Balance of Fragile Things

by Olivia Chadha

  He noticed one fellow that showed up in almost all of the photos.

  “Oh, that’s our founder, Heathrow Johnson,” Nancy said. “He built this town on a strong work ethic.” She pointed to a photograph from at least one hundred years earlier of the gray stone arch that curved over Main Street. There was a freemason’s symbol at the highest point and an inscription that read: Home of the Square Deal. The arch was still there; Paul passed it each time he went down Main Street. It was now directly next to the golden arches of a McDonald’s, which cast a shadow over the stone structure.

  Nancy told him that Cobalt was first a mining community but that all of the digging in the earth had been long since abandoned because a catastrophic flood had brought the natural water table higher more than a century ago.

  “Do you keep maps of the town?” he asked. “Can I look at them?”

  She was delighted to have someone interested in the layout of the town—so delighted, in fact, that she smiled as she unlocked the back room, which she said hadn’t been opened in years. She turned on the flickering fluorescent lights and pulled out several maps protected by a thin plastic film. As Paul sat down, she spread the maps across the table and said, “These are originals. Say, where are you from?”

  “India.”

  “That’s interesting. So far away.” She leaned in too close over Paul’s shoulder as he perused the map. He could smell the hairspray that she’d sprayed on her white hair. This closeness made him uncomfortable, so he twisted his wedding band to make certain Nancy could see it clearly. He was thankful when the phone rang and she excused herself.

  The map that interested Paul most was the one that illustrated the different underground goings-on: the drainage, sewer systems, and water. A complicated web of snakes twisted around everything. He placed the underground map beside a very simple map of the natural area, which depicted the hills, the low points, and the bodies of water. He didn’t notice anything unusual except for the web of pipes that tangled under the town in several different areas.

  Nancy came back into the room.

  “Ms. Nancy, do you know of any other maps that would show what is under the ground here?”

  “Maybe I could help you better if you told me what you were looking for.”

  “I’m a history buff. This is my neighborhood, here. Just want to know what came before us.”

  She wrinkled her forehead and went to the back room. When she returned, she brought three maps of different sizes. “These are from around the time Progressive Machines International came to town, in 1908, but it wasn’t called that yet. A lot of things changed since then. Be careful with these; they are the only ones that PMI left.”

  The PMI campus sprawled across the base of the hillside, contained only by the borders of South Street and the forest line. It ran about four full city blocks. Paul saw now how close his home on Peregrine was to the site. Every building on the PMI campus was white: white concrete, marble, frosted glass. It dominated the surrounding area like an industrial ice city. It had shut down about five years ago, and many of the streets had closed as well. Everyone assumed that PMI, like many corporations in a changing world, found it cheaper to outsource.

  Paul shook his head. The Cobalt community had depended on PMI. Families moved into town because of Progressive Machines International’s promise: Our machines make your life easier. Then, suddenly, as though it was only a phantom, the company dissolved after sixty or so years of operation. No more bustling about. Thousands of people—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends—without jobs and without decent severance packages flooded the unemployment lines in downtown Cobalt. Some had worked their entire lives at the plant and had no other skills other than the specific placement of a particular chip in a particular slot, that key into that typewriter. Even Paul had worked there for a short time, until he decided he wanted to run his own business. He’d gotten a good deal on the gas station from a family who’d inherited it and didn’t want it, and that was that.

  The phone rang once more, and Nancy went into the lobby to answer. Paul looked at the map. He put his finger on Main Street and walked it toward his station. There were things he couldn’t make out along the pipeline. Oh, how he wanted to make a copy of this map. Perhaps Nancy would allow it. No—she wanted to be the gatekeeper of Cobalt’s history. Paul squinted, cleared his throat, and made up his mind. He looked toward the lobby and saw Nancy twirling the phone cord in her hand, her back to him. He gently rolled the map into a tube and covered it with his Members Only jacket. He waved to Nancy as though he were saying It’s all right and left with the jacket under his arm. He walked with a swagger, slow and methodical. He was a renegade.

