He ran a hand under the smooth swell of his gut. Neither he nor Rondelé was hugely fat, but in the year since Mother died the bathroom scale had come closer and closer to bowling a perfect game. Food had never been an issue when she was there to cook and to act as the center of every meal, but now they ate mostly junk that came as bags within boxes and seemed to be all there was in the pantry and cold bins. Shared meals had been replaced by individual gorgings—just one of the many ways the house had changed since she’d gone. Now her TV was silent, the roque court went unvisited, and her beloved birds, once allowed free roost in the rooftop gallery, had flown and not returned.
It was different than when Father passed nearly a decade ago. Montal missed him dearly, but he’d been an intermittent presence, like fog, whereas Mother was constant, the Earth. She had named them, raised them, and bequeathed to them her faith in a cosmic Grand Plan. Father and Uncle Herbink had shown them the house, taking them ever deeper into the warren of corridors, but Mother had been the heart of the family, in every sense of the phrase. Without Father, they still made a circle. Without Mother, they could only make a line.
He stepped away from the refrigerator. No dessert tonight, and no meditations on family relations, swine or otherwise. Instead, he would blow glass. The warm glow of the furnaces was soothing, and he loved the feel of their heat baking first one side of his face and then the other as he turned among the tools.
He climbed the spiral staircase in the kitchen to the fourth floor, puffing like a steam engine. The glassblowing studio was down the long main hall, past the wood shop and the archery range and the radio room, which was muttering softly to itself on various open channels. Once inside, he fired the furnaces and set about mixing colors. When the glass was near white with heat, he dipped his pipe and drew out a blob that ran like honey. He marvered it and then blew steadily, puffing it into a globe. Blues and greens swelled like nebulae. Working carefully, he rolled on brown mountains and a thin screen of white clouds, then spun it, re-fired it, and sealed it. After the globe had cooled, he held it to the light: a miniature world, safe and unchanging.
The next day was an office day. Soon after Father’s death, Mother began putting in monthly appearances at the company started by his great, great grandfather. There was nothing for her to do, she admitted, but they’d asked her to come, and trips into town were a chance to get a dose of the world. She had tried several times to convince Rondelé to join her—Montal himself had zero interest in running the company—but he said his onetime desire to fill Father’s shoes had died along with him.
When Mother got sick, she made them promise to continue the trips after she was gone. They had honored her request, although there seemed to be no purpose; the company ran itself. Typically they spent their visits reading or snoozing in high-backed leather chairs. Last month Montal had overheard an employee complaining of her office-drone’s pallor and spent the afternoon converting one of the photocopiers into a flash tanner.
They met in the kitchen for breakfast. Montal slopped up five packets of syrupy instant oatmeal and Rondelé, still wearing the black headband, prepared his customary repast—a half dozen boiled eggs—on the huge iron stove. When they were done he plucked them from the water, hissing and shaking his fingers. He loaded them into an old cloth bag and said, “let’s go.” They went out the side door, which opened onto a path leading through Mother’s rose garden, left tangled and unpruned since last fall.
The house sat on a broad hilltop, surrounded on all sides by forest. Just beyond the garden, the path plunged directly into the trees. As they stepped into cool shadows, Montal glanced back. The house bulked against the sky, a wild conglomeration of styles. Sharply peaked gables gave way to Mansard roofs, ramparts stretched between cone-capped turrets, and chimneys rose here and there like shoots from an onion. There were columns and archways and balconies and cupolas, the geodesic bubble of the greenhouse and the slotted dome of the observatory. Windows of all sizes and shapes caught the morning sun, which pooled like butter in the hollows of toasted bread. The entire structure was green with red trim, but the colors had faded and the surface was bubbled and peeling. He wondered if it needed to be painted, and then wondered who had done the job in the first place. The questions made him mildly uncomfortable. Such thoughts only occurred when he was leaving, thoughts about upkeep and origins and how the house, big as it was, could contain all its rooms and passageways.
After twenty yards or so, the steep angle of the slope lessened. Rondelé opened the sack containing his eggs, making anticipatory smacking sounds. He ate one, cracking it on his belt buckle. When he tried the next egg, it made a sharp clink, and his shoulders slumped. “Glass?” he asked. Montal smiled.
