by Ted Sanders
Julie’s cell phone rang from the bedroom, shrill and tinkling, once, twice.
“That’s you,” Shad said.
“I’m aware.”
Julie held her elbows in her hands. She stared at the TV, her smooth forearms like wood. There was tapering meat beneath skin there. Shad made fists, rolling the tendons in the long thick bellies of his wrists. He fingered and smoothed the nearly empty tube of crackers in his crotch.
“Toothache,” Julie said, and she held her hand up, and she held her index finger and her thumb apart in what was, Shad knew, her best approximation of lion tooth size. Julie looked at her own hand as she did it, her head slightly cocked, her lips parted. Shad reached deeper into his lap and snapped the remaining stack of crackers into halves, quarters, crumbs, inside the plastic tube. Julie turned to him on the couch, her long legs all up underneath, Indian-style.
“And, yes, okay, you might say there’s no excuse for the first one,” she said. “Because how would he have known, right? About the softness of people. But people are easy to catch, of course. For lions. And maybe that first person was especially soft. The softest, creamiest person in the village. Somebody old, or young.” Julie chewed on nothing, made smacking noises in her wet mouth. She made the vaguest little bent-finger claws with her little lifted hands. “And that lion had never had such good food before, but all the rest of the people after that were never as creamy, as tender, and he just kept trying and trying, but no other villager was as good. As gristle-free as the first.” She dropped her arms into her lap. She pulled her collar out, glanced down into her shirtfront, let her collar snap back. She said, “I’m just saying, we don’t know.”
Rory washed himself against the wall.
Shad said, “What is gristle, anyway? Is it bone or isn’t it? Gristle. Gristle.”
“I wonder how it would be if the Pope was attacked by a tiger,” Julie said. “What he would think, or do. How he would taste.”
“Anyway, I think you made that up. All of that.”
“If Rory was a tiger, how big would the Pope be?”
Shad looked over at Rory. Rory wet a paw and drew it over his head, down to his mouth again and back, over and over, a smooth oval, cleaning himself. The fur on his head stuck up like dead grass. Julie clucked at him, but he paid no mind.
Shad surged forward on the couch. “Scram, you fuckhole!” he yelled. The couch tipped up, rocked. Julie threw her arms out. Rory flickered instantly up onto all fours, strung with tension, ears and eyes. He stared at Julie. “Get the fuck out!” Shad shouted, his neck swelling with effort, and then Rory was gone, his paws crackling through the carpet. The couch fell back on its feet.
“Fucking Christ, Shad.”
Shad worked the remote. He went to the channel where they tell you about all the other channels.
“I mean, goddamn lord,” Julie said to him.
The landline rang. Shad said, “What the hell was that stuff? What do we even have around here that’s like that?” He smoothed his eyebrows down. The phone was ringing. “Are you getting that or what?”
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“And where the fuck am I?”
“I don’t know, you’re just being Shad, Shad.”
The phone stopped ringing. The answering machine clicked and droned on the counter, gave its long beep. There was a pause and then Ed’s voice came through, like it was coming through paper. It sounded like Ed’s voice, but it was so high, so canned.
“O-o-o-o-kay,” said the voice. Shad flipped through the channels. A clumsy, heavy sound of disconnection came through the answering machine.
The answering machine said, “Sunday. Four. Thirteen. a.m.”
They watched TV. A couple was cooking, a woman washed a car. A crowd gathered outdoors.
“It smells like cat piss right here,” Julie said after a while.
“Where, the couch?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I keep smelling it. This whole apartment.” She sat up. She drew up her nose, drawing in thread after thread of air, letting it out through her mouth. “I think I do.”
“It’s the couch.”
“I don’t know. See, now I think I can’t smell it.”
Shad lifted his face into the air and sniffed. “That cat. I wish he would get rid of that thing.”
“Do you smell it?”
“No. Maybe. That cat pisses on stuff, I know it.”
Julie sat back down, facing Shad. “There, there it is. I think it is the couch. Or I don’t know.”
