Asunder

by Robert Lopez

  What are you doing here?

  Waiting for you.

  How long have you been waiting?

  It’s the strangest thing.

  What is?

  Did you put this on me?

  The man has an erection. The woman is locked in the bathroom. The kitchen table is covered with electric bills and receipts but is not set for dinner or anything at all. There is nothing in the oven. The dog is dogging his way through the darkened hallway and the rest of his natural born life. The children are sinking down in the backyard pool. Everything else is almost ready.

  The man ignores his erection. The woman comes from the bathroom without a towel or robe. The man and woman look at each other like butchers look at locksmiths.

  They tangle.

  NINE OFF THE BREAK

  * * *

  WE'D BEEN TO THIS POOL HALL BEFORE. Our habit was for me to play a few racks while she sat on a stool and feigned interest. She would say things like, good shot or you are a handsome man. I could never get her to shoot with me. I told her I would make it worth her while, twenty a spin, spotting her the break and the five. She said the game was too violent, that it was beneath her.

  I’d known this woman for a year or so and she was right about all of it.

  I decided to lay down my cue and walk to the bar. It was the first decision I’d made in weeks that didn’t concern stripes and solids, english and position. I thought it was a good start, something to build on.

  I ordered two whiskey sours and brought them back to the table. I said take your medicine and handed her one.

  This woman was operated on last week. She called it a minor procedure, but didn’t say what they fixed or what was cut out of her. I looked for scars, tremors, signs of infection. I think her left pupil was dilated. Her tongue appeared swollen, her lips ashen.

  She wouldn’t let me examine her, even after I begged.

  I said let me have a look around, make sure they did a good job.

  I’m not a doctor, have never been to medical school, but I’ve watched a lot of television. I told her all of this.

  Then I told her I would start at mid-thorax, explore the alimentary canal and check for irregularities. I told her I knew my way around the innards, the same as a tough layout in nine-ball. I said you’ve seen me operate before.

  She said bowling pins and billiard balls. She said they were breaking all over.

  I told her I wasn’t that man anymore, that I need things spelled out. I asked her where she got the bowling pins. I said plain English.

  This is how we talk to each other sometimes. It’s senseless.

  The trouble is this woman is smarter than me by at least half. I realized I needed a new strategy, something else to go on. This is how I came to the second decision.

  I had to start thinking way over my own head.

  I told her if she survived till next week I’d do something nice. Maybe buy her a ring or an expensive dinner. Then I said please.

  She said fine, but just this once.

  Her next move was to get up from the stool and limp over to the table. She cleared a few balls away from the near side and laid herself down on the felt. Close to her head was the six, which was inches from the nine, which was lined up perfectly with the far corner. Under those lights she’d never been more beautiful.

  She looked up at me, all broken and spread out. She said billiard balls, bowling pins.

  I said I know, it’s terrible.

  SOUTH DAKOTA

  * * *

  THE SKY LOOKS BEST OVER SOUTH DAKOTA, SHE SAYS.

  I say, fuck South Dakota will you please.

  She says, you go fuck South Dakota. Then she says, you fucking child.

  We go on like this for a few minutes until she removes her clothes. Naked she looks like a real woman with the skin and bumps. Otherwise, I don’t know what’s happened to her.

  She wants me to say she is pretty, beautiful, call her a filthy whore. She wants me to touch her places.

  She doesn’t have children but wants me to call her mother. She wants me to spend the night so she can nurse me in the morning. She always wants, this woman.

  Me, I can’t say there’s anything I want for outside of sleeping the night straight through. I’ve been told I should visit a doctor, that I should consider medication. The people who told me this, I’ve seen them naked, too. The same skin and bumps and awful wants as this woman here.

  The one thing I know is this—Mother did not give birth to me.

  The other thing I know is it is no real calamity.

  My real calamity is I can drink myself drunk or dead and still not sleep through the night.

  After we’re finally done we both say we’re hungry but there’s nothing to eat. We listen to our naked stomachs grumble instead of talking or finding food somewhere.

  If I had to guess I’d say I met this woman in a downtown bar in some bad luck city. There was probably a jukebox playing country music and maybe we danced to it. Otherwise we stayed at the bar and nursed one nasty straight up after another with beer chasers until deciding this was the best we could do. Either way this was probably three or four years ago now. I think her name is Alice or Gretchen. She won’t confirm or deny anything but I went through her purse once and found driver’s licenses for both names. One had her as a blonde in Georgia, the other a brunette in New Mexico.

  Me she calls her baby boy. She’s never said why.

  She says things like, Come on over to Mother now baby boy.

  I tried to shake her once in the Pacific Northwest, but it didn’t work. She says she wants to fuck me in all fifty states; that she won’t give up until we hit them all.

  I don’t know how many are left.

  Tomorrow I’ll leave her in this hotel room and break north. I’ll hide out and try to get some sleep in Sioux Falls until she catches up.

  But what I’ll tell her is I’m going out for breakfast and will bring Mother back something good.

