Bright Shards of Someplace Else

by Monica McFawn

  He slid into unconsciousness like a butterfly sidesteps under a leaf in the rain. Later that week he had begun working on the problem. He thought of how confident he was at first—it looked so simple!—but it had taken all of his concentration. His mother and father were arguing over how to revive a dying shrub outside his window, and their voices kept cutting in. He picked up his notebook and all the loose sheets he had been working on and walked away from the sound. He was looking down, calculating in his head, and before he realized it, he had walked straight into his brother’s room, where it was always quiet. It was of course the same—the plaid comforter, the basketball trophies on the shelf, the tennis shoes under the dust ruffle, poking out like two deeply bonneted faces. The room had been vacuumed (how long ago?) and the carpeting groomed in perfect diagonal strokes with curves around the dresser feet.

  More time passed. He was again laying down, his forehead rooted in an ant mine. His right hand was knuckle deep in the earth. He blinked, and his eyelashes raked dirt. He raised his head and saw the office door and the ball of pulsing light above it. There was a sound of crickets, a sound that seemed to travel not through the air but through the earth. The sound was like the windup truck that inexplicably began running, deep in his brother’s desk drawer, the moment he sat down and put his pen to the problem. The thing had jerked to life among the pens, erasers, and leaves his brother had preserved between bits of paper. The weak grind of the mechanism moving through this detritus had seemed like the room itself waking. He pulled the drawer open and ran his hands among the things; reaching into that dark drawer without seeing what he was touching felt illicit—touching anything in the room did.

  The white back door of the office, no more than twenty feet away, rose above the grass like the keystone of some spectral ruin. He breathed in-out-in, counting, as he often did involuntarily whenever he was stressed, but this time the sound of the building numbers in his mind seemed the sole evidence that any time was passing, that any moment trailed a thread from the moment before. His brother’s room had been a spacer between two times—the time he was there and the time he was not—and his parents left it untouched as if he might come back and occupy, retroactively, the years he had been gone. Occasionally, they got letters: Drew was in Alaska, hiking with the Inuits! He was in Santa Cruz, selling blown glass vases his friend made. He was bartending in Florida, he was hitchhiking across the plains, he was married, he was separated, he needed cash, he was silent.

  He stood, tried to take a step, but his own body seemed infinitely far away, his feet so small that they seemed beyond control, bouncing like electrons, circling the unsteady nucleus of his head. He fell, his vision going in and out so fast it was as if his blackout were on a propeller, spinning in front of his sight. For weeks he had worked on the problem in his brother’s room—at his desk—thinking that something about working there was lucky. There was something about the room—the objects so settled in the deep hush, the way even the light seemed to hesitate at the window, casting itself in modest rays that didn’t touch anything, didn’t even reach the bed—that seemed anticipatory, matching the mood in which he always worked. And he liked touching the things in the room, bumping the shoes with his shoes, running his hands down the duvet cover, opening the closet and clapping the old sport uniforms, Sunday slacks, and sport coats covered in plastic between his hands. He always sat back down to the problem refreshed.

  He shut his eyes and relaxed into the earth, which swayed and arched up around him, so at some moments he felt a wall of vertical grass behind his head, sometimes under his chin, and sometimes pressed to his face, damp and gentle as a hot cloth dabbed on his forehead. Afternoons in his brother’s room, he would lie on his back on his brother’s made bed, imagining the figures and forms of the conjecture playing themselves out on the swirled plaster above. He kept his visits to his brother’s room from his parents, only working in there when they were outside or away. He knew that occupying the space would only make Drew’s absence more keenly felt, whereas the empty shrine of a room, always shut, was like a brilliant idea waiting to be thought. The ceiling fan revolved but there was no breeze, as if the air in the room were gelatinous, pinching closed the moment the blade passed through. Every now and again a new angle would come to him, and he would reach over to the nightstand and scribble it on the thick block of his brother’s neon notepaper. Sometimes he rumpled the duvet when he napped; he drooled on the pillow made to look like a softball. When he left the room for the day, no evidence of him remained. He even made sure the pencils were all pointing the right direction in the pencil holder, the calculations picked from the trash.

  Something crawled over his nose. He snatched at his face, sending his head vibrating like the blur of a dog’s scratching foot. He pressed his hands over both ears, trying to stop the movement. When he was younger and his brother would get in trouble he would put both hands over his ears and listen to the sound, the ticking and settling of his head, like an old house at night. He honestly didn’t remember much about his brother. They were six years apart, and Aaron was twelve when Drew left. All his memories of Drew were memories of trying to remember him. He used to feel guilty about how little he remembered, so he would steal into the empty room, look at his brother’s stuff, and half-create, half-recall things that had happened between them, using the objects in the room to star in these inventions. The ant farm in Drew’s closet—didn’t they mix carpenter and regular ants to see what would happen? Didn’t the two colonies burrow from opposite sides, through the sand, so they met and rumbled in the very center while he and Drew made opposing bets on who would win? It was as if the objects held the memories, as if all he had to do was concentrate on a photograph, ball, or toy and an experience he and his brother never had would form, popped like an insect from the amber. Years later he lay in that same room, bearing down on the conjecture so neatly printed out next to him in the bed, waiting for its provenance—the proof—to appear in just that way.

