by Ann
In voluminous sighs the fat man smiles beatifically and spreads his hands. His body comes apart into silver wires and bells, swells like a great, white tree.
The Whitest Teeth
When I was a boy, my friend Kajetan and I lived in the same U-shaped apartment building, with a common area within the loop of the U. This common area was a lumpy mattress of lawn that never completely dried out. Even in the summertime, it was dank and shady, an assembly of clumps of grass and big sinuous puddles.
Our families lived opposite each other. All the apartments were the same, porcelain floors in the bathrooms, kitchens, hallways, and in the other rooms a dingy chitin of pressed ivory shavings, suspended in a crinkly sheath of yellowing resin, had been laid down. The same, fantastically heavy burgundy curtains, with thick, burdensome golden fringes, hung over every window, shutting out all trace of daylight. Kajetan and I would meet in front of his door every morning and walk to the Lycée together; we attended different classes, but we always ate lunch together. He was a quiet, fawning boy; he never had a teacher who didn’t instantly love him. No one in the school was as fair as Kajetan. His hair, his flesh, except for his lips, were all white, and he had a blazing, retiring smile, like the dazzle of daylight on drifted snow.
That day, the day I am thinking of, I had been gloating over some dirty postcards that I had found somewhere. I pored over the grey bodies, the black eyes and lips, the dark islands and white prominences, filled with riddles, all bordered with dark burgundy red, and gold braid. I was too young to be aroused by these images, but I was aflame with curiosity about them. After devouring a card with my eyes, I would hand it to Kajetan, who kneeled beside me in the mud. We studied together in silence. Here were all my postcards, the grey, supine, obliging or oblivious bodies, scattered on the muddy ground. I was reaching to gather them up when I felt something cool on my upper lip. I looked down, and saw drops of my blood falling into one of the puddles. The drops bloomed when they struck the water, making little billows of fine red threads. Two more drops, big ones, fell, and sank to the bottom. They hovered there, conspiring together in the depths, without dissolving. I crushed my nostril shut and tilted my head back. After a few minutes, I stopped pressing on my nostril, and it opened slowly, tearing through the membrane of candied blood that had congealed over it. The bleeding had stopped. Kajetan had noticed my problem, looked at the last couple of postcards, then put them aside and sat with his hands in his lap, his eyes on the ground.
He’d had a nightmare, he said after a few minutes – a horrible, frog-like man with a huge, round, smiling face, hiding in the reeds by a pond, or a pool. This man hadn’t threatened him at all – he had only smiled, with closed lips. He had attacked Kajetan with the sight of this wide, wide smile.
‘You won’t have nightmares any more when you grow up.’ I solemnly believed this.
He looked at me levelly, and said softly, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to kill you.’ His smile slowly came out then, like the sun in a winter cloud.
In my memory, the sentence stretches, and seems to be said a hundred times not quite at once. That sentence has its own particular, special moment in time, which lasts until now.
Kajetan made me this promise, but he was not the one who would go on to take life. That might have been his calling, but he failed to answer, and I was chosen instead.
I was the energetic one. Kajetan was lazy. He spent his time with me because I always had some project in the works. After his sister’s health collapsed, and his parents separated, he moved away, and thereafter I saw him only in my dreams, sliding into the shadows of an arched doorway in a stone wall…which the rain had marked with grey-brown stains…his white head gleaming in the dusky light…fluorescing, like a will-o-the-wisp, as he floated into the dark.
That wall and doorway, I soon discovered, belong to the estate by the sea; a palace of gnarled stone surrounded by black pines and beech trees. The gloom of the place drew me strongly; on the grounds, the sound of the surf is audible, but the sea is not visible. The underbrush here is thick and elastic, the leaves made rubbery by the salt wind, and difficult to penetrate. One follows the sound of the waves, and eventually the soil becomes sandy and thin, the vegetation more sparse, and then the dunes and the horizon appear together. The house looms above the level of the beach on a slanted promontory of rock, its shuttered windows refusing to open on the sea. I have the impression the place is in probate, some sort of protracted dispute; it is empty and neglected. Only occasional trespassers from town make use of it. I secretly oblige the owners, whoever they are, by killing these trespassers.
