Exigencies

by Richard Thomas

  Jones was born on a farm. College brought him to the city. More than one person I spoke with said he keeps the city running, that without him everything would go to ruin. He is respected and even feared. Before his marriage it was said he never arrived at or left the office unless the stars were out. Some would arrive early and see him on his second cup of coffee. Some would stay late and he would tell them that he would lock up as they left. His superiors joked about his country work ethic until he became a supervisor himself. A co-worker described his wedding to Alice as beautifully perfunctory—everything in its right place. A doll wedding. I’m sure Jones does not think of it that way. Most of my notebooks are full of details about how happy his family looks through binoculars.

  Which is why it is a surprise when he disappears.

  I follow him to work. It is a Thursday, a week after he yelled at Jacob for jumping out of the car. We both put our visors down to block the morning sun as we drive east into the city. At a coffee shop, he orders his usual, and I order an ice water. I do not care for coffee, not anymore, but he drinks many cups throughout the day. I see him go to refill his “World’s Greatest Dad” mug through the glass walls that surround his office. At this distance, his job for the city does not seem so special. His office is one of many. His chair is not from a well-known designer. His screensaver is the seal of the state university he attended. He is only one more man in a dark suit.

  When I get disappointed, I get sloppy. I stare too intensely at the back of his head. A secretary across the hall has been watching me. I know because I know. She looks away too quickly when I turn in her direction. When watching, you have to hold a person’s gaze long enough to seem confident but not long enough to be remembered. Like patience, it is an essential skill when watching someone. I leave for my truck to change my shirt and put on a baseball cap. I am only gone a moment, but when I return he has disappeared.

  I will never see him again.

  Almost as soon as my wife and I moved to our farm, the city came. We had one year of nights dreaming out loud before they built a highway along our back fence. In that time, we had not planted any fruit trees or bought goats. We did have a golden retriever, Simon. My wife took Simon when she left. Or at least that’s how I see it. If you ask her, she will tell you I left. But she would be wrong. I am still here.

  It is a strange place to live. Because we never worked the land, the grass grew high. Because the grass grew high, strangers feel like they can pull over on the highway and dump unwanted items. There are rusted refrigerators and old television sets hidden in the grass. Nights, the metal winks back at the stars.

  This is where I go after I realize I’ve lost Jones. I never expected him to disappear, but maybe it was inevitable. Every day he was so precise, so perfect. Had he known about me? It’s possible. The first time I took my eyes off him, he was late to get his son. The second time, he disappeared. But when we met at the school, he had not recognized me or been afraid to see me with his son. If anything, he had been curious, like he wanted to ask me a question but could only think of statements. If I had known he was about to leave, I would have stayed away from his son so the boy would have been prepared. I will not always be there to wait with Jacob. From this day on, he will always be waiting, and because of me he knows nothing of patience. This is what keeps me awake in my bed.

  My home is modest, a bachelor’s home now that my wife has gone. In my cupboards, there are old spices for recipes I cooked only once, if I cooked them at all. Some may have been there for nearly a decade. Somehow, time goes quickly for me here even if day-to-day life feels torpid. Just like those stars throwing old light, thousands of years can pass in an instant if you look at it from far enough away. But for the stars, they still have to shine, day after day, until they can do it no more.

  I realize my dog is probably dead. Poor Simon.

  The next day there are no police cars in front of his yellow house. The day after there is one. The day after that there are three. One of them is black and does not have lights, but the men who come from the car are clearly detectives. The holsters on their hips clip their gates. Their upper lips look like they only recently lost their mustaches and might miss them. It is a Sunday morning, and their suits have just been lifted from the church pew. Alice greets them at the door and they disappear inside. Jacob is in his room. Every so often he peeks through his blinds as if he will see his father’s car squeal around the corner.

  In a week, the police rarely come by and neither do I. Maybe I am not so patient. My wife used to say that I experience power surges.

  “Like when lightning strikes the power lines,” she said. “There’s no predicting it.”

  “Isn’t it good?” I said. “Otherwise I might have too little power.”

  I said this to give her an out to make me feel better. I did not like thinking of myself as someone who blew light bulbs and sent people scuttling to buy new appliances. I knew what became of the old ones.

  She appeared to think about it.

  “Maybe. But you get bored waiting for the lightning.”

  This was only days after I purchased the farm for us. I told myself she was angry and taking my rash purchase out on me. Now I don’t know. She was so thrilled with the house and the land and our imaginary farm. I don’t remember her being angry at all.

  But without Jones, I really am bored. Alice has not come outside since his disappearance. A neighbor from across the street carries casseroles and plates of cookies to the yellow house. She is a young woman trying to help, but after a while she looks exhausted. There is nothing to be done about someone else’s tragedy. After a time, you want to grab the victim by their shoulders and shake the grief out of them so you can tell them about your own.

  To pass the time, I look for new items that have been left on my property. I find a broken shopping cart and a microwave that appears to be in perfect condition but is an unfashionable color. It takes time to remember how to sleep in my bed. The sound of the highway never fully dies. If anything, it gets worse past midnight when it is only big, lonely trucks. Sometimes they seem to blow their horns just to see if anything will blow back, like whale song.

