McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  “That’s us, I’m sorry to say.”

  He tipped the hat back, bringing his eyes out of the shade.

  “Momma thinks I can tow you with the tractor,” he said. “I say she’s right. I went and looked at it this morning.”

  “I’m not sure we can afford any major repairs,” Kirsten said.

  “You work for a children’s charity,” the old woman said.

  “That’s right.”

  “We’ll get you going,” Mr. Bowen said. “Up to the Mennonites, right, Momma?”

  The old woman—Gen—nodded. “I put towels out. You kids help yourselves to a hot shower, and meanwhile Daddy and me’ll tow your car up to the plain people and then we’ll just see.”

  “We’d like to go into town,” Kirsten said, “if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” the old woman said. She looked at her husband. “Yeah?”

  “Of course, yes. Yes.”

  Fresh oil shone like obsidian at their feet, the blackened road like a liquid flowing over the fields until, turning to gravel, it sank down into a dusty basin that held town. Main Street was wide and empty, the storefronts colorless in the flat light. A traffic signal swaying over the only intersection ticked like a clock in the quiet. Feeling faint, her stomach cramping, Kirsten sat on the curb. A hand-lettered sign on a sheet of unpainted plywood leaned against a low stucco building, advertising: FRESH EGGS, MILK, BROCCOLI, CHERRIES, BREAD, POTATOES, WATERMELON, STRAWBERRIES, ROOT BEER, ANTIQUES.

  “No corn,” Lance observed, pitching a rock at the sign. “You gonna tell me?”

  She shook her head. “I just went for a walk, Lance. Nowhere,” she said, pressing a print of her hand in the dust. She was wary of Lance, knowing that if she let him, he would tap her every mood, make of a bad morning a change in the map, turn the car south if she so much as frowned. He treated her like an oracle or divine, believing a rich and deserved life ran parallel to theirs, a life she alone could see, and so he would probe her dreams for directions and tease her premonitions for meanings, as if her nightmares and moods gave her access to a world of utter certainty, when in fact Kirsten knew the truth, that every dream was a reservoir of doubt. She had spent most of her life revolving through institutions— foster care, detox, hospitals, detention. Even the woman she called Mother was an institution, a fumbling scheme. Her brothers were boys with pallors like warm cheese, sweating and impotent as they sat out another day, pinching at the knees of their pajamas; and her sisters were girls like herself who’d passed through some door in back of love where they were beaten or whored or drugged and left yearning and clueless; her mothers had come to nothing but the bafflement of hospital life in a bathrobe, and her fathers were stripped of strength and dressed like dolls in paper gowns, their hairless legs faintly embarrassing even in frank life inside institutions. This improvised family of shifting faces sat together in common rooms furnished with donated sofas and burned and torn lampshades and ashtrays of cut green glass, in lounges that were more home to her than home ever was, the inmates more family than she’d ever known.

  It was in those lounges, in mornings that never began, in afternoons that lasted forever, in nights that wouldn’t end, charged with the vast assignment of swallowing all the horror of those idled hours, that Kirsten elaborated her sense of the other world. She stripped her diet of the staples of institutional life—the starches, the endless urns of coffee and the sugar cubes and creamers, the cigarettes. She cropped her hair short. She stopped wearing jewlery, and one afternoon, while the janitor mopped the hallway, she slipped the watch from her wrist and dumped it into his dingy bucket of water. She cleaned her room and kept it spare, and was considered a model inmate, neat and quiet and nearly invisible. By experimenting she discovered that the only deeply quiet time on the ward was in the dark hour before dawn, and so she began to wake at four A.M., first with an alarm clock, then automatically, easing from sleep into a stillness that was spacious and as close to freedom as anything inside detention could be, when she would pull a candle from her dresser drawer, melt it to her bedpost, sit in her chair, and stare at the mirror bolted to her wall. For days she waited for something to appear in the clear depth, looking into the glass as if into a great distance, and saw nothing. An instinct told her she was trying too hard, but giving up was a conscious effort too, and she saw only herself, day after day, week after week, until one one morning her arms lost life and went leaden, her fingers curled, and the mirror turned cloudy, her face fading as if it had sunk below the surface of the glass. The next morning she learned again that guiding the images made them go away and she spent another disconsolate hour staring at herself. Eventually she was able to sit without panic as her image sank and vanished into the murky gray of the mirror.

