by Lucy Corin
Angela toddled around the counter and into the kitchen, hands and face sticky and pink, wearing a head kerchief with tiny apple trees on it and a pacifier on a string around her neck. She did a little rocky dance when she saw me, and burbled. Then she went over to the dog and splashed with him in the bowl. The dog sat and they did a funny negotiation over the water with their eyes. I saw the feelings move across her features in shades of light like fast weather. Used to be, as I understand it, people thought of feelings not so much as things that come from people as things that circulate the earth, and people get caught in them, pass them along, or travel along within them. I watched Angela’s face for a while, all these feelings that could have come from anywhere and there they were, on her face. I listened to my wife’s noises a little more and then, finally, I heaved myself to a squat, and I don’t know why . . . well I do . . . but I coiled myself up and I sprang into the air and spread my body as wide as possible and yelled, “Surprise!” My wife dropped a grocery bag and laughed while a dozen rosy fruits slid around her feet. “You monster!” she said, and because I left my arms open she strolled into the kitchen and then into them. She put her hands on the back of my head and lay her eyes on mine. I said, “It’s just that I caught you being happy.”
She grinned and winked at me.
“Let me show you something,” she said. She scooted back to the dining room and returned with a damp flyer. It had a drawing of a bloody fist on it. “These people,” she said, beaming, “are not sissies. I went to my first meeting today. I’m in a swoon.” Then she whispered, “We’re underground,” and almost trembled.
“What do these people do?” I said. “March?”
“We’re huge,” she said. “And yet invisible!” She scooped up Angela, carried her to the sink, and began to wipe her hands and face with a sponge. “We’re one made of many.”
“Like what, a march?” I said.
“You just murder your mousies, mister,” she said with a wiggle.
Oh, honey, I thought. “Like what?” I said. “A cult?”
She put Angela back on the floor and came over. She hopped up into my arms and I held her with her legs around my waist. Angela came over and put her arms around my leg. I could hear her sucking on her pacifier.The dog came over. He sat at my other leg and dripped water onto my foot.We stayed there for a while in a clump.
I thought I heard a trap spring in the night. I moved through the house in the dark. I felt so hungry. In the kitchen, in the stove light, I went through the cabinets checking the traps, but part of me was scanning for food. I know it’s not so much that I’m hungry when I do this as that I want something and I know there’s food in the house. I could see well enough to see that none of the traps were sprung, or maybe I just knew by my sense of the shadows as my eyes processed them. I did not want to turn on more light and blind myself. I was, in fact, a little afraid to turn on the lights because of having seen, when I was a child, a mouse with his head crushed in a trap, a mouse spotted brown and white like my long-escaped hamster. My father had placed the body on the kitchen table and explained several things to me about nature while we sat across from each other and looked at it.Weather cycles, he explained. Food chains. He loomed there like the future, like me, projected on a large screen. My father, speaking the truth he believed, as if translucent.
I opened the refrigerator and stood spotlit in the cool light, filling the frame with my silhouette. One thing I know from the past: if the blood and guts are from someone you love, there is nothing disgusting about them. I know this from a car wreck. I know that if a person’s insides are hanging from her body and you love her, you just want to lift them and nestle them back where they belong. Say she’s your sister, as she was my sister. If her blood is everywhere you just want to gather the blood into your arms and keep it from leaving.You love the blood because it is her, and you cannot bear that the blood is merging with dirt and grass. When I look at images of people from war with their bodies scattered I can’t tell you what is going on.
I don’t know what it means or doesn’t mean if I don’t look.
I don’t care if we are all connected. I want what’s mine.
I didn’t have to worry. In the morning the food from the traps was gone. I replaced the food, reset the traps. A week later, one and then its twin mouse skittered, furniture to furniture, sleek and fat. I began to despair. The kitchen was as if I’d never cleaned it, the air heavy with mouse. I went to work with my teeth gritted and a throat of lumps, knowing the mess I’d find on my return. At work, the office hall stretched and I felt lost even though there were no turns. Meanwhile, my wife became happier and happier. Her grin grew sly. Time slipped. She wore tighter jeans and clingy undershirts. She looked lean and more muscular, and this I did find sexy, yet entirely unapproachable, like a movie star, like she was teasing me. The dog was mostly asleep from so much action in my absence. He’d sometimes come to me with a look like, “Save me.”
