by Peter Straub
“If we were supposed to just keeping doing this, ad infinitum, then we would have tripped over some more food,” said Donny. “What has to happen now is we need to shake up the system. Do something deterministic. Declare ourselves in a way that has nothing to do with patterns.”
“Well, I declare I’m gonna collapse here and try to sleep,” said Zach, sitting down heavily in the sand.
“You’ve just contradicted every other argument you’ve made,” said Vira, more weary than surprised.
“No, Vira,” said Zach. “I can see it. No explanation works. Therefore, logic isn’t a way out. It’s the kind of answer you get to by working through all the other answers. Right, Donny?”
He shrugged. “Except I can’t suggest what to try.”
“We could walk back to the car,” said Vira. They glared at her. “Joke,” she said, putting up her hands, surrendering. She shielded her eyes and plopped backward onto the sand as though her spine had been extracted.
Zach encamped nearby—not cuddle-close, but near enough to look possessive—like an infantryman who has learned how to drop and sleep in full gear. Soon he was snoring softly, the sound obscured by the light wind that always seemed to kick up at sunset. Just enough to stir the sand into a genuine annoyance. Zach rolled over, cushioning his forehead on his arms, forming a little box of deeper darkness. Burying his head in the sand, thought Donny, who remained irritated that his friends had accepted the routine of their bizarre situation so readily, and without question.
Donny pulled off his boots, one-two. There was nothing else to look at except the skyline, the sand, an occasional weed, and the two sleepers. He was not tired. His heart was racing.
He weighed one boot in his hand. It was scuffed and dusty, and radiated stored heat like fresh bread from an oven. One-two.
One: Holding the toe of the boot, Donny clocked Zach smartly in his occipital ditch, right where the backbone met the brain stem. Zach went limp and Vira did not stir. They were exhausted; fled to another place, chasing dreams. Donny sat on Zach’s head, mashing it down into the sand until Zach stopped breathing.
Now Donny felt the surge. He had it all—correctitude, the energizing thud of his heart, dilated pupils, an erection, and the exhilarative adrenaline spike of knowing he was on the right track. He was doing something, taking declarative action.
After all, what were friends for?
Two: There were no fist-sized rocks or round stones, so Donny used his other boot to hit Vira in the back of the head, so he would not have to look at fresh blood while he raped her. By the second time, she was bloody anyway. She might have orgasmed once, through sheer autonomic reflex. Donny pinched her nose shut and clamped her mouth until she, too, stopped breathing. As she cooled, he did her once more. It really had been a while since he’d gotten laid. He woke up still on top of her, neck cricked from the odd position in which he’d dozed. His weight had pushed her partially into the sand, half-interring her, but she was in no position to complain, or criticize, or judge him anymore. Or feel sorry for him.
Their water bottle was down to condensation. Night was better for walking in a desert. And Donny had taken action.
He left his companions behind and soldiered onward, alone, until his boot heels wore away to nothing. If he ever found civilization, he’d feel sorry later.
The Two Sams
Glen Hirshberg
FOR BOTH OF YOU
What wakes me isn’t a sound. At first, I have no idea what it is: an earthquake, maybe; a vibration in the ground; a two A.M. truck shuddering along the switchback road that snakes up from the beach, past the ruins of the Baths, past the Cliff House and the automatons and coin-machines chattering in the Musee Mechanique, past our apartment building until it reaches the flatter stretch of the Great Highway, which will return it to the saner neighborhoods of San Francisco. I lie still, holding my breath without knowing why. With the moon gone, the watery light rippling over the chipping bas-relief curlicues on our wall and the scuffed, tilted hardwood floor makes the room seem insubstantial, a projected reflection from the camera obscura perched on the cliffs a quarter mile away.
Then I feel it again, and I realize it’s in the bed, not the ground. Right beside me. Instantly, I’m smiling. I can’t help it. You’re playing on your own, aren’t you? That’s what I’m thinking. Our first game. He sticks up a tiny fist, a twitching foot, a butt cheek, pressing against the soft roof and walls of his world, and I lay my palm against him, and he shoots off across the womb, curls in a far corner, waits. Sticks out a foot again.
