Another Perfect Catastrophe

by Brad Barkley

  “My wife and I used to live here,” he said. “Except we didn’t have a bomb shelter.”

  Celina wiped her mouth. “You’re kind of a quirky guy.”

  He shrugged. Jack Benny faded out and a commercial for Texaco came on the screen. “And what about you?” he said.

  “I’m not that quirky.”

  He took a cracker from her plate and bit it. “But are you married?”

  “I live with my boyfriend. He sells cars. He’s learning to play the drums.”

  Jeremy nodded and looked at his watch. In twenty minutes the mayor’s dance would start and Jean would be looking for him. He closed his eyes a moment, weighing the drunkenness inside him.

  “Bored with me already, huh?” Celina said. “It’s the job, not me. The boredom just clings to me.”

  “You’re not boring,” he said. “Do you plan to work this job all your life?”

  “No,” she said. “I want to be a nurse. Either that or euthanize dogs for a living.”

  He looked at her.

  “I’m joking,” she said. “Except about the nurse part. Lighten up, Jerry.”

  “Jeremy,” he said. On the screen, Dr. Joyce Brothers stood locked in an isolation booth on The $64,000 Question. Out the window, surrounding their bomb shelter, stretched a lawn of bright green Astroturf.

  “I hate all this phony newness of everything,” Jeremy said.

  “Hey, this stuff is fifty years old. Older than me by a mile.”

  “Old but new,” Jeremy said.

  “You want older, like antique?” Celina said. “Jerry wants to go back in time.”

  He drank, and she wiped his chin with her finger. “Isn’t that what everybody wants?” he said.

  “Not me, buddy. Nothing back there I want.”

  He grinned. “You’re the here and now, huh?”

  Celina drank from the champagne and handed it to him, then stood. “Come on,” she told him. “You want old, I’ll show you the off-limits stuff.”

  She led him out of the Atomic Age, through darkened halls and along back stairways, past a display on extinct mammals, past dugout canoes, mannequin conquistadors and explorers. They entered a door posted AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Inside, Celina skimmed her flashlight along a row of empty glass cases to the back of the room, where an artificial cave had been built against one wall. The outside was unfinished, the concrete and wire mesh and fiberglass exposed; the inside walls were textured and painted to look like limestone. Beneath Jeremy’s hand the mouth of the cave felt like the real thing, a solid, permanent opening into the earth. Somewhere above them, he heard the shuffle and murmur of the party, the faint bass notes of Don West’s keyboard.

  “It’s a new exhibit they’re building on early man or something,” Celina said. “We aren’t supposed to be here. At least, you’re not.”

  It was approaching midnight. “I have to go soon,” Jeremy said, slurring a little. Celina nodded. He undid his tie and stepped into the cave, imagining that the air felt cooler, damp. The cave was at least twenty feet deep, the back wall a black-painted sheet of plywood. He thought of the airplane with its fake controls.

  “Where are the department store cave dwellers?” he asked.

  “Still on order, I guess. All the mannequins come from either Indonesia or Pittsburgh.”

  “The two seedbeds of civilization.” He stepped farther inside. On the floor were three metal plates where the mannequins would be bolted down.

  “Kill the light,” he told her. She shrugged and clicked the flashlight, the bulb wire a faint orange glow behind the lens. He heard the jingle of her keys, the squeak of her leather holster as she stepped over the ropes and toward him. Sounds came more fully to him now, the noise of the party upstairs muffled through a heating duct, carried along the currents of filtered air. His eyes pulsed in purple steaks and flashes against the dark. Celina’s fingers brushed his wrist. She took hold of his sleeve.

  “This is weird,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not blind. I would hate that.” Jeremy heard through the faint whoosh of air the sounds of spoons stirring in coffee cups, champagne glasses clinking, Don West playing slow, intermittent chords on his synthesizer and talking to the crowd. There was a short crackle of applause, then a burst of laughing like noise rising out of a radio speaker. The rough wall of the cave came up behind him as he felt his way, and he let himself slide down, sitting on the hard floor.

  “Where are you?” Celina said. As his eyes adjusted, she became a faint, blue-white glow. “Can we sit? I’m tired.”

  “Here,” he said, taking her hand. He could smell on her a faint odor of garlic mixed with the champagne. As he raised his hand to her, his wristwatch moved like a firefly in the dark cave, flashing 11:53. He pushed it up under his sleeve. The sounds of the party faded in and out, layers of laughing and dancing and music and silence. The air vent blew down on them, cooling their skin. It would be good to have a fire, he thought. Celina sat next to him, their shoulders touching.

