Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  With no difficulty, my left foot found the first step, and my right the second. Thirteen to go. I remembered the thousands of journeys up and down these stairs, and the house was a great relief and shield against the aura of doom that had threatened me since I fell. In The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” As long as I am in my own house, there is nothing to fear, for it seemed to me that the house could be trusted when everything else posed nothing but mysteries and questions. I love the Poetics and at the architectural firm where I work, when no one else was around, I would read it furtively at my desk. The book sort of just landed in my hands at a moment of particular despair over my future as an architect. For the life of me, I can’t remember who gave it to me. Someone important, who has escaped through the hole in my head.

  Despite the utter gloom of the staircase, I made it to the bottom step without tripping and killing myself. The switch downstairs had been positioned between off and on, so I corrected the situation and illuminated everything. Pupils dilating, I stumbled into the kitchen. On the digital clock built into the stove, I punched in one minute on the timer and waited. While the digits did not regress, the beeper sounded its alarm after the appropriate interlude. Certain that some electromagnetic catastrophe had stopped the power, I went to the window but saw nothing but the dead of night, not the least hint of the dawn that should have been there. I scratched my head and suppose I would still be doing so had not a sudden clunk, like a chair losing a leg or a Tlingit woman staving my father’s skull, sounded in the room over my head.

  The urge to flee tugged at the hem of my bathrobe, but I ignored it as one might a pestering child. This is my home after all, and I was determined to figure out what was happening here. Moreover, I had the dim sense that I was missing someone else in the house, someone dear to me, whom I should protect from harm. I could not quite place her name at the moment, but my short-term memory may have been hampered by the concussion. Someone I love may have been at risk, so I screwed on my courage and marched to the stairwell, now shrouded in darkness again, with the switch at the top stuck in the middle position.

  More comfortable in the shadows, I took the steps in pairs and reached the top in no time. All doors leading off the landing were closed; behind each, dead silence. I thought of one other clock and entered my office, sat down at the desk, and pushed the start button on the computer. The flash of light and trumpeting notes that the machine played as it came to life nearly scared me to death, and I momentarily wondered if the noise had awakened anyone else in the house. A blue screen gave way to corporate graphics, and the icons popped into view like blooming flowers. In the corner, the time remained fixed, and though I could not fathom why it was still 4:52, I was pleased to know that all of the clocks in the house were in sync.

  Laughter from the bathroom filtered through the ventilation ducts, a disembodied titter that sounded like a happy memory, and upon opening the bathroom door, I discovered its source. Dolly sat on the edge of the tub and standing inside, behind her, the old man ran a brush through her long black hair. Mild surprise registered on their faces for an instant when they saw me, but then they resumed without the slightest show of modesty. He appeared to be taking some sensual pleasure with each stroke, and she relaxed under his gentle attentions. Pangs of envy poked at my stomach.

  “Was there an accident?” I asked. “There was a thump a while ago, like a chair that toppled over.”

  “A chair would be a provident addition to this room,” he said, and now caressed her hair with his fingers. “Where have you been all this time? Dolly here was regaling me further with the erotic version of the ‘Woman Who Married an Octopus’ and other tales of her Tlingit cousins.” As he spoke, his eight arms encircled her and withdrew when he came to the end of his sentence.

  She opened her eyes, and on her night-black irises, two moons rose and arced across the sky, changing phases from waxing to full to waning to no moon at all. “Old stories are best,” she said, “for love and truth.”

  “I’m not sure what to make of your story,” I said.

  The old man stepped out of the bathtub and interjected himself between the girl and me, and then he laid a fatherly hand on my shoulder to walk us a few paces farther. She began to sing in her native language a kind of chant that, while confined to a repetitive rhythm and scale, possessed a certain hypnotic charm. Under the sound, he spoke in a confidential whisper. “I wouldn’t bring up the matter of personal tragedies, Sonny. She’s been brooding over a grave injustice forever, and it’s quite a grudge.”

