by Alex Behr
the neighbors who heard the screaming and crying and tantrums (not so secret).
they don’t talk to you.
you are an inner system of consume and produce, waste in and out.
dusty mugs at the back of the cabinet.
dark stain by the front door where the cat rubs himself.
how has the micromanaging served you, when you want to please others and you mistrust those who praise you?
you wear out your shoulder.
you have a large house.
you have a cat who peers outside.
people who take risks ignore your emails.
the body fights itself, or turns ninety-three and says, “I want a divorce.”
A REASONABLE PERSON
Mary feels no relief in the courthouse bathroom. She should be used to this condition, three weeks into the trial—panic and a shy, clamped, out-of-order bladder. She has to go! She’s hardly paid attention to anything the lawyers or witnesses have said all morning.
For days, she’s tried not to pee here. She’s waited until she and the other jury members were dismissed for the day. Today, like always, she wants her cushy toilet and her pale-blue bathroom, where Gladys, her guinea pig, watches her from her cage, and where the yellow-flowered hand towels are always clean.
She’s trying to accept her reality, like her shrink advises. But these Hall of Justice toilets verge on ones from Mary’s nightmare, because water from the plumbing seeps in the corners, predatory, wanting to despoil her overstuffed purse and knitting bag. Someone removed the coat hook from the back of the door, which makes the soggy tile more menacing. What—someone’s going to steal from you here? It’s a police department, too, for Christ’s sake. But it’s also a jail.
She clutches her long, puffy jacket in her lap. If the floors start to flood, she can pick up her feet quickly to avoid the water, but how can she wipe and pick up her bags without dripping pee down her leg or in her underwear? At least these stalls, unlike the ones in her dreams, aren’t cut in half. The floors aren’t black with greasy liquid. The toilet bowl she’s forced to use isn’t six inches tall and full of noxious fluids. And heavy metal singing sensation David Lee Roth isn’t flinging his pom-pom of dirty-blond hair and dancing by the sinks.
Mary sniffs her armpits. Sad, too sad, but what can she do? She hears someone enter. She slowly unzips her purse and finds the smooth cylinder of her deodorant. She snaps off the cap. She puts the stick on her lap, on top of the coat. She can’t reach under her turtleneck, which is tucked firmly into her jumper. She wipes it on the outside of her shirt. No one will notice; she’ll put her jacket on.
“Hey, anyone have any extra TP?”
Mary recognizes the voice. It’s chair number eight—Coral, the woman next to her. Mary sweats more. Should she admit she’s in the stall? How would her voice sound? Pinched, confident, casual? Should she speak loudly, as if she’s in another type of room, or in a normal tone? Could Coral sit next to Mary in the courtroom without thinking of her, hunched and debased?
“Hi, here you go!” she calls. She tosses the roll over the stall door, forgetting to tear off a supply for herself. Thank goodness she can use a Protecto toilet cover. She flushes, forces out a few drips, then flushes again and walks out. Coral hums in the next stall. Mary stays to be neighborly.
She checks her crepe-soled shoes. Dry. She looks at her face. Dry, too. She fishes moisturizer from her purse and rubs a white gob on the creases lining her mouth and forehead. No doubt her severe looks were a plus when she was chosen by the assistant D.A., a heavy-set, jowly woman—God bless her—in dark-pink tights and a dark-pink suit, who lobbed her easy questions. No doubt the defense attorney’s desperation let her stay; the judge, D.A. and defense attorney went through about a hundred people to seat the jury.
Mary shouldn’t have been selected because she knew someone who was murdered. The defense attorney sought her out based on one of her answers on the pretrial questionnaire. He called her by name, and she felt special. “Was the murder solved?” he’d asked.
“Excuse me?”
He repeated the question.
“No, it wasn’t,” she said. She laughed into her hand. “I said ‘excuse me’ because I thought you asked if the murder was ‘soft.’” Then she sunk in embarrassment, leaning her head against the wall and looking up at the acoustical tile. Even now, she cringes. How callous. How disrespectful of the dead; poor Jerry, shot on the doorstep of his apartment after selling his uncle’s stamp collection. He didn’t need the money. He could’ve gone the next day. The guy beside her had groaned. He was shaped like a tent. He moved in his chair and tapped his foot. He sweated and coughed. He told the courtroom he’d seen his dad kick his mom while she was pregnant with his little sister. He was dismissed.
