The Stone Loves the World

by BRIAN HALL

  But oh, the agitated heart

  Till someone find us really out.

  Mark stands motionless for a long minute. The room surrounds him with that uncanny silent hum of small enclosed spaces. The Holy of Holies. Maybe once a year he could ritually purify himself, enter this darkness, and query, “Dad?”

  Heading back through the main basement to the stairs, he notices still chalked on the wall:

  Susan—4

  me—116

  He turns out the lights as he ascends, floor to floor. Brushes his teeth in the upstairs bathroom, crawls into his sleeping bag on his old bedroom floor. He’s not bathed in moonlight. The moon is low in the west, hidden by the house next door.

  Sleep won’t come.

  His memories of this room from his childhood are overlaid with those of the years after his mother took it over. (I lost my sweetheart, his father cried. The same words, every time.) Scores of his mother’s mystery novels filled bookcases along every wall. One entire case was devoted to mysteries involving cats, including ones purporting to have been written by a cat. Mark noted that other than Dick Francis, all the authors were women.

  Here he helped his mother dress, while she apologized for subjecting his eyes to her “disgusting body.” Here he sneakily deposited deodorant on the inside armpits of her shirts when she was refusing to bathe. Here she told him that the next-door neighbor, Jim, was coming into the house at night to steal her cigarettes, and to sabotage the coffee machine so that she wouldn’t know how to operate it.

  On one visit he discovered a framed photo on her dresser that he’d never seen before, the head and shoulders of an attractive dark-haired woman in a tweed coat from (perhaps) the 1950s. It was the only photo in the room.

  “Mom, who’s this?”

  “That’s someone I used to be pen pals with, I can’t remember her name. Isn’t she pretty?”

  “Yes, where’d you find it?”

  “It’s always been there.”

  A few months later he asked, “Mom, who’s this woman, again?”

  “That’s no one. I just like the picture.”

  When he moved her into the hospice, he brought along the photo, and set it up on her bedside table next to photos of Susan, himself, his father. He sat near her and read about the Allied bombing of Germany, watched her drift in and out of sleep with her finger in Ruffian. During the long hours he would often gaze at the woman in the photograph and wonder who she was. His parents had never talked much about their pasts, and now he realized there were many things he would never know.

  His mother’s last day was in mid-May. A saucer magnolia was in full spectacular bloom outside her window. He tried to direct her attention to it, but she seemed uninterested. The day shifted between sun and clouds, and in the late afternoon a sudden shower blew through. His mother had been unconscious most of the day, but as the rain spattered against the screen she perked up and said to Mark in a clear, strong voice, “Someone better close that window.” Which he did. She slipped back asleep, and that night she died.

  Back in Ithaca, when he was in the midst of trying to figure out what to do with all the stuff in the house, he got a call from Frank, a cousin of his mother’s, who in the last few years had been phoning the family house every six months or so to see how she was doing. Mark had met him once decades ago, when he was in the Boston area for a relative’s wedding, but barely remembered him. Frank had lived all his life in Alabama, where Mark’s mother’s family came from, and he spoke with a wonderfully slow and thick Southern accent.

  “Mark, I’m so sorry. Your mother was a real live wire.”

  “Yes she was.”

  “When I was six or seven and she was nine or so she dared me to peek into the girls’ changing rooms at the beach. She taught me all sorts of things my momma would have whipped me for, if she’d known.”

  Mark turns over in his sleeping bag. He should have brought a thicker pad. He doesn’t want to be tired tomorrow for the closing and the long drive home.

  On the drive here, he stopped at a McDonald’s along I-90. He ordered a special, an Angus burger with swiss cheese and mushrooms, and he asked that they add a slice of raw onion. The gawky, acned teenager who brought him his order said something as he handed over the bag that Mark didn’t catch. “What was that?” he asked.

  “I said, I always eat it with a slice of onion, too. My friends say I’m crazy.”

  Mark thought about this for a couple of seconds. He knew he should say something friendly in return, maybe something witty, but he couldn’t think of anything. Finally, he just said, “They’re wrong.”

  The kid beamed, and as he turned away he said happily, “They are!”

