by Unknown
He was stooped and feeble, so she walked over, turned the door’s handle and let him in. “I’m Havel,” he said, “Mr. Havel from 214.”
“I’m Robin from 114,” she replied as he squeezed through the door.
He nodded and walked slowly past.
From then on she’d only heard his footsteps through the ceiling, muffled as if he were trying to control the noise. She was never bothered by a television too loud, which pleased her. She liked living quietly.
She liked being able to go to bed at nine p.m. and drift to sleep with only an occasional sound from Havel: his footsteps padding across the floor, the creak of his bed (which must have been directly over hers, she decided) as he lowered himself onto the mattress. Sometimes in the early hours of the morning she would wake to hear a sound like ball bearings rolling inside a box, but that was rare, and tolerable.
On Friday evening the ambulance had come screaming up front.
She’d rushed to the window to see them pulling out a stretcher, and Mrs. Bulmer, the landlady, scurrying out to grab a medic by the sleeve.
She walked back to the stove to turn down the heat, so the chicken wouldn’t burn, then stepped quietly toward her door. She could hear the medics hustle the stretcher into the elevator, and the elevator open onto the second floor, and she followed the footsteps over her own room. She heard anxious voices and the creak of the bed, then the sounds had diminished. A half hour later they loaded Havel into the ambulance. Gazing down at the humped sheet she thought poor man. The ambulance door shut, and that was that. She went back to her chicken. Police drifted in and out for the rest of the evening, and by eleven p.m. the apartment was once again quiet.
She didn’t think about Havel until the next afternoon. A knock interrupted a phone call from her latest boyfriend. “There’s someone at the door, John. I’ll see you next week okay? I’m worn out. I don’t even want to get up and answer the door. Give me a call. Good-bye.” She replaced the receiver and walked to the door.
Mrs. Bulmer stood outside. “Robin, I was just upstairs …” She paused, mouth open. Her teeth were narrow and yellow, and reminded Robin of soft wood. “I was just upstairs straightening the late Mr. Havel’s apartment, and I came upon a few of your things. Did you want them back?”
Robin raised an eyebrow. “Things?”
“I’m not suppose to disturb the room since they’re still trying to locate his family,” said Mrs. Bulmer, “but I thought I’d let you sneak in there and grab your stuff if you want to?”
Robin bit her lower lip, thinking about Havel’s footsteps, and the mattress creaking as he settled into bed. “Sure,” she said, “Wait just a minute.” She pulled on some wool socks, grabbed her keys, and locked the door behind her.
“What are these things, Mrs. Bulmer?” They stepped into the cramped elevator, and Robin pulled shut the gate. With a lurch, it began to climb.
“Just a few knickknacks. You don’t remember giving them to him?”
“Uh-uh.” She turned toward the gate, felt the warmer air as they breached the second floor, saw the drab hallway carpet, then the dim light fixtures. The car jolted to a stop, and she pulled the gate open.
“It shook me,” said Mrs. Bulmer as she selected a dull gold key from her key ring. “Finding him like that.” As she struggled to get the key into the lock, Robin wanted to ask “like what?”
“Don’t forget the rent, dear.” Mrs. Bulmer pulled out the key and selected another one. “It’s ten dollars a day overdue.”
“I was finally paid yesterday. Remind me to give you a check.”
The lock sprang. “You should tell your employer to pay you on time. There’s laws in this state, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Robin as the landlady pushed open the door.
Havel’s apartment was cold. White sheets were draped over a long couch and an easy chair. The carpet was older than hers, faded into a light gray.
“Poor Mr. Havel never married. Many times I tried to introduce him to my single friends, and he always declined.”
Robin noticed a stack of cardboard boxes beside the sofa. “Where are these items, Mrs. Bulmer?”
“Back here,” said the landlady, and Robin followed her across the living room, through the open bedroom door.
The curtains were pulled wide, and sunlight revealed stained diamond- print wallpaper and a frayed rug. A king-size bed occupied the corner directly above her own. The closet door was open, and she saw slacks and shirts, a collection of Wingtip shoes, and a lone golf club.
