Threats

by Amelia Gray

  “You deal in mystery just as I did,” David said. She was laughing before he began, but he had thought it all out while taking his coffee on the porch earlier that day and was set on sharing. “At your job, you shake a woman’s hand, look at her face, she seems fine. But then you get her back, remove her makeup, shine the exam light on her, and you see everything she’s hiding. Comedones, age spots, pencil-thin lines. You bring them up and she starts apologizing. ‘I know, I should be wearing more sunscreen. I just ran out and forgot to get more.’

  “It was exactly the same at my job. I would meet a perfectly nice person, maybe a spectacularly nice person, a minister or a pharmacist, the kind of person I was raised to trust. Then I’d get into his mouth and it would be a disaster. Infection swelling a gum line like a hidden pouch. Trench mouth leaving a gray film on the teeth. Ulcers full of six months’ worth of midnight snacks without even a rinse afterward. Back to bed. The guy would say, ‘Doc, you gotta understand, I brush my teeth almost every day.’ He’d have no reason to lie to me but he would lie. We’d see it all the time.”

  Franny, pressing her lips together, let out a stifled laugh that startled them both. She set down her wineglass and covered her mouth with both hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, snorting. Her face reddened to the ears. “I’m sorry, that’s not funny. I’m sorry. I think you’re right.”

  He watched her red ears and felt a lightness in his chest that he hadn’t felt since they were dating. From then on, he made a small special effort to compare his old profession to hers. It was so good to see her laugh that he didn’t mind. Sometimes she would lean over and hold his hand or even kiss him between peals of laughter. He saved the comparison for special occasions, such as their anniversary.

  28.

  THERE WERE TWO UPSETTING THINGS about the new threat. One item of concern rested in the body of David’s father, the other in the body of his mother.

  When David and Franny were in their fifth year of marriage, they moved in with his father. This meant moving into David’s childhood home, a dark-wooded, many-roomed house on the old side of town. David and Franny had spent the years prior renting their own apartment, but when his father needed help walking from kitchen to basement and eventually from bedroom to bathroom, David found himself spending nights on the sag-springed bed in his first bedroom, and then nights plus weekends, and finally all of the time. He returned to his wife and their apartment, where the landlord wouldn’t allow them to put nails in the walls. Their picture frames leaned against the walls from their permanent spots on the floor.

  David had spent their savings first paying down the debt of his mother’s care, then fighting his malpractice case in court. Without his income, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to hire a home nurse. Franny and David began to consider the monthly expenses they could save by giving up the apartment. Franny mentioned wanting some repairs on the car to fix the heater before winter. The decision to move evolved quickly and came with other benefits. The question of having children was resolved by the presence of David’s father, a strange older child, with his stubbed toes and occasional tears and oversize diapers. David’s father called them “incontinence products” in the rare instances he mentioned them, saying, “If you are going to the store, I require one box of incontinence products.”

  The years had worn on the details of the house. Photographs turned yellow and then brown. Upholstered fabric began to show its threads. Spoiled food grew a bacterial fuzz on the dishes piled in the sink. Before he took Franny over to see the place for the first time, David had tried cleaning. He ran three loads of dishes and swept the downstairs and vacuumed the upstairs and dusted picture frames and unscrewed burned-out lightbulbs, wrapping them in newspaper before throwing them away. Franny declared she liked the house and helped him haul bags of garbage out to the curb. David’s father watched her warily from his chair. “A busy woman has a plan,” he said. In the basement, David showed her the marks on the wall that signified his increasing height, and that of his sister, who was gone before they could make her third mark. Franny asked for the history of the home before David’s family had moved in, but he didn’t know it. The property was old enough to have a carriage house and a farmer’s fence, but it was all in extensive disrepair and offered more nuisance than charm.

  It was hard for David to remember how old he was exactly when he and Franny rented a truck and moved in over the course of an afternoon, but he always had a problem with his memory. In fact, he had trouble remembering basic details about his parents, such as their birthdays. He had to go to the drawer by the kitchen door and dig out their old driver’s licenses to recall.

