McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  A woman rushed from the back of the house, a cordless telephone clutched between her raised shoulder and her ear. She tugged the baby free of her swing and hugged her to her hip. Then the woman bent over the small boy and shook his arm with her free hand, all the while continuing what appeared to Edie, through the window glass, to be an animated telephone discussion. Edie was overwhelmed by a sudden desire to grab the woman’s arm and shake it, just as she was shaking the boy’s. Edie could feel the soft white flesh beneath her fingers, could see the angry half-moon indentations her fingernails would leave. She staggered backward, afraid that the force of her rage would transmit itself through the glass and cause the woman to look up from her telephone conversation and her children.

  Edie ran back down the path to the street. She unclipped the monitor from her waistband, pressed it to her ear, and listened to the baby’s cries, comforted by their familiar monotony.

  She kept walking, rounding the block and making a complete circuit, stopping to listen at every house where there was evidence of a child, but the sound came only through the monitor, distant and fuzzy. As she turned the corner to her street, the volume picked up and she quickened her pace. It grew louder and louder, clearer and clearer, until she was standing in front of her own house. Edie stood on the sidewalk in front of her house, staring up at the bay window hung with long, shiny curtains and swags, and listened to the baby’s voice, clearer and louder than it had been at any time in her walk through the neighborhood.

  She stumbled into the house and up the stairs to her bedroom, where she switched off the monitor, tossed it on her dresser, and crawled into bed. She fell immediately and thickly asleep and at once began to dream. She dreamed that her baby had been born, sick and needy, but alive. Undeniably alive. Minnow looked as he had in the hospital, when she had held him, wrapped in a pink-and-blue-striped blanket. His skin seemed translucent; she could see the red layer of muscle, the purple lines of his veins. His body felt limp, rubbery. But his face was frozen into a stiff, white mask. Only his feet were perfect. Small round toes, round heels. His foot rested in the palm of her hand, as delicate and flawless as an egg.

  In her dream, Minnow cried for her all the time. He would not let her put him down, even for a moment. And she obliged. When he demanded to be nursed, she brought him close and closed her eyes, his mouth open wide on her breast, her nipple brushing the back of his throat. His suck was voracious and her contentment absolute.

  Edie woke to a soaked bed and the sound of the baby’s cries coming from the monitor.

  She tugged her wet and sticky shirt away from her chest and then pulled it over her head. It was only when she was standing naked, dumping her wet clothing into the laundry basket, that she remembered turning off the baby monitor. She leaned over and picked it up, turning it over and over in her hand. It was on, although she was certain she had turned it off. As she spun the monitor, the baby’s cries wobbled, as if they were undergoing a kind of Doppler effect. Edie spun it faster and faster, listening to the changing pitch of the baby’s cries. Then she opened her hands and, fingers pointed wide, watched the monitor tumble onto the carpet. The baby kept up his droning cry. Edie picked up the monitor. On the back, next to the on/off dial, was a second small switch, marked with an A and a B. Edie flipped it, changing the channel to B. For a moment there was no sound from the monitor at all; she could hear nothing but her own breathing. Then there was a crackle of static, and the cries began again. Edie gently set the monitor back in its place on the dresser, and with the light touch of a single finger, turned the dial off.

  Edie burrowed into the soft cocoon of her bed. “I have gone crazy,” she said aloud. She waited to cry, to be overcome with fear at the thought at having succumbed to the septic psychosis of grief. While she was waiting, she fell asleep.

  After Matt left for work, Edie took the receiving end of the monitor with her into Minnow’s room. She set it down on the dresser, pulled open the top drawer and took out a small cardboard box with a brand-new nursing bra inside it. She slipped her bathrobe over her shoulders, strapped on the nursing bra, and opened up the flaps, adjusting her breasts so that her long, dark nipples protruded evenly from the holes cut in the fabric. She pulled two cloth diapers out of the stack on the shelf under the changing table, picked up the monitor, and sat down in the glider rocker. After she had shifted the footstool a few inches so that it was aligned comfortably with her lower legs, she splayed her feet out on the padding. She folded the cloth diapers into fat squares and placed one under each of her breasts. She centered the monitor on her lap and began rocking back and forth in the glider. Then she turned on the dial.

