Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  Yani’s soft face had been pinched that day with anxiety over Kwamla. “What can I do?” she said. “He eats almost nothing, he refuses to see a diviner. I know he’s being bewitched, because our farm has done so well while others have done so poorly.”

  Barbara murmured sympathy—the poor man looked so thin and haunted. Suddenly there arose in a nearby compound the usual angry hubbub of Yao and Sunu, a newly married couple.

  Yani clicked her tongue, continued nursing Amwe. “Those two—their scars don’t match. The paths of their spirits rarely touch.” Barbara slipped a piece of paper into the typewriter and tapped away while Yani said, “In the best marriages the scarification designs become full during lovemaking, when the scars rub and fit together.” As if ashamed of her words, Yani stopped.

  “But you,” she said suddenly, staring hard at Barbara’s face, “how can you know your husband if you don’t know the movements of his spirit?”

  “Good question,” Barbara says now to the empty room. She rubs her back against the chair, imagining an Isono couple making love with those curving ridges of skin: their dark bodies elaborate mazes leading to each other, nipples rubbing against chest scars, fingers following the raised marks, the patterns channels for sweat.

  Barbara pushes away from the computer and stands up: after burrowing for so long into their culture, now the Isono are burrowing into her. Her back itches, just beneath her left shoulder blade where she can’t reach. She grabs a pen, bends her arm back awkwardly, and rubs until the tingling is satisfied.

  There’s a slight tickle just below her ribs, and before she scratches that too she imagines a design of ridges tingling her entire body—smooth, hairless nobs of skin hidden beneath her clothes. Why not turn the pen’s felt tip around and mark the itch? Barbara laughs nervously, but she pulls up her blouse and draws a nice, dark dot. Another itch rises up, just below her left breast, and she marks that spot with a deft touch of the pen. Then she strips off her blouse and bra and continues a careful catalogue of sudden itches that seem to have no relation to thought or intention.

  Barbara stares down at her torso, foolishly inked all over. Beauty marks indeed. The points scattered below her breasts and the wavering line leading across her stomach aren’t beautiful at all—merely signs of a lopsided and aimless spirit. What if we returned to the Isono with our bodies speckled with pen marks? We could tell them that in our country initiations are performed after marriage, that we only draw our spirits’ travels and then chart new paths once the old ones wear off. But Barbara imagines an elder asking, “Why do your spirits change their paths so often—why are they so restless?”

  The radiator begins to clank—it’s cold outside, and Martin could come home any moment. What would he say if he saw her like this? She pads to the bathroom and takes a shower. Dark inky stains slip down her body like bloody trails, and Barbara shudders. She scrubs and scrubs until it hurts.

  *

  Martin makes himself sit at his damned desk and tries to rework another sentence: “Isono farms are exclusionary space that admit no strangers. Here, apparently, is where one truly becomes Isono.” He puts down the pen. Kwamla would have felt guilty whether I found him killing those bugs or not, Martin tells himself, and I did keep my promise—I didn’t tell anyone, not even my wife. What more could I have done? On his last day in the village Martin spent hours at Kwamla’s compound. Sitting beside his friend and trying not to stare at his wasted body, Martin waited for a brief moment when they would be alone. “Please don’t die, please,” he’d finally whispered. “I’ll never tell anyone.” Stretched out on a palm frond chair, Kwamla merely offered a wan smile, his thin face a mask Martin couldn’t read.

  He stirs his coffee until it’s tepid. Behind him, Barbara clatters away at the computer—all day she’s been stuck to the chair. Martin sighs and puts on his heavy coat, though he doesn’t want to go out, afraid of where he’ll find himself this time. He walks to the door, sure that Barbara is watching him.

  “Where are you going?”

  His hand grips the doorknob but he doesn’t turn around. “Nowhere in particular—just a walk.”

  He hears her press the Save button. The computer’s contented grunting starts up.

  “Please don’t go.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Please don’t go.”

  Though Martin doesn’t reply, he doesn’t move either. “Do you want to come along?”

  “Why don’t you stay and work?”

