Halfway Down the Stairs

by Gary A Braunbeck

  "Remember now?" whispered Lucy.

  "...yes. I'd kept my drawing a secret After Dad died, Mom didn't spend much time with me because...because she said I looked too much like him. This was the first time in ages that she'd come into my room. It was the first time in ages I'd seen her sober."

  The woman put a hand on the little boy's shoulder and said something to him.

  My chest hitched.

  I didn't want to remember this; it was easier to just stay angry with her.

  "What happened?"

  "She looked through all the drawings and...she started to cry. I was still mad as hell at her because of the way she'd been treating me, the way she never hugged me or kissed me or said she loved me, the way she spent all her time drinking...but she sat there with my drawings, shaking her head and crying and I felt so embarrassed. I finally asked her what the big deal was and she looked up at me and said—"

  "—said that you had a great talent and were going to be famous for it someday. She knew this from looking at those drawings. She knew you were going to grow up to be what you are today. She told you that she was very proud of you and that she wanted you to keep on drawing, and maybe you could even start making up stories to go with the pictures—"

  "—because she used to know someone who did that when she was a little girl," I said. "She said that would be nice because...oh, Christ!...it would be nice if I'd do that because it would make her feel like someone else besides her was remembering her childhood."

  Old Bet gently lowered me to the ground. My legs gave out and I slammed ass-first into the dirt, shaking. "I remember how much that surprised me, and I just sat there staring at her. She looked so proud. Her smile was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen and I think—no, no, wait—I know I smiled back at her. I remember that very clearly."

  "And that was it," said Lucy. "That was her moment. Do you have any idea how much it all meant to her? The drawings and your smile? When you smiled at her she knew for certain that you were going to be just what you are. And for that moment, she felt like it was all because of her. The world was new again." She brushed some hair out of my eyes. "Do you remember what happened next?"

  "I went over to give her a hug because it felt like I'd just gotten my mother back, then I smelled the liquor on her breath and got angry and yelled at her and made her leave my room."

  "But that doesn't matter, don't you see? What matters is the moment before. That's what's waiting for her. That's what she's forgotten."

  "...Jesus..."

  "You have to remember one thing, Andy. It wasn't your fault. None of it. You were only a child. Promise me that you'll remember that?"

  "I'll try."

  She smiled. "Good. Everything's all right then."

  I rose and embraced her, then patted Old Bet. The elephant reached out and lifted Lucy onto its back.

  "Are you going back without Mom?" I asked.

  She tsk-ed at me and put her hands on her hips, an annoyed little girl. "Dummy! I told you once. We aren't allowed to take people. Only remind them. Except this time, we had to ask you to help us."

  "Are you...are you her guardian angel?"

  She didn't hear me as Old Bet turned around and the two of them lumbered off, eventually vanishing into the layers of mist that rose from the distant edge of the field.

  The chill latched onto my bones and sent me jogging back inside for hot coffee.

  Gina was already brewing some as I entered the kitchen. She was wearing my extra bathrobe. Her hair was mussed and her cheeks were flushed and I'd never seen such a beautiful sight. She looked at me, saw something in my face, and smiled. "Look at you. Hm. I must be better than I thought."

  I laughed and took her hand, pulling her close, feeling the warmth of her body, the electricity of her touch. The world was new again. At least until the phone rang.

  A man identifying himself as Chief something-or-other from the Cedar Hill Fire Department asked me if I was the same Andrew Dysart whose mother lived at—

  —something in the back of my head whispered Africa.

  Good little girls.

  Going home.

  * * *

  My new book, After the Elephant Ballet, was published five weeks ago. The dedication reads: "To my mother and her own private Africa; receive the world prepared for you." Gina has started a scrapbook for the reviews, which have been the best I've ever received.

  The other day when Gina and I were cleaning the house ("A new wife has to make sure her husband hasn't got any little black books stashed around," she'd said) I came across an old sketch pad: MY DrAWiNG TaLlAnt, bY ANdy DySArT, age 6. It's filled with pictures of rockets and clowns and baseball players and scary monsters and every last one of them is terrible.