The first time, I was kneeling in a clump of ferns, watching a man. He was sitting on a stone beneath a tree. He’d taken his rucksack from his back and set it beside him, eaten his lunch and now was smoking, leaning back against the trunk. A hiker, apparently. He finished his smoke, crushing the butt out under a rock, and knelt, tying his bootlaces. I leapt on him then, weightless, the sound of the wind and surf very loud, his grunt of surprise very far away. I rolled on top of him and drove my fists into his face – his hands outflung made a sort of thicket between me and his face – I swatted at him with a rock, he tried to wrestle it from me, all the while yelping bits of sentences at me – I released the rock, took up another and swiftly smashed his head with it. I sunk my fingers into his cheeks and eyes bent forward and pulled his face in half with my hands – his body bucked and thrashed under me, his arms flailing. Finally I strangled him, staring and dripping perspiration down into the torn flesh, and exposed bone, of his face.
Satisfied, I assembled his meagre possessions and dragged him down the beach to the water. Launching his body from the rocks, I could be assured the current would accept him. This sea, sky, woods, house, were all my accomplices. Kajetan’s face dwindling in shadowy passageways, his flickering smile flashed white in the instant before shades filled his features altogether.
The second time, a woman was taking photographs on the beach. I hid in the rocks and jumped her from behind. There were many deep tidal pools here between the boulders. I seized her by the hair and pushed her head into the water. I straightened my arm – she clawed at me, kicked back at me, but her angle was all wrong. After a few moments she went limp – a ruse. I did not budge. A few more seconds of frantic activity, shreds of water dashing in all directions, and then nothing but the rumble of the waves.
Drowning is one of the better ways to kill someone, provided circumstances allow for it. At its edges, the estate dwindles into flat, sallow land, grey soil, grey sky, a handful of scarred, defiant trees, and a handful of farms. Black clouds turned the dim, watery light of that day a brownish-green color. A stand of dead trees, pinched off by an arm of sand from the body of the woods that surround the house. The trees enclose a little depression in the ground where rain water collects to form a broad, shallow pond of iridescent brown. A dirt road runs by the stand. A few heavy branches bristling with grey, wiry sticks had blown down and dammed the wind’s flow of dead leaves and bits of bracken. The road was blocked. I found a farmer clearing the debris out of the way and offered to help – seamed, lean face, slow, patiently moving body. I clubbed him over the head with a rock when his back was turned and dragged him, surprisingly light and thin, to the pond. I knelt on his back and held his head down. He was unable to struggle. His body seemed heavy and tired. He seemed to lie beneath me resigned, his face mired in black, stagnant mud and thick brown water. Everything was quiet. Despite his weakness, I remained kneeling a long time – every now and then thinking I felt a sort of inner tick beneath my knees. This farmer was like a plant himself – I had to dig his life out of him by its roots to keep it from growing back, and it took a long time. Kneeling there, my gaze was drawn out across the pond toward the house and the grounds, and further to the sea. Although I was drowning a man, I felt as peaceful as a stone. After a long time, I rose and he drifted out from the bank. I almost left him floating face down in brown water, brown light.
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nbsp; I caught a woman from behind with my necktie, stood motionless as a statue while she clawed at her throat, twisted this way and that. I turned my head to see our shadows together on the stone wall. They looked strange. When her knees buckled I straddled her, her body lying flat on its stomach, her head dangling from her neck, which I held above the ground with the tie. She had been strolling the grounds hand in hand with a man. I had watched them draw near the house, and took hasty advantage of his leaving her alone a moment. When he returned, he found her at once and knelt slowly beside her with his bearded mouth open. I stepped from the hiding place, the doorway I had seen in my dream. He looked mutely up at me, and I struck him in the face with an axe. The single blow killed him. I am strong, the axe swung light as a reed in my hand. The red dew of his blood congealed on her icy cheeks like studs of cinnamon candy.