  Vic

  It wasn’t long before Vic gave in to the ache in his knees and knelt on the ground. The grass was cool and a bit moist. He tried to prevent grass stains on his knees by keeping his movement down to a minimum. It was quiet in Vic’s favorite pasture—he had to walk nearly a mile from the closest street before he came to the first hill, then across a short span of bog and then over another hill to finally arrive at the stretch of earth that stood just in front of the thick red pine and hemlock forest.

  Vic enjoyed visiting this place he called his land for many reasons. Though homesteading was a thing of America’s distant past, and he knew claiming open land and building a home was now a romantic chapter in a history book, he still dreamed of such a life, in which he’d have the freedom to live near an untouched forest that would provide deer to observe and berries to pick. His land was beautiful in a sigh-inducing way. Little insects and butterflies coasted above the tall grasses, and if he squinted, they would become fairies or gnomes. Although it was fall, and there had been a particularly odd first frost, there were still a few airborne mayflies. Vic adjusted the brown baseball cap atop his patka and narrowed his eyes. He was watching the few coasting insects, hoping to spot a butterfly, a grass skipper or small satyr. He would love to see a satyr to inspect the small dots on its wings, which mock a many-eyed creature of a much larger size. Maybe he would finally spot that strange blue butterfly in his shadow box that books failed to identify. He knew that there were various blues in the area, but he had only seen them in the spring months.

  Just earlier that day, Vic had made one of his more fascinating discoveries while researching the area’s butterflies in the public library: Some caterpillars allowed themselves to be raised by ants. Myrmecophily was the term that explained how ants nurtured and protected certain caterpillars as they grew in exchange for the sweet juice they excreted just for them. Some caterpillars returned the hospitality by eating their nurse ants. Vic would think twice before stepping on one, or wiping out an entire hill, for that matter. The strange word he wasn’t certain how to pronounce rang out in syllables in his mind: mer-me-co-fily. Vic was relieved to realize that his interior was a secret place that no one could hear if they were simply walking past. No one disturbed him in the library; not even the librarian looked up from her large stack of books to notice him. Vic’s collection comprised Essential Lepidoptera; History of the Sikhs Vol. I; How to Tie Knots, Vol. II; Walden Pond; and Lives of a Cell. The Cobalt Public Library was his favorite after-school stop; he had to take two buses out of his way to get there. Cobalt High only had a couple of bookshelves, but in the public library, he could stack books around himself and manufacture invisibility. After he read as much as he could about butterfly habitats and habits, he jumped onto the next bus from downtown Cobalt to his land to inspect the invertebrate life firsthand because books could only teach him so much.

  The afternoon light hung shadows behind every leaf of grass. Vic saw only one Little Yellow butterfly flitting wildly around a clump of weeds. He took out his notebook, and on a new page he wrote: Little Yellow, perhaps a sulphur. The book was half-full of his notations and sketches, and he transcribed his notes onto his blog.

  Vic’s fascination with winged insects began when he was seven years old; his parents had given him a ladybu
g farm for his birthday. He set up the small plastic dome, arranged the leaves and fake plastic trees, and mailed away for his fifteen to twenty ladybug larvae. Ladybug Land looked like a fun place. It was a bug amusement park, where the ladybugs could slide down the gray plastic volcano into the green plastic forest as though it were a water slide. The front of the stickered base read: Watch the magic of metamorphosis! The bugs grew up quickly, as larvae are accustomed to do, and soon Vic watched the red-and-black bugs fly around inside the clear dome. One day, however, he noticed one particularly small bug fly repeatedly against Ladybug Land’s plastic walls. Again and again, the flying bug rammed against the plastic until Vic realized that he just wanted out. He took the whole lot out to his mother’s rose garden and released all of his little friends. He watched as some flew, some crawled, and most escaped alive. From then on, Vic always found himself watching the ground closely for insects. Butterflies became a natural fascination when he realized how variegated they were.

