by Amelia Gray
He put his face close to the ground and found one ant. The creature walked unevenly, hefting a crumb larger than its body. It bumped into a pebble, the kind that might wedge in the tread of a boot, and began the slow journey around it. David pitied the ant and understood it. He took a tissue from his pocket and laid it down before the ant. After some coaxing, the ant stepped onto the tissue, pausing, pressing on. David slid his hand underneath and, moving low to the ground, stepped, crouching, up the stairs to the point where the line of ants vanished into the house. He shook the tissue close to the line, and the ant landed near. It touched the other ants with the tips of its mandibles, and they paused and touched the first ant before continuing on their way. David noticed that the crumb had fallen loose during transport. He examined the tissue and the porch at the point where he had released the ant. When he looked back at the line, he couldn’t tell which ant he had moved. It was too late.
The dead bolt did not spark his hand on the way back inside, but he still did not feel safe. He considered the ways in which a wire could be secured to the bolt’s knob, improving the safety of the door should the bolt at any point become electrified and a grounding element be unavailable.
He washed his hands upstairs, looking at the beauty products that still surrounded Franny’s side of the sink. One bottle claimed to be a vacuum device for blackheads. He opened it and found a pump mechanism that dispensed an opalescent cream. Dabbing the cream on his forehead, he picked up another jar, a moisturizer with royal jelly. He wasn’t sure how a jelly could be royal, but he removed its lid anyway and spread the cream under his chin. He picked up the tube of retinol eye cream she kept behind her toothbrush and smeared it over his eyes. He removed his clothes and sprinkled acetone-free nail polish remover on his pubic hair and worked it in at the roots. His eyelids stung. He opened a precious-looking prismatic glass jar with a clear gel inside and smeared the gel on his testicles.
He sprayed her perfume on the back of his tongue. It made him retch, and he gripped the sink, coughing and spitting toward the drain. The perfume’s fragrance was of flowers and some kind of light powder, but it tasted like cheap gin. It coated his tongue and cheeks and sank into his body. He splashed water into his mouth, but it served only to spread the flavor. He regarded his face in the mirror. Red welts were rising on his eyelids and neck. He resisted the urge to touch them.
Crouching down, he opened the cabinets under the sink. He pulled out bottles of cleanser, gallon jugs of shampoo and conditioner Franny had borrowed or taken from work, the box of Franny’s pills. David counted ten months’ worth of pills, ten stickers bearing Franny’s name, twenty plastic hinges, hundreds of tabs of foil behind which hid hundreds of pills that meant nothing at all. A dental water jet attached to a turquoise-colored plastic box whirred when he plugged it in. David lay down and pressed his hands against the blind underside of the sink. He opened a jug of shampoo and emptied its contents over his body. The shampoo was a translucent blue and felt cold at first, but it warmed protectively and lathered a bit when he rubbed it. It covered his body and held him. He tried to crawl under the sink but could not fit his shoulders through the door. Instead, he lay with his head inside the paper-lined womb of the cabinet, its frame a wooden pillow under his head, the dental water jet whirring like a lullaby.
17.
DAVID STOOD beside his wife at their wedding reception. The event was well attended, in part because it was held at an Old Country Buffet during the dinner rush. Their invited guests didn’t seem to mind the $7.99 charge. David had just taken on more debt by buying his dental office, in addition to what he paid monthly for his mother’s care, in addition to her old legal bills. Franny and David had been married by the justice that afternoon, and she was still wearing the white lace skirt that made her knees look like the speckled hams under heat lamps at the buffet. Patrons of the restaurant wandered into their corner to shake David’s hand and tell Franny that she looked lovely. A child gave Franny a fistful of gummy bears from the ice cream station.
The young husband of one of David’s dental hygienists brought a cooler of beer. David’s father returned from the dinner line with a plate heaped with meat. “Pig to pork,” he said. He shook his son’s hand and picked up a rolled silverware napkin from the table. “Live with meaning and die old.”
Three empty plates at a table held corsages as symbols of Franny’s parents and David’s mother, who had moved herself into a women’s home when David was very young. He couldn’t recall exactly when his mother had gone to the home, and he and his father rarely visited. When they did, she always gave David something she had made, a card or ornament, out of the same type of construction paper her son had used in his kindergarten class. Once, the keepsake was a picture she had drawn of David in red and blue marker.
His mother had been a math teacher and was the only truly calculating element across the entire course of David’s life. She expressed no interest in ever meeting Franny. On their wedding day, his mother called the Old Country Buffet and the newlyweds passed the phone back and forth while standing at the hostess station.
Everyone got a little too drunk and kept eating. They put away plates of meat and baked beans and iceberg salads with ranch dressing. A distant cousin ate only creamed corn. David and Franny sat at the table with his father and the hygienist and her husband. David’s father lifted a spoon of mashed potatoes. “Once, this was all underground,” he said. The hygienist’s husband ringed his big arm around David’s neck and told him it was good to marry a strong woman who could get herself out of trouble. David imagined Franny pinned under a grain thresher, hefting it overhead into a hayloft.
