Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  “So that we may have no further interruptions to your saga,” Beckett said, “perhaps it would be wise to find some nourishment for this young bucko. Would you have any Melba toast in the larder? Or they seem to favor dry breakfast cereal in the shape of life preservers. Circles of bananas. Cold Spaghetti-os. Any morsel, really, small enough to be picked up by tiny fingers but soft enough to avoid choking if swallowed whole.” He whispered an aside. “They feel independent at this age if they feed themselves, matteradam if they make an unholy mess. Would you have some tidbit about the place?”

  I informed him that a search of the pantry would be necessary.

  Beckett addressed the toddler directly. “What do you say, young man, some num-yum-num in order?”

  “Soightenly,” the baby said.

  I bowed to his wishes and backed out of the bathroom.

  Grateful for the silence and emptiness of the hallway, I paused with my hand on the doorknob and considered my predicament. Although this had long been my home, it felt like a strange land in which strange things had been happening all night, ever since I found myself naked and bleeding on the floor. No, before that, strange things from the moment I arrived home to discover the seven bicycles splayed across the front yard. Or perhaps even earlier? I tried to remember the last normal thing to have happened, retracing my steps past that homecoming, but memory failed me. All I could truly recall was waking in the middle of the night and finding my way to the bathroom.

  The doorknob jiggled in my hand, so I let go and hurried downstairs to look for some food for the baby. At the bottom landing, I glanced to the right and saw that everything had changed in the living room. The white walls had been painted sea green and the decor had morphed from my rather traditional Stickley to a sleek fusion of styles, the lines vaguely art deco but the furnishing a mixture of Japanese-Italian-Southwestern-Zen ethos, favoring a kind of modern simplicity. It all looked like some interior decorator’s misguided vision of the future. Instead of the old television, there stood a panel thin as glass, but flexible to the touch. Worst of all, my books were missing. There was not a volume to be seen, not even The Poetics of Space. It looked like a wasteland.

  More formal and austere than before, the dining room bore only the faintest traces of my design, and the kitchen appeared to have been dropped directly from the spaceship of an anal-retentive species of aliens. Gone were the rustic cabinets, the bread on the counter, the booze collecting dust, and the cookie jar molded into the shape of a mermaid that my brother had acquired on some Caribbean vacation. Stainless-steel cabinets and appliances in brushed nickel gave the room cleanliness and order, but the immediate effect was mitigated by the sensation of having wandered into a morgue. What lurked behind those closed metal drawers? It all looked sterile and dangerous. I opened the cupboard in the area where the cereal had once been stored, but the freakish designer who had made over the outside of the room had carefully catalogued and labeled the foodstuffs into clear plastic containers. The cheese crackers were filed beneath the challah and above the chutney. Alphabetized. Talk about measuring one’s life out in coffee spoons (between the cocoa and the corn chips). Imagining the baby might be thirsty after his snack, I fished around in the gigantic fridge and poured a half glass of skim milk. I also remembered that the cat was about the house somewhere, and I left a saucer of water on the floor. Not wanting to wake anyone, I softly called for Harpo, here kitty, kitty, but no meow echoed back. Cats are notoriously independent and cannot always be bribed, like dogs, with food. I shut off the lights and made my way through the strange rooms to the upstairs landing.

  The urge to peek in on them was too strong, so I softly elbowed open the door to my bedroom, just a skosh, enough to see the three bodies remaining on the bed. Two of the women groaned slightly at the disturbance and tangled themselves together in a knot, and the third had not moved all night, if indeed the night can be said to have passed at all, but she remained still, her face to the wall, and her hand resting on the swell of her hip. For a moment, I watched the rise and fall of her breathing, and not wishing to disturb her sleep, I left the room as quietly as I had arrived. The floorboards groaned at my tread, and the bathroom door flew open suddenly, flooding the space with light.

  “There you are,” the old man said, pulling me by the wrist into the cramped room. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for ages.”

