A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  I took a few more breaths, my hands on my knees. I turned from her and looked at the floor.

  I said, “I can’t remember. I just can’t.”

  She gave me one last pat, said, “You take it easy,” and left.

  I turned back to the surgery table, the needle ready to slip down into the burr hole, then pierce the dura mater, that sheet of tough, thin tissue keeping things whole inside the skull, and plunge into the brain itself, sink into the Red Nucleus, where, indeed, it would fry brain cells.

  I pictured the electrode down inside the brain, saw the tip of it send out sparks I knew I could never actually see, saw brain cells fold and implode one after another, unable now to regenerate, dead for all time.

  Then I saw the electrode, the current off, lift from inside the brain, track up along its own path, up through the dura mater sealing itself off once the needle had been pulled up through it, the electrode emerging from the burr hole, the needle clean and harmless and gleaming. Next I pictured the Gelfoam being packed into the hole, that toothpastelike synthetic material we pretended was as good as bone, tamped down and sealing off the skull as if it were a tomb we had entered only to steal small items, nothing significant. Then came the removal of the hemostats, the skin pulled back into place, and the black thread—always black, a horrible, stark black against pink skin and white fur—that would lace things back together, Chesterfield as good as new, but never as good as new.

  I looked at the table, at Chesterfield’s skull still exposed, the electrode waiting. I had all that work to do; had to finish this surgery, then do Small #2, then the next rabbit and the next, on and on, and I saw that today would be filled with rabbits, each moving a few brain cells on to their deaths, and that it wouldn’t be over when I operated on the last rabbit. It would go on forever, go on, my life here with this table, these skulls, these fissures. That was who I was. This was my living.

  I was crying, the tears welling up, blurring my vision, the white and the red and clamps and pipes fusing into bizarre permutations of their original shapes, and I put both hands to my eyes to try to stop myself.

  Martin, I thought. Martin. He was who had come to me. Martin. But why?

  I’d been thinking of children in a dream, and the dread in me they had somehow caused.

  But why Martin?

  I swallowed, took my hands from my eyes. I caught a breath, glad for it, though it stank of formaldahyde and blood and bone.

  Martin.

  I focused on the electrode. I had things to do. A job. Things that had nothing to do with Martin, with my dream, with crying over the future of dumb animals, and so I put my hand to the dial again, and began lowering the electrode, lowering it, until its tip disappeared into the skull, and it sliced down toward its destination, clean and easy.

  By lunch I had finished four rabbits, each one placed back into its cage to sleep things off.

  I went up to Paige and Wendy’s office, got my sack lunch from the small, dorm-sized refrigerator beneath the table the coffee machine sat on, the refrigerator door covered with wood-grain Contact paper, someone’s idea, I imagined, of making the refrigerator look more natural, less a metal box pouring out warm air.

  Wendy was gone, Paige working at her typewriter. She was facing the wall, her head turned toward a handwritten manuscript on the paper stand, a yellow plastic magnetic bar clamped onto the page to hold it in place.

  On the bulletin board above her were those pictures of her boy and her husband. But now there was a new one, put up, I imagined, just this morning; otherwise, I would have noticed it before. I looked at the bulletin board and the pictures every day.

  The paper sack in my hand, I moved closer to Paige and the board. The new photo, like all the others of her son, was one I wished were mine.

  Phillip, his back to the camera, stood at a low windowsill, his feet spread apart farther than necessary, his head turned to his left just enough to show the soft curve of cheek and chin, the outside corner of his left eye and the thick, almost girlish eyelashes. He had on a navy blue jumpsuit, the wrists and neck ringed with blue and white stripes, and he wore thick, red socks. One hand, the right, was grasping the edge of the sill for balance, the other hand holding a baby-blue hairbrush up to his mouth. Light fell through the white curtains of the window before him, diffused light that seemed to illuminate the outline of his body without blocking out the details of him: the fine, brown hair down over the neck of the jumpsuit, the tiny fingernails of the hand holding the edge of the sill.