  He turns and strides toward her, anger rising up from who knows where. “Just what makes you think I’m not working when I walk?”

  Barbara hesitates. “Your desk. When you’re gone I don’t see any writing being done.”

  “It’s in here,” he says, pointing at his head.

  “Oh, very good.” Barbara mimics his gesture and taps at her forehead. “Is this what you’ll do at your thesis defense? Think you’ll pass?”

  “Shut up. Worry about yourself. Keep pecking, pecking, pecking away!” His rage is a thing that must be shaken loose, and he sweeps stacks of papers from his desk. They scatter on the floor and Martin, so embarrassed, wants to escape the apartment even more. He slams the door behind him.

  It’s so cold outside—he can’t take these walks much longer, and he paces himself as if trying to hurry away from his unfairness to Barbara, breath fanning out and dissipating before him as he huffs down avenues and short alleys. No homeless people out tonight, thank God.

  Passing through a neighborhood of single-story boxes he hears the distant blare of a bell, an alarm, perhaps. Martin crosses a main road and follows the noise down a long stretch of small stores to a hat shop at the end of the block. It is an alarm—someone tried to break in.

  The window display is bathed in a gray sheen from the street lamps. Martin draws closer, looks inside. The dim light in the back of the store casts odd shadows, and those clusters of hat racks could be a forest found nowhere else: stunted trees weighted with strange, bulbous fruit. Watching his reflection in the window, Martin moves as if he’s actually skulking in there—he raises an arm and his shadowy fingers try to pluck a fruit from a branch. He stops. There he is—the thief in the field. He leans closer, presses his hand against its image, feels the plate glass vibrating from the alarm.

  A police car roars down the avenue, its light flashing. For a moment Martin stands there before the store as if exposed, caught, and then he dashes off, the siren wailing behind him. What am I doing to myself? he thinks, but he doesn’t slow down, racing into the shadows of a side street, then cutting across a dark yard.

  He crouches behind the shrubs along a darkened house and waits. Through the branches, eerie streaks of light and dark are cast by the police car’s cherry top as it passes. Then the lights go on in the window above him and Martin tears off, crossing an empty street. Another police car passes by the intersection and stops. He rushes away from its siren, across another backyard. Hopping a fence, he hurtles through the dark, down a line of trees—a sort of alley between backyards. I’m only guilty if I’m caught, he thinks, stray branches scratching his face. I have to get back home, back home. His chest aching from the cold, Martin stops at the thought of facing Barbara: how much longer can he keep his secret from her? I should just rip up those maps, just rip them up!

  Then Martin continues to run down that alley of trees until he comes to the dead end of a brick garage. Somewhere behind him a dog growls and barks. Kneeling in the dark, he grabs a smooth, oval stone, vaguely remembers an Isono song Barbara once mentioned to him—something about a drought—and waits for the sound of swift, padding feet. But when he hears the dog straining against a chain fence he cuts through a garden, a playground, and then an unlit parking lot.

  The sirens now seem closer, and Martin stops at the edge of the street, at first afraid to cross the open space. At the other side is a blanketed figure, curled up on the sidewalk over a library’s heating grate. The perfect place to hide, Martin thinks, sprin
ting across the street. He lies down on the steel grid and slips under an edge of the blanket.

  He smells stale breath and looks at the sleeping man beside him: his mouth is half open, a dark space where his front teeth should be. Trying not to move, Martin rests his face against the steel grid of the grate and feels the welcome heat rising up, his face tingling as he lies still, minute after minute slowly passing.

  The interlocking sirens suddenly sound louder, and the man beside him stirs and turns. Martin can see traces of the grate’s pattern marked on the man’s stubbly cheek: little squares echoing along the jaw line. Martin traces his fingers against the slight imprints on his own cheek, tries to imagine the design—his own beauty marks. Well, well, he thinks, this has been one hell of an initiation.

