I stop for a moment and so does he. I turn finally toward him and he looks suddenly afraid. I make an honest effort to see something in his face. But I see nothing.
—I don’t know, I say again.
—Please, he says. Please.
And the look he gives me is naked enough that I finally promise him,
—Soon.
He nods, and smiles a little, and we hurry to catch up with the others.
But giving him such assurance is a mistake, for soon I am giving it to all the others as well. I don’t know, I say. I don’t know. And then, finally, giving in, Soon.
And yet we are all of us still walking, my small book slowly filling up, even though no more of us as yet have died.
sky as slate
water dark gray
stumbling forward
—Soon, I tell him yet again. Soon. Eventually I will be telling all of them, I know. But for now he is ahead of them, the most insistent for death. My answer will not satisfy him, or them, forever.
III.
—When will I die, he asks of me again. A day of flat gray light, no difference between water and land. I am tired of hearing him ask; I am becoming impatient.
—Now, I can’t stop myself from saying. You will die now.
The other three around me stop when I say this, the first time I have seen them all stop at once. Suddenly, it is oddly silent. They wait, looking at both of us.
—Now, the pale, gaunt man says, and smiles. He lies down in the water, on his back. I write his name in the back of the book as he watches me, and then the four of us who remain set off.
I cannot stop myself from casting glances over my shoulder. He is still there, still lying in the water, his knees and the tips of his boots and the swelling of his chest cresting the water’s surface. He has raised his head a little and watches us go.
No point posing questions. The world is brutal and life, when it happens at all, short. I could, perhaps, make up a past for myself from the scattered viscera of images I still believe are real. But why bother? There is not enough blankness left in this blank book for me to waste it on such luxurious reflections.
And then there he is, a dark spot behind us, in pursuit. The other three are mumbling to themselves, and then they pick up the pace. But he keeps with us, gaining on us rather than growing smaller, somehow more powerful than us. He is, after all, as one of those left suggests, dead. One can never, so he reasons, outrun a dead man.
So he gains on us, slowly but inexorably, until finally we fall back into our normal pace and let him come.
—I’m not dead is the first thing he says when he catches up with us.
—You are, says one of the others.
—No, he says, shaking his head, a little desperately perhaps.
And so I show him his name in the back of the no longer so blank book.
—No, he says. You made a mistake.
But the others have already turned away and have started to walk on. He keeps pace with us, still talking. The others refuse to speak to a ghost. Soon, so do I.
After a time he accepts his lot. He falls into silent step with us. He walks forward, dim, lost, and, though with us, alone.
Soon one of the remaining three sidles into step with me, wraps an arm around me, whispers in my ear.
—What is it? I say.
—Am I on the list? he asks.
—Are you dead yet? I ask.
—Am I on the list?
I show him the list. His name is not on it. He looks at it for a long time, stopping me when I try to turn the page.
Why is my name not on the list? he asks.
I open my mouth to answer and then realize I don’t know what, if anything, to say to this.
We walk together for some time. He keeps lightly touching my hand that is holding a pencil until finally I allow the pencil to enroll his name on the list at the back of the book.
—Am I on the list? he asks.
—Yes, I say.
And so he releases me and, like a sleepwalker, moves slowly away, now dead. He never again says another word.
And so it goes. First one and then the other of the remaining two approach me, and are only satisfied when I strike them dead. And then there is only me, alone, the only one living among a silent company of seven ghosts. When I regard them I can see the way in which their skulls are struggling to be seen through their skin. We slosh slowly forward, I and the seven men I have killed.
What is the next step? It seems inevitable that after a few dozen, a few hundred, a few thousand more strides, I will reach a place inside my head where I will see no choice but to record my own name. And then we will proceed forward, all of us a company of ghosts, silent, dead.
But for now, the last man alive, I take a step forward. And then another. And then a third. I will inscribe everything that happens. Daily, I will make the count of my remaining number. When the time comes I will write myself dead and gone.
Secrets and Lies
Valerie Martin
NORA FOUND THE MARIJUANA pipe inside a sock in her son Sam’s dresser drawer. She wasn’t looking for it; she wasn’t invading her son’s privacy. She was just putting his clean socks away, there was a clunk, something heavy, unsocklike, and then she was shaking out a small wooden pipe from which rose the thick, unmistakable perfume of the sixties.
At that moment the pipe was a secret her son was keeping from her, but it was not yet a lie.
She thought about Sam. He was fourteen, bright, winning, his grades were good, his teachers praised him, girls called him. Most of the time, he was polite. He was kind to their old dog, Zephyr, and he could make Beth, his older sister, laugh even when she was in a bad humor, which was most of the time. Sam was perfect, but if he got caught with this pipe at his expensive private school he would be automatically expelled.
Nora dropped the pipe into her sweater pocket. She closed the drawer and took up the laundry basket. She could feel the weight of the pipe in her pocket like a leaden heart. She stopped off in her study and slipped it under a pile of unpaid bills in her desk drawer.
The pipe was now her secret, but it was not yet a lie.