  There are no drawings of angels.

  ANdY DySArT, age 6 didn't believe in them because he'd never seen proof of their existence.

  In the back there's a drawing of a woman wearing an apron and washing dishes. She's got a big smile on her face and underneath are the words: MY mOM, thE nICE lAdy.

  The arson investigators told me it was an accident. She had probably been drinking and fallen asleep in bed with a cigarette still burning. One of them asked if Mom had kept any stuffed animals on her bed. When I asked why, he handed me a pair of small, curved, fired-clay tusks.

  On the way to Montreal for our honeymoon, Gina took a long detour. "I have a surprise for you."

  We went to Somers, New York.

  An elephant named Old Bet actually existed. There really is a shrine there. Circus performers make pilgrimages to visit her grave. We had a picnic at the base of the gorgeous green hill where the grave lies. Afterward I laid back and stared at the clouds and thought about guardian angels and a smiling woman and her smiling little boy who's holding a drawing pad and I wondered what Bradbury would do with that image.

  Then decided it didn't matter.

  The moment waits. Still.

  I go along, thud-thud.

  Cocteau Prayers

  The snow had begun falling again, lightly, but seemed heavier because of the sharp, steady wind blowing in from the east. The cemetery looked fresh, almost pristine; a newly completed ice sculpture. The mourners clustered together near the head of the grave, their backs to the wind. Looking at them with their hair and coats flowing forward, Michelle couldn’t shake the feeling that all of them were fighting against some force, unseen and unknown, that was trying to suck them into the ground. She walked quickly around the grave and the eight or nine floral arrangements positioned at the head, noticing as she did that someone (not her) had thought to send irises—Kate’s favorite flower. She took a place next to her uncle who, like most of the people assembled here, had his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets and was staring at the ground—not into the open grave but somewhere just to the right where a bit of soil could still be seen through the snow. A few people folded their arms across their chests and watched the sour sky, blinking against the new snowflakes that fluttered down and clung stubbornly to their eyelashes. Everyone stood in postures that seemed more distracted than grieving. Michelle looked around at all the faces, none of which would meet her gaze. It didn’t surprise her that Mom hadn’t shown up; she was either stoked on tranqs or bouncing off the walls, deep in the grip of a manic phase. Just as well; she and Michelle had never much gotten along and had only been courteous to each other out of respect for Kate’s feelings, even though her mother took every available opportunity to remind the two of them that she was disappointed in them: “Girls like you are supposed to be special. Isn’t that what all the books say? That twins are supposed to be special? What happened? You two are nothing like your older brother—he always makes me feel proud.”

  Michelle stared up at the sky, wondering if her sister were up there, looking down. She and Katie had always shared that special bond reserved for twins—knowing each other’s thoughts, being able to tell when the other was sick, or sad, or anxious…she wondered if she would somehow, now,
share Kate’s death; after all, hadn’t a part of her died along with her sister?

  It suddenly occurred to Michelle that everyone looked drugged, and she didn’t know what to make of it. Had they already wrung dry their grief? God. She felt as if she’d stepped into the fifth reel of some impenetrably enigmatic art film, one of those profoundly ponderous black & white meditation pieces where no one speaks for minutes on end, then some minor character no one has given a second thought to steps into camera range and starts paraphrasing Camus or Borges while the trees melt behind them: A head-on collision between Cocteau and Dali. Even the minister looked surreal, his face something that was hastily painted on a nesting doll (“Matryoshka doll,” Kate always corrected), his gourd-shaped body standing at the head of the grave with a Bible clutched in one shaking blue-cold hand, squinting as he read the passage committing Kate’s mortal remains to the earth. Completing the requisite benediction, he signaled the men from the funeral home to lower the coffin into the ground. It hissed hydraulically into the cold, dark, open maw of the grave. Michelle had to fight the urge to turn away. She didn’t want it to end like this, with distracted matryoshka mourners and surreal Cocteau prayers and sour snow on an ice-knife wind. Even her own hand looked like some fuzzy image on a screen as it scooped up the symbolic handful of frozen death-dirt and tossed it down onto the lid of the coffin. The gourd-shaped minister stalked over, misting some words of comfort, then grimly wobbled away. Michelle looked at her uncle, who nodded his head, understanding, and she walked toward the ice- and snow-sheened northern plat of the cemetery, then down a small incline that led her to a stone sculpture of an angel standing at the less-accessible north entrance.