The room smelled of disinfectant.
Mrs. Bulmer walked to the foot of the bed. “Here,” she said, pointing to a box. Black socks spilled over the sides, but Mrs. Bulmer was pointing to something gold and glittering. Robin waited for her to lift it up.
“It’s yours,” Mrs. Bulmer said, trying to sound uninterested. “It has your name on it.”
The gold and glittering item was a bracelet, and after close scrutiny she recognized it: something her parents had bought her when she went to summer camp in the seventh grade. An identity bracelet, usually worn to label yourself a diabetic, or allergic to penicillin. Robin Myers/ 411 South Templeton Street, Seattle/ We LOVE you, darling was engraved on the metal. She’d been embarrassed by it, and recalled casting it into Lake Sealth her first day at camp.
“Yes,” said Robin. “It belonged to me.”
She thought of what she would eat for lunch; she recalled snatches of her argument with John, all the while holding the bracelet between two fingers without listening to Mrs. Bulmer.
“… and I know it isn’t proper,” the landlady said, “but if you want,
I’ll let you rummage around in here, to see if there’s anything else of yours.”
“No.” She had dropped the bracelet on the floor. “I lost that in the lobby a few months back. He must have found it, and not bothered to return it.”
“Oh.”
“If that’s everything, I should get back to my apartment.” She looked in the direction of the front door. She knew the route but expected the sheeted furniture to rise in her path. “I’ll write you that rent check.”
“So you don’t want the bracelet?” Mrs. Bulmer held it out.
She smiled. “Of course,” she said, and took it.
“And you’ll want the other thing as well, won’t you?”
“What other thing?”
“The photograph.” Mrs. Bulmer fished it out of the box. “I could tell it was you immediately. Your eyes haven’t changed.” She held it up to Robin, and though she held it in a steady hand, Robin felt the photograph move away—as if she were looking through the wrong end of a telescope.
“Thanks,” she said, realizing there was nothing else to say that would wipe the smile from Mrs. Bulmer’s face.
Later, she sat cross-legged on her bed, the photograph in front of her, a wine cooler clutched in her hand.
She closed her eyes. The details of the photograph were burned in her memory: the square border with June 1973 written along the lower right-hand side; the little girl standing at the edge of the dock, the green waters of Lake Sealth lurking indistinctly behind her. The little girl held an oar in both hands, and the photo captured her smiling as she struggled to stay balanced. The smile was enough to remind her of that day, her second day at camp, her first time in a canoe; but she didn’t remember posing for the picture.
She opened her eyes.
No, she was positive. There had been a group of kids on the dock, not just her alone. They had been so unruly that the counselors threatened to veto the canoe trip if they didn’t calm down. “Safety First,” the counselors said, and instructed them on the proper way to put on a life jacket.
They had loaded four children and a counselor into each canoe, and there’d been no time to stand, no time to pose. Indeed, she remembered the entire summer as a flurry of group activity.
Finishing the cooler, she picked up the bracelet and examined the words. They were exactly as she remem
bered them, every embarrassing syllable. Also, stretching from one side to the other, barely discernible, was a scratch in the metal. She’d slashed at it with a utility knife before leaving for camp, and she’d tossed it into the lake that first day ….
She brought the photo close to her eyes and examined the bracelet on the little girl’s wrist. The image stayed with her for the rest of the day, haunted her dreams that night. She got up early the next morning, thankful it was Sunday, and tried to explain everything away over a bowl of granola.
“Hello, Mrs. Bulmer. Sorry to bother you, but I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to go into Mr. Havel’s apartment and see if I’ve left anything else. Am I too early?”
“No, no, no, let me find my housecoat.”
Mrs. Bulmer appeared in the hall ten minutes later, dressed in a canary-yellow robe, and led Robin into the elevator.
The apartment looked dreary this morning. The sheets seemed to grow out of the gray carpet, and the light had a diffused, dusty quality.
“I can’t leave the keys,” Mrs. Bulmer said from the hallway, “so just come get me when you’re done.”
