Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  “But what about me?” Larry yelled. “What about me? You shrunk me! What about me, huh? What the eff about me?”

  And we all looked at each other. There was a sick feeling in my guts. Like I had the cramps. Like I wanted to throw up.

  Like he was right.

  “I don’t know,” said Mel. She pushed herself away from Todd, wiped at her eyes again with the pale underside of her wrist. “I don’t know what to tell you, Larry. We wait, I guess. We wait and see.”

  And that moment stretched on. And on. Larry was shaking. Like he was finally scared now too. Scared by what he’d just said. And it was only then that it had started to dawn on us that the little guy was only five inches tall. I mean, really dawn on us. He was shrunk. I mean, really shrunk. And maybe, just maybe, there might not be any way to make it right again. There might be no growing up for Larry like there would be for the rest of us.

  And none of us could think of a better thing to say than that.

  It was like the world our parents had always been telling us about, the world of mistakes matter, the world of no more freebies, the world of ain’t just kids anymore was the world we were gonna be living in for the rest of our lives.

  God. Whaddya say to that? Just whaddya say?

  Finally it was Melanie who found the words first.

  “Here,” she said. “We got one Boyer Smoothie Peanut Butter Cup left, don’t we? We’ll help you look for Rufus. Okay, Larry? You dig it?”

  And, reluctantly, Todd nodded. You could see he had that same look on his face. Like he was feeling the same thing I was feeling. Like we were looking at Larry and we were wondering what the hell it was we had all gone and done together.

  And then Marvin nodded.

  And then I nodded.

  And the moon was hanging low and fat on the horizon, and it was starting to sink beneath the hills. And the air was starting to cool, just a bit, just the tiniest bit. Outside there was a city three feet tall. Out there was Shrinksville, USA, where our fathers and stepfathers and mothers and sisters were trapped in their tiny houses. Locking their tiny doors. Scared to death of the thing that we had done to them, even though we hadn’t meant anything by it. Even though it’d just been crazy kid stuff we were up to.

  And then Larry spoke at last in a voice that sounded as tired as it was scared. “I dig,” said Larry. “I dig, Mel.”

  And so Marv slid him back into his pocket. And Todd helped Melanie get to her feet. And then we set off. The five of us. Together.

  And maybe there’d be a miniature dog to find, with a white-speckled nose and a tongue made for licking up peanut butter. And maybe there wouldn’t be.

  And maybe tomorrow we’d wake up to find Todd’s stepfather’s Buick Super Rivera parked outside the garage, large as life, with its headlights like torpedoes and its hubcaps gleaming in the July sun. And maybe we wouldn’t.

  And maybe there was a letter already winging its way home with the signature of President Harry S. Truman inked at the bottom. And maybe not.

  But we set off together.

  With all our tiny loves.

  Our tiny hopes. Our tiny maybes. Our tiny tomorrows.

  “You will fall and you will fall and you will fall.”

  WE RUIN THE SKY

  The night seeps in through a hole in the cracked window.

  You can see it. Feel its inexhaustible weight, the pressure of lake water on the windshield of a drowning car. Smell the night air, sharp with the cat-piss stink of gasoline and exhaust from the traffic on 23rd Street. The night pours in through the hole, magnifying sound, the conversations from the street. From twenty floors below me, a man hails a taxi. He curses loudly in that thick Chicago accent you hated so much when Jonathan first brought you here. “Fuck,” he says. “Fuck-fuck-fuck.” A door slams. “Fuck-a-duck,” you hear.

  “Fuck-a-duck,” you experiment, savouring the guttural sound, the suggestive slide of fricative to plosive, the same sound a cork makes when it leaves the bottle. “Fuck-fuck-fuck.” The word has a hard, delicious weight; a word that Jonathan would never say, and so it is precious to you.

  You have been staring at the hole for two hours.

  You glass is empty. This is not the central problem: it is a peripheral difficulty, solvable. The bottle of gin is two feet seven inches away from you: the golden label winks, light glances off the curve of its glass shoulder. The window is six feet four inches away from you. An approximation, but realistic. In seven steps you could reach the window, but in one step, you could take hold of the bottle.

  Fuck. Fuck-a-duck.

  One step. Nothing, correct? Perhaps. That would be a wise estimate, nothing to a single step, is that not so? But magnetism is the problem, the attractive pull of negative space. If you move, the force will increase; if you approach, it will become irresistible.

  That’s the worry. Magnetism. The hairs on your arm flutter, teased by the persuasions of that force. Oblivion beckons.

  One step to reach the gin. You think you are fully capable of this, of a single step. You are not so old that you should totter, though some might think you so, with your hair gone to white, but distinguished, some would say, attractive even. You are stronger than they take you for—why should this frighten you so much?