  Back in the car, Mark wondered why the exchange pleased him so much. The warmth of it lasted all the way to Boston.

  This reminds him of a larger bubble of happiness, equally mysterious, that formed around him a couple of weeks ago. He was driving to the county recycling center to renew his trash disposal license. He stopped at a light. A blue car turned right off the intersecting road, and as it passed Mark’s car in the opposite lane, euphoria blossomed in his chest. It kept expanding, filling the passenger compartment. After a moment of puzzlement, Mark realized that the color of the vehicle that had passed him was the exact blue of his Iso Grifo Matchbox car.

  Suddenly, he noticed everything. Or perhaps more accurately, the fact that he was capable of noticing things suddenly seemed miraculous. A teenage girl was standing on the corner. Her dog had lifted its foreleg, looking up at her with ears canted forward in expressive dog-worry, to show her the leash was tangled, but she wasn’t paying attention, she was texting a friend. A semi-trailer was making a left-hand turn into Mark’s street, and the minivan in front of him wasn’t backing up, even though there was space for it, to give the truck more room, and Mark wondered if it was sexist of him to have the impression that women were more likely than men not to notice that backing up in such situations was helpful. The truck driver inched along, eyes on his side mirror, stone-faced, barely making it, and the bubble of happiness kept expanding, taking in the small truck with the slat-walled flatbed that now zipped through on the late yellow light, carrying discarded Christmas trees that had been picked up along the city sidewalks and were shipped to barrier islands for burial, where they helped stabilize sand dunes.

  It kept expanding, and there was no open cattle truck with cow and careless calf, no panel van with fifties script reading tv repair, but everywhere there were people turning right and left, crossing railroad tracks, accomplishing errands, living their lives on a speck of space grit, and he thought of the list written by every first-grade nerd who ever lived since the invention of writing and cosmology, only now with adult completeness: Mark Fuller, Room 3, Munroe Elementary School, 1403 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, Massachusetts, United States of America, Earth, Solar System, Orion Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, The Local Group, Laniakea Supercluster, Universe, Brane-verse—and behind it all, Leibniz’s question: Why is there something, rather than nothing?

  The light turned green. The minivan in front turned left. It was a woman. Mark followed her, and the words that flowed around and through him, lifting him higher and higher, were, We’re all in this together.

  Wednesday, February 17, 2016

  The bus was scheduled to arrive in Cleveland at 2:55 a.m., but it was 50 minutes late. It was supposed to depart at 3:55, but now it’s 4:02, with no sign of the driver. She’s been trying to sleep. The bus is overheated. Except for the terminal, there’s nothing but parking lots in every direction. Correction, behind the bus, across a derelict street, there’s a featureless brick warehouse. Correction, there’s a louvered steel vent in the otherwise featureless brick warehouse, obscenely gummed up with gray glistening foamy material that appears to have boiled out and frozen. She imagines the warehouse filling with toxic waffle batter, some military-industrial p
rocess spiraling out of control, fleeing workers pressed into the corners, suffocating, creating negative molds of themselves like Pompeiians.

  In Pittsburgh, 33 passengers got off, 18 got on, leaving 19 empty seats, five of them in pairs and nine single—one of them next to her—meaning presumably the other 13 pairs were all occupied by couples. Such a high percentage of lovebirds would indicate that her probability figures regarding her pariah status have been worthless from the start, since seat selection isn’t close to being random. Fuck that, fuck them. Here in Cleveland 15 passengers got off and four got on, making 24 passengers, each of whom could have a pair of seats to themselves, yet seven pairs are full. Ratio of lovers to loners in the last bus was 26 to 9, making lovers about 74 percent of the total; ratio in this one is 14 to 10, or about 58 percent, suggesting that as night hours deepen, more loners crawl out from caves and climb on long-distance buses. If she adopts 74 percent as likely closer to a daytime average, then, of her first two buses, both had approximately 38 lovebirds in 19 pairs, leaving only eight additional seat pairs for determining pariah status, thus 3/8 times 4/8, or 12/64, or 1 in 5.3, instead of the self-dramatizing 1 in 61 she originally came up with. She’s perfectly aware she’s calculating rotely to reduce stress, she’s not stupid.