  A siren wails nearby and the man stirs again, his brow crinkled from troubles Martin can’t imagine: on a night like this he must have nowhere to go. Or perhaps this grate is his last, tiny spot of territory. Ah, trespassing again. Suddenly, desperately, he needs to confess to someone, anyone, he needs this stranger’s forgiveness. And if I do confess, Martin thinks, if he’d even listen to my story, would he let me stay here and hide? Martin has to know. The man smacks his cracked lips in half-sleep—he might wake at any moment—and Martin reaches out under the blanket, certain that a gentle nudge is all that’s needed.

  *

  Barbara stares mournfully at Martin’s pages scattered at her feet and wishes she hadn’t been so cruel. But did he have to leave? She’s so afraid she’ll mark herself up again while he’s gone. Barbara bends down, about to busy herself with picking up the batches of pages, when she notices rough diagrams of some sort: she reads measurements, the names of crops.

  They’re maps of the Isono farms. Somehow Martin managed to sneak in and draw these… and he hid them from her, she realizes, he hid them. Yet Barbara manages to check her anger—one of the maps lying next to her looks oddly familiar, though she has to turn it upside-down in order to read Martin’s angular scrawl in the corner that identifies Yani and Kwamla’s farm. Strange—now it doesn’t look familiar. Flipping it back again, Barbara leans over, peers closely until it seems her hands can feel the individual nubs of the carpet, and she shivers: it’s as if Yani is before her.

  To make sure, Barbara scrambles to the desk, searches through a folder for her own sketches, finds Yani’s scarifications, and compares them with the farm: detail by detail, they’re almost certainly the same design! She sits down, nearly breathless, and then, wondering if this pattern repeats elsewhere, she jumps up and quickly pages through one of her notebooks. She’d once mapped out Yani’s compound—would that match too?

  Her crude map doesn’t look anything like the other two, no matter which way she turns it. But there’s more, she knows there must be more. She pulls out her picture of Kwamla’s scarifications and places it beside the compound. Again, no match. But on a hunch Barbara turns the compound sketch upside-down, and the asymmetrical arrangement of courtyards and mud huts match the clusters of beaded scars: they’re virtually identical.

  Feeling as if secret paths are being cleared inside her, Barbara recalls the ritual for a new compound, when the entire village would walk through it, following the head of the household and his wife. And then the Isono, so far away, rear up to engulf Barbara and her faltering understanding: to walk down those convoluted alleyways, she thinks, must be like a spirit tracing the same paths inside the body. The Isono were making familiar landscapes for their spirits!

  But why upside-down? She arranges the designs on the coffee table and stares and stares. Nothing comes to her, but her own strange tracery of paths within makes Barbara willing to attempt anything now, and she picks up her sketch of Yani’s scars and places it against her own stomach. Trying to imagine Yani planning the arrangement of crops, she looks down, and there is the design of the farm. Of course—hadn’t Yani said that a spirit wishes to be born? So its paths should face down, like an infant in the womb. From an Isono’s perspective, this must be the true way to view the scars. Barbara walks back and forth across the room, anxious, shamed. My god, I drew all the designs the wrong way. Why didn’t anyone tell me?

  Because we were outsiders, strangers, she realizes with a rush of sadness. But now I know, now I know! Barbara flips on the computer and types every interpretation she can think of until her fingers begin to tingle, until she’s even sure she understands why outsiders aren’t allowed to enter the fields: the farms must be a kind of sacred space, where the spirits are reborn each year when the crops rise.

  The sudden wail of distant police sirens breaks Barbara’s concentration, and she stops and scans row after electronic row. She’s come up with speculation, nothing more. The wall of bright green words facing her on the dark screen looks like the forest that surrounded and locked the village into its own curious energies, but now suddenly lit up and phosphorescent in the night. Even the howling of those sirens outside sounds like some nocturnal forest animal.

  If only I’d known enough to ask the right questions, she thinks, would Yani have shared these secrets with someone who wasn’t Isono, or had our intimacy really been false, a joke? Imagining Yani in the room with her, just out of sight, Barbara asks, “Were we friends?” There’s no answer.