Time, time, time.
“I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” I’d shake my head.
“You will, you will . . .” she’d singsong back.
I refused to picture what she might mean.
What is it exactly that you do all day, I phrased to myself and did not ask aloud, now that you are not depressed? Most wives with little kids, they’re running around with laundry and toys and to-do lists dangling from their pockets, their hair all over the place, the dog dragging dirty diapers around the house—who wants a wife like this? not me!—the baby sticking its fingers in the sockets, the phone ringing, the garbage disposal shooting sludge, the tub overflowing, the baby tumbling down the stairs or getting peas stuck up its nose, the dog hauling in a dead rabbit and digging up the rosebushes, the TV loud with the picture flipping in ribbons, electronic robots muttering the alphabet, the baby slipping on magazines . . . But they’d become so happy—angry sometimes, usually at this one guy in the group who my wife thought was a pussy, and when she’d say his name and look at Angela the two of them wrinkled their noses and stuck out their tongues—but happy. They had in-jokes, the two of them. And they were developing a language. Not English. It was part baby talk and part something else that sounded sophisticated and ancient. They were always home when I came in, and the house looked just as it used to—messy—but now they spoke in their secret language until Angela fell asleep with a great collapse from a busy and important day.
Once, I cornered Angela by the dog’s water bowl, squatted as close to her level as possible, and looked at her, searching for our connection. Had there ever been a connection? I tried to remember. “Come on, give your old dad a try!” I said. “Come on, I’m a clever bastard!” But she’d look at me as if she actually understood my words and I was weird for even asking. Honestly, though, I could’ve been projecting refusal onto a face more blank than I knew how to recognize. She zipped her lips and she issued no peep. She tugged at the hem of her jumper. She moved her head a little, as if she were testing her neck out. She laughed and sunk her fist into the water bowl.
The dog licked drops from the linoleum.
Something secret happens between blood and grass, something underground.
Once, after dinner, my wife looked up from their syllabic exchange and caught me staring at them from the kitchen.
“Tell me,” she said, half shadowed, lording over the table with a pair of wooden salad spoons, wearing a bandana like a TV gangster, “what exactly is it that you do all day?”
Even at eight in the morning artificial light bulged from the open offices and darkness pooled in the recesses made by the closed ones, the offices like nubs on an ancient insect that can glow or not glow. I walked as if on a conveyor belt and nodded as I passed Jeff, then Benny, then Elsabeth, at their desks. The hall was so long. Mike’s office, staggered across from mine, remained dark. I unlocked my door and looked at the window. The building was situated such that even on a clear bright day, as this day was humming up to be, the windows remained a weakly illumi
nated and purblind gray. Outside were walls from the building next door, but something about the angles made this impossible to see from inside. Our windows teetered as if between elemental phases, like clouds pressed into shape. We were alchemists, like everyone in the whole economy.We were trying to turn our spittle into gold. Every day I looked at my hand and dared it to move over the phone to call the hotline about my ethical concerns. I pretended to dare myself because I thought it’d be funny. I didn’t call because by then I knew it was not funny. It was not spittle. It was not ours. I knew better than that. I knew what it was we made gold from.
I heard Mike coming down the hall. I could tell by the way he scurried. He said, “Hi Jeff! Hi Benny! Oh, Elsabeth, I like the hat!” and bounced along the walls with his briefcase, which I knew very well enough to imagine. His keys jangled against his door as he unlocked it and then I could hear him pouring himself tea from his thermos, which made an empty metal sound. He said, from behind the walls,“Good morning!” to me. I wanted to call him over and run the home situation by him, but I worried that I had the power to get my wife in trouble, which made me feel powerless; it was humiliating to have a secret and not to know what the secret was, to be forced into complicity because she knows I have always pictured myself doing anything for my family. She seemed to taunt me with her understanding, and then I said, in my mind, to soldiers chest-deep in tanks like bathtubs: “Look at my wife and I’ll blow your fucking heads off.” I thought about searching the computer for some ideas, but then I thought about being surveilled.
