by Jim Hanas
"Yeah."
The Cryerer rolled out of bed and peeled off his suit and the shirt the color of a Band-Aid. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and found his face to be as he had reported, terminally serious but untouched, although his torso was covered with red bruises the size of compact discs. He eased himself into the shower and stood there for a long time.
***
The phone rang again while the Cryerer was driving in the Valley. The fingers of his right hand were stiff and sore and when he reached for the phone he knocked it under the passenger seat. At a light he reached over the emergency brake and his aching ribs and fished around. The phone rang as he fished, but when he finally located it the ringing had stopped and his hand was smeared with streaks of thin, brown film and he tried to remember not to touch his mouth or his face, going so far as to retrieve his cigarette pack from his pocket and a cigarette from the pack all with his left hand as he drove to the studio.
When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer considered the phone and the thin, brown film before answering. She was crying.
"You are where?" she sobbed.
"On my way to the studio," he said. "Where are you?"
"In darkness," she blubbered.
"You'll be fine."
"No."
"You're fine. Take a Valium. Do you have Valium?"
"Already I take."
"You'll be fine."
"I am dying."
"You are not either dying," the Cryerer said.
"No."
"I have to get ready. I'm late."
"No," the Brazil Nut sobbed as the Cryerer hung up the phone.
At the studio, the guard waved him through with barely a pause. He parked the car and sat, wiping his hand on the passenger seat, taking a few moments to collect himself. He dialed a number and let it ring. When the redhead answered — "Hello, this is Alex." — he hung up, relieved she was still alive. He smelled sulfur and heard metal scraping on metal. He recalled yellow gun-shaped controls that sent tiny cars flying around the track, and often flying off the track, at what seemed like impressive speeds. There had been no intensive training and everything was left to chance. Hold the trigger tight and so what if the car, filled with oil from a tiny plastic bubble, comes flying off the track and across the carpet amid smells of sulfur and reckless speed? These were not historic runs.
He remembered the day, four days after Christmas, that the track caught fire, right there under the tree. It was the scraping of the trigger back and forth, lurching the cars around the track, that set the black plastic pieces of track on fire. Pieces of metal like two wooden sticks scraping together to make fire. The gorgeous smell of electrical fire.
***
The Cryerer limped into the studio. He had worked with the Sister, the woman playing the Mother of the Baby, before. She had had a sitcom once and had since been in many of these missing baby capers. The director was somber and supportive. He nodded whenever people spoke and looked into their eyes. The Cryerer thought he recognized him from Van Nuys. He couldn't be sure, but if so he had once been known as the Skin Doctor and he might have the tapes that could wreck that beautiful Malibu wedding.
"So," the director began solemnly. "You are the Mother of the Baby." He fixed his eyes on the eyes of the Sister and nodded. "And you are the Brother." He turned his eyes to the Cryerer, nodding and fixing. "And the Baby is gone."
Brother and Sister both nodded.
He repeated: "And the Baby" (looking at the Cryerer), "your baby" (looking at the Sister, the Mother of the Baby), "is gone" (looking intently at both).
When the Brazil Nut called, the Cryerer was having make-up applied.
"You are where?" she sobbed.
"I'm at the studio. I told you."
"I am dying."
"Can I call you back later? Listen I'll call you back later," he whispered. "You're fine."
"No. I won't be here," she said. "I'm going away."
***
The Cryerer couldn't remember how long he sat there, watching blankly as the racetrack melted and the Christmas tree dissolved in flames. It was engulfed almost immediately. He was not startled; not even amazed. He sat there on the living room carpet, watching the tree spit bits of itself onto the rug around him. His father appeared, suddenly and aggressively, stomping viciously on the racetrack and headlong tackling the flaming tree in a counter-intuitive attempt to make it stop flaming, which (more counter-intuitively still) seemed to work. He watched with fascination in lieu of horror, his father wrestling the green, smoking limbs back and forth across the deep-pile carpet before finally standing up and kicking ridiculously at the smoldering branches, sending storms of dried needles across the carpet.