  David’s father sat in his rose-colored recliner and held his journals on his lap long after his vision had regressed to the point of near blindness. To him, living at home meant remaining stubbornly comfortable long after the actual comforts had vanished. After his wife left, David’s father had spent many years sitting in his chair. The chair cultivated his scent. The man might read the paper or a book, but more and more often he sat with his hands circled underneath his stomach, looking out the window or more likely looking at the window itself, considering its construction, trying to remember the last time he had had it replaced, how much it had cost at the time, and the conversion of those funds into a modern-day equivalent. He suspected that the window was as few as fifteen and as many as twenty years old. Then he thought at length of the new technologies—those of which he was aware, such as three-paned glass, and those he could only speculate about, such as four-paned glass. He considered the cost of such advanced technology and the resultant energy savings. “A window is a life which presents a life,” he said. “A timeline itself, designed to witness an exterior and interior timeline.” Thinking in this way, David’s father could spend a week in his chair.

  In the home for women, David’s mother grew happily old. Her room featured a small television mounted in the top corner. She had herself wheeled out to a brightly lit meeting area in the center every morning. Each day, her attendants heard her speaking numbers. At night they wheeled her back to her bedroom, where she slowly changed into her pajamas, climbed into bed, and covered herself with a thin blanket. It was as warm as an incubator in the home for women. She often dreamed of herself as a chicken hatching from an egg.

  29.

  DAVID’S FATHER had been prone to axiom. “Weight is the most important force in your life,” he would say, upside down in his inversion machine. David’s mother was cooking dinner in the other room, dumping pasta into the strainer, broccoli onto the pasta. “Everything is affected. Everyone succumbs.”

  His mother tended to make a remark after such statements, but David couldn’t remember what she said. Once she was gone, David and his father ate a lot more toast. David’s father would regularly make a meal of five pieces of toast. He ate his own toast dry and smeared grape jelly on a single slice for his son. During one such meal he set down the jelly knife, plucked an eyelash off David’s cheek, and held it before the boy’s face. “You have more intelligence in this eyelash,” he said.

  “Than what?” David asked, but his father had already left the room, toast in hand.

  The man stored pens all over the house. They were taped under desks and tucked over doorframes. He kept them around so he could write down particularly succinct pieces of wisdom or pay the bills while he was taking a bath. He had worked as an accountant and was often writing figures down both sides of a page. Despite never holding a job for more than a few months, he liked to stay informed and involved, to engage his mind.

  He valued the knowledge that he gathered during his vast stretches of private time. He liked to make a daily report of the way he spent his hours. He might divide the day into time spent eating toast, sitting in the bathroom, hanging upside down in his inverter, or sitting in his chair, down to the half minute.

  After his father died, David read the man’s notebooks. There were hundreds of them, lined up carefully on a shelf in the workro
om. On the front page of each notebook was written LIVE WITH MEANING in the man’s careful block print. It was full of numbers and shorthand, symbols that did not correspond to anything David understood. Columns stretched down the page, unknown symbols on each side. There was a drawing of a window, including what looked like dimensions translated into concentric circles. Behind the line of notebooks David found a box of red pens.

  30.

  WEEKS PASSED. David ate all of the unspoiled perishable foods in the refrigerator and moved on to the pantry, where he found pasta, beans, and a collection of cans of sodium-rich broth, which he heated daily on the stove for his lunch.

  The threat that had been placed in a sandwich bag rested in the sun on the kitchen table, in case Chico felt it necessary to come back and have a look. The rest of the threats were collected in the silverware drawer. That afternoon, David had found another to add to the collection. It had been in the pantry, wrapped around a package of spaghetti and secured with a rubber band.