“Has anyone witnessed or experienced domestic violence?…Has anyone known anyone who was murdered?…Has anyone experienced or been affected by marital or sexual infidelity?” Mary had cringed at that last one, but she would betray nothing about her ex for her son’s sake, even though he was selling Christ in Papua New Guinea.
“Can you scoot over, dear?” Coral asks. She looks at Mary in the mirror. They don’t face each other. “Look at the bags under my eyes,” says Coral. “This trial has made them bigger.”
“I’ll say,” Mary says. She blushes. “I mean, I look tired, too. I mean, you don’t look tired. I love your angel pin!”
Coral leaves quickly. Mary follows her, crossing the tiled hallway to the courtroom’s leather door.
Mary likes to stare at the judge when she’s not staring at her hands, her notes, the accused (so flat, like something to wipe away), the witnesses, the tile floor, the emaciated court reporter, the attorneys, the clerk (who plays computer solitaire for hours). The judge wears sweater vests but has the presence of Clint Eastwood. Mary wonders, on and off, if he’s single.
This afternoon, Mary’s a mute witness to bloody underwear. She can’t touch it—not that she’d want to; she can only look. The blood is so familiar, from menstruation. Her mom used to cut out hearts from iron-on fabric to cover the brown stains on Mary’s sheets.
In the crime scene photos, the blood is like a punch. The blood on the underwear, however, is muted. It needs an iron-on heart. But the heart would be too big. It’d be hard to buy an iron-on patch as big as the bloodstains, especially on the nightgown. Blood forced its way out of the woman’s nose and mouth. It gushed through new holes. Death greeted her in a minute or so.
No one asks, “Who took the cat?” Mary saw the scratching posts in the photos and on the crime scene video. She saw the plants. Did they die, too? Who took her stuffed animals stacked on the TV set? Who took her Last Supper painting? Did the chrome mirror in the bedroom end up at Goodwill? And she tried not to cry when Rueben, the murdered woman’s teenage son, spoke on that first day of the trial. But Mary cried anyway. They all did. He’d tried to prevent his dad from killing his mom. The accused stuck his foot in the door of Rueben’s bedroom, where his mom had run for safety. She’d told her husband that day that she wanted to leave. He was too jealous, too crazy. That night he forced his way in. He grappled with his son. He switched the knife to his other hand so he could thrust the blade in his wife more easily. And the coroner, on the witness stand, confirmed the outcome, “Obviously, she had expired.”
Mary pinches her hand to stay focused. She listens to a police officer with a broken nose. One time, her husband had lit his nose on fire. He was smoking a cigar and had stuck a toothpick in the stub. The flame caught on a tissue, which he’d stuck up his nostrils after he’d gotten a bloody nose. She stifles a laugh. The things she remembers in this courtroom! If only she could tell her son. He’d give her good advice on what’s important, what will give her some leverage in the deliberation room. But she’s not supposed to talk about the details of the trial until it’s done. Until we reach a verdict. Until we nail the bastard.
We’re supposed to look at the bloody underwear, the bloody br
a, and the bloody nightgown without compassion or sympathy. We’re supposed to view the video of the crime scene stoically. We’re supposed to avoid eye contact with the attorneys outside the courtroom.
After the trial breaks for the day, she runs, breathless, down the three flights of marble stairs, skittering, sweating, her long, gray braid swinging against her sweater. She rushes by the security man, bulked up with a gun and walkie-talkie, and through the metal detector. Someone says, “Watch it, lady,” and she pushes a bow-tied lawyer-type out of her way to hop into a taxi, where she urges the driver to turn up the all-news radio and hurry her home.
Mary overtips the cab driver and hustles up the short path to her house. San Francisco’s Sunset District is near enough to the ocean that she’s surprised how often she forgets it’s there. The fog edges over the roof and lingers by her potted ivy. Her house is small, but it suits her. In the hallway, she brushes lint from her quilted rainbow wall hanging. She made it while she was pregnant, thinking it would bring her luck.