  She worked on the mirror gazing and she believed and word got around. Lance’s fascination was fast, and it frightened and attracted her. Early in her detention, a social worker had advised Kirsten that the only thing better than heroin was a future, and that was Lance’s gift, a restlessness that seemed about tomorrow, a desire that made the days seem available. She’d snorted once, banged once, and that was it; she’d found her answer—heroin had given her love, acceptance, security, and so had death, and now crying too—a feeling would come over her—a perfection better than the absence of pain—and she would see the pink fluttering hands—never anything more—just the hands reaching out, pressed flat against the glass. Often she emerged from her trances with her hand stretched to meet the hand in the mirror. In league with Lance, she felt her visions might stay, might last beyond the morning, but he was impatient, and his sense of her gift was profane and depleting, with every half thought and reverie expected to strike pay dirt.

  “Okay, fine,” Lance said. “Let’s hit the trailer court.”

  “I’m tired of those smelly trailers.”

  “We’ve talked about this I don’t know how many times.”

  “I want the nice houses. Those people have the money.”

  “They have the money,” he said, “because they don’t fall for bullshit like ours.”

  Kirsten started up the steps of the biggest and nicest house on the street. With its wide and deep veranda it seemed to have been built with a different prospect in mind, a more expansive view. She knocked and wiped her feet on the welcome mat and shuffled through her pamphlets and forms. Dressed in overalls and stuffed with straw, a scarecrow slumped on a porch swing, its head a forlorn sack knotted at the neck with a red kerchief. Kirsten knocked again, and then once more, but no one answered.

  “See,” Lance said.

  “See nothing,” Kirsten said. She marched across the lawn to the neighbor’s door. Lance remained sitting on the curb, picking apart a leaf. No one answered her knock. She shuffled through her materials, stalling.

  “Time to hit the trailer trash,” Lance said.

  Kirsten ran to the next house. A ghost hung from the awning, and the family name, Strand, was engraved on a wood plaque above the door. She drew a deep breath and knocked. For some time now she’d done things Lance’s way. She would only solicit homes where she found signs of a shoddy slide—a car on blocks, a windowpane repaired with tape, some vague loss of contour in the slouching house itself—fissures in somebody else’s hope where she and Lance could crawl through. But what had happened? They’d become sad little children, they were petty thieves and liars, swiping things no one would miss—five dollars here, ten dollars there—and laying siege to it with large plans, intricate calculations. Lance had his theories but lately it occurred to Kirsten that he was conducting his life with folklore. He had a knack for discovering the reverse of everything—the good were bad, the rich were poor, the great were low and mean—and it was no surprise they were now living lives that were upside down.

  A little girl pulled the door open a crack, peering shyly up at Kirsten.

  “Is your momma home?”

  “Momma!”

  The woman who came to the door, wiping her hands on a dishtowel
, was a fuller version of the little girl, with the same blond hair and blue eyes. Kirsten told the woman she was from B.A.D. and offered her one of the brochures.

  The little girl clung to her mother’s leg. She wore one yellow sock, one green, orange dance tights, a purple skirt, a red turtleneck.

  Kirsten said, “Did you get dressed all by yourself this morning?”

  The little girl nodded and buried her face in the folds of her mother’s skirt.

  The mother smiled. “Cuts down on the fighting, right, April? We have a deal. She dresses herself; then she has to eat all her breakfast.” She handed Kirsten the pamphlet. “I just made some coffee,” she said. “Do you like Pop-Tarts?”

  Kirsten leaned forward in a faded green chair by the window and watched Lance aimlessly tossing rocks and sticks in the street.

