A Different Bed Every Time

by Jac Jemc

  The father falls for the dark wood laminate, telling people it’s a fine room they’re living out of these days. The child tinkers with the blood in the tubing when his parents are preoccupied with the doctor. He can make the deep red stop and start with just a pinch. His imagination shapes itself based on his surroundings; he dreams himself a nurse, a doctor. Even when he imagines blaring on a trumpet, he is holding the nebulizer, blowing sour notes sweet. His IV becomes the ripcord on this parachute as he envisions telling his coach, “Maybe we should turn back,” before jumping toward the center of the earth. His childhood is possessed by this place. Tangles of days swirl back and forth and none of the family can recognize the present, but they resolve to smile: sad smiles and weary smiles and mesmerized smiles when the doctor brings news that says, “Improvement has come in the form of staying the same.”

  Each night abounds with the invisible impossible. What if the child fell from bed and none of the alarms laughed their cruel laugh? The parents bring in a radio to keep the child’s ears filled with the same piano mazurkas and polkas he loved, but the child misses the vibrations, the small violences of the hammers dancing on the wires just inches from his face.

  The parents’ wingspans grow smaller. Their car hasn’t been touched in days.

  “That noisy sun. Tell it to shut up,” the boy says in the afternoon, his eyes squinting, and the parents squelch their scolding and close the blinds. They miss the way the light warms their core and mourn the cacophony of life outside the window, but they keep telling themselves, “It is not the skin of our teeth.”

  The child mouths gibberish much of the afternoon, drifting into a kind of stupor, anesthetic shooing or beckoning. The mother reads to the child even after he has fallen asleep: “A fox remembers easily.” She pauses on this, stranded.

  The children who are well enough put on a play. It takes weeks to prepare. It makes the father’s tears ceiling within his eyes each time he thinks of it. The parents take their son to see it, but the play is about a garden, and the garden is just off-stage. It drives the mother into a fit by the end of the show, knowing that off-stage there is no garden at all. She tells the director, “I would have folded colored tissue. I would have pinched together fabric scraps so these children could have had a real garden.” Some of the kids overhear her and look around, confused. They do not know what might have been.

  Grandmother visits and she is full of laughter and soft to hug. Grandmother gives charming warnings for the future and the parents look away, convinced of what is not to come. They hold the point of view of each visitor in their mouths until it becomes soggy and they spit it out. They have come to vie for the insoluble. They have made up a new way to survive knowing what they know. They no longer hesitate or whisper or experience anticipation. They used to shimmer with restlessness, and now they blink largo.

  The father read that animals that breathe more slowly—pythons, elephants, tortoises—live longer. The family begins losing sleep in the attempt to breathe more and more slowly, and so even their breath becomes strange to them. They slow their heart rates by seventy-five percent. They hibernate awake.

  The parents read to the child about everything in the hopes of telling him the one thing he needs to know. “Breathing is one of the few things we can both control and not about our bodies. That means, it happens without our thinking about it, but we can also think about it and change the way it happens.”

  The child is familiar with things that he can’t stop, so he listens carefully.

  The father reports, “Conscious breathing is found in many forms of meditation and exercise and performance: yoga, swimming, vocal training, the playing of musical instruments. You can change your unconscious efforts slowly.” The mother caresses the back of the child’s head and says, “Unconscious breathing starts back here in your brainstem.”

  The child, trying to wrap around this information, asks, “So I could stop my breath? I could end?”

  The parents look at each other nervously, want to run to another room and punch the other’s lights out for thinking this was a good idea. Instead they silently agree what a privilege it is to live so closely to this pocket of wonder they call their son.

  The father says, “No. A person cannot just voluntarily stop breathing. Your reflexes would cause you to breathe or you would lose consciousness and your body would breathe for you.”

  The mother changes the subject quickly. “Hippocrates thought you could determine a person’s health by their breath.”

  When the doctor comes in with his brain full of news and his mouth full of reassurance, the child begins to cry and his color begins to change, but no one notices, for they’re all torn apart by the prognosis. The child falls off into a forced sleep, the pain having stopped his breath. The parents weep all the more loudly, so they don’t notice one missing voice, one absent pattern of inhales and exhales. The doctor notices the child’s color only after he has already stranded himself in a faint.

  The doctor uses complex words there are easier translations for: cyanosis, syncope, hypoxia, postictal. There is so much that the child’s body needs energy for, but not this education.

  The child awakes an hour later with more tears. He can remember all of it. He wishes for forgetting. He asks them to turn the sun away.

  When they all fall down into sleep again, the nurses arrive in fleets, carefully watching over the family, keeping the hushed, unspoken ritual of vigilance. The elders wake before the child, feeling negligent and whispering their wishes for rescue as if hidden by dark branches.

  The flame of the child is dying out. Words spread quickly as they make their way down to the valley of the cafeteria. The parents torch themselves with coffee, uttering on the view from every window. The mother hisses and spits, and with time they begin to compose themselves with the tenderness necessary to return to the child. They hike back up the floors, calibrating their proximity.