  I WILL GATHER YOUR OLDEST FRIENDS AT MY HOME AND WE WILL HAVE A CONVERSATION. YOU WILL HEAR US TALKING BUT WHEN YOU COME INTO THE ROOM WE WILL STOP TALKING.

  David thought about the two boys who had lived down the road. He imagined them sitting there as adults in the living room. Samson would be squeezed into the too-small recliner in the corner of the room, while the other one would sit where David was now, on the couch. He thought of them talking and tried to picture who stood in the center of the room.

  He read the threat again and drank his mug of broth until his tongue swelled. He thought of his oldest friends standing with him in someone’s father’s shed during the time of year when moisture made every surface soft and wooden surfaces a sponge, the three of them sinking into the plywood floor, barely buoyed up by some miracle tension of pulped material. One of them managed to set things on fire despite the high humidity, mostly leaves and sticks and sheets of notebook paper gone so soft in the weather they were like cotton cloth against his matches. Once, the starter of fires lit up the tip of his shoe and danced it back and forth. The other boys laughed before they realized what was happening and then they laughed in a different way, scrambling away, leaving the poor kid to cry and stomp his smoking feet.

  Something had to be done. David realized that if he didn’t take active steps, it was possible that the threats would continue. He imagined it wouldn’t be out of the question to write a letter to his old friends. The letters could be the same beyond their greeting, but David would write them in longhand so that they might feel personalized even though they were identical. It seemed more likely that he would receive a response that way.

  It was important to receive a response. If the threats were meant for him, as it seemed they were, it was possible that his friends might know something. Perhaps they had actually had a conversation. David felt good to be considering the possibility of taking active steps.

  He dressed without showering, took the newspaper into the living room, and started on the crossword puzzle. The puzzle had a few squares filled out already and he examined the completed squares, frowning, before remembering Dr. Walls sitting at the table. She had figured out the upper-right across and a few three-letter answers scattered throughout, but the puzzle was otherwise blank. David didn’t appreciate the kind of person who would answer the simplest questions without considering the whole of the problem. He put the puzzle aside.

  The package from the local funeral home made an unattractive centerpiece on the coffee table. It weighed down the permanent display of magazines published with the goal of helping their readership learn about celebrities. It was hard not to see the package, even when it was fully behind his head as he reached toward the bag of Apollonia medals on the highest bookshelf.

  There were thirty or forty medals. He usually found more than one a year. When he started leaving the house less and less, Franny showed him how to buy his medals online, and they arrived in sealed bubble wrap containers that lay flat on the kitchen table and gave David no pleasure. Even when Franny threaded one of her best ribbons through it, a red ribbon with velvet on both sides of the fabric, designed to give the wearer the pleasure of velvet at any time, he felt strange admiring it.

  He spread his thirty or forty medals out on the table before him. The most expensive was a golden charm with a very clear marking, but he couldn’t tell silver from tin, plated gold from solid. The funeral-home package sat at the edge of his eye. He looked up from the medals and his eyes rested on the package.

  Whenever she saw smoke on the horizon, Franny took her keys off their peg by the door. Farmers in the country rid themselves of their brush in the colder months by burning it. The fires sent up plumes that could be seen for miles. Franny might vanish for entire afternoons and return smelling like a campfire. She changed the subject when he asked her where she had been. She started coming home with vegetables she had bought from produce stands along the way. She showed him peas and squash and carrots when he asked why she was missing a shoe. She would roast the vegetables for his dinner and serve them to him in a white bowl. While he ate, she went upstairs to take a shower. Autumn leaves always made him remember the smell of carrots roasting in oil.

  David thought of the autumn leaves while observing the Styrofoam container on the coffee table. The shades were drawn over the windows, but he could still hear the noise of people outside. He couldn’t tell which of the Apollonia charms was the golden one, as some were gold-filled and others gold-colored and they all looked to be about the same level of quality to David. He picked a silver medal out because he recognized the ribbon from one of Franny’s spools. He hung the medal around his neck.