High in the branches, birds trilled and a brisk wind turned the new leaves. They followed the path, the dark earth crossed in places with fallen branches. As always, once they’d gotten started a rhythm set in and he felt like walking all day. It used to seem that the forest went on forever. He could remember nature hikes with Father that lasted days without them coming across another soul. They rarely ventured into the woods anymore, though, except for the handful of visits to the office. Now his brother, clumping alongside, said, “Remember fishing trips on the big lake? All those Murray cod we caught? We should go again some time.” Montal agreed, although he wondered if it would still be possible to find that lake.
They took a right fork and a few minutes later emerged into sunshine. A set of ancient railroad-tie steps led down the side of a grassy hill. Below, a new housing development was laid out in serpentine fashion, square plots bracketing the road like vertebrae on a spine. At the head of that development was a bus stop. They arrived just in time to catch the eight forty-seven.
The office was like a cheerless banana split: yellow cubicles topped with white swells of fluorescent light and Exit signs for cherries. Moody, the bug-eyed manager, met them at the door. His bald head was beaded with sweat. “Thanks so much for coming, gentlemen,” he said. He walked them to an empty conference room. “Here you are. There’s a stack of manuscripts on the table, Montal, if you want to look through them. The media division is developing new TV pilots. Any ideas you’d like to contribute would be wonderful.” He turned to go, and then hesitated. “Rondelé, I’d love to give you that tour I’ve mentioned. I bet you’d like to . . . you know, to see how the whole operation fits together. What do you say?” As he spoke, he wiped his palms nervously on his hips, like a gunfighter holstering imaginary guns.
“Not today,” Rondelé said. He glared at Montal. “I’m weak from lack of protein.”
When Moody was gone, Rondelé sacked out on the floor, and Montal read manuscripts. Most were about love, family crises, or finding one’s place in the world—standard fare. He snoozed and dreamed of God’s abacus, rising into infinity like a great beaded wall. Around one o’clock Rondelé shook him awake and they went down the hall to the tiny kitchen, which smelled like stale crackers. He found several microwave meals in the freezer and blasted them on high. As they were sitting down to eat, a female voice boomed, “Ahoy, strangers!”
He turned and saw a tall, pale-skinned woman in a baggy yellow sweater and a purple skirt. Her hair was pulled up on the sides in a clip, leaving black bangs nearly obscuring her eyes, which were large and dark and vaguely bovine. She was holding a hummingbird feeder, and binoculars hung from her neck. “Mind if I join you?” she asked, taking a meal from the freezer.
“Oh, we’re having a little meeting,” Montal said.
“What are you talking about?” Rondelé poked him. “Wake up. You’re still asleep.” He pulled out a third chair. “Have a seat.”
“Thanks. I’m Eve.” She sat between them, so close that Montal had to slide his own chair back to make room. “Do you know,” she said, “that this is prime hummingbird season? Some will tell you it doesn’t really get going until two weeks from now, but they’re just not paying close enough attention.” She lifted the feeder. “This year I�
��m going to watch them at home and at work.”
“Sounds great,” Montal said, and turned his attention to his food.
For ten minutes the woman chattered about hummingbirds and spring and the changing constellations in the sky, and Rondelé hung on every word. Montal ate, musing over ideas for his own TV pilots. He was halfway into his second meal when his cardboard tray skittered away across the table. Rondelé reeled it in with the hook and line he’d tossed and it plopped to the floor, bleeding cheese.
“Fishing, huh?” Montal said.
Eve propped her chin on folded hands. “Well that was interesting.”
Rondelé looped an arm protectively around his food. “We’re on a diet.” He explained the concept and she laughed, a deep, donkey-like haw-hawing sound. She rocked and clapped her hands with delight.
“Brilliant!” she said. “Where did you get the idea?”
Rondelé pointed. “Big brother.”
“I love it,” she said. “And I want in.” She patted her soft belly. “As you can see, I could stand to shed a few skins.”
