“You may rest your head on my knee,” he said, and Melba started.
“Oh, that’s very kind,” she said, and then, realizing that her attempt at polite refusal had surrendered at polite, she remained perfectly still as Mr. Sack took a small velvet pillow from his desk drawer and positioned it on his lap.
“I so often rest my head on things, though,” said Melba. “Warm, unfrosted cakes. Freshly piled laundry. I’d better not.” She giggled nervously but Mr. Sack only shrugged.
“The vertical carriage of the human head is marvelous,” he said, “as are the orthognathic jaws and mobile tongue, but it often results in hypertonicity of the neck muscles.”
“Why don’t we ever talk about the neck muscles?” asked Melba. “Or about the tongue? There’s so much I want to know.”
Mr. Sack took a nose from the desk drawer and regarded it sadly, his index fingers thrust deep in the snoutish nostrils.
“Melba,” said Mr. Sack, finally. “You’ve grown tired of noses. Hush! Don’t argue! I’m a teacher and I understand things. You think I should widen the scope of my classes. Well, you’re wrong, Melba. Dangerously wrong. The students in this school have excitable passions. Sometimes they kiss each other feverishly in the halls, or stand up in class, screaming, ‘I am thy vessel! Fill me, dark prince, with the power of evil!’ Certainly, you’ve noticed.”
Mr. Sack shook his index fingers so that the nose dropped to his desk with a dull clunk.
“The students in this school can’t handle the stimulus of absolute knowledge. They need routine and fentanyl lozenges.”
Melba felt a deep thrill at this unexpected confidence and she leaned forward eagerly.
“I’m not like the other students, Mr. Sack,” said Melba. “My airflow is too restricted for kissing and I hate to make a scene.” She lowered her voice. “Mr. Sack,” she confessed, “Principal Benjamin told me about epochs. He said I would learn about them someday. I thought he meant in high school, but maybe he meant at some other point in life, when I’m in the workforce, or taking a course at a retirement community. Mr. Sack, I have a problem,” whispered Melba, almost breathless, “I just can’t figure out what time is made of.” Mr. Sack worked a mauve lollipop out of his pants pocket and he offered it to Melba without speaking. She ignored it.
“Mr. Sack,” whispered Melba. “Sometimes I think time must be like a kind of jelly. A jelly that makes us move slower than we would otherwise, because isn’t time just a way of delaying the inevitable? If there wasn’t time, everything would be over. But then I’m afraid I’m wrong. I’m afraid that, if there wasn’t time, everything wouldn’t have started yet, and we’d be at the beginning. Then I feel so daunted I can barely move. That’s why I fall down sometimes in class and lie in the aisle. Tell me, Mr. Sack,” said Melba, eyes glowing. “Is time a jelly? A clear jelly, like nothing we’ve ever eaten? Principal Benjamin was going to explain it to me, but then …” Her voice broke and she slapped a hand over her mouth, horrified at her uncharacteristic display of excitement. Mr. Sack had pressed the back of his hand against his forehead, as if to ward off her words, and his body trembled. He tore the wrapping from an elongated lollipop and jammed it into his mouth, cracking the hard glossy cone with his teeth.
“You won’t get an answer out of me, Melba,” said Mr. Sack. “You say you’re not like the other students, but how can I trust you? Any one of them would say the same thing. Principal Benjamin trusted you and you know what happened to him.”
Melba felt as though her body had spun a few degrees around her vertebral column. She leapt to her feet, steadying herself against Mr. Sack’s desk.
“What happened?” she demanded. “What happened to Principal Benjamin?”
Mr. Sack’s eyelids were drooping. His chin bobbed against his shirtfront.
“Mr. Sack,” said Melba. “You can trust me, Mr. Sack.”
Mr. Sack’s voice was so thin Melba could barely make out the words.
“Miasma,” rasped Mr. Sack.
“Miasma?” repeated Melba.
“Not jelly,” rasped Mr. Sack. “Miasma. Time.”
“Oh!” cried Melba, but before she could form another thought, Mr. Sack slid down his chair onto the floor. He dragged his torso beneath the desk and drew in his legs. Melba stood in the empty-looking office. She’d felt like she was the only person on the earth and retreated quickly into the hall.