  SHALL WE RUN FOR OUR LIVES

  * * *

  THE WEATHER HAS BEEN FOUL. It is probably no one’s fault.

  Still, people are looking to pin it on someone.

  There are warnings and watches and advisories as to what might happen next. On television they explain the differences between the warnings and watches and advisories. In real life people are frightened into stockpiling provisions. There has been a run on batteries and bottled water.

  There are people on television and people in real life. Like on television Jesus has blonde hair and blue eyes and in real life he was god knows what.

  In real life people are getting ready.

  The woman next door is one of the real life people getting ready. If this were television she would be played by an old-time character actress whose face you’d recognize but whose name you wouldn’t know. In real life she is either an Edith or an Esther or a Clara. She looks unwell. A stream of people come by to check on her.

  The stream of people look like apostles. The women walk like nuns and the men like priests and they all of them have leathery skin, pious features, and virgin hands. Perhaps this stream of holy people keep her unwell deliberately. Perhaps they have nothing else to do.

  On television they have reporters interviewing cashiers, store managers and the man on the street. The man on the street says things like: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m just doing what they tell me to do. My family comes first. The clerks echo what the store managers say: We’ve had a run on bottled water and batteries. We can’t keep canned goods on the shelves. People are scared.

  The people taking care of Clara have been doing it for some time. The foul weather has not prevented any of them from checking on her. In this manner they are like postal workers. I have seen them hopscotch over puddles and tunnel through snow. They are devout. It is unlikely they are keeping her unwell deliberately.

  They bring her food, flowers, medicine, prayer cards. One would think she is bedridden or an invalid.


  The woman next door is old and will likely die soon.

  This is one reason she is getting ready.

  She looks out the window or else the front door, which she keeps open even in this rash of foul weather. Around the neighborhood, people are boarding up windows and barring doors. Lines at the lumberyard are a street long. The conversations there resemble those between Lot and his wife.

  When the time comes don’t look back.

  Or else what?

  The interstate is awash with flee-ers breaking north. On television they are running hourly tests of the emergency broadcast system. In the likelihood of an actual emergency … Meanwhile Esther is hither and thither with great big cow eyes seeing everything. She is like a watchdog this way. I haven’t seen a leash, but she could be strapped into something, a chair or tree.

  Anyone walks by her house and she will be at her window or door to watch them do it. That way she is like god.

  On television warring factions argue the barometric whys and wherefores. They talk about trade winds, clippers, niños. Only here and there someone mentions the old lady next door.

  She’s called the horsemen to their mounts and into the starting gate, is what I think.

  I’m certain Edith does not pray for me. She was at her window when I moved in. I waved once and smiled twice while carrying boxes of books and lampshades. There was no reaction to any of the gestures, just a cauliflowered blankness. I think she objected to my appearance, which most old people are uncomfortable with.

  I look like I belong on television.

  Otherwise she doesn’t like anyone who doesn’t come around to feed or bathe her or whatever goes on over there. As a rule I don’t like oldsters. People pity them because they will likely die soon. I’m afraid of them because they will likely die soon.

  In this way people and me are almost kindred.

  The people who come by to check on Esther glance at me sideways. I’ve done nothing to warrant these looks, I don’t think. Most of these people are younger, who I take to be children or maybe nieces and nephews. There are several attractive women and three men who wear different styles of clothing. The older people I take to be siblings. None of them are actual clergy. They only resemble clergymen and women. There is a certain resemblance, a grave countenance shared by all.

  For my part I go to a job and motion myself through time and space with two friends who are certain of how things go. They believe this rash of foul weather will end. They believe the omnipresent woman next door has a real name and will outlive every one of us by a mile.

  When the waters break the levy we’ll see what’s what and who’s who.

  That aside there is a woman who permits me to her innards when it isn’t raining. What motivates her to allow these transactions I don’t know. There is nothing about me you couldn’t find twelve of down the block and for a better price. We regard each other as sexual laxative, though none such has been verbalized. For my part, I was conceived, incubated, born, and reared without incident or fanfare. Since, I have pantomimed a life out of imposition and deductive reasoning. This woman, she knows all of this. I haven’t seen her for weeks. It’s the kind of life you rarely see depicted on television.

  The woman who keeps me regular has been to my new place only once. She asked about the old woman in the window before she even said hello. I said her name was Harriet and that she was blind, having lost her eyesight under mysterious circumstances years ago. I also said she was a television star from the fifties and played the lead female character in Gunsmoke. I had never seen Gunsmoke and didn’t know if there was a lead female character but it sounded about right. Then I amended part of the story, positing that she’d lost her sight on the set—that one of the blanks wasn’t actually a blank, that maybe it was sabotage with flash burns. By the time I was blanking and sabotaging the woman was halfway naked and we’d both lost the story. I was sorry she didn’t ask more questions. I was going to mention the three children she had by separate fathers, the rumored affair with James Arness. The bastard son, a renowned monologist who shunned the priesthood for secularity, the team of nuns and priests, all of it. Instead, we peopled together in the kitchen while two of Edna’s daughters brought her flashlights, fruits, vegetables, magazines, diapers—all the necessaries for the coming flood. One of them could see my head through the small kitchen window. She couldn’t know what I was subjecting the rest of my body to. She regarded me for a second, motioned with her hand as if absolving me, and then turned her head to pray.