“That fucking cat. I wish he would get rid of it.”
“Why am I even here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“I know it.”
“You could have come out of me.”
Shad pushed buttons on the remote.
“Think about it,” Julie said, and she laid her hand inside her lap, her fingers curled around her inner thighs, her thumbs angled out to frame the rounded V between her legs. She lowered her chin. She pressed her knees out and down, away from one another. “Think about it. You could have come out of me.”
Momentary
I SHOULD MENTION: SOMETIMES IN THE HOSPITAL WHEN I AM wandering heavy around my sleep, I think about all the beautiful sheltering trees in my neighborhood at home, and the spastic indecision of squirrels in the road.
HERE IS CELIA STANDING AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER, LOOKING out our window there, or down at the knife like a needle in her hand. She is sewing a tomato into pieces. The knife is one of our big television knives, forked at the end and mouthed with menacing, ornate serrations. The tomato came from the garden. The sound of the blade across the counter comes like scratching at the door, and as Celia makes it she looks out at the sideyard, down at her work. The knife is so fine the tomato barely bleeds, and my question is whether you could ever hear the sound of that flesh being torn gently apart beneath the scratch of the knifetip across the countertop.
The woman outside my room owns a soft busy sound herself. She makes it in the hallway and I wake to it in the morning; she always rises before me. It’s a small sound she makes, but it fills the room like the breathless voice of an insect, whirring. It reminds me of Celia’s toothed knife being dragged lightly and quickly down off the edge of a cutting board, over the soft buried bone of meat.
I get up quiet and I go to the door. The woman outside my room is there. Her hair hangs in blinders, and I can’t see her face. She stares down onto her hands together below her belly. They curl into a cloven shape, her fingers bent over deep, nuzzling one another at the nails. She works her hands back and forth swiftly and they blur in a little safe space there barely larger than themselves, like they are busy making fire. The faces of her nails slide across one another, whisper and click, seem to hum. The sound is trickling down around her feet, feathering through my door.
I drift back, let my bed pull me back in. As I settle there, the sound the woman makes stops just for a moment, starts again. Celia doesn’t set the knife down until her tomato is diced into pieces smaller than fingernails. A small pool of seeded pulp stains the striped countertop. I wonder how close any single piece of tomato has come to a cube now, and what shapes it shed to become that way.
CELIA HAS A STORY SCAR, ONE THAT HAS A SIMPLICITY I ENVY. I never tire of hearing her tell the story to people; I tell it myself when I can. I tell it to Theresa in the hospital, in the common area where she has been sent by Dr. Lane to listen to me: how when Celia was very young she had two of those cheap swingsets in her yard, two swingsets back-to-back, and one day when she was about six she was swinging very high, crazy high I imagine, I imagine high enough that you could feel the feet of the swingset lurching just up off the ground—this sensation, in fact, was her motive. And a neighbor boy was on a swing behind her, I don’t remember his name, and as she describes it I have this very vivid picture—silhouetted against the sky—of the point between the two swingsets where two robustly moving swing
s could nearly meet in the middle, high off the ground. On that day the meat of her hanging calf met the squared bolt protruding from the side of the boy’s swing, and the bolt was driven through her skin just in that instant. Or maybe: her skin was driven down over the bolt. It doesn’t matter, really, because it’s at this point in the story, when Celia is telling it, that she always makes the earnest gesture that mimics the two swings coming apart—her drawn-flat hands sweeping out and down to the sides. She says she remembers looking down into the grass, seeing a piece of her flesh there. She calls it a chunk.
And now after all this time a delicate drop-shaped patch the size of a mouse decorates her leg, like a patch of oil on water, and I find it a miracle that you can see one or two thread-sized veins running through it. If you were to press your thumb lightly against it, you would find that it feels like the skin on top of pudding. It gives, I’m not sure how much. I don’t like to touch it, or I love to. I can scarcely bear to think of it.