  Here comes the driver. 4:16. He’s got a thermos in one hand, papers tucked negligently under the other arm (maybe it’s the schedule). A graying trapezoidal moustache, bloodshot hazel eyes above puddled pouches. If he falls asleep, it will turn out that escaping on the bus equals escaping under it, a fine irony. He slewfoots down the aisle wheezing, checking tickets. Looks at hers, grunts. “Seattle.”

  A theme, apparently. “You are correct.”

  “Long way.”

  “So I’ve been informed.”

  “Family out there?”

  She stares at him. He likely means no harm. Blathering in the wee hours, one loner to another. “No.”

  He moves on.

  They leave the station at 4:23. Ten blocks of unloved Cleveland shudder by, then they hit the ramp for I-90. 423 is not a prime number, but 421 is. If he hadn’t indulged his curiosity about her family life, they could have left two minutes earlier.

  She closes her eyes, hoping sleep will come.

  She spent half an hour Saturday night trying to figure out how to look. Black lipstick or white, bomber jacket or army anorak, shitkickers or sneakers, red pants or black. She has never worn earrings or nose rings or anything like that. Her hair is bottle-black because, shit, she doesn’t know, because it’s been that way for years, because otherwise it’s her mother’s color, because when it’s greasy it’s glossy, because in the dark you can’t see it. She looked in her mother’s mirror and didn’t know if she should be feeling satisfaction or self-loathing. All that female body dysmorphia, she hates that shit. Who cares what you look like, stop obsessing over yourself.

  Alex had said to her on Wednesday in the glass cube and exposed brick playspace Miles (CEO, brilliant weirdo, dick) called their office, “Hey, dark lady, you free Saturday? Let’s go on a date.”

  Alex talks to everyone that way. “Listing tower of manflesh blocking the aisle.” “Want me to get you a latte while I’m out, winsome tidbit?” They say it all deadpan, as though these are the names everyone uses.

  She froze. Her brain drowned in stupid scenarios. Alex and her walking in a park, sunlight gamboling. Lying with a bottle of blushing wine on a checkered picnic blanket. The two of them programming together, maybe even rubbing each other’s shoulders.

  “You can just nod, turtle bean,” Alex said.

  She nodded.

  “Seven p.m. I know the perfect place.”

  It was in Williamsburg, 1.2 miles from the apartment where she lived with her mother. She walked down in the deepening cold, anorak and shitkickers having won out, plus a mud-green scarf, her only one. The restaurant was Japanese, looked expensive. She had plenty of money, but she never ate out. Alex arrived unhurriedly, twenty minutes late. They came right up to her and kissed her on the cheek, flustering her. “Why are you waiting outside? I made a reservation.” They intertwined their arm with hers. “Let’s scurry.”

  The seating was in little booths with bamboo screens that rolled down for privacy. She and Alex took off their coats. Alex gestured her forward and she sat, and instead of sitting opposite, Alex sat next to her. They did the thing with the arm again. “How could anyone come here and not feel romantic?” they said.

  She basically couldn’t believe that any of this was happening. Her, on a date! And with the only person in her entire life she’d ever wanted to go on a date with. What were the odds? She had no idea how to behave, so she let Alex do everything, which Alex seemed comfortable doing. The restaurant recommended a variety of eight-course tasting menus, with sake pairings. “Food restrictions?” Alex asked.

  “None.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “Anything.”

  “You’re perfect, aren’t you?”

  Alex ordered the most expensive course. “This is on me.”

  “I have a ton of money—”

  “So do I, and you’re my date. Let’s start with a sake tasting, I’ve always wanted to. You’re my excuse.”

  On the bus, wishing like death she could sleep, she doesn’t remember much of the talk. It wasn’t a dialogue, Alex talked and she floated in a dreamlike state. Alex touched her hand, stroked her thigh, nuzzled her ear. Little cubes of food came on lanceolate leaves, or in lacquered bowls with wooden spoons. There were miso broths and grilled fishes and curly herbage; jellied rounds, red roe in a cobalt dish, jewel-green snow peas arranged like a fan. The sake came in clear glass bowls that glittered in the candlelight.

