Toplin

by Michael McDowell

  “Who is that?” I asked occasionally, pointing at a figure in one of the photographs.

  “That is Sally,” Annie would say. “Sally and I were best friends but she died in a car wreck.”

  Or I’d comment, “That man has a nose just like yours.”

  And Annie would say, “I’m not surprised. That’s my grandfather. He lived to be ninety-eight, and then he was run over by a streetcar in Canada.”

  I’d seen other albums of Annie’s, albums that purported to be of her high school friends or of her coworkers at the ribbon factory or of her father’s French relatives. They were all the same: new albums with new photographic prints so recently pasted in that the glue was still tacky in places. One she showed me over and over again was the album of her baby pictures, but these photographs were so evidently of scores of different infants in as many different houses and flats and locales that I found it impossible to maintain even a remote belief in them.

  I do not pry into Annie’s life. That would be inconsistent with the perfect trust I repose in her. I am not the one to point out that what Annie represents as her immediate family and the entire of her past is no more than a miscellany of photographs taken by city office workers and compiled by her very nearly at random.

  I see Annie’s transparent subterfuge here not as, say, an orphan’s pitiable attempt to construct a family and a personal history. I see it rather as a charming prelude to sex, all the more titillating for its very innocuousness.

  Annie and I never have sex without looking through an album first.

  I’ve no need to urge my penis up when one of those albums is opened across her lap and mine. It knows what is to follow.

  “Want to see another?” Annie always asks after the last picture of Uncle Bill posing on the walls of Masada.

  “Yes,” I reply invariably, and out comes another album.

  I smoothly flatten my lap as this second album is opened.

  The photographs here are of a different nature altogether. They, too, are taken from her customers’ rolls of film. Annie enlarges them in a room at the back of the shop, on her lunch break.

  We rarely comment on these photographs, which Annie invariably produces—for my sake—in black-and-white, though the originals may have been in color.

  Annie, however, may remark, “This one is new. It came in yesterday.”

  We note with little slips of paper those we are most intrigued by, and when we’ve gone through the album completely we return to these.

  Annie’s blouse is open again.

  I do not bother to flatten my lap.

  Annie much prefers her work in the photographic shop to her former employment at the ribbon factory.

  Annie and I have a single bone of contention. She would like to emulate some of the photographs. I on the other hand prefer to employ the second album of photographs only as a means to arousal. I find the photographs, in point of fact, disgusting.

  My preference prevails, of course.

  I don’t do variations.

  A man who is sure of himself performs the sexual act in the prescribed fashion.

  Variations are made up by women who have not been satisfied in bed. Men would never have thought of them on their own.

  Variations are indulged in only by those men who are uncertain of their masculinity. They are men with withered scrotums. Or, worse, they are at base homosexuals.

  Annie and I peruse these photographs at our leisure. The furnace knocks and cracks and bellows. The stone walls sweat and the brick walls bleed.

  I insist that Annie remove all her clothing. All her jewelry. She scrubs the lipstick and eyeshadow from her face. She stands in the shower and the powder and dry deodorant run from her body and spiral down the drain. I insist that she be naked. Even the sight of her gold molars is distressing to me. They seem to me a kind of jewelry. I asked once if she’d have them removed, and this was the only thing Annie ever refused me.

  It was an unsettled question in my mind whether Annie fucked any man but me. Certainly I was faithful to her. So far as I was concerned our relationship was perfect. Annie was my sister. I memorized her body. I loved every part of it but her gold molars. They always came as a surprise. It was a possibility, however, that Annie herself did not consider our relationship perfect. I know that women’s desires are different from men’s. Women also, for that matter, have no working concept of perfection. Incapable of it, they are also incapable of recognizing it. It was only logical, therefore, that Annie would not think our relationship all it might have been.

  Her desire for variations alone showed that, I suppose.

  I was not bothered by Annie’s blindness to the perfection of our relationship. She wasn’t capable of recognizing it; therefore I did not blame her for her shortcoming. I only wondered if her perceived but unjustified discontent was so strong that she was driven into the embrace of any man other than myself. It was a possibility. I saw Annie generally no more than once a week. She had opportunity. She might even receive propositions behind her counter. A man who had brought in rude negatives, receiving them as developed prints, might remark with a leer, “Did you look through these?”

  Annie wouldn’t be the woman to deny she had, if that were the case. It would be the case, for Annie looked at all her photographs.

  “Yes,” Annie would say.

  “Did you like what you saw?” the man would ask.

  “It’s no more than I’ve seen and done in the flesh,” I can imagine Annie saying.

  Things would go from there, on evenings when I did not see her.

  These men, if they existed in Annie’s life, did not satisfy her. If they had satisfied her, she would never have thought of variations. It was their inadequacy—if they existed—that drove Annie to beg me to swerve from my invariable course. I did not blame these men, but I despised their shrivelled sacs and their hidden burning desires.

  I was not jealous. Jealousy never entered my brain within those sweating, bleeding walls of Annie’s flat. The hammering that beat in my head was no more than the expansion and contraction of the walls of the ancient furnace. The mere unflawed roundness of my being precluded jealousy of the inadequate.