This got me pretty deep into midmorning and on my way toward lunch. I sat at my desk. I looked at the window. I tap-tapped along, as if my fingers were not mine and my mind floated about the room like a piece of weather. I considered Mike. I tried to think of something about Mike that would explain my consistent desire for his counsel. I didn’t know much about him, but the thought of him cheered me. He drove a tin can of a Honda hatchback. He lived by himself in an apartment. I realized I was afraid to tell him how I was beginning to feel about the mice, how I wanted them dead, dead, dead. I thought this might be why I wanted, rather, to tell him about how much I wanted to fuck my wife. I thought about his homosexuality and imagined I could get really graphic and specific about my desires and he’d just understand in this way that someone else would jump in with what he wanted to do to my wife. I could picture Mike nodding more and more kindly the more I let loose with my ideas. I looked at the window and my mind hovered in the spaces between the series of walls surrounding me and Mike. I shifted the focus of my eyes and saw the whole hulk of me in the window, dense in the glazed-over glass, craggy as a bare mountain, my mouth limp and bulbous, my eyes drooping and protruding, my teeth pressing against my jowls. No one this ugly should get to do anything.
Through the day the gray of the window darkened and my image within it evolved and devolved, by which I mean shifted. By the time the office closed it was dark outside. I stopped at the bank and took out some money. I think I thought,What if my wife is running low on cash and I can just supply it, snap-of-the-fingers? At home they were watching the television in the bedroom, all three of them, all shadowy on the coverlet of blue roses. The dog lifted his head and thumped his tail when I looked in. My wife lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her hands full of colorful wrappers and her mouth full of something sticky and sweet. She looked over at me and said, “Mmm?”
Angela sat nestled in the curve of her mother’s waist, sucking on a carrot, and light changed her skin in flashes and waves. The light moving across my baby’s face . . . what can I say? It horrified me. I thought I could see a talking head superimposed on hers. I wanted to pull her from it as from polluted waters. I resisted and resisted abducting my daughter from my bedroom. I could see the light turning her into someone, ruining her. My body filled the doorway with fat, and hair, and muscles. My wife looked at me, still chewing, and her face and eyes said, “What? Bug off.” So I shoved myself from the doorway and went to take out the garbage. I took the canister out from under the kitchen sink, thinking how kitchen sink means more than everything, i.e., something impossible, and then, when I lifted the bag, this is what I found amid the commentary and explosions: the sudden stench of a mouse that had died under the liner, and stuck to the mouse a maggot so white and fleshy I could see within it the black seed of a developing fly.
The next day I bought a cardboard wedge of poison granules and placed it near the sink pipes so they’d land beside it upon entry. I put a safety lock on the cabinet and within two days the house was littered with radioactive-looking mouse pellets. Two weeks later saw an influx of large slow-moving flies that I knew came from inside the walls and inside the bodies of the mice that had died, growling flies that I thought could rupture and a squirming new mouse would leap out. One by one I swatted them with a newspaper. By afternoon the president’s pixilated face was obliterated by the deaths of insects. How dare you, I thought to the president, come into my house and make my wife crazy. Indeed, how efficiently I am able to swat flies. How within my nature it has always been.The paint on the kitchen walls was slightly discolored in spots from where I’d sprayed disinfectant. Angela followed me around as I completed all this. She was intrigued, or she was oblivious. I swept the bodies into the dustpan and flung them into the garden. I sang, “Fly, fly away!” but Angela didn’t crack a smile. I said something about fertilizer, about natural cycles of life, and she remained unamused. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said, Let Freedom Rain, with a picture of a gingham puppy, leash dangling, peeing on a fire hydrant and holding an umbrella. I stared at the tee-shirt but it remained both silly and incoherent. I began, again, to clean the house.
