The Lonely

by Ainslie Hogarth

  The next customers to come in that day were a pair of young brothers. Probably close to my age. They both wore jeans and white T-shirts and were munching down Popeye Cigarettes to their ruddy fingertips as they spoke.

  Names: Billy and Sol Hornburger. Occupations: Kids. Faces: Round and red. Aura: Also round and red. Smell: Coppery, sharp. Like park dirt and pennies and bloody noses. Business: “To check out the view,” one had snickered. “Two please,” the other said through wood chipper teeth, clouds of white, sugary dust billowing from the sides of his mouth as he inserted the candy smokes horizontally inward. “Ten bucks,” I replied. He slapped two fives on the table and took the key I handed him and they trampled off together through the first door. It was actually only four bucks, but I knew they’d come to peek at the naked women through some of the Our Town windows and for that the price doubled.

  Mr. Ungula was uncommonly loud and very stubborn. He didn’t believe in knocking on doors and butted his way through most of the Wonderland, announcing himself with a deliberately cleared throat seconds before he entered a room, which made you feel guilty about whatever you were doing even if it was something perfectly innocent.

  He had seven sisters who called him many times a day, always worried about him or furious with him or trying to make him feel guilty. He spent a lot of time with his feet on his desk in his workshop, his head hanging backward over the top of his chair, one hand steadying the phone next to his ear, the other hand pulling down on his sallow cheek, exposing the red that cushioned his eyeball. I felt awful transferring the calls.

  They were constantly setting him up with their friends and neighbors and manicurist’s older sisters and their names were Nora, Nikki, Layla, Helen, Mona, Alice, and Brenda. Nora was the oldest and called him the most, Mona was the smartest and called him the least. When Nora called, she let out a yawn and encoded within it were the words, “Izzy in?” Just one yawn. And then she hung up as soon as the words “yes” or “no” left my mouth.

  Nora liked to carry conversations with Mr. Ungula toward the subject of morality and then scream at him for being such a heathen. You see, Mr. Ungula didn’t believe in marriage and had sympathy for pedophiles. When he read about either incident in the paper he would say, “Those poor sick bastards.” Then flutter closed the newspaper and steal to the back porch to roll a cigarette.

  When Nikki called I heard the flapping of her eyelashes, “Hi Esther, is my bruddadaya?” Her voice sounded pink, through wet, bubblegummy lips. I never corrected her about my name. It didn’t seem worth the trouble.

  Layla had six sons and she would command me to “put Morty on the phone.”

  Helen had six daughters and she would say, “Oh hello, Easter darling, how are you? Is my brother around? I hope he is this time, I wouldn’t want to have to call again just to speak to my own brother, you understand. Isn’t it funny? I was always Mortimer’s favorite and now I have to fight to get a phone call with him. Is he there, sweetie? You can tell me, you know. I won’t tell him you told me. But is he there? Just, shhh, don’t tell me. I think I know.”

  Mona played softball and mumbled quietly into the phone, “HelloEastercanispeaktomybrotherplease?thankyou.”

  Alice and Brenda lived together and shouted at me through speakerphone. “Hey there, is he in?” one of them would squeal and the other would say, “Has Nora called?” “Yeah, did Nora call? What did she want?” I would tell them that I didn’t know what Nora wanted, that she hadn’t told me, she never does, she never speaks to me. And they would tell me that Nora was a bitch and never said thank you to anyone in her life, but not to tell Morty they said that, or Nora for that matter, but of course I wouldn’t get the chance to tell Nora because she’s such a bitch when she calls. Ha ha!

  I liked to chat with Alice and Brenda from time to time, but they made Mr. Ungula the angriest. He would munch aspirin as they spoke over each other into his ear.

  Julia hated when I was away at work and kept me up all night over it. Kicking me just when I fell asleep or pushing me out of bed. She even brought back a terrible dream that used to keep us up all night when I was small.

