White Dialogues

by Bennett Sims

  3.

  The boy walks his bike up a hill. In the middle of his street he sees a dead chipmunk, crushed evenly by the tires of a car. It has been flattened into a purse of fur. Around it, a red aura of gore. It makes a brown streak in the center of the lane, straight as a divider line. Ahead of him on the sidewalk he sees a live one. Only a yard away, a second chipmunk stands tensed on all fours, eyeing the boy and his bike. When it wrinkles its nose in rapid sniffs, the boy can tell that it is smelling the carcass stench, wafting in faint off the tarmac behind him. It must seem, to the chipmunk, as if the boy is its brother’s murderer. He does not know how to correct this misunderstanding, or reassure the rodent that he means it no harm. He stands silent, trying to stifle any movement that might terrify it. It flees in terror anyway. In an abrupt about-face it dashes up the sidewalk, hugging the hill’s concrete retaining wall; when it reaches a ground-level drainpipe—barely bigger than its body—it squeezes inside. The boy walks his bike up to the drainpipe. He moves slowly, so as not to startle the animal. But his wheel spokes make a sinister sound as he approaches: each bony click seems to close in on it, skeleton sound of Death’s scythe shaft tapping. When the boy reaches the drainpipe he bends to peer inside. Huddled into a ball, the chipmunk is shaking violently, its walnut-colored chest convulsing. It glares out at the boy, trapped. The rear of the pipe is backed up with gunk: mud, pine needles, dead leaves. The sight of the boy there, darkening the aperture of the drainpipe, must be a source of unbearable dread for the creature. He starts to back away, but it is too late. Inexplicably, recklessly, the chipmunk rushes forward. It reaches the edge of the pipe and leaps free, landing on the sidewalk at the boy’s feet. There it freezes, locking its eyes on his shoes, as if awaiting the killing blow. The boy is careful to stand behind the bike’s front tire. He gives the chipmunk a barrier, a zone of safety. He reassures it, by his very posture, that he means it no harm. The chipmunk cowers, catching its breath. The wheel casts a barred shadow over its body, a cage of shade in which the chipmunk trembles, frozen amid the many spokes. Indeed, the way that the tire’s shadow encloses the rodent, it looks like a phantom hamster wheel. Like the kind of toy Death would keep its pets in—all the mortals who are Death’s pets. Maybe that is why the chipmunk dares not move, the boy thinks: because it already understands the nature of this wheel. To flee from Death is just to jog in place. Spinning inside one’s dying. The boy takes the bike by the seat and rolls it back. As the front wheel withdraws, the shadow slides off its prisoner. Now the chipmunk is free to flee. But it hunkers to the ground, eyeing the boy’s feet with coiled purpose. The boy understands exactly what is about to happen: feeling cornered, the chipmunk will charge him. In a brown blur it will scurry up his shoe and latch onto his pantsleg, the way a squirrel mounts a tree trunk. As it claws at his pants for purchase, tearing through the cotton, the boy will be able to feel its bark-sharpened nails get a scansorial grip into his shinbone. The sear of skin tearing; the beading of blood. He cannot help imagining all this. He will kick out his leg—as if it were aflame, he imagines—but the chipmunk will hold fast to him, out of rabidness perhaps. Then the boy will have no choice. Above all, he knows, he will have to keep the creature from biting him. After trying so hard not to frighten it, he will be forced to kill it. With his free foot he will have to scrape it from his pantsleg, onto the sidewalk, and stomp the life out of it, flattening it as dispassionately as that car had flattened the rodent in the road. In this way, he will become everything the animal mistook him for: its murderer, its personal death. The boy stares down at the chipmunk, which has begun to vibrate like a revving engine. Because it was wrong about the boy, it will prove to be right about the boy. Because it has mistaken the boy for a murderer, it will make the boy murder it. And so perhaps, the boy reflects, the chipmunk wasn’t wrong after all: maybe it could see clearly what the boy could not. That he had a role to play in its fate. The boy stomps his foot lightly on the sidewalk. Still the chipmunk does not run. It is ready now. It must have been waiting for this moment its entire life. Seeing the boy today, it recognized him instantaneously: he was the human who had been set aside for it, the boy it had been assigned from the beginning. He was the place it was fated to die. Now, at long last, it has an appointment to keep.

