In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  Well, that wasn’t true. Every time her mind was invaded like this, which by now must be thousands and thousands of times, something was deposited. This time it was hopelessness. She didn’t want it. She had no choice but to just let it be and try to think about something else.

  The kids’ tire swing had hung from the thickest branch long after they’d both grown and gone. Inez tried and failed to remember the moment it had come down, the dividing line between existence and nonexistence. Year after year the swing had hung there, its graying rope loosened and retied to accommodate the growth of the limb. Maybe somebody had taken it down without telling her. Maybe it had finally just slipped away without her being aware of it. Or maybe it hadn’t seemed important at the time; she’d been noticing how some perfectly ordinary events and the perfectly ordinary absence of some events stood out in relief now that she looked back on them.

  She did clearly remember the day Ken had planted the tree, no taller than he was and its trunk no thicker than his thumb. The house hadn’t been finished yet. They’d just had their first anniversary. She’d been pregnant with their first baby, though she hadn’t known about the baby or the miscarriage yet. She’d been painting the kitchen, pleased by afternoon light across new sunflower-yellow, when someone else’s thought had fluttered among her own like a swatch of bright ragged fabric. There had been words and an actual voice, …get this damn thing in the ground, so she’d known it was Ken, get loose, go to her.

  Embarrassed and excited by the pictures that accompanied the words, she’d come to a stopping point with her painting and climbed down from the ladder and gone to get ready for him, bathe and change clothes and dab cologne behind her ears. Only when he’d shouted to her from outside that he was going into town for something, and then hadn’t come home till after midnight, did she realize it wasn’t her he’d been thinking of.

  Still whistling half under her breath, though the bird had stopped, Inez noticed how the stripe of the tree shadow crossed the sill, the brown-and-beige oval rug, the dusty floor. Vaguely she wondered whether the bright blue sky sectioned by the tree was the same sky she’d seen for forty-three years from this window, or whether sky could be said to be one thing sometimes and then another while still being sky, like a river, like a life, like a person’s mind.

  You could get lost in ruminations like that, and why not? More and more it seemed to her that she didn’t altogether live in this world any longer, that time and space were changing shape, that she was floating even as her body grew stiffer and slower by the day. Maybe this was what it meant to be old and getting ready for death.

  Focus was seldom required of her anymore. Even with all her visitors, some more welcome than others, though their visits felt like acts of charity or job assignments, she still spent many hours a day, a night, a week, alone with her own thoughts and the scattered thoughts of others—a mental soup, sometimes thin as broth, often a glutinous porridge shot through with shreds and chunks and lumps of foreign matter.

  Inez drifted with this cloud of speculation. There was no reason not to.

  Some time later, loud chirping brought her back. Bossy and strident, it was probably a jay. Not for the first time, Inez wanted to know more about the mental processes of other species, regretted she’d never swum with dolphins or worked with gorillas, wished she could have tapped into the minds of Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall.

  But she’d never had anything to say about what alien thoughts passed into her mind, could neither invite nor refuse them. As she used to grumble about menopausal hot flashes—too bad you couldn’t order them up while you were waiting for the bus on a cold winter morning-—it was too bad none of Mama’s thoughts had ever come to her that she’d been aware of, or maybe knowing what was on Mama’s mind would have just made her feel worse. Too bad she hadn’t been able to pull answers to the eleventh-grade algebra final exam out of the mind of the smart girl who’d sat behind her—although she’d probably have felt guilty about cheating for the rest of her life. Too bad she hadn’t been able to read ahead of time her son’s decision to invest in that fly-by-night company, or Ken’s intention to keep up his wanderings. More an annoyance than either a gift or a curse, telepathy, if that’s what it was, had never been what it was cracked up to be.

  For a long time as a child she’d assumed everybody else got those snatches of words and songs and images, too. During her teen years she’d decided it was just her over-active imagination, or maybe a sixth sense she’d developed in a botched attempt at self-defense from growing up with Mama that told her something was wrong but never what or why and so made her more nervous than if she hadn’t known anything at all. Often, she’d worried about her own sanity, but consulting a doctor would have meant telling someone about it, and of course she couldn’t do that.

  No matter what she called it, it kept happening. Single words and phrases would appear, so truncated and out of context they made no sense, mental pictures of places and faces she’d never seen, entire paragraphs in what might have been foreign languages or just gibberish. Once she’d picked up part of a plan to blow up a train; she’d never heard that this had actually happened, but the saboteur could have been anywhere in the world so maybe the news just hadn’t reached her. So many spouses toyed with the idea of infidelity that it got boring. Other people’s love and loyalty and courage and compassion buoyed her through the times when she had little of her own.

  She’d known that Papa knew he was sick. She hadn’t known he’d be gone that day when she came home from school. For a long time, and again these past few years, she’d tried to keep herself open to communications from him, but none had ever come.

  The jay was complaining. She didn’t blame him. The birdfeeder was always empty now because she couldn’t keep it filled or take it down. Even at this time of year when the birds could find their own food, it was a constant reproach.