  Afterwards the woman and I decided we should seek alternatives, a different source of fiber. The discussion resembled the talk one has with a cashier.

  Listen, I’d like to return this.

  Do you have a receipt?

  I’ve lost it.

  Is store credit okay?

  It looks like rain again.

  Shall we run for our lives?

  I’ve never run for my life, I don’t think.

  There’s a difference between never and not yet. And here’s your change.

  I watched her trot back to the car, picking up the pace as she went along because it had started again. She slipped and fell when looking over her shoulder to see if blind old Harriet was still out the window.

  On television there is a reason for everything. In real life people sometimes have to put a stop to things.

  I walked out in a bathrobe to help the cashier to her feet. I escorted her to the car and kissed her like a man on his way off the plank. Afterwards I turned to face Edith head on. This is the moment I’d been born for, I’d decided. I stood there in the driveway, undid my robe, and stared her up and down. I studied every nuance of her face—the way her florets were swollen shut, how her stalk fought a losing war with gravity, the chapped broccoli leaves that threatened to bleed out. I kept my robe open and let her take it in.

  The watchdog god did not blink.

  That afternoon Edna received three visitors bearing gifts. All three noticed the wet bathrobe I’d left in the driveway. Each stepped gingerly over it and glared at the bathrobe like it was a leper begging alms. When the one I took for a daughter or niece left Clara’s house she picked the bathrobe up with a stick and carefully walked it down the driveway. She was holding an umbrella in one hand and the robe was dangling from a stick in the other. The wind and rain were tossing her around and she had to fight to maintain balance. A tornado was dancing its way down the street, hurling cars and trees—everything not tied down or boarded up. Hailstones the size of cabbages peppered the ground. Edith’s daughter dodged first a German shepherd and then a front porch swing and then a tire iron. From where I was it looked like she was questioning her way of life. It looked like she was about to leave Edna for good, drop the stick and bathrobe and fly to the lumberyard to build herself a boat.

  I stood naked and watched the world end from my kitchen window.

  In this way it was better than television.

  OLD MAN'S HANDS

  * * *

  USUALLY I LET MY BEARD GROW THANKSGIVING THROUGH CHRISTMAS. No one in the family likes me with a beard. They tell me this every year. They say, we don’t like you with a beard. I always apologize when they say this. I say, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. Then they say with a beard I look like my grandfather, which is probably not true, but I don’t mind. I don’t think my grandfather minds either. He hasn’t spoken in ten years. The family thinks it’s from the stroke but I think he’s run out of things to say to these people. I’m the same way, with or without a beard. I don’t think the family likes my grandfather with a beard either, but I’ve never heard one of them say so. Every day for my grandfather is uncalled for but his beard is handsome, groomed. He looks like someone who used to be in charge of big operations, of people. The hairs on my face run all haywire and I haven’t a single responsibility. Nevertheless we are kindred, the two of us. Neither of us accepts nor distributes gifts of any sort, even cards. Like him I wear flannel shirts, blue work pants tied with a rope around t
he waist, black shoes and white socks. His face hangs off his skull and looks like it would slide right off if he could stand up straight. When he sees me he pats my head and cups my hairy chin with both hands. He’s got the old man’s hands, stayed in the bath too long. Someone always puts a Santa hat on him but I always take it off and then we sit together and look out the window. We do this until someone says it’s time for dinner. We sit at the kid’s table and wait for them to pass us the turkey and whatever. The people in the family rarely have anything to say to either of us. One aunt says I look like a terrorist. To my grandfather and me it makes no difference. He is old and looks nothing like a terrorist. And the rest of the year I shave nearly every day and am said to have an appealing, almost baby-like face.

  HELL ON CHURCH STREET BLUES

  * * *

  THIS IS ONE THAT IF YOU SKIPPED TO THE END YOU WOULDN'T MISS ANYTHING. What takes place between here and there is both no one’s business and beside the point at the same time.

  The middle part concerns a round woman whose dog died on a transatlantic flight. The dog died in the woman’s arms right there in business class. It was very sad.

  What happens next is the woman tells me the news in a delicatessen two weeks later. I was there for a turkey sandwich and french fries. I tell her I’m sorry and that it’s awful.

  The real story, of course, takes place over those two weeks.

  I find it helps to imagine the worst and work your way down.

  For my part I spent each day of those two weeks waiting for the next to come and go gracefully. Then I attended the wedding of two friends. I overheard people talking about the chicken and fish, the oysters Rockefeller, the centerpieces, the hall, the bride and groom.