by Michael West
She couldn’t figure them out. She wanted to know them, to understand them, to catalogue them and toss them behind a partition in her brain where she filed the vast and forgettable species of stimuli called “normal.” But they weren’t normal. They were shaped like people, but they stared at her through eyelids fused shut, their skin thin and jaundiced and divided into uneven puzzle pieces by a lattice of thick black veins. They sniffed the air, ticking and twitching and shivering the same way she’d seen tiny dogs shiver in the arms of women blonder and more successful than her. They were hairless, or were almost so, and their not-quite-hairlessness (patches of thin white wires that seemed to quiver like insect antennae) was worse than pure baldness. They opened their mouths and made thin, wordless, bubbling noises, and even when their mouths were closed, their long, sharp teeth hung over their chins like stalactites, rotten, yellow at the ends and black at the roots, the teeth of tigers in the mouths of meth addicts. And all of them were fused together, a shared carcinoma of a body from which jutted their terrible hungry heads and twitching toes and waving, spasmodic arms.
God, she wanted a cigarette.
They couldn’t touch her. Not if she sat far enough away. The far wall, framed by the sliver of light from the hallway beyond the door, consisted entirely of them. From floor to ceiling, a wall of flesh. There were twenty-six of them that she could see (or twenty-six heads, anyway), and sometimes she thought there must be more, that the Sudden Room must stretch backward for a thousand miles of cramped, conjoined bodies. The wall of monsters in the Sudden Room. In college, when she had been an optimist, she wrote a paper on Rodin’s Gates of Hell. She spent weeks staring at the sculpture, analyzing the cramped faces and bodies of the damned, lost in thought or twisted by misery, reaching, climbing, curled into fetal clumps and crammed into alcoves. The things in the Sudden Room with their terrible teeth and their weak, reaching fingers brought her back to those Gates, a breathing representation of Rodin’s masterpiece, hungry and blind. And before them, a supplicant engaged in perplexed and petrified prayer, sat Abigail Quatro, queen of failure.
And downstairs, the doorbell rang.
-----
Downstairs, the doorbell rang, and Jim resisted the training that compelled him to answer. On the couch with the old wooden metronome in his hands, running his thumb along the pyramid angle, watching the arm tick back and forth, trying to hypnotize himself. He wanted to fill a syringe with something dark and thick, something that could numb and blind and fuzz-out, and he wanted to jam it into his brain and push the plunger down and force the whole operation into blankness for a while. Hence, the metronome. The insignificant rhythm.
The bell again, belligerent and obsequious.
There’s no rule, he thought. There’s no law against ignoring a doorbell. Nobody can force you to answer it. But the imperative to answer tugged at him. It was funny how much power people had over you. They didn’t even need to know you, and they could command your attention with a pointed index finger and a tiny fucking button mounted to the left of your front door. To be in your house was to be powerless.
The doorbell shrieked again, and Jim bit down on his tongue. With the pain, the world swam back. The truth resolved, focused, became sharp. And there didn’t seem to be any reason to ignore the door anymore. So (groaning, growling, glaring at the frosted glass window set into the front door and wishing sudden death upon the person behind it), he went to the door and opened it.
“Hello, homeowner,” said the doorbell man. He offered Jim his hand and, not wanting to, Jim shook it. It was a thin hand, delicate, a pianist’s hand with long fingers and short, clean fingernails. He wore a gray suit and a green tie and a black overcoat. He wore a fedora and a pair of circular sunglasses. He carried an umbrella, for which Jim immediately and irrationally hated him. Affectation, he thought. A stupid affectation. Sun’s shining. What are you trying to prove?
They stood there shaking hands for too many empty moments. Jim’s chest tightened, his shoulders clenched. He ground his teeth together. The doorbell man smiled silently.
Jim’s brain rolled through its lexicon of pleasantries and settled on, “Can I help you with something?”
“Homeowner,” the doorbell man said, “I understand you have a pest problem.”
-----
They sometimes said things that sounded like words. She had a little moleskin in which she took notes of what they said, time-stamped and dated, a little book of nonsense quotations.