  “This is so cool,” she said. “I can almost see you. Like I can, but only sorta, like a really faint star at night.”

  “You smell good,” he told her. “You smell like food.”

  She laughed. “You just want everybody to like you, don’t you?” she said. He heard her moving around, settling in.

  “Same as anyone. That could be the theme of this entire museum. Except the dinosaurs and insects; they don’t give a shit.”

  “I like you pretty good,” she said. “You gave up a whole party to hang out with me.” She patted his hand, groping a little to find it. Above him he heard different off-key singers trying drunken verses of “All I Want for Christmas,” and he pictured the handheld mike making its way around the room, past his empty seat, Jean sitting, twisting her napkin, watching the stairwell doors. He spoke quickly.

  “Ask me some more questions,” he said. “Ask anything.” He wanted to tell her every thought that came into his mind, as if by words he might make her understand who a Jeremy Barseleau is, who he had become in forty-three years.

  “Hmmm.” She was silent. “Tell me one time when something really broke your heart. Or someone.” She leaned against him.

  The question panicked him a little. He tried to think of Jean in some setting that had moved him deeply, brought him to real sadness. There was the time not long after their marriage, in a walk-in clinic at the hospital, when they were told they could not have children. But he could remember only the long first days of silences and averted glances that came after, how Jean had joked them out of themselves until through time the loss seemed only a mild disappointment, like a picnic rained out. Since then, it had never seemed that they really needed children. He ran through other things in his mind, old girlfriends, sad movies he might have seen, deaths of distant relatives, watching his parents as they aged. All of these things seemed remote now, fuzzy around their edges. Then he remembered something, and quickly turned to Celina.

  “This will sound silly,” he said.

  “Yeah, probably so. Just try me.”

  “It’s a little thing, really. Once, Jean and I were at this company picnic at Hagenstone Park. The usual, cooking burgers, swimming in the lake, volleyball. I was hot and sat under a tree and watched this other family, not part of our group.” Jeremy shifted his legs. “This is stupid,” he said.

  She took his hand and squeezed it. “I don’t care. Tell the story.”

  “Anyway, they were all doing the usual stuff, too, and the kids were bawling over fruit punch or something, and I saw what must have been an uncle, an overweight guy in tattoos and this mesh shirt and tinted glasses, he’s away from everyone, with the family dog, some little mutt on a leash. The guy has the leash looped around his ankle and he’s inside this narrow patch of shade trying to work this big corkscrew into the ground so he could tie up the dog.”

  Jeremy took a deep breath, feeling words gather in him. In the dim quiet echoed the sound of a synthesized fanfare upstairs, then the deep tone
s of the mayor’s voice. He could feel Jean’s waiting. Words spilled out of him.

  “I just thought about him sweating, digging into the dirt, tearing up his back. The guy is slipping and puffing like he’s going to have a heart attack, just so the dog could rest in the shade. I mean, a damn dog. It seemed like he had tied himself to the dog, not the other way around. No one even noticed the guy. No one helped him.”

  He stopped, his lungs filling. T probably sound like a Lassie episode,” he said. Applause filtered down to them, the mayor having finished his speech.

  “I love that,” Celina said. “I feel like I love that man.”

  Jeremy nodded. “It’s weird. That’s what I felt, too. Like he deserved something from me.”

  She turned toward him. “Well, now he has it. You told about him.”

  He wanted to tell her everything, about the man and the dog, about the electrified boys in the rain, all the small moments of his past. Beside him he could just make out the movements of Celina, her starchy clothes rustling like grass. He felt the weight of his drunkenness, allowing his head to tilt against her shoulder. From this angle he could see high on the opposite wall the faint, crude scratches of cave drawings, dark as rust at the edges of his vision. Upstairs, the keyboard started “One O’clock Jump,” and feet shuffled across the floor above them, through the layers of insulation and particleboard and the concrete and fiberglass of the cave. He heard laughter, the faint wheeze of breath through Celina’s nose, her fingers smoothing his hair.

  “You’ll be all right,” she said. “Sleep it off.”

