Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9B

  “Excuse me, sir.”

  “Sorry,” said The Father, still standing in the pouring rain.

  He did that a lot, apologizing for things that were not his fault.

  The couple squeezed past him to enter the meeting. The way they contorted their bodies and the awkward shapes they embellished, it was as if he had something on his shirt, something of which he was unaware, but something they did not want to pass onto their own.

  The door closed quickly, weighed by heavy hinges.

  It seemed fitting.

  Considering the theme.

  He saw though, as the couple snuck past him and shook off the hundreds of droplets of rain from their shoulders, the woman he had fallen out of favor with, lurching into the embrace of a young boy and beside her, on the ground by her seat, lay the small colored butterfly with its small button nose, swinging back and forth lightly, as if it had just been put there; as if it had just happened.

  The Father turned from the door and, convinced that the disruption of his thoughts was from a hunger, went in the direction of a gas station, somewhere up the road from where he was. Though he could see very little through the spitting rain, he knew the station was there. He could see its neon light, like a careless spilling of yellow paint, smeared across the dank evening sky.

  As he stood on the edge of the curb, his feet perching precariously past their ability to keep him from harm, scores of screaming cars rushed past him, their wipers screeching in vehement fury. The Father looked as if he were waiting for the right time to cross, though, rallying back and forth on the balls of his feet, with his arms weighted and deadened by his sides and his eyes kept perfectly shut, his thoughts were of a wind, picking him away from where he stood and showering him down into a pit of endless abandon. Somewhere that he could fall for an eternity, without having to think of what came next.

  And in his thoughts, in his dangerously rocking imaginings, as he so nearly fell into the path of a passing bus, he wished for the wind to pull apart him apart, atom by atom, and cast him into the infinite black traverse. But that wind of which he wished for, to a god in whom he did not believe, that very same wind, instead of fragmenting his molecular self like a child’s breath upon a handful of sand, that very same wind, it brought with it, a hundred thousand trillion billion atoms.

  Tiny atoms.

  Of so many different colors.

  Of which warmed

  And then swarmed.

  Of which furled.

  And then swirled.

  Of which settled in the form of a sad little girl.

  And as he stood on the edge of the curb almost falling into the flow of heavy traffic, he stared at the sad little girl who was in the middle of the road with an unopened umbrella in her hands and her fringe, matted across her face.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he screamed, spitting like the heavens above.

  He shouted so loud that a passing car heard his plight and shouted back, but it was hardly as loud or as terrifying as the crack of thunder which struck above The Father’s head, sending him hurtling backwards, knocking over a passage of huddling pedestrians and then falling awkwardly onto his hands and his rear.

  He looked disheveled as if he had just woken from some opiated stupor, unsure of how he was ever going to get back on his feet. And should he somehow manage, how then would he stop himself from falling back down?

  “Hmpf” declared an elderly woman standing beside him. “Typical.”

  She turned in obnoxious objection and her much younger but still, very much elderly companion, moved to her championing, putting himself between her and the saliferous villain, dawdling on the filth ridden concrete by their feet.

  They both shook their heads with the lady pulling her scarf to silken her insulted expression. And one of them mentioned drugs, for that was what the world had come to these days. And then the other one mentioned pity, not of the kind that they would spare for this man, but for the world in which they had borne, that which had so unfortunately come to this.

  The Father started to weep and his tears were heavier than the rain.

  The old lady, she cringed, as if a vermin had scuttled past her shoe.

  The chivalrous man, elderly he was, yet a young man in the old lady’s thoughts, he said, “We should go” and the old lady agreed. And the elderly man put a knightly hand on her back and before they were gone, he turned to The Father, despondent on the ground, and he gritted his teeth and he shook his one free fist. And then they were gone, into the cloud of wispy rain.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said The Father, over and over again. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  He stayed on the ground, his knees pulled into his chest, rocking back and forth; not like a crazy man sitting in a thunderstorm, broken by the insanity of his fractured past and crumbling thoughts. No. He rocked back and forth lightly like a man, nearing insanity, on the verge of fracture.

  “Oh dear, your nose. Are you ok?” a voice asked.

  It was a woman’s voice. She wasn’t from the group. Those people, they spoke differently. As if their words were sculpted with cotton and taffy.