  4.

  On his walk home from school the boy pauses at the edge of his neighbors’ yard. It is wide and well manicured and unfenced, and today their dog is out in it. A standard chocolate poodle—as tall as the boy’s chest when standing—it is couchant now, in the middle of the lawn. It has not yet noticed the boy from where it lies. It pants happily in the midday heat, its long tongue lolling from its jaw. Some curls are combed into a bouffant on its forehead, where they seem to seethe, massed and wrinkled like an exposed brown brain. The dog’s owners—the boy’s neighbors—are nowhere to be seen. Far out of earshot, deep within their white two-story house. If the dog were to suddenly bark loudly and attack the boy—if the boy were to shout for help—they would not be able to hear. At least twice a week the boy passes the poodle in the yard like this. The sight of it always paralyzes him with fear. He will stop walking for a moment, then sidle slowly down the sidewalk, careful not to draw the dog’s attention. What is to keep it from mauling him? The owners are never outside with it. Evidently they trust the poodle. It is allowed to roam unsupervised in the yard, which is not technically—but only appears to be—unfenced. In reality, the boy’s mother has explained to him, it employs a so-called invisible fence: a virtual boundary of radio waves tracing the perimeter of the lawn. GPS coordinates are broadcast to the dog’s shock collar, which is programmed to administer mild jolts of admonitory electricity whenever the poodle trespasses the property line. There is nothing—she reassured him—to be afraid of. After a few hours of behavioral training, the dog would have learned to obey the dictates of its collar. It would have internalized the limits of its prison. And so even if it noticed the boy one day—even if it bounded barking toward him—it would know to stop short at the pavement. As his mother was explaining this, the boy nodded to show he understood. But deep down he still does not trust the invisible fence. He wonders, for instance, how it is supposed to keep other animals out of the yard. All it would take is for a rabid bat, or raccoon, or chipmunk, to crawl across the boundary line and bite and infect the dog. Then when the boy was walking home one day, he would see the poodle foaming at the mouth in the yard, with nothing but a symbolic cage of X/Y coordinates separating it from him. And what was to keep the dog—mindless with rage—from simply disregarding the fence, in that case? Assuming it could remember the fence at all. For the rabies may very well have wiped its memory clean, erasing its behavioral training. Then the dog would be incapable of recognizing symbolic cages, only real ones, and it would not think twice before bounding across the yard at the boy. He stares at the poodle. It is facing the house, panting. He does not know its name. Sometimes he imagines being attacked by the dog, and in these fantasies—which he indulges in involuntarily, standing motionless with fear on the sidewalk—he assigns it the name Gerald. He imagines the neighbors running across the lawn, calling Gerald, Gerald, get off him, even as the poodle pins him to the pavement and snaps its jaws. This is always the most horrifying moment, for the boy, in the fantasy. How the dog can ignore its own name. How it can conduct this beast’s balancing act, suspended between two minds: the mind that answers to Gerald and the mind that murders meat. For once it starts tearing into the boy’s throat, it is not Gerald any longer: it has already regressed, passed backward through some baptism. Not only nameless now, but unnamable. That is what terrifies the boy. The name cannot enclose the dog forever. It is just a kind of kennel you can keep it in. The boy pictures all the flimsy walls of this poodle’s name: the collar’s silver tag, engraved Gerald; the blue plastic food bowl, marked Gerald; the sound of its owners’ voices, shouting Gerald. Each of them is just another invisible fence, which the dog can choose to trespass at will. The poodle turns to him now, co
cking its head sideways. At any moment, the boy knows, the animal could transform from a friendly housepet into a ferocious guardian: a Cerberus at the gates of the hell that it will make this boy’s life, if he makes even one move toward its masters. From his place on the sidewalk, the boy reaches out his arm. He extends it over the lawn, as over a candle’s flame. Unfolding his hand, he holds it palm-down inside the dog’s territory. The poodle rises, stretching its hind legs and shaking the tiredness from its coat. It begins to cross the yard. Every few steps it stops, eyeing the boy. It is afraid of him, he realizes. The dog must recognize the threat that the boy poses. That he could snap. Attack it. That he is wild, unpredictable, unconstrained. From the poodle’s point of view, the only thing holding the boy back is a kind of invisible fence, or else system of invisible fences. The name his mother gave him. The school uniform he wears. The fact that he walks with his back straight, and hair combed, and that he knows better than to murder his neighbors’ pets. This is all that protects the poodle from him now, the poodle must be thinking. He imagines himself enraged like the dog, rabid like the dog; he imagines himself punching the animal, in blind mindlessness. Yes, it is possible. He can see himself that way, one day: suspended over a void where no name reaches. The dog approaches the edge of the grass. It stops a foot back, looking up at the boy’s hand. Suspicious, it sniffs. It curls back its lip slightly, revealing a white incisor. The boy’s palm is cold with sweat. It is exactly as he always imagined. He wants to call the dog’s name, in soothing tones—There, Gerald. There, Gerald—but he remembers that Gerald is not its real name. And so, not knowing what to call it, the boy says nothing. He stands there on the pavement. The dog stands on the grass.