When Sam came in from school, he grabbed a bag of chips and went straight to his room, where he stayed until Nora called him to dinner. At the table he was cheerful. Had he checked the sock drawer for the pipe? Did his good humor mask his fear of the confrontation to come? Nora pushed her peas around her place disconsolately. “So how did the algebra test go?” she asked Beth.
“Don’t ask,” Beth said, the too-ready tears standing in her eyes.
“Pass the potatoes,” Sam said.
Nora handed him the plate, uncomfortably conscious of how resolutely her eyes stayed focused upon the potatoes. Great, she thought. Now I can’t look at my own son.
The pipe had become a lie.
When the children were asleep, Nora made the mistake of calling their father, Jeff. His young wife answered, sounding nervous. She and Jeff fought a lot, Beth had told Nora; the marriage was doomed. When Jeff got on he snapped, “What do you want?”
“I found a marijuana pipe in Sam’s drawer,” Nora said.
“What does it look like?”
“Like a marijuana pipe,” she said.
“Is it wooden?”
“Yes.”
“Is it small, black?”
“Yes.”
“It’s mine,” Jeff said. “I’ve been looking for it for a week.”
Nora closed her eyes. Sam had never intended to use the pipe. He had taken it to get at his father, with whom he was increasingly at odds, and now she had betrayed him right into the lion’s jaws. After seven years, Jeff was still resentful of Nora for forcing him to leave his family to take up with a woman half his age, and he liked nothing better than characterizing her to their children as a manipulative harridan. He would turn the whole thing into a major battle, and Sam would end up blaming her. “How stupid can you be?” Nora said, and hung up.
That night Nora lay awake, going over her options. She could try to persuade Jeff not to tell Sam how he had found out about the theft, but even the thought of such a conversation felt demeaning. She could say nothing and let Jeff and Sam have it out, then try to pick up the pieces and regain her son’s trust. She could tell Sam frankly what she had done and why. This was the obvious best choice, but Nora knew Sam would take it as an attack on his character; there would be harsh words, tears, misunderstanding; something would be permanently altered between them.
In the morning she was haggard, but she was at her post at the stove when her children came down for breakfast. It was cold out; she had chosen oatmeal for comfort. Beth came in and put her arm around her mother’s waist, breathing in the steam from the cheerfully bubbling pot. “I thought I smelled oatmeal,” she said approvingly. Sam put a bowl of milk and raisins into the microwave. “I love oatmeal,” he said.
Everything was fine, Nora told herself. Her children were eating oatmeal. Then they were out the door, their young shoulders bent beneath the weight of their schoolbooks. No sooner were they gone than she dug out the pipe, took it upstairs, and dropped it inside a sock—was it the same sock?—in her son’s drawer. Maybe he had never looked and found it missing. As she stepped out of his room, the front door slammed and Sam came charging up the stairs. “Forgot my bio book,” he said, rushing past her. In a few moments he passed her again, clutching the heavy textbook. Bio book? Nora thought, as the door slammed behind her son, or had he come back for the pipe? Should she look to see if it was still there?
So Nora stood paralyzed on the landing, pretending she didn’t know her son, pretending she did, every moment becoming more and more tangled in a web of secrets and lies. She couldn’t remember which came first, the lies or the secrets, the secrets or the lies.
Just calm down, she told herself. Just get used to it. Most people live like this all the time.
The Aquarium of the Dead: Chicago Stories
Peter Orner
EDGEWATER TERRACE APARTMENTS, CHICAGO (2007)
BORN AND RAISED IN Chicago, my grandmother, as she approached ninety-seven, began to remember the childhood in the old country she never had.
One scene in particular: she remembered standing in a puddle holding a cabbage to her chest.
They took cabbages, she says. She eyes me long and hard. You think I don’t know they took a lot more than cabbages? But they also, she says, seizing my arm and pulling me closer, took cabbages.
BROOKS BROTHERS, MICHIGAN AVENUE, CHICAGO (2002)
My father roams Brooks Brothers like a leopard in his own jungle. This particular hue of blue all his. Today, though, he’s not on prowl. He’s come in for—
What has he come in for?
A suit salesman gradually approaches. Mustache, a pronounced limp that makes him sway from side to side as he moves soundlessly across the thick carpet. Longish face, eyes set forward in his head, not quite buggy, almost. Not a handsome man yet not without dignity in his homeliness, my father thinks. But where’s Charlie?
“Can I help you?”
My father’s not sure what to say. I’m only here for refuge. How would this sound? He stares at the unfamiliar salesman. The salesman looks for a moment at his cordovans, then back at my father as if he’s begun to understand. His eyes wetten slightly. There is comfort in our blueality. I know it. You know it. Nothing to be ashamed of. Here the harshness of the world is lessened.
“Where’d you get the limp?” my father says.
“I was born with it,” the salesman says.
“Oh,” my father says. He’d like to lean up against the false mahogany and whistle. Just passing the time.
“So you weren’t in the service?”
“No.”
“I was,” my father says. “In Biloxi. Mostly KP duty.”
“Kitchen patrol,” the salesman says.
“That’s right,” my father says. “Soap and bubbles. My hands have been clean ever since. Relatively.”