Mrs. Bulmer gently shut the door, and all was silent. Robin walked across the living room and stopped next to the covered couch. She imagined the old man’s body beneath the sheet, equally gray and dry, his sightless eyes watching her through the fabric, and she forced herself to lift the edge of the sheet. The material refused to yield, then billowed from green velour upholstery. She let the sheet fall.
Glancing at the taped boxes beside the couch, she decided to postpone those. First, the bedroom.
As she walked toward it she conjured up Havel: his wide face and narrow, sleepy eyes, his receding white hair, his jowls. How much could he have changed in thirteen years? She was sure she’d never seen him at summer camp; she’d never seen him before the time in the lobby.
Swallowing hard, she approached the box at the end of the bed where Mrs. Bulmer had found the bracelet. She crouched in front of it and reached inside. Her right hand moved through underclothes. Just underclothes. She overturned it, spilling boxer shorts and black socks onto the carpet.
As she straightened, she noticed something in the corner of her vision. Something on the bed, amid the sheet, almost lost in a fold. The figure of a woman standing on a pedestal. Robin picked it up, weighed it in her palm and studied its sleek black polish. At first she thought it was a chess piece, but this woman wore no robes, no crown. She was nude. One slender arm was lifted in greeting, and Robin noticed a smile on her tiny face.
As she set it back on the bed, leaving it to slumber in the folds of the sheet, she was reminded of Havel.
How did he die? She would have to ask Mrs. Bulmer for the details.
She walked through the living room and checked the kitchen. In the refrigerator she found a bottle of olives, a few celery stalks and an open box of baking soda. She found dry cereal and two cans of tuna in the cupboards. Nothing exciting. Which left her with the sealed boxes next to the couch.
Mrs. Bulmer would undoubtedly notice if the tape was cut, but she decided to open this first box, then stack the second on top.
Kneeling beside them, she pulled out her apartment key and ran the jagged teeth along the tape. She grasped the flaps and yanked them free, revealing a loose collection of photographs: Polaroids of Robin as a teen; an eight by ten of Robin caught unaware as she sat on a bench downtown, her skin pale, her arms almost skeletal, her eyes gazing down at nothing; another eight by ten of a heavier Robin, her face aglow, holding an infant to her breast; still another depicting a backyard party in a backyard she’d never seen, a handsome man lifting Robin’s bridal veil and leaning in for a kiss.
Beneath the layer of photographs she found a small pair of shorts, a T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes, all dirt-encrusted, stiff and smelling of mildew. Tendrils of dry weed tangled in the shoe laces. She lifted out the T-shirt and shook it, releasing a cloud of dust, and read the words Camp Sealth printed across the front.
She pushed the box away and stood, almost falling over.
She left the room. She shut the door without locking it and walked slowly down the stairs, thinking of Havel’s footsteps, of his bed creaking, of the strange sounds in the early morning. Once inside her apartment she could only find the phone and dial John’s number.
He answered on the twelfth ring. “Yeah, Robin. What now?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, biting her lower lip again, “How about going out tonight? Please?”
“What’s up?”
“I’d just like to see you.”
John sighed. “We were going to go out last night,” he said. “Instead, I ended up with nothing to do, all my plans shot to hell.”
“We don’t need to go anywhere. Just come over, okay?”
“I’m afraid I have other duties today, Robin. Let’s make a tentative date for next Saturday, huh?”
She sat on her sofa through the afternoon, until Mrs. Bulmer knocked on the door.
“Are you done upstairs?”
Robin thought for a moment.
“No. But, please come in.”
Mrs. Bulmer stepped inside. She clutched a dust rag in both hands.
“What is it, dear?”
Robin shook her head. “Please do me a favor, would you? Tell me what you found Friday evening.”
The old woman sat down beside her. She cleared her throat and squinted at the ceiling. “I was going up there to get the rent. It was his habit to stay in his room a lot, so I would visit on the first and fifteenth, and he would always have the cash on hand.”
“He never went out?”