  Above the gentle breeze of monitors and ventilation comes a knock at the door, almost impossible to hear. And again, topsy-turvy news. And again, the mother misunderstanding herself. And again, the contemplation of their little stamp of outside world beyond the glass of this awful place. And again, new arrivals of cheery flowers. But the summoning happens all too quickly. What little potential they thought was theirs is rioting.

  The loud will soon perish for the quiet. The mother will croon out the happiest songs, transubstantiated to doleful lullabies. She will think of the nest she’s formed in the left ventricle of her heart just for the child. The child will grow lighter than an inflatable beach ball. The mother will squeeze him to her chest, afraid he might be carried away.

  “There is time for one more story,” she tells him, and she squeezes herself on the bed beside him as the child drifts away in the current. In his dream, a voice tells the child to be wary of walking down the chalk path for fear of brushing it away. “Like breadcrumbs,” says the voice. “Be fearful of erasure.” The child refuses the fear and leans into the wind. A glowing magnificence, he reflects everything. The sun cups him so pointedly that even his eyelids don’t hide the light. Those around him can hear his breath curving in coils of alarm, but the child has been rendered graceful.

  As people get older, their lives pass at an ever-dizzying pace. People close themselves off with certainty. People laugh less and less. But when death snarls so close and hungry behind a young child, the child, in all his slow-motion time and openness, might invite the wolf in. There is room for new kinds of friendship and new shapes for hope.

  For everyone else, the end is full of fervor and calamity. The parents try to flex reality. They try to stretch life a little longer, like the moon in the morning. But then pressure. But then sitting down to play a piano with keys arranged backwards. Impossible anger. Radiant denial. Resounding disorder. Time will teach the way, but first everything will have to be unlearned. The hammers will hug the strings; the strings will shake free.

  Unaccounted

  Pochard
’s eyes buckle with the sight of scratches in the wall like bent nails. Bent nails covering the floor like broken fingers. What Pochard needs is a dead pulse. What Pochard says sounds the right way.

  Pochard waits with a camera hung round his neck, can feel the hard streaks on the side of his face left behind by a slap, the spin and drag of being watched. What he wanted was the shame of alarms sounding, the orgasm of suggestion. Pochard wanted to feel trapped, like the tight water of a still lake. He wanted to feel pulled firm, like the snap of a snakeskin belt. Instead, he felt full of half-light and the patience of waiting for the right time to speak up.

  “Tell me later,” his lover would say. “Shallow and easy.” But he knew he had been let go when he came upon the simple scene he did. She had dented their connection. In this small house that crouched on a block of mansions, his life had been sold out from under him. His mind was loose with mothers and thieves, either offering useless advice or clearing him out.

  He could think of only his lover’s knobby teeth, shining broad through her smile now. He thought of children and powder kegs. He was hungry, but steered and muttered that feeling away.

  He thought of when they’d met in the church hall, of the way her hips had hauled and bossed their way over to him. Of how they mixed their glances and how the Savior careened and sloped in his mind, trying to get him back on track. He had breathed in the scent of her and thought of burning candles and handfuls of pennies. He repeated her unusual name in his head: Grebe, Grebe, Grebe. Like the firm beeps of a heart monitor.

  He avoided cracks in the sidewalk on his way home, like he believed again. He was thirty-eight, and he’d almost given up. He thought of her fluid wrists, which had curled like ribbon against scissor blades. His face, he was sure, had crawled with surprise as her eyes imploded into their sockets each time she blinked.

  Once they had one another, they left the rest behind. They made a ritual of each other. Grebe proved difficult early on and Pochard reveled in it. She lied and cried, and he had dreams of Lady Macbeth. He tried to tune her out. He left sticks inside her mouth as placeholders, spread roads out across her body, eyed the trails of gathering tattoos like a shimmering gas leak, and when that wasn’t enough, they found new habits.

  Pochard watched the thick slide of tar through Grebe, nauseously conscious of her ruin. He smelled the mesquite cling to her. He gave up his back pockets to her to try and help. He watched her roll into rooms like a truck without brakes. He italicized himself to fit into this new lifestyle; he pulled himself sideways. He dropped a mess of postcards across the country, trying to make sure someone always knew where to find him, if he needed looking for.

  He scrubbed her stains and nudity and filth. He fell into and crawled out of that space between too many times to keep blaming her for it. He made temples and rubbed sharp corners round.

  But still he wanted her fist in his mouth. He wanted to feel the cotton of her skin magnet to him with sweat. He wanted to taste the metal of her blood and feel the gold flecks of her eyes shine all fake on him. He wanted one more dark summer. He wanted to feel one more wall close in. The tiny electric motors in him began telling the truth, but he ignored them.

  Now, after the months they’d spent together, after she’d turned out to be the one to swat him away, he wondered at how clocks must have pocketed the time away, at how he’d never learned his lesson, at how the fear boated through the murk of him, rocking and sinful. The windows bundled the light in and made it all clear.