  The baby cried, Edie rocked, and soon her milk began to flow. As the diapers grew wet with sweet, warm milk, the baby’s cries softened. He hiccuped once, and then again. Soon no cries came through the baby monitor, only the sound of sucking and the click of the baby’s swallow. And then the flutter of his breath as he slept.

  Only the weekends were hard. Matt was gone all day during the week, and he worked late, often coming home as late as eight or nine. Edie could spend all day with the baby, rocking in the glider, nursing him, or just listening to him breathe. On weekends, Matt might work one day, but never both. He would never leave her alone on Saturday and Sunday. So on weekends she would have to steal her time with the baby, creep away in the middle of the night, or when Matt went out for a run. Otherwise her breasts would start to ache, and she would begin to grow frantic, knowing the baby was hungry. She would lie in bed next to Matt while he read his book or paged through the Sunday paper and she would stare at the monitor, knowing that if she turned it on she would hear her baby crying, knowing that he needed her and that he couldn’t understand where she was and why she didn’t come.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Edie opened her eyes. Matt was standing in the doorway of the baby’s room, staring at her. She looked down at her chest. Her sweatshirt was hitched up over her breasts and they hung, heavy and blue-veined, resting on the wadded cloth diapers.

  “I’m just taking a nap,” she said hoarsely. She cleared her throat and looked over at the monitor. The row of lights blinked merrily, indicating visually what she could not believe Matt didn’t hear, the baby’s soft snoring, audible under the static hum of the monitor.

  “In here?”

  “I like it in here.”

  “Why is your shirt up?”

  Edie looked down at her naked chest and then up at Matt. She blinked. “My breasts hurt. Because of all the hormones. It helps if I keep them out in the air.”

  “Still?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that a nursing bra?”

  “What’s with the third degree?” Edie yanked the flaps of her bra closed, silently begging the baby to stay asleep, not to wake up, not to cry. She did not know how she would explain the baby’s cries to Matt or, worse, what it would mean if Matt could not hear him.

  “Edie,” Matt said.

  She looked down, away from his flushed face, and as she did she caught sight of the tented fabric at the crotch of his mesh running shorts.

  “Edie,” he said again.

  He crossed the room and pushed the footstool away, kneeling between her legs. While Edie clutched the armrests of the rocker, Matt unsnapped the flaps of her nursing bra and pulled them down. Over the monitor, the baby’s breathing caught for a moment, and then settled again, bringing with it a corresponding tightening in Edie’s breasts, tingling out to her exposed nipples. While she and Matt watched, a bead of thick white gathered at the tip of each nipple.

  Matt bent over and licked the drop off first her right nipple, then her left. His tongue sent a shock through Edie’s body, down through her stomach, to her groin. She made a low noise in her throat, quiet enough not to wake the baby. Matt bent over again, and began to suck, drawing her nipple, her areola, almost half her breast into his mouth. Her letdown came. He wrapped one of his arms around her waist and massaged her breast
with his other hand, squeezing more and more of the liquid into his mouth. The other breast sprayed, soaking through the diaper to her lap, drenching Matt’s shoulder, running down his neck to the collar of his shirt.

  Edie twisted under Matt’s grip, not trying to pull herself away but rather to push herself farther inside of him, to push more and more of her breast into his mouth, to press her groin against his thigh, to drown him.

  Matt lifted his face. It was slick with fat. They stared at each other for a moment, and then she opened her mouth to his, pushing her tongue inside him, tasting the sweetness of her milk.

  Matt brought Edie flowers. Tuberoses and sweet pea, fragrant and easily bruised. Edie held the cone of pale-pink tissue paper in her hands and stared vaguely at the bouquet, one ear cocked for the baby. Usually she turned the monitor off when she heard Matt open the front door. Today he had surprised her by arriving earlier than usual, and had caught her downstairs, eating a peanut butter sandwich—she was so hungry nowadays, especially late in the afternoon, when the baby seemed to need to linger on the breast.

