Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  But he was no war hero, no spy, no secret great notebook novelist; only a factory worker with no factory who’d exchanged a lathe machine for a mop and a bucket and pitying looks from faculty members. To the students, he was either invisible or an object to mock.

  No, I don’t remember your name. I don’t remember my name, but what does it matter now? Our names, like our flesh, were only a façade, an illusion to be embraced, a falsehood to be cherished and mistaken for purpose, for meaning. We have—had—what remained of our bodies to remind us of that, beneath the floor, flesh long decayed and eaten away, two sets of bones with skulls frozen forever into a rictus grin as if laughing at the absurdity of the world we’re no longer part of.

  Let’s not stay here for now, let’s move outside, round and round this house, watching as the living ghosts of everyone who once passed through the door come and go in reverse; watch as the seasons go backwards, sunshine and autumn leaves and snow-clogged streets and sidewalks coming and going in a blink and…and let’s stop here. I want to stop here, in the backyard, just for a few moments, just to see his face as it was on that night.

  Watch; see how pretty it all is. Murky light from a glowing street lamp snakes across the darkness to press against the glass. The light bleeds in, across a kitchen table, and glints off the beer can held by a man whose once-powerful body has lost its commanding posture under the weight of compiling years; he’s overweight from too many beers, over-tense from too many worries, and overworked far too long without a reprieve. Whenever this man speaks, especially when he’s at work, especially when he’s holding the mop and bucket, his eyes never have you, and even if they do you cannot return his gaze; his eyes are every lonely journey you have ever taken, every unloved place you’ve ever visited, every sting of guilt you’ve ever felt. This man’s eyes never have you, they only brush by once, softly, like a cattail or a ghost, then fall shyly toward the ground in some inner contemplation too sad to be touched by a tender thought or the delicate brush of another’s care. To look at him closely, it’s easy to think that God has forgotten his name.

  He lifts the can of beer to his mouth. It feels good going down, washing away the bad taste in his mouth that always follows him home from work. He drains the can, sighs, goes to the sink and pours himself a glass of water. He is thinking about his days as a child, about the afternoons now forgotten by everyone but him, afternoons when he’d go to the movies for a nickel and popcorn was only a penny. He thinks about how he used to take his daughter to the movies all the time when she was still a little girl and her mother, his wife, was still alive. He remembers how much fun they used to have, and he longs for the chance to do something like that again, something that will put a bright smile on his daughter’s face and make himself feel less of a failure.

  He stands at the sink listening to the sounds of the house, its soft creaks and groans, still settling after all these years. He thinks about his dead wife and doesn’t know how he’ll be able to face the rest of his life without her by his side. She was a marvel to him. After all the mistakes he’s made—and, God, he’s made a lot, no arguing that—her respect and love for him never lessened.

  He tries to not think about the things his daughter has done for him the past few months, things he didn’t ask her to do, but things she’s done nonetheless. Just to help him relax, to help him sleep.

  And then he hears a sound from his daughter’s room. A squeak of bedsprings. A soft sigh. The muffled laughter of a boy.

  His face becomes a slab of granite and the broken things behind his eyes shatter into even more fragments. Unaware that he’s doing it, he reaches over and picks up the hammer he left lying on the kitchen counter last night while he tried repairing the loose cupboard door above the sink. He turns and marches toward his daughter’s bedroom, knowing what he’s going to find when he opens the door and—

  —what? All right, just this once, we won’t watch the rest. He wasn’t really there. Anyway. I’m glad we know that now. He just wanted to scare us but his frustration, his anger, his heartbrokenness took control.

  Let’s pretend that we still have hands, and let’s pretend to hold them as we play “Ring Around the Rosie” once more, going back just a little more, a year, maybe less, because I’ve been saving this for you, for this anniversary, this most special anniversary. Why is it special? That’s a secret I need to keep just a little while longer. Take my hand and let’s go, round and round and round and—

  —stop right here. Yes, this is the place, the time, exactly right.

  There’s a young girl of seventeen sleeping in her bed who, for a moment, wakes in the night to hear the sound of weeping from the room across the hall. She rises and walks as softly as she can to her door, opens it, and steps into the hall.

  “….no, no, no…” chokes the voice in the other room.

  “Daddy?” she says.

  “….no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please…”

  She knows he can’t hear her, that he’s dreaming again of the night his wife, her mother, closed her eyes for the last time, of the way he took her emaciated body in his arms and kissed her lips and stroked her hair and begged her to wake up, wakeup, please, honey, what am I supposed to do without you, wake up, please….

  She takes a deep breath, this seventeen-year-old motherless girl, and slowly opens the door to this room stinking of loneliness and grief. She takes a few hesitant steps, the moonlight from the window in the hallway casting bars of suffused light across the figure of her father as if imprisoning him in the dream. She stares at him, not knowing what to do.

  Then his eyes open for a moment and he sees her standing in the doorway.

