The Involuntary Sojourner

by S. P. Tenhoff

  And then there was his behavior at the shopping mall.

  On Saturday afternoon Raymond Sekowsky left his house, drove to the mall, and sat for a long time on a bench in front of the LensCrafters with a bag of Pretzel Time Cinnamon Sugar Bites. At first Doug took this as possible evidence of grief, since he just sat there all by himself with a peculiar strained look on his face. But then he noticed the Forever 21 next to the LensCrafters. When teenage girls entered or left Sekowsky’s head would turn surreptitiously, his hand would freeze in the bag, and he would follow them with his eyes until they were out of sight. Then he would innocently resume munching until other teenage girls passed. Sometimes he leaned past the fern to get a longer look.

  How would the kid—why did Doug resist using his name? To keep him at arm’s length? To make him less specific and therefore less human? Or was it that calling him by his name seemed presumptuous, as if he were pretending that he knew the kid, when in fact he didn’t know him as anything other than a flash of moving color followed by a shape twitching on the street? Anyway, how would the kid feel if he were here to see that, instead of staying home and grieving and possibly drinking too much, his father was spending his Saturday afternoon eating Cinnamon Sugar Bites and leering at underage girls? But—Doug would have explained to the kid—this behavior could, if you thought about it, simply indicate a need to escape from his feelings. Lonely people often went to public places. Maybe he found solace in the parade of young lives marching past. Some of these girls must have been the kid’s own age. Some of them might even have known him. Maybe Sekowsky was considering this as he watched the girls. Or maybe he was imagining his son, alive, sitting there watching the girls in his place. The point was, Doug and the kid couldn’t know with any certainty what was going through the father’s mind. So what would have looked to the kid like leering if he were there, peeking from behind the wedding card rack of the Hallmark’s with Doug, might not have been leering at all . . .

  But there would have been no way to explain to the kid’s satisfaction the incident the next afternoon. Sekowsky came out of his house with a bag of garden wood chips, walked onto his lawn, and started adding chips to the ones already there. Doug could see his lips puckering as he poured the chips from a hole in the bag’s corner. His lips puckered, and even though Doug was too far away to hear, he knew, as the man scattered chips across the speckled, sunlit length of his garden, puckering and scattering and repuckering and sometimes squatting to smooth and sculpt the growing mounds, he knew that Raymond Sekowsky was whistling.

  ***

  Sekowsky left his house a little after noon. Doug watched him lock his front door, swing the keys around their ring with a flourish and drop them in his pocket.

  Afterward, they claimed premeditation. A plan. It wasn’t true, not in the sense that they meant it. If anything, it was because he couldn’t decide what to do that he had come. He was hoping a confrontation might force some kind of decision out of him.

  Later, he often regretted not being able to say he was drunk when it happened. It would have made everything easier to explain. But the fact was he had taken just one gulp from his flask, and that was more of a token confidence-builder than anything else. The blood alcohol content measured during the arrest—this time they actually gave him the Breathalyzer test—was a result of all the drinking he did while he waited in the car for the police to arrive.

  Doug had been about to get out of his car and go knock on the door when it opened and Sekowsky came out instead. So instead Doug sat, damp and jittery, hand on the car door latch, unable to persuade himself to move, while Sekowsky crossed the lawn and got into his own car.

  Allowing himself one drink, he realized, had been a mistake. He should have allowed himself two, or three, or as many as it took to be able to do something he couldn’t take back. He’d imagined himself getting out and confronting Raymond Sekowsky there at his front door. Confronting him with what? Insufficient mourning? No, not just that: with being a bad father. Yes, that was it: bad father. Angry words, back and forth. He would tackle Sekowsky. Sekowsky would tackle him. Either way, it wouldn’t matter. A tussle there in the grass. One of them beaten bloody. But he had never been violent, drunk or otherwise. He didn’t seem to have it in him.

  So then why had he hit the gas pedal when the kid raced in front of him?