I tell Dr. Lane this story, too, early on. Who knows what he’ll make of it. Probably he thinks it doesn’t apply to my situation, because the accomplishment itself—Celia’s injury—was so improbably orchestrated that it had to have been an accident. In this sense, he doesn’t appreciate me.
I AM MADE TO MANUFACTURE WORDS HERE, MOSTLY FOR Theresa. Dr. Lane sends her to me—banking, I think, on Theresa’s sturdy brand of bovine maternalism. And I do talk to her. I tell her she should think of my experience as something akin to the slight, understandable slipping of barely imperfect gears, that I was unlucky in a way, encountering an instant of lost traction under unfortunate circumstances. Circumstances, you understand, bloated with potential. Theresa listens to me talk. We sit together in the common area, and Theresa has a way of angling herself against the table, of looking around the room, of humming in a warmly distant monotone that makes it seem as though we are out together at leisure, talking our way lazily out of lunch, meeting for the first time or the thousandth. She is very intelligent, a constant surprise; I weigh all my words with her like a druggist—the same as she and Dr. Lane do for me. I tell her things she should know, how for instance you might find yourself at the kitchen counter with a long perfect knife in your hand, and how it seems such a deadly thing, and how your soft belly is right there, such a soft and vital thing, and how it would take so little. So little time, so little effort, maybe just a lack of effort. I describe the laughable relief of putting the knife down, walking away. Theresa hums and she makes her faint nod which is not a yes. She is devastatingly unattractive, strictly utilitarian. Like burlap.
I say to her, “It seemed like such a danger, you know? More than danger: a threat. To even be there like that. It was like I’d armed myself, and it was a thrill—suspecting I was someone I couldn’t trust.” I hold up my good hand. “Not a nice thrill, though. I was pretty scared. A thrill like falling in the dark.” I stop talking. Theresa sits in her implacable plastic chair.
“It happened fast,” I tell her.
She blinks at me. She points vaguely at my arm, her finger circling as she points. Her voice is always sure, I love and hate her voice, and she says, “This didn’t happen to you, James. You did it.” She dips her head as though she is giving me another nod, and maybe she means it as a prod—in the way, for example, you would urge a child into water.
“Hm,” I say.
Theresa scratches her nose. “I mean, god,” she says. “You did this to yourself, James.” She emphasizes did this. She says it like you would say cancer. The rest of the sentence is warm.
I slide my forearms on the table. I make them as symmetrical as I can. I should mention: I am missing my left hand, and what Theresa means when she talks to me now is that there was an accident in which I cut it off. Or, at least, this is close to what she means. I spread the fingers of my other hand carefully, until they hurt. I see that my bandages need to be changed. Theresa is very homely, did I say that? I shake my head at her. “You keep saying that,” I say.
She sighs. “Well, James.” She looks around the room.
I’m never sure we should speak to each other this way. There is something of an impropriety about our talks, I’m sure I don’t imagine it. She must sense it too, because we always work our way into silence. And there are things I would like to tell Theresa. Details that might interest her. Maybe, for example, she would like to hear about how I recall shouting for Celia, and how Celia finds me in the grass going black, and how her face comes rushing in and swims away at the same time. How I remember that last turgid look on Celia’s face, like something detonating powerfully in a stubborn steel box. How she says nothing, but her hands are busy and sure. Maybe I could describe for Theresa how my skin surrounds me, toiling to become new, or why I am conscious that every hair is oldest at the tip, or what I feel about water’s way of delivering weight. But by the time I can muster these thoughts, I am back in the doorway of my room. When I go in, the woman outside says what she says: “Oh, you’re that one.” I tell her what I always tell her, which is that I might be.
The lights go down. The woman outside my room reassures me, frightens me. My nights here are long and perversely private, here where people are so unabashedly preoccupied with their own obsessions, and I wait to re-emerge into morning, myself or something like it. Here is myself, my bed here, and sometimes the woman outside my room and always the hours before I wake, myself. At home Celia saves our plastic grocery bags, keeps them in a cloth tube that hangs on the refrigerator, elastic openings at both ends. You push the bags in through the top and pull them out the bottom when you need them. The tube bulges, crinkles. I tell Celia: it’s like a little time machine.