  The woman brought two cups of coffee and a plate with Pop-Tarts, toasted and cut in thirds, fanned around the edges.

  “You’d be surprised how many around here get into drugs,” she said.

  “I’m not sure it would surprise me, ma’am,” Kirsten said. “Everywhere I go I hear stories from people who have been touched by this thing.” She sipped her coffee. “This tragedy.”

  “I worry about this little one,” the woman said.

  Kirsten bit a corner of a Pop-Tart, feeling the hot cinnamon glaze melt on the roof of her mouth. On the mantel above the fireplace was a collection of ceramic owls. They stared steadily into the room with eyes so wide-open and unblinking they looked blind.

  “My owls,” the woman said. “I don’t know how it is you start collecting. It just happens innocently; you think one is cute, then all of a sudden”—she waved her hand in the air—“you’ve got dumb owls all over the place.”

  “Keep them busy,” Kirsten said.

  “What’s that?”

  “April here—and all kids—if they have something to do they won’t have time for drugs.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “People think of addicts as these lazy do-nothing sort of people, but really it’s a full-time job. Most of them work at it harder than these farmers I seen in these cornfields. It takes their entire life.”

  The woman cupped her hands over her knees, then clasped them together. Her wedding band was either on the sill above the kitchen sink, left there after some chore, or she was divorced. Kirsten felt a rush of new words rise in her throat.

  “You know what it’s like to be pregnant, so I don’t have to tell you what it means to have that life in you—and then just imagine feeding your baby poison all day. A baby like that one on the pamphlet, if they’re born at all, they just cry all the time. You can’t get them quiet.”

  It was a chaotic purse, and the woman had to burrow down through wadded Kleenex, key rings and doll clothes before she pulled out a checkbook.

  “I never knew my own mother.”

  The woman’s pen was poised above the check, but she set it down to look at Kirsten. Then she filled in an amount and signed her name.

  “I myself was put out for adoption,” she told a young couple next door, carrying forward the same conversation. They nodded and offered in unison looks that were sympathetic and uncomprehending. It was a look she’d lived with all her life and felt vaguely ashamed of, seeing something so small and frail and helpless at the heart of other people’s understanding. They meant well and it meant nothing. Sympathy exposed a blank that had confused her as a child before she learned to keep quiet and go without.

  “And I never really get away from this feeling. Sadness, you could call it. My mother, my real mother, I mean, is out there, but I’ll never know her. I sometimes get a feeling like she’s watching me in the dark, but that’s about it. You know that spooky sense you get, where you think something’s there and you turn around and, you know, there’s nothing there?”

  They did, they did with nods of encouragement.

  “When I think about it, though, I’m better off than these babies. Just look at that little one’s dark face, his shrunken head. He looks drowned.”

  The couple leaned together and examined the pamphlet. The picture was still ghoulish, no matter how many times Kirsten showed it to people. Its eyes were crimped shut and its mouth was open in a violent wail so that when you stared at the black oval the baby’s purple flesh was like a loose envelope of skin closed over nothing. There was nothing inside that child.

  “Mostly they just want their mothers for the methadone or what have you in the milk. That’s what they’re crying about. They want their fix.”

  Although the couple studied the picture, lingering to show their concern, Kirsten knew she hadn’t convinced them of the horror. Sitting on the sofa with their knees angled in and their heads nearly touching, she saw how closely they resembled each other in quiet, subtle ways. They had the same color lips, they shared a clear line in the jaw and an identical wideness in the forehead. Meeting each other for the first time, they must have felt mysteriously moved, as if they’d discovered a profound secret. A weight must have gone out of their lives. Looking at them, Kirsten knew what would happen, and then that’s what happened: they rejected the dark malformed baby on the pamphlet by giving her fifteen dollars.