Theramin forest – 11:35 PM October 28th.
Stinking nest – 4:14 PM November 1st.
Regards – 1:21 AM November 10th.
When she started taking notes, she told herself that she was trying to piece together the quotes, solve the mystery of the Sudden Room. But as the months wore on into nearly a year of sitting and writing, she abandoned that goal. They were mindless words, the kind of thing dementia patients said as their brains broke down, and she was sure that she was imagining at least half of them. Still, she wrote. Because she’d already started, and she needed the habit.
They were excellent listeners, the bound-together cave-fish things. She could talk to them for hours, in a low monotone gone creaky, dry, and uneven from nicotine withdrawal and depression. She could tell them all sorts of things. She could eviscerate the girl she’d been before her life fell out from underneath her, the girl who had decorated the ceiling of her college apartment with glow-in-the-dark stars and moons and planets, who sipped wine and imagined herself to be an adult, the girl who forgot that someday you had to get a job and grow old and die, and that manic optimism and bright-pink hair dye didn’t change any of that. She could talk about how, by thirty, she had expected so much more than this.
Argument fish assembly – 10:10 AM December 3rd.
Paramount – 3:33 AM January 9th.
An aimless, and apparently ownerless, arm swung rhythmically. A blind and hungry head snapped its jaws at it. The whole party hissed like vipers.
“I just wish,” said Abigail, “That this wasn’t the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.”
Hungry hungry hungry – 6:01 AM January 13th.
Seed eating parable – 1:12 PM February 20th.
Portcullis – 12:30 PM February 21st.
Someone downstairs laughed like a radio announcer, and then was silent.
-----
The doorbell man, sitting on the sofa next to Jim and holding his coffee cup without drinking from it, laughed like a radio announcer, and then was silent.
Jim disliked most people he met these days. Just standing within breathing distance of the debris of his ambitions could turn him against a person. He knew that it was all bullshit, that he was lashing out, taking out his disappointment on the people around him. But he was starting to think that this polite little doorbell man, whose every expression and action seemed to be rehearsed, was legitimately deserving. He carried an umbrella on sunny days. He had absolutely no hair beneath the fedora, absolutely no eyebrows either. And he had just laughed at absolutely nothing. It was as though he had read, without context or explanation, that people sometimes laugh when they sit with one another.
“What’s funny?” Jim asked.
“Nothing, homeowner. Now, back to it.”
The doorbell man had asked for coffee, and for information. He wanted to know about their life together, Abby and he. Were they happy? Were they really in love? Where was she from? What did she do for a living? What did he do? How often did they make love?
And you know what the fucking terrible part was? Jim was telling him. Jim had lined up their photo albums on the coffee table and he was telling him all of it because this delicate little grub worm of a man knew — he knew! — about the Sudden Room and its residents, and that had to mean … something.
“Okay,” Jim said. And again, “Okay.” He took a deep breath, and he told the man everything. He told him how he met Abby, in a Women’s Studies class in which he was one of four men, and in which they sh
outed at one another from across the room, Abby passionately championing Steinem, Jim aligning himself with Paglia despite not knowing the first thing about feminist theory. “I just thought,” he said, “that she was fascinating to look at when she got worked up.”
The doorbell man nodded and hmm-d and hrr-d and picked up a pencil from the coffee table and tapped it against his lips.
Jim told him how they’d dated, at first like silly high school kids despite being in their twenties, sneaking away from every social engagement to make out in closets or cars or behind the high hedges in the park, and then later like ancient friends, sharing stories with brief glances, holding between them a thousand esoteric punchlines and secret passwords. “Turkey-fingers,” he said. “I used to … This is so stupid, but in college I used to wrap my hands in sliced turkey, like sandwich turkey. And I used to chase her around the apartment. Kind of, you know … warbling. ‘Turkey-fingers! Turkey-fingers are coming for you! Turkey fingers!’ Like a ghost. Like, I don’t know, it was like a half-cocked Boris Karloff impression. You know? You know.”
The doorbell man chewed off a hangnail. He said, “I know.”