  They had been up to their usual shenanigans in my absence. Someone had found a lipstick and rouge, and they had painted their faces. And each woman had a new hairstyle: Marie in a medusa of dreadlocks, Alice in a Veronica Lake wave that dipped over one eye, Dolly in twin braided pigtails of prodigious length, and Jane and Flo, tall and small, in matching pageboys. Powder caked their faces, and they looked altogether artificial. Beckett’s eyes had been shadowed with kohl, making his stare starker still, and even the baby had rosy cheeks. Perhaps the little one smelled or saw the cereal through the plastic or heard a typical rattle, for he implored me by clenching and unclenching his miniature hand to give over the loot.

  I pulled off the lid and offered the container, and he reached in up to his wrist and came away with little Oaty-Ohs sticking to his skin and spilling from his grasp. The tot seemed more concerned with what he had lost than with what was still in hand, and he struck me in the moment as somewhat emblematic of the human condition, not to read too much into basic greed and regret. He shoved the lot in his mouth and happily chewed and chewed. Alice took the cup of milk and set it on the sink counter, and then reached for her broom and pulled out a single strand of straw and blew on one end, forcing a hole the length of it to make a suitable tube through which the child might easily drink. The crowd in the bathroom saluted her ingenuity, and everyone watched as if they had never before seen a child take a sip. His first assay was too forceful and the boy gasped and spewed out the milk, but he soon learned his lesson, and general applause was proffered. Fondness and pride buoyed our hearts. I wondered what raising a child with Sita might be like.

  Batting his eyes at me, Beckett resembled a rather gaunt raccoon, but when he fluttered his eyelids again, there was no mistaking his ploy to attract my attention. As best we could, we huddled into a corner for a tête-à-tête. He spoke in a hoarse whisper that anyone could hear. “You were gone a long time. Is anything awry?”

  “Now that you mention it, the whole of the downstairs has been redecorated, like some designer’s bad dream of the future. Very modern, very austere. Someone came in and got rid of all my stuff.”

  He put a finger to his bottom lip in a gesture of cogitation. He was wearing pink lip gloss. “That isn’t right. Much too soon.”

  “Do you have any ideas as to who’s behind all these changes?”

  “Household elves,” he said, without hesitation. “Or perhaps gremlins, or the faerie changelings or wayward angels. A pair of giant lobsters or two tramps with nothing to be done. How the hell should I know?”

  His sarcasm perplexed me, but I did not press the point. Beckett had saved my life five times, yet possessed a preternatural relationship with the five would-be assassins, cozying up to them in my absences. Nonchalant to the essence of my predicament, he seemed awfully familiar, yet his true identity shifted in mysterious ways. One moment he reminded me of my deceased father, the next I was sure he was the spirit of Samuel Beckett come to wait with me for a truth that would never arrive. I could not tell if he was friend or foe, and as these thoughts raced through my mind, he smiled dumbly at me, as though content to let me stop and ponder it all. The rouge on his cheeks, the pink gloss on his lips, and the heavy black around his eyes contributed to his rather seedy demeanor. For the first time that night, he looked old and tired. I felt a sudden need to strike back at him for his cold remarks. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror? You look like an old drag queen at five A.M. on the morning after.”

  Brushing me aside, he stepped to consider his reflection, pulled off his glasses, and leaned so closely that the tip of his nose was touc
hing the glass. I fear I may have hurt his feelings, for tears collected in the red bottom rims of his eyelids. Jane gave him a hand towel the moment he reached out blindly, and burying his face in the cloth, he rubbed savagely against his features, blew his nose, and handed the towel back to her. The old face had returned to the old man, and with it, the old glee and lechery. He ogled a pair in the corner and then turned to me with mischief in mind.

  “So, you were saying. These seven women are all trying to hug and kiss you at once …”

  Momentarily, I was lost in what seemed like a non sequitur, but then it came to me that he wanted me to continue the story I had begun long ago, before the quintuple interruptions, the story of what had happened before we met under such odd circumstances. I was in the process of losing that story; that is to say, the stories that each woman told, preceded by their attempts on my life, had superseded prior events. Or at any rate, the two stories were jumbling together so that it was difficult to separate what had happened and in what order. One of the functions of the old man must have been to get me to keep my stories straight. I was having trouble remembering what had happened before and then after the bump to my head, and the threat of amnesia hovered and cast a dreadful shadow.