  “The secret is to think of the sound as angels going by,” my wife told me once.

  “Where are they going?”

  “To perform miracles,” she answered as if she had thought a lot about it.

  I nodded, even though it was dark and this would never be my solution. The sound is too sharp, and I don’t believe in angels.

  My solution was different. I never told my wife, but she knew I found one when I began sleeping through the night.

  “The angels, right?” she said.

  I smiled.

  It was partially her idea: I think of the hum of the highway as light, as electricity. I imagine it coursing through my body and keeping me alive. In the dark, I concentrate on the sound until I know that it is light and not blood in my veins. I know this because when I close my eyes so tight that I feel like my head will burst, I see not darkness but stars.

  Three weeks after Jones’s disappearance there is a knock on my door. I have not left my home to sit outside the yellow house for two days. Stupidly, I think it might be Jacob at my door. He will demand to know why I abandoned him. Instead it is a very short man in a blue suit. He is years older than Jones and at least a head shorter. It is hard to tell for certain because he wears a grey fedora. It appears to be a nice hat, but it is not one you see much anymore. When men wore hats like this the city ended miles from here and my farm really was a farm.

  “Is this about Jones?” I ask.

  The man tilts his head to the side like Simon used to do when he didn’t understand something.

  “No,” the man says. His voice is deep and slow, as if he’s struggling to pull it up from somewhere hidden far inside himself. “I do not know Jones. I’m here with an odd request. My wife, you see, she threw away something that means a great deal to me. Perhaps she did not know how much. I on
ly recently discovered what she had done. After a great deal of questioning, she confessed to having driven by your property and thrown it from the car. I did not understand why she would throw this item on a stranger’s property, but now I see why she might do such a thing.”

  “Yes,” I say, “People do it often.”

  The man takes off the fedora and squints at a skeletal antenna someone has propped against my fence. It is a hot afternoon and there is a whisper of breeze swaying the grass.

  “I would like your permission to search for this item. If I find it, I will pay you for it, of course.”

  “Money is no matter,” I say. “I’ll even help you look.”

  The man purses his lips and places the fedora back on his head. He says, “I do not mean to be ungrateful, but I would prefer to search alone.”

  I tell him he is welcome to search for as long as he likes. I show him the hose he can drink from and offer to take his coat and hat, but he declines and says he would like to get started.

  He is a patient man. On the first day he walks the property at random. He walks north for twenty yards then abruptly turns to the east before cutting back south and so on. It is a romantic way to search, to hope that fate will bring the item back to him. Lovely but ineffective and after the first stars come out the man leaves without a word. His white pants are torn and sweat has soaked through the brim of his hat.

  The next day his search begins early and is scientific. I watch him scratch a grid in the dirt. For three days he walks the grid until it’s exhausted. Next he climbs trees and looks down into the grass from above. The man must know I am watching, but he does not seem to mind. Nor does he ask for my help. He arrives before the sun rises from behind the road and leaves after it falls into the city’s skyline. When he goes I step out into the night and search myself. I think maybe if he searches with the sun and I search with the stars one of us will find it. I find broken baby carriages and old mobiles but not what the man seeks. I am certain I will know it if I see it.

  After his 18th day of searching the man knocks on my door. I have been watching him, but I count to 20 so he thinks I came from deep inside the house.

  “I knew that if I did not find it on the first day I never would,” he says. The search has aged him, made him smaller. He turns from the sun like it is now his enemy. “There is a time when patience becomes blindness. I believe we are at that time. Farewell.”

  I will never see him again.

  That night there are not many trucks on the highway, and I feel like my battery is nearly dead. When I close my eyes so tight it feels like my head might burst. I do not see stars. It is as if they all burnt out years ago and only now am I discovering that their light has gone. Since I cannot sleep I drive my truck to the yellow house for the first time in weeks. All of the lights are on but no shadows move behind the curtains. I enter without knocking. It feels like my own home. The walls are white and the floors are oak. Everything is meticulously clean and silent except for a familiar hum coming from upstairs.

  There, Jacob sits on the floor of his room taking a toy racecar on laps around a blue rug. The car makes the sound of an engine traveling at a much faster speed. Jacob does not look surprised to see me, but he does not look happy either. I ask him where his mother is.

  “She’s here,” he says. “In her room. I think she comes out when I’m asleep. That’s why I’m trying to stay awake.”

  Every door in the hallway is open except the set of double black doors at the end of the hall. I knock softly. I wait as long as I can manage, but I am tired. I knock a final time but there is no response. When I walk back down the hallway I see that Jacob has fallen asleep with the toy car still in his hand. Carefully I lift him into his bed. He mumbles, “Dad?” as if his father is there in his dream.

  With only the motion of bodies in the house, I cannot manage a good sleep on the couch. In the morning, I take Jacob to school then drive into the city. No one says anything when I sit down in Jones’s chair and sign his name onto important papers. One day, I even join my coworkers in singing happy birthday to someone. A skinny woman cuts me a big slice of cake and asks after Alice and Jacob. I tell her I will say hello for her. It is the opposite of disappearing. I stay in the house for nearly a month. At night I cannot hear the highway, and the streetlights make it hard to see the stars. The lights in the house are always bright now, and it is exhausting to be such a dim sun in their presence.

