His blindfolded wife had given up trying to get him out of bed and down the hall, Ray said. His boys were being bad, staying up late and telling one another strange stories of sound and how it makes the air it travels through its own, throwing a Nerf ball from one bed to the other, waiting for their mother, or maybe their father, yes, maybe tonight it would be their father who would finally get out of his bed and storm down the hall to tell them to put that darn ball down and get to sleep. They hadn’t heard their father for days. They didn’t know what it was they’d done wrong to anger their father so. They had never known him to stay angry this long, Ray was saying, just as we passed one of the sheltered bus stops the city had placed around downtown, as if the weather there were worse than where we lived.
Through the glass smeared with god knows how many handprints and with weather, we saw a woman with ragged and orangish hair, waving her arms frantically in the air over her head. It looked like she could have been under attack from some band of itinerate and hungry insects, gnats with an attitude maybe, Ray said, or mosquitoes with acne and something sharp they swung in the air ahead of them. Nothing. There was nothing there but the woman and her ghastly hair and her arms doing their strange and jerky dance all around her head. I had no doubt Ray would change his story and he did. After we passed the woman, he started to talk about a woman gnats loved so much they couldn’t leave her alone. How they loved the way her sore arms flapped around them in the humid air. Ray was already into the story, which is why he didn’t see what I saw, looking back at the woman we had passed.
Her arms had stopped dancing around her head and made a sturdy and unmistakable hammock for a baby, crossed that way in front of her chest. Her head was bowed and she could have been whispering, or singing some elegant lullaby to the baby in her arms, if only her arms had not been empty. I stopped listening to the story Ray was making up as we kept walking. I didn’t want to listen to any story right then. Right then, all I wanted was to go back to that woman and reach down and take the baby from her tired arms. Right then, all I wanted was to whisper the silly sounds to that baby I had never had the chance to whisper to ours. All I wanted was to make her let out one of those wonderful little baby laughs. Right then, that was all it was possible for me to even think of wanting.
• • •
I can’t say what had gone wrong for that woman, no more than I can say what’s gone wrong with this world. It’s no doubt, though, something has. Something has very definitely gone wrong. Yesterday, on my walk, something I haven’t been able to stop since Ray died, these walks, I saw the oddest thing. Three birds were flitting erratically just over the pavement and making some really ugly, disturbing sounds. As they got nearer I could see it was two crows and a pigeon. The crows were attacking the pigeon, and being rather vicious about it, too. They had the poor pigeon so rattled that it flew straight into the glass window of one of the shops on the block I was walking. It was one of those second-hand clothing shops. You know, where they dress dummies in the window in clothes so out of style that, to some folks, usually young couples, they seem trendy, original even.
The pigeon staggered on the sidewalk under the window behind which a mannequin stared off into the distance wearing a dress with so much lace it was like a thick fog wrapped tight around the stoic, feminine figure. The pigeon staggered and actually fell against the brick façade under the window. The crows landed awkward on either side of it, penning it in against the building, and started taking turns pecking at the smaller bird. There were several tufts of what looked like ragged fur on the pigeon, one on the back of its head. It was not long for this world, that pigeon. Not without help.
I turned back to the defense of the pigeon, though I have no love of pigeons. I shooed the crows away and they flew across the street, one settling on the metal arch of one of the old-fashioned street lamps the city has recently put around town, the other settling on the sill of a third floor window. Both were still eyeing the staggering pigeon. What had it done, I wondered, to deserve this? I spoke to the pigeon in a soft voice, telling it, though I had no way of knowing it was true, that it would be okay now. The crows wouldn’t bother it again, I told it as gently and as soft as I could. It staggered along the sidewalk at the edge of the building and looked over at me without even the slightest hint of trust, despite my having saved it from the crows, both still perched across the street, apparently waiting to see what I would do next.
What I did was to tell the pigeon it was a pretty bird, though it wasn’t, and turn and start off toward the local deli. But before I had gotten even twenty steps back into my walk the crows were back and pecking away at the pigeon unable to defend itself or even fly off, just stagger in a small circle and take it. I shooed the crows off again, this time with more fervor, wondering what someone driving by might think if they saw me through their palm-smeared side window, flinging my arms madly in the air and shouting something inarticulate. This time the crows flew further off than the first time, one disappearing into the sky past the buildings across the street, the other making it well down the street before it flapped down to the sidewalk. This time I didn’t say anything to the poor pigeon still staggering in front of the second-hand clothing shop. What was there to say?
• • •
Once Ray had me straddling Charlton Heston in bed. Without my knowing it, he had grabbed the little stuffed monkey that usually sat in the rocker in the corner of the bedroom where the light from one of the windows fell in the late afternoons. With me straddling him and starting to moan, Ray reached down beside the bed and brought up Alfie, that was the monkey’s name, and draped the monkey’s long arms on either side of his neck as if the stuffed animal were trying to strangle him.