  5.

  Behind his house one afternoon the boy finds a chunk of ice. It is lying on the sidewalk, fist-sized and flecked with dirt. Someone must have dropped it there from a five-pound bag or a cooler. Now it lies exposed to the summer. It is the clear kind, blue-gray all the way through, except at its core, where a brilliant whiteness has condensed: sunlight, locked inside. Tiny hairlines of trapped light radiate outward, veining the ice’s interior from corner to corner, touching the edges and returning to center. The radiance seems to ricochet around in there, bouncing off the walls of its container. Even as the boy is considering this, the ice jerks toward him. The chunk shifts a centimeter across the pavement, then stops abruptly, as if thinking better of it. The boy can hardly stifle his surprise. He knows that there is some kind of glacial principle at work: that as the chunk melts, it lubricates its own passage, and is displaced across the pavement in a basal slide. But still, the way it had moved. Exactly like a living thing. Bending down, he can see the darkened trail behind the ice, where it has wet the pebbled concrete. While the boy is studying this, the chunk scrapes forward again, another centimeter. The light at its center glints, melting it from within. Where is it headed? The boy’s shadow stops an inch or two away, and it almost seems as if the ice is trying to crawl inside. As if, stuck beneath the sun, it is seeking shelter in his shade. Dragging itself into his shadow. And it’s strange, too, the boy thinks, how what melts it helps it move. That is the paradox the ice has been presented with: this light at its core, the light that is killing it, is what enables it to escape. It has to glide along a film of its own dying. The faster that it moves, the more of itself that it melts, and so it is alive with its own limit, animated by this horizon inscribed in its being. There is a lesson to be learned in this, the boy thinks. He watches the chunk, waiting for it to judder forward again. The ball of light sits calmly at its center, like a pilot in the cockpit. It will steer the chunk forward by destroying it. Death is what’s driving the ice. It collaborates with the ice’s other side, the side that wants to survive, and together these twin engines propel the chunk to safety. As the boy watches, a thread of water melts off one edge, trickling down the sidewalk in an exploratory rivulet. Paving the way for the glacier. The boy was right: it is headed directly for him. He watches the tendril inch into the shadow of his head, worming blindly forward. It punches deeper and deeper into the darkness. This is the track that the death-driven ice will travel, the boy understands. Gradually the glacier will slide into his head. One-way into the shade. One-way into the shadow that his skull casts. There has to be some kind of lesson in this.