  He put his sketchbook down on a tree stump. A breeze rustled the tree limbs, and one yellowed and wrinkled sycamore leaf fell to the ground. The changing light played with the bark of the trunks in the forest, and Vic could have sworn there was something moving within. One low-hanging branch of hemlock jostled in the wind and exposed a stake in the ground. The branch fell upon the stake once more, covering it up. There wasn’t a house for miles. He never saw a person around here, but all this must belong to someone. As he pondered this idea of land ownership, the sound of a firecracker fractured the air.

  His neck burned from moving so quickly in reaction. He crouched low to the ground and turned around, searching the horizon atop the hill for movement. He couldn’t see over the hill, which made him nervous. The air tingled and pinched sounds to a different tone. Vic knew that anyone he’d run into out here would mean trouble, but the villains from his imagination were the worst: a witch who’d trap him in a cage and eat him for dinner, a toothless serial killer who’d escaped Sing Sing, or the revenge-seeking ghost of a Civil War soldier. He picked up his backpack and made a beeline for the forest, creepy branches be damned.

  He was well camouflaged by the densely needled red pine. He thanked the gods he wore the brown baseball hat today over his patka—the white fabric would have been a beacon. He crouched behind a massive tree trunk and waited. And there! He saw tops of heads coming over the hill. Three—no, four—guys. They were throwing things at each other teasingly.

  He heard, “Hey, dipshit!” and “I’m going to kick your ass!”

  Unfortunately for Vic, it was Joe Balestrieri and his friends. They were the kind who’d dismember small animals for kicks and break their neighbor’s window just to hear the glass shatter. Joe lit a match and touched the flame to something in his hand, then threw it at one of his mindless soldiers of mayhem. The firecracker exploded in midair. Vic hoped they would kill each other.

  It’s not their land, he thought. How’d they manage to find this place? Joe, their leader, bent down to where Vic had just been thinking about butterflies and picked something up from the ground.

  “Hey, what’s this?”

  His notebook. In his rush he must have left it there, exposed, alone. The mob looked at his entries, which dated back to early spring, and laughed. Vic was relieved he hadn’t put his name anywhere inside the book. Maybe they would just think some old man had dropped it. Maybe they wouldn’t think about looking in the forest for a recent passerby to torment. The posse circled around the notebook, tore pages out, and crumpled them into a pile. Then, each lit a firecracker and stepped back. The whole thing exploded. Sheets became yellow flames, then quickly metamorphosed into black wisps of ash in the air. The thugs let the flames continue unattended and continued their path of destruction directly in front of Vic. He held his breath, clenched his teeth, and grasped the branches of the tree tightly. Time stood still until they were out of sight.

  The fire left nothing more than a scorch of black on the grass. Vic could see the small wisp of smoke trundle into the air above his sketchbook’s corpse. He smelled its burned pages. He wished he hadn’t forgotten his notebook. Now he was truly thankful for his blog; no one could destroy that, at least, unless they had his password.

  When he was certain the thugs were long gone, he backed up from the tree trunk and shook out his hands, as his palms were white from holding onto the bark so tightly. Vic picked up his pack and took a large step backward, deeper into the forest. As he did so, he felt the strangest sensation he’d ever felt: The earth moved under his feet.

  The sound that escaped the ground wasn’t loud at all. It was more like a whoosh than a crack. And suddenly everything turned black.

  Vic fell for so long that his stomach hit the back of his throat. His arms and legs flailed in the darkness, but only air and dirt slipped between his fingers. When he landed, his bottom skidded to a stop along a rocky strip of land, and he wondered if he was still alive. Whether something was physically covering his eyes or there was simply not enough light to see, he didn’t know. The air was musky and thick with sweet-smelling moisture; he had fallen into a hole of some sort, of this he was certain. Like Dante in the forest, he, too, had fallen into hell. His heart raced, and he tried to quiet his thoughts. What kinds of monsters lurked here? As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he felt vulnerable, like a small mammal fumbling stupidly near a snake’s hole at night. He reached blindly into his backpack. He now knew why he kept the emergency kit with him at all times: Swiss army knife, six feet of rope, tweezers, a plastic rain tarp, and the waterproof matches that he’d hoped to be able to use someday. Today was the day.