  Bad Dreams

  The whole thing flickers like an old newsreel. Sepia. Scars in the film crackling through the sky, black lightning through a bright white day. Easter is standing in the middle of a wide, grassy field. She is a beautiful girl. A naked girl. A girl who drinks in the sun voraciously. And the sun loves to be drunk by her, begs for it. You can feel it in the air, how much he loves to be consumed by her, his happiness making everything electric. Dripping down her chin, plopping to her chest, funneled by her protruding rib cage downwards, over the mound of her young belly and settling mostly in her navel, warming her whole body from there. And Easter is happy, so happy, and proud of her smoothness and countable bones. She belches sun and pats her stomach, satisfied.

  A pair of eyes appear behind her, but she doesn’t notice them.

  Big, unblinking eyes. Blue and white and red, staring out from the precipice of the woods that surround the field.

  Tall trees with tumorous trunks, their roots spread like patient dragon claws. Sounds of cold water coming from somewhere inside. A creek, perhaps: pulsing, eroding, scrambling over rocks.

  And the eyes. Which sit side by side, irises facing forward, nestled in a deep scar along a fallen log. With their bottoms squeezed, wedged, into the bark, the tops of the eyes appear bigger and more bulbous than they probably are. But who knows what they’d looked like in a head. You can throw a pair of eyes onto anything and give it a personality. Just ask Officer Big Mac.

  Knuckles of rocky earth jut from the ground, tall enough for a person to hide behind. Which, of course, there was. A person hiding. Because this is a dream, and there are always people crouching in the dark corners of dreams. In this dream, the person who’d left the eyes hides behind the largest wedge of rock, perched on his haunches like a frog, biting his fingernails down to the quick, not stopping till he tastes blood, then going further still, gnawing at them from the front with excitement; laying his heavy tongue against the raw, pink nail beds, hot and sore. Had they been his own eyes? One can’t quite tell. Because although his face is fully visible, the dream makes it somehow difficult to see whether there are a pair of eyes in his head or just two empty sockets. Woven through with a metal ring, like the skirt of mink in The Cube.

  Julia made us dream about that man a lot when we were small and again when I started leaving her to go to the Wonderland. Hiding somewhere in the creek woods, removing his eyes, resting them in bird’s nests and in branches, seeing things he wasn’t supposed to see. I’d started sleeping on the couch to get away from the dream but it didn’t work; she still found me, made me bolt up straight and make my way upstairs.

  But one night it was The Parents who woke me up, not the dream. They walked in, heavy footsteps, and I stole upstairs in a blink, unseen. Julia was already sound asleep under the covers, the top of her head peeking out, her hair a splash of moonlit red across my pillow. I crawled in next to her, let our spines grate against one another; our bodies curved and tucked up like a pair of open butterfly wings against the sheet.

  A few minutes later the tops of our heads were pushed right up against one another, our ears pressed to the floor. I liked the feeling of the top of Julia’s head on my head. Our two hard skulls pressed together, adjusting and re-setting against each other’s little dents and deformities. Our hair scraped together like sandpaper and thundered in my ears. Things sound quite different when they come from above your head.

  Ours was the hottest room in the summer and the coldest room in the winter due to a pair of badly warped window frames next to the closet. There were many microscopic breaches in our room through which harsh, angry winds turned to whispers, and it was at one of these tiny fissures, a small violation between two floorboards, that Julia and I huddled, warming our ears on the reverberations of The Parents’ scream
ing.

  It was a stifling hot night in July. The heartbeat of an old ceiling fan lub-dubbed above our heads, moving the air heavily like a spoon through stew. We were both in long white tank tops, loose with the memory of a few hours sleep. I don’t think that Julia thought at all about our heads rubbing together. Touching me wasn’t the moment, the thrill, the delight that it was for me to touch her.

  The Parents were fighting about the bells. The Mother sobbing hard, incapable of catching her breath, saying that she needed them, that it relaxed her to hear how we moved through the house. The Father, anger growing steadily warmer like a stove-top coil, insisted that she had no right.

  “I hate the bells,” Julia whispered.