And my wife was—what? Brimming, as if I could unzip her and it would all spill out. What would it be? Cells in the shape of her, the many from the one. Now as she read books of histories and revolutionaries, and moved through the dark house and the internet with a swooping grace I knew only from certain shots in movies, she did so with a large spiral-bound notebook that I never saw unless she was writing in it. She remained not unfriendly and she remained remote. She offered little jokes about mice, my desire to “get them” and my recent success, having “got them good.” One night, while Angela and the dog were sleeping, I stood at the counter polishing silverware and looking out the window over the sink to the moon. She came in and took a glass from the cabinet. When I saw what she was after I rinsed my hands and took the water pitcher from the fridge. I met her in the center of the room and poured it for her. I stood with the pitcher and watched the water move in waves as she drank it. I admired the perfect communion of the water, the glass, and the force of her mouth. The kitchen smelled of faraway spaghetti. Under that, the only animal scent came from the dog’s bowls.The romance of domesticity swept into me, I put my arm around her waist, and we embraced with our symbolic vessels hovering in the air behind our heads. We moved a little. My wife has sleek reddish hair and I put my nose into it. I thought about cells multiplying, and my body filling with myself. I thought about men who go to Alaska and shoot sheep—sheep that are so wild they’re as dangerous as bears. Those people think they’re facing themselves but I think they’re not, they’re just being assholes. I’ve seen a photo of a man with a gleaming white ram sunk into his arms and reclined like a woman on a fainting couch, eyes open and behaving in death as it never, in any possible contortion, would have behaved in life, which is precisely what makes the man feel what he is feeling, which is satisfied, and right, perhaps even with God. It’s so ugly. I know it’s natural, but still. “I just really want to fuck my wife,” I said into her ear as sweetly as any words can come from a mouth like this.
“I know you do, honey,” she said. I backed her toward the counter for a step before what she meant sunk in and we released our embrace. I put the pitcher in the refrigerator and paused to let its air push into me. Then I closed the door, leaned on the hulking white thing, and listened to the scraps of paper struggling under their magnets i
n the breeze that came from the window and the ceiling fan.
I would never get anything right.
I could feel my teeth in my mouth. “I think you should tell me what you do all day with my daughter and my dog,” I said.
She crossed her arms over her chest and let her head fall to the side, thinking.
“Balance,” she said.
She extracted a rubber band from the pocket of her jeans and worked to pull her hair back with it. Don’t touch that hair, I thought. It flowed from her. I wanted to say, mine.
I said, “You need to be more specific.”
“Entropy,” she said with the band in her teeth. “The opposite of you.” Heat expanded in my body, idiotically, like a campfire marshmallow. She looked at me in a way that you could say she considered me from afar. With her head tilted, her eyes precise, the tone of her gaze forthright, I watched her take in all my available dimension.
She said, “You big, sweet, hairy baby.”
I moved toward her knowing that my face was shifting, in the static half-light, from moonlit to monstrous. “I deserve to know—” I said. She rolled her eyes, let the band snap into place, and disappeared into the darkness of the house. “What are you going to do?” I called after her. “Are you going to blow something up? What? Are you going to blow yourself up?” When I heard nothing back, I called: “You know what? I dare you! You know what? You should just come on over to my office.You should just come on in and blow us both up!” Then I plunged in after her.
Moving through the house, quickly, quickly, I brushed against wallpaper and caught my robe on a sconce, glided down a hall and then scraped my feet on something like legos. At first I tried to listen for where she could be, but the rush of organic heat in my head was so loud that I couldn’t hear past myself. My flesh thumped furniture and I kept my elbow trailing along chair rails until they ended and I flailed in a chasm. I swiped walls for switches and gave up. I moved in gushes and spasms. I heaved along and I heaved inside. I felt the press of my toenails. I gushed forward and forward—as if I were moving down one long passageway, scaling boulders and leaping craters, as if I had traveled for miles, for days. When I stopped to listen to my breath in the dark, the carpet hummed under my feet—I could feel its wormy shapes on my soles—and my arms reached like zombie arms, and my face, it seemed to me, in the darkness, had let itself loose; I couldn’t imagine what I could be wearing, only my lumpen body like a formation of lava left to millennia of stasis: crude, elemental, both alien and utterly of my core. I waited, panting, listening to the muscles in my face come into focus, and by the time I spied what looked like a light in the distance I knew tears were forming in my dumb eyes and traveling along my slack cheeks. I pushed one foot forward and then another, moving myself like a dead bear or an armoire, and finally I stood again in the kitchen with the disappointing moon tippy behind the perforated skin of our window screen. I looked blankly at the screen, at a loss as to what could possibly be out there.