  Standing now, swaying slightly, you lean over and take up the moss-green bottle in your hand. Your weight shifts dangerously as you pour a drink, and replace the bottle. Prone to panic, this is enough of a trigger. Your throat seals itself up. You gasp, but the air is too heavy, viscous as molasses, and black too, also like molasses—and in that moment, you realize it is not air that you are breathing, but the night itself, which has crept in through the window, the night which has been slowly insinuating itself like a heavy gas, invisible and undetectable. There is a word for this. You reach for that word. Vertigo. You are light-headed and leaden at the same time. You are now less than four feet away from the window, but of course, it is not the window you fear, but rather the brutal cavity, the hole. How can an absence exert such force? You can feel the pull of it. If you fall, you know you will fall toward the window. You will fall and you will fall and you will fall. Your skin shivers and tightens, gooseflesh, and a hard weight in your stomach. You tip.

  But then the drink is in your hand, the clear liquid perfectly level in the crystal tumbler. It does not flutter or distend. You see no signs of meddling.

  And so you are perfectly calm.

  You retreat with your gin, steady on your feet, entirely in control of your faculties. As the distance increases, your head lightens mysteriously, and you laugh at your own silliness. What a fool you have been, how extraordinary! You sit down lightly in your armchair. The pattern has always pleased you: diamonds picked out in gold, against black and blue. Jonathan did not like it, but you prevailed, and, as such, you have always felt a keen smugness in occupying this chair; You feel, you imagine, as Napoleon must have after Austerlitz. Marriage is a battleground, you have always thought so: at times it is filled with the sturm und drang of cannons, and yet it has its ceasefires, its quiet occupations, the extraordinary moments when the two lines meet, and cigarettes might be exchanged, stories of home, warily done, of course, but not without affection. Napoleon was famously in love with his wife Joséphine, and she with him; they took lovers, sometimes, fought bitterly, but this was a problem of timing. They were never in love with one another at exactly the same moment. It is easy to mistake this for a genuine lack of passion, as some have done. You stare at the diamonds, they have their own hypnotic power, and your nerves ease off their eccentric energy as the seconds slowly tick by. But then you are looking at the window again, and the hole in the window—and, beyond it, the night.

  Is six feet enough? A safe distance? Should you go to bed?

  It will not be so easily solved. You would try, of course, but if you were in bed, even if the duvet buried your neck and shoulders then you would still clench the
white cotton sheets so tightly you would feel the imprint of every thread. You could not stop thinking about the hole. You would see it in a vision, on the ceiling, perhaps, or the door, or floating in space like a phantasm: the delicate bloom of cracks and fissures.

  Several minutes have passed. Your tumbler is empty. The bottle of gin is still two feet seven inches away. The window is still six feet four inches away. The tableau is fixed as if in a museum. You crave sleep, but you fear it as well. What if you should sleepwalk? What if you should rise from the bed, unbeknownst to your conscious mind? Then you will be in its power completely, and can you imagine what it would be like, to wake and discover yourself falling? To find the wind ravishing you, the ground rushing up on your uncomprehending but now terrified mind?

  From this height you can see the Chicago River. The boats thread merrily along beside those famous buildings, and in the distance glitter the bright lights of Navy Pier and its magnificent Ferris wheel.

  So you explore the dilemma further.

  You are on the twenty-first floor. It is a fact known to you that one should never take a room above the fifth floor, a point you made to Jonathan several times in your initial deliberations, but this was not one of your victories. Only the penthouse would do, he insisted. He did not understand. No ladder reaches higher than the fifth floor. Or perhaps a ladder might reach so high as that, but it is policy that emergency services will climb no higher than the fifth floor for fear of falling. And so, in the case of a fire, those occupying the penthouse suite, however much they have paid for it, however impressive and tastefully decorated it might be, whatever their fame and fortune, or, perhaps, because of this, there is no doubt at all that they will be abandoned.

  Jonathan would not listen; he could be implacable.

  Is there a fire escape outside this room? You do not know. You can only assume there is not, or if there were, it would be completely untenable in any case. The force of the wind at this height is enough to sway the building several inches, it would knock you flying. And this is the so-called Windy City.

  But you could check. Would it reassure you to know that there is a fire escape? It would. But that would be impossible. To check would be to place yourself in too much jeopardy. You will not do it.

  And yet, why? If you were to fall from this height, you would not feel it. You would only ever see the ground approaching. In the final six feet of descent, you would be moving faster than the signal in your brain, and so death would be painless, unprocessed: you could apprehend the ground without experiencing the final collision. Perhaps it would be lovely to die like that.

  But you do fear falling: that empty space, the sense of powerlessness. But why should this terrify you? You know that marriages are built on emptiness: the gaps in conversations, the lags, silences that take upon themselves a weight. Jonathan was always rushing to fill up the emptiness; like the boy who sticks his finger in the dam, there was always another hole, and another hole. Eternity is like that, and marriage is, of course, like eternity.

  You force yourself to blink, but the hole is still fixed as ever, still gaping, and so you reach for the gin. You hand stays suspended in the air above the neck of the bottle. You close your eyes once more. You try to imagine what it would be like to fall, but instead you imagine nothing at all: only blackness.

  You open your eyes. How many minutes have passed?

  The hole is bigger.

  It cannot be a trick of the light, no, the hole is bigger. You are fascinated, but wary—the edges of the hole have peeled away like the petals of a dark flower. And the night is thicker, so thick it bleeds out over the carpet, sweet-smelling and rank at the same time, like lilies at a funeral.