  I stood directly behind Paige now, nearly touching her, my eyes still on the photo.

  Without moving, without missing a beat of the rhythm she had created at the typewriter, she said, “Tom called. You were in surgery, so I didn’t want to bother you.” She paused a moment, leaned toward the page, and went at the typing again. “He said you guys are meeting with the lawyer tonight.”

  I was still looking at the photo, taking in as much as I could, trying to be there with soft light on the hardwood floor, there with the pale, pale skin of his hands and ears, skin almost as pale as the boy’s in my dream. I said, “What lawyer?”

  She stopped typing, and I glanced down at her. She was looking at the photo now, too, her hands in her lap. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you would.”

  We were quiet then, looking at the picture, our eyes, I knew, roving, searching, recording this small life before us, Paige knowing more than I would ever know: the tear and seizure of birth, the fire and fear, the joy at hearing cries, new sound in the world where once had been nothing. She knew what I would not; knew the love of creation, of giving life.

  She knew the fear, too, the well-founded kind, anchored in the black knowledge of death. There was a word for children who lost their parents, but none had yet been formed for the parent who loses a child. I envied her for that willingness to bring in life in the face of the possibility of loss. One had to accept death, I saw, if one wanted to have a child.

  Paige looked at me now, her head leaning back so that her face was upside down below me. She smiled, moved her head forward, and looked at the manuscript a moment. She started typing.

  Outside, the sky was clear, the air cold and windy, dead leaves from trees around the lab scraping across the sidewalk. Everywhere, too, were students, now the mad rush at lunchtime. Cloistered in the lab, I seemed to forget more and more often that this was a campus of over 20,000 students, every one of them, it seemed, crossing back and forth in front of me, the sidewalk that ran alongside the lab the main thoroughfare between campus and the Tower Dorms.

  The wind was cold, but it hadn’t yet deterred any students. It was still only October, and they hadn’t given in yet to the firm truth of winter. Boys and girls still wore walking shorts and Bermuda shorts and gym shorts, or wore sweatpants with the legs pushed up to just below the knee. Some girls had on short, tight denim or sailcloth skirts with flats or sandals. Every boy had on either a pair of deck shoes and no socks or a pair of unlaced Reeboks, tongues of the shoes cockeyed and flapping as they walked.

  They were working-class kids, you could tell, just normal kids, kids who’d probably hoped for a better school than this—who in Massachusetts didn’t think they might go to Harvard or Smith or Amherst or Mount Holyoke?—but hadn’t the money or the grades or both. Kids, I knew, who were a lot like me. I’d gone here. I’d graduated. I’d never left.

  The kids continued moving past. I knew I had to cut through them and the parking lot beyond to get to Whitmore and the snack bar. There was no way I was going to have lunch in the lab, not after that morning.

  And here was the feeling again, that fear creeping into me. I didn’t want to have to pass between people, cross the parking lot, walk into the ugly white concrete building with narrow black windows. All this space, all this air and movement around me.

  But I did it, took the step into the crowd and maneuvered my way between kids, and then I was in the lot, walking along the rows of parked cars. A moment later I
had my hand on the door of the administration building, and I was inside.

  It wasn’t quite noon, the snack bar not yet full. The snack bar was a small room, one wall all glass with a door that let out onto a patio, Whitmore actually a square building with the center a sort of atrium furnished with metal outdoor tables and chairs.

  Around the room were small, square tables of white Formica, chairs with seats and backs of hard plastic. The wall opposite the windows was where the food was kept: a stainless-steel-and-glass counter ran the width of the room, on it two trays of donuts; a refrigerator case lit with fluorescent bulbs to display tuna, ham and cheese, and roast beef sandwiches, all wrapped too tightly in cellophane; the stainless steel tank of a coffee machine. Behind the counter was the grill and deep-fat fryers and the larger refrigerator case and, of course, the old women, short and squat and dressed in white uniforms, their hair always up in hair nets; occasionally there was some poor work-study student back there, given the job of changing the oil in the fryer or of scrubbing down the grill.