  He kept asking himself this as Sekowsky pulled out of his driveway and drove down the street. He already knew where they were going. Sure enough, ten minutes later they turned into the mall’s giant parking lot. The lot was divided into sections marked with animal signs, big colored signs on posts to help you remember where you’d parked your car. They were in the Giraffe section.

  Sekowsky managed to find a space right away. Doug circled. There was no hurry. He had a pretty good idea where Sekowsky was going to end up: back on the bench in front of the LensCrafters, his hand in a bag of Cinnamon Sugar Bites. And Doug would end up in the Hallmark’s again. He saw the scene as if he were spying on someone: a man stands at a wedding card rack, fraudulently fingering a lacy card while he peeks through the glass. He didn’t recognize himself in that scene. That man wasn’t him. It was clear enough what he should do: leave the parking lot and go home. But leaving felt like a surrender. Like giving up on ever figuring out what killing the kid had meant. He circled the Giraffe section, thinking he would park and thinking he would leave and doing neither.

  Ahead, down near the end of the row, Raymond Sekowsky stepped out from behind a pickup.

  He felt dizzy, as if the circles he’d been making in the car had been getting smaller and smaller. Then panic, and with it a hatred for himself more vivid than anything he’d ever felt before.

  Raymond Sekowsky was walking, his back to Doug, in the direction of the mall. And his walk, as he went, was—what else?—buoyant and carefree.

  Doug hit the gas and turned the steering wheel slightly, altering his trajectory.

  In those few seconds before he changed his mind and slammed on the brakes, he understood something. He knew it as the car hurtled forward, his head tingling crazy warning: he had never done this before. This experience was new. He hadn’t hit the kid on purpose after all. There was no time for him then to consider why he’d needed to blame himself, no time to locate and name the guilt he’d been secretly hoarding since long before the accident. He only knew this: he wasn’t a killer. Foot on the pedal, he rushed toward a collision not yet too late to stop, paralyzed with disappointment and something like joy. He wasn’t a killer. He was innocent.

  The Visitors

  When Dr. Tauber imagined the woman with the unpronounceable name, as he did more and more frequently, it was always without her son. In his daydreams, the boy was as absent as the husband. Only the woman was there, at his office, in his bedroom, on the stairs, clothed or unclothed, and although even in his fantasies he couldn’t imagine her speaking his language, whatever he said to her she understood perfectly.

  He didn’t know what to call the distraction she’d become. What he felt for her, if it was love, what he felt for her was love, if it was. He trudged through a morning, labored across a dark afternoon. If it was love. He leaned into a face, conscious of tainted breath and the periapical swell of an acute abscess. He ate dinner from a plastic tray that nearly burned his fingers when he pulled it, unthinking, from the microwave.

  Why the need to give the feeling a name? In the morning he waited for five minutes on the stairs, but she and her son didn’t appear. Then the hated ascent to his office. Wasn’t the feeling more genuine if it remained nameless? He traced gold inlay over the craze line of a maxillary premolar. But possibly that was the point: by naming it he might bracket it. Build a fence around it. The bright memory: her handing him a pair of onions.

  He paused, sickle probe in hand, to look at them, oversized and lopsided on a silver tray, shadowed in an alcove like a shrine.

  ***

 
“Are you okay?” the voice—a child’s voice—had asked.

  He was hunched over a handrail, taking his customary break in the morning climb up the hill. They had stopped four steps above. He noticed the woman first, face dark and steeply angled and creased diagonally along the forehead. Then the boy beside her, nine maybe or ten. Her jacket was too small for her and the boy’s too large. That was one common characteristic of the Visitors: mismatched clothes, or improperly sized, or belonging to yesterday’s fashion, a piecemeal assemblage of parts that gave them a scarecrowlike, patched-together look.

