by Amelia Gray
7.
IT WAS EASY to stand in line at the post office. The action required walking for thirty minutes beside the road, but David walked. Three buses passed him. It was a comfort to know that every footstep was possible. Earlier, he had let workers into his house. They arrived with proof of license and an order to clean the stairs. He wasn’t sure who had sent them, but his own presence in the house while they were there made him feel uneasy.
The post office was a low brick building. The handrails that flanked it looked as if they’d been painted blue a thousand years before. Standing beside them meant becoming intimately linked to a moment in history.
Inside, individuals entered their personal information onto slips of paper. A woman smiled at David and pointed at a change-of-address form in front of him. He passed it to her and she accepted it with a slight, half-bowing nod. Everything seemed possible at the post office. The customers brought canisters and tubes and small cubes to the counter, and the men and women behind the counter accepted these objects and affixed them with stamps and stickers indicating their destination and contents, and at that moment they were in America, everyone in that room was in a city in Ohio in a country called America and the packages were in America and they were all a part of that.
David looked for the postal clerk who had wept but could not find him. He thought about how each of the postal clerks had likely wept at some point in time, though he had not witnessed it. When it was his turn at the counter, he produced a piece of paper that he had found in his mailbox.
The clerk accepted and examined the page. “You’ve got to be checking your mail every day,” he said.
David didn’t very much like the idea of speaking, but the man seemed kind in an unsmiling way. “I’m sorry,” David said. “Things got out of hand.”
The man tapped the card once on the counter and began to enter David’s information into his computer. “I’ll need some identification,” he said. David saw flashes of lateral incisor. He handed over his driver’s license.
“You can always come down here and stop your mail,” the man said. “We’ll hang on to it for you.”
“Thank you.”
“No thanks necessary, sir. It’s the duty of the United States Postal Service.” He tapped David’s license on the counter again and slid it across the table. “I’ll fetch your mail.”
He went into the back room and returned with a bundle of junk and bills. A card banded to it bore David’s name. David accepted the gift and felt that it would be possible to survive. It was good to be out of the house.
8.
WHEN HE RETURNED HOME, the workers were still there. They were pulling up carpet on the stairs. They had seemed kind enough when he let them in before, but after he left, they put on hazmat suits and masks and stood on the stairwell, where he had recently spent a concentrated span of time. It had been enough trouble to get around them on the way up the stairs, and David didn’t want to do it again. He sat in the bedroom and smelled its occupied smell. He imagined that the comforter was packed with particles of skin, and stretching out on it made him feel cradled in a hand. He rolled to his side, opened the compartment on the back of the digital clock, and ticked out the battery with his fingernail.
The workers were listening to classic rock from a portable radio. David heard one of them singing along. The music sounded filtered or reversed. Still, it felt good to have some activity in the house. He remembered the sound of his mother announcing breakfast.
He didn’t remember calling the workers, but he did remember letting them into the house. He was glad they were there.
It was hard to leave the bedroom. He heard them calling out to one another over their machines in the stairwell. Their voices came to his ears as a comforting hum. David moved to the floor and sat with his back to the bed.
Eventually they came to speak to him. One of them helped him up and brought him to the stairwell, where he saw that their work was done. The human waste was gone, as was the carpeting. They had cut a clean line in the carpet at the top of the stairs and ripped it all out, removing nails, sanding down what remained. The walls and wood had been cleaned with a solvent. The men had taken the hoods off their hazmat suits, and their faces were ruddy and flushed, suggesting a fine day of accomplishment. He couldn’t understand what they were saying behind all the buzzing, but they seemed pleasant and kind to him, and he nodded. It did register to him that they were speaking in English, but they were saying things he couldn’t follow. One of the men reached out with a gloved hand. David felt confused. He heard a ukulele. The men looked at one another. They seemed very kind.
When they didn’t leave, it occurred to him that they might require some form of payment. He found a set of silverware in a velvet box and gave it to them, smiling. He bowed slightly, the way the woman in the post office had bowed, a gesture of respect.
The men left through the front door. David had been holding the digital clock battery between his cheek and his right maxillary second molar. Once they were gone, he ejected it into his hand. He observed it, whole and unconcealed, with no small amount of satisfaction.
9.
FRANNY had been an aesthetician, specializing in pore extraction and deep chemical peels. She talked infrequently about her job, becoming vague about the details like she was afraid to give away too much. “It’s more complicated than that,” she would say, and change the subject without elaborating.
About a week after the workers took out the carpet on the stairs, five women from the salon came by and offered to cut David’s hair. They wore matching tank tops and salon aprons and arrived unannounced. One of them laid a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor and put a chair from the dining room in the center of it. They had brought clippers and products.
“We can do something about this salt and pepper,” said one, yanking on a fistful of hair. “Update the look a little?”