There in her mother’s kitchen, Melba had tried and failed to summon that same feeling of solitude. She was excruciatingly aware of her mother’s presence, of her mother coming toward her, her mother lunging across the kitchen in fifteen-pound ankle-weights. Melba shifted her palm gingerly. Part of the snail adhered to her palm and part of the snail adhered to the wall. Melba rubbed her palm against the wall. Her mother was almost upon her, and she rubbed harder, reducing the snail to a dark and textured patch, indistinguishable from the other dark and textured patches on the wallpaper, just as her mother’s final lunge brought the toes on her left foot in contact with the dado.
“What are you doing, Melba?” asked Melba’s mother, mildly. Melba thought quickly.
“I’m generating static electricity,” she said. “Otherwise I fall asleep in the middle of the day. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Safe!” snorted Melba’s mother. “What about Bret Glenn?”
“I don’t know about Bret Glenn,” said Melba.
“Of course you do,” said Melba’s mother, her voice vibrating from the exertion of maintaining the lunge. “Bret Glenn!” said Gigi Zuzzo. “He was repairing our television and rubbed his knees on the area rug one too many times. The static discharge made him jump so that he sent his head through the picture tube.”
“Did he die?” asked Melba.
“I should say so,” said Melba’s mother. “You don’t see Bret Glenn in town anymore!”
“What did he look like?” asked Melba. “Did he always wear an amulet?”
“No,” said Melba’s mother. “His hair brushed his collar, ever so lightly. Sometimes you almost thought it wasn’t quite reaching, there was no contact, but then, when you got closer, you could see it, you could hear it, Bret Glenn’s hair brushing his collar.” Her mother gripped Melba’s arm and steered her through the kitchen, so they could look down into the sunken room where her mother stored the exercise equipment.
“It happened right there,” said Melba’s mother, “by the Smith machine. He was so happy! He loved doing favors for friends. He didn’t just repair televisions! He dug the septic tank! Sometimes he drove you to elementary school, Melba. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”
“He didn’t die right there,” said Melba, uneasily. “Wouldn’t he have died somewhere else? In a hygienicized venue? The hospital in Henderson?”
“Dr. Buck was napping upstairs when it happened,” said Melba’s mother. “But by the time I got him showered and fed and properly awake, there was nothing Dr. Buck could do for Bret Glenn.”
“Dr. Buck! He’s been to our house!” Melba shrank back against the doorframe. Gigi Zuzzo looked at her with irritation.
“He’s been to everyone’s house,” she said. “He’s a doctor. Mayor Bunt made him keys. Sometimes he comes into the house in the night and tiptoes around, just to check on everyone.”
“You were telling me about Ann Dump,” Melba burst out, desperate to change the subject. “Why does Ann Dump want to lure the snails to the town hall?”
Gigi Zuzzo’s lower jaw jutted forward and she dropped into a furious squat.
“Addiction!” she sneered. Melba gasped. She had never joined the clusters of children licking snail and slug trails on the rubber tiles around the condemned Dan Mats & Flooring Emporium, and she had always doubted their reports of hallucinogenic experiences—red foxes playing bouzoukis and long beards growing at tremendous speeds on every face they saw—but she knew at least two of them, Em and Perry Blake, now lived behind the emporium in a hut and did nothing else.
“Ann Dump licks snail
s?” said Melba.
“Only nitwits lick snails!” snorted Melba’s mother. “That Ann Dump is no nitwit. It’s the toad she’s after. She’s infiltrated the reptile trading community with her boxes of snails. Every day, she sends the reptile trading community a fresh box of snails. One of these days, she thinks they’ll send her the toad. In the meantime, she doesn’t care how many snails run wild in the town hall, what they do to vital records. I’ve seen the records, Melba! It’s as if you don’t exist! There’s a hole where your name used to be! It’s like you’ve never been born!”
“That Ann Dump,” repeated Melba’s mother, but Melba suspected that the blame did not rest squarely on Ann Dump. The blame could not be conceived of as a regular polygon, contained and conventionally dimensional. The blame was a bigger, murkier object, with a drifty quality that frightened Melba. The blame hung in the sky over the valley. It was like humidity! Or a curse!