  “Really? I don’t even notice them.”

  “Honestly, Easter, sometimes I wonder why I’ve bothered with you.”

  “What do you—”

  “Shh, I want to hear this.”

  My knees were starting to hurt. I wriggled my splayed-out fingers a bit and stretched one leg out, then the other, then I moved back on my haunches and looked at Julia’s face. It’s harder to hear someone when their head is pressed up against yours; two layers of skull and brain instead of just one rubs words down into mumbles.

  “Why do you hate the bells?” I asked her.

  I didn’t mean to but I’d let a little bit of venom creep into the question, slowly, in reaching tendrils, like the blood that replaces medicine in a syringe. I didn’t like that she hated them so much and I didn’t.

  “Because they’re terrible, Easter. It changes a person to hear bells all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “People use bells to train animals; don’t you know that? The Mother is training us.”

  “For what?”

  “To be just like her.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about.”

  “She’s not training me.”

  “She is, and it’s already working.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re leaving me behind.”

  “Julia—”

  “SHH! I’m trying to hear!”

  So I put myself back on my hands and knees and pushed my head once again against Julia’s.

  But they’d moved into the living room where we couldn’t quite make out the words. Where all that passed up through our floorboards were the guttural depths of The Mother’s sobs, the sound of her lungs snapping back after almost folding in on themselves she was crying so hard. And The Father might not even be on the main floor anymore. He might have retired to the basement, through with the conversation because he knew he didn’t have to fight with her if he didn’t want to. He knew that she would never leave him no matter what he did. But she was still crying hard, still talking to someone. It scared me that she might be all alone, talking to herself in the living room.

  And for a minute I really hated The Mother. Hated her for how pathetic she was. Hated her for making me pathetic too. I wanted to be rid of her. I felt as though if she were gone I would be a much better person. Not better in a way like I’d start volunteering or giving things to charity or anything like that, but better in the way that I’d be more beautiful and happier and more confident and be able to speak easily to big groups and impress everyone. She was like a shell I’d outgrown, that I needed to crack and peel off of me and emerge as the thing I really was. But the more I thought about how much I hated her, the sicker I felt. The guiltier. The more sure I was that I needed to get rid of her for good.

  The basement bell rang loud. The sound made me think of burying my fist into The Mother’s stomach, kitchen knife first.

  And the guilty nausea wouldn’t stop. I just wanted to lie in bed and simmer with the rest of the air in the room. I would be a tuber if our room were a stew. I stood up and made my way to our bed.

  “Hey, where are you going?” Julia looked up at me with big confused eyes.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Why? They might start up again. Please stay up, Easter. Come on.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because we can’t hear anything anyway, Julia.” I lifted the thin sheet and crawled beneath. “And my knees hurt. And I’m tired. And I hate what I’m thinking about so I’m going to go to bed.”

  Julia’s eyes narrowed to whiskers and she hissed at me through thin lips:

  “Goddammit, Easter, you’re no fun at all.”

  She stood up, stomped over to the bed, flung up the sheet as loudly as you can possibly fling up a sheet, and smashed down onto the mattress beside me. Her anger made her bigger and more cumbersome to sleep with than usual. She pulled the covers over to her side gradually and almost completely, daring me to say something about it. I shivered until I knew she was asleep and gently pulled some back to my side.

  Miniature Wonderland,

  Day 9,330 (One Customer)

  A boy with a long neck and hunched shoulders, his head mounted on his body like a stuffed deer head to a wall. Like he’s spent most of his life crammed into a box, or a cave, growing into its constricted dimensions. Long brown hair falling over one eye, a kink running through it like a recently unfolded sheet. Large ears with soft-looking lobes, warm hanging honey. Sweet. White T-shirt accentuating a small frame, yellow under the armpits, a hole along the seam, a peek at barely opaque skin. Maybe he’s lived his whole life in a cave, tucked away from sunlight. He doesn’t move his arms as he walks; they hang still at his sides like a suspended axolotl’s.

