Glass

by Sam Savage

  The moment I turned the corner, I saw the store was not there anymore. A sign in the window read Ethel’s Hair & Nails, and someone had cleaned the window glass. A girl with a silver ring through one eyebrow was standing with her back to me when I entered, behind a chair in which an older woman was seated, doing something to that woman’s hair, cutting it perhaps, though I don’t recall scissors. When I came in they both looked at me in the mirror. “Can I help you?” the girl asked, talking to my reflection. She did not turn her head, so I looked away from the girl standing behind the chair with her back to me and spoke to the one facing me in the mirror. I told her I was looking for the man who used to run a typewriter repair shop in that building. The reflection said it did not know anything about that. “Maybe Ethel knows,” it said. But Ethel had left for the day. I asked if there was a number where I could reach her, and added, “It’s a long trip for me, I’m not sure I can come again.” The girl said, “I’m not authorized to share that number,” and then, speaking to the customer in the mirror: “So that’s what it was. I saw all them old typewriters and I thought this must have been like a pawnshop or something.” I said, “Typewriters? Where?” The real one turned to face me. “Around back. They’re gone now, though.” At the side of the building was a small parking lot—puddles of water in the broken pavement, clouds in the puddles. I walked across it and around to the back. Nail-studded boards, broken sheetrock, empty paint cans, and other trash were piled against a wall. A bundled sheet of paint-splattered plastic spilled water on my shoes when I pulled on it. The sheetrock was sodden and pulpy and came apart in my hands, and my shoes and dress were soaked and filthy by the time I had shifted enough trash to get a good look at the typewriters underneath: a dozen or so lined up against the shop wall, quite ordinary machines for the most part, all of them badly rusted. Steadying myself against the wall I pushed on the keys of one with the toe of my shoe—they failed to budge. The IBM Selectric was not among them, but the antique Underwood I had noticed before, that had belonged to a person with a long name I couldn’t remember then, was. I turned the tag over with my foot—it was Mary Poplavskaya. I knelt next to that one and slipped my hands underneath, took a deep breath, and clambered to my feet, staggering, and struck my shoulder hard against the wall. The typewriter wasn’t heavy, as typewriters go, but it was heavy for me, considering. Essaying it on my hip and then on my shoulder, I found that hugging it to my abdomen was best, though it forced me to walk with a broad waddle. I had to stop and rest twice on the way to the bus, sitting on the curb, and the second time a woman came out of a shop to ask if I was all right. The bus was not crowded, and I placed the typewriter beside me on the seat. When I reached home I practically threw it on the kitchen table, heaved it up on top of the breakfast dishes and broke a plate with a rabbit on it. My hands, my dress, and the insides of my arms were brown with rust. When I showered, the rust-tinted water swirling around the drain at my feet reminded me of the murder scene in Psycho. There are no Poplavskayas in the phone book.

  My shoulder is still painful. I am not going to type today. This was typed with my left hand, slowly.

  Ravel, Prokofiev, and several others, I believe, wrote left-handed pieces for the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm in the war. That would be the First World War. He was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother. I don’t know which battle he lost his arm in—on the Eastern Front, maybe. I don’t know the names of any of the battles on the Eastern Front in that war, though I know the names of a few of them in the next war: Kursk, Smolensk, Stalingrad.