  Was he okay: what a question. Did he look okay? He didn’t say this but thought it. He didn’t say this because he was in no condition to speak, occupied as he was with breathing and coughing and handrail-gripping to prevent a backward tumble down the hill. On the other hand, this was a fairly ordinary morning. This moment occurred every morning; it simply occurred at a progressively lower point on the stairs as the months and years and decades passed.

  When he first set up his practice on the hill he’d told himself that the stairs would keep him young; when it was no longer possible to make that argument, he’d maintained that the stairs were, at least, preserving him; when what the stairs were doing, it had eventually become clear, was killing him. Slowly wearing down bone and joint and ligament and muscle. His ex-wife, who as his dental assistant had needed to brave the same stairs, had wanted to relocate. But their apartment, he’d reminded her—the apartment he now lived in alone—was a seven-minute walk away; they would never find a more convenient location. As much as he hated to admit it, she’d probably been right all along. Now, though, it was too late: if there had ever been a time when he might have summoned the resources to find a new office, to move equipment, to establish and groom new patients, that time was over. He would never know how many patients he had lost to the stairs; how many, especially the older ones who made up most of the neighborhood, had given up and gone somewhere less demanding. But there was one small advantage: the patients who did come arrived breathless and exhausted, and he’d always suspected that this made them more willing to sink gratefully into the dental chair and open their mouths to the needle and drill . . .

  Of course Dr. Tauber also arrived breathless and exhausted. These days a minimum of thirty minutes was required before he felt capable of wielding needle or drill or any tool for that matter, which was why he arrived at the foot of the hill every morning at eight twenty. Occasionally people passed as he made his gradual way up the stairs, neighbors usually on their way to work, but he had never encountered Visitors here before.

  They stood silently above him, watching him gasp and hack. The woman prodded the boy and he said it again—“Are you okay?”—in a tone that made the question sound like an accusation.

  Dr. Tauber held up a hand: Wait.

  So it was her question. Her concern.

  “Thirty-two years here,” he replied when he was eventually capable of speech. “You’d think I’d be used to it.” Smiling at the woman he realized she hadn’t understood a word. She looked down at the boy.

  “I’ve been here for thirty-two years now,” he repeated slowly to the child, “and I’m still not used to these stairs. Do you understand?” The boy nodded. “Well tell her then.” He drew an impatient line with his finger from the boy to the woman. “Tell her what I said.”

  The boy emitted an arrhythmic blurt of sound. When he’d finished, the woman turned to smile at Dr. Tauber, diagonal crease gone.

  “So you live here on the hill?” Dr. Tauber asked, although he was fairly certain he already knew where they were living, where they must be living.

  The boy nodded.

  Looking at the mother so the boy would understand that Dr. Tauber was addressing her and that the boy was only required to translate, he said: “I guess that makes us neighbors. I have my office here, on the top of the hill. I’m Dr. Tauber, by the way. Edward. Call me Edward.”

  The boy blurted sounds; somewhere in the middle of it Dr. Tauber recognized his name. The woman put a hand to her chest and said something unidentifiable that he knew must be her own name. Indicating her son, she spoke again; this time he thought he detected a strangled “gaa” between clicked and throated consonants.

  “Right!” he said. “Well, nice meeting you. Better get back to it. These stairs, you know!” And, nodding abruptly, he stepped past them, resuming his climb. He’d had a feeling, as she pronounced the unpronounceable names: a neighbor might be watching. From a window or doorway, from the top or possibly from the foot of the stairs, somewhere a gossipy neighbor, watching him chat with the Visitors.