  “Yeah,” he said, without thinking.

  Things like that were automatic.

  Like saying thank you, I’m sorry or shaking after taking a piss.

  He wasn’t alright, though. He was nowhere it. And the woman, still with her hand just barely touching his shoulder, she knew it too. It was the thing about talking in this world. Someone would say one thing, but everybody almost always understood the other. People were like salmon you see, swimming against the current of negation.

  And The Father, he had been pushed out of the stream and he was flapping about neath the clawed foot of the inevitable. And with his eyes shut, in a dream or wide awake, she was always there, waiting and watching with her broken umbrella and her look, as if someone had eaten the last cupcake.

  Korine.

  “Help him up,” said The Woman.

  Her husband quickly rushed over to where The Father was heaped and hunched, and he linked both of their arms, lifting The Father up and onto his feet. And The Father’s legs, they wobbled at first, like a child, escaping infancy with its first giddy steps. He looked like he was going to undoubtedly fall back down to the ground the second The Husband let go.

  He, The Husband, looked to his wife. He wanted some kind of assurance that he was doing the right thing. When The Father first held Korine, he gave the same expression, looking over to The Mother with the sleeping child in his arms, certain in his mind that at any second, he would flinch or stutter or give in to an itch and then the infant would fall from his arms and crash and tumble along the floor and ‘oh god just do something’ was the look that he wore on his face while his wife, lying bloodied and sutured and imprisoned by tubes and wires to her bed, looked at The Father consolingly as if to say, “Don’t look at me, I’m tied to a fucking bed.”

  The Woman wore the same look on her face, looking up from the note that was in her hands, that which had fallen from the pocket of The Father’s jacket. She looked perturbed as if she had discovered the ending to a book that in her life, she would never have imagined reading.

  “Just seat him down there, it doesn’t matter,” she said to The Husband, hinting towards a small plastic seat that sat unseated by an inclining staircase to an office with no name upon it.

  A minute earlier, maybe even as little as a second or two, The Woman might have knelt down beside The Father, and she might have spoken to him as she would, an injured bird or a frightened child. She might have descended to his level, speaking at the pitch of his disparity and listened, with such delicate sedulity, to the subtle gestures between every sulking breath inhaled and every teary bridge, haloed out in frustrated chorale; those winks and nods and slight tremors of his lips or even the slight curl of his tongue, pushing against the back of his teeth.

  She might have waited until the storm of his indecision took a breath of its own; unti
l the galling wind eased for just a trillionth of a second. And in that space, in that infinitesimal break in the vacuity of his rage and torment, she might have dived into the silence and whispered to his quieted penurious ear, something of which would be enough to console him, as whatever storm lashed and raged about in his mind and swept up the tides of his emotions, passed over his head quicker than if he had tried to fight it on his own and left him unweathered.

  The Father might have looked at her and though he might have known that she was not his lover, his wife, his maid or his mother, that she might have been all of that to the strange man looking on precariously beside her, he might have done something so unexpected yet something so real and so unquestionable as to throw his arms around The Woman, to nurse himself on her shoulder and to weep, without pause or reflection, into the flow of fine blonde hairs that swept like listing clouds across her neck.

  And strangers might have stopped, and in seeing this, they might have, in the rasping of cold wind upon their ittery and jittery arctic expressions, felt a rush of warmth spill from their hearts, down until their fingertips. And they might have, watching two strangers embrace, taken the hands of their lovers or their children or even taken the passing glare of an absolute stranger and turned it from being something ordinary and unmentionable, into something as kind, heady and peculiar as a first kiss.

  None of this happened, though.

  Had it been a minute or a second earlier, maybe it might have, who knows? But as long as The Woman had in her mind and in her heart, the message she had read from that note, there was no way that she was going to descend unto where she needed, to look The Father in his eyes. There was no way she would extend herself. Not that far, not that low.

  “C’mon,” she said, hurrying The Husband along.

  She gave him a specific kind of look. She may not have ever given it before. In fact, this might have been the first she had ever felt like this in her life, having to express something so sternly and with such urgency, without word, and without obvious expression.

  The Husband stared at her.

  He looked lost.

  Out of synch.

  Without translation.