“For grocery shopping, sure. And he went out once a week, on Friday afternoon, to play his game. He would walk out with a board under his arm and tell me he was meeting some friends. ‘Going out for a game of possibilities, Mrs. Bulmer’, he would say. So he did go out at least once a week. I was glad he had friends.”
“That evening I knocked on the door and I received no answer. I became worried, because he was always home from his game before nightfall, and he was an old man. I tried the door and it was unlocked. I pushed it open and found all the furniture covered, all the boxes stacked by the sofa.”
“Like he was packing to move out?”
“Not to move out,” said Mrs. Bulmer. “He hadn’t packed up his furniture, remember, only covered it, like he was going on a long trip."
She cleared her throat. “I found him on the bed. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling. All dressed up in his nice black suit. He looked like my Roger during the funeral ceremony.” Mrs. Bulmer blinked slowly.
Robin nodded.
“The medics said it was old age.” Mrs. Bulmer shook her head.
“I’ve seen my share of deaths, Robin, but I’ve never seen one so peaceful, so … unusually laid out. They told me that every so often a person just knows they’re going to die, and they dress up all fine, and they choose the time and place to go. It’s sort of like winning a game.” Mrs.
Bulmer smiled. “He was a gamesman till the end,” she said, and stood.
“I got a call from the social service, and you’ll be happy to know they found some of Mr. Havel’s relatives. Two of his brothers. They’ve arranged to ship his body to the family plot in Bucharest, and they’re coming tomorrow to claim his belongings. Thank God. I wasn’t looking forward to clearing it out myself.”
“The white lady,” Robin said, “what did you do with it?”
“I tucked it into his breast pocket before they carried him out. I felt that he wanted it with him.”
That evening, she became sick. She threw up her stir-fried vegetables and tried to settle her stomach with lime soda. She sat on the edge of her tub and gently touched her abdomen, trying to recall the symptoms for stomach cancer.
At eight p.m. a headache appeared and sank needles into her right eye. She swallowed two aspirin and a few Rolaids, and walked upstairs to Havel’s apartment. She was wearing a sweater an
d wool socks, but she was cold. Her teeth chattered; her fingers shook. Cold air seemed to come in waves off the furniture, from beneath the sheets.
Sitting down on the living room rug, she proceeded to open the other two boxes with the jagged edge of the key. The first contained more photos of lives she’d never led. They showed an exuberant young Robin and her child. The handsome husband. The life she had once planned, until reality, or something, drained her of the will.
The box also contained seven notebooks filled with cramped handwriting, each labeled with her name. The first page of the first book was dated June, 1973. The seventh notebook ended halfway through, with Friday’s date. Columns of figures and bizarre equations crowded each page:
Q^1*X2, Q2=Q^1!X2.
In the second box she found her death certificate. Snohomish County
Coroner’s Office, it read, and the date was June 3, 1973. Cause of death: drowning. And beneath the certificate, she found a game board.
It was made of heavy wood, with a raised edge about an inch high.
An uneven division of small squares covered it, with three interlocking circles transposed.
She lifted it out and found three metal balls. She dropped them onto the board and listened to the slick, low sound of the balls moving across the wood, encountering an edge and darting back, finally resting atop a particular square and circle.
She sat with the board on her lap, idly tilting it left and right, watching the zigzagging paths. Then she was a young girl again, standing on a dock in the summer sun. She held a huge oar, and smiled for the nice man and his camera. She held the pose for a long moment, almost losing her balance, and then she heard the click and he lowered the camera. He smiled. He said, “That’s it, I’ve got you.”
Union Dues
By Gary A. Braunbeck
Some stories hit just plain hit you right where you live. By odd coincidence, both of our fathers were machinists, both working in monstrously large, hellishly loud factories. We both saw the toll this kind of work can take on a person, and when Gary Braunbeck’s story of the life and death of a factory man arrived, we were both touched by the achingly accurate portrait of pain and desperation he had captured. A recent Bram Stoker Award winner, Braunbeck is one of the brightest talents working this field. We think you’ll agree that his time to be recognized is at hand because he’s more than paid his own union dues…