  They were called “the Visitors” in the neighborhood even though it had become clear that they were not visiting. That they were staying. Once the state revealed its plan to put on the hill, in the abandoned dormitory of the old polytechnic institute, these people fleeing from—was it conflict? drought? redrawn borders?—anyway some calamity or other, a petition had been circulated, led by an old woman named Marie. Dr. Tauber knew her as well as he knew anyone there, having for three decades attended the gradual disintegration of her teeth. Sweet and soft-spoken, with a lisp now due to her recently installed dental plate, she was not the obvious candidate to rally the residents against what she was calling “the Vithitorth.” He hadn’t wanted to sign the petition. Not due to any particular sympathy for “displaced persons,” who—with the exception of the man that limped up the stairs every Monday to deliver dental supplies—seemed less like “persons” than statistical abstractions from a news report. His reluctance was due, rather, to a fundamental distrust of joining causes. Of joining anything, really: his ex-wife’s most frequent complaint had been his supposed remoteness; the only time he ever let himself get close to people, she used to say, was when he was leaning over them in mask and gloves. His fear was that signing the petition might rope him into unforeseen responsibilities. But Marie’s argument was sound: if these Visitors were allowed to come it might scare current residents away and discourage others from moving in, resulting in a loss of business for him. What she didn’t say, what was not even hinted at by her but remained nevertheless firmly in his mind, was that refusing to participate might be seen as less than neighborly by his patients on the hill. So he had signed, his name added to a long list of mostly elderly residents, and there followed a festive adorning of the neighborhood in brightly colored posters, yard signs, and banners, and Dr. Tauber was surprised to see Marie’s name in a newspaper article about the issue. A decision had been made, not an official announcement but a rumor interpreted as one: the dormitory would not be used after all. They had won. And although there was nothing that could be described as a celebration, there was a general sense of relief.

  Then one evening, on his way home, he’d seen the gate to the dormitory open for the first time in years. He could hear hammering, pipes clanging. A few weeks later, other sounds could be heard beyond the gate. The sounds of children: shouts and cries and laughter reaching him on the stairs together with the smell of unfamiliar food cooking. And nearly overnight the hill had become noisier, wilder, infused with a volatile new life . . .

  There were no further petitions. Now that the Visitors were there, the residents didn’t have the heart, it seemed, or at any rate the bad manners, to demand their removal. There were children after all, mothers and children . . .

  The particular mother and child that Dr. Tauber had met on the stairs became a common sight as he made his morning climb. The boy, he learned, had just started attending the local grade school. Dr. Tauber got the impression that it might have been his first time attending school in America, but he didn’t dare ask where the boy had learned English, just as he didn’t ask where they’d been living or what they’d been doing before coming to the hill. When he spoke with them—or rather with the mother by means of the boy’s sullen translation—he made a point of avoiding tactless questions about their previous lives. He
told her once about a nearby park with a playground. Another time he recommended one supermarket over another. There were mornings when they didn’t appear, and mornings when he found himself disappointed to see her going down the stairs with other mothers and children; and on those mornings it was astonishing to see her speaking in her language, voluble and animated, with a boisterous laugh he wouldn’t have expected from her. She was like a different person, and he realized how much the constraints of translation must be stifling her when they talked. Embarrassed, he tried to ignore her then, but she always smiled and waved, even when the other mothers glared at him stone-faced.

  In their encounters she never used English, although she must have learned enough to offer a simple greeting at least, a “hello” or “how are you.” At times it seemed she understood more than she let on; at other times he was convinced she understood nothing at all . . . The boy’s English, on the other hand, continued to improve as the months passed, until he sounded like any American child. His interpreting skills, however, remained as poor as ever. It wasn’t just his sparse vocabulary; it was, more than anything else, his attitude: he regarded Dr. Tauber with unconcealed suspicion, and provided only the barest translation in either direction. Dr. Tauber would see layers of feeling cross the woman’s features as she spoke, only to hear the boy deliver in his terse monotone a phrase about seasonal fruit or the unreliability of the local buses. It was as if he were trying to flatten the contents he was transmitting to a single dimension, extracting any depth or substance. Sometimes Dr. Tauber felt that the boy was more of a barrier than a bridge. It might be better, he thought, if the son weren’t there at all; then he and the woman could communicate unimpeded, learning to read each other in a pure, wordless language of gestures and facial expressions . . .