  Another of our extravagances, after the Africa trip, and after Mexico, was a year in France, when we lived all winter in a gigantic house in an absolutely tiny village. I might have already said something about that house, which was so big we started out by writing in separate rooms. We each had two rooms, one for the morning sun and another for the evening sun. It was early autumn when we came. A few weeks later the weather turned icy cold. The house had no heating system at all, just fireplaces, and by late December we were spending most of our time huddled next to the fireplace in the kitchen, a long room with a vaulted ceiling and a little window at one end. It was like living in a cave. Clarence stopped typing and wrote in longhand, with mittens on, and every afternoon, unless it was pouring rain, we took long walks through the countryside. In my memory we did not see the sun again after winter set in, but that can’t be true. When I recall our walks, there seems always to be fog or drizzle. The countryside was fantastically bleak once the leaves had fallen, a dull-brown planate expanse, nothing resembling a proper hill, the fields bare and brown after the harvest: acres of clumped and furrowed earth without a trace of vegetation, separated by narrow woodlands of scrub trees and thickets. We never walked in the fields except to cross them in order to reach the woodlands beyond. At the edge of the village, visible from the kitchen door, stood a white cement signpost bearing the name Château-Thierry followed by number of kilometers. I have forgotten how many kilometers exactly—forty or fifty, I think it was. Seeing the name Château-Thierry every day when we were living there made me think a lot about the war, because of the monument on the hill perhaps, where I saw the name for the first time when I was just learning to read and where I finally understood that it was a place where a large number of people had suffered and died in wretched circumstances. “It was ghastly,” Clarence said, referring to that war. He had books of photographs of that war. More ghastly than the images of dead soldiers, blasted trees, and dead horses, were the stunned and staring faces of the living. We sometimes walked across a field to reach the woods on the other side. The mud was gluey and tenacious; it clung to our shoes, more with each step, until we were compelled to stop and scrape it off with a stick. I rested one hand on Clarence’s shoulder to keep my balance while I scraped. When the mud dried on the boots of the soldiers it became as hard as plaster of Paris. Sitting on the floor of the trenches they chipped at it with the points of their bayonets. If they fell facedown in it when they were struck, the stretcher bearers, when they turned them on their backs, did not know who they were. Huge rats were everywhere in the trenches, feeding on the dead and the wounded. Clarence told me that rats crawled under the greatcoats of the dead soldiers and chewed tunnels through the frozen bodies, and when they lifted a corpse to bury it a dozen rats might tumble out. We did not have rats or mice in France, because the house came furnished with two cats—a gray female called Chatte Grise and a black male called Chat Dingue. Chat Dingue means Krazy Kat in French. The mud never dried the winter we were there, though sometimes it froze, and on the coldest days we were able to cross the fields without sinking. The whole time we lived in France that winter I thought about the suffering of the soldiers, which was so different from the way I suffered. I did not know how to compare it to my suffering. I did not know how to measure either of them.

  There is an incongruity. Maybe events in the world are too big for words. War is too big. They, the words, are like tiny insects banging against a windowpane (the “window of the mind”) trying to get out, and outside is the big tumultuous world. Or maybe it is the other way around: it is the words that are too big; some words are too big. The word “love” is too big. Maybe the word “Clarence” is too big as well. I used to think the mute, incoherent daily suffering of ordinary life was too big for words. Now I think the words are too big for it. There are no words trivial enough to say how terrible it is.

  Yellow police tape surrounded the site, but people were lifting it and walking under. I walked right up to the edge of the hole: a rectangular cement-lined crater, twisted iron pipes projecting from the walls. Except for the pipes it could have been the roughing-in for a swimming pool. Concrete steps descended into the hole on one side, but I did not try to go down them. There were several other people there, standing about vaguely or taking pictures. There was nothing to see, just the hole with a great heap of debris at one end of it and a small bulldozer next to that. The bulldozer was not running
. I didn’t see anyone who looked like he belonged there. Some of the neighboring houses had plywood sheets blocking the windows, trash and debris littered sidewalks and lawns, and the street gutters were full of ashy mud. A tall man came and stood beside me. He said, speaking to no one in particular, “Not much to see, is there?” I made a small noise. I was turning to go, and he handed me a flyer: I was invited to visit the Tabernacle of Praise Church of God in Christ. If this city were bombed, there would be thousands of holes like that one. I have, despite myself, formed a picture of Henry Poole: standoffish, weird, late-night walker, a big man, probably, people remarking on the smallness of his dog. He was a prolific writer of something, I think, owning such a large, expensive typewriter; of letters, most likely. “Ungainly fifty-two-year-old lonely TV repairman” sums him up, I suppose, for the rest of us. A stooped, overweight man with a hanging lower lip, is how I picture him. He had lugged that heavy IBM Selectric typewriter all the way across town to be repaired, because he had something important to write, I imagine. Concealed in his character were aspects of the artist, revealed by this determination to finally set it all down on paper, to confide it there. The fact that his note was not going to survive the explosion would not have troubled him, the fate of what he wrote did not, I think, even interest him. If he ever spoke of his desire to set it down—to whom would he have spoken of it?—he would have used the phrase “get it all out,” I think. He wanted, finally, to get it all out. He would not have thought of himself as an artist, though, and would not have been weighed down by the feelings of responsibility one gets when one thinks of oneself in that way. He would have been amazed to learn that I once wanted to be famous. Nigel won’t stop squeaking his wheel, despite my shouts.

