by Ronald Malfi
Collie Burgess screamed into the ceiling, his breath coming right back into his face like exhaust. He felt his knees press firmly into the ceiling, the pressure—the pressure—
Restrained, confined, he suddenly could not move. The sound of his heartbeat suddenly all he could hear, he willed himself to think of wide open spaces—of fields of bluegrass and the unfettered vastness of Caribbean beaches. But in the end, all he could think of were graves.
Underneath
Many years ago, toiling for some time beneath the weight of creation, a momentary, self-loathing lapse in my own judgment, coupled with the despair of countless failures, caused me to summon him, birth him, afford him a name and a purpose: a Frankenstein pseudonym whose passion and creativity, along with his prolific nature, were frighteningly alien to me, though whose handwriting was more than just a sheer mimicry of my own. Never did I anticipate the final outcome—the resentment laced with irony; the justified sense of personal failure in the wake of unmitigated success; the torment—on the day of his summoning. Throughout the decades and as the success mounted—as the fame rose to proportions dreamt of by starry-eyed young girls in pink gowns and glittered, bejeweled tiaras—we orchestrated a dance, commingling like brothers jumping from book to subsequent book, or like enemies—yes, enemies!—conspiring to work together for the sake and gratification of their individual wants and desires, hopes and dreams, prisoners orchestrating an escape. In the periods between projects, he would vanish, would retreat to the underneath of things—of my life—and float like a shadow through which the motes of ancient dust could pass. And there he would stay until summoned by me, over and over again, to put my words to paper.
Yet now, in my old age, and despite the security of wealth and fashionable circumstance, he visited one last time, and for once without pretense.
Cloaked in the fragrant vapors of nonexistence, he wisped into the room, the worn and cracking soles of his old shoes whispering on the hardwood—a familiar cadence. He was slightly stooped from decades slaving over notebooks and typewriters, his long white fingers fat at the knuckles, aching almost audibly with each creaking flex and bend of their tendons, snapping and popping, settling and unsettling. His face was mine, of course, but it was a withered albino impression of my own darker, healthier features. Had we been twin brothers clambering through childhood, faceless mothers would have whispered about the cruel discretion of God to grant one child with color and life, the other a carbon imprint of his more fortunate sibling. About him wafted the stale scent of sacrifice, of ancient dust and fallen cobwebs gathered like epaulettes on the shoulders of his greatcoat, and that same sacrifice, I could see, echoed in his sad, hurtful eyes.
All these years of believing he’d stolen from me, was it really the other way around?
With a slight agitation of his features, he glanced upward and around, where his name teemed now from the bookshelves, embossed along the brittle spines in gold stamping, testament not just to the depths of his creativity but my own years of success donning his cloak. He executed a flourish with one hand, as if to bring the books to my attention or, perhaps, to address the books themselves. But his eyes turned from them and, on a creaking, pivoting neck, he leveled his gaze back on me. In his pupils burned the accumulation of years of torment, turmoil boiling over like hot pots, a hammer slamming coldly against the dented face of a Chinese gong.
Here I was, a thief facing my accuser…yet the accuser owed me just as much as I owed him, forging between us and through the strands of deceit and tension a sinewy bond, a union of sorts, that resonated simultaneously throughout both our beings like the amplified plucking of a single bass note. So it was inevitable we would jab accusatory fingers at each other, which we did simultaneously, both victims and victimizers alike. Yet the hardship of our lifelong union, to my shock, appeared more profound on him: in his stooped posture and pale, ghost-white face, the sunken, sullen features, that relentless banging behind those steely eyes. How I had laid awake nights, sweating his success, hating his name as it appeared on the title page of every word I had written! A name I had given him! A life I had granted him!
But, oh, what life? To be extracted from a crypt on the occasions my muse was restless, forced—strapped and chained, slave-like—to a worktable, pen in hand, scribbling words upon words upon words at my insistence, at my will? A creature devised from nothingness to vault me to financial success while I stood on his worsening, weakening, bowing shoulders. Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I saw him from a different angle. How foolish I’d been to be jealous of this man! How ridiculous I’d been to begrudge him his fame! Did we both not cultivate calluses on our index fingers after hours of furious scribbling? Did we both not sigh in mutual relief at the completion of a tale, knowing there was one less story in the world waiting to be told? In short—did it not take both of us to complete each work? We were nothing without each other.
Suddenly, surprising myself, I found I pitied this man standing here before me, dull as bone, futile as a flicker of projected light. After all, he had afforded me wealth beyond my own adolescent expectations, expensive chrome-rimmed automobiles and houses of grotesque elaborateness situated in lavish parts of the world. Likewise, his fame—his name—had seen to it that I’d married not once, not twice, but three times, the totality of them all so beautiful and young, eager women eager to wait on my every desire…while all the while he—this man!—skulked in the darkness of closets, was dispatched to the dampness of basements, stowed away like cargo underneath it all. His foil-stamped name on a lifework of dust-jackets was his only achievement, his only happiness, and I, like the fool, had spent just as long a lifetime resenting the success I’d bestowed upon him! My hands accepting the money and awards, my back accommodating the numerous claps of praise and accolades while I feasted and indulged at dinners and commencements and various other noteworthy engagements in his honor. His name and his fame for my wealth and wellbeing: a tradeoff.
