The Chair

by Richard Garcia

  No one comes here on purpose. No one wants to leave after they have tasted the waffles at the We Thought We Were in Another Town Café. Felsenfeld started walking out of town as if he were balancing on the white line on the road. Every few steps he would stop, and stand there with his arms spread out like a scarecrow. It was his special dance. He called it The Felsenfeld Movement and said that it would catch on someday. He began to add new moves, slow, underwater-like moves.

  CONFUSION

  The road into Confusion was downhill and coated with ice. I wondered as we slid, my foot not touching the break, if there was only one stoplight in Confusion, and if that was it at the bottom of the hill, and if it would change from red to green. Felsenfeld scrunched low in his seat, an unlit Pall Mall dangling from his lip, the visor of his cap over his eyes. If I wake up dead, he whispered, I’ll kill you. I remember reading in the guidebook that the original name of Confusion was Quandary. As we spun in circles through the intersection I noticed how quiet it was, how slowly we turned, or were we absolutely still, and Confusion was revolving all around us? This seemed like a good time for a little known fact. I said, Did you know that the first toilet seen on television was on Leave It to Beaver? Felsenfeld did not answer. He was asleep, an unlit Pall Mall dangling from his lip.

  NO ONE

  Felsenfeld changed his name to No One. No One climbs a cliff to take a baby eagle for a pet. No One sneaks tiny monkeys past airport security, safely hidden in his overcoat, until they get out in the men’s room. No One and his brother are on hands and knees, climbing stalls, chasing little monkeys. His brother says, I see how it is with you now that I have chased monkeys on my hands and knees in the airport men’s room. Verily, I could have told him. And if you drive across the desert with No One, he won’t let you drive. You might end up chasing the car, as it rolls on its own toward a crater that has become a dry lake bed. You might end up out of gas next to a wooden, hand-lettered sign: ALKALI FLATS—100 MILES FROM NOWHERE, 2 FEET FROM HELL. No One sets his car on fire. Dining out with friends, he shows off his skill at eating small sections off the rim of his wine glass. It was then we realized that one day No One would tire of this world. But No One had already disappeared. It was after I said, I’ll call you tomorrow. Tomorrow came many years later. But by then he had changed his name to the less formal Nobody.

  VOWELVILLE

  Arriving at last in Vowelville we were greeted by the Vole. At least he said that was his name. But Felsenfeld said to me later when we were at the Vowelville Motel, where we were the only guests, That man is not the Vole, the Mole or even the Bole. It was all the same to me. That night I was startled out of sleep by a startling sound. It was unsettling and indescribable, like restless leg syndrome. What was it? Felsenfeld was no help—he just slept on. But something had changed in the world. Something, perhaps in the atmosphere, had been rent, and would never be the same. Many years later, after I learned that Felsenfeld had died, I read about the Great Vowel Shift. Swineherds who said potato now said potahto. Churlish marauders would tilt their chins up and say rahther, rather than rather. Now I know what Felsenfeld had known all along. Something that night had changed and would never be the same.

  MISSING ONE

  You lay the paint chip labeled Missing One on the table. You pick up Blueberry and Sweet-Talk. But face it, Missing One suits you. You’ve always been Missing One. The one no one remembers in the photograph. The almost gray of what you wished you had said but did not. Some say Missing One is just slightly tinted white. That there are many like it. That there is even a Missing Two, and a Missing Three. But Manuel, the house painter, given to superstition, never speaks its name, just referring to it by its number, 001. He has learned to ignore the elastic holes he sees opening and closing in the air whenever he pries open a gallon of Missing One. He knows better than to believe what his senses tell him: no matter how appealing, Missing One does not really smell like banana milkshake. He wonders if Missing One has a sound? Would it be like the coin dropped into the abandoned mine shaft at Los Pozos, Mexico? A deep, deep hole inside a cave. No guard railing, no ladder. You toss a peso into the darkness and wait. And wait.