  He concentrated on the light above the office door, trying to keep it in his flickering sight. He crawled, lost consciousness, cried out, slithered and kicked, sat up for a few seconds, and fainted. Loose butterflies were tucked in the grass all around like crocus buds. The door was ten feet away. He fluttered his eyes open and saw not the grass, butterflies, light, and fireflies but the thin light under his brother’s room’s door. “Have you been in Drew’s room?” his mother asked, and he had shaken his head without thinking. “The light was on.” His father appeared behind her, a jeweler’s loop hooked around his forefinger; he was working on something small. The next day they heard from Drew; he was coming home to get back on his feet, or something. His parents pretended to be guarded about it—he had said he was coming home before—but Aaron could sense their excitement. All he thought of was losing the room. He realized the room was just a space, just a weird little place where he worked on a pointless problem—but why should that be upturned? He didn’t need the memories of his brother, both actual and invented, diluted by the real thing. His parents left for dinner (a celebratory dinner?), and he lay in Drew’s dark room, not venturing the light. He had made great progress towards the proof—the evidence lay spread all around him on Drew’s notepaper, on Drew’s old homework, even on the back of some girl named Heidi’s love letter. He reached for his brother’s clear plastic phone, the kind where all the inner workings were lit up and exposed in primary colors.

  “You sound a little down,” Dr. Bajpai had said. Aaron was surprised. They had never addressed each other outside of math, though math, as Dr. Bajpai made clear, covered a lot of ground. Math could be funny, the professor had pointed out, telling a long joke that played on the ideas of negative and positive numbers, something to do with where to seat whom at a dinner table. Math could be defiant, as when Aaron, when asked to “show his work” in high school, responded by writing up a narrative of the whole development of his mind, from the cradle up until then, to explain how he had come to be able to so
lve the problem without “work.” Math could be mysterious, of course, what with all the conjectures, like the Birch and Swinnterton-Dyer, that behaved as perfect mathematical rules even though they had yet to be proven. But mostly math was oblivious, marching forward in its formations, unspooling into infinity, unimpeded by anything but itself. There was always something you couldn’t solve, always a place math could go where you could not, it was like riding a horse in a forest of lower and lower tree branches until you were on your back in the dirt, listening to the numbers gallop off and away. He blinked, opened his eyes, and looked up at the moon. The pinprick stars widened and shook, becoming thin and sloppy before tightening back up into spots.

  The door was the door to Drew’s room. If he opened it, he would see all Drew’s things, the bed, the sports trophies, the pinup in the red suit, the tennis shoes venturing from under the dust ruffle. It was right here in the middle of the lawn. The world tipped and tipped again, and Aaron thought he could hear the objects in Drew’s room being scrambled by the motion. Maybe there were butterflies in there now, perched on the trophies, cocoons in the shoes. Fluttering when it was in flux. The sounds made him afraid. What if he didn’t make it? Would his room, then, become the shrine? Aaron’s coat—the one he decided not to take this morning at the last minute—would never move from the old wooden rocking chair in the corner. The math textbook, spine broken, would remain opened to the conjecture, a pen in the slit between pages. His old upper body cast, propped in the corner and signed by all his college friends (mostly his professors, truth be told) would stand sentry like a truncated ghost. The blue pillowcases under his green plaid comforter would become conjecture, known but never again verified. The room would become a placeholder, a zero in the middle of a figure, the absence that anchors the eye when transcribing a long number, the nothing that changes the value completely.

  Would Drew tiptoe into his room when his parents were out, running his fingers over the math theory books, the compass for drawing curves, his Final Release work shirt, with the butterfly-heart on the breast? Perhaps he would creep into Aaron’s room and ponder some great question, something related to dark matter, what happens when something disappears. Leap up when he heard his parents downstairs and hurry back to his own room, the shoes, the trophies, the red suit … As Aaron talked to Dr. Bajpai about his work on the proof, looping and unlooping the phone cord around his fingers, he opened his mouth a few times to confess that yes, he was a bit down, and did Aaron ever mention that he once had a brother? But the proof and Drew were two things he had to reach hard for, grasping this, grasping that, turning from one to reach the other. He lay on Drew’s bed, prostrate, trying to bring the threads closed, but Dr. Bajpai, with that warm and wonderful voice, had to go. The lights deep in the plastic phone went off.

  He slapped open the door with his forearm and crawled, curve-straight-curve, like a snake, toward the main office. When he was a few feet from the desk, he grabbed the line and pulled the phone off the desk. It was a heavy old mechanical Princess phone, and it chimed in protest as he dragged it towards him. He had two calls to make. He punched the first number with his thumb and began talking the minute he heard a voice. “I’ve been attacked,” he tried to say, but his voice seemed to be dropping vowels and extending consonants, so much so he could hardly understand or decipher for himself what he meant to say. “Need help,” he said more simply, and then he mumbled the name of the business and ended with “bu-butterfly” and another help or number or some other SOS sound. Dr. Bajpai, on the other line, was yelling into the phone: “Who is this? What’s wrong? Is that you, son? Have you been in a car accident?” Dr. Bajpai kept asking questions, his voice rising even as Aaron passed out, jerking an arm out and flinging the cradle across the floor.

