I try to take a drag from my cigarette, but my hand is shaking. I need something to steady me. My mother reaches for me, and I let the cigarette fall to the ground. She takes my cold, shaking hands into her warm, steady ones.
“It’s okay,” she says. I nod and try not to cry. An older man opens the church door and tells us the service is about to start. With my free hand, I pull my coat tightly around my body and follow my mother inside.
There are no more than ten mourners, the two of us included. I don’t recognize anyone by name or sight, but I figure they must be the relatives who were lost to me many years ago when my father packed up the back of his car and drove away.
I remember the day well. I helped him carry his suitcase, an old thrift-store treasure he and my mother had bought in Old City the first time he went on tour. It wasn’t until later I realized that everything he owned, every instrument, was in the trunk of the car. He didn’t say when he would be back. When he closed the trunk, my mother went inside and shut the screen door real hard. He pulled one of my ponytails and kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m gonna go make some noise,” he said. That’s what he always said when he practiced or when he had a gig. “I’m gonna go make some noise.” I saw him once or twice after that, but after a couple of years he was just gone.
In the funeral program, I’m not mentioned as surviving the deceased. Neither is my mother. We sit in the back of the church, and from the distance I can see the outline of my father’s face, his profile, but no specific features. My mother asks if I would like to see him before they close the casket, and I shake my head. I’ve come as far as I can. I’d buried the idea of my father long ago, and even if I want to be angry at being expected to repeat the task, to do it all over again, I can’t. I know why I am here: this is a moment for my mother; it is her peace that is being made here today, and it is my job to sit beside her as she does it.
She rises from the metal folding chair next to mine and processes down the aisle toward the open coffin. In her right hand, she clutches a small familiar black bag, where she has kept her wedding band. Never divorced, my mother is finally the widow she has claimed to be all these years. At the gray-and-silver casket, she leans over the body of the man she must have once loved the way I once loved Nini, and she whispers something. She lingers there for just a moment before turning around and coming back to me. She makes eye contact with people she once called family. She nods at them and then sits back down.
She takes my hand and speaks to me in a whisper. “I’m not saying you should come back here or stay over there. That’s up to you. But you have a history there now, and it’s complicated with a marriage and death, and I know I’ve been saying different, but those are strong ties. They don’t break so easily.”
The preacher, a willowy man with a long face covered in wrinkles and lines that suggest he is well into his seventh decade, gives the eulogy. They knew each other well, my father and this man. His eyes are wet with tears, and his voice is gravelly with emotion. He speaks of my father the musician and says the way he played the piano was a thing of beauty. He says my father played the trumpet with such heart that after two notes, you knew exactly who was blowing into that horn even if you couldn’t see him. His instruments, he says, were like his children, well cared for and nourished by his passion for the melodies he played. He is crying now, sobbing for a man I can’t really remember and didn’t ever really know.
He starts to leave the podium but then comes back. “Marty,” he says, “didn’t always know how to do the right thing. Sometimes he didn’t even try to do the right thing. But when he did, you could see he had a good soul, a good heart. It was in his music. He made a lot of people happy making that noise.”
My mother squeezes my hand, because she knows I can’t remember a single note he ever played.
After the doctors informed Nini and me of our loss, I went to sleep and let Nini handle everything. If there was a baptism, I know nothing about it. If there was a service of some kind, I did not attend. The details I had cared about were tiny clothes and shoes, bassinets and strollers, stockpiled in Nini’s office, which was soon to be converted into a nursery. It was all gone by the time I was wheeled from the hospital and taken home in a taxi with an armful of sympathy cards and flowers.
When my father’s service is over, we get back in the car and drive in the silence I am so familiar with. My mother looks straight ahead, focused on the road in front of us. I watch the sidewalks, see mothers tugging their small ones, bundled up so tight that their little limbs can do nothing but remain outstretched. I feel the longing that has not left me in these last few months. If I could, I would trick myself into going back, into staying and making a home with my husband.
Once, my mother told me that she had no more tears to give my father. I wonder if I will ever feel the same about Nini, about the baby. I think about the kind of father my husband would have been. Would he have stayed Nini, the boy, or grown into Giovanni, the man? I wonder if I would have been a good mother or if my youthful impulses would have overshadowed my maternal instincts. I wish I could tell my mother that I will stay with her, that I am ready to come back, but I know that leaving an unfinished life with Nini would be no better than the way my father left us behind.
About the Author
Originally from Philadelphia, KHALIAH WILLIAMS resides in Baltimore, where she works as a college counselor and English teacher. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and received an MFA in fiction writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2013 she was selected as a Kimbilio Fellow. Currently she’s working on a novel and a collection of short stories.
