Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  Others come and go from one week to the next. Maybe, she thinks, they have found themselves not cut out for the work; maybe they’ve been intimidated by the occupants of this evenly lit and colour-coded dungeon which she dresses up nicely to visit.

  She sees one of them quit. He is a bearded man, but otherwise she could hardly tell him from the rest. He is standing beside the door of a toilet, waiting for the reappearance of the inmate he has accompanied there. Except when the inmate emerges he is naked and covered in his own filth. The bearded man responds by removing his own smock as if he is planning to join in the nudity, but instead calls to a colleague and hands him the smock, renounces the job in vivid language, his face crimson under the beard, and walks for the exit. He has never been a parent, Polly guesses, so afraid of a little dirt. His ex-colleague trots after the naked, filth-covered man.

  Today she smiles in what she hopes to be a church-like and motherly way and the boy stationed at the entrance smiles indulgently back. She makes her way through the green corridors into the blue and then red, passing him again, the same boy, in the same white smock, a half-dozen times more, the only difference whether he wears glasses and if he simpers or frowns.

  *

  The door at the corner is open. Inside he sits in the same spot, always. He sits by the window, looking out or seeming to. He is stained in ochre and sweat: his vest, his thin trousers, his feet and neck. On his head there is the thing—the mess of wood and pipework, like a cage, his hair and beard growing wild around it.

  He is completely still, perfectly ridiculous. He looks like an old bear, dead in a trap.

  She goes in the room and he turns to her, like he always turns to her, like he always turns to anyone who puts a toe across the invisible line that keeps his madness in this room from all of the madness in all of the adjacent rooms, in these red and blue and green and yellow halls, his eyes lighting up with eagerness. ‘Morning, Box,’ she says, as his look fades to nothing and he turns back to the window. Outside on the ledge is a round little bird on matchstick legs.

  Polly sits where she can watch Box watching nothing, and from her bag she takes a newspaper and begins the crossword.

  *

  I sit and think, which is all that is required of me, which is plenty, to think and to wait until word comes, which it will. I think with a kind of drifting contemplation, a slow thinking, slow and charged. Thought hisses out of me, thin as a gas, so they can’t even see it as they edge around the corners of the room or swim up through it and tip milk into my mouth or stick me with needles and speak about me like I’m absent, saying how I might be dead and who would know.

  I go breaking hands with _____ in memory, and ride the rollercoasters. We sit next to frying onions and we throw cards into a hat. We trail between corpses for Swagger and we go drinking with Swagger. A drifting contemplation. I go to see Evvie Heydt, and sit with her. I fall asleep with her beside me, and she wakes me. ‘Hello there, happy bear.’ Welcome thoughts of Evvie fill me, they crowd out everything and make sense of where I should be. I know what it is to be still and content. I go back to Evvie’s, and go back again.

  Be careful, some thinking is too much, is too hot and quick, and what is needed is a slow, drifting contemplation.

  There is movement in the room, but it’s nothing—Polly is taking her spot, putting down her bag, big as an automobile, getting out her newspaper.

  I wonder if the skin beneath the strap, which once boiled purple and blistered and itched insufferably, has died, if my top few inches are already dead. If what I am waiting for, one of the things I am waiting for, is for the rest of myself to catch up.

  Drift back into thought, into slow-punctured memories.

  The apartment manager comes back and Lydia keeps him at a distance until she doesn’t any more. She’s pregnant. They’re sitting on the steps counting cars with their son. Drift backwards. Lydia is pregnant, then she isn’t and her husband is still run off and no one knows where. Childs is Swagger’s gunsel, and _____ hasn’t yet run out in the street and raised his head at the sound of the fairground and taken two shots in the back. We fall from the window of a hotel room, where a corpse has taken two shots at us and burned itself up, my hand is cut, and I try to tell _____ that Swagger is making us for the frame. Holcomb is dead, and he has a metal ball that can see the future and I plant it in the head of a crying man who has come to kill him. We bounce Gabriel off the walls and hide behind a hotel curtain and I am smoking a cigarette and patting the ash when _____ is thrown at my feet. _____ looks up at me. Like I am lying in his gutter.

  More movement. A white smock. Come to pat at me and make notes on a clipboard and chew gum.

  Drift into thought. Think about Cain and his ear. Think about going to Jarecki’s after _____ has taken two in the back. Think about carrying a hotel drunk out into the street. This thinned-out thought, prolong it, this gas hissing out from me flooding the room and the device, giving the charge to the device, and all I need to do is sit and think and wait for word.

  Of course once something terrible has been done it can’t be easily undone, but it will be undone, with time. And all that is required of me is to think, which is a lot, which is plenty, and to wait.

  Think about the apartment manager coming home and playing poker. Think carefully and prolong it. The apartment manager comes back and we are playing poker in the apartment that used to be _____’s and is now mine.

  Lydia is watching the game but is mainly watching her husband, who has reappeared one day without explanation. Which is, I assume, the absolute best explanation he can give for the time he has been away. Specifics will do nothing to help his cause, which seems to be a sincere one: instead he comes back without them, ready to take his licks.