The game terrified me at first. I kept thinking about signs in aquariums warning against tapping on glass, giving fish heart attacks. But he kept playing. And tonight, the thrum of his life is like magic fingers in the mattress, shooting straight up my spine into my shoulders, settling me, squeezing the terror out. Shifting the sheets softly, wanting Lizzie to sleep, I lean closer, and know, all at once, that this isn’t what woke me.
For a split second, I’m frozen. I want to whip my arms around my head, ward them off like mosquitoes or bees, but I can’t hear anything, not this time. There’s just that creeping damp, the heaviness in the air, like a fogbank forming. Abruptly, I dive forward, drop my head against the hot, round dome of Lizzie’s stomach. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. I could be wrong. I press my ear against her skin, hold my breath, and for one horrible moment, I hear nothing at all, just the sea of silent, amniotic fluid. I’m thinking about that couple, the Super Jews from our Bradley class who started coming when they were already seven months along. They came five straight weeks, and the woman would reach out, sometimes, tug her husband’s prayer-curls, and we all smiled, imagining their daughter doing that, and then they weren’t there anymore. The woman woke up one day and felt strange, empty, she walked around for hours that way and finally just got in her car and drove to the hospital and had her child, knowing it was dead.
But under my ear, something is moving now. I can hear it inside my wife. Faint, unconcerned, unmistakable. Beat. Beat.
“‘Get out Tom’s old records…’” I sing, so softly, into Lizzie’s skin. It isn’t the song I used to use. Before, I mean. It’s a new song. We do everything new, now. “‘And he’ll come dancing ‘round.’” It occurs to me that this song might not be the best choice, either. There are lines in it that could come back to haunt me, just the way the others have, the ones I never want to hear again, never even used to notice when I sang that song. They come creeping into my ears now, as though they’re playing very quietly in a neighbor’s room. “‘I dreamed I held you. In my arms. When I awoke, dear. I was mistaken. And so I hung my head and I cried.’” But then, I’ve found, that’s the first great lesson of pregnancy: it all comes back to haunt you.
I haven’t thought of this song, though, since the last time, I realize. Maybe they bring it with them.
Amidst the riot of thoughts in my head, a new one spins to the surface. Was it there the very first time? Did I feel the damp then? Hear the song? Because if I did, and I’m wrong…
I can’t remember. I remember Lizzie screaming. The bathtub, and Lizzie screaming.
Sliding slowly back, I ease away toward my edge of the bed, then sit up, holding my breath. Lizzie doesn’t stir, just lies there like the gutshot creature she is, arms wrapped tight and low around her stomach, as though she could hold this one in, hold herself in, just a few days more. Her chin is tucked tight to her chest, dark hair wild on the pillow, bloated legs clamped around the giant, blue cushion between them. Tip her upright, I think, and she’d look like a little girl on a Hoppity Horse. Then her kindergarten students would laugh at her again, clap and laugh when they saw her, the way they used to. Before.
For the thousandth time in the past few weeks, I have to quash an urge to lift her black-framed, square glasses from around her ears. She has insisted on sleeping with them since March, since the day the life inside her became—in the words of Dr. Seger, the woman Lizzie believes will save us—“viable,�
� and the ridge in her nose is red and deep, now, and her eyes, always strangely small, seem to have slipped back in their sockets, as though cringing away from the unaccustomed closeness of the world, its unblurred edges. “The second I’m awake,” Lizzie tells me, savagely, the way she says everything these days, “I want to see.”
“Sleep,” I mouth, and it comes out a prayer.
Gingerly, I put my bare feet on the cold ground and stand. Always, it takes just a moment to adjust to the room. Because of the tilt of the floor—caused by the earthquake in ’89—and the play of light over the walls and the sound of the surf and, sometimes, the seals out on Seal Rock and the litter of wood scraps and sawdust and half-built toys and menorahs and disemboweled clocks on every tabletop, walking through our apartment at night is like floating through a shipwreck.