  Za

  Two weeks after B leaves, A receives her first email from him. In it, he describes the various people he has met abroad so far. He makes no explicit mention of lovers. But he devotes an entire page to recounting a group Scrabble game, with particular attention paid to the woman seated next to him. Ever since receiving the email (one a.m., perhaps a reasonable hour where he is), A has not left her laptop. She has already reread the letter several times. She is trying to understand what it means.

  A met B only a month before he left. She knew from the outset that this trip was imminent. He had hidden nothing. My work will be sending me away soon, he had told her: Six weeks. And what about this, she had asked, referring to the bed in which they lay. No one else, he promised, if that is what you want. And she had said: You don’t have to do that for me.

  It is difficult to tell, from this email, whether he has kept his promise. Instead of addressing the promise directly, he meticulously describes the Scrabble game, almost play-by-play. A could not care less about B’s Scrabble game. She wants to know whether he has met anyone else. He appears to have met this woman. Yet it is difficult to tell, from B’s description, who she is, or what she means.

  She’s just a colleague, B wrote, another American from the company, as well as the most aggravating Scrabble player he has ever encountered. She was the kind of player who contested every recherché two- or three-letter word on the board, B wrote. For instance, on one of B’s very first turns, he played jo horizontally, scoring a triple-letter on the j. Since he had set the j atop a vertical word—ape, forming jape—he scored a second tripleletter. The o, too, was a vertical addition: he’d placed it on bi, forming obi. The play was worth more than fifty points. But the woman—this woman—challenged all three of B’s words. She had never heard of any of them, she scoffed, B wrote. She challenged jape, so he looked it up (they hadn’t brought a dictionary; he had to search Hasbro.com’s Scrabble page on his smart phone). Jape: to joke or quip, to make sport of. She challenged jo, so he looked it up: an Irish term of endearment, a sweetheart. She challenged obi, so he looked it up: an alternative spelling of obeah, a religious system of African origin, involving witchcraft and sorcery. The whole ordeal lasted fifteen minutes, B wrote. The reception at the compound was capricious, so the Hasbro website kept lagging. At one point B even had to hold his phone above his head—squinting to see the 4G signal’s ziggurat of blue bars—until finally obi’s page had loaded. In the end, of course, the woman’s challenges came to nothing. But because it was a friendly game, informal, no one made her forfeit her turn.

  Naturally A had not meant what she had said, when they were lying together in bed. It had been a gambit on her part. She had said, You don’t have to do that for me, when what she wanted more than anything was for him to do that for her. Yet there were limits to what or how she could ask. Obviously she could not request his fidelity outright. She would be overstepping her prerogatives as his lover. They had been together only for a matter of weeks, and while she might have drawn future credit on the relationship, she would have risked jinxing the relationship. What’s more, she might have come across as presumptuous, possessive, jealous; and if she made him feel at all claustrophobic, he was liable to take up a lover on principle (whether or not he even realized—consciously—that that was what he was doing). On the other hand, her current stratagem was not without its own risks. Namely, that B would take her at her word: that he would pursue a lover, or lovers, without guilt, because that was what she had encouraged. But she trusted B not to take her at her word. He was smart enough, she knew, to detect the double meaning in her message: You don’t have to do that for me meant Please do this for me. In
this way, her so-called permission put B at a moral disadvantage: because he was free to pursue lovers, it was out of the question for him to pursue lovers; because there was no need to feel disloyal (for he had every right), he would succeed only in feeling selfish (for exploiting those rights). That was the double bind A had placed him in. She knew this, and she knew that B knew this. What she did not know—what she could not determine—was whether B knew she knew. Because for the stratagem to work, it must not seem like a stratagem. A had to seem undesigning, self-sacrificing; her position had to seem like a plea, as opposed to a ploy. Only then would B feel tenderness toward her, and make it a point of pride to remain faithful. His constancy would even take on an erotic quality: he would derive pleasure from denying himself pleasure. Whereas if he ever suspected that she was playing on his feelings—that she was the one denying him pleasure—he would begin to feel claustrophobic. Then they would be back at square one. It was all a matter of how many moves ahead B thought A was thinking.