  He lit one of the matches and looked around. He’d landed on a ledge over a deep crevasse. If he’d moved one more foot in the other direction, he’d have kept going down who knows how far. A metal ladder was screwed into rock and led back up, and another ladder led down. This place was manmade.

  The match burned out and singed his fingers, and now Vic found himself in a darker place than before. He needed to light something with the match, but he hadn’t thought that one through when planning his emergency kit, and the Dark Knight he was not. His hands moved through the darkness, and he grabbed in the direction of the ladder. It was cold down here. He tried not to think about the things that would like to live in this complete darkness. He tried so hard that he almost forgot to breathe. Got it. With both hands on the ladder, he pulled his feet up, moving higher and higher until he could see a sliver of light from above. It was as though the earth had swallowed him. He thrust his hand through the pile of leaves that had blanketed the opening, and lifted himself up and out into the light once more. He paused at the surface and realized that he had just found one terrific hiding place. Joe’s posse had passed it by, so they couldn’t know about it. He smiled; this place would be his fort from now on. After, of course, he equipped himself with defensive weapons and lanterns, lots of lanterns.

  Maija

  Maija applied another coat of lipstick as though this shade of red would make her feel brighter and more cheerful. She was getting ready to retrieve her father-in-law from the airport, and she still couldn’t figure out what to wear. If she wore a dress, it would appear she was trying too hard to look feminine. If she wore what she wore every day—jeans and a sweater—it would appear that she was treating this day like any other, which would illustrate her disdain. She needed to be an example for her children, but at the same time, she wanted to be herself. She was sitting at the dressing table in her bra and underwear, painting her face with soft brushstrokes of lipstick, when she heard Paul calling from the foyer again. She couldn’t move. This was an identity crisis, after all.

  Maija knew this arrival would unsettle their happy little home. Papaji was a mythical creature—someone who’d affected her life from afar since she’d first married Paul, even though they’d never met. She knew this man would bring answers to questions that she’d carried all these years. Here she was, a grown woman, nervous about the arrival of he
r in-law, or, as her friend Adelaide called him, The Outlaw. Adelaide was witty; she was good for venting. Maija had convinced Adelaide to come with her to the PTA meeting the previous day by telling her she could write a story about it for the Daily Mirror.

  Though she hadn’t known what she would do when she arrived at the PTA’s new members meeting, Maija had to attend. She couldn’t ignore the vision that entirely consumed her life. Everywhere she looked, Maija could see only the way Eleanora’s expression was tortured as she took her last breath, a mixture of warm shower water, blood, and air. Her wide eyes looked as though she were questioning her very own death as the walls closed around her. It was as though even Maija, in her vision, knew there was something she could do to break the line toward this future. She had to try; Eleanora’s eyes pleaded with her every time Maija closed her own lids.

  There had been twenty women in Cobalt High’s music room that night. Maija didn’t see the small man in attendance, Herbert, until he moved from behind the upright piano. The others Maija recognized were Eleanora; Jennifer Thomas, a mother of triplets in the first grade; Harmony Tingle, wife to Tom Tingle and mother to their two middle school–aged children; and Deborah Espirito, wife to Dante Espirito and mother to their four children. Sheets of music for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Away in the Manger,” and the four verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner” with the notes colored in crayon hung on the walls. Maija was not comfortable making small talk because to her it was pointless. She knew what people were really asking in their seemingly harmless questions. Where do you live? meant How much money do you make? And What grade are your kids in? meant How old are you, really? She was on psychic business here and had no time to make friends.