  He reached back behind him and found with his fingertips the indentations of other drawings, rough figures etched and painted into the stone, his hand careful as it traced the shallow lines, the thin, smoothed ruts. He heard his own name then, called in dim echoes, the laughing that followed it. He imagined Jean with the cordless mike, making a joke of looking for him, her voice altered and modulated, his name something far off and unrecognizable. The sound faded against the rushed pulse of his blood, the scant sigh of Celina’s breathing. He held to the sound of his name as his fingers traced the jagged lines on the wall. He wondered what tales they told, of hunts or kills or defeats, and in what language they might be written, some ancient language lost to history, telling stories without words.

  The Small Machine

  George Bartel has earned enough money in commercial lending to finally afford an extravagance, and now finds himself seated on an airplane, muscle relaxants in his blood to forestall nervousness, his wife Maurya beside him. He liked the idea when it occurred to him, she loved it when he told her: three Valentine’s Day dinners in three time zones, toasting twenty-two years of marriage across the continent. So romantic, she said, so expansive. They’re due, he said. And so they began that afternoon in Boston, with orzo pasta and wild mushrooms, fugasa bread, and pear-and-hazelnut crisp, and now a three-hour hop to St. Louis for chicken with passion fruit and champagne, then on to San Francisco for Belgian waffles and mimosas. Roses and a limo ride started the night, sleepy handholding and familiar sex will end it. Two stones, they are, skipping across time and geography.

  Like most plans, this one is already truncated, deformed. He’s saved money buying coach and now sits with his knees scrunched, feet cramped. The air vent blows its staleness and stink. Every seat is full, babies crying in rounds, no one watching the mime show of flotation devices and oxygen masks. George’s thighs hurt, and the prescription makes his heart race, his palms over dry, his scalp tingly. “This is so exciting,” Maurya says, and, God bless her, means it. She is still pretty, despite the years that have pulled him down into jowliness and a measurable gut, despite the severity of her haircut, which, if she were a boy of ten, he would call a brush cut. Gold hoops dangle from her ears, swaying as she dabs nail polish at the run in her stockings.

  The ground drops away as the prescription smears his usual quiet panic into an agreeable fog. The pasta has settled badly, and he hides a belch in his fist. The young woman in front of him (he noticed her when they boarded—a round, plain face and chunky calves, but that hair, a shiny curtain of it hanging several inches past the hem of her T-shirt) tips her seat in full recline, squeezing him. He sighs, too loud. Nine more hours and two more meals of this, the airliner gaining time he doesn’t want. Maurya kisses his hand, an old gesture that still moves him. He decides to do better.

  The captain comes on fuzzy through the speakers and tells them—George could swear he hears this—to eat their peas. The cart rattles down the aisle and he buys two tiny bottles of rum to mix with Coke, then accepts the foil packets of almonds and a cellophane packet of candy hearts, for Valentine’s Day. Everything is whimsy now, the world laughing at its own jokes. Maurya reads some aloud as she feeds them to him: BE MINE. HOT STUFF. Air hisses through the fuselage, and the seat belt sign winks out. The old, darkened NO SMOKING signs are still at the ready, should the latest tyrannies ever vanish from the world. Maurya asks if he’s okay and he promises he is, speaking through the sugared paste on his tongue. He rinses with drink and thinks better of taking another pill, his palms still papery and dry.

  Just as Maurya settles in with People, as George allows his eyes their heaviness, the young woman before him, stirring in half sleep, lifts her heavy hair from behind her and tosses it free of its confinement, her motion practiced and effortless. The hair fans out in slippery waves, a billowing of auburn, gold, saffron in slow motion, like a shampoo commercial. The bulk of it settles, thickly, in George’s lap.

  Maurya, engrossed in Mel Gibson and celebrity weddings, fails to notice. The hair, dense and opulent, slides along the folds of his wool slacks, cascading as he shifts. Night encloses the plane as the cabin lights darken, people napping on pillows or sitting under their spot lamps, quiet performers on a dozen tiny stages. In the shadows George lets his knuckles graze the tips of the woman’s hair. Soft, a silk chemise, the fur of some exotic animal. Maurya slowly nods off, and George, emboldened, a little drunk, extends his fingers so the hair slides down between and through, the gold of his wedding ring a nugget in the bed of some coppery autumn stream. The young woman sleeps, her nose slightly whistling. He combs her tresses with his hands, bundles it loosely in his fist like bolts of voile, and admires its liquid falling. Then the woman shifts, stirs. George’s heart whirs like a small machine. He closes his eyes, then thinks better of it, imagining Maurya waking and finding him, with half an erection, touching one of the other passengers. He holds her hair and bends to sniff it, careful of his movements, pretending to adjust his socks. The smell is honeyed, ambrosial …

  The woman sits up.