“Well,” Montal said, “you do look a bit like a snake.” He pointed at her skirt, made of some shimmery fabric. “But—”
“You got it,” Rondelé said, and hooked her macaroni and cheese. It joined the cordon bleu on the floor. He took the last bite of his own meal and smiled. “Lunch is over.”
“Yes,” Montal said, standing up. “We should get going.”
“Now hold on,” Eve said, picking up her feeder. She waggled it at Rondelé. “You said you’d come out and help me spike this thing.”
“You did?” Montal said.
“I did,” Rondelé said.
“Let’s do,” Eve said.
They left. On the way out the door, Rondelé said, “I’ll meet you back in the office in ten minutes and we’ll head home.”
After they were gone Montal ate the part of his lunch that wasn’t actually touching the floor. He looked out the window, but apparently Eve’s cube faced a different section of brownish grass, because he didn’t see them. He returned to the office and paged absently through manuscripts. It was a lot longer than ten minutes before Rondelé came back.
At home, Montal fiddled with circuit boards in the electronics lab and Rondelé floated on a raft in the pool. That night they had plans to build a clock in the short hallway leading to the skydiving chamber. Montal wanted to see if they could make an accurate floor-to-ceiling chronograph using the tiny battery-powered mechanism from a cheap clock. He’d dug up some large sheets of balsa wood and small metal weights, and they were supposed to spend the evening cutting and balancing the hands. But Rondelé didn’t show, so Montal went looking for him. He wasn’t on the rink or in the bowling alley, nor was he in his bedroom. Eventually Montal found him in the greenhouse, walking among the orchids. “Come on,” he said. “It’s clock o’clock.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. I don’t think I’m up for it tonight.” Rondelé paused. “I’m going to the office tomorrow.”
“What? Why?”
“I’m in love.”
“Oh, brother,” Montal said. He gave up on the clock and got a snack instead.
The next morning, Rondelé left to catch the bus alone. At breakfast he ‘accidentally’ emptied the ink from his pen into Montal’s cereal bowl, but Montal let him eat unmolested; Rondelé had someone else to play with now. After he was gone, Montal forced himself to spend the morning swimming laps, the sound of his thrashings echoing loudly off the domed ceiling. Following a large lunch eaten amid the click and clack of the model train village, he went to the library to take a cut at writing a TV pilot. He started and discarded a number of them, and then rapidly fleshed out a story about the exploits of an eccentric billionaire who subsisted entirely on human breast milk. “The Mampire” employed a team of wet-nurses, had an unassailable immune system, and served the richest cheesecake in the city. Montal combed through it for subtext—the milk without the cow?—made a few changes, and put it up on a shelf.
That evening, Rondelé couldn’t stop talking about Eve. She could ride a unicycle. She grew tomatoes the size of cantaloupes. She told jokes about the Roman Empire. And she’d gotten others from the office to join the diet. At lunch she rigged a rubber band catapult and launched a woman’s sandwich when she went to the kitchen for extra mustard. It caught a guy nicknamed Egg behind the ear and converted two new dieters.
“Sounds great,” Montal said. And if Rondelé planned to put in so much time at the office, he might as well stay home. Tonight he thought he’d do some work on the twenty-thousand piece puzzle of a needle in a haystack. In fact, if Rondelé wanted they could start it together.
“You go ahead,” Rondelé said. “I want to be alone for a while.”
Over the next few weeks Rondelé spent nearly every day at the office. In the evenings he helped with projects, but his mind was elsewhere. Once when they were collecting honey in the hive room Rondelé forgot to close the door and they had to wait two hours for all the bees to come back. Another time he spilled acid in the chem lab and it ate through the floor and down into the music room, blistering the finish on one of Mother’s favorite pianos. Rondelé went all out for the diet—the trap door he cut under the kitchen table was his most spectacular interruption—but each morning after breakfast he was gone.
One night in late May, Eve came home with Rondelé. Montal was in the prosthetics laboratory working on an idea he’d had about using small counterweights to help stabilize a knee joint at standing rest. He heard footsteps in the hall, turned to ask Rondelé for a hand holding the leg, and there she was. They filled the doorway, pressed shoulder to shoulder, he in jeans and a brown shirt, seedpods clinging to his hair, and she in another gaudy, iridescent skirt, face ruddy and eyes sparkling.