  “Arlene,” he says, his voice still thick with tears. “Arlene, is that you?”

  “Shhh,” says the young girl, suddenly so very cold at hearing him speak her mother’s name in the night. “It’s just a bad dream, go back to sleep.”

  “…I can’t sleep so hot, not without you…”

  She can hear that he’s starting to drift away again, but she does not move back into the hallway; instead, she takes a few steps toward the bed where her father sleeps, tried to sleep, fails to sleep, sleeps in sadness, sleeps in nightmare, wakes in dark loneliness, drifts off in shame and regret.

  For the first time, she realizes the pain he’s in, the pain he’s always been in, one way or another, this man who was no war hero, no spy, no secret notebook novelist, just a sad and decent and so very lonely man, and she feels useless, insufficient, foolish, and inept; but most of all, she feels selfish and sorry.

  Her eyes focus on one bar of suffused moonlight that points like a ghostly finger from her father’s sleeping form to the closet door a few feet away, and she follows the beam, opening the door that makes no sound, and she sees it hanging from the hook on the inside of the door: her mother’s nightgown, the one she’d been wearing on the night she died.

  “Oh, Daddy…” she says, her voice weak and thin.

  Still, her hand reaches out to lift the gown from the hook and bring it close to her face. Her mother loved this nightgown, its softness, its warmth, the way it smelled when it came out of the dryer after a fresh washing, and this girl holds the garment up to her face and pulls in a deep breath, smelling the scent of her mother’s body and the stink of the cancer still lingering at the edges.

  From the bed her father whimpers, “….no, no, no, oh, God, honey, please…”

  And she knows now what she can do for him, what she has to do for him, and so she removes her nightshirt and slips on her mother’s death-gown, crosses to the bed, and slips beneath the sweat-drenched covers.

  “…Arlene…?’ says her father, not opening his eyes.

  “Shhh, honey, it’s me. Go back to sleep. Just a bad dream, that’s all.”

  His hand, so calloused and cracked, reaches out to touch her face. She lies down on her mother’s pillow and is shocked to find that it still carries the ghost-scent of her perfume. She remembers that her parents liked to spo
on, so she rolls over and soon feels her father’s body pressing against her, his legs shifting, his arm draping over her waist as he unconsciously fits himself against her. After a moment, she feels his face press against the back of her—her mother’s—gown, and he pulls in a deep breath that he seems to hold forever before releasing it.

  She does not sleep much that night, but her father sleeps better than he has in years.

  We can watch now, you and I, and see his face, see my father’s face when he wakes the next morning and sees her next to him. Shadows of gratitude, of shame, of self-disgust, of admiration and love flicker across his face as he stares down at her now-sleeping form. He feels her stir beneath his arm and realizes with a start that his hand is cupping one of her breasts, the way he used to cup his wife’s breast before the cancer came and sheeted everything in sweat and rot and pain.

  Still, his hand lingers for a few moments as he realizes how very much like her mother’s body does his daughter’s feel. Then he feels her stir, waking, and closes his eyes, pulling his hand away at the last moment.

  His daughter rolls over and sees how deeply asleep he is, and realizes that she’s now given herself a duty that can never spoken aloud, only repeatedly fulfilled. Only in this way can she comfort him, help him, thank him.

  She slowly rises from the bed, crossing to the closet where he replaces her mother’s gown on its hook, then slips back into her own nightshirt and leaves, closing the door behind her.

  As soon as the door closes, her father opens his eyes and stares at the empty space in the bed next to him that now hums with her absence. So much like her mother. So much like her mother. So much like her mother.

  This goes on for nearly a year, her assuming the role of her dead mother in the night so her father can sleep. In a way, both know what’s going on, what they have become, the roles they are playing, but neither ever speaks of it aloud. And even though nothing physical ever occurs between them in the night as they keep the grief at bay, a part of each of them falls a little bit in love with the other. In this way they become closer than they had ever been, and though the house is never again a happy place, the shadows begin to retreat a little…until the night when her father hears the muffled laughter of a boy coming from his daughter’s bedroom and storms in with a hammer that he does not intend to use but does, nonetheless, then collapsing to the floor afterward, vomiting and shaking with the realization of what he’s done, what he’s become, and it takes only a few frenzied hours for him to mop up the blood and tissue and then tear up the floorboards and move the piles of human meat underneath, burying his daughter in her mother’s nightgown. He takes great care replacing the boards, hammering them into place, then covering them with an area rug taken from the living room before gathering a few things—some clothes, what little cash is in the house, some food—and stumbling out into the night.

  Shhh, listen—do you hear it? That sound like old nails being wrenched from wood? The front door is opening, someone is coming in, someone who walks in a heavy heel-to-toe fashion as if afraid the earth might open up between each step and swallow him whole.