  The Woman smiled. It was a heavy smile. It opened and shut like the swing of a car door. And it didn’t at all seem like she was pleased or happy in any way and what a strange time and place if she were; having just picked a man up from the puddle of his own tearful disgrace.

  The Man realized, though, not by his wife’s expression, but by his daughter, who stepped closer to his side and cusped her tiny hand around his smallest finger. The little girl clung to his hand like an old man lying on his deathbed would, to his very last breath.

  He read his daughter, in the same way that she had read her mother.

  “I’m really sorry,” said The Husband. “I wish there was…”

  “Shhh” hushed The Woman, poking him in his side and then turning to The Father with a condescending smile.

  “What is it?” The Husband said as the family turned from The Father and walked down the street.

  “I just want to forget what I read,” said The Woman.

  “What did it say?” asked The Husband.

  “No,” she said, clenching her teeth, wrinkling her face and clasping so desperately at her daughter’s hand.

  The couple continued discussing. The Husband, pestering to know more, was desperate in his childlike want, to taste a slither of what she was trying to protect him from. Their words, though, were lost in the pitter patter of water, slashing up from the shoes and boots of busied people that ran past The Father as he sat, despondent and with no grievance to how the family felt about him, for it was how he felt about himself.

  He watched, though, as the couple waited by the traffic lights.

  They stood on either side of the girl, both clasping her hands. And The Father wondered if she knew what they knew if she felt and if she thought the same as they did. He wondered if the little girl was as a scared of him as her mother was. He knew, by the way, she looked at her father, and the way that she curled her hand around his pinky, that she was frightened. She had inherited this from her mother.

  Children were so trained at reading their mother’s still expressions.

  But he wondered if she knew why she was scared, if, in her mother’s expressionless glare that she had pointed out the serpent sleeping amidst the bustle of dried crinkling leaves. Or, whether she was made to feel that danger was near and that danger, whether it could be anywhere and whether it could be anyone.

  The Father had his head tilted on its side but not so much that it was turned completely, just so that he could see the small girl between her mother and father’s hands, twisting her own head so that she was looking over her shoulder, and back at him. And her head was titled like his. And she didn’t look as afraid as her mother. And she didn’t look as forceful or as bold as her father.

  She looked confused like she had been made to feel this way and no-one had bothered to explain why. And if they asked her how she felt, if they did lend an ear, its debt would no doubt be without interest or attention.

  The little girl looked at The Father in the same way that he had looked at The Woman and at The Husband. She had been made to feel a fear, but she did not attend his direction as a child who had just escaped the cunning invite of a monster’s charm. She looked at him with no learned derogation. Her eyes did not speak, “That is a monster, remember its outline, remember its scent and remember the clothes that it wears.”

  She didn’t look at him with studious intent, as she might have done, a circle or a square or a hippopotamus; being learned of a shape and what it looked like and then remembering its name and what it sounded like and then the noises that it made and the things that it ate and what whether it was food, a pet or a monkey in a zoo.

  And she didn’t look at him as if she were learning what he was. She just looked at him. And then she looked up at her father and she tugged on his hand and then he looked down at her and he smiled, taking her hand and then looking back, over her shoulder. He had some clemency in his eyes. He didn’t at all seem angered. He looked worried as if the monster he saw sitting slumped upon a chair were the monster he feared that one day or another, he might be unfortunate enough to become.

  She had told him.

  There was no doubt.

  The Husband leaned down to his daughter. She was stretching her arms upwards and making crablike gestures with her hands. He lifted her up and onto his shoulders and the girl squealed jovially, so much so that every passerby turned and their surprise changed into smiles as they watched the girl twisting about on her father’s shoulders, the frenetic beam of her eyes, lighting their way through the endless drizzle.

  The Father stared not at the girl, as everyone else did, he stared at The Husband’s hands and how they curled around his daughter’s ankles. He was wondering if The Husband felt as unsure as he used to and whether he thought that the girl might fall at any second, and if he could only rest from his worry when she was asleep and safe from herself.

  And then he thought of Korine, standing in the rain with her broken, pink umbrella and her long fringe, matted across her rosy cheeks. And he wondered to himself, “Is this how other fathers feel? Am I the only one who feels this way?”

  Because inside, he didn’t feel like a father. He didn’t even know what one should feel like. He still felt like a boy, waiting to become a man.