  “You’re putting me in a mood,” Alex said, and she didn’t know what Alex meant, but liked the sound of their voice when they said it. She liked, disbelieving, the brush of Alex’s lips against her cheek. She liked the way Alex leaned into her at the climax of something they were saying, the press of their shoulder, like a conspiratorial nudge, like saying, Just you and me, and nobody knows.

  Alex took pictures of the food, and of the two of them, their arm around her, cheek pressed to cheek so that the two near-side eyes, one hers and one theirs, were pulled into tadpole shapes. She kind of liked this, as proof she had a social life, and kind of didn’t, because who knew what strangers might pore over these, tag her, post her, caption her, look at those jug ears, look at those horse teeth. She only ever took pictures of things she wanted to model on the computer, such as self-ordering or emergent phenomena in nature, motions of constrained objects subjected to forces, complicated lighting effects.

  Alex told her that “Alex” was not the name they were born with. “I’m only admitting this because I’m kinda drunk, but I picked ‘Alex’ because ‘a-lex’ means ‘outside the law.’ That’s the sort of thing that impresses you when you’re fifteen.”

  This was one of the few times she was inspired to say something. “What a coincidence. People never know how to pronounce my name, so I tell them, just think ‘meta,’ like metadata. So, you know, ‘beyond,’ or ‘transcending.’” A-lex and Meta, lovers who transcend the world and its categories, a couple of nerds chuckling over language games.

  “I’m falling in love with you,” Alex said, which was ridiculous, but she hummed with ridiculous happiness, she wanted to hear them say it again. Her conch-pink agar dessert was nestled in a transverse cut of a large bamboo. The polished edge of the bowl was stippled with vascular bundles, umber dots on amber, decreasing in size and increasing in density toward the outer edge in a distribution that was partly random but kept tending toward Fibonacci spirals. She marveled at how beautiful it was. She longed to program a model that would mimic just that level of randomness.

  By the time she and Alex left the restaurant it was nine degrees outside and windy. Alex held her close and said their apartment was j
ust around the corner. They gave her a long kiss on the lips. She felt panic, which maybe Alex could sense, because they said, “Are you okay?”

  She found she couldn’t speak. She nodded.

  “Why don’t we get out of this cold?”

  She and they turned into the wind, and she shivered, and Alex held her closer. When they reached the corner Alex turned her to the right, but she wished the two of them could just keep going, hugging, matching strides, red frosty cheeks braving the wind, reaching the park along the East River where there were too many BBQ pits and tables and too few trees, but where there was at least a small chance that she might glimpse a chipmunk sprinting away with its tail up, and she would point it out to Alex, who would express sincere interest and want to know more, and she is dimly aware (on the bus) that she must be dozing because of course there would be no chipmunks to see in the middle of winter, they would all be asleep in their burrows.

  Tuesday, February 16, 2016

  Saskia is a slave girl in the mumbojumbium mines of Altair VI. “Please, would you untie me?” No doubt she has a skimpy torn scrap of shirt, great abs and firm full breasts, deliciously grimy. Wouldn’t you love to lick them clean, boy-wanderer. Ooh my hardening nipples seem to have burst my shirt straight off me! She does a more urgent take: “Please would you untie me?!” On second thought, don’t touch those knots. Surely a pasty-faced fourteen-year-old such as yourself knows how to take a hogtied woman to heaven. A helpless take: “Please . . . w-would you untie me?” That one for the sados. Only if you suck my cock, bitch. Oh no, please, I’ve never . . . gobble gobble. Hey, Mikey, she likes it!

  Now the responses. First fork: “My god! Thank you! You’ve restored my faith in humanity. I haven’t much, but please, take this.” Second fork—if he accepts the offered item, a charmed doodad or a note leading to a hidden cache, whatever—“You deserve it. I wish I had more.” If he doesn’t take it: “Well, thank you for that, too. I could use this myself.” Back to the first fork, if he doesn’t free her: “Thanks for nothing, asshole.” Way to show some sass, girl. Maybe they could have a cutscene of the slave girl kicking him in the balls, the boy-wanderer collapsing in his own vomit. If he clicks on her again: “Unless you’re willing to free me, I’ve got nothing more to say to you.”