  I sprang up so precipitously I knocked my chair over on its back. Trying to kick it out of the way, I managed to tangle a foot in the rungs and nearly fell. I caught myself by grabbing hold of the typewriter and almost dragged it off the table. A chain reaction begun by the rat, who pushed first—pushed psychologically, of course, not with his paws: the relentless squeak of his little wheel was pushing. “A final squeak knocked Edna from her chair” was how it felt, I suppose. I snatched a pencil from the table and stamped across the room. Nigel’s eyes bulged when he saw me coming. I am sure he thought I was going to stab him with the pencil. I leaned over the tank, nose almost touching the wire screen. I shouted down into it as loud as I could and smacked the glass side with the flat of my hand, smacked it so hard that I am surprised I didn’t break it. Nigel flew straight into the air. I thought for a second he was going to topple over backwards, but he caught himself in time and shot into his tube. I waited to make sure he was not going to rocket back out before lifting the wire top. After a minute with neither hide nor hair of him, I reached inside and jammed the pencil down through the spokes of his wheel. I must have really frightened him—it was a long time before he came back out. He climbed in his wheel and tried to make it spin, then he sat in it, scratching. I don’t know why I said feelings of responsibility, when I meant feelings of failure.

  A blank of days, days of blank. I did not type a word, I slept a great deal, I ate. I went down to Potts’s place. Despite my sporadic efforts several of the plants are intent on dying. I sat in Mr. Potts’s chair and watched the fish—subaqueous flowers afloat in a green fusion. From the window ledge a few feet from where I sat a plant had littered the carpet with yellow leaves. I dwelled, I thought, like Keats, among sere leaves and twigs. I fell asleep in the armchair and had a dream in which I was presenting a young Clarence to Papa, though in reality Papa died before I ever met Clarence. In the dream, instead of “Papa, this is Clarence,” I said, “Papa, may I present Sir Nigel Poole,” and Clarence bowed deeply, with a sweep of an ostrich-plumed hat. On other days I walked over to the park. Once I fell asleep on a bench there and dreamed of the gardener and the mole. After putting the mole in his pocket, he began jumping about, hopping from foot to foot, and then he stopped, unzipped his fly, and pulled out a rat. Nurse put her hands over my eyes and made me turn and run away. We paused in the driveway by the house, I looked up, and there was Papa seated on top of a hedge. Nigel has made bite marks up and down his pencil.