David felt the paper band stretched around his neck like a cleric’s collar. He thought of ways to politely refuse.
“Let’s keep foils out of it,” said another girl, and David realized that the first girl hadn’t been talking to him before, despite looking at him and speaking to him, and that this was a thing that would continue to happen.
“It’s nice of you all to do this,” David said. “Franny always said you were so generous.” She had never said such a thing about anyone, but he felt it was important to get her involved. A young woman sat on the floor and painted his toenails with clear polish.
“Frances always bugged us to come here and cut his hair,” one of the girls said, brushing clippings from his shoulders. “We figured we ought to. She didn’t want to do it herself and she said it was getting pretty bad, since he never leaves the house.”
“Even up the ears,” said another.
“I do leave the house.”
“Aileen said.”
Franny had one close friend while she was alive, a coworker. Aileen was a nice woman but strange, and she held what David felt was an excessive interest in the salon.
“These toes,” said the one on the floor.
“She said I never leave the house?”
“I don’t like this spot on his neck.”
Another leaned in and began plucking the hair between his eyebrows. “Frances said he likes things to be a certain way.”
“Who doesn’t like things to be a certain way?”
They looked at one another and shrugged, a wave of shifting tank top straps.
“She said that a man can make himself busy around his home,” one said.
“Frances said that,” said another.
“She was so beautiful,” added another.
“Too busy,” said the first.
“Thank you,” he said, and “I am,” and “It’s true,” in an order that made the girls briefly cease their instrument movement and look at him with small smiles. One of them scratched her belly with the side of her shears, wincing in pleasure. “We all like things to be a certain way,” she
said.
“He’s been through a lot lately,” said another, tugging the first girl’s shirt down to cover her midriff.
One of the girls said nothing the whole time, but instead hummed a song that was familiar to David. He thought of his mother cutting his hair while he sat on a wooden chair wedged into the bathtub.
The girl who had been scratching her belly advanced on David with floss strung between her fingers. “Open up,” she said cheerfully, and David obligingly leaned back and opened his mouth. The girl plunged her small hands inside and tucked the floss around his teeth. He heard the popping noise of glutinous bits emerging between his second and third molars. The girl rotated her fingers and dipped the floss between his teeth more expertly than the hygienists David had known. As part of his interview process at the dental office, he had set it up so that they would floss him. He could get a better sense of how they handled floss and teeth and various pressure. He could tell a set of hands fumbling with nervousness from a pair that had been undereducated or were simply clumsy, pressing farther when they caught gingival sulcus, causing blood to well up from David’s taut gums. With the woman from the salon, he felt his gums plucked and loved.
“You’re good,” he said, running his tongue over his teeth when she removed her hands. There was no slick of blood on the floss.
She unwrapped the string from her fingers and dropped it in the garbage pail. “I used to have to floss my brother,” she said, patting his knee.
“We figured a man who didn’t leave the house before would really never leave now,” said the one on the floor. “After everything happened.”
When they were done, the women removed the cape and paper collar and gave him a handheld mirror to look at. They packed their scissors and products into black canvas bags and folded the plastic tarp with his hair inside. One tucked the chair back under the table. They hugged him one by one, and he gave them each a book that he picked from his library. This transaction occurred by the door. One of the girls reached for the doorknob and drew her hand back, wincing. “Damn shock,” she said.
“Winter,” said another.
The girls waved as their car pulled out of the driveway. David waved back and thought again about the hygienists he had known. There was one he had liked while he was in dental school who made him quiz her when she studied for her tests. Another, who must have been that girl’s friend, put her hand on David’s thigh at a party and asked if he knew of any eligible bachelors in school. They made him nervous, these girls. The ones he hired at his office were all intelligent and professional and good with teeth. They were all girls to him, fresh-faced, out of trade school at twenty, worrying about how their underage bridesmaids might drink at their weddings.
He was by no means attracted to the girls, who, with their unmarked faces, shared more features with ambulatory fetuses than with women. Franny teased him anyway, asking him where he had been when he arrived late, noting how comfortable his reclining examination-room chairs were, speculating on the smell of bergamot on his body, a scent David wouldn’t be able to identify even if he knew what it meant. It sounded like a flower. Still, Franny would tease him as he sat at the table or lay down in bed, naming scents, claiming to smell lavender or brown sugar, touching his hand at dinner and bringing it to her face, recognition narrowing her eyes. Her scent changed when she began working at the salon, but, she said, that was different.
10.
WHEN THE OFFICERS ARRIVED at his front door, David found himself mentally unable to touch the doorknob.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never use this door.”
“Is there a problem?” one of the officers asked from the other side.