In my dreams I see again the enigmatic seeds of his teeth. I rise in the morning, my curtained room is dark. My employer will send a car for me. I must deliver some records to our office in the adjacent town.
I return on foot. When the pavement gives way to rutted clay I realize I’ve been on the wrong road for several miles. After a moment’s reckoning I decide I’m better off going on than back. I’m heading in the right direction, by a more rambling route. After half a mile more the road dwindles to a broad level path bordered by rattling humps of ivy, and tall grass. The breeze flourishes into a steady, nervous wind. The sky is dense, silver and black; the humid air is thick with captive rain. I can hear surf. I’m approaching the sea.
There before me is a wide ribbon of black trees, and peaked slate rooftops above the trees, black against the sky as dried blood. I have been here so many times, I remember them all, but I have no memories to compare with this; I have no memories of coming or going. Why do I only now realize this? Rain patters all around. I walk with a little difficulty through the tall grass into the shade of the trees. As I cross the boundary, some fraction of the daylight is absorbed by the air. Colorless shade rises from the ground.
The path runs by the wall, toward a paved terrace surrounded by overgrown planters. Over the sound of the rain, which still forms in distinct drops, instead of a seamless hush, and the remote surf, I hear violent splashing. In the middle of the terrace, I know, there is a rectangular, lichen-encrusted pool, now drained. When I once lifted the tarp that covered it, I saw only the crumpled brown remains of dead water lilies smeared against the bottom. The terrace is ringed with empty pedestals upon which some classical figures once had stood – I come up behind one of these, to which there still adheres a single broken, heavily veined foot, flexed in mid-step, in time to see a figure recoil into the bushes opposite me. A young woman lies flat on the pavement, her head bobs in the agitated blue water of the pool – who refilled it? – her arms up hands floating half netted in the black tendrils of her hair.
I step forward, looking at her in confusion. Someone else works here?
I hear a step behind me and feel a light hand on my shoulder, and sudden pain – my heart gulps, flails…dizzy, my body weighted, I turn a little as the hand is removed from my shoulder. Something is pulled from my back. The world lists and slides away, the picture I see sets back into my mind slowly – lean Kajetan, tall, hands diffident behind his back, his face fluoresced in a white smile. White and red. The pavement buffets me. Now I am floating, the wind in my hair, not on my face.
Water clicks at intervals in my ear, the water is red and white. My hands rise nerveless to the surface. The water convulses once, the body beside me launches forward curling limp down into the water trailing long lacy sleeves of bubbles, and a plume of her blood like thick smoke rises and envelopes me. Long sleeves of red reach languidly for the bottom, and cross long white sleeves of bubbles.
Now I can see only the featureless, blue depths.
His memories remove their disguises and show themselves for what they are. His dreams file past, smiling, showing their teeth – I am trying to keep hold of them…of one at least, only leave me one.
None of them are mine.
…the water grows calmer and calmer, and soon will be completely still.
…the motion it lends me will abandon me, and I will lie completely still.
…my face is dead, my harmless teeth smiling bitterly. Yes…yes, of course.
My Father’s Friends
This is theatre critic Simon Klai – here is his wife Doriandra, these are their two sons: Louy and Leonard. Simon is acerbic, impatient, acute, aloof. He loves his family as if from on high.
First Exhibit:
Simon on his way to the newspaper office to present his copy. Double breasted suit, silk tie, hat, overcoat…walking stick, soft leather briefcase with two buckled straps. It is early morning. The streets are still fairly empty. His breath mists in the air. Alert, leaning forward, walking briskly although he is not late, he watches the pavement pass under his feet…darts glances this way and that. The sun is still low and cold in the sky. Crossing a bridge, Simon’s steps come slower; he is looking at the sun. He stops, his eyes on the sun. He does not lean on the bridge’s stone rail; he is rigid, shoulders back, briefcase at the end of his arm, his stick held firmly in his right hand at about a forty-five degree angle to the street. A car whirs by, misses him only by inches – he does not move. He is staring at the sun as though he’d never seen it before.