  “Don’t you want to put them in water?” he said.

  Edie plucked at the twist of raffia knotted tight around the blossoms. The stems squeaked in protest as she pulled at the cord, and while she reached across the kitchen counter for a knife she felt Matt slip his arms around her waist. She froze, one arm extended, a serrated blade trembling in her hand.

  “I love you so much, Edie.”

  From the baby’s room she heard a faint mewing sound. He was waking up.

  Matt pressed against her. She could feel his erection, hard and unyielding against her back. He rubbed his face in her hair, inhaling with a congested snuffle. “You smell so good.”

  “It’s the flowers.”

  “No, it’s you.”

  Edie slid the knife under the raffia and jerked upward. The blade was dull and the cord more resilient than a pretty bow should be, so the edges of the blade caught and tugged, fraying and tearing but not slicing through.

  “God damn it.”

  “Last night was so great,” Matt said into her hair. “Weird, but great.”

  “God damn it!” She sawed the blade back and forth a few times and then wrenched it up. With a squeak, it tore through the raffia and, propelled by the force of her angry jerk, smacked Matt in the forehead. The flowers dropped out of the paper cone, scattering across the counter.

  “Jesus!” he yelled, leaping back, his palm against the wound.

  Edie turned to face Matt, the knife clenched in her fist. His mouth hung open, loose and flaccid. He lowered his hand and stared at the smear of red dirtying his palm. “Oh, no,” he said weakly. Edie looked at the cut; ruby dots in a neat line from his hairline to his brow.

  “How bad is it?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think I need stitches?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Shit. All right. Can you drive?”

  She listened for a moment. She could just barely hear the baby stirring, beginning to cry. She pressed her hand against the side of one of her breasts; it was swollen and sore, full.

  “No,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I can’t go to the hospital now.”

  Matt picked up a dishtowel and pressed it against his forehead. A ragged red oblong immediately wicked through to mar the pristine white terry cloth. “I don’t really want to go back there either, but I have to get this sewed up. Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Edie!”

  “I can’t.”

  Matt slammed his fist on the counter, making the flowers jump. “What is wrong with you? I’m hurt. Do you understand? I’m hurt. I need to go to the hospital and get stitches. Are you actually telling me that you won’t drive me there?”

  Edie stared at the spray of blooms. She wished she could explain why she couldn’t leave. She wished she could tell Matt that as much as she wanted to take care of him, there was someone else who needed her more.

  “Edie. Edie! You need to stop this. It’s enough.”

  “What’s enough?” she said, speaking to the flowers.

  “You have to get over this already.”

  “Get over it?”

  “You know what I mean. You think I’m not sad about Minnow? I’m sad! I lost my baby, too. But we have to move on, Edie.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because Minnow is dead, and we don’t have any other choice.”

  Edie laid the knife gently down on the counter and began picking up the strewn flowers.

  “Please, Edie,” he said.

  With her index finger, she dabbed at the knife blade, wiping away a tiny droplet of his blood.

  Three hours and four stitches later, Matt returned from the emergency room to an empty house. The tuberoses and sweet pea were carefully arranged in a cobalt-blue vase on the kitchen table, their stems freshly cut, two tablets of aspirin dissolving in the bottom of the vase. The house was neat, Edie’s purse sat on its shelf next to the front door, her keys dangled from their hook on the kitchen wall, her cell phone rested in its charger, and none of her shoes were missing.