Brooke Weeber © 2014
THE INAUDIBLE FREQUENCY OF LONGING
* * *
KIRBY ALLEN
Lab Report #6160891
Title:
The Manifestation of Abstract Affection Properties in Small Mammals and the Detrimental Physical Effects Thereof
Lab Partners:
Me
You (in absentia)
Materials:
The Rat Room under the stairs, Woods Laboratory
2 lab rats, adult and infant
Inadequate sleep
Full moon
Orange mohair cardigan
Tortoiseshell reading glasses
7.5 cups of coffee
2 chipped beige industrial-grade coffee mugs
Blue oxford button-down, still smelling of you
12,495.5 km, the distance between us
86 days
Negative space you left behind
2 letters, unaddressed, postage incalculable
Epstein-Barr virus, untreated for approx. 6 wks
300 ml tequila
3.79 liters Cactus Libre margarita mix
1.77 grams marijuana (“Super Diesel”)
30 mg hydrocodone cough syrup
1 1988 Volvo station wagon, peak speed before impact 17.7 km/hr.
Live oak tree, approx. 200 years old
Emergency room, St. Benedict Memorial
1 pair seafoam-green nonskid socks
Whale-print pajama pants, drawstring removed
2 antiseptic blue hospital gowns
Bleach-scented cotton waffle blanket
20 mg haloperidol
2 mg lorazepam
150 mg bupropion
72 meters of horseshoe-shaped hallway
4 trees (indeterminate deciduous) behind glass
The purple crayon I’m now using to record data
Purpose
Statement of the problem:
There are several.
How can something invisible, insubstantial, and therefore unquantifiable affect the physiology of a biological entity? (Subjects studied: common brown rats [Rattus norvegicus] and their captors [Homo sapiens].)
Property derivation is clear; it is the precipitate of close contact between two (or, theoretically, more) subjects. But it is unclear how this intangible property is affected by physical fac
tors such as time and space.
If this property is imaginary, how can it manifest physical change in the subject(s) exposed?
What is the nature of said property (elastic or inelastic), which seems impossible to dissolve or forcibly sever, even over distance (approximately 12,495.5 km) and time (as yet to be determined).
You left without saying good-bye.
Once one has been committed to the care of a psychiatric facility, he or she is no longer entitled to caffeinated coffee, closed doors, sharp corners, decisions.
Preliminary Observations
You have a better facility for academic jargon, structure, rules. If you were to read this, you would read it with a red pen. But I have a better memory, a fact even you conceded once, and this is how it happened:
You wore an orange sweater under your lab coat the night I met you, two in the morning, bleary-eyed under fluorescent lab lights. Your research project escaped after consuming four of its five offspring. You were three floors and a wing away from your own lab, down in the wood-paneled basement. My department—dingy, forgotten Entomology. I left my moths to help you. We searched the avocado halls, tiptoeing, but our sneakers still squeaked louder than scrabbling rodents.
“No shoes,” you said, quieter than mice. Sock-footed, we found her almost an hour later on top of the upstairs lounge microwave, halfway through her third package of peanut-butter crackers.
“How is she still hungry?”
“It’s not,” you said and took her by the scruff like a kitten.
I followed you to a wooden door, unmarked, under the back stairs. I’d passed it three or four times a day for years and assumed it was a broom closet. The Rat Room. Inside, under a sloping ceiling: stacks of wire cages, rat piss and cedar shavings, two hundred black-glass eyes tracking our movements. We went through them like sheets of paper. You reached into the cage and pulled out the last baby rat, a newspaper shred clinging to its naked pink skin. I held out my cupped hands, and you indifferently dropped the rat in, like a licorice jelly bean.
“What happens now?” I asked.
This time you fastened the mother’s cage door with a padlock.
Hypothesis
[love]: a qualification for this abstract property, which is neither solid, liquid, or gas, but is possibly a sublimation of the body and the yawning nothingness that exists between molecules of matter—a telegraph that very nearly spans the infinite distance between two minds. And though the mind is part of the brain/body/meat, it does not seem to be wholly corporeal; it is the same with this nonmaterial property, tethering one subject to another. And though the tether has no physical presence, if severed, aftereffects are felt in the physical realm, creating a sensation not unlike being hollowed like a melon with a plastic cafeteria spork. Insides scraped pithless, cavernous, a near-complete nothingness, smelling of ozone. What seeps in after is drowsy-making, heavier than tungsten and just as inert, but somehow simultaneously alive and seething, acidic, slowly chewing its way to the outside.
The sudden onset of tether-severance—for instance, when one unsuspecting subject receives a message reading Moved to Abu Dhabi, Thought you should know—may catalyze an uncharacteristically melodramatic, but wholly physical, series of ever-worsening events, which could, hypothetically, result in an involuntary (and completely unnecessary!) observational confinement for a minimum of seventy-two hours.
Procedure
Burns, the blonde nurse with tyrannosaurus arms, finds me in the dayroom.
“Leave your crayons,” she says, but I fold up the construction paper and take it with me. At the nurses’ station there’s a familiar-looking woman, someone I’ve seen in your lab, maybe, but if she recognizes me (my messy hair, double hospital gown, lorazepam eyes), she doesn’t let it register on her face.