At the end of the evening, Franny placed a dish of pudding by one of her parents’ memorial plates and started to cry. The guests had mostly left, save for a patron of the restaurant named Chuck who produced a flask of whiskey and sat with his back to the wall. Franny wiped her eyes with her mother’s memorial napkin and took a pull from the offered flask.
That night, Franny and David lay in bed together, immobile from the pleasures of the buffet. She slept, and he examined the muscles twitching under her skin. In those early years, Franny’s body lacked the twin mysteries of scent and softness that had initially allured and eventually drove him from the bedrooms of his few previous girlfriends. His wife’s scent that night was of a wet rock, as if she had been created from the stream that ran behind his childhood home.
18.
OVER A LIFETIME of experience, David’s mother learned that institutional food was more or less the same, regardless of the location, purpose, or quality of the institution in question. If they could make a fruit out of a chunk of Styrofoam, they would do it. David’s mother felt certain that she had once eaten a synthetic pear served to her by the institution. She could discern the pear’s flavor but it registered only vaguely, as if she was experiencing the pear under sedation or in a dream. Its texture was of a wet sponge soaked in chemicals.
She fumbled to peel the crimped foil on her orange juice container. It evaded her fingers, which felt thicker with every year’s birthday card she opened from her son, her old fingers failing even to separate paper from adhesive. He sent old cards, even a few she had given him for his own birthdays. The other ladies read them to her. David sometimes sent the letters her sister had written before she passed. This was before she settled into a less-demarcated timeline of growth and weakening. Her hands lost their power to the point where she had trouble turning a doorknob.
David’s mother fantasized about being able to turn doorknobs. There was the unyielding chill of metal under her strong hand, which gripped and turned so easily, feeling through her fingers the internal mechanism of the door. Her blindness heightened her sense of touch, allowing her to experience an even purer form of pleasure. Each joint in her body moved with a similar efficiency and silence. Shoulder and elbow, wrist, knuckles, fingertips; synchronous. She slowed down the motion in her memory of it, fingers grasping, tucking under the metal with
such precision. She could feel the seam where metal met turning metal, the knob’s joints meeting her own. In her fantasy of it, she felt so strong that she could rip the knob off the door and hold it in her hand like a stone.
The women at this particular institution guided David’s mother through open doors in the distant way that they would guide an old woman at any institution. They sat her at empty tables and helped with her playing cards. The ridges and grooves in the cards greeted the sense of touch in her hands, which she still refused to admit was dimming.
19.
ONE NEW MESSAGE. Three saved messages. First new message. From, phone number three three zero, three two three, seven four nine eight. Received, November eleventh at two-thirty-two p.m.
Hello, David, this is Reginald Chico. I’m going to need to come by and ask you a few questions about the case. It’s important that we clear up some things to close the file. It’s an open file now. Well, we opened the file. Please give me a call if you won’t be home. I figure you’ll be home.
Message erased. First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, four five four, eight seven zero one. Received, September fourth at nine-forty-three a.m.
Hello, this call is for Frances. This is Andrew at the Precious Memories preservation department. I am calling to report that your order is complete and ready for pickup. Thank you for your patience and have a wonderful day.
Replay, four. Erase, seven. Return call, eight. Save, nine. More options, zero. Message erased. Next message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.
First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star.
First saved message. From, phone number three three zero, eight four five, three four three three. Received, October fifteenth at eleven-eleven a.m.
Hey. Please wash and prep the vegetables before I get home. We’re in a hurry. Sorry. See you.
Saved. There are no more messages. Main menu. Listen, one. Send, two. Personal options, three. Call, eight. Exit, star. To indicate your choice, press the number of the option you wish to select. Whenever you need more information about the options, press zero for help. You can interrupt these instructions at any time by pressing a key to make your selection.
20.
CHICO knocked on the front door for some time before moving to the window. David lifted the sash and held out his hand for Chico to take as he crawled in. The detective was a thin man, but it took some leverage to pull him through. He moved as if struggling against considerable weight, and the two men had to take a break in the middle of the action, while the detective’s legs still rested on the ground outside.
The detective tried to find a toehold on the brick wall. He grunted and sighed. “You’ve got to get that door fixed,” he said.
“It may be electrified.”
“I know. I know you think it may be electrified.” He wedged his foot into a crack in the foundation and hefted himself in.
They sat on the floor together. Chico leaned against the wall and coughed. “The doctor claims I have a good heart,” he said. He removed his muddy shoes and placed them carefully on the wood floor beside the rug.
David produced one of the police blankets and made a nest around Chico’s feet.
“Thank you,” said the detective. “Cold outside. I believe I walked through half a pond in your driveway. Have you examined the drainage out there?”
“Can I offer you something to drink?”