The door’s lock was a mystery. Its silver dead bolt gleamed, barely visible through the crack in the jamb. David wondered if the bolt was electrified and immediately became convinced that it was. If the bolt itself was laced with energy, how much would travel through the actuator? How much force would have to be employed to push the engaged device horizontally through the jamb? At that moment, was he safe? David did not feel safe.
One of the men outside straddled a bush and knocked on the window. The glass rattled in the frame and the frame strained on its tracks. David urinated silently down his left leg. He shifted sideways from the window, covering his thigh with his hand. “I’m sorry,” he called out.
“We want to ask you some questions,” the officer said. “Please, David. Open the door.”
There were so many ways anyone could learn his name. David thought of how easy it would be to take a piece of his mail from the mailbox.
He pressed his cheek to the doorjamb. Air whistled out or in. “How did you know?” he asked. His slipper was wet, his leg, his hand. He held his breath to listen.
“We want to talk to you,” said the officer at the window. “What are you doing?”
David removed his pants and underwear and slippers and slid them into a far corner. The scent of urine coated both hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. He sat on the floor by the window. “I’ve had a difficult day.”
From his spot, he could see the officer on the front porch as well as the one standing at the window. The lawn was graded so that David and the officer were at eye level, though David was seated and the officer stood. “You have removed your pants,” the officer said. The radio on his shoulder buzzed with activity.
David pointed. “They’re over there.”
“The man urinated,” the officer at the window, whose name badge read CHICO, said to the officer on the porch. The window was an old single-pane variety, which made it easier to talk and listen.
David sat cross-legged on the floor. “I’m sorry, Officer Chico.”
“We don’t require an apology,” said Chico. He was an older man, maybe ten years older than David, but he possessed an energy in his eyes that David did not. “You are a man in your own home. You have the freedom to act within the confines of the law.”
“That’s a refreshing opinion from a member of law enforcement.”
Chico turned down the volume control on his radio. “Also, I am a detective.”
“You sound like a smart guy,” said the man on the porch.
“Pay no mind to my partner,” said Chico. “Justice holds the progressive close to her breast. Anyway, we see it all the time.”
David closed his eyes. The wood floor felt smooth on his nakedness. “Her heart may bleed,” he said, “but the scales are forged with hands wrought heavy by tradition.”
“Urine, I mean,” said Chico. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m confused all day,” said David.
“That’s understandable. Do your friends come by? Family members?”
“I got a haircut.”
“Give me a break,” said Chico’s partner.
The detective pulled a notepad from his back pocket. “Could you give us the names of some people we could contact?”
David knew he would enjoy very much the feeling of a woman placing her palms on his face. “Someone altered my clocks,” he said.
“We don’t want to alter your clocks, sir.”
“I’m concerned.”
“Could you look at me?”
Chico was bundled in police-issue winter gear, which included a heavy coat, his badge pinned to the lapel. “Neither myself nor Officer Riley over there is going to alter your clocks,” he said.
“Maybe clean ’em,” Riley said.
“That’s not as helpful as you might assume, Officer Riley,” said Chico, keeping eye contact with David. “Sir, please let us in. We do have the power to make this unpleasant.”
David hooked his fingers under the window’s sash. “It has already been unpleasant,” he said. He pulled with no luck, then squatted and pushed up. The sash groaned and lifted, and he felt cool air against his face and lower body. His skin felt moist and young as he leaned close to Chico’s face. “I am concerned that the dead bolt is electrified,” he said.
11.
THE MEN
seemed exceptionally kind, considering that one had crawled through the window. David apologized to them for the trouble, and they apologized for interrupting him. Officer Riley found a blanket and a small cardboard box in the trunk of the squad car. He tossed the blanket to David and deposited David’s wet clothes in the cardboard box. He left the box at the base of the stairs.
Riley led the way to the kitchen and began going to some trouble to find instant coffee and mugs. He boiled water in a pot someone had left on the stove. Chico walked the perimeter of the room, his arms crossed.
David stood in the doorway and watched them both. He felt comfortable and warm, wrapped in the police blanket from the waist down. He imagined that if his house was on fire, he would want to be wrapped in that same blanket while standing on the street. The feeling of being swaddled as an adult was foreign and tender.
“The city has no shortage of blankets,” David said. “Have they considered opening a Salvation Army?”
Chico removed his gloves and raised one hand toward Riley. “You know, that’s a fine idea,” he said to David.
The men stood, listening to the sound of the hissing range as it heated the water. “The dead bolt was not electrified,” David said. “I was glad to learn that was the case.”
“As were we,” said Chico. “Why would it have been?”
“I feel swaddled.”
“Understandable.”
Riley took the pot of boiling water from the stove and filled the cups. The instant grounds soaked to become an approximation of coffee as the officer carried the remaining water to the sink.