  I replied in a soft voice, “But what’s that got to do with me?”

  “Best to change the subject.” When he winked, a third eye appeared on the shut lid. Not a working eyeball, but rather a crude approximation in the thick line drawn by an eyebrow pencil or similar crayon. “Follow my lead, if you please.” He ushered me back to the toilet, and we resumed the positions of our initial encounter, the sole exception being Dolly’s presence on the bathtub edge to my father’s left. She finished her chant to polite applause. “You were telling me,” he spoke in a loud, artificial voice, “about the bicycle girls.”

  My face wore a befuddled expression, a look I have seen more than once in official photographs of myself, such as those required for a driver’s license or international passport, the kind of picture snapped at the subject’s worst moment.

  “The ladies and the bicycles,” the old man insisted. The furrows of his brow, carefully etched by decades of worry and frustration, deepened to a row of crevasses, and the blue of his eyes whitened to ice. “The naked women in your bed. You were about to establish causation, man. Surely, you are one of the most forgetful little bastards I have ever met.”

  His clues, verbal and visual, sparked nothing. Dolly rolled her eyes. “Mind like a sieve.”

  “Holier than a Swiss cheese,” he rejoined. “An empty beehive.”

  “A bucketful of holes.”

  Rubbing the bristly top of his hair, the old man was at a loss.

  Dolly assayed another. “He uses a salmon net when fishing for herring.”

  “Well done,” he said. Raising her fingertips to her lips, she played the coquette. On her left eyelid, the same third eye had been drawn, to match the old man’s. What antic games, I wondered, occur in my absence?

  He turned to me. “Your line, I believe, was ‘When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the something something sky.’ ”

  “Mirrors to the sky,” I said. “On the chrome handlebars and bumpers, a million little suns reflected. But that’s all I can remember.”

  “The opposite of the elephant,” Dolly said, “who never forgets.”

  “A leaky cauldron.”

  “An unwound clock.”

  “The cyclical amnesiac.” He bowed.

  “Well played.” Now, she addressed me directly. “Whenever I lose something, I always retrace my steps beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Or until what’s missing is found. Shall we look for your mind? What is the last thing you can recall?”

  Falling. My face smashing against the bathroom floor, a tsunami of blood sweeping across the tiles and washing against the white wall of the tub. “Checking the time on my watch.”

  “Good,” the old man said. “Progress. So, you arrive home this afternoon at eight minutes till the hour and there were seven bicycles heaped in a tangle of spokes and chains, and then what happened?”

  “I have never seen bicycles out in front of the house, but then again I am not usually here at that particular hour during the workweek, and I thought perhaps they belonged to some schoolchildren who left their bicycles and ran off to play. They looked chained and locked together, the bicycles, not the children, and there were no children. Nobody was about despite the fineness of the hour, the warm weather returning. You can feel the change in the air.”


  “The days are on the mend,” the old man said.

  Dolly patted his leg and deposited her hand upon his knee. “June. The birds and the bees, the scent of love a-bloomin’ yet again. Maybe you left work early because of an assignation?”

  “An illicit rendezvous with delight,” he said.

  “Love in the afternoon,” said Dolly, and the point was won.

  I was reasonably certain that was not the case, though this talk of love whipped another chain of images through my brain. A woman, surrounded by fireflies, and something I intended to do or say to her. Love, yes. I knew I was in love with someone I could not quite remember. On a spring afternoon when I opened the door of a taxi for her, she touched my arm and smiled when she got in and drove away. After she was gone, she lingered in the air. A different story unfolded in the pea of my brain.

  “No, not a tryst. It was a day like every other single day. I was a bit fatigued and bored, nearly fell asleep at my desk, so having nothing pressing, I left the firm a little early. The bicycles waited in the yard in front of the house all jumbled together like a knot, and I just stood there wondering when the singing began—”

  “Singing bicycles!” Bemused, he clapped his leathery hands together, sending a talc of dead skin puffing like a cloud.