He did not choose this burden; rather, I’d placed it on his shoulders, giving him form lest he disintegrate into particles of dust beneath such weight, giving him hands with which to write alongside my own, and a studious face, black-pitch eyes, cherry-hued pockets filled not with coin—for all his money was mine—but with dust, bone-dust. Ah, that this nonexistent entity could cause me such grief, such anxiety, such contempt throughout my life!
His eyes, as soulless and inanimate as the inks used to line every handwritten page over the years, rolled again in my direction, a feeling of utter despair rising up through me like steam. He motioned me to take position at the writing table, a table we had shared throughout the years, never meeting each other’s gaze nor speaking aloud (for speaking aloud was pointless—we lived and thrived in each other’s head). I creaked along the floorboards, my old age cold upon me, the taxing, unyielding flex of my prehistoric bones like the corrosion of oxidized copper. He, the man, moved with me in perfect step, our shadows woven into one along the expanse of bookcases along the wall.
Intentions were clearer as he pressed a hand on my frail shoulder and directed me into my chair and, with just two pincer-like fingers, urged a pen in my direction. He, too, sat beside me in his own chair and staring at each other was, for me, like staring into a funhouse mirror. We’d done this for so long, in these very positions, that our chairs would forever retain the twin-hub impressions of our buttocks, the chair-backs contoured to the subtle undulations of our spine.
He slid the notebook before me, motioning for me to open it. So there would be one final story to tell! I gathered up the pen, opened the notebook—he had already picked up his own pen—and we commissioned for one final walk across the mental macadam, opening doors of creation that had been our bread and butter throughout our distinct but inseparable lives, letting the creative sconces burn till the dry-powdered walls caught fire.
We joined in union, as always. None of it was any different than it had ever been, except that our hands moved with equal and
deliberate slowness now—we were no longer as young as we’d once been—and our eyes were held, squinting, closer to the handwritten text than we’d ever held them before.
But still—
Sitting at the table, as we had for our entire intertwined careers, we wrote until the life began to slip from my old man bones and my balding, dimpled head thudded soundly, in a final surrender, against the splayed wingspan of the open notebook beneath me. As my pen rolled across the tabletop only to be gobbled up by the fall of space that carried it straight to the floor (where, along the warped and tired floorboards, it continued to roll), he set his own pen down beside the notebook and my dimpled head with his pale and paining fingers. My breath coming in labored wheezes, my eyes were powerless to stare at anything, save for the underside of my eyelids, except the rows and rows and columns and rows of spines proclaiming his name. His name, his name, always and forever his name! By the sheer arrangement of letters that formulated the name I’d given him all those years ago, he was going to live forever, immortalized, while I had become old and withered and plagued with the daily strains of the nearness of death. Edition after edition, supplemented by countless language translations, copyright extensions, nonfictions written about him, using his name, not mine, never mine. On the awards, the countless awards with the engraved plates of brass I’d received over the years, it had always been his name engraved on the plates, always his name on the marquees. And still, given all this, I returned to the endless struggle, the unanswerable question and never-ending debate: who had stolen from whom? Was I the victor because of my wealth or he because of his immortality?
His name, his name, his name!
Here, in this forsaken room surrounded by nothing but his name, I was ravaged not by feral wolves but, quite unceremoniously, dispatched by the fragile hands of time which, in that very moment of my last soured breath and like the sloughing of a second skin, stripped away all I had created.
All is Calm
Following his death, you play Alice and try to push your head through the bathroom mirror. You take off weeks from work, then eventually quit. You sit for a duration under the tortoise-shell reading lamp with a book open on your lap, but do not read. You prepare dinners that will never be eaten. Funny, the way you still set two plates. Funny, all of it. You check your shelves, you check your record albums, you check your clothes. Everything you own is yours now. Everything you own now owns you.
The passage of eons as you stare into the guts of the medicine cabinet.
Ticking clocks.
A showerhead that runs continuous.
You check your pockets. You check the cupboards. You check your books. Funny, how people are so clearly defined by the books they own.
You cannot live here anymore. You are a stranger here. This becomes clear to you. You are not welcome. Nothing is familiar. Everything is familiar. All of it. None of it.
* * *
On a Tuesday, you move into the new apartment. Four Tuesdays later, and it is what it is. Maybe it is the same or maybe it is different. But now you are different. There is an obsession to you now. When you wake up, morning light in your face, morning water in your eyes, you breathe, and it is like the first time.
A new apartment.