Burns tells us to sit in the courtyard. The ward is overfull, but depressives are so quiet you’d never know. When she unlocks the double doors, wet air rolls in, condensing in the bleachy beigeness. I realize that I haven’t been outside in more than two days. We sit at a plastic table in the middle of a balding ten-by-ten square. There are four trees. Smells like Pine-Sol.
“Kimberly,” the woman says, offering me her hand. “I’m your doctor’s intern. Any questions?” She is reading from an index card.
“I’m a scientist, too,” I say, maybe too enthusiastically. I can’t tell, because the blue pill I took after breakfast makes me feel like I’m packed in cotton and talking through a long pipe. “Entomology! Maybe I’ve seen you? I used to have a friend in Neuropsych.” I almost say your name, but I stop talking because her professional demeanor cracks for a second.
Looking me up and down, a cautionary tale, she says, “We’d better get started.” Back to the note card. “Please describe what you see.”
I.
“A moth.” It figures I’d say that. Every single person who sees this inkblot probably says “moth,” or else “butterfly.” Boring. But I stare at them all day, moths, their little dead bodies lined up on corkboard. So I also say, “A two-headed angel arguing with himself.”
No response from Kimberly.
“The Halloween mask my little brother wore in 1989.”
She scribbles something in her notepad.
“A rat face.” That makes me think of you, but I don’t say so.
Your rats flipped switches and navigated labyrinths. You taught them the rules. You were professional with them, but they seemed to like you. They came when you called. In your notebook I once read “Subjects respond best to unsalted peanuts,” so I know you cared.
“Finished?” Kimberly asks.
“What?”
“Next card.”
II.
“A butterfly, there, and two creatures giving each other a high five.”
“What kind of creatures?”
“Donkey-headed beasts, but more like bears. I don’t know. I remember them from somewhere, like a cartoon or a dream.”
“So you’re saying they’re bears?”
“I’m not explaining very well.” I lean back in my wobbly plastic chair. The sunlight hurts my eyes.
“And the red shapes at the top are their faces?”
“I don’t know what those are.” I reach for the card. She places it faceup on the table and slides it toward me. The red blobs look like two obese centaurs, rearing. “Pentecostal flames?” I say. “Is it bad that I’m not seeing a cohesive image?”
“What do you mean by ‘cohesive’?” Kimberly doesn’t look up from her notebook.
“I’m seeing a bunch of disparate things.”
Kimberly shakes her head. “So butterfly, bears, flames?”
“More like wolverines.”
“Is that it?”
III.
“Two waiters, carrying a soup tureen. And there’s the butterfly.”
I guess it makes sense that they’d all have butterflies. Tempera-paint butterflies from kindergarten, the wet construction paper peeling. Squished paint inside—heavy, thick, and satisfying, coating the paper like peanut butter if you used just the right amount of water, but if you used too much, color dribbled onto the table.
I remember the story about your kindergarten class, how you told your teacher about the baby birds outside your window, and the whole class walked single file across the street to your front door, where your mom, surprised, reluctantly let you in. How everyone, holding hands with their field-trip buddies, took turns climbing onto the window seat to see the three screaming, naked blue jays. Only years later were you embarrassed to realize how strange it was to have your entire class in the crayon-scrawled pink bedroom, how unnaturally intimate.
“Is that all you see?” Kimberly wants this to end as quickly as possible.
“The elves floating behind the waiters’ heads are giving them directions.”
IV.
“The head of a wild boar. A baby dinosaur. A rat’s skull.” I wait while Kimberly codes her data.
Remember the day you showed me
the rat skulls in your office, former research subjects lined up on the bookshelf, small to large? The largest as big as a tangerine; the smallest, barely a solid thing at all, a breath of bone, incomplete cranium like an exploded paper balloon. One in the middle: your favorite, Subject 47. “Exquisite cranial sutures,” you said. And they were exquisite—cilium-small bone tendrils reaching out to one another, knitted together like the barbed feet of ivy runners.
I nod my head for Kimberly to continue.
V.
“That is clearly just a bat.”
VI.
“A vagina totem pole?”
Kimberly is furiously coding. Probably she thinks I’m a serial killer. I search around for some other image to latch onto. Where are the butterflies now?
“Are you done?” Kimberly almost smiles. She looks up in my general direction at least. “I’m not supposed to say this, but if you’re done . . . ?”
“Sure.”
“It’s amazing. Your response to the picture. Almost everyone says something like that!”
VII.
I stare at the card for a long time. Nothing. I lean on the table. There are water droplets on the surface. Too late for dew. How long until second meds? I look at the sky, and it is a low gray ceiling.
“Take your time,” Kimberly says.
I try harder. “Faces?”
“Where?”
“Two different sets, maybe. Wait.” I want to leave. My hands are sweaty, and more than anything I need to wash them. “Baby birds on a teeter-totter?”
“Okay.” She holds the card, waiting.
Day One, Year One: Best New Stories and Poems, 2014 Page 18