  It seemed wrong to put the medals back on the shelf, so he arranged them on the package from the funeral home. It was an attractive memorial. He folded his newspaper, put it in the bag, and threw it into the basement. The bag made a soft sound when it landed at the base of the stairs.

  31.

  Dear ,

  I hope that you and your family are doing well. It has been a long winter at our house on the hill, and we’ve been dealing with some issues with the doorknobs in the house. It’s nothing a few months won’t fix. I know you understand the perils of homeownership.

  My apologies that this letter comes too late to be a true Christmas card. I know you appreciate the mystery and tradition of the Christmas season. If I found myself with more daylight, I would be out taking down the lights. Fortunately, there was not enough daylight, so I didn’t put any up. I know you understand the perils of light.

  I do indeed have a reason for writing you today: I wonder if you’ve had any occasion within the past five years to speak with another person about me. This could be any other person—my wife, a police officer, a mutual friend—and the exact details of the conversation are not important. The conversation itself is the most important.

  If I have your most recent address, you still live in town. I contacted our mutual friend ; he has responded and is eager to meet with me on the subject. If you would care to join our meeting, please make arrangements to meet at my home on Monday, . If you can attend this meeting, I will compensate you five hundred dollars for your trouble.

  I look forward to sharing an honest afternoon with my most trusted friends.

  Sincerely,

  David

  32.

  THE ACT OF CHECKING THE MAIL lost some charm once records were updated and mail stopped arriving with Franny’s name on it. Also, it was more difficult in the snow.

  It had been a warmer winter, which meant more snow than usual. It was a long forty feet to the mailbox without a shoveled path. The drifts were deep enough to reach halfway up David’s knee, soaking into his slippers and up the lower leg of his pajama pants, his robe trailing regally behind. The snow shocked his skin, invading all layers, cupping his heels. He felt that he had made the last of his intelligent cold-weather clothing decisions many years before, or in a previous life.

  Because of his lack of sartorial foresight
and the absence of mail, he made fewer trips to the box, going out once every few days or weeks to dislodge the catalogs and bills packed inside. He wore one of Franny’s winter hats, which fell over his eyes, making it so he could see the ground only if he tipped his head back and to the side. Sometimes pieces of mail were packed so tightly that removal required finding the most solid object, usually a magazine, and wrenching it free before the rest would emerge.

  One morning the ice climbed the post and moisture seeped in and froze the periodicals completely. David braced himself on the mailbox and reached his ungloved hand inside, coming out with fistfuls of torn bills and circulars that fluttered to the ground as he went back for more. He pulled the majority of it out in one handful, bundled the seeping pile in his arms, and reached down to clean the pieces off the ground. He kicked a stone aside to uncover something that had been wedged underneath. It was a scrap of paper concealed within a Christmas-themed baggie, the type one might use to distribute cookies to neighbors. David wiped the condensation from the baggie onto his jacket and read the page inside:

  MY TRUTH WILL BRING ATOMIC SNOW UPON YOUR SWEET-SMELLING LAMBS AND CHILDREN.

  Pocketing the threat, he looked up and down the street. He considered the mail carrier, a man named Edward who wore a safari hat year-round and waved when he saw David standing at the window. David considered the concept of irradiated snowfall and whether it might glow in certain light or darkness. He created an image of what a child might look like if it were also a lamb. The image was of the girls from the salon as lambs with the faces of children, stepping gingerly through his home. One of them pressed her wet nose forward to smell objects while another shit on the rug, then looked at David and spoke words so softly that he was forced to lean close to hear before realizing that the language was not a recognizable dialect of English, if it was in fact English. The words spoken by the child-lamb sounded more like the noise a baby might make to himself while discovering a box of wooden toys crafted to fit into one another, the baby realizing in his discovery that things beyond his control had been created for his amusement, that there was in fact a world beyond the walls of his home, and if the world had created such an object as a wooden star that would fit into a star shape on a board, what other wonders might it hold? In this way, the child is tricked.