His father, covered in botanical soot, loomed over him. The Cryerer sat awed amid the wreckage, pulling the trigger of the pistol-shaped controller. Metal on metal. Back and forth.
"Put that fucking thing down," his father boomed, grabbing the cord and snapping the controller out of the child's hands. The moment the controller left his hand, he returned to the scene. His father looming. The Christmas tree smoldering. He had begun to cry all at once, uncontrollable spasms racking his small body, terminating in a full, open-mouthed blubber.
"Look at this," his father roared. "You think this is funny?"
The boy shook his head, gasped, and moved his lips in an airless, "No."
"Quit your damn cryin'."
Another airless, "No."
***
When the Brazil Nut called again, the Cryerer was on the set in the Valley, preparing to embrace and comfort the Mother of the Baby.
"You have a call," whispered a production assistant who had stepped up gingerly beside him. "It sounds like an emergency."
The Cryerer excused himself. He stepped behind a camera, put a finger in one ear and picked up the phone.
"What."
"You know," she whispered quietly. "I am loving you David."
"What are you talking about?"
"You know, I am not blame you for anything David."
She was not crying.
"Get some rest. I'll call you later."
She was singing.
"Am not here later David," she sang.
"I'm working," he said. "Go to bed."
The Cryerer stood there for moment. He put his head down and closed his eyes. When the director appeared he waved him off.
"Almost ready," he said.
***
His father lay flat on the carpet, peaceful except for the red half-moon spreading around his head from where he had collided with the coffee table, causing a cloud of Christmas cards to erupt and gently float to the ground. It all happened quickly — the clutching, the staggering, the falling — and the Cryerer had not immediately understood. His mother appeared from nowhere. Kneeling amid ashes and drink coasters, she ran long fingers through her husband's hair and dabbed at his head with a dishtowel. "Are you alright?" she screamed. "Are you okay?" she begged him as the Cryerer muttered a steady stream of airless Nos.
***
He passed a forefinger under each eye to mop up tears that had already begun to form. "I'm ready," he said. A woman in an army jacket appeared and applied a few fingertips of make-up under his eyes.
"I'm a big fan," she said. He nodded, managing a twitch. "Are you okay?" she asked.
It started in his lower back, an intense and knotted throb. It would've been difficult for him to sit, and he shifted from foot to foot to keep the spasms moving.
"Places," the director said, and the Cryerer took his place outside the door. The Mother of the Baby sat inside some sort of a waiting room — it could have been a hospital or a police station.
He tried to stand still with the throbbing growing in his back and contractions, like hiccups, taking hold in his chest. He tried to still his quivering lips.
"Rolling," the director called from the other side of the door. "And action."
The Cryerer lurched through the door and his pretend
Sister, the Mother of the pretend Baby, rose.
"I came as soon as you called," he panted.
"Oh John."
"What is it?"
"It's the Baby."
"Where is she?"
"Gone," the Mother squeaked, nodding slowly in a protracted wince before burying here face in the Cryerer's shoulder, the Cryerer himself now coming unglued as the throbs and contractions became no longer local, wrenching his entire body and turning his trembling lips into an eight-shaped, teeth-baring hole. The crane zoomed in to capture the close-up and locked for a moment before panning right, then left, then spiraling gently up and around the entangled bodies of the mourners as the point of view rose, turned and dissolved somewhere up — up, up, up — and into the slowly rotating sky.
From the same author on Feedbooks
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Cassingle: Five Stories (2009) A follow-up to 2006's Single, Cassingle is a collection of stories that originally appeared in Fence, McSweeney's, Bridge: Stories & Ideas, and Twelve Stories. Toronto's Eye Weekly wrote of Cassingle, "No matter the cut, this is writing that speaks American, in all its complexity."
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