  He drops the hair and adopts good posture, snatches a safety folder from the seat back and opens it. With feined concentration he studies the cartoon drawings of faceless, androgynous passengers escaping down an inflated slide. The woman turns, blinks, looks at him without accusation. He smiles, and she settles back again.

  Hands shaking, he flips the safety card to a map of the airline’s hubs, red dots spread across the country, a disease. The map is made of colors: red for Eastern Time, blue for Central, yellow for Mountain, green … He looks again at that boxy yellow swatch, the jaundiced middle. Somehow, he’s forgotten Mountain. For weeks he’s bragged about his plans, and no one asked about Idaho or Montana. The travel agent never brought it up. Even the TV neglects Mountain. Every night, the announcer speaks only of Eastern, Central, and “later on the West Coast.” Not one word about Mountain, that yellowed hole in his plans. The entire scheme seems pointless now, riddled with faulty plans and superfluous time zones. Even the woman’s hair is probably some kind of ruse—a wig, maybe, or expensive chemicals purchased at a salon. He reaches up again, lets his fingers slide through the soft strands, remembering the experience of finding beauty there as though it had happened years ago and not two minutes prior.

  How wrong can he be? First the trip and now the hair, all his feeble desires filtered through his own candied heart. He lifts h
er hair again in both hands. The smell is the thing, all the old nostalgias. Grimsley High, class of 1972—cheerleaders and backseats and sweat and promise and ache. The captain announces their arrival time, the hour shedding minutes to the swiftness of the plane, and George shedding years to the swiftness of his life. He presses his nose into the handful of hair, breathing. Why had they made this trip at all? The full implement of love became operational at age sixteen; the rest was only packaging, bright distraction from rust and wear. His entire plan feels arbitrary, fake, set up, the whole idea of Valentine’s Day nothing more than some corporate contrivance, propped up by Hallmark and Whitman’s. He knows how the world works. The grown-up world of falseness and whimsy. He holds the fan of hair to his face. They should have stayed home, bought a porch swing. Built a porch. Sat and held hands. If not that, not in their own mortgaged space, then what is there to find in St. Louis or San Francisco?

  George breathes deeply, fighting tears, rubbing the hair into his eye sockets. He imagines this: a wife, a husband, swinging out and then back into the comforting drop he feels now as the plane begins its slow descent, swinging out over the night and the neighborhood, the welcoming blue-beaded landing lights below no more than the straight lines of TV sets, guiding them to ground, easing them out of the dark. He releases the bundle of hair and sits back, Maurya stirring, muttering in her sleep, settling against him. His feet push against the narrow carpet, moving Maurya lightly in her sleep, his fingers finding her severe hair, stiff with mousse. He moves his fingertips, over and over, soothing her, each tiny hair a needle of compunction, steely and familiar.

  19 Amenities

  We are not big time, and as Tricia says, it takes no lethal act of imagination to see that. Here is how bad it gets: About sixty miles outside Jacksonville we were cruising high because Tricia’s Blitz made his best showing all winter, coming from the outside eight box on a muddy track and placing second in the sprint stake, winning enough to get us motoring back toward West Memphis, tossing leers at one another, sharing little airline brandy bottles in the front seat with Tricia edged close to me and her hand on my thigh. Near dark we stop for burgers etc. at a Tastee-Freez and then get back in the station wagon and the horn and dome light stick. I mean they won’t quit this blare of noise and light until I pop the hood to yank the ground wire, then claw at the headliner and start shearing wires with Tricia’s nail cutters. After that it’s two hundred miles of dark, with no light for bathroom breaks or road maps, no horn if we start to get killed, and that flap of headliner waving between our heads like some don’t-get-horny warning flag. Highway 10 is a bad pull of road like this, the Delta scary quiet, the Gulf Coast just another something to get past; and like he knows things are going to shit, Tri-cia’s Blitz whines and scratches at his crate, and we have nothing to feed him but pork rinds we buy off gas-station racks. The plan is to hit the winter races at Texarkana, then swing back through West Memphis, but the thing about no dome light is that every plan looks worse in the dark.