She takes Gladys from her cage and breathes in her sawdust fur. She wishes Danny would come home. She’s avoided his room since he went overseas half a year ago with his missionary group. His walls are still black—static black that hurts from the bad stucco job she did before her husband left. Well, she was mad at the time, understandably, and the stucco turned out a little sharp. The black is from her son’s acting-out stage, before he became born-again. He insisted on the black rug, too.
Mary walks back to the living room and fluffs the pillows on her plush, white sofa. Gladys looks at Mary with brown dismay when she’s returned to her cage. “Sorry, cutie, I’ll bring you out later.” Mary goes down the hall again, into her son’s room. There’s something she needs from it. Rueben lost his parents, too, and the jury, the sentient body, had to pretend it didn’t care. She turns on the radio to a rock station that her son once liked. She reads the Christian books on his shelf, and they scare her. They’re one reason she stays far from his room. Occult Bondage and Deliverance. Demon Possession and the Christian. Angels: Elect and Evil. Victory over the Darkness. He barely tolerated her the last few months he lived here. She pulls out a book, Confronting the Cult. Behind it is a squished plastic bag.
She pulls it out, holding only the outside corner. Inside lie a dozen or so condoms, unused. She drops the bag on the rug. So that’s where they went. And she thought her husband had used them with someone else. She’d counted them regularly, always looking for proof. She sticks the bag back on the shelf, as if the condoms might burst out of their foil, inflate, and chase her out to the ocean.
She unfolds a pair of her son’s brown dungarees and his blue- and white-striped workshirt and arranges them on the bedspread, as she used to do with his clothes when he was little. She gets out tube socks from his top bureau drawer and unrolls them, tucking each sock under a cuff. She starts to lay out a pair of boxers but decides against it. She knows her boundaries. She lies next to his clothes. She says, “Talk to me.”
She lifts a sleeve and waves it at her face. She laughs. He thought she was silly, foolish, really. She jumps up and puts one of his baseball caps on the bed, too. She pats the knee of his pants and sits up.
“I found the condoms,” she says to the pant leg. “Why didn’t you tell us you wanted them? Or tell Dad at least? I thought he used them with someone else. You heard our fight. And it turns out there was someone else, eventually, as you know,” she sighs, “but that’s water under the bridge.” After his dad left, Danny acted like he didn’t care which parent he stayed with, until he was old enough to leave them both.
“You’re bright. You’re smarter than me. How should I vote when we deliberate tomorrow?” she asks his sock. “Maybe I can get sick. That’s what the alternates are for. They’re for people like me, who can’t cope.” She looks at the space where his face would be, but can’t see him; she can’t picture him. She gets up and takes his senior photo down from the hallway and puts it on the bed. She studies his wide forehead, his freckles, and his stern, thin lips. His eyes look kind, though. “Is your acne clearing up in the jungle? Have you met a nice girl?” she asks.
“You’d like the lingo at the trial. You were always a good one to pick up slang. The emergency people, when they look for injuries, they call it a ‘strip and flip.’” Mary punches her palm. “I want to punish the guy. What would you do? He stabbed that lady, his wife, and his son saw. He tried to save her. She died in his room. Would you have stopped Dad if he really came after me—not yelled or sulked?
“Would you have run away? Ha. I guess I know. You ran pretty damn far from me!”
She stands and paces the room, acting like the teacher she used to be. “You’ll like this—the science—or you used to like science, well, we learned how the lung functions and the consequences of his stab wounds. The pathways became open conduits for the blood. It came out the windpipe, out the nose, out the mouth. So much blood. The coroner even said, ‘There were no other disease processes that could’ve contributed to her death.’ Well, there you go. She looked so pretty in her driver’s license. A sweet Filipina lady who had gotten up the courage to leave her abusive husband. Straight out of the headlines, right? And now what? What good will our verdict do? The son’s life is ruined. He has no family except his paternal grandparents, and they didn’t want him to testify. They didn’t want him to bring shame to his family. They looked beaten, too.”