Second Exhibit:
Later the same day: Simon is sitting on a bench with his head back. After a few hours he rises stiffly and crosses the park, walking slowly, a little unevenly. Presently he raises his head – he is on a narrow side street that curves away to the left. Just ahead, a hotel signboard hangs over the street; white façade, billowing urns of flowers. The lobby is small, filled with dusky golden light and a carpet smell. Simon takes a suite on the uppermost floor; in shirtsleeves and stockings he orders a bottle sent up from the bar. He tips the girl lavishly. In the days to come, despite his straitened condition, he will stop ordering bottles; sortie out to the stores and back, instead.
On the tenth day, he checks out. Home is only a few blocks away. He lets himself in during the middle of the day, when the boys are at school and Doriandra is rehearsing. Lying on the bed, the pillows smell of her hair. When she returns, he will present her with an uncannily reasonable excuse for his absence.
Third Exhibit:
It is a cloudy morning. Simon reaches for his umbrella, taking its handle with two fingers, then his head twists on his neck slightly as though a thought had very forcibly occurred to him, and he instead takes his heavy walking stick. As he steps down the stairs he inspects the stick, peels the india rubber tip from the end and tosses it back into the umbrella stand.
On the street: the inaugurating first drops of rain patter on his shoulders. Cause and effect – he heads for the awning of a bakery along with several other adjacent pedestrians. Halfway there he stops, and then continues past the bakery through empty streets, keeping to the lee of the buildings so as to stay dry – into an area of a few blocks in size currently under renovation after a fire – burnt shells, new lumber, frames and bricks, tools lie in the street. Striding against the rain all at once he stops, turns a little indecisively to the right, looking around as though trying to sight a sound, then slips into the gaping front door of a partially rebuilt house. Once under its roof, he shakes the rain from his hat and coat. He stands, seems to wait, in what once was the entry way – smell of plaster dust and fresh paint. Now he quietly climbs the stairs to the second floor apartment, which opens out to the right. The kitchen – a white box, fifteen feet square, two windows without glass admit the sound of the rain. A boy about eight or nine looks up at him, rain dropping from his clothes. Simon walks toward the boy.
‘I was trying to get out of the rain.’
He seems to think Simon is a contractor, or a security man. Simon’s stick flashes up and cracks down over the boy’s head. The boy crouches without quite falling down and veers randomly toward the wall opposite the door.
Simon raises the stick again, then his head jerks and he alters his grip, taking the stick in both hands and driving the end into the boy’s stomach. A purple stain spreads from the boy’s solar plexus and he falls on his side holding himself. Simon straddles the boy and churns the stick up and down on him with all his weight. There are two softly audible snapping sounds. Now the boy is limp, breath rattling. Simon turns him on his back with his toe, drops to his knees on the boy’s chest, and presses his stick across the boy’s throat. The eyes are still sluggishly moving. There is still a remnant of fear, surprise, imploring, on the boy’s face. Simon’s face is attentive, impassive. He looks like a dentist bending over a patient. The boy fumbles the stick weakly, then his limp hands fall away.
Now the boy’s face is dark. Simon slips from the house. It is dusk; the rain has stopped; the uninhabited street is dark. Simon tosses his stick over a fence into a vacant lot as he walks briskly home. Drops of the boy’s blood seep into the dry grass.
Fourth Exhibit:
Autumnal gloom in the park of dead trees: mercurial light fades against a sky of deepening indigo. Simon passes the brick kiosk which houses the public bathrooms – he abruptly stops, and walks back to the kiosk.
Behind the kiosk, there is a square of bare pavement hidden from public view by the overgrown iron fence that rings the park. A gun lies in the center of this area. It is loaded and fits in his coat pocket easily.