  He came to already dialing. It was time to let Dr. Bajpai know. A voice answered, a strange voice, but it was likely Bajpai playing a trick. “I discovered it,” he began, utterly lucid, he thought, though the sound that issued from his lip sounded more like a series of underwater bicycle honks. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”

  “It’s really quite elegant,” he went on, then began his brief and careful explanation, answering every question before it could be voiced. “What has happened? Have you been injured? Is anyone there with you?” Ah ah ah, you are not too quick for me, Dr. Bajpai. He laughed and realized he loved it when the old man played dumb. What a wonderful thing that was. “Can you tell me where you are? Please stay on the line, sir, please …”

  He dropped the receiver, rolled so that his arms spread wide, and waited for what he was sure would come.

  A COUNTRY WOMAN

  There is a country woman now among us. We can see her from most of our backyards. Whatever you lack she will exemplify in your view—that is, if you are slothful and prone to depression she will be whistling and weeding in the single place in her yard that you can see from the recliner you have not left since last night. If you are needy and rattled when alone you will catch a glimpse of her through her window sitting down with a three-course meal she made for herself. You might even hear the music on her radio—old bluegrass—and hear her sing along. If you are lacking in purpose and passion, you need only see the peppy flick of her muck boots on the sidewalk as she heads out for the day.

  “With these two hands and a day’s time, I can move a mess of earth,” she likes to say, but only to those of us who become impotent thinking of the brevity of days. She is referring to the koi pond she’s digging, which she plans to stock with “offspring of her daddy’s fish farm salmon,” a losing proposition considering salmon’s need to migrate, but it seems like a dreamer’s envious boldness to those that hear this particular detail. If only they could throw themselves into something so hopeless with such aplomb!

  She is at all the parties. To invite her is to send the message: I can face up to my faults. A kind of sweet torture is to engage her in conversation in a corner after having a few glasses of wine. The country woman speaks of many things: her family, the farm, weather changes, ham hocks, apple butter, the orneriness of old roosters as opposed to the sass of old hens … None of it means anything to you—why should it?—but the telling is full of charm and homespun wit. Things you clearly lack, if she’s displaying them. The only recourse is to keep listening until she loses her charm, thereby affirming yours. It is a convoluted game, and the longer you listen, the more you are entertained and delighted, the more you wince at your own delight, and the more the country woman tries to amuse, sensing your discomfort and trying to alleviate it … you end up drunken with your arm around her shoulders, drooling compliments in her ears, as if by foisting your admiration on her you will somehow take on her traits. It is like taking a rubbing of a gravestone with a pencil and paper—the closer you press the better impression it will leave.

  It might seem most logical just to avoid her, to keep the shades down and the eye averted, and this we try. One neighbor invests in heavy drapes, tightly locking blinds, and tall wild hedges for her front walkway so she can avoid seeing the country woman in the few steps from the driveway to the front door. And indeed if you walk fast with your head down you need never see the country woman in full. You might hear her whistle as she reams her gutters with a toilet brush or peripherally see the flash of a tartan plaid work shirt through a thicket, but the county woman herself is never again manifest.

  Then as sudden as “sow-to-trough” (her saying) she is gone. The flash of her yellow raincoat through the gap in the drapes, the squelch of her Wellington boots, the sound of burning, cooking, nailing, feeding, mucking, whetting, basket braiding, carcass cleaning, pie frying, and meat baking (her order): all this came quietly to an end, as if the country woman had scuttled away in secret though she was the one from whom we hid. We listen for her like the clear tone of a bell long after being struck, a kind of warbling vibration that held us in thrall while we waited for it to cleanly end. Had she gone back to the country? Would she be back? Hers is the most palpable of absen
ces, a not-aroundness so forceful that even her yard, left intact, is ragged, as if something had been rent from it—the pond and roosters and wheelbarrows seem too small for the space they take up, rattling stand-ins for something larger that once fit flush. The neighbors open their windows and beat their drapes with brooms and look around as if relieved but there is a great unease: one could avoid the country woman but not her absence. It was more here than what remained.

  LINE OF QUESTIONING

  The accused was excited. They walked him down the halls of the police station with the absurd gravity he had expected, but he had not been ready for how intense and real it seemed. My god! The more powerful man—that guy the rookie cop called Sergeant Ron—walked next to him with magisterial bearing, a rolling of the foot in leather boots that was positively, quintessentially, justice performance art. All the details were tuned just so—from the dull green walls to the bored receptionists with the tattooed eyebrows. The halls rang with all their shoes. When they flicked the light on in the interrogation room, the two cops split up, as if the long, white table had cleaved them. The accused sat at the head of the table with a cop on each side, and he had the funny thought that he should say grace, give thanks for this sparkling situation on which he could already feel himself feed. He put his elbows on the table, awaiting their questions.