The store is mostly empty. A couple of younger salesmen murmur to each other in the back. No sign of Charlie.
“So,” my father says. “How’s the fall line?” Again only as one Brooks man to another. He doesn’t want the obsequious song and dance. He only wants to talk a little shop with someone on the inside.
“Seersucker’s back.”
“Again?”
“In yellow and pale blue.”
“Hmmmmm,” my father says. “Hmmmmm. Anything else?”
“They’re bringing back the three button.”
“The three button? When did they get rid of the three button?”
“Last year. It was foolish. Last year everything was two button with double vents.”
Double vents. Awful. A kinsman.
“You haven’t been here long.”
“No. I was out in the suburbs. Transferred.”
“Transferred? Like in the army.”
“In a way,” the salesman says. “We are, after all, on the front line of fashion.”
The salesman and my father laugh together. When they stop, my father says quietly, “It’s lonely, moving around like that?”
My father’s feeling a little wobbly. Drunkish at 4:00 in the afternoon on a Monday?
The salesman nods and half smiles. He doesn’t show his teeth unless he has to. Again, it’s as if he understands what my father’s getting at in spite of the fact that my father isn’t sure himself what he’s trying to say.
“You get attached to a place,” the salesman says.
“I myself haven’t done much moving around. Not since the army really. I was born here. Staying in one place can be lonely too. Of course.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve been in the same office on Wabash for—”
The salesman breaks in, he can’t help himself. “I was in Northbrook for seven years.”
“In the mall?”
“Yes.”
“Good God.”
“And before that I sold shoes at Fields in Lake Forest for eighteen years. Now that took courage.”
“A week in Lake Forest.”
“So you know.”
“Snoots,” my father says. “When you’re born up there the doctor shoves a polo stick up your ass.”
“So you know!” the salesman practically yelps.
“Jews know.”
“Catholic myself.”
“You’re no better. To them you’re worse. There’s more of you.”
The salesman rolls back on his feet and laughs harder now, and again, he and my father—kinsmen—laugh together until neither of them is laughing anymore but they’re still laughing.
“Not a religious man myself,” my father says.
“Neither me,” the salesman says. “Still you drag it along.”
“That’s right,” my father says. “What are you going to do?”
“What are you going to do?”
My father reaches for a display of belts hanging nearby. They look like a set of lonely tongues. He reaches for one and fondles it. “Alligator?” he says wistfully.
“Cowhide,” the salesman says.
No, true. Brooks has never been known for its leather. Even so, my father thinks, you can never have enough decent quality belts.
“Say,” my father says, “what happened to dear old Charlie?”
“Charlie Hubbard?” the salesman says. “Oh, they put Charlie out to pasture.”
My father grips the belt. Charlie. Stories about growing up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Always sucking a cough drop that made him slur his words when he talked. One about a boot getting lost in the muck. Having to hop back to the house on one foot. And in the spring of that year, a shoot of corn growing up out of that boot!
He thinks of Charlie in a seersucker suit on all fours in a field chewing cud. When this city’s through with you it spits you back to Oshkosh. It’ll happen to me.
“Oshkosh,” my father burbles. Still wobbly.
&n
bsp; “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”
“Oshkosh,” my father says. “Oshkosh, Wisconsin.”
Again the salesman nods. Again, he gets it. He gets Oshkosh.
Who is this person! My father thinks. My father wonders. My father. He tries to look into the salesman’s eyes, but doesn’t get very far. It’s as if the man’s eyes have been varnished over. He’s hiding somewhere in there and my father can’t find him. This is all very strange. Dizzier now. Brooks Brothers afternoon. Outside, the paling cement light. In here the sinkingness, the old muffled feeling. A kind of happy drowning. And you could, couldn’t you? Right here? In this deep welcoming carpet?
TOUHY AVENUE, NILES (1997)
The architect who designed it used a postcard of the real one and he didn’t do that bad a job. It leans. Except that this leaning tower is only three and half stories high and next door to a used car lot in Niles. On their way home from cards at Twin Orchard, Bernice Burman and Gert Zetland always stop at a coffee shop across the street. Just a stupid funny thing. A whim of Gert’s. Always made her think of her honeymoon in Italy although they never made it to Pisa.
They are sitting at their table by the window and Bernice is listening to Gert yatter on about her nephew Jerry, the maverick tort lawyer. Cars whiz by on Touhy Avenue. Occasionally someone slows down, someone who hasn’t seen the tower before, and there’s all kinds of honking.
Gert’s voice, after all these years, has become an almost pleasant background gurgle. Occasionally Bernice sighs over one of Jerry’s triumphs. Hears none of it. She watches the busboy clear away the cups and crusty soup bowls, a young man with tapered black hair and invisible buttocks. She wonders what he sits on. If it hurts in the bones. Maybe he never sits. Maybe he never sleeps. Clears tables. Clears tables. Maybe there is no end to the clearing of our tables? Mexican, he probably came across the border in his underwear. Maybe he’ll look at her. And what would he see if he did. An old biddy making eyes.
Gert reaches and pinches Bernice’s forearm.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 49
