Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  “Okay. Sorry about that. Forty-fucking-three years old and crying like a goddamn baby for its bottle. I’m losing ground here, folks. Losing ground. Because when I look out at Laura, there at her desk, and I remember Sarah Grant walking up to her family’s home, and realize how many of the dead have been able to come back, have been able to walk or drive or in some cases take the goddamn bus back home…when I think of how they recognize us, how they remember us…you see, the thing is, Laura used to always bring in home-made chocolate chip cookies once a week. No one made cookies like Laura, I mean nobody! She’d always wrap them individually in wax paper, lay them out on a tray, cover the tray with tin-foil, and put a little Christmas-type bow on top.

  “There’s a tray of home-made cookies setting out there on her desk, all wrapped and covered and sporting its bow. Half her fucking brain is gone, splattered over a wall in her house…and she still remembered. Is this getting through to you, folks? The dead remember! Everything. It doesn’t matter if they’ve been in the ground ten years or crawled out of drawer in the morgue before anyone could identify them—they all remember! All of them!

  “Is this sinking in? And doesn’t it scare the piss out of you? Look; if they can crawl out of a grave after ten years of being worm-food and volleyball courts for maggots and still remember where they lived and who they loved and…and all of it…then it means those memories, those intangible bits and pieces of consciousness and ether that we’re told are part and parcel of this mythical, mystical thing called a soul…it means it never went anywhere after they died. It didn’t return to humus or dissipate into the air or take possession of bright-eyed little girls like in the movies…it just hung around like a vagrant outside a bus station on a Friday night. Which means there’s nothing after we die. Which means there is no God. Which means this life is it—and ain’t that a pisser? Karma is just the punch-line to a bad stand-up routine, and every spiritual teaching ever drilled into our brain is bullshit. Ha! Mark Twain was right, after all—remember the ending of The Mysterious Stranger?—there is no purpose, no reason, no God, no devil, no angels or ghosts or ultimate meaning; existence is a lie; prayer is an obscene joke. There is just…nothing; life and love are only baubles and trinkets and ornaments and costumes we use to hide this fact from ourselves. The universe was a mistake, and we, dear friends…we were a fucking accident. That’s what it means…and that makes me so…sick. Because I…I was kind of hoping, y’know? But I guess hope is as cruel a joke as prayer, now.

  “Still, it’s funny, don’t you think…that in the midst of all this rot and death there’s still a kind-of life. You see it taking root all around us. I suppose that’s why so many of us have found ceiling beams that will take our weight, or loaded up the pump-action shotguns and killed our families before turning the gun on ourselves…or jumped from tall buildings, or driven our cars head-on into walls at ninety miles an hour…or-or-Or-OR!

  “There’s a window behind me that has this great view of the hillside. In the middle of the field behind the station there’s this huge old oak tree that’s probably been there for a couple of thousand years. Yesterday, a dead guy walked into the field and up to that tree and just stood there looking at it, admiring. I wondered if maybe he’d proposed to his wife under this tree, or had something else really meaningful—pardon my language—happen beneath that oak. Whatever it was, this was the place he’d come back to. He sat down under the oak and leaned back against its trunk. He’s still there, as far as I can make out.

  “Because we found out, didn’t we, that as soon as the dead come home, as soon as they reach their destination, as soon as they stop moving…they take root. And they sprout. Like fucking kudzu, they sprout. The stuff grows out of them like slimy vines, whatever it is, and starts spreading. I can’t see the tree any longer for all the…the vines that are covering it. Oh, there are a couple of places near the top where they haven’t quite reached yet, but those branches are bleach-white now, the life sucked out of them. The vines, when they spread, they grow thicker and wider…in places they blossom patches of stuff that looks like luminescent pond-scum. But the vines, they’re pink and moist, and they have these things that look like thorns, only these thorns, they wriggle. And once all of it has taken root—once the vines have engulfed everything around them and the patches of pond-scum have spread as far as they can without tearing—once all that happens, if you watch for a while, you can see that all of it is…is breathing. It expands and contracts like lungs pulling in, and then releasing air…and in between the breaths…if that’s what they are…everything pulses steadily, as if it’s all hooked into some giant, invisible heart…and the dead, they just sit there, or stand there, or lie there, and bit by bit they dissolve into the mass…becoming something even more organic than they were before…something new…something…hell, I don’t know. I just calls ‘em as I sees ‘em, folks.

  “Laura’s sprouted, you see. The breathing kudzu has curled out of her and crawled up the walls, across the ceiling, over the floor…about half the broadcast booth’s window is covered with it, and I can see that those wriggling thorns have mouths, because they keep sucking at the glass. I went up to the glass for a closer look right after I got back from the bathroom, and I wish I hadn’t…because you know what I saw, folks? Those little mouths on the thorns…they have teeth…so maybe…I don’t know…maybe in way we are going to be eaten…or at least ingested…but whatever it is that’s controlling all of this, I get the feeling that it’s some kind of massive organism that’s in the process of pulling all of its parts back together, and it won’t stop until it’s whole again…because maybe once it’s whole…that’s its way of coming home. Maybe it knows the secret of what lies beyond death…or maybe it is what lies beyond death, what’s always been there waiting for us, without form…and maybe it finally decided that it was lonely for itself, and so jump-started our loved ones so it could hitch a ride to the best place to get started.