  HEMLOCK 1-7563

  H is a piece of ladder. Or a short kid afraid he won’t grow. He gets his friends to pull on his arms and legs. There is a popping sound. It seems to him that after that, he begins to grow. The E is another piece of broken ladder. 1 is a stick. Never very many toys, but plenty of sticks. A rifle, a bow, a sword, a cane if he is wounded in the war. 7 rides his bike, coasting downhill with his feet off the pedals—Look at me, he yells, One hand! Wakes up in a hospital. His buddies, a 5, a 6 and a 3, all standing around the bed. Who are they? He does not recall their names. The smartass kid with his cap on backwards. The chubby one. The boy with the small waist and curves who looks like a girl. Back home, in his room, he plays detective. He can poke a skeleton key out of a keyhole; it falls on the newspaper he has placed under the door. Someone is dialing. He listens to the clicks of the dial, counting. H is four clicks. E is three. One click. Seven clicks. Night comes striding, dark, starless, cold. And he remembers the cry of the peacocks.

  THE THREE

  The bear did not return as he had promised. Parachutes bloomed and drifted silently into the darkness of that moment just before sleep, nodding as if in agreement.

  It was then that the boy remembered there were three things he was supposed to remember. Did one go this way, or was it that way?

  Maybe one got lost like the soldiers returning from the war and entering the wrong houses. But the houses were almost like their own houses. They recalled towers in flames, torn banners dangling from minarets.

  But still, the bear did not return. Sometimes the boy could sense him in the rustle of leaves at the edge of the forest. He imagined him standing against a tree in a clearing, waiting for silence, for attention, as if he were about to tell a story.

  The bear did not return as he had promised. So the child never left the cottage. Never Left the Cottage became his name—that’s what the hunters called him. Never spoke, never answered, although sometimes he did hop about the room like a sparrow on the grass, a tiny sparrow about to take flight.

  Someday he would remember and tell them about The Three: three ways at the crossroads, three words to say or not to say, or maybe which three stars to follow.

  They noticed that when light came into the room, not just daylight, but a beam with spirals of dust suspended in it like a diagram, the child welcomed it like an old friend, and moved his lips, silently.

  The bear did not return as he had promised. So the child never left the cottage. The tree refused to grow.

  Grandma Nana decided to cut it down. She swung her axe into its bark and it bled. She decided to leave the tree alone.

  The boy dreamt that he was the only one who knew the answer to the riddle: The bear, the cottage, the tree. Or was it the stars, the crossroads, the words? He set off to find where everyone had gone. When he looked back, it seemed the tree was much taller.

  83

  Eighty-three words leap from their horses. Eighty-three words all lie down, each bearing a sign on their chest. One forgot his hat, one forgot a feather. Not words, but Little Big Horn battle reenactors at a sushi restaurant. No wonder they were confused. How can a horn be little and big at the same time? A man sitting beside me turned to face me. Can you lower your voice, he said. Surprise, it was my deceased father dressed up as Crazy Horse, that dandy.

  There are times a man has to choose between a feather and a bullet; my father told me this. I’ve made a list of all the things he told me that were important, and this is first. Strange as it seems, there are eighty-three things on the list and he died on his eighty-third birthday, eighty-three days after my mother passed. There’s no explanation for this. And yesterday I was dismayed to discover my car is parked eighty-three steps from my front door. In numerology eighty-three stands for eternity and a half.

  They say Crazy Horse was late for the
battle of Little Big Horn because he kept changing his outfits. Finally he had it right, his cream buckskins with the red tassels. At the end of each tassel, a crow feather. His braves, who had been waiting impatiently, were relieved to see him come out of his tent. At that very moment in eternity, my father came out of the bathroom of the sushi restaurant.

  When Crazy Horse was murdered, eighty-three braves, in war colors with long headdresses of eagle feathers, danced around his body. The history of eighty-three is written on the back of a sushi menu in downtown Los Angeles and memorized in Japanese by each sushi chef. That’s what I love about eighty-three—the color, the history. The only other number with a comparable story is one hundred and eleven, yes, one hundred and eleven. But there’s so much heartbreak there it makes me sob to tell.