“Hi, Montal,” she said. “Missed you at the office lately. Rondelus Maximus and I have gotten more people dieting, did he tell you?”
“So glad to hear I’ve started a movement,” Montal said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m in the middle of a project.”
“Need any help, Ricardo?” Rondelé said.
“Not a bit. Fine by myself. Eve, such a treat to see you again.” He turned his back.
They left, the sound of their voices and laughter echoing back down the corridor. He spent another hour trying to get the weights to engage and retract according to minute changes in the center of gravity, but the proper balance eluded him. Finally he slammed the leg onto the workbench, notching a small divot into the heel. He was wasting his time; no artificial limb could adequately replace the original. Besides, he was hungry.
He stomped down the back stairs to the kitchen and took a giant bag of chips from the pantry. From the rear parlor he heard the murmur of low music. He peeked through the doorway. Eve and Rondelé sat together on the couch, legs intertwined, watching unshaven detectives slouch through gray city streets on Mother’s TV.
Eve saw him and patted the couch. “Come join us.”
Montal sat in his armchair, bag of chips propped between his knees, and crunched. Shards of oily potato crisps flew from his mouth, but he didn’t brush them from his chest. On the screen, a woman was sobbing, probably over something to do with thwarted love. The Mampire would be ten times more gripping than this pap, he thought.
When a commercial came on, Eve whispered, “Hey, Montal.” He turned his head, and she gave him both barrels of the gigantic water gun she had pulled from behind the couch cushions. One stream hit the mouth of the bag of chips, filling it and making a sound like raindrops on dry leaves. The other stream, slightly off center, arced directly onto his crotch.
Rondelé guffawed, rocking back and forth like a demented chimpanzee. “Oh, ’Cardo, she got you!” Eve lifted her bangs to reveal Rondelé’s black headband and winked. Montal scooped up a handful of wet chips and flung them at her.
“Whoa!” Rondelé said, sitting up suddenly. His soda spilled on the floor and foamed weakly.
“I’m sorry,”
Eve said, blinking rapidly, her large cow’s eyes wet and confused. “Rondelé said it was okay to—”
“Well, it’s not.”
“Oh.”
They sat in silence while the TV detectives bullied a suspect in a garbage-strewn alley. Montal studied the grain of the rough beams girding the ceiling and stroked the pillow of fat beneath his chin. Rondelé looked anxiously from him to Eve, fingers twisting at the buttons on his shirt. After a minute, Eve cleared her throat and wiped the clots of potato from her face and arms. “Well,” she said briskly, “at least your snack is finished. Now you’ll have room for dinner. Why don’t you eat with us tonight?”
Montal stood suddenly, the footrest of his chair banging down hard enough to ring the springs inside. His bag of chips sloshed to the floor. “Why don’t you just go home?” He wheeled and strode from the room.
“Montal!” Rondelé called after him, but he was already in the kitchen starting down the spiral stairs. Let them cuddle and laugh and wet each other’s pants; he had better things to do. He went to the aquarium in the sub-basement, stopping for a bucket of herring in the bait closet.
For nearly two hours he tossed fish to the sand tigers and hammerheads, watching them arrow across the tank and swallow up their shimmering prey. Eventually he turned out the lights and returned to the kitchen. It was empty, but the good smell of cooked chicken lingered. He looked in the refrigerator. On the middle shelf was a plate of breaded cutlets, scalloped potatoes, and broccoli, covered in plastic wrap. A folded piece of paper bearing his name sat on top. He closed the door.
Eve came home again a few days later, but as soon as Montal heard her loud, strident voice he retreated from the kitchen, where he’d been tinkering with an ATM modified to dispense slices of various cold cuts. He expected Rondelé to come looking for him, perhaps to report what a wonderful juggler or scuba diver Eve was, but they ignored him. After an hour in the library flipping randomly through Cramer’s “World of Parasites,” Montal gave up and went to find them.
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