  “You left off, Sonny, with the girls in their Wild West costumes about to devour you with carnal desires?” He leered and waggled his eyebrows lasciviously à la Groucho Marx, and I half expected him to lift a cigar to his mouth beneath a greasepaint mustache.

  “Don’t get me wrong. The moment when they rushed to greet me was more an expression of how happy they were just to see me, and after the initial kisses, my face was dotted with lipstick impressions, and I was in a state of euphoria. Tiny stars and moons and flapping bluebirds orbited my head, and the group moved forward as one from the piano recital and into the hallway. I had no idea how I was even walking, but the women chatted among themselves, wandering to and fro, paying almost no attention to me, and we reached a crossroads of sorts. To the left was my bedroom. A sharp right round the bend was the staircase, and farther along was the bathroom. My inclination at this point was divided into two distinct and competing urges. Did I dare suggest the bedroom, or would I be a gentleman and allow the mob to dictate the rules?”

  “Seven women would require a full week.”

  “Apparently the decision wasn’t mine to make. Into the bathroom they filed, some glancing back, one or two waving discreetly, and the last, Jane here, telling me that they needed a moment to freshen up.”

  “A wise decision, I should think,” the old man said. “I myself have been a bit, shall we say, stale, and a quick wash, brush the teeth, and a dash of talc, and you’re good as new. Cleanliness is underrated as a virtue, and many people nowadays forget to scrub behind their ears.”

  The rest of us, by reflex, checked to feel if the space behind the ears was clean, and each of us sighed with relief when fingertips grazed smooth skin. Nobody bothered to check the baby, of course, for it is a well-known fact that small children are almost always dirty, their folds and creases the hiding place for grime, and in the summertime, they usually excrete some clammy, sticky substance that covers their entire persons. Pick up a baby of your acquaintance at a July or August picnic, and you will be shocked. They can be as slimy as a three-day-old mackerel and often smell none the better. Moreover, they swarm with germs and harmful bacteria and carry untold diseases. One of the women in the firm is the mother of twins, and she is forever sneezing or wheezing or complaining about ear infections or some bug going around the day care, and thus the contagion travels outward from child zero until everyone has a cold or the flu.

  “Well, I waited,” I told him. “First pacing up and down the hall, and then finally sitting on the top step. They took forever.”

  The old man laughed. “What is it with women and bathrooms?”

  All at once he was assaulted with flying objects—a wad of toilet paper, a sliver of soap, an avalanche of cotton balls, the cap to a can of shaving cream, my toothbrush! Even the baby tossed a few Oaty-Ohs at him, thinking their protest a new game. Beckett covered his head beneath the shield of his hands and apologized in a sonorous voice, “Désolé.”

  “There were seven, after all,” I said, “but I was curious as to what was going on. The shower had been flowing for some time, and when it finally stopped, the singing commenced—”

  “Ah, the same singer as when you thought the windows had been singing.”

  “No, this was different. Seven voices in a kind of roundelay, the women singing each to each, a melody so entrancing and bewildering that I could have listened to it all night, and yet it lured me to the door and to the keyhole.”

  “Why ever would you have a keyhole in the bathroom door?”

  “Precisely. Furthermore, no such hole existed prior to that evening, nor is there any such key on the premises. I concluded that there was one reason only for the keyhole, and that it had been put there for me to spy on the women in the bathroom.”

  The old man clapped his hands with delight. “Very good, old man. Deductive reasoning at its finest. But you could have asked me for the skeleton key.” From the pocket of his robe, he removed a long, black old-fashioned iron key with a skull at the top of the handle. “It unlocks all the doors in this house.”

  “But you weren’t here at the time.”