  She was glad she’d walked away; she needed a few moments alone before saying her final good-bye to her sister, her friend, her life-long companion; even when the two of them had been hundreds of miles apart, they’d always felt the connection, and so had never truly been alone.

  Are you alone now, my sister? thought Michelle. What am I supposed to do now, without you to lean on?

  She wiped a few stray tears from her eyes and looked up at the face of the angel. If ever a sculptor had captured an expression of grief so purely, she’d not seen it. In its face was everything from anguish and rage to acceptance and peace. She saw in that face the way all mourners were meant to be; diminished, yes; broken-hearted and scared, certainly; but if you looked at the face long enough you saw a certain, enviable measure of tranquility which hinted at actualization, a look suggesting that all the conflicting emotions associated with death eventually coalesced to warm a sorrowing heart with the knowledge that, though it seemed to take forever, life was over in a second but that was all right, because there would be someone waiting for you at the end to make Act IV a little easier. And though Michelle had often laughed at that sort of psychobabbling sentimentality, she found herself hoping now that some of it might be true, even though all her years as a biology teacher had taught her otherwise. Death wasn’t instantaneous, the cells went down one by one; it took a while before everything was finished. If a person wanted to, they could snatch a bunch cells hours after somebody had checked out and grow them in cultures. Death was a fundamental function; its mechanisms operated with the same attention to detail, the same conditions for the advantage of organisms, the same genetic information for guidance through the stages, that most people equated with the physical act of living. Now, standing in front of this angel of perfect grief, Michelle couldn’t help but wonder: If it’s such an intricate, integrated physiological process—at least in the primary, local stages—then how did you explain the permanent vanishing of consciousness? What happened to it? Did it just screech to a halt, become lost in humus, what? Nature did not work that way; it tended to find perpetual uses for its more elaborate systems. Maybe all that crap from 70s about “All of us, together, make up God” was true; maybe human consciousness was somehow severed at the filaments of its attachment and then absorbed back into the membrane of its origin. Maybe that’s all reincarnation was: the severed consciousness of a single cell that did not die bur rather vanished totally into its own progeny. Maybe it was more than that—and maybe she was full of shit and needed to get some sleep but how was she supposed to do that? The apartment was so small, suddenly, a child’s crib, barely enough room to turn around, and knowing that Kate would no longer be there on the other end to answer the phone in the middle of the night when loneliness really got its hold on her, Michelle couldn’t face it. She could sleep at a motel, or go over to her brother’s place. It didn’t matter. Without her sister, none of it seemed to matter now.

  She looked up once more at the angel of perfect grief and felt her heart skip a beat; it seemed to be half-smiling, half-snarling at her, as if she’d accidentally hit on something human beings were never meant to realize. “Thanks,” she said to the statue; then, looking up at the sky: “And fuck you, too.” Words that came easily, because none of this was real; they were all only images on a screen, somewhere, blurry and disjointed. Even now she thought that if she looked hard enough, she could see the scrim hidden out there in the distance, maybe even catch a glimpse of the audience out there in the theater, sitting in their seats, watching, watching, watching as the cells went down, one by one....

  * * *

  Later that night, she got up off the couch and went into her kitchen, opening the refrigerator door and removing two small Petrie dishes that she held in her hands while whispering, “Oh, Kate, oh, Jesus, oh, my sister, my sister, my sister….”

  Cell to progeny to membrane.

  Love never dies.

  Dinosaur Day

  Well, you got some idea of what happened then or else you wouldn’t be here talking to me now, would you? Don’t look at me like that. Every couple of years one of you new reporters over at the Ally stumbles on that old story and then comes around asking your questions, so if you don’t mind I’ll tell it in my own way, thanks very much.