  “Where do you think your father is?” I ask Jacob one morning.

  He pulls his mouth to the right as he thinks it over.

  “Space. That’s where I would go,” Jacob says. He is so young.

  One night Alice finally emerges from her room while we are eating dinner. I have made tuna casserole from a recipe I found in a kitchen drawer. The house had all the ingredients.

  “I would like you to take the dollhouse away,” she says. Her voice sounds very different from what I imagine the pretty woman I used to watch gardening sounded like. It sounds like the buzz of bees. I wonder if I ever know anyone at all.

  “I’ll take it to the dump,” I say. “Or maybe the Goodwill.”

  “No,” she says. “I couldn’t bear to throw it away or give it to someone else. It meant so much to him. I only want it gone. Please.”

  The garage lights are on and the black car shines brightly in its usual spot. Beside it is the blue dollhouse. It appears to be a very nice dollhouse but nothing particularly special. The windows are real glass and behind them are curtains cut from lace. There is no furniture inside. When I lift it, it is heavier than I expect and I am careful not to fall as I cross the street and set it into the back of my truck. I take the highway. Even though it made her think of angels, my wife was afraid of the highway. The truth is, she was afraid to drive at all. She never had a car, and I would drive her everywhere in my truck. Simon would sit between us. Where did they go? I wish I knew. They would say the same about me.

  I pull over near the fence that marks the edge of my property. I lift the dollhouse and step into the field. Here, a thing can disappear without burial. The stars glisten above and below, and I feel like a turtle inside a box with pinprick air holes. I walk until I find a spot for the dollhouse where the grass is short and there is protection from a tree. Behind me the highway roars electric. In the house where my wife and I once lived two shadows move behind the curtains, but they are not ours. We have new homes and we live there.

  adam peterson

  is the author of the flasher, my untimely death, and the co-author of [spoiler alert]. his short fiction can be found in the kenyon review, indiana review, the normal school, the southern review, and elsewhere

  WHEN

  WE TASTE

  OF DEATH

  DAMIEN ANGELICA WALTERS

  Two lines of Death on a mirror.

  No one could mistake it for something as mundane as cocaine. Death is blood red and the experience depends on the user—what they’ve eaten, how much they weigh, how many hours of shut-eye the night before, some kind of crazy biochemical magic or madness that defies explanation. Drowning, fire, heart attack, flesh-eating bacteria. There’s no way to tell what you’ll get.

  That’s the beauty of it, the powerful, terrible beauty. You’ll never know until the drug hits, and once it does there’s no way to change your mind and jump off the train. Boys and girls, keep your hands inside the ride at all times. You’re stuck here until it comes to a stop.

  Unless it never does.

  The water has no top, no bottom. You can’t swim your way to freedom and there’s no life preserver waiting for you on the surface like a bit of cereal in milk. There is no surface. You spin and twist and finally you open your mouth and the water pours in and in and in.

  Nate takes a deep breath before he enters the common room. Lila’s sitting in a wheelchair, a thin blanket draped across her lap. She looks up and smiles when he walks in, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. Her shirt partially conceals the IV needle current
ly connected to nothing, but the smell of the place is a reminder that can’t be tucked away. Her limbs are stick-thin; eventually her muscles will atrophy and the chair will be a necessity, not a choice. There’s only so much they can do after all, but she’s alive and will be for a long time. Long enough, anyway.

  Dark shadows mar the skin beneath her eyes and hollows run under her cheekbones, giving her the look of a starving supermodel. A slim silver chain around her neck holds her wedding rings; her fingers are too thin to keep them in their proper place. Nate kisses her forehead, remembering when her skin tasted of forever instead of antiseptic and sickness.

  “You look good,” he says.

  Her eyes say she doesn’t believe him, but her mouth remains silent.

  “Want to take a walk?”

  She gives a slight almost-nod, a gesture that maybe means yes or I don’t care, so he pushes her chair out to the gardens. They talk but it’s rambling, perfunctory. There’s so much he wants to say, to scream, but he taps his fingers on his upper thigh, holds his words, the real words, in.

  They don’t talk about why she’s here or what happens after he leaves.

  The box is holding you in. Top nailed shut. Dirt above. Two feet? Six? It could be a hundred. No one’s waiting with a shovel and a need to see your face again. You try to scrape a hole in the wood, and end up with your fingernails hanging in shreds of lost hope from the raw skin underneath. No point in screaming. The air is almost gone. You’re holding the last breath inside, and once you let it out, that’s it. Hold it in as long as you can, it doesn’t matter. There’s no one but you; nothing but the box, the silence on your lips, and the screaming in your lungs.

  A month later, Nate’s back. The doctors don’t know why it works that way, the drug they have her on, but nothing else does a damn thing. A dose every day and still, she’s only Lila once a month. It is what it is, his father would say.