  Though I’d worked here on campus all these years, had gone over to the snack bar at least two or three times a week, still the women acted as if they did not recognize me, as if each time I ordered what I did—always an onion bagel, always with cream cheese—I was someone they had never seen before, the order something alien to them. They always placed the bagel on the counter before me, always gave a quick smile without our eyes ever meeting; always I smiled back, hoping that they might see I was somebody. But nothing ever changed, and every time my smile faded, I wondered why I had put it there in the first place. And every time I realized that they were only working, only doing their jobs. They would be paid no more if they were to smile. They gave students and faculty and staff alike the food they ordered, and went on to the next person, thinking, I imagined, only about when the last person would come through, the last burger cooked, the last bagel served. They would go home then to cook even more, I imagined, this time for a husband who maybe worked over in Physical Plant or somewhere else on campus, their kids already grown, gone from the house. I could not blame them for not having given a smile that meant anything.

  I went to the end of the counter to the cash register, where yet another short woman sat perched on a stool. She rang up my order, I paid, and I began looking for a place to sit.

  There in the corner of the room, her table pushed up against the glass, sat Sandra, alone, bent over a sandwich on a paper plate, a wad of cellophane on the table. Next to the plate sat a Diet Coke and an open bag of Doritos.

  I’d never seen her here before, never known her to come over except for coffee runs whenever the office ran out. But here she was, about to bite into a sandwich from the refrigerator case, sandwiches that seemed so flat, squashed, and older than we could know. The only food I’d ever seen her eat was what she brought from home: juices in small, clear bottles, fresh fruit, yogurt and carrots and celery sticks.

  I made my way to her table and set down my bagel and sack lunch. She had the sandwich up to her mouth, then lifted her eyes to me.

  She stopped, put the sandwich down, dusted off her hands and put them in her lap. She gave an embarrassed half smile as I hung my pocketbook on the back of my chair. I sat down.

  I said, “What are you doing over here? And with that food? What is it?”

  She picked it up again, smelled it. “I think it’s egg salad. That, or tuna fish. Either one would probably smell this bad.”

  We both laughed, but stopped at the same moment, the air suddenly gone dead between us.

  I opened my lunch bag, peered inside as if there might be something other than what I had put in there this morning. I said, “So you think I was talking to myself in there, huh?”

  She was looking at her sandwich, and for a moment I thought she hadn’t heard me. “Sandra?” I said.

  She looked up at me, startled, her eyes quick with alarm, open wide. “What?”

  “You said I was talking to myself in there. In surgery.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah. That’s right.” Again she put the sandwich down. “I could have sworn. I could swear you were saying that name again and again. Like it was some sort of mantra for you. It was crazy.”

  Her mind was off what she’d just been thinking about, I could see. She put her arms up on the table and crossed them in front of her, leaned toward me. “So who is this guy?” she said. She was smiling now.

  “Stress,” I said, and I popped off the top of my yogurt container. I didn’t know what I was going to say, how to get beyond the topic of Martin and my dream, didn’t know how to get around the fact that I’d been talking and had no recollection of ever having spoken. “Stress,” I said again, “is probably who it is. The truth is there’s this guy who’s involved with the house whose name is Martin. He’s one of the two guys who goes out and cleans up the place during the year. He’s—”

  “Is he cute?” Sandra cut in, still smiling. Though her face was pale, her hair out of place, a plate of nonfood in front of her, this was more the real Sandra, the one I’d grown to love, the one I’d talked with enough times to say anything I wanted.

  During the last three years we’d spent enough lunches in the computer room, the lights out so that Will wouldn’t think to look for us there, sitting in the dark and talking of things, things that would have been enormous or irrelevant in the light of day. In that dark, things seemed small enough to handle; we could talk of death, of life, of women and men and love, all without inhibition because we could see nothing except the crack of light beneath the door, that crack our focal point, the only thing we needed to see while we ate our lunches.