  IT’S LIKE

  It’s like the phone rings but the person on the other end has forgotten how to speak. It’s like trying to hold on to clumps of dollar weed, but a giant hand is shaking you off. Or do you fall into space, getting smaller and smaller, and when you drift over the moon you look down and see three dead Russian cosmonauts lying on their backs as if they were sleeping? Is that what’s bothering you, Bunkie? It’s like you’re in bed looking at the clock, which has become a red patch pasted on the ceiling. And the alarm goes off and it’s 3 a.m., it’s Stars and Stripes Forever and a deep voice shouting, Buck up! Get a grip! Isn’t this, you think, when most people die? And you gasp, your throat sucking in air with a series of snorts. Aren’t you sorry now that you said breathing was overrated?

  LIKE TWO PEOPLE

  I fell into bed like a cascade of fiberglass filters or more like a bowl of cold oatmeal. Tossing and turning was like pulling weeds in warm rain, until my wife said, Go read a book, one that calls to you like a phone ringing in an abandoned airport. Then I slept as if I had never existed and jumped out of bed like a harlequin astride a palomino. I shimmied sideways in the shower like a car skidding across five lanes of rush-hour traffic. Then I wrote a poem that tried to draw Rodin’s Balzac from memory. My wife came home for lunch and handed me a note like a blind bank robber. It said, Please mow the lawn like a stevedore braving the gauntlet of challenge and I will love you like an angel that has forgotten the sky. I made her an omelet but she was afraid to touch it, as if it were a sleepwalker standing on a construction girder twelve stories high. I lay down to nap on the couch, forgetting that I had left my baseball cap on. It remained on my head while I slept like a cat in a banana tree. My dreams were deep and uncontrollable, as if I were like two people, twins, both accountants, both in love with each other’s spouse, also twins.

  JUST LIKE TWO PEOPLE

  I got out of bed like a decomposing century of death. I had been in a dream in which we were together like a steel daisy and a rose made of razor wire. Then I took a shower, all the while thinking of you, and my thoughts were a robin frozen on your lawn or maybe a snowman in a blizzard. So I drove to work, which is actually next door to the bedroom. My office reminded me of a blood-soaked hairdresser—at least that’s what I thought, until I wrote a poem that hit me on the head like a book falling out of the sky. Later I rode my bike through a park that was like a hot iron I thought was unplugged. All the bare trees made me think of Vlad the Impaler, but the birds were chirping like explosions in reverse. Or was it bald trees, or bards, or tresses instead of trees? Bike—poem—thoughts of you—all in all, a successful day. Time for a nap, and I slept like a duck in a phone booth. Again, I dreamt of you, picking up where we had left off. You and I together just like . . . like shards of falling glass. Except that I was just like two people, someone named You and a person named I. Once again my brain waited for me to wake like the basket waiting beneath the guillotine. But it was too late; already I had begun interviewing myself. I was also a panel on Keeping the Faith. I was the audience too—sometimes bored and skeptical of my answers, sometimes amused, but cautiously so, like a lion tamer with narcolepsy.

  TRISTES TROPIQUES

  Talk about shadows had overshadowed the afternoon. Then a tropical evening with light rain was delivered by mistake and we felt giddy. As if we were on vacation, and about to meet someone interesting. Like ominous music, the shadow of the earth dissected a crater on the moon. As if the waiter moving so inconspicuously among us was a spy. In one corner, poets from Los Angeles were discussing traffic. But you, you were like the rain, not caring if you disappeared into the ocean. Oh well, I thought, as I brushed a tiny bit of cake from your cheek and placed it on my tongue, even a shadow can cast a shadow. There is a lost shoe on the bottom of the ocean. The shoe is right next to a claw-foot bathtub. In some poems the shoe and the bathtub would not speak to each other. The poets from Los Angeles were discussing secret shortcuts. The shoe thought it had a lot in common with the bathtub, both being hollow, singular, and somewhat out of place. How lucky we were to step out into the evening that had been delivered to us, even if it was a mistake, to let the frothy chill of surf stun us into feeling alive. We stood knee-deep in the ocean and raised our empty glasses to the rain.