“In Dan, we all live in the shadow of blame,” said Melba to herself on her stool in the well-lit bakery. But shouldn’t her generation be blameless? Surely they hadn’t done anything wrong. And the next generation? The infants? What did Bev Hat’s infants have to do with the curse of Dan?
When Melba was a young child, far too young for high school, a group of women had disappeared from Dan. They were older women, old enough to bear some responsibility for Dan’s circumstances. Nonetheless, Melba had admired the women. She had enjoyed watching the women eat their meager lunches outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail.
In those days, Dan had several businesses in addition to the bakery, and a hosiery district. Mayor Bunt encouraged the production of fine hosiery through financial incentives to hosiers, and quite a few people in Dan had responded to the call. A great deal of hosiery was manufactured in Dan and stored in several warehouses, of which Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail was the largest. Unfortunately, the roads leading into and out of Dan were not stable enough to bear the weight of freighted trucks and it proved impossible to empty the warehouses, or, at least, to empty the warehouses profitably, delivering the goods to points of sale. The warehouses were emptied at a loss. Small barrel fires stoked by tube socks could be seen burning brightly in the hosiery district at night.
Melba was warned by her mother not to visit the hosiery district at night, although other children enjoyed the festive atmosphere and played complicated finger games with elastics cut from the big spools that overflowed the dumpsters.
“You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from before your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”
At her mother’s mention of her umbilical cord, Melba probed her bellybutton.
“I didn’t know about my abnormally long umbilical cord,” cried Melba. “Can I see it?”
“I buried it in a secret place and disguised the map,” said Gigi Zuzzo, sharply. “You’re better off not seeing something like that, Melba.”
“You’ll never develop normal attachments,” sighed Gigi Zuzzo. “We’ve never been as close as other mothers and daughters, have we Melba?” But Melba was concentrating and barely heard her mother’s question.
“Those years that I had the hiccups,” asked Melba. “Was that because of my umbilical cord?”
“It was,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “And that’s the least of it! The cord’s torsional compression in the womb cut off blood flow to your brain and dried out your brainpan. Your brainpan cracked in half! Toxified brain fluid leaked into my blood stream! I was nearly poisoned! I had to drink charcoal every day for a week!”
“The toxic brain fluid,” asked Melba. “Did that reach your womb through osmosis? Or was there another process involved?”
“What other process is there?” barked Gigi Zuzzo.
“I don’t know,” said Melba quietly. “Reverse osmosis, probably.”
“No one said anything about processes, reversible or otherwise,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Though the charcoal explains your hairs and your eye color, Melba.” Melba’s hairs were much blacker than the hairs of her mother, father, and sister, and she had not inherited the blue eyes of her mother and father, having instead dull, protuberant black eyes, which Randal Hans once told her resembled the eyes of a deer with a neck wound.
Melba heeded her mother, and only visited the hosiery district during the day. Outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, the women always seemed to be eating darkened wormy apples. They ate the apples rapidly, producing them one after the other from huge burlap sacks, until a man with a whistle appeared from nowhere, and the women hurried through the metal side-door of Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, hauling the sacks between them.
As she watched the women from the culvert, Melba would feel the muscles on the sides of her tongue shivering. She longed for just a tiny bite of an oddly-shaped mahogany apple! Until one day Melba Zuzzo could not contain herself. Just as the metal side-door swung shut behind the women, she lunged from the culvert and scuttled across the gravel lot, searching for a discarded apple core. Something dark and slick glinted in the gravel. Melba Zuzzo picked the thing up impulsively and thrust it in her mouth. She recognized the taste! It tasted like when, as a child, she had mashed anchovy in the wall socket and licked the wall socket on all fours, pretending that she was an animal navigating a maze in the service of science. Melba’s mouth flooded with saliva. She shuddered. She wondered how the women could maintain their appearances of solid and attractive tidiness while lunching on such apples. The pH of their saliva must be 1! Or 0! What did this saliva do to tooth enamel? Were the women’s tongues corroded? For a moment, Melba doubted the sanity of the women, but the moment passed quickly. Melba realized that the dark thing she had discovered was not an apple core, but rather a metal whistle. She spat a hasp and a bit of broken chain into her palm. Suddenly, a man was running toward her. Melba recognized him as the man with the whistle, for even without the whistle, his lips formed a tense repellant O. Melba fled, the man’s whistle clamped in her mouth, her breath chirping as it divided inside the whistle, deflecting down into the whistle’s dank chamber and up across the whistle’s slot. Finally Melba reached a phone booth and ducked inside. She had no desire to keep the whistle in her mouth and removed it immediately.