  Yet I wondered.

  Inside of Annie, my penis was whitely sheathed in the coagulating pools of other men’s unfertile slime.

  When Annie opened her mouth, I saw the reflection of their straining faces, at the riotous moment of expulsion, shining on the corrugated surface of her golden molars.

  On four golden molars shone the faces of four different spindling men, aroused by Annie’­s cactus beauty. They spewed their slime in decadent variations contrived by generations of the race of unsatisfied human females.

  I examined Annie’s body under a lamp. Splotches of shiny skin denoted old pools of slime, shot out upon her variously, allowed to dry, and finally rubbed into the epidermis.

  I climbed atop her, entered her, thrust, and emptied my testicles of their most potent white mead.

  The brick walls bled, but Annie evidently hadn’t.

  She intimated that she might be with child.

  She took the album with photographs of babies out from under the bed and leafed through it.

  “My baby will look like that,” she said, pointing at one of the infants no more hideous than the others.

  I said nothing.

  There are ways and means of dealing with infants. Children are conceived of whom no photograph is ever taken. I’ve seen brass plates on out-of-the-way doors that suggest solutions within. I spoke vaguely of all this.

  Annie, if she understood, pretended not to.

  She went into the bathroom and shut the door behind her. The knocking of the furnace all but covered the noise of running water. I stood out of the bed and pressed my brow against the sweating stone wall of Annie’s bedroom.

  When Annie came out of the bathroom, I went in, shut the door, and vomited into the toilet.

  Rising to my feet a few moments later, I upset a bottle
of prescribed medicine on the lid of the toilet. Without thought I picked it up and read the label. The name of the medication—a pale separated liquid—meant nothing to me, but I noted with alarm that it had come from the pharmacy that employed Howard Dormin. Howard himself, perhaps, had brought the bottle to Annie’s door.

  Howard, I may have said, I do not class as an ordinary young man.

  I can conceive, for instance, that his loins might provide issue.

  Annie’s child, if there was one lodged in her womb, might be Howard’s.

  Howard had come far afield to this neighborhood, it was true. He may have been winded climbing Annie’s steep stoop. He may have had difficulty in finding his way down the darkened hallway to the narrow door that led down, down to Annie’s subterranean flat. He may even have stumbled on the stairs, nearly smashing the bottle of liquid medication. It would have shook in his grasp, its separated layers mixing again. He would have knocked on the door, wondering if his summons could be heard over the noise of the furnace, bleating and striking like the furnaces of Hell, and he may have been kept waiting by Annie, who did not know him. But all this trouble would have proved no trouble at all, for Annie threw wide the door, opened her blouse, raised her skirt, and drew Howard to her. She claimed no variation, and the bottle of medicine was held locked in their clasped sweating hands.

  If there was a child, then it was Howard who should provide and not I.

  Of all this, I said nothing to Annie when I emerged from the bathroom. She lay asleep, her invaded belly exposed.

  The album of infants lay open on the floor next to the bed. I softly closed it. I went into the living room and took my sleeping blinders from the inside breast pocket of Suit S-6. The left-hand patch is black, and the right-hand patch is white. I put them on, lay down upon the couch and slept the sleep of the righteous.

  I awoke at dawn. The sun shone through the single small window high up in the wall. On the screen covering the window, in white chalk, was drawn the figure of the winged hourglass. Its black webbed shadow fell cool upon my face.

  I left the apartment without telling Annie what the future held for Marta and myself.

  11

  I told Howard Dormin the truth when I mentioned that I work on Saturday. I would not have said so if my Employer had been present, for my Employer does not know that I appear in the office on that sixth day.

  Saturday, in fact, is my favorite day for work, for a number of reasons.

  The first is that there isn’t anything I must accomplish. My Employer, not knowing I come in on that day, has left no tasks for me on the red deal table between our offices.

  The second is that the building is otherwise empty. On Saturday I do not even hear the surreptitious footpads in the loft above.

  The street outside is deserted and clear of trash.

  Across the way, the city offices of employment, or unemployment, are closed and unlighted.

  I sit alone at my desk. I count my Employer’s pencils at my leisure. I watch Karl out of the windows at the back of the loft. This neighborhood, made of light manufacturing concerns and small offices, has very few residents. Most of these last are illegal tenants I suspect, squatters perhaps or renters despite zoning restrictions. I conjecture that Karl must feel very much alone on Saturdays and Sundays.

  He rises late on Saturday. His coffee pot is of tin or perhaps aluminum.

  I stood at the back window and waited for Karl to show himself at his window. On some Saturdays he does not appear before eleven in the morning, or even noon. I am patient, however, for I’ve nothing else to do in the office.

  This particular Saturday, in Suit S-1, my oldest and most comfortable, I leaned against the corner of my Employer’s desk, patiently watching for Karl’s appearance and piecing together all that had happened in the past two days.

  This was a task of some complexity and import.

  I first reviewed all that had occurred in the Baltyk Kitchen, shuddering just to recall my first glimpse of Marta. I brought to mind all that she had said, that I had said, that I had heard said about her. I visualized her apartment building, Number NINETY-FOUR.