Jim told him how they’d forgone the vows and quoted Wilco songs at each other, because it was silly and irreverent and somehow more meaningful than somebody else’s old promises. He told him they’d come to live in the big house in the nice neighborhood. “My dad,” he said, “My dad is … was … an attorney. It was a wedding present. The house, I mean. God.”
The doorbell man took off his hat and scratched his scalp.
He told him of the fall, the gradual slope away from ambition and hope toward debt and joblessness. Useless degrees, an absence of marketable skills, property taxes and student loans they couldn’t afford. The miscarriage, and the money they’d spent on a baby that never came. How they slept back to back, or sometimes in different places, he in the bedroom and she in the Sudden Room where she didn’t actually sleep at all. How they couldn’t afford cigarettes anymore, and how neither of them wanted to leave the house even to find a smoker from whom to bum. How they could go days without saying much to one another. How when he said, “I love you,” it sounded like a plea, like a desperate dive toward her, and how he wasn’t really sure he was capable of loving anyone anymore. He said, “Things were supposed to be different for us.”
The doorbell man said, “I see.”
-----
Her back hurt. She had gone into the room around seven o’clock this morning, and it must have been after four by now. Her entire life story had fallen out from between her lips for the thousandth time, unheard by the slit-eared fungus of skin and limbs and teeth. She said, “Last night, Jim tried to cheer me up. I was falling asleep on the couch and he came in with, ah, the, uh … ” she sighed, snapped her fingers together. “The shirt he wore at our wedding. It was … ” a smile, weak and noncommittal, something to which she couldn’t devote any patience or energy. “It was just way too small for him. He’s put on some weight. We both have. His gut was pushing out the fabric, like, putting these great big gaps between the buttons, and he looked at me and he said … he said, ‘Enjoying the view?’”
She thought about laughing, decided against it. She listened to the grumbling and bubbling of her monsters, trying to figure out why she’d started this story in the first place. “Thing is,” she said, picking at the cuticle of her left thumb, seeing how deep she could stand to drive her house key into the soft skin, “it was just so desperate. I could see how angry he was, how aimless and scared and angry. I’m not dumb. I felt … insulted. How can you pretend that anything is normal?”
Pushing deeper with her house key, pushing the dry white ridge of her cuticle backward, back as far as it could go. It hurt, but what else was new? Lots of things hurt. Not smoking hurt. Looking at your checking account balance hurt. Watching your husband pretend not to hate you hurt. Walking by your diploma hanging on the wall hurt. Not acknowledging the bulk boxes of diapers or bottles of formula or untouched toys and baby books hurt. Pain stopped being such a big goddamn deal after a while.
A head close to the ceiling hissed, writhed, coughed up thick mucous the color of mustard, and said, “Turkey-fingersssss.”
Every muscle in Abigail Quatro’s body tensed. Her eyelids retracted, her throat went immediately dry. Her key slipped, sliced a jagged reservoir across the knuckles of her thumb. She gasped, more in shock and recognition than pain. She said, “That wasn’t fair.”
Now all twenty-six heads were still and silent, pointed at her, their nostrils flaring rhythmically as though some olfactory homing device had lighted upon its target. Her breath was coming faster than her lungs could handle comfortably and her brain screamed for nicotine, and she reeled. These emotions, this fear, was stronger and more manic than anything she’d felt in almost a year. What were they doing now? Why were they quiet, why weren’t they moving, what did they smell with their terrible misshapen, uneven, grown-together nostrils?
In the silence, she could hear blood pattering from the gash on her hand to the naked floorboards. And with each drop, the twenty-six heads (oh God, no, no, perfectly choreographed, synced) twitched. She sat up straighter, snagged the moleskin from her back pocket, readied her pencil.
Turkey-fingers – 3:somethingPM March 3rd (WHAT???)
They sat there for a long time, and the only sound was the syncopated drip of her blood and the matched rustle of her rotten monsters straining toward it.
