her father, who couldn’t possibly even give a fucking shit. She knew that there was still some hope, that maybe she wasn’t doomed and maybe she was wrong about everything. Everything. And she didn’t know why that scared her to death when she knew there was no such thing as death.