  I retraced the reasoning that had led me inescapably to the conclusion that Marta wanted to die and that I of all men on Earth must assist her, for both our sakes, equally.

  I found no fault in that reasoning. I had not expected to.

  This review was only a self-indulgent prelude to my real concern that Saturday morning, and that was the business of what had followed.

  Three things of importance had occurred after Marta’s lifeline crossed mine.

  I had seen, for the first time, the gang whose insignia was a winged hourglass. More­over, this gang in some vague but pronounced manner, seemed cozily cognizant of my existence.

  Second, Howard Dormin—a young man I have seen about for more than a year—suddenly took on a different character. He was revealed to be a Messenger. He also, it turned out, knew about the gang and provided me with their collective name—the Fuggits, and their individual names—Shade and Shadow for the two women, Clay, Dust, and Ashes for the three indistinguishable young men.

  Third, Annie intimated to me that she might be pregnant. And I discovered that there was some, albeit possibly slight or even unconscious, connection between Annie and Howard, and Annie and the gang. A bottle of medicine in Annie’s subterranean flat was procured at the pharmacy that employs Howard. (It was even possible that Howard was the father of the child whose existence Annie seemed anxious to credit to the potency of the slime in my testicles.) The Fuggits scrawled their sign on the sidewalk outside Annie’s building and on the screen of the single window of Annie’s flat.

  Now it was possible, certainly, that all this circumstance was innocent, or indeed, occurred only in my mind, fevered with the thought of my newfound purpose. On the other hand, it was just possible that the links between Annie and Howard, between Annie and the Fuggits, between Howard and the Fuggits, were real, strong-forged, and purposeful.

  And if the latter, what was their purpose?

  I could scarcely believe that it had nothing to do with Marta.

  It was possible I was being led a merry chase. The death of Marta was a part of a larger plan coined in the brain of Another. I was the mere instrument. It was the job of the Fuggits, Annie, and Howard to make certain I fulfilled this duty.

  I did not like the feeling that I was chained to Another’s purpose. For the first time, I wondered if Marta and her longed-for death were not mere aberrations of my brain, implanted by Another. Perhaps even her supreme hideousness existed only in the shard of command that had been implanted in my head.

  I could not, I decided, kill merely at the behest of Another.

  My mind, in these ruminations, had been drawn away from the buildings across the courtyard. Some movement in one of the windows drew my eye, and I refocused my attention.

  Two of the windows—somewhat to the right of those in which I was accustomed to seeing Karl—were lighted from within. The day was heavily overcast, yet still the lights must have been very bright in those rooms for me to have seen into them as clearly as I did. I even seemed to remember that before, I had seen those windows blocked by stacks of cartons.

  But here was an apartment, with a palm in the corner and framed photographs on the white walls and a door with chains.

  I raised my binoculars to my eyes.

  The chains on the door were undone. I could even detect a slight motion in them, as if they had only that moment been released. The door swung open, and a figure stepped resolutely into the room.

  My mind was about to identify that figure. I know it was. But then the light went out. I could no longer see inside the apartment. The windows were dark and blank. I thought I could even make out stacks of cartons where before there had been a palm on a polished wooden floor. My mind had been about to say, That figure is no other than Howard Dormin.

  I sometimes am a step or two ahead of my mind. Not infrequently I can pre
dict what my mind will think, conjecture, conclude. This was one of those times. If the lights in that apartment had remained on one-tenth of one second longer, my mind would have told me, Howard Dormin is there.

  I put down my binoculars and counted the number of windows I could see from the vantage of my Employer’s desk. On six different buildings, I made out forty-seven windows.

  All of them were dark. Their panes were black and unreflecting.

  In a systematic pattern, I trained my field glasses on the windows of each building, beginning at my far left and proceeding to my right.

  Nothing, nothing, black panes, and at most a glimpse of boards or boxes piled or stacked just behind the windows. Some of the windows were of frosted glass or had been painted white.

  From ONE to FORTY-SEVEN I had seen nothing. I put down my binoculars and rubbed my weary eyes.

  Suddenly something was flung from one of those windows. It was dark and squarish, but I couldn’t make it out exactly. It arced in the air for a moment, then plummeted to the courtyard below with a crash.

  I raised my glasses and peered through them across the courtyard. The FORTY-SEVEN windows were black and empty.

  I stood and watched for half an hour longer. No lights came on. I detected no movement but that of Karl, who appeared at last at his accustomed window and filled his tin, or aluminum, coffee pot at the tap.

  In order to rest my eyes, I walked to the front of the loft and looked out those windows for a while.

  The six alcoholics who inhabit the abandoned car in front of the building are un­molested by me on Saturday. Three of them sat in the vehicle today. One of the back wheels had been taken off during the night. To maintain balance the men had propped the car on cement blocks. They tossed an empty bottle from one of the windows and it smashed in the middle of the street.

  I sat down at my desk and found that I was listening, with some trepidation, for the sound of the elevator starting up.

  I was fearful, I discovered, that the Fuggits had followed me to this place. If Howard were across the courtyard, then the gang might well be downstairs. Howard and the Fuggits might even be in communication, with the aid and apparatus of synchronized timepieces and short-wave telephones.