  A train went by, its diesel hoot nowhere near as expressive as a steam engine whistle, but still nice to hear. When that had been a passenger train, and then when hobos rode the freights, Inez would try, just for fun, to snatch thoughts from the people speeding by, but she never could.

  She thought she was a little hungry, as hungry as she ever got these days. What did she feel like eating that she had the energy to fix? Maybe just the spaghetti from the Meals-on-Wheels lunch, not half-bad, and easy. Absently whistling, she sat and considered what to do.

  Thousands of miles away in south-central Florida, Daniel entertained the idea of suicide.

  Like everything else these days except her own fundamental loneliness, Inez’s sense of alert was muted. Her body, already stiff from age and Parkinson’s, didn’t clench. Her heart didn’t beat any faster, adrenaline didn’t spike, her ears didn’t perk up. But she stopped whistling and her mind was spattered with residue like a cold white comet trail, a few disconnected words and random images (rope), music all beat and no melody.

  The thoughts not her own that came into her head were not always this clear. As a child she’d almost never known what they meant or whose they were, though from the vantage point of adulthood and experience she’d been able to identify some of them—numbers from Papa’s store ledgers, a few musical notes she recognized much later in a Duke Ellington release all full and new and quite beyond her, once a terrible detail which, when the truth about the concentration camps came out, she’d had no choice but to believe had been flung into her mind from a Nazi’s.

  Usually these weren’t messages and she didn’t have to take any action, though she still worried over that Nazi thought, whether she could have stopped something. They just came and went, bubbling up or zipping through, and she’d learned to live with them.

  This time, though, it was her own great-grandson Daniel to whom she’d once been very close, and Daniel was considering suicide, and Inez had Daniel’s phone number. She eased herself to a sitting position, placed her feet side by side on the floor, stood up, exhaled, and, whistling thinly, began the labor of walking th
e twenty or so steps into the kitchen where her address book was in the drawer.

  But it wasn’t. In the drawer were rubber bands and paper clips and thumb tacks—all tools for attaching one thing to another, she noted wryly. But the brown spiral-bound book—with years’ worth of names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, anniversaries—had vanished.

  The panic that threatened whenever she couldn’t find something, which was often, made her clumsy now as she dialed her daughter. The machine answered, so at least Inez had remembered Donna’s number right. “I was just sitting here looking at the apple tree and I got to thinking about Daniel,” she said as if the apple tree and Daniel had anything to do with each other. Acutely conscious of her voice being recorded, she wished she could edit. “I don’t seem to have his number. Have you heard from him lately?” The chain of connection that would have to work here, down through the generations from herself to her daughter to her grandson to her great-grandson, was almost more than Inez could keep straight in her mind. And she didn’t have to—once set in motion, it would happen or it wouldn’t, without her. She finished as always with “I love you,” hung up, and stood there for long moments not even whistling, frozen in place by Parkinson’s and fear.

  Inez had long experience with being wrong about this. Nothing had come of what she’d taken for that young soldier’s attraction to her. Neither of her children had ever shown the slightest real-life interest in missionary work despite what Inez had picked up. All the music that had appeared in her mind during her lifetime had not made her, as she’d once hoped, a composer or a musician or even a respectable shower-singer or whistler. So she was probably wrong about Daniel, too.

  The day moved forward without her. Time stretched behind and—a much smaller distance—ahead. After a while, through no effort or will of her own, she was again able to move.

  She took the spaghetti out of the microwave too soon and ate it tepid from the carton. Like most things with tomato sauce, it was better the second time, quite good, in fact. She ate it all and finished the green beans, too; spaghetti and green beans were a funny combination, but it tasted fine. Having started with the gingerbread when the meal had been delivered, for dessert she happily chose chocolate-chunk from among the four flavors of ice cream in her freezer and savored half a dozen tablespoonfuls without bothering with a bowl.

  Neither Daniel nor his father nor his grandmother had called back. Maybe the phone was out of order. Inez picked up the receiver and was both relieved and worried to hear the dial tone going strong. She had email addresses for them, too, but had given up on the computer her grandson had set up in the spare bedroom and several times tried to teach her to use. The idea of messages flying through space should have made perfect sense to her, but did not. Daniel had told her he could stream music through his computer, too. She didn’t have to understand it to like the idea of streaming music.

  The day outside seemed lovely, and Inez had been thinking she might take a walk to the corner and back. But, as so often happened after she ate, her energy had plummeted. It seemed particularly cruel that such a basic necessity as eating should make her feel so terrible, that the very act of sustaining life made life so hard to live.

  Fatigue was fast overtaking her. To protect herself against waking from a nap into a silent house, Inez managed to find the TV remote among the couch pillows. No sense in changing channels since she didn’t know what was on at just after four on a weekday afternoon and it didn’t matter anyway. There was music of some sort and that soothed her. But worry about Daniel and about what would become of her in these last years of her life was with her as she sank into heavy sleep and busy, vivid, meaningless dreams from L-Dopa and her own subconscious that would leave her even more frightened and fatigued.