  She shook off a slight doubt as she waited at the next house. For now the words that came out of her were the right ones. She believed what she was saying. A man answered, and immediately Kirsten smelled the sour odor of settledness through the screen door. A television played in the cramped, cluttered front room. A spider plant sat on a stereo speaker, still in its plastic pot, the soil dry and hard yet with a pale shoot thriving, growing down to the shag, as if it might find a way to root in the fibers. Pans in the sink he scrubbed as needed, coffee grinds and macaroni on the floor, pennies and dimes caught in clots of dog hair. A somber, unmoving light in rooms where the windows were never opened, the curtains always closed.

  “Some got to be addicted,” the man said, after Kirsten explained herself. “They never go away.”

  “That may be so,” Kirsten admitted. “I’ve thought the same myself.”

  He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.

  “You want a beer?”

  “No, thanks.”

  The blue air around the television was its own atmosphere, and when the man sank back in his chair it was like he’d gone there to breathe. He looked at Kirsten’s breasts, then down at her feet, and finally at his own hands, which were clumsy and large, curling tightly around the bottle.

  “Where you staying?”

  “About a mile out of town,” she said. She handed the man a pamphlet. “I’ve had that same despair you’re talking about. Nothing’s going to change enough to wipe out all the problem.”

  “Bunch of niggers, mostly.”

  “Did you look at the one there?”

  “Tar baby.”

  “That kid’s white,” Kirsten said. She had no idea if this was true.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Kirsten nodded at the television. “Who’s winning?”

  “Who’s playing?” the man said, shrugging indifferently. He was using a coat hanger for an aerial. “The blue ones, I guess.”

  “But a little—isn’t that enough? If you can save one baby from this life of hell, isn’t that okay?”

  “Doesn’t matter much,” he said. “In the scheme of things.”

  “It would mean everything,” Kirsten said, “if it was you.”

  “But,” he said, “it’s not me.”

  The vague blur of the television interested him more. “Where?”

  “Where what?”

  “Where’d you say you were staying?”

  “With Effie Bowen, Effie and his wife, Gen.”

  She wanted to tell him more about the baby but he dropped the pamphlet on the floor.

  “It’s a small place,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s related to everybody else.”

  He pushed himself out of the chair. He swayed and stared dumbly into a
wallet full of receipts.

  “Well, tonight, you say hi to them for me. You tell Effie and Gen Johnny says hi.” When he looked at Kirsten, his eyes had gone neutral. “You tell them I’m sorry, and you give them this,” he said, leaning toward Kirsten. Then his lips were gone from her mouth, and he was handing her the last five from his billfold.

  “I wish I was invisible,” Lance said, palming his thin hair back in place. “I’d just walk into these houses and they wouldn’t even know.”

  “And do what?”

  “Right now I’d make some toast.”

  “Hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Wouldn’t they see the bread floating around?”

  “Invisible bread.”

  “You get that idea from your cowboy brain?”

  “Don’t make fun of the cowboy brain,” Lance said. “It got us out of that goddamn detention. It got us over that fence.”

  “We are ghosts to these people, Lance. They already don’t see us.”

  “I’d like to kill someone. That’d make them see. They’d believe then.”

  Kirsten cupped her left breast and lifted it, relieving the dull ache. “I think I’m getting my period,” she said.

  “Great,” Lance said. “All we need.”

  “Fuck you,” Kirsten said. “I haven’t had a period in two years.”

  She turned over one of the pamphlets. Seeing the dark, inconsolable face reminded Kirsten of a song her mother would sing, but while the melody remained the lyrics died inside the memory, because the mere thought of this mother was collaborating in a lie and everything in it was somehow corrupted. Words to songs never returned to her readily—she had to think so hard just to recall a Christmas carol, trying to join in, once a year. It was like Mother—never in her life had she said or thought or read or heard the word without a twinge. Saying it aloud she felt like a mimic, an imitator in a world of authentic things. The word came to her with an echo, rising from a hollow she tried to fill with adjectives that would absorb and dampen the sound. Her real or true or birth or actual or genuine or biological mother . . . but in the end Mother was just something she felt in the dark sometimes.