Where are you? I think to the room, the shadows, turning in multiple directions as though my thoughts were a lighthouse beam. If they are, I need to switch them off. The last thing I want to provide, at this moment, for them, is a lure. Sweat breaks out on my back, my legs, as though I’ve been wrung. I don’t want to breathe, don’t want this infected air in my lungs, but I force myself. I’m ready. I have prepared, this time. I’ll do what I must, if it’s not too late and I get the chance.
“Where are you?” I whisper aloud, and something happens in the hall, in the doorway. Not movement. Not anything I can explain. But I start over there, fast. It’s much better if they’re out there. “I’m coming,” I say, and I’m out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me as if that will help, and when I reach the living room, I consider snapping on the light but don’t.
On the wall over the square, dark couch—we bought it dark, we were anticipating stains—the Pinocchio clock, first one I ever built, at age fourteen, makes its steady, hollow tock. It’s all nose, that clock, which seems like such a bad idea, in retrospect. What was I saying, and to whom? The hour is a lie. The room is a lie. Time is a lie. “Gepetto,” Lizzie used to call me before we were married, then after we were married, for a while, back when I used to show up outside her classroom door to watch her weaving between desks, balancing hamsters and construction paper and graham crackers and half-pint milk cartons in her arms while kindergartners nipped between and around her legs like ducklings.
Gepetto. Who tried so hard to make a living boy.
Tock.
“Stop,” I snap to myself, to the leaning walls. There is less damp here. They’re somewhere else.
The first tremble comes as I return to the hall. I clench my knees, my shoulders, willing myself still. As always, the worst thing about the trembling and the sweating is the confusion that causes them. I can never decide if I’m terrified or elated. Even before I realized what was happening, there was a kind of elation.
Five steps down the hall, I stop at the door to what was once our workshop, housing my building area and Lizzie’s cut-and-paste table for classroom decorations. It has not been a workshop for almost four years, now. For four years, it has been nothing at all. The knob is just a little wet when I slide my hand around it, the hinges silent as I push open the door.
“Okay,” I half-think, half-say, trembling, sliding into the room and shutting the door behind me. “It’s okay.” Tears leap out of my lashes as though they’ve been hiding there. It doesn’t feel like I actually cried them. I sit down on the bare floor, breathe, and stare around the walls, also bare. One week more. Two weeks, tops. Then, just maybe, the crib, fully assembled, will burst from the closet, the dog-cat carpet will unroll itself like a Torah scroll over the hardwood, and the mobiles Lizzie and I made together will spring from the ceiling like streamers. Surprise!
The tears feel cold on my face, uncomfortable, but I don’t wipe them. What would be the point? I try to smile. There’s a part of me, a small, sad part, that feels like smiling. “Should I tell you a bedtime story?”
I could tell about the possum. We’d lost just the one, then, and more than a year had gone by, and Lizzie still had moments, seizures, almost, where she ripped her glasses off her face in the middle of dinner and hurled them across the apartment and jammed herself into the kitchen corner behind the stacked washer-dryer unit. I’d stand over her and say, “Lizzie, no,” and try to fight what I was feeling, because I didn’t like that I was feeling it. But the more often this happened, and it happened a lot, the angrier I got. Which made me feel like such a shit.
“Come on,” I’d say, extra-gentle, to compensate, but of course I didn’t fool her. That’s the thing about Lizzie. I knew it when I married her, even loved it in her: she recognizes the worst in people. She can’t help it. And she’s never wrong about it.
“You don’t even care,” she’d hiss, her hands snarled in her twisting brown hair as though she were going to rip it out like weeds.
“Fuck you, of course I care.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“It means what it means. It means we tried, and it didn’t work, and it’s awful, and the doctors say it happens all the time, and we need to try again. It’s awful but we have to deal with it, we have no choice if we want—”
“It means we lost a child. It means our child died. You asshole.”