Get your filthy paws off me, you damn stinking ape, Charlton Heston’s voice, a bit raspy but undeniably Charlton Heston, said. Laughing made me start to come and I collapsed onto Ray and Alfie and breathed in the soft odor of that fake monkey fur as my body finished its trembling.
Ray put his arms around me and, before he let Heston off for the night, said, From my cold, dead hands.
Ray is still so much with me sometimes it hurts so much I can’t help but cry.
The Adulterer Fails to Balance Desire and Decorum
After the night of my confession, you might think everything was different. With me and Angela, I mean. You might think that, but you’d be wrong. Remember, this was back when I suffered under the illusion I was a moral person and confused as to just what that meant. It’s not like the balance sheets I do every night after I close, or even the weekly or monthly versions.
On those balance sheets, numbers, which are much easier to understand than the simplest of people, are placed next to other numbers and there are absolutes. What’s taken in must balance the value of what’s gone out. And when the numbers tell me there’s an imbalance somewhere in the equation, I know the tricks, the places to look for the missing numbers. I actually enjoy doing the books, and I’m good at it. Like Columbo or Monk or some other TV detective, I hunt down the variance. I have never failed to have the sheets balanced before I leave and lock up the store for the night. I like to think that’s one of the reasons I was given my own store, and one of the better ones, in terms of volume, in the city, over other managers who’d put in more time as assistants than I had.
Balancing desire and decorum just isn’t as cut and dried. Numbers can’t, by themselves, sufficiently represent the equation. Too many shifting factors. Not to mention the whole question of context. Though it’s true that my position on the question of how to determine whether or not any particular act is moral or not has shifted back and forth with enough violence almost nothing I once believed has made it through without some damage, back then the balance sheet analogy still ruled my morality, which meant I could not let that night, or any of the other nights we would walk for miles and talk about our lives, influence my behavior enough to let my hands touch her the way they wer
e telling me they needed to. I would often walk with those hands in my pockets, just to be safe, no matter what the weather was like.
Which is not to say that things weren’t different for me. Angela has admitted to a similar sort of struggle, especially after days or nights when her husband had been particularly cruel to her. When we would walk after one of those times, she has told me the way I treated her, the way I listened, really listened, to whatever she had to say, the way I made her laugh even at things she might have wanted to cry about, even the things she had, she would tell me later, been crying about earlier that evening, the way she said that being with me, walking beside me for miles, made her feel cared for, made her feel loved, all of this, she has told me, made it difficult for her not to ask me to hold her, just hold her. There came a point, of course, when she found a way to do just that, though she couched the request in such a way as to make me believe it was my decision to put my arms around her that first time. She’s admitted that, too.
But back then, all I knew for sure was my own suffering. So many nights would end with me walking home alone from the old Heinz plant. That was where we parted. We would walk all around the neighborhood, just her and me and Lena, the wolf-dog, talking about our lives, our pasts, about the glimpses of people we caught through lighted windows. We would make up silly stories to explain the glimpses. And we never seemed to run out of things to say.
Once, I remember, rather early on, we had walked far enough we were pretty much out at one edge of town. We had left sidewalks behind at least fifteen minutes earlier, and there were fewer and fewer street lights of any kind. We were walking alongside fields of corn and soy. The moon was full and there were only a few wisps of clouds in the sky, so the light would only dim a little now and then. With the moon, for the most part it was pretty easy to see where we were walking. And my God did she look amazing in that moonlight. She started talking about scars, saying you could learn a lot about a person by learning what scars they had and how they had gotten them.
Tell me, she said, about your scars.
So I told her. Starting with the scar behind my right ear, from when I had fallen down the basement steps and my ear had been caught on the edge of part of the railing and ripped down with enough force it ended up dangling down, the hollow of the ear pressed against the lower lobe and my neck, blood everywhere. I was only seven when this happened, I told her, and I could remember sitting on one of the steps down to the basement and holding my ear up so it was where it was supposed to be and yelling for my mother. My father was off at work somewhere. He had several jobs back then. And I couldn’t yell to my brother for help. He was the one who’d been chasing me when I had fallen. I later learned he had run to get my mother as soon as he saw me fall. My mother, I told Angela, rode beside me in the cab to the hospital where some doctor or intern stitched my ear back together. I don’t remember how many stitches it took, I told Angela, but I can still feel the scar behind my ear.
Can I feel it? Angela asked.
I stopped walking and bent my head down so she could feel the scar. God, her finger felt so good on that scar, and the ear her finger ran along for the length of the scar. I tried not to but I shivered as she touched it.
What other scars do you have? she asked.
Next I told her about the scar on my elbow. As I held my elbow up in the light of the full moon so she could see the paler streak of slightly raised skin that was the slash of the scar in that light, I told her how the story of this scar started a month before the night I actually got the scar. I told her how some friends of mine had convinced me to let them regress me hypnotically. One of them was really into all that past life nonsense, and had participated in several regressions with a friend of hers who was a professional psychologist. She knew what she was doing, she told me. Not only did I not believe in past lives and all, I was sure she wouldn’t be able to put me under. But to humor them I said Sure, why not?