  “Not singing bicycles, singing from the windows.”

  “Even better,” Dolly said. “Singing windows. Or maybe it was the house itself that was singing?”

  Bachelard would allow such a possibility in his poetics, but only in a metaphorical sense, with a house so imbued with happiness that the windows could be said to sing. He speaks of the archetype of the “happy house” that young children reproduce when asked to take up their crayons and color their idea of home—a square with a peaked roof, two windows and a door that suggest a face, and around the house a tree and flowers, a line of blue at the upper border to indicate the sky, and a sun, often smiling, radiating from its tucked position in the corner. While there is no good reason to dispute the existence of a companion to such an idealized fantasy, say, a singing house, a family place so full of joy that it hums a musical score night and day, I have never seen or heard of such a space. My own childhood, as my father would attest if he is indeed my father, lacked all such song, unless one includes the dirty ditties he would sometimes croon late at night after arriving filled to the lid with drink.

  “You have misunderstood me, or perhaps I did not make myself clear. It was like the opening prelude of some fantastic play or movie, and the house itself was the theatre. I was on the lawn marveling at the bicycles’ sudden strange appearance and studying the light reflecting off the chrome when I heard someone singing from one of the open windows. ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca.”

  “Verdi?” the old man guessed.

  “Not so. A common mistake, but I believe it is Puccini.”

  “If you two are going to hide behind the screen of dead white male Eurocentric cultural references, I will take my skullcrusher and leave.”

  “Apologies. The actual composer is not as important as the song, and the song itself is not as crucial as the singing. And it only truly gains significance through the hearer.”

  The old man enjoyed my gambit, for he nodded vigorously and sprang to life. “A word is not a word until it is heard.”

  “A soprano floated out the melody and drew me in note by note.” My audience of two appeared mesmerized by my story, for their jaws gaped and their eyes widened in anticipation. A cool breeze or, rather, an intake of air behind me tickled the short hairs on the back of my neck, and the scar tissue from the earlier hole constricted. Had a window been opened in another room to cause a sudden backdraft?

  “Do you trust me?” the old man asked.

  A preposterous question. Even when alive, my father earned no such confidence. Trust him? I was not sure that I even believed in his existence at all or, indeed, that he was my father and not some conflation of my imagination. A larger-than-life character from the stage. Come to think of it, my father had hazel eyes, and my inquisitor’s eyes were quite blue.

  “Come now, Sonny, no time to dally. If I give you the word, will you follow without reservation, no questions asked?”

  “The word?”

  “A command, boy-o. When I issue an order, do as I say at once, for your very life may depend upon it.”

  Beside him on the edge, Dolly nodded her agreement.

  “Yes, I trust you.”

  “Good lad. Now, one, two, three … duck!”

  I squatted immediately as above my head a projectile creased the air and smashed into the opposite wall. An irregular corona of cracks radiated from the impact against the shower tiles, and anchored deep in the center, a pointy barb of a small harpoon. From the direction whence the weapon had been chucked spewed a fount of the vilest invective. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, swore and cursed like a sailor and stomped her feet in fury. “Whoreson dog, blot, canker! Blast to Hades, I’ve missed.”

  Framed in the doorway, she shook with rage, balled her hands to fists, and agitated her head till her dreadlocks clumped and swayed like a custodian’s mop. The bottled anger had nowhere to go, so out it fizzed in tears and spittle. Blood rushed to her face, darkening her complexion against the orange chiffon nightgown that twisted round her lanky frame, and when she stomped, her long legs looked like fence posts being driven into a peaty meadow. Though her frenzy obscured her features, her tantrum reminded me of such a display witnessed long ago. However, I could not place the exact location, time, or person. I turned back to confab with my associates, only to find them inspecting the spear attached to the wall. Dolly thwacked the shaft with her hand, and the vibrations caused a droning bass hum, which confirmed that it was indeed stuck.