  Besides, this has got nothing to do with me. Not really. This is about a couple of folks I used to know and the nice little kid they had who they didn’t much like and so did everything they could to horsewhip the nice right out of him. I understand all about the so-called “tough-love” approach to raising a child, but I think these folks carried it a little too far. Seems to me more and more folks these days want their kid to pop out of the womb fully-raised and don’t much have the patience or care to take the time to teach them things, instill values and such. They let the movies and video games and cable channels do all of that for them, or else the belt and fist, then wonder why in hell it is every so often a kid or two walks into their school and opens up with a Howitzer or rocket-launcher or something. I’m getting off the subject, sorry. My mind wanders a bit these days. Got that tape recorder running? Good.

  Jackson Banks is the name. Appreciate it if you spelled it right this time. I’ve lived in Cedar Hill all my life, including the last six years here at the Healthcare Center. Got a nice private apartment-style unit all to myself, round-the-clock care, and—I’m proud to say—money in the bank, thanks to the retirement package I had waiting when I punched the clock for the last time at Miller Tool & Die almost a decade ago. That’s where I knew Don Hogan. Him and me worked the line there. On the job Don seemed a decent-enough fellow, hard-working, friendly, never what you’d call antisocial. We’d go out for some beers and burgers with the other fellows after the shift and bitch about the foreman’s brown nose or some such—you know, the usual guys-after-work kind of talk. We’d make jokes about the wives (except me, my Maggie had passed on the year before and the fellahs were always careful not to make jokes about wives buying the farm), piss and moan about the economy (when you work the line in a place like Cedar Hill, the economy’s always in the crapper), and then get on to things like sports.

  That’s when something about Don would change. Other guys, they’d be talking about the game that had been on TV over the weekend or what OSU’s chances were of winning the nationa
l championship, and Don, he’d talk about this some, but then the other fellahs’d get on about their kids; so-and-so’s boy was going out for football at Cedar Hill Catholic this year, or such-and-such’s daughter was making a name for herself on the Blessed Sacrament volleyball team, that sort of thing. That’s when Don’d clam up. Oh, he’d listen and nod his head and ask questions, but you could never get him to talk about what sports his own son was into. There was a reason for that, but I need to tell you about something else first, so bear with me.

  This was back in 1970. We still had boys over in Vietnam and the Kent State shootings were so fresh the wound hadn’t even begun to scab over yet. Our involvement in Vietnam had been good for Ohio’s economy but not so hot for Cedar Hill’s. We didn’t have any major manufacturing plants that could fill military contracts fast enough to suit Washington, so most of that went to places like Columbus and Dayton. Even back then the industrial heart of the city was starting to murmur (it wouldn’t ever completely stop, but it’s been on life-support since the mid-80's) and the city needed some kind of new industry to come in and boost the local economy. So Cedar Hill got into the gravel business.

  See, there was this rock quarry a couple miles out past the old county home that had gone under during the Great Depression. For decades it’d just been sitting there, this big-ass hole in the ground, no use whatsoever, except during the rainy season when it’d fill with water and high-school kids’d go out there to skinny-dip and smoke dope. Well, the city leased this land to a gravel company, and they came in with their Allis Chalmers and their feeder hoppers, radial stackers, jaw crushers, and a couple hundred jobs to fill, and set about the business of digging the living shit out of that quarry. Now, they had this one piece of equipment called a PIP (short for Portable Impactor Plant) that was basically a sixteen-wheeled horizontal hydraulic pile driver. They fired this bad boy up every Sunday afternoon and the operator’d drive it up to one of the quarry’s lower walls and start hammering away. One hit from the impactor would go about twenty feet into the wall, and inside of a couple hours, there’d be tons of rocks and boulders for the workers to go at on Monday. Thing is, it made a noise the likes of which shook the ground and rattled windows over a good quarter of the town. Imagine an hour or two of continuous sonic booms. It wasn’t so bad for folks who lived far away from the area, but if you lived anywhere near the north side of Cedar Hill, it felt like bombs going off in your backyard.