  We watch as the old, hunched, broken thing that was once my father makes his way toward my bedroom. He carries a battery-operated lantern with him, a small backpack, and so much regret that its stench reaches us even in this non-place we wander.

  He sets down the lantern, then his backpack, removing a hammer from inside. The same hammer.

  In the light we see how he’s changed. Well over seventy-five, and the years have not been kind. He looks so much like Mother did toward the end, a living skeleton covered in gray skin, slick with sickness. He moves aside what little remains of the rug and sets to work on the floorboards, which offer little resistance, and within a few minutes, he is staring down at us.

  “I’m home,” he whispers.

  Hello, Daddy. I’ve missed you.

  He sits down, his legs dropping down beneath the hole in the floor, his feet resting between us.

  “I thought about the two of you every day,” he says. “I’ve dreamed about the two of you every night…those nights that I can sleep. Ain’t too many of those, especially lately.”

  It’s all right, Daddy. I understand. We understand.

  He reaches into his backpack and removes something we can’t quite make out, because he’s deliberately keeping it hidden from our gazes. We’re back in what remains of our bodies now, staring up at this lost, broken, sick old man whose face is drenched in sweat, in pain, in the end of things.

  “I had no right,” he says. “I had no right to love you like that, in that way. I had no right to be jealous, Melissa.”

  Melissa. So that was my name. How pretty.

  “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to do it.” And he brings the object into the light so we can see it. But we already knew, didn’t we, you and I? His old gun from the war where he never was a hero, just a simple foot soldier who helped fight the enemy and serve his country before coming home to marry a good woman and build a life for his family.

  He begins to speak again: “Oh, honey, I…” But the rest of it dies in his throat, clogged by phlegm and failure and guilt.

  It’s all right, Daddy. We understand. We’re not mad anymore.

  But he doesn’t hear us. He clicks off the safety, jacks a round into the chamber, and pushes the business end so deep into his mouth that for a moment we expect him to swallow the entire weapon.

  He hesitates for only a moment, but that gives us enough time to move, to rise up as we are now and open our arms as he squeezes the trigger, and we are with him, and he is with us, and as the human meat explodes from the back of his head we lean forward and take him into our embrace, cold flesh and tissue meeting bone and rot, and he embraces us both, does my father, and we hold him close as his blood soaks into the tattered, rotted remains of my mother’s nightgown, and we can smell her, she is within us, around us, part of us, and in the last few moments before we pull my father down into hole with us, I find some remnant of my voice in the release of his death, and have just long enough to say, “I forgive you, daddy, And I love you.”

  Then he is in the hole with us and in this way are our sins of omission at last atoned.

  We remember the way we mingled as we decayed, how we were then found and identified; we remember the way Uncle Sonny claimed our bodies—even yours, my teenaged lover whose name I still can’t remember—and had us taken to the place of cardboard coffins with plywood bottoms where we were fed one at a time into the furnace, our tissues charred and bones reduced to powder. We remember the way the workmen swept us into the containers and then into the machine that shook back and forth, filtering out gold fillings and pins once inserted to hold hips together.

  And now we are here, all three of us. Our new home; our hushed home; our forever home.

  And you are welcomed here, I tell them.

  Mrs. Winters thinks Melissa sounds like a nice girl, the type of girl her grandson might have married if he hadn’t died in Vietnam, and oh, by the way, don’t let me forget, young lady, to tell you all about my son who was a pilot, who flew so high above the clouds you would have thought he was some kind of angel.

  I’d like that, Melissa replies. I smile, insomuch as I am capable of performing such a thing, and I continue through my corridors with their marble floors, looking through my glass doors at those who reside behind, and I know that I will never know the loneliness and hurt of those who reside here, for I will always have these hushed and hallowed nights, I will always have those who rest here within me, and—most of all—I will until eternity is no more have the tales the ashes tell.

  Just Out of Reach

  Introduction by Chesya Burke

  One of the most exciting things about the future is that it is a distant, unreachable period of time for which none of us can ever fully know and, more importantly, can never understand. The future is always just out of reach, whether it is ten years from now or just a few moments away. We all race
toward the future, often ignoring or putting off the present, but knowing full well that it is a race that we, as individuals, can never win. Our children and grandchildren will one day reach the future but we simply cannot.

  Unless, of course, we find ourselves in the pages of a Gary Braunbeck story. Then the future can appear instantly, so that if we tilt our heads just right, we can glimpse a shimmer of it within the image of an old Polaroid photo. And we know – we know for a if only for a split second, that there are more possibilities within that future than we want to admit. That things can go so terribly wrong that in order to protect ourselves, we simply choose to forget.

  In that way, Braunbeck does not offer a safe, Utopic future for his characters, but instead an unnerving one from which there is no escape other than their own limited memories. So sit back, ready the covers, and await the future. I have been where you are now, in my past.

  Just Out Of Reach

  Before my face the picture hangs,

  That daily should put me in mind,