  All this Matt noticed within minutes of his return. He wandered through the house taking inventory of Edie’s absence and of the presence of her possessions, panic slowly twisting his bowels and causing the blood to pound in his aching forehead. He knew from the first moment that she was gone, that she was not on a walk or visiting a friend. He was, however, too sensible to allow himself to accept his own miserable certainty and so he waited, first in the kitchen, then on the front porch, then in their bedroom. His voice, when he called Edie’s mother, was falsely jovial, the alarm all too audible beneath the lighthearted lack of concern. It was she who told him to call the police, she who gave him permission to give voice to his dread. The police, though, were less willing to give credence to his fears, and Matt spent a long night drifting from room to room in his house, alternately crying with worry for Edie’s welfare, and cursing her for abandoning him. In the blackest part of the night, when the moon had set and the dawn not yet begun to lighten the sky, he stood in the doorway of Minnow’s bedroom. The room was so dark that the furniture was nothing more than hulking shapes in the corners of the room. Matt gazed into the dark. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a row of flickering red lights on the floor. He blinked and stared more closely. After a moment he realized that what he was looking at was the baby monitor. He sighed, turned around, and closed the bedroom door behind him.

  Five months after Edie disappeared, Matt decided, finally, to pack up Minnow’s room. Edie, he was not yet ready to let go of. Her clothes and shoes, the drawer full of lipsticks and moisturizer, hair elastics and tubes of sunscreen, those he left exactly as they were. But one Sunday he decided the baby’s things could go. He disassembled the crib, packed the baby clothes away in two of the plastic bins Edie kept stacked in the garage, and took down the curtains. He wrapped the pictures in bubble wrap and put them in the front hall. A beer crate served well for the odds and ends in the room, and Matt filled it with diapers and baby wipes, the miniature manicure set, the soft-bristled brush with matching comb. He tossed in the transmitting end of the baby monitor and looked around the room for the receiver. It was on the floor next to the glider rocker, plugged into the wall socket. Matt knelt down and pulled the plug out of the wall. As he was getting to his feet, he stumbled over the leg of the rocker. He reached out to steady himself, knocking the baby monitor receiver against the floor, freeing the cord and activating the battery power. There was a burst of static and then a woman’s soft humming filled the room.

  Matt rocked back on his heels and listened. The tune was one he thought he recognized; it hovered just out of reach of his memory. The baby cooed, and a painful smile played over Matt’s lips at the sweet sound and the mother’s soothing hum.

  Then the woman spoke an
d Matt’s smile faded.

  “It’s all right, sweetie,” Edie said. “Mommy’s here.”

  ZEROVILLE

  by STEVE ERICKSON

  WHEN HE WAKES in the early hours before dawn, one morning near the end of summer, he knows he’s almost reached the door. Lining the stairway of his house are the enlarged celluloid images of a thousand doors, although really they’re all the same door, moving from one location to another, each growing closer to him or, more exactly, he grows closer to each.

  It’s the first or second summer of the new millennium, depending how you count one or zero. By now Monk’s dreams have enough precision that a part of him would like to know, How do you count one or zero, and is it the first summer, or the second? He dreams very efficiently. Over the past two decades, the scenes in his dreams have become almost exact replicas of those from the movies that inspired the dreams. Lately when Monk wakes, he knows right away which reel to pull from the wall of shelves around him; he’s taken to sleeping on the floor of the library so that when he has such a dream, immediately the film is at his fingertips. Up until now he’s known the films well enough that he could put them in the projector and go to the very scene he’s looking for, and then begin searching frame by painstaking frame on his editing table.

  In the beginning, he barely realized what he was dreaming. Only from his years as a film editor had he developed an affinity for the subconscious of montage, for the id of the film that even the filmmaker doesn’t know is there; and in the beginning almost twenty years before, when he had the first dream, night after night he tossed restlessly in a sleep mottled by glimpses, flashes, messages, echoes of one film in particular he had recently seen on videotape—until finally he tracked down a print, paying good money for it. “Boy you must love this picture, huh?” the guy in the Valley had said to him. It was a porn movie called Nightdreams about a woman in a psychiatric ward having a series of carnal hallucinations: in one she’s a slave on her knees in the Arab desert, being taken by two men at each end of her; in another she’s in Hell being fucked by the Devil . . . but while these images slithered into Monk’s sleep as visual ephemera, what became clearer with each passing night and each passing dream was the door in the far background. In this particular case the door, just slightly ajar, stood alone on a distant barren veldt, although as far as Monk could tell there was no such image in the film at all.