  There is a story about silence: a story she told you, Jonathan’s friend, his little friend, his fuck-a-duck friend with the slim, white neck and the golden curls, the one who smelled of lilies, that one. She recounted it at a dinner party you held last November, a fine affair which the mayor and several councilmembers attended, the entire table was astounded and delighted, oh, they roared with laughter! She was quite the sensation!

  She liked to travel, this pretty friend of Jonathan’s. She travelled wherever took her fancy, eager to experience beauty, unwilling to leave any country unexplored. Napoleon, you imagine, was rather similar. He could not look at a map without wishing to conquer it. But Napoleon is not the point, this girl is, and so. She spent a month in India, in a Buddhist monastery, one of the few places in the world, she said, where one could properly contemplate such things as beauty and eternity. She had taken a vow of silence, she told you, her eyebrow cocked, a playful smile alighting on her lips as if to say, “What a thing it was! How charming!”

  But she was a sleepwalker, Jonathan’s friend, a condition she had managed all her life, though it seldom put her at a true disadvantage.

  On a day soon after her arrival, she went to explore the city. This was encouraged to provide fodder for contemplation, but there were lepers in the city. Jonathan’s friend had never seen a leper before. She was afraid of the way they huddled together in clots on the street with their fingers reduced to short stubs and their noses collapsed like old buildings. She was afraid of the things she had read about lepers, about their disease, about the putrefaction of their bodies. One of them asked her for money, but she could not say anything—at this point in her narration she would mime her consternation, her sadness at having no money to give them, but also her disgust at the sight of the lepers, her utter revulsion, and of course the councilmembers laughed along with her.

  And so, without giving the lepers anything, she went away.

  But that night, as she lay in her bed, tucked away inside the monastery, she dreamed that she was in the street again, with the lepers, and she was walking. She was walking, but because it was a dream, the ground moved strangely beneath her feet. When she tried to step over one of the lepers, she stumbled and fell. Her foot—naked now, because it was a dream—pressed into the leper. She could see the expression on the leper’s face, something like horror and something also like hunger. As his body gave way around her foot, she could not free herself; the feeling, she said, was like trying to pluck a spoon out of congealed porridge.

  She screamed, of course.

  But there were others in the room she was sharing, fellow tourists such as herself, or contemplatives perhaps, and she woke up hunched above one of them, a terrified women, with her foot sunk into the pillow next to the woman’s head.

  And she couldn’t explain. Not a word, the vow of silence, remember? And so she and the frightened woman spent the subsequent month locked together in the room every night, Jonathan’s friend unable to explain herself, and the other woman no doubt terrified of her, afraid she was a lunatic.

  She told the story charmingly, and the councilmembers were in stitches, the mayor himself tore a button from his suit, he was doubled over with such laughter.

  But you were quiet. You and Jonathan both. And afterward you asked him, what was worse, the dream she had or the vow of silence that prevented her from explaining it? This was one of those rare times he took your hand. He told you not to be so silly. It was just a story, it didn’t mean anything more than that, and he laughed but you could tell it frightened him, how those ruined bodies repelled her.

  You have thought about this for some time now, and you believe you know the answer: the dream, you would say, was worse. The silence, although it may have frustrated her, also offered her a measure of protection. She never had to reveal, in the presence of those monks, how terrifying she had found the lepers. She should not have told Jonathan that.

  The young are terrified by imperfection; they cannot imagine a world that does not serve them exactly as they demand.

  It has been thirty-seven minutes.

  Is that even possible?

  You could not have been here for thirty-seven minutes.

  But then, the hole can’t be there either,
it is impossible. The window cannot be pierced, you were assured of that, nothing could break the glass. And since the hole is there, anything is possible. The hole is like a penny thrown into the fountain. The hole is like a wish. The hole is magic.

  You can feel it here, even though you are sitting down: it is like the room is tilting toward the hole, as if the room were a jar that was being shaken out very slowly. Your fingers clench on the arm of the chair, your nails dig into the flawless fabric, you could scratch it to pieces right now! Your knuckles are white. Your breathing is harsh. It makes a strange sound in your ears, like someone who has been weeping. The hole is bigger, and its force is magnified: the chair moves, to some it would be imperceptible but you have been steeling yourself for this moment, for the chair to move, to slide, just a little bit, toward the hole.

  The world is not the place people imagine it to be. The world is full of pitfalls, and odd occurrences; it is full of hauntings and dark powers. The longer one lives, the less one comes to trust oneself in the perfection of the world, the more the struts of logic and reason are stripped away.

  It is amazing what can happen to a body.

  Let us take Jonathan, for instance.

  You start to laugh, and the sound is a wild, howling thing, shocking in its intensity, echoing round and round the penthouse suite, bouncing off the Chippendale cabinet, the Japanese dining table until the laughter falls dead where the night is pooling beneath the crack in the window.

  Pooling with. . . .

  Pooling with . . .

  Take Jonathan, for instance. Jonathan who was always clean as a whistle, Jonathan who never left a mess before today, no, he was a Harvard man, perfectly appointed to his situation, never swearing, never one to say more than G.D. when he meant “goddamn,” no sir, no ma’am, it was against his upbringing.