-----
The only sound was the syncopated tick of the cat-shaped clock above the television, a relic of an era of silliness and kitsch, as Jim tried to figure out what to say next. He thought, Stop talking to this asshole. There’s something wrong with him, this hairless little freak. Have you stopped to think for one fucking second about why he’s here? What he intends to do? What he has to do with the putrid secret cancer growing upstairs? What he said was, “They’re like … mole-rat people. Have you ever seen those? Mole-rats? They’re hairless and wrinkled and blind and … ugh … ugly. And these mole-rat people … their skin has grown together and now they’re just this big wall of mole-rat men … In a room we never knew was there until ten months ago. Ten months ago! How do you live in a place,” the words spilling out of him as though tied to a string tugged by the skinny fingers of his uninvited houseguest, “for seven years and never see an entire room of it? How can that happen?”
The doorbell man pulled a face, a bawdy parody of empathy, and reached out and patted Jim’s knee. Jim lurched away from him, his pulse swelling and pulsing below his jaw. He wanted to scream at the man, to attack the man, to light a fire underneath him and remove him like a tick from his house. Except this didn’t feel like his house anymore, and hadn’t for a long time. His nerves quaked and rattled, and he curled into himself on the edge of the sofa thinking, I look like a junky. A quivering junky going through withdrawal. He said, “I’m sorry. Just … I’m really sorry, I just don’t want you to … to touch me, okay? Just don’t … fucking touch me … sir.”
The doorbell man smiled, bit his bottom lip. His teeth were too long, too white. He looked like a theatrical mask. He said, “Mr. Quatro … homeowner … have you ever heard of the Rattenkönig phenomenon?”
“No. Nope. I, uh … no.”
“Hmm,” said the doorbell man. “It is said that rats, when isolated together in small spaces, will fuse together at the tail. Can you imagine, homeowner Jim Quatro? A nest of trapped rats, isolated from food, from sunlight, as their tails tangle together and eventually become … one. Amazing, if it’s true, although I myself have never seen any compelling evidence for its veracity. Imagine, then, homeowner, that a nest of some other animal becomes trapped. An animal that survives by different means, adheres to different rules.”
The doorbell man stood up, stepped onto the coffee table, kicked aside the photo albums, crushed his coffee cup beneath his heel. Jim stared, open mouthed, and thought, You’re standing on my table. You’re standing on my table. I don�
�t know why, but you’re standing on my table and gesturing at the ceiling like a professor lecturing to the ceiling fan.
“Let us theorize that this species travels through secret corridors, makes its way toward new feeding grounds via an entire sequence of tunnels, much like your … ugly … hairless … wrinkled … blind … mole-rats.” He was smiling now, the doorbell man, breathing fast, haloed by the ceiling fan, lost in his lunatic sermon. “Let us further theorize that the way is one day blocked by some means, homeowner! Let us now hypothesize what might happen to such a marvelous species over decades, over centuries, homeowner, in the dark! In the bloodless, skyless dark, homeowner!”
A pause. The doorbell man stared longingly at some distant point beyond the house, out in the cold dark bloodless, skyless universe, and caught his breath. Jim realized he was digging his teeth into his tongue, gnawing on that same fat ulcer he’d made earlier when the doorbell had interrupted his thoughtlessness. It had been a very long time since he had’t felt angry. But now he did not. Only scared and confused and unbearably sad. He thought, You’re the same. Same as the things in the Sudden Room. Something with a barely functional understanding of human behavior, something doing a bad impression. And you exist. The universe is huge and cruel.
The doorbell man smoothed his suit and stepped down from the table. He took a seat, crossed his legs, adjusted his fedora. “What do you suppose would happen then?”
-----
This was what they wanted. What they always wanted. Just this slow thick leak, these fat droplets spattering against the floor and sinking into the woodgrain, staining the teeth of her house key. She squeezed the meat of her thumb with her opposite hand, milking the blood from the wound and speeding the drip. The monsters (No, she thought, not quite monsters, are they? Or not just any kind of monster. I know what they are. I know their name. They have been understood and catalogued and thrown behind a partition marked with their species and phylum) shuddered and salivated and gnashed their rotten broken saber-teeth to match the new tempo.