  And what about Martin’s betrayal? They were supposed to share all their data. How could he have possibly kept these maps from her, how can he leave her alone night after night in this apartment? He’s as much a stranger as Yani, Barbara thinks, yet he’s not here to answer questions either—who knows where he is or when he’ll return. She stares at the screen, as if those words might help her understand the mystery of her husband. She sighs, turns off the computer.

  Her eyes hurt. It’s time to sleep. Slowly Barbara prepares for bed. Again and again, as she brushes her teeth, washes her tired face and then undresses, she pauses, thinking she hears a key turning in the door.

  But even when she’s lying in the dark under the thick covers Martin still hasn’t returned. And then, as though she hasn’t wearily closed her eyes, Barbara is back in an Isono compound, but she’s not sure which one. The sky is black, moonless: on such a night, with just a few steps the village could suddenly become a dark maze. She’s lost.

  Or perhaps Martin is lost and she’s searching for him. Barbara feels her way forward cautiously in the dark by touching the rough edges of the cool mud walls. A piece breaks off, but she can’t hear it fall. Barbara listens to the strange silence—no baby’s wail or distant laughter, no insistent insect hum from the forest. She hears Martin now—a sharp cough, almost like a door clicking open. She’s certain he’s looking for her too—there are his footsteps—but where are the compound’s corridors leading him? Barbara feels her way forward slowly, hoping that Martin is doing the same. At any moment he could be just around the next turn. And then, through the darkness, there’s his hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her as if she’s been asleep.

  The Pose

  In Isabel’s dream a baby floats inside her, in cushiony water that amplifies her heartbeat and stomach gurglings, even the faraway murmur of her already familiar voice. Her baby is a curled inner ear, but against such enveloping noise it folds slowly into its own silence, into a tiny, tightening knot. When Isabel feels a sharp cramp she knows what is shrinking within her. Desperate to draw her baby back from its vanishing, she coos, then cries, then screams out words of endearment until she awakes, still childless.

  Morning light slants through the blinds. Isabel hurries from the bed and her still-sleeping husband, as if she could escape this recurring dream that mimics her miscarriages, escape what it releases inside her. One morning just last week she wanted so badly to slam the windows of the house up and down and shatter each pane. Now Isabel stands near the top of the stairs and regards the throw rug at her feet, with its diagonal pattern of white Vs over a blue weave that seems like a flight of birds. Nudging a slipper under the rug’s tangled fringe, she’s tempted to kick it in the air and watch it
try to fly before it tumbles down.

  She resists the impulse and steps lightly over the rug, but a faint tick on the third stair down sounds like an infant’s hiccup and her feet are suddenly fluid, not her own. She bounds down the stairs to the kitchen, where she stops and stares at the white refrigerator door. How easy it would be to reach in, turn off the thermostat, and wait for everything to warm and spoil. If only she were working her register at Discount Palace, she could suppress these terrible impulses by ringing up lipstick, comic books, pliers, anything—but her next shift is two days away, and she needs to be distracted now. Isabel opens the white door carefully—an elaborate breakfast might be a good way to start the day, something Richard might actually notice when he finally wakes up.

  After she slips in the muffin tray and sets the dial, Isabel stares out at the street through the blinds. Soon the young women with their toddlers will stroll by: Doris and her weepy boy, Tammy’s girls, Marilyn and the twins—she could name and name them, and all just on this block—and none of them will even glance at her window as they pass.

  Upstairs, Richard’s morning noises begin—the slide of the closet door, the wooden tug of drawers—and she hurries to lay out the breakfast spread.

  *

  Richard enters the kitchen slowly, plucking at his shirt with his good hand—a bit of thread hangs from a loose button.

  “Good morning,” she whispers.

  “Morning, honey,” he says to the plate as he sits down, then scratches at the stubble on his chin. Why does he have to stop shaving whenever there’s a layoff?

  Isabel lifts the pitcher of orange juice. “It’s fresh,” she says, and Richard raises his glass, eyes tracing idly over the table. She slits open a corn muffin and holds out half. “For you,” she says, but he’s already dabbing toast into an egg yolk and doesn’t hear. His thin mouth moves so slowly he might as well be dreaming breakfast.