“No thanks, David. But thank you. Thank you. I came to ask you a few questions. The department prefers that I travel with a partner, but I felt you were uncomfortable with Officer Riley. I came alone today to ask you some questions.” He tucked the blanket around his feet. “Would that be amenable to you?”
David nodded.
“Very good.” Chico leaned to the side and extracted a writing pad and utensil from his back pocket. “You’re wearing your bathrobe, David.”
“That’s right.”
“And your slippers are wet. You’ve been outside?”
“Sure,” David said. “Yes.”
“Where did you go?”
“I walked on the grass after the ice storm.”
Chico nodded, making a note.
“I like the sound of the ice. I was wearing pants at the time.”
“Pants,” Chico transcribed. “Jeans, or pants?”
“Pants.” David half stood, but didn’t complete the action and ended up bending at the waist over the detective.
“Did you have somewhere you needed to be?” Chico asked, leaning back to meet David’s eyes.
“I thought we had been talking for a while.”
“We just started talking.”
David looked at the hall clock, which had stopped. “It is possible we have only just begun to talk. I’m sorry.” He sat down again.
“The apology is unnecessary.” Chico maintained his extended level of eye contact.
David regarded him as a careful man who took regular trips to the doctor. It seemed easier to trust a careful man.
Chico turned back to his notepad. “Did you love your wife?”
“I love my wife.”
“Did you two ever have any big arguments? Fights? Shouting, throwing objects at each other? Physical contact?”
“Not really, no.”
“It’s a common phenomenon.”
“She threw a newspaper at me once, but she apologized.”
Chico turned the page and kept writing. “Did Franny enjoy her job?”
“It was half a newspaper, really. Less than half. Just the sports section.”
“Did she have many friends?”
“Of the Saturday paper, you know. We’re talking eight sheets of paper here.”
“That sounds very minor, David.”
“I wouldn’t have noticed if she hadn’t knocked my glasses off. She messed up the center bar. I had to tape them up. They were never like they were before.”
“You wear glasses.”
“I’ve always worn glasses.” David touched his own face. “I’m wearing them now.”
Chico closed his notepad. “David,” he said. “What happened to your wife?”
“When?” asked David. “When?” He lay down on the floor, at Chico’s feet. He saw a paper bag on a shelf. The ceiling was a strange thing to see, and David realized that he had never lain flat on the floor in his own home. The ceiling’s surface was dusty and smooth, forming an angled plane with the wall. It looked like it was a cold surface, one he could press his face against. He thought about how no dust should rightly form on the ceiling and how strange it was that dust did somehow populate up there, the webbed pockets of dust texturing in the corners. David imagined that if one or two specks of dust impossibly clung to the minute crevices of the ceiling, then another piece of dust and another could attach to those first colonizers, and in the course of fifty years, that string of codependent detritus could make its own meaningful line, stretching toward but never reaching the floor, existing beyond the reach of brooms and rags. He remembered how his mother would dust the corners of that very room with a damp rag. She wore another damp rag tied over her mouth for the sake of her allergies. He thought of the individual path of one such piece of dust: into the rag and washed down the sink, affixed to the interior of a pipe for a few weeks or months, time becoming less relevant to the speck than time was before—which is to say not at all relevant or
perhaps negatively relevant—the speck washed free after some time, proceeding through the mess of pipes and into an underground tank, sinking through sludge to become sludge yet remaining an individual speck, having no original qualities yet remaining unique, sinking or aloft, present in the world.
21.
DAVID AWOKE ON THE FLOOR. It was dark outside, and his shoulder was too stiff to move. He felt bruised. He didn’t remember falling asleep. Over the hours that had passed, his bones had settled and pinned him down. When he moved his legs, he felt the blood coursing to his lower body. His sore shoulder flushed and tingled as he sat up.
It had been a long time since he had needed his heavy winter coat, and he hadn’t looked for it in years. He tended to wear his robe for trips to the mailbox or a light jacket for walks around the neighborhood. He hadn’t taken note of the temperature or what he was wearing on his recent trip to the post office.
The coat was not in the downstairs closet. He checked the closets upstairs, the bedroom closets, the linen closet, the closet in the bathroom. He found the extra towels and considered wrapping them around his hands and arms and face. He forgot what he was looking for and checked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. He remembered and dug through his side of the bedroom dresser. He found long underwear, jeans, a sweatshirt, and a ballpoint pen. At the back of one drawer was a scarf his mother had mailed from the home for women. David removed his robe and pajamas and put on the clothes.
Under the bed, he found winter clothes that had been vacuum sealed in large plastic pouches. When he opened one, it expanded and released the odor of a wet stone. David put his face into the pouch and held it there. His face touched one of Franny’s favorite coats from the previous winter, one she had worn nearly every day. The coat was sewn from a bronze-colored fabric and gathered at intervals, giving the wearer the look of having stacked multiple cast-metal hoops up the body.