  “I’m so tired. There’s no unspoiled food left from the vending machines—did I mention that I took a baseball bat to those things five—almost six days ago now? I guess the delivery guy never got here to re-stock them. Candy bars, potato chips, and shrink-wrapped tuna salad sandwiches will only get you so far. I’m so…so tired. The kudzu is scrabbling at the base of the door…I don’t think it can actually break through or it would have by now…but I’m thinking, what’s the point, y’know? Outside, the field and hillside are shimmering with the stuff—from here it almost looks as if the vines are dancing—and in a little while it will have reached the top of the broadcast tower…and then I really will be talking to myself.

  “If anyone out there has any requests…now’s the time to phone them in. I’ll even play the seventeen-minute version of ‘In A Gadda-Da-Vida’ if you ask me. I always dug that drum solo. I lost my virginity to that song…the long version, not the three-minute single, thanks for that vote of confidence in my virility. I wish I could tell you that I remembered her name…her first name was Debbie, but her last name…pffft! It’s gone, lost to me forever. So…so many things are lost to me forever now…lost to all of us forever…still waiting on those requests…please, please, PLEASE will somebody out there call me? Because in a few minutes, the vines and thorns will have covered the window and those little mouths with their little teeth are all I’ll be able to see and I’m…I’m hanging on by a fucking thread here, folks…so….

  “…three minutes and forty seconds. I am going to play ‘The Long and Winding Road’, which is three minutes and forty seconds long, and if by the end of the song you have not called me, I am going to walk over to the door of the broadcast booth, say a quick and meaningless prayer to a God that was never there to hear it in the first place, and I am going to open that door and step into those waiting, breathing, pulsing vines.

  “So I’m gonna play the song here in a moment. But first, let’s do our sworn FCC duty like good little drones who are stupid enough to think anyone cares anymore, and we’ll jus
t let these six pathetic words serve as my possible epitaph:

  “We now pause for station identification….”

  Part Three:

  SOMETIME THEN

  Sometime then there will be every kind of a history of every one who ever can or is or was or will be living. Sometime then there will be a history of every one from their beginning to their ending. Sometime then there will be a history of all of them, of every kind of them, of every one, of every bit of living they ever have in them, of them when there is never more than a beginning to them, of every kind of them, of every one when there is very little beginning and then there is an ending, there will then sometime be a history of everything that ever was or is or will be them, of everything that was or is or will be all of any one or all of all of them …

  —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

  “Who’ll tell the story?” asked the child to the magician. “People should be told.”

  “Never mind,” said the old man, smiling like a beaver. “For centuries and centuries no one will believe it, and then all at once it will be so obvious only a fool would take the trouble to write it all down.”

  —John Gardner, Freddy’s Book

  “Hello. I must be going.”

  —Groucho Marx

  While I—unlike several of the powerhouse contributors to this collection—am far from a household name, I am lucky to have achieved a certain “cult” status in the field, most of it based on my output as a short-story writer; I have been luckier still that a handful of these stories have come to be referred to as either “…classic” or a “…classic in the making” (a phrase that I’ve never really understood but am always grateful for the sentiment behind whenever it is employed). This collection began to emerge as something of a mini-career retrospective (not the original intent), so I thought it might be nice to close the proceedings with a selection of my stories that have attained a certain popularity among readers. I won’t be so arrogant and self-aggrandizing as to call this final selection a compilation of my “greatest hits” or anything asinine like that; it is, rather, a selection of stories that I consider to be among my best work, and that best represent both how I write and what I often choose to write about (although I suspect by this point you’ve already got a pretty good grasp of the latter). These are the stories that I would offer to a person who’s never read my work before, and these are also the stories that many readers have told me are among their favorites. I’ll let you be the judge.

  Okay, that’s it for me. Thank you for spending your time with these stories. I hope you liked most of them. I’m off now to try and get better at this holy chore, and I hope that when next we meet you’ll expect even better from me, and I hope to deliver on those expectations.

  Rami Temporales

  “When I face myself I’m surprised to see

  That the man I knew don’t look nothing like me...”

  —John Nitzinger, “Motherload”

  It started with the woman in the restaurant and her hysterectomy story.

  I was alone in my favorite booth at the Sparta, enjoying the last of my cheeseburger, when I happened to glance up.

  “...and like I said before, she never listens to me—hell, she never listens to anyone when they try to tell her something for her own good. She’s been that way all her life and look what it’s got her.”

  She was at a booth toward the back of the restaurant, while mine was up front on the same side; I sat facing the rear, she facing the front, so she was looking right at me and there was no place to hide.