  My assertion seemed to confuse him, and he scratched at his hair with the blade of the key. “Right, so. Still. You were about to place your eyeball against the perforation and behold the maidens …”

  “That was my expectation, but when I looked through the hole, the bathroom itself had been replaced by what appeared to be an ocean and a rocky shoreline that resembled the coast of Maine or Cornwall, some rugged northerly locale. Waves rolled and crashed, and above in the pale blue sky, a gull laughed and winged beyond the frame. In disbelief, I blinked, and then the perspective shifted so quickly that my eye functioned like a zoom lens, making all appear closer or giving me the sensation of being on the sand itself and the rocky ledges near enough to touch. I heard that singing again, a dying strain, as the tune passed along a chain of voices, and then I saw the first of the seven, naked to the waist, and where her legs had been, a fish’s tail. All of them were mermaids, sea-girls wreathed with seaweed, singing atop the outcropping of rocks, luring sailors to their ruination.”

  Through the open window, some stray music reached us, the morning medley of a mockingbird auditioning for a mate. I wondered if his cry meant that dawn would soon come, but a quick glance at my watch disappointed me. The birdsong faded.

  Beckett took up his part to fill the silence. “Lonesome mariners in their longing often mistakenly believed a herd of walruses, far off on some ice floe, to be a school of mermaids, until the ship drew near to the fearsome beasts. Have you ever seen the tusks of that fellow? Two daggers, big as a man’s leg. Or some say the mermaids were actually the manatee, a freshwater mammal, sometimes called a sea-cow for its placid demeanor, vegetarian diet, and prodigious weight. In India, I believe, it is called the dugong, but you would have to ask that girlfriend of yours. Sita. In either case, a rather far-fetched connection. The mermaids’ song, I’ve heard, is actually the song of the humpbacked whale, as the behemoths wander the oceans of the world, calling one to the other. You’ll not hear a more haunting song on land or the deep blue sea.”

  “Aye,” Jane stepped in. “The humpback is a good songstress, and the beluga whale is known as the canary of the sea. But all the tales of whales and walruses is stuff and nonsense. ’Twere never thus that a grown man mistook such a creature for a woman. ’Twere the long years aboard ship that drove sailors to madness. A woman’s body above and a fish’s below is a matter of imagination and great longing and fear. Afore the houricane blew in on us, we had a cloudy night on the sea with no moon or stars, just the lanterns of the ship, and beyond nothing but blackness and the sound of waves slapping against the hull. Nine hours I was on watch, looking into nothing, and is it any won
der that every errant splash became a great sea monster, and every groan of wood meant the spars would soon crash down, and every sigh in a man’s sleep gives birth to a ghost.”

  “Nine hours, hah,” Dolly scoffed. “I once waited nine years in a cave for a ghost who I knew was never going to come back. Imagine the demons who visited me.”

  Marie shook her dreads. “Try waiting your whole life to be free, and then you will see what the imagination conjures. It is the secret of the voodoo.”

  “And the curse of the human race,” the old man said. “Imagination is the fuel of hope. Better you should leave such fires be and see what is truly in front of you.”

  Red hair draped across her face, Alice rose with her baby on her hip. “Don’t you dare say such awful things in front of the child. I carried him for nine months, nine months of hoping for him with every breath, imagining what he would be like, and imagining now what he will become. Imagination is no curse, mister, but what separates us from the monkey, and hope is enough to bend iron bars as though blades of grass. Never underestimate the human mind.”

  Placing his hand over the region of the heart, Beckett bowed slowly. “I stand corrected. You will forgive me. The young gentleman most of all.” The baby gurgled at him.

  Quick as a terrier, Flo crossed the room, spat in her palm, and offered her hand to the old man. “Apology accepted,” she said in a brassy tone.

  A loud bang on the door prevented the consummation of their handshake. Someone had thrown something hard enough to cause the wood on the inside to buckle, and the missile sounded loud as a stone. I imagined David slinging rocks at Goliath, and the next one came in harder, the impact like a thunderclap, spraying splinters into the room.

  “That was a pretty good one,” the old man called out. “A little higher next time.”