A strange apartment chocked with strange smells. A month goes by. Hapless, you wander into the kitchen. You recoil, vampire-like, against the insult of daylight through Venetian blinds. Arranged on the countertops: a display of jars and empty bottles, label-less wines and fruit long soured. Yet it is not the smell of these items that prompts your olfactory retreat; rather, it is your own ruined flesh, ripe with dried and soured perspiration, mucus-heavy, droopy-lidded. You are filthy in your nakedness. So you shower. You shower for a good, long time. You wash the flecks of grit from your eyes and you scrub the scum off your lips. Finished, you towel off while standing in the cramped, foreign bathroom, blurry in the steamed mirror. This is not your apartment. This is not your bathroom. You are scrubbing your crotch now with someone else’s bath towel. Nude, you return to the kitchen. The light of day no longer threatens you. You pull back the blinds. Below, in the baking heat of an urban morning, the city is long and rectangular and infused with color, glittering with glass and steel and strung with bands of concrete. Scratching your head, you go to the kitchen to fix some eggs. It occurs to you, while opening the refrigerator door, that you have no idea if there are eggs in this strange apartment or not, but only that you crave them. You search and, behold, there are two left. They are in a small door inside the larger door, sitting patiently side by side, in concave half circles. On the stove, you cook them. You add butter—a lot of butter—and some parsley and some oregano (because there is some in the cabinet next to the parsley). You add pretty much whatever you find. It is suddenly a game: put in as much stuff as you can. You add salt and pepper and, daringly, paprika. Anyway, you think it is paprika, but you’re not really sure what paprika is. Then you eat the eggs out on the balcony, looking down on the city. The eggs taste horrible. It is your fault. Too much junk. The game was lost. Or was it won? But the smell out here is not of eggs; it is the diesel exhaust smell of the city. You inhale and think of gas fumes. You go back inside to get dressed and realize you have no idea where your clothes are. Or what your clothes even look like. But you don’t panic. There is an obsession to you now, and it is the obsessed part of you that makes things run smoothly. You go to the bedroom closet. There will be clothes here. For certain. You search through the clothes. They are drab and outdated, polyester hostages from some bygone era. Unimpressed, you decide to squeeze into a simple pair of faded chinos and a button-down paisley shirt with a too-big collar. You look like a man and it doesn’t flatter your feminine figure, but it’s the least offensive ensemble you can put together.
In the foyer, beside the front door, there is a small, circular table with a bowl on it. The table is finely carved and lacquered, intricately detailed with a somewhat oriental design. It looks expensive. Quite the opposite, the bowl atop the table is made of ceramic and, as is observed by the undulations of its contours, not very well made. It has been baked in a kiln and not yet painted. It is the color of bone. You look in the bowl and find a silver button for a sports coat, a keychain bottle opener, two blue rubber bands, and what appears to be a single petrified kernel of corn. It resembles a tooth. There are no car keys, which is what you are looking for. But that’s all right. Somewhat amused, you pick up the kernel of corn and examine it with mild interest before dropping it into the breast pocket of your brand new paisley shirt. You feel constipated from the eggs and still a bit groggy, but there is a whole new world waiting for you just out the door. So you leave.
* * *
Before his death, you are watching them dig around for the girl when he comes home.
“Tell me,” he says breathlessly, his key still in the door, carrying on his suit the scent of New York City, “tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me you didn’t sit here watching T.V. all day.”
Because you’ve started this thing together.
Because you’ve mutually agreed on a plan, a game plan, and it does not include you watching television until he comes home from work.
That night, in bed, you run your fingers along his chest and he tells you how much of a girl you are sometimes. You tell him about the girl they still have not found and he makes a Jimmy Hoffa joke. You do not find this funny. You tell him you do not find this funny. He kisses the top of your head and says something you cannot fully make out. Sleep is quickly claiming you both.
Because you’ve started this thing together.
This crazy, crazy life together.
Later, after it is all over, an x-ray and subsequent autopsy would reveal six plastic buttons, a sewing thimble, a pair of gold hoop earrings, ten inches of fishing twine, eleven rubber bands, bits of a colored toothpick, the pull-tab from a can of soda, and seventy-three pennies in his stomach.
* * *
Maggie and Joel convince you to go to co
unseling. Except it isn’t really counseling but a group of people who get together once a week to drink lukewarm coffee, nibble birdlike on cookies, and talk about problems. There are all sorts of problems. You are not comfortable at counseling, but it seems to make Maggie and Joel happy and, anyway, Maggie and Joel were always good to you. They were always good to you both.
Both.
“Both,” you say. The word has no meaning. You say it over and over and over again until it is no longer English.
You start reading like it’s the end of the world and you need to pass an exam to get into heaven. You find boredom in novels and biographies just remind you of your own personal failures, so you settle on books about strange facts. Because facts seem safe and unchanging.
You learn King Alfonso XIII of Spain was tone deaf, and had in his charge an “Anthem Man” whose duty it was to inform the king when the national anthem was being played so the king would know when to stand.
You learn Grand Central Station accumulates approximately seven pounds of chewed and discarded gum every single day.
For the hell of it, you begin shoplifting. You make off with fistfuls of lipsticks and eyeliner and candy bars until security catches you sniffing around an aisle one afternoon. They do not call the police. Instead, they sit you down in a room behind the walls of the store—a gray, shapeless room, overburdened with video monitors and computers—and the overweight, unhappy-looking security manager begins to ask you questions. You have no qualms about answering his questions. You even inform him that rubber bands last longer when refrigerated, and that if you place a drop of alcohol on a scorpion’s back it will go insane and sting itself to death.