  As he approached my reception desk I wanted to run away, heart fluttering as hard as a trapped bird. I was scared of him.

  “Hello,” he said.

  I knew he was going to say it but it startled me anyway.

  Then he said, “I’m sorry for scaring you. How much to go through?”

  I pointed to a sign behind me. He nodded.

  “I’m Easter,” I blurted. I’m Easter and I’m an ass who lets nonsense fly from her mouth.

  “I’m Lev.”

  “I have to find out your name so that I can fill out your particulars in this book here. It’s got everyone’s particulars.”

  “Particulars.”

  Particulars? I wanted to fix the barrel of a gun to each of my eyeballs and blow my brains out in either direction. Particulars. Mr. Ungula’s idiotic words coming out of my mouth.

  “Yeah, your information. Your specifics.”

  “Well, my name is Lev. And I’ve seen you before, walking through the woods in town.”

  “Oh?” I’d heard ladies say it in movies like that: “Oh?” I didn’t really know how someone was supposed to respond to it, but it seemed appropriate here. I waited to see what he’d do with it.

  “Yeah. I saw you there. And then I followed you here.”

  “You followed me?”

  “I did. You seemed wonderful to me.”

  I seem wonderful to him. I opened my eyes wide. Wonderful. Wonderful. He seems wonderful to me, for thinking that I’m wonderful. I might not have found him wonderful until he thought I was wonderful. And the sound of the bells filled my ears, loud and warm and vibrating. Julia would kill me if she heard this. Kill me even harder if she could feel how happy I was in this moment that she was gone. And then I felt terribly guilty; it moved through me slow as oil, coated my insides like Pepto-Bismol does in the commercials. Thick pink guilt. Now that I knew he thought I was wonderful, I wasn’t nervous anymore. My heart sucked in the wings it had momentarily grown. I’m wonderful, so who cares. The bells quieted a bit but didn’t go away.

  “Well, are you going to go through or not?”

  My sudden impatience caused his neck to droop further.

  “What’s the rush?” he said.

  “If you’re not going to buy a pass you’ve gotta leave. T
hose are the rules.”

  “I don’t have any money,” he said.

  And I shrugged, not really wanting him to leave and not really knowing why I was being so mean. He left quietly, leaving two little insects behind where he’d stood. Had they fallen from him? Maybe he really did come from underground, crawled from a grave just to tell me I was wonderful.

  These are his “particulars” in the book:

  Name: Lev

  Occupation: Boy

  Aura: Cramped and sore, grown too much without enough room. The see-through skin and red-rimmed eyes of a blind cave newt. Axolotl arms. A bit wonderful, too.

  Smell: Dry skin and peppermint chewing gum.

  Business: To tell me that I’m wonderful.

  Lev. Lev. Lev. Long Lev. The Long Necked Lev. Once trapped in a box, a water dragon in an aquarium, but now free to roam the Miniature Wonderland. I thought about chewing on Long Lev’s honey-dripped earlobes, spreading them on crackers to eat. The way I’d once thought about Julia’s lips, as spreadable and delicious. But the bells didn’t ring encouragement when I thought about eating Julia’s lips the way they did when I thought about eating Lev’s ears. Maybe this meant I was getting normal.

  A Bad Day

  The Father spent most of his time down in the basement and decorated it in all the stuff that was a little too good to throw out but not nice enough to keep on the middle, our most presentable, floor.

  A grimy fish tank, once occupied by an ill-fated party of goldfish, was now turned upside down and used to hold a small television. An ancient set, infected with a virus of off-color distortion that spread slowly and steadily from the bottom left-hand corner. The Father would watch the news down there; I could hear it muffled through the floor. Across from that, a big blue worn-out corduroy chair with crops of patches all over it from Denmark, Amsterdam, wherever. I think it was supposed to look like it had been all over the world, but really it just came from a Sears in Michigan and it was one of the ugliest chairs I’d ever seen. We called it “The Everywhere Chair.” He had a computer down there too, an old one with a big, heavy monitor and a grubby keyboard.