  I did not hear the buzzer. I opened the door to take the trash out, and Brodt was standing on the landing—a different Brodt, I am tempted to say, owing to the elegant brown suit, collar noosed tight by a blue-and-yellow striped tie, and owing, I think, to the expression on his face. Well, he was smiling, and he was not wearing his uniform, and I did not for a brief moment know who he was, which is odd, as I had been expecting him since the day I glimpsed him staring up at my windows, if that was Brodt in fact and not, as I suggested then, someone who had come about the gutter. I was so agitated during his visit that I forgot to ask if it was him before. Perhaps not agitated, implying that I was thrashing about, however slightly—disquieted is how I was, the whole time he was here. I told him how surprised I was to see him, and he nodded slightly. I stood aside and he walked in. I left the bag of trash on the landing. He was wearing a brown hat with a narrow rim, not quite a bowler, that looked as if he had found it in a cinema—found it inside a movie, I mean, not on one of the seats; an older British movie that would have been. He carried a black satchel on a strap over his shoulder. He took the hat off—it must have been rather tight as it left a red line across his forehead—and smiled again, disclosing a gold tooth. I held out my hand, and he handed me the hat. I walked behind him, carrying the hat, while he circumambulated the room, stepping around my pages and pausing now and then to examine some object, because he was looking for something, as I thought at the time, or because he didn’t know what to do with himself, as I think now. He picked up a little soapstone Buddha from the windowsill and turned it over in his hand, looking, I assumed, for an identifying mark or label on the bottom, and placed it back. He paused by the sofa and stared down at the heap of books and photographs I had pushed off onto the floor, nudging some of it aside with the toe of his shoe, in a manner I thought inquisitive, though he might have been, in a very tentative way, clearing a space to sit down. If the latter was the case, he thought better of it, for he went over and stood at one of the windows plastered with notes, reading them perhaps (his back was to me), or else peering out between them at the ice cream factory, and I heard it roaring for the first time in a while, heard it, I want to say, with his ears. When he turned back to the room, he seemed to veer in the direction of the typewriter, which still held a page I had been typing, and he seemed to bend slightly, and I thought for a moment he was going to lean over the machine and read it. Pointing to the armchair, I suggested he take a seat, and he did, sliding the satchel from his shoulder and setting it on the floor in front of him. I sat on the edge of the sofa, facing him, the hat resting awkwardly on my knees. I considered placing it on the floor but did not want to appear to be discarding it. He looked down at the pages scattered on the floor next to chair. He glanced up at Nigel, who was peering at us through the glass. He made a series of little squeaking sounds in Nigel’s direction, lifting his upper lip and sucking through his teeth—the rat did not give any sign of hearing. “Would you like coffee?” I asked. He did not want coffee. He would enjoy a glass of water. I placed the hat on my seat and went to the kitchen. When I returned the hat was on the floor beside the chair. I handed him the glass and sat down again. He took a sip of water and placed the glass carefully on the floor next to the hat. I noticed he was looking at my pages again. He cleared his throat and leaned forward with a little smile that I did not know how to interpret, not being able to tell if it was sly or shy. I thought, Now he is going to talk about seeing me taking things. He bent down and snapped the satchel open. “I have something for you,” he said. He reached into the satchel. A moment’s pause, and he extracted my sheepskin earmuffs. “My favorite muffs,” I exclaimed in a whisper, snatching them from him. I put them on. The world went suddenly soft. I took them off (the world rushing back) and held them on my knees. I am sur
e I was beaming. He placed both hands on the chair arms, elbows crooked, as if about to stand up. He looked intently at me and said, “I had an uncle who heard voices, had heard them ever since he was a child. At some point, after he was already grown and had a wife and children, if you can believe it, he discovered that if he wore earmuffs he wouldn’t hear them anymore, hear the voices anymore.” I started to speak: “I don’t hear …” But he continued, “In the summer it was too hot for earmuffs, so he went around with big wads of cotton sticking out of his ears. A tall, really scrawny guy with a long nose, he looked just like a bird, some kind of crane, with downy tufts on the sides of his head. He looked really comical. Funny thing is, his name was Robin Bird.” He chuckled slightly. I think I did not smile, I was so taken aback. I was expecting him to talk about staplers. He must have noticed my puzzled look. He dropped his eyes, looking down at my pages again. “I feed birds in a park near here,” I said brightly, intervening, “sparrows and pigeons.” And he said, “In a tree outside my window I have seen blue jays, crows, orioles.” “I see only sparrows and pigeons,” I replied. He went on, “They trumpet outside my window in the morning. On Sunday morning they wake me up when I’m trying to sleep.” “Pigeons and sparrows wake me too, when they accumulate on the fire escape,” I said, helping, “though of course they can’t trumpet.” “Whistling and trumpeting. Mostly whistling,” he said. “That might be a cardinal,” I said, “Cardinals whistle.” He looked directly at me: “Yes, a cardinal. And something else too, in the top of a tree.” He was silent a moment. Then, pointing to the muffs in my hand, he said, “Nice color.” “Yes” I said, “I like blue,” and added, “I don’t have any trees, so I only get sidewalk birds like pigeons and sparrows.” “Orioles and cardinals are the only colorful ones I see,” he said. “Compared to sparrows,” I observed, “blue jays are colorful.” He laughed. “When I was a boy we hung aluminum pie pans on strings to keep birds out of the garden, but the blue jays weren’t frightened.” “I used to throw breadcrumbs out my window for the sparrows,” I said. “That’s nice,” he said. “We didn’t have a feeder, because we didn’t want to attract birds to the garden.” There was a long pause. He shifted in his seat, leaned an elbow on the chair arm and then seemed to think better of it and placed one hand in the other, resting both in his lap. I said, “Would you care to look at some of my pages?” He stared at the papers on the floor again. He seemed to be considering. “No, I don’t think that would help,” I think he said, finally. “I mean, I prefer not.” We seem to have said other things, which I have forgotten. We were standing in the doorway, he was turning to leave, when I said, “I was afraid you had come about the things I took.” I hesitated. “All the things I stole from work.” He made a sweeping gesture, as if casting something to the wind. “Those things?” For a moment I thought he was going to touch me on the shoulder, but he let his arm drop. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Everybody was taking things. Even the director was taking things.” I closed the door behind him. I leaned against it. I heard his footfalls descending the stairs, and then, faintly, the street door open and close. I went and sat in my typing chair. It is dark now, night fell while I was typing, and I can’t see the words. Oh, Brodt!