  It was 6:22 when she awoke. Her back hurt and her need for the bathroom was urgent. Working to get herself off the couch, she registered that the news was on and the light was wrong. It was not until she was washing up and changing clothes that she realized it was morning and she had slept for fourteen hours. Suddenly clear-headed, she stood still, awestruck by the sensation of having one foot in this world and one in another.

  “…lost in space.” The TV announcer was chirpy even in his attempt at solemnity. Inez turned on the electric toothbrush, gratified to find the switch easier to work this morning than usual. “…casualty of humanity’s quest for knowledge,” she heard when she flipped the switch off, and then, clearly, a name: “Casey Liebler,” such a young-sounding name. She’d seen it in print but couldn’t recall having heard it spoken aloud before. Probably she had, though—-this was the current big story, the latest public tragedy.

  Already Inez had forgotten his real name, the one a pair of loving parents had given him. She’d think of him as The Lost Astronaut. What was lost could be found. There was always hope. Almost always.

  What broke her heart was that no one waited for him, no one cared in a very personal way that the astronaut was lost. His parents were never mentioned. A year before he’d gone into space the lost astronaut’s wife and little girl had been killed in an amusement park fire. Everyone knew this the way everyone knew George Washington had had wooden teeth and a wife named Martha. Everyone knew this sort of the way Inez knew things—from words flying through the air.

  She became aware of dampness. In the mirror her hair and clothing appeared dry, but her cheeks were wet, her eyes red. Obviously, she’d been crying. But she never cried, even when she wanted to, even when what she needed to do more than anything was start crying and not stop. She couldn’t cry. It was a personal failing. And right now, she hadn’t been aware of even feeling sad. She was whistling soundlessly in what she recognized as a nervous habit but saw no reason to break.

  A man’s pale face precipitated out of the depths of the mirror, somewhere back of her head, his features distorted under plastic shielding. She started to look behind her. That’ll do no good. Had the thought been hers or his?

  “You worry too much, Nezzie.” Ken had been talking with his mouth full. She’d told him a thousand times how much she hated that. It wasn’t just the mastication itself, but the thoughts that went with it, and with sex, going to the bathroom—primitive wordless mental processes of desire, hunger, relief, anger. Being on the receiving end was beyond uncomfortable. Ken had been filling himself, and spitting some of it out at her. “Stay out of other people’s business.” HIs biscuit had dripped gravy onto her best tablecloth. If she said he was criticizing her, he’d just deny it and twist it into another example of how she took things too seriously. But she knew the truth—more than a few times she had heard the aggression in his mind when he said things like that. He waited for her to answer. She just looked away and whistled very softly. That drove him crazy.

  Ken faded from view, and she was alone at her dining room table, staring at his empty chair. He’d died—-she wanted to say twenty years ago, but she’d been saying “twenty years” for the longest time and it must be much longer now. He’d had a heart attack. She hadn’t known it was coming. He’d had many secrets, though a lot fewer than he’d imagined.

  “… yellow roses … bells … why can’t I say what I feel … alone so long … goodbye …”

  Someone somewhere was lost and desperate. Inez had the familiar and pointless impulse to cover her ears. She could feel lost and desperate just fine all on her own, thank you very much. Now the actual ringing of bells came to her, which might be her own memory—she couldn’t place it, but she’d heard a lot of bells in her life. Donna, in fact, had been in a children’s bell choir for a while; Inez floated in that happy memory until it was interrupted by music she didn’t recognize, surely from a place and time she’d never visited, strange instruments and strange voices and alien language and tune. Music was always nice. During the periodic long stretches when she’d had no thoughts but her own, Inez had most missed the alien music.

  “ … hope her mind … didn’t take a turn …” Inez recognized the particular warmth:
that sweet girl from the agency who did shopping for her. The girl was about to knock on her door. Wasn’t she a few days early? Or had Inez lost track of time? It was her biggest worry, that she would lose time, the idea of it, the working of it, and she’d be wandering through space with no clear memory of anything, until death made her land.

  Whistling, Inez made the mistake of opening the door before the visitor had a chance to knock. “Oh!” said the girl.

  Dotty old woman… Which of them had thought that? Inez resorted to talking with no thought at all. “I came out to look for the paper and see the flowers and that silly barking dog across the street? And what do you know? There you are?”

  “Hello, Inez. How are you today? Are you doing okay?”

  Inez made herself laugh. “Oh, fine, fine. I … don’t think I expected you today, did I?”

  The young woman gazed at her, no doubt evaluating. “It’s your grocery list, hon. There are some things on it I don’t quite understand. I just thought I’d better check.”

  “Let me see it.” Inez held out her hand. Was she being a little snappish?

  The list was in her handwriting, so she knew there hadn’t been a mix-up between clients. She studied it.

  Cheese

  Furniture polish

  Stamps

  Bottle orange juice

  Glittering dust

  Crackers

  Faulty navigation

  Raisins

  Distant

  Wheat bread

  Tea

  Signal

  Cream

  Lost

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Oh, honey, it’s okay.”

  “Why, my penmanship is atrocious!”

  “Is it?” She touched the list, and when Inez didn’t let it go, gently pushed one corner of it down and twisted her head and shoulders around so she could read. “I didn’t think the handwriting was so bad.”