Some of what I’m going to tell you, I told Angela, is what I was told, as my memory of what happened after she set out to put me under, as they say, is not at all clear. Apparently she did put me under, and with the others helping her, she started trying to regress me, to send me back to some previous life and let me tell them who I was. For some time there was nothing. Just darkness and stars. Finally, far back, there was a snow storm and a man dressed in thick animal skins stumbling through blinding snow whipped into his face by a freezing wind. This man knew, they said I told them, that not far off in one direction or another there was a hut he had built. This man, I told Angela, knew his family was there, gathered around a fire. Some of them, he hoped, were thinking of him. This man also knew he was dying, that he would not make it back to that hut, that fire, those other bodies. This man had collapsed in the storm and was freezing to death.
When my friend tried to bring me out of this, bring me forward, as it were, I, or the man, or someone, refused. My friend tried a couple of different times to bring me back, but I, or whoever it was, kept refusing. Later my friend said it wasn’t me who was refusing to come back. She said it was the man dying in the snow. He didn’t want to be left alone, she said.
So my friend ended up calling the psychologist, who came and helped get me out. After which he spent some time with her off in another room. We could tell by the tone of his voice he was not happy with her. When she came back in after seeing him out none of us were sure whether the tears on her face were from concern for me or from being chewed out by the psychologist. She didn’t try any more regressions on her own, though.
So how did you get the scar? Angela asked, tracing the scar on my elbow with her finger. I shivered, lowered my elbow, and stuck my hands in my pockets.
A month later, I told her, I was on a camping trip with my best friend. You have to understand, I said, what kind of camping trip this was. This was the kind of camping trip where, right after you set up your tent you open the cooler and start drinking, and you don’t stop drinking till you’re both so exhausted you have to sleep. You drink and walk around and talk yourselves into exhaustion. That kind of camping trip.
We had finished drinking for the first night, just after some rain had forced us into the tent. We had both gone to sleep pretty quickly, I told her. Apparently, I said, I woke up having to answer the call of nature, as they say. We had set up camp near the ridge of a fairly deep gully. I must have headed back to the gully to take care of business. Some time later, my friend woke up and realized I was not in the tent. He waited a while, he told me later, I said, and when I didn’t come back he went out looking for me.
It was still drizzling. He said he heard something which led him over to the gully and when he looked down he saw me lying about forty or fifty feet down the side of the gully. I must have slipped and fallen along the side of the gully until gravity wore out or something stopped my fall. My friend said he freaked out. He thought I was dead, or at the very least dying. He scuffed his way down the side of that gully, managing to stay on his feet somehow until he got to where I was lying.
Now here’s the strange part, or part of the strange part, of the story, I told Angela. My friend swears this is true. I don’t remember any of this. This is all from him, what he told me the next morning. He said he tried to get me up to help me back up to the tent, and I told him not to touch me. The thing is, though, he swore it wasn’t my voice. He said I told him not to touch me in someone else’s voice. He said it didn’t sound anything like me at all. He said he tried again to get me up. This time, in this voice that was not my voice, I told him that if he touched me again I, or whoever it was who was speaking, would kill him. My friend said he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t just leave me down there alone at the bottom of a gully in the rain, but he was afraid to touch me. So he sat down beside me and waited.
He said that for the next twenty minutes or so he waited next to me while I made other sounds, inarticulate, even inhuman sounds, he said. Finally, he sa
id, he noticed my body go calm and he asked if I was alright and I answered him in my own voice and let him help me back up to the tent. I had twisted my ankle and had some cuts along my back, but the worst was the gash on my elbow. The scar is all that remains of that night in the gully.
Who do you suppose was talking? Angela asked.
That’s the other strange part of this story, I told her. Later I learned that the friend who had tried to regress me was telling the story of that regression and the problems in getting me back from it to some people at the very time I was falling down into that gully and lying there and threatening my friend in someone else’s voice.
Ooh, she said. That is strange. Eerie.
I didn’t tell her about my other scar. The one from the only operation I had ever had. She would find that scar herself, later, and I would tell her then how one of the only clear memories I have of my childhood is of being left in a hospital corridor on a bed they had wheeled off to the side after having wheeled me from my room where I’d been given a shot that was supposed to put me to sleep. I was waiting to be wheeled into surgery, I sort of knew that. And I knew I was supposed to be going to sleep. But I was not going to sleep. I was lying there awake and looking around at other people, children and adults, lying on other beds that lined either side of the corridor. I remember panicking because they were all asleep. I was the only one awake. I remember a woman with a mask over her face coming over and looking at my face and saying, muffled, that I was ready. He’s out, I remember her saying. And though I wanted to tell her I wasn’t out, that I was still awake and that they couldn’t start the operation with me still awake, though I wanted to say something to let them know she was wrong, I couldn’t make my mouth move. I remember being wheeled past opening doors and then I was out.
Report from a Place of Burning Page 8