Mary looks at the son she created on the bed. All she needs is straw or newspaper to stuff him with, then her neighbors would really think she was nuts. “I need to relax,” she says. She draws a bath until the water storms the edges and the steam cradles the surface. She dumps her jumper and turtleneck on the floor, takes off her bra, and slips off her panties. She steps into the water, the heat searing her foot. She eases her body into the bath. Her breasts float and her knees stick up. Her toes pucker, but not unpleasantly. She folds her hands over her creased belly as if waiting for the judge’s instructions: to be fair; to consider the evidence; to put personal feelings aside. The boy, the boy. She’s sure the mother would never have wished that her death be witnessed by her fifteen-year-old son. Maybe he came into his life hearing her screams, too.
The prosecutor had asked him, “What’s the last sound you remember your mom making,” and he stood at the stand, his high school football jersey too big for him, and he said, “She was screaming.” Mary rides her soapy finger down her stretch marks. She had screamed when her son was born. “No! I can’t! I can’t!” The contractions had come too fast for her to get over the pain of the ones before. To her shame, her son’s head made her rectum pop outward. She could feel it turn inside-out. She screamed because she thought she’d have to have a colostomy bag the rest of her life. She felt slit in two, ripped in half, and after her son was born her brown nipples cracked and bled at his hard sucking. But she forgave him.
Lust had made her son. She once owned that lust with her husband, who loomed over her and drove a cab and knew how to solder things. His low voice once led her beyond comfort and affection toward gnawing and lunging so quickly that she didn’t recognize herself. She wouldn’t want to. He woke her. She woke up so much that she couldn’t look at their skin pressed together, but he found a way into her, cracking her skull against the headboard, so she lashed her mind into her body again. But he left because of her jealousy. She made a feast of it. She had more jealousy than the man accused in her trial, the one she could help send away for fifteen to twenty years.
After her husband left, she’d pull his stray hairs from a wool blanket they used on camping trips. And now she finds her son’s stray hairs in odd places, like under the TV stand. She must be more vigilant with the vacuum.
Gladys is loose in the bathroom. She runs toward the sink, jumps straight up, lands, and runs toward the door. Popcorning. A happy beast. Prey. The phone is ringing. It goes to the answering machine. Then rings again. Mary dips her head so the tub’s echoes comfort her. She’ll consider th
e evidence at the trial. She’ll put aside her personal feelings. Sure she will. It’s what any reasonable person would do.
MY MARTIAN LAUNDERETTE
Troy paid attention, so things made sense. He stood on a metal stepstool, next to a rattling dryer. His back ached. He weighed 249 pounds (113 kg), which on Mars should have felt like 92 pounds (42 kg, a fucking nymph), but inside the inflatable space-colony dome, he was still huge, lumbering. Colonists were naturally nostalgic, and they had set up the space colony to replicate conditions on Earth, terraforming it with artificial greenhouse gases to make it habitable. No relief for a fat man. At the back of the Laundromat, Troy poked his hand through a hole in the wire mesh covering an air exhaust vent. Someone had inched down through to the other side and cut it out, hoping to steal from the coin-op machines. The space colony was crawling with drug-addicted thieves. All you needed was a clean brain scan to get here, and you could barter pharmas for a baby’s scan from any orphanage on Earth. They always wanted meds.
On Earth’s second day, God had separated the water in the air from the water on land. But on Mars, water was buried underground. The colony pumped and processed it, neutralizing the bad taste. And where water flowed, humans followed. The miners were drawn to the Laundromat not only for the promise of clean clothes but also for the steaming, sudsy water in the machines—it prompted saccharine visions of waterfalls and primal memories, when they were suspended in the saltwater curve of their mothers’ wombs.
The Laundromat, painted Earth’s sky-blue, had two aisles of washers separated by a long folding table. In the back were the dryers, stacked two high. About a dozen chromium miners, all men, were doing their laundry, standing over the machines with their eyes half-closed, humming to themselves. Their faces and hands bore the effects of heavy metal poisoning: mottled brown skin and dark pigmentation on the palms. Mars’s thin atmosphere made the miners buoyant, and they gobbled serotonin re-uptake inhibitors to make them work happily. One sat quietly in a plastic chair. He must have wet his curls in a public bathroom and combed it down. It was greasy on top.