“What a horrid, strident device,” thought Melba Zuzzo angrily as she shoved the whistle in the change slot.
Shortly after this disappointing episode, Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail went out of business. Melba heard that it reopened days later as a travel agency but she never saw anyone coming in or out and weeds grew up thickly in the gravel lot and it became customary for people to drive up to the gravel lot in the night to dump mattresses. What had happened to the women with their sacks of apples?
It was possible that they were sent on a group tour of a foreign land by the travel agency. Melba Zuzzo liked to think of the women eating apples, perhaps beside the Great Wall of China. Eating apples beside the Great Wall of China, a landmark of interest to people in space, the women had a very high chance of being photographed by satellites. Someday Melba hoped to go to a space station, or to Florida, to NASA headquarters. She would eat the astronaut ice cream she had heard so much about and she would buy a satellite photograph of the Earth. Running her magnifying glass along the Great Wall of China, she might at last obtain proof that the women still existed. The women would be unmistakable, crouched in the weeds with their cheeks filled with apples, and Melba knew they could still break her heart with their beauty, even in a photograph taken from the distance of the moon.
The bakery’s wall-phone rang and Melba sprang from her stool to answer.
“Bev!” cried a voice. Melba rested her forehead against the wall, cradling the receiver on her shoulder.
“Men lactate,” she said, at last. “I’ve never seen it happen, but they can. I heard from a man who did it. Not at a mere whim!” said Melba hurriedly. “I’m not trying to say that men lactate frivo
lously. It requires duress, great duress, but it can be done,” whispered Melba. “Like on the Oregon Trail. Don’t you believe me?”
“Bev!” cried the voice and Melba slowly hung up the phone.
I don’t have any obligation to inform Ned Hat, she reminded herself. It’s not as though I am Bev Hat, no matter what he says. She saw Grady Help’s profile moving along the bakery window at head height.
“Grady Help!” she called, running to the door. “Wait!” Grady Help had an open sore on his temple and stopped walking at Melba’s cry, looking around dimly, a finger in his ear.
“I’m here,” said Melba, rushing up to him. “Right in front of you.”
She felt the strangeness of stopping a man like Grady Help on the street.
Grady Help had once been a victim, and as such was not usually spoken to directly. Melba had herself inquired about Grady Help from time to time, asking other townspeople how he was doing and whether he had preferences in daily activities, but facing him now she could not help but feel flustered and importuning. He hasn’t been a victim for years, she reminded herself, at least not actively, and so she pressed on.
“Bev Hat is dead,” she blurted and wrenched at the waist, burying her face in her hands.
“Well that’s not so,” said Grady Help gently and Melba uncovered her face. Grady Help’s voice was soft and weak but it did not break. It wasn’t precisely firm, thought Melba, but it held together, possessed of a coagulated quality, like the innocuous cheese Zeno Zuzzo fed her after meals for several months when she was still a schoolgirl. He claimed it was an experiment, although he had never told her the purpose or results. Melba almost smiled at Grady Help’s voice; it was a triumph for a former victim, she reasoned, and blushed, not knowing the best way to recognize a former victim’s triumph, if tacit approval was suitable or if something more demonstrative was in order, and if the former, how to be certain the tacit approval had registered as such, and if the latter, whether or not the demonstration should center around an impulsive hug, and if yes, how to summon sufficient propulsion and which part of Grady Help’s loosely jointed body to encircle. Perhaps she should just grasp his hand in both of hers and press the knuckles to her cheek.
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