  “Hither, child,” the old man said. “Come dislodge your harpoon and apologize.”

  “A pox o’ your throat,” she hissed. In three long strides, she marched into the full light of the bathroom, and beneath the tempest of her light brown hair, her green eyes darted upon the current occupants. As she walked past me, her upper lip curled into a sneer, and then she braced her foot against the tub, took hold of the weapon, and pulled. Small hills of muscle rose on her biceps, and with a great grunt, she extracted the double-flued point from the ceramic. The old man reached for the harping iron, and she handed it over without further complaint.

  He touched his finger to the prick of the point and pretended it was razor sharp. Although the mere handling of the tip would not draw blood, the weapon looked fearsome in his mitts, and my eyes darted back and forth between the barbs and the barbarous woman who had tossed it headward in my direction. Hiding behind that matted hairdo, she resisted close scrutiny. Another tile, loosened by the impact, fell and shattered on the bottom of the tub.

  “You could have hurt someone with this,” he said. “Not a child’s toy to be flinging about willy-nilly. What do you have to say for yourself, maid of the sea? Who or what are you, and why have you attempted to pin my man to the wall with your javelin?”

  “Some call me by my Christian name of Jane,” she said. “But I am known by many names, all of which result from my most common surname.”

  “Shall we guess?” the old man asked.

  “Somers,” Dolly said. “Gates. Newport.”

  “Go on, then. None of them fellas. Just take a look, and you’ll guess.”

  The old man scratched his chin as he looked her over head to toe. “Tanglehair? Beanpole? Skinbone?”

  “Long,” she said. “I am often called Long Jane Long on account of my height.” Raising her heels from the floor and straightening her back. “Though he may know me as Long John Long.”

  I confess I had no idea what she meant. I knew no Longs, John or Jane, nor could I determine why a girl would have both male and female names. There was something unforgettable, however, about the way she talked, or should I say the quality of her vernacular, an accent faintly British as if she was trying to hide or reveal her origins. The old man
held on to the harpoon like a bishop’s staff by the cathedral of the tub. Dolly settled in by his side, and I attended next to the toilet.

  The tall woman opened the spigot on the sink, closed the stopper, and filled it with a rush of clear water. Dipping a long finger through the surface, she changed the colorless liquid to a briny blue-green and, stirring with a single digit, she created a miniature sea of sorts, waves and whitecaps, spindrift gathering like soapscum at the porcelain edges. We three witnesses peered into this ocean and beheld a miniature vessel, like a ship escaped from a bottle, beating against the swale and foundering in a storm. The old man brimmed with glee and beseeched her to begin the tale. “Go to, go to.”

  Eight weeks out of Woolwich and seven since they left Plymouth Harbor in the glories of an English June, in the year of our Lord 1609, bound for the settlement at Jamestown in Virginia, the good ship Sea Venture, under the hand of Sir Thomas Gates, Admiral Somers, and Cap’n Newport and bearing the souls of fifty and one hundred men, women, and children, storm-wracked and separated from the other ships of the fleet, found itself in a watery hell. The houricane blew for four days, the clouds spit and lashed and covered both sun and moon in turn. Lightning crackled over the top of the mainmast and raced down the spars, the admiral’s flag on the mizzen stiffened in the constant wind, and the wild and wasteful ocean swelled and made to swallow them. Every jack pumped belowdecks, the oakum seals peppered with holes large and small, till the leaks threatened to let in the whole Atlantic. It were Mr. Frobisher, the ship’s carpenter, who suggested that the seams might be plugged with beef and biscuit, ten thousand weight in all, from the ship’s stores. The common mariners and servants stripped naked in the water so as not to shrink their blouses from the salt, and only one, Long John Long, the cabin boy to the ship’s pilot, refused to part with a single thread on his back. He was a beautiful lad, fair of face, and all of fourteen years, and not a hair on his cheek.