  “I kept telling her, ‘Sandy, your frame is too small to chance having another baby. You almost didn’t squeeze out little Tyler the first time, there’s no way you can have another one.’ I think she knew I was right but she wasn’t about to have an abortion, not with her Ronnie being the way he is—you know, all manly and pro-life: ‘No wife of mine is going to kill our baby. I’ll not have people gossiping about me like that.’”

  Her tone suggested that the two of us had just resumed a previously-interrupted conversation. For a moment I thought she might be talking to someone seated across from her in the booth, a short person, or even a child—though why anyone would want to speak to a child about abortion was beyond me. I then thought she might be wearing one of those new cell phones, the type which you hang off your ear and have a small fiber-optic microphone, but, no: she was looking at and talking to me.

  “I know she thinks I’m a nib-shit, but that girl has no idea how terrible he treats her. Or maybe she does and figures she ain’t gonna find a better man so she puts up with it for the kids.” She was on the verge of tears. “I mean, Ronnie forced her to have that second baby, even though he knew there was a chance it was going to...y’know, mess up her insides. She almost died. They had to do an emergency Caesarian, and by then she was so tore up there wasn’t no choice but to do a hysterectomy. She’s only twenty-three and now she’ll never be able to have more children—and Sandy loves children. She spoils that Tyler rotten, and she’ll do the same for little Katherine. But she...” The woman leaned forward; secret time. I found myself leaning toward her, as well.

  “...she bleeds a lot sometimes,” she whispered. “Not her period—she don’t have those no more. It’s on account of her still being raw in there from everything. And sex—forget that. She don’t even want to look at Ronnie, let alone share her bed and body with him. But that doesn’t stop him, no sir. If he wants it, he takes it, and who cares if she’s doubled over with cramps and bleeding for two days after. She ain’t a wife to him, she’s just a possession, so to him it ain’t rape. Them kids don’t hardly exist for him at home—oh, if there’s an office party or picnic or something like that, he’s Robert Young on Father Knows Best, but the rest of the time...” She shook her head. “You know, I seen him just today. Walking into the Natoma restaurant with a woman from his office. Had his hand on her ass. ‘Working late on the new contract proposals’ my ass! And after all he’s done to her.”

  “He...” I couldn’t believe I was asking this. “...forces her to...?”

  “All the time.”

  “My God.” The whole of Sandy’s life suddenly played out in my mind and I felt soul-sick and ineffectual as I witnessed it; Sandy: under- to uneducated (as so many young women in this city are), no dreams left, working nine hours a day in some bakery or laundry or grocery store, then coming home to a husband who didn’t much like her and children who—though she might love them and spoil them rotten now—would grow up following Daddy’s example to not much respect her, and before twenty-five she’d be wearing a scarf around her head to cover the prematurely gray hair, read only the saddest stories in the newspaper, and spend any free time she might have watching prime-time soap operas and getting twelve pounds heavier with each passing year. I think I’d’ve known her on-sight, no introductions necessary.

  “That poor girl,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” the woman said, “I got half a nerve to just go over there with my truck and tell her to pack herself and the kids up and come stay with me. Maybe I should.”

  “That sounds like a splendid idea.”

  “Does it?” Look at how alive her eyes became when she heard this; goodness me, somebody actually thinks I had a splendid idea.

  She finished her coffee, took the last bite of her apple pie, then gathered up her purse and resolve and walked up to me, her hand extended. “Thank you for listening to me.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Still there were tears trying to sneak up on her. “I just feel so bad for her, y’know?”

  “But she isn’t alone. She has you.”

  Her grip tightened. “That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in a while—and you’re right. She does have me. And I got a truck and she’s got the day off.”

  “Ronnie’s working late, I take it?”

  “Bastard’s always working late.” She smiled at me, then released my hand, leaned down, and kissed my cheek. “Thanks,
mister. I really appreciate you lettin’ me go on about this. I hope it wasn’t no bother, it’s just, well...you just got one of those faces, y’know?”

  One of those faces.

  How many times in my life have I heard that?

  I don’t avoid contact with strangers. It would do no good. They always come up to me. Always. Take any street in this city at a busy hour, fill it with people rushing to or from work or shopping or a doctor’s appointment, add the fumes and noises of traffic, make it as hectic and confusing as you wish—I am inevitably the one people will stop and ask for directions, or for the time, or if I know a good restaurant. “You got of those faces,” they’ll say. I have had homeless people politely make their way through dozens of other potential benefactors to get to me and ask for change. I always give what I can spare, and they always tell me they knew I’d help them out because—say it with me...

  This is why I’m thought of as friendly person. Ask anyone who thinks they know me: “You want to know about Joel? Oh, he’s a great guy, friendly as they come, the best listener in the world, sincerely.”

  Truth is, human contact scares holy hell out of me. I’m always worried that I’ll say the wrong thing or misinterpret a gesture or infer an attraction that’s not there. So I listen, even though most of the time I want to slink off into the woodwork, especially when the stories are troubling.