Once—one time—I handled that moment right. I looked down at my wife, my playmate since junior high, the perpetually sad person I make happy, sometimes, and who makes everyone around her happy even though she’s sad, and I saw her hands twist harder in her hair, and I saw her shoulders cave in toward her knees, and I just blurted it out.
“You look like a lint ball,” I told her.
Her face flew off her chest, and she glared at me. Then she threw her arms out, not smiling, not free of anything, but wanting me with her. Down I came. We were lint balls together.
Every single other time, I blew it. I stalked away. Or I started to cry. Or I fought back.
“Let’s say that’s true,” I’d say. “We lost a child. I’ll admit it, I can see how one could choose to see it that way. But I don’t feel that. By the grace of God, it doesn’t quite feel like that to me.”
“That’s because it wasn’t inside you.”
“That’s such…” I’d start, then stop, because I didn’t really think it was. And it wasn’t what I was trying to say, anyway. “Lizzie. God. I’m just…I’m trying to do this well. I’m trying to get us to the place where we can try again. Where we can have a child. One that lives. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate goal?”
“Honey, this one just wasn’t meant to be,” Lizzie would sneer, imitating her mom, or maybe my mom, or any one of a dozen people we knew. “Is that what you want to say next?”
“You know it isn’t.”
“How about, The body knows. Something just wasn’t right. These things do happen for a reason.”
“Lizzie, stop.”
“Or, Years from now, you’ll look at your child, your living, breathing, beautiful child, and you’ll realize that you wouldn’t have had him or her if the first one had survived. There’d be a completely different creature there. How about that one?”
“Lizzie, Goddamnit. Just shut up. I’m saying none of those things, and you know it. I’m saying I wish this had never happened. And now that it has happened, I want it to be something that happened in the past. Because I still want to have a baby with you.”
Usually, most nights, she’d sit up, then. I’d hand her her glasses, and she’d fix them on her face and blink as the world rushed forward. Then she’d look at me, not unkindly. More than once, I’d thought she was going to touch my face or my hand.
Instead, what she said was, “Jake. You have to understand.” Looking through her lenses at those moments was like peering through a storm window, something I would never again get open, and through it I could see the shadows of everything Lizzie carried with her and could not bury and didn’t seem to want to. “Of all the things that have happened to me. All of them. You’re probably the best. And this is the worst.”<
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Then she’d get up, step around me, and go to bed. And I’d go out to walk, past the Cliff House, past the Musee, sometimes all the way down to the ruins of the Baths, where I’d stroll along the crumbling concrete walls which once had framed the largest public bathing pool in the United States and now framed nothing but marsh grass and drain-water and echo. Some times, the fog would roll over me, a long, gray ghost-tide, and I’d float off on it, in it, just another trail of living vapor combing the earth in search of a world we’d all gotten the idea was here somewhere. Where, I wonder, had that idea come from, and how did so many of us get it?
“But that isn’t what you want to hear,” I say suddenly to the not-quite-empty workroom, the cribless floor. “Is it?” For a second, I panic, fight down the urge to leap for my feet and race for Lizzie. If they’ve gone back in there, then I’m too late anyway. And if they haven’t, my leaping about just might scare them in that direction. In my head, I’m casting around for something to say that will hold them while I swing my gaze back and forth, up to the ceiling and down again.
“I was going to tell you about the possum, right? One night, maybe eight months or so after you were…” The word curls on my tongue like a dead caterpillar. I say it anyway. “Born.” Nothing screams in my face or flies at me, and my voice doesn’t break. And I think something might have fluttered across the room from me, something other than the curtains. I have to believe it did. And the damp is still in here.
“It was pretty amazing,” I say fast, staring at where the flutter was, as though I could pin it there. “Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. ‘You hear that?’ she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click, from right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser, then, I made it myself. The drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin-face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge, white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.”