  Now, I wanted that Sandra. I wanted her back, wished we were in the computer room again instead of here, the words Martin’s retarded poised on my tongue and ready for release. It was because of the look on her face—the conspiratorial grin about a man she thought could be cute, though she, too, was married—that I wanted her back. She was, right then, the happiest I’d seen her in weeks. But I could only imagine what would happen if I were to tell her what I wanted to say about Martin.

  I lied. I said, “Yes, I guess so,” and I looked into my yogurt. With my spoon I pulled up through the white a burst of dark, red fruit. I was smiling.

  “So?” she said, and leaned even closer.

  “So nothing, okay? So he’s cute. That’s all.”

  Though I hadn’t intended anything, any maliciousness, any anger, she seemed to shrink away, moved her arms off the table and back to her lap. Her eyes fell to the plate before her again.

  I stopped stirring the yogurt. I said, “I’m sorry if I said anything.”

  “It’s me,” she said. She crossed her arms, looked out the window. She squinted at the light, the sun as high in the sky as it would be this late in the year.

  It was her, I saw. She had changed, changed in ways I’d thought unimaginable for her. Slow changes that, I realized, had been at work for weeks, changes nearly imperceptible until now, right now, when they hit me full on: she really didn’t care anymore. There was her hair, her skin, the food. It had been three weeks since I had seen her bike in the locker room, Sandra taking the bus now. Last week Will had had her completely rewrite a short article she’d written, calling it sloppy and inarticulate. I had gotten hold of a copy, ready to defend Sandra against what I imagined must have been yet another of Will’s needless tirades. But he was right; the paper was poorly written, hardly publishable.

  Just the week before, I’d gone down to the running room to find her sitting next to the filing cabinet, the fan going, the potentiometer ticking away. She sat with her knees together, her arms crossed, her head down. She was asleep, while her own batch of rabbits were running. Asleep, instead of monitoring them for any skipped stimuli or malfunctions.

  I’d said her name once, and she had awoken, startled, her hands quickly moving to the edge of her seat and holding on tight, her head darting around as if she were expecting something to hit her any moment.
It had taken her a full minute to come around, to see where she was, what she was doing. To recognize me.

  And finally, there in the snack bar, her face turned from me, things fell into some order: I remembered the morning the rabbit had bitten me, remembered our conversation in the hallway, remembered losing her face in the dark of the hall. I remembered she’d wanted to talk to me about something.

  I’d forgotten. Forgotten it completely, caught up in my own preoccupations, my own life: that bite, the house, my dreams, my job, and Grady and Martin and lawyers and realtors. Caught up in just living.

  A month ago. It had been a month ago when her hair had been beautifully braided, her skin tan.

  I said, “My God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You wanted to talk to me. I’m sorry.” I put the yogurt down, placed my hand on the table, showed her I wanted to touch her.

  She did not move.

  “Sandra,” I said, and moved my hand closer to her.

  Slowly she looked down at the table. She said, “That was a while ago. A month ago. A whole month. I wanted—” she said, and stopped. She bit her upper lip, her chin quivering now. She put a hand to her forehead, closed tight her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and took in quick, short breaths. “It’s me. It’s nothing you did. Nothing.”

  Before I could move she blinked several times, rubbed her nose, and stood. She placed the open bag of chips and the cellophane on her plate. Still not looking at me, she picked up the plate and the can of soda, dumped them in the black-plastic garbage barrel next to the door, and left.

  I sat there a few moments, stunned, not moving. Then I looked outside, where within the last few moments shadows had begun to fall over the furniture out there, the air already going colder, the sun already descending.

  I found her where I knew she would be, the first place I looked. No light came from beneath the computer room door, and I pushed it open. The door was near one of the few lights in the hall, and when I opened it, there sat Sandra, one hand up to block out the light. She was off to the right, her feet up on a chair.