“What?” she says.
“The thing, the tube. The bags,” I say.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The bags, you put a bag in the top and the same kind of bag comes out the bottom, but really it’s a different bag. A bag from the past. Like maybe the bag you brought ice cream home in six months ago.”
She frowns. She is looking up over my head, around me at the walls or the ceiling maybe. She says, “I don’t keep those bags. They get wet.”
I think myself light as a feather stiff as a board. I try to imagine my bed into motion, into flight, into any gentle rocking, but it’s hard because my hand itches terribly. That hand. I don’t mean the wound itches, although it does—I mean past that, further from me. It happens to me sometimes. The itch is always specific, fascinating. Sometimes it’s a desperate hot irritation, jumping up between two fingers, or just an insectlike disturbance on the back of my hand, but right now it’s a deep pulsing jangle that slowly swells in the fat of my palm where the thumb roots, just southwest of where that last curving crease would be. That palm line, I don’t know the name. I check my other hand to be sure of the geography.
It’s not surprising, of course, that so cruel a trick could be played on me, but it keeps me awake. The hospital is otherwise very quiet. As far as I know, others sleep. I lie in bed, and I try to scratch my itch along the same stream of thought that makes it rise in the first place; sometimes I can. I could mention too: sometimes with my left arm I still reach up unthinking in the dark for my hair, or to smooth my eyebrow or pick at the corner of my mouth, and just as the expected moment of contact passes I get a chill I can’t really describe; maybe it’s like a ghost passing through my face. Or sometimes, horribly: my face is the ghost. Or one and then, quickly, the other. Confusion burbles thickly then, heavy inside me like a desperate, symptomless sickness. I tell myself it’s a problem of perspective.
The fold of bedsheet I rub between my fingers is slick and thin, not like the flannel sheets on our bed at home. Those sheets at home, I like them; they have always been thick and warm, the bed’s own pajamas, but you can’t run them between your fingers like I am doing now. And anyway I don’t sleep any better on them, I don’t know why.
It’s not that Celia is always there; she is an adversarial sleeper, but I don’t m
ind. She takes, for example, the shape of a lowercase h across the bed, and I become an r. I understand that she needs this; there are rumors of the trouble her back gives her. After she’s asleep, she stretches her long smooth slender thigh out into my part of the bed, holds her knee there just where I would lie, and it means there isn’t much room for me but I don’t mind. I wouldn’t ever want her to know about it. I never sleep much anyway, and furthermore it seems like a vivid element of our romance—that I would keep a secret from her about herself, I mean.
Sometimes at night I get up, get away from her, go to the bathroom and fill the tub in the dark. In that kind of total dark you can only get in windowless, appliance-free rooms. There’s a night-light, but the bulb is forever burnt out.
The tub fills in the dark; the faucet becomes too hot to touch. The tub makes its intestinal sounds, the sinking pitch of fallen water rising. I try to gauge how near to the top the water comes, using only my hand because that’s all I have, and I marvel to imagine what lies my fingertips tell me as they reach down, stretching into the heat rising thick, into the water more hot than wet, or maybe they haven’t reached the water yet, or maybe they have been in water all along. You think your fingers will know, that they would never lie to you about the difference between water and air, but they are dumb. More than half mute from all their listening. Too vigilant to engage in gossip.
So I slip into the tub, into the watered dark, into warmth like skin. I go under until even my mouth is under, water sleeping around the feet of my nose. I pretend that I exhale so softly that I make no ripples. I rock my head back and forth, let the water come conducting into my ears, listen to the faraway pipe sounds, the sounds of myself against the porcelain, the sounds of blood bringing breath to my eardrums. Mostly I lie still, mostly water myself. Something like sleep comes to me, or maybe I am being taught that time runs differently through water, like light.