  The Crickets Try to Organize Themselves Into Some Raucous Pentameter

  A gulch split Odette down the middle and she had the world believing this was the way she liked it. Odette spent entire days bending backward within herself, never letting on that she was uncomfortable, out of her element, ready to leave.

  Odette had fallen in love with a waitress who was too good to be true. Odette thought the woman looked familiar and asked if they’d met somewhere. The waitress said, “Nope. I remember everyone I haven’t met.” Odette tried again the next weekend, made sure she was seated at an appropriate table. Nothing.

  Odette dreamed of the waitress, dreamed she found a red silk blouse on the ground in the woods, and several yards up, she found the shirtless waitress crouched in a bush. Odette dreamed she handed the waitress her blouse with her head turned and then the waitress walked out of the woods while Odette walked farther in. The dream happened again and again. Odette went to the restaurant the next week. Still nothing.

  The next time she had the dream she crossed a shallow brook before she found the red blouse in the woods, and when she found the waitress in the bush, after she’d put her blouse back on, the waitress said, “The water is taught to become wider.” Then the waitress walked back, and when Odette followed her several minutes later, the waitress was almost to the clearing, a full stretch of rapid river between them.

  Odette returned to the restaurant and the waitress said, “Listen, I will never remember you, okay? I have been yumped up too many times and I’m not ready for it to happen again.” That killed Odette. She left a bigger tip that night.

  Odette returned to the restaurant the next week and the waitress said, “Listen, you act like you know what I’m doing, but you don’t. Trust me.”

  Odette said, “All I’ve got is every minute of the day.”

  The next week, she went for a drink at the 400 Club instead. She felt uncomfortable in low-class places, like she was pretending. All these people saying they preferred a dump, but she required a bartender in a collared shirt, a clean glass, a hand-stuffed olive. She couldn’t help but feel the money within her. At the 400 Club, a banker appreciated her youth, thought she was an escort. “I’d like to use your dress as an alibi, if it’s all right with you.” She accepted the drink he offered her and hoped the mirrors would carry her off into some netherworld while he went on. Before long, his thumb bones cocked up and down her knee and she would be lying if she said she didn’t enjoy it.

  The banker asked Odette if he could lure her home with him for a nightcap. Odette said, “You’ll have to delay the sunrise if you want me to go anywhere with you.” She’d drunk enough to arrange herself into poems that he wouldn’t understand. He urged her on, unable to take a circuitous “no” for an answer, but she spouted off another refusal: “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of spare change and guts in your piggy bank, but I’m going to my own home alone before the light reveals me.”

  “Odette is the world is Odette.”

  The banker pouted. “Can I get your number?”

  Odette shook her pretty little head. “You can have my permanence and the rest of this rotgut.” She handed him her glass and he drained it. There were enough napkins on the bar, but the banker pulled a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and wrote his number on Odette’s arm.

  She watched the runny ink bleed between her skin cells. By the time she got home it would be unreadable. “Classy,” she slurred.

  Odette did nothing that week. She thought, “I wish that asshole would have written his number on a goddamn napkin.” When the next weekend rolled around she went back to the 400 Club, the banker already at the bar, talking to another girl. Odette walked up to him anyway.

  The banker frowned at her. “You didn’t call me.” He looked over at his new companion as if to say, “So this is what has happened.”

  Odette said, “The ruins were profound and formful, but totally unreadable.”

  The banker nodded. “Nice to see you though.”

  Odette walked away; some sentiments she understood.

  She drank her whiskeys slowly and alone, eavesdropping for a while on a bottle blonde ranting at her companion about how they never went out for nice dinners anymore. She listened to more of the conversation and built her remaining suspicions carefully. This woman had found her meal ticket in a guy who was tall, well-built, attractive, but obviously lacked confidence for one reason or another. This man could do better than a bleach job with a hunger for fancy dinners and an
allowance.

  Odette spun on her stool to get a look at the man over the shoulder of the blonde, and before too long the man couldn’t hide his attentions and both he and his companion had turned to Odette.

  “Can I help you with something?” the blonde asked Odette.

  “Put your mask back on, sweetie.” Odette was ready for a fight.

  The blonde said, “Excuse me?”

  Odette shrugged and looked over to the blonde’s companion, raising her eyebrows. He smiled a little and then tried to take it back. The blonde kept looking back and forth between them, until she was disoriented and her anger carried her off.

  “I needed that,” the man told Odette. “You saved me.”

  Odette offered her arm. “Take me for a walk.”

  The man was anxious not to lose his chance. “It’s raining out there, you know.”

  “We’ll admire the light catching the umbrellas together.” The man looked a little stunned. He didn’t know the game of saying extraordinary things, but Odette thought, “I’ll teach him.”

  This man was an engineer who didn’t engineer anymore. They strolled the wet streets and he began talking about how it was tomorrow already and how tomorrow, today, marked the anniversary of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.

  Odette thought, “This guy has a long way to go,” and so she said one of her extraordinary things. “Can you imagine the bodies trying to heal themselves? The contrast of their wet new skin to the cremains around them? The pattern of a dress burnt onto a woman in patches?”