  UNDECIDED

  A man could not decide if his belt was too tight or too loose. Sometimes, in bed, he could not decide if he was hot or cold. He put on his long-johns and socks. He took them off and lay under the blankets, a thin layer of cold perspiration coating his skin. On the treadmill, he did not know if he was walking forward or backward. It was the same when he was stopped in traffic and the cars started to move and his car seemed to be drifting backward and he would slam on the breaks. There was this place he remembered that bothered him because it did not exist except in his memory. He had dreamt about it, perhaps several times, or he had dreamt once that he had dreamt about it several times. A run-down building in the Mission district of San Francisco, divided into cheap apartments. The walls were painted white, the doors red. Mildew, doors slamming, worn-out carpet. Maybe it was a place that he had forgotten and then dreamt about. He thought, if I woke up in the dark and did not know where I was, I could spit to see if I was upside down or right side up. He thought, if I were a spider blown across a mirror on a front lawn I would think that I was sliding against the sky.

  SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN

  Get up off that couch. Flap your arms. Do The Chicken Dance. Do The Chicket. Do El Pollo Loco. Go out into the yard where the bamboo grove leans on its side, and the wind, spinning in a circle, goes clack-a-clack-a-clack. Pretend you’re dodging bullets in slow motion. Now it’s time to become a famous painter you admire, for you have stepped into a painting of the backyard; each blade of grass stiff with intention, each blade of grass awaiting further instructions. Now jump rope and flap your wings. Say, Miss Mary Mack Mack, won’t pay you back back back. Jump like you’re doing easy-overs with your best pal, Ernie. Okay, go back inside. Stand in the middle of the room, in front of the television. I know, it’s broken, but turn it on so you can hear it sizzle, swish, and hiss. Now make like you’re Anthony Quinn in La Strada. After a year of not even thinking about her, you hear that Gelsomina, little clown who played the snare drum, who loved you so, whom you mistreated, is dead. You’re at the beach. Kneel in the sand; beat the cold water with your big wings. Stand and stumble around in your chicken feet and cry, cry like you’ve never cried before.

  THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING BLONDES

  Blondes are disappearing from the world. Just yesterday, one sat cross-legged on my desk looking all blonde and dangerous. She was staring at her nails, which were painted deep blue. She seemed just about to speak when she disappeared, leaving her fox stole behind, its little glass eyes staring up at me.

  My red-headed wife confesses she’s a blonde. And her name is not really Katherine, but Linda. That’s OK, I never knew my first wife’s real name until I was walking out the door with my golf clubs slung over my shoulder, while the cabdriver, claiming the right of salvage, gathered my neckties from the front lawn.

  In a country where there are no blondes, even fake blondes can make big trouble. My wife, looking ov
er my shoulder as I write this, says, You’ve never had a lawn, you don’t golf, and you don’t even know how to tie a necktie. Go color your roots, I say, the blonde is showing through.

  The government of Sweden has convened an emergency session. Icelandic police are gathering up Icelandic blondes and taking them to an undisclosed location. Back at the office I lean back in my chair. I wonder why it’s only blonde women who are disappearing. I open up the newspaper: no more blondes in Minnesota.

  I look through the files in my computer. Blondes are disappearing from my poems: the one who had tried to poison me with developer fluid; the one I ran over with a motorcycle; the one who was last seen in the Amazon jungle smearing mud on her body that contained flecks of gold; the one who tempted me to follow her out into the rain when I was in bed with the flu.

  Just then my wife, roots freshly dyed copper-red, strides into my office. She sits on my desk as if she owns the place. Stares at her cobalt nails.