  Except, he says (later he says this) there are no screams and no punches. Lydia stays in her bed, where she has shrunken into the sheets. His reappearance doesn’t move her any further than onto her elbows. She lights a cigarette and holds it while he apologises and begs and explains the ways he has changed and some of the reasons, and she doesn’t so much as move the cigarette to her lips, it just burns its way down to her knuckles. She asks him if he means it this time because she can’t take it, can’t take it not even once more.

  ‘First time I ever knew I could hurt her,’ he says.

  Then a week where no one sees them, except when the apartment manager leaves to buy food and more cigarettes. They stay in their apartment and I imagine them like two dogs padding around each other in the street, uncertain, deciding if they’re interested in fighting, or if they can get along.

  It’s a long time before Lydia eats a full meal or tells a joke, or lets her husband finish one of her stories or share her bed. ‘For a long time,’ he says, ‘she wouldn’t let herself cry when she looked at me, then she started crying and wouldn’t stop. And still getting thinner, so thin you couldn’t believe it. Anything I brought her she wouldn’t eat—not hamburger, not buttered toast. She lived on cigarettes and nothing else.’

  At some point they stop eyeing each other warily but they don’t stop locking eyes, and she lets him back in her bed and then she is pregnant.

  And all of the worry leaves her and goes into him. She stops looking at him like she’s expecting the day when he will disappear again. She grows merry all round and rounds in the middle, and the apartment manager worries because she’s old to be going through all being pregnant puts a woman through, and thin too. He lifts her feet for her and puts them on stools and brings her food, and now she eats it, with the calm of an endless field of cattle all comfortably doped.

  I give him the cash for the rent and ask how she is and he smiles weakly and says, ‘She’s never been happier. I think my chest might be about to cave in though. I woke up today to blood on my pillow: turns out I’ve been gnawing on my hands.’ He shows his right hand and every finger wears a bandage like a hat.

  But when their son comes it is without incident. Does someone tell me she is serene throughout?
Maybe I just imagine her as serene because now she is become serene, is always. To think of her any other way is to look at a lake and think it might boil.

  I go back to Evvie’s to tell her all this, how Lydia has forgiven the apartment manager, how serene she has become. Evvie has added another chain to her door and she keeps both of them across her. The door and the chains and the look she gives are all to keep me from her. ‘Why are you still coming here, Box?’ she says. ‘What can I say that would get you to stop?’

  *

  ‘Take care, Mother,’ says one of the boys cheerily as he leaves the room, and Polly smiles sweetly back. It must be nice, she thinks, to have no brain in your head.

  ‘They condescend,’ she says to Box. ‘They think you are born at 100 and all set to die any day at 101, and in these last days of your dotage you must be grateful for any word or glance. A thought from an actual strong and living young man, oh dear oh my aged heart, the sweetest act of charity!’ She fans herself dramatically with her newspaper.

  She puts down the paper, bored with it. She has brought some knitting with her, or there is an apple in her bag too, which she could spend some time peeling and eating. She looks at Box as at a great undusted cabinet, tiring just by its presence.

  As she sits in this empty room with this empty, absent man she’ll find her mind thumbing its way through memories. Some of them she sits quietly with, some she speaks aloud.

  Now something makes her think about Sue Gaston.

  Some of this she says and some of this she only thinks, and it makes no difference what is said and what is only thought for all that reaches Box, sitting heavy in his own leaking thoughts:

  *

  When I was sixteen I had a boyfriend called Peter and Sue Gaston had a boyfriend called David, and we sat the two of them down and explained that we were swapping. Sue Gaston was my best friend at the time and died three years later when she was so bored by her parents’ conversation that she tried to climb out of the window of their car, the first and only car that either of us had ever seen up close or been inside. The car was hardly moving—it was crawling the last few yards of the path to their house—but she slipped and fell with her head foremost, and the most Sue Gaston part of Sue Gaston went straight under a wheel and she popped like a porcupine, her fine legs still in the car, shoes kicking at the inside of her father’s second greatest pride and joy, at that moment rolling itself to a promotion. My mother swore until her last day that she was standing at the sink doing the dishes and heard Sue’s mother’s scream when Sue popped, and that she knew it immediately for a mother’s grief. Swore it even though we lived more than a mile away and I never but twice saw my mother do any dishes.

  Anyway before she was nineteen and she popped like a porcupine, Sue Gaston was sixteen and she had a boyfriend called David, who she was bored with, and I had a boyfriend called Peter, who I thought I loved because I assumed that the first boy I kissed I would love forever. I didn’t realise how absolutely bored of Peter I was until Sue pointed it out to me, in the same way she diagnosed all my feelings for me when we were sixteen, the same way she had for years.

  In my head I had built up a little married home with Peter that looked like my parents’ home and like Sue’s parents’ home, and put in it a score of little boys who looked like Henry, Patrick and Anthony, my sweet little brothers, and one who looked like Christopher, my naughty little brother, and was naughty like him too. I would sit and daydream of being in my little home, like you’re daydreaming now, Box, maybe, if that’s what you’re doing.

  I would be pressing clothes or polishing everything in sight, and one of my good children would appear for a kiss on the cheek or the naughty child would appear with a torn jumper or a bruised eye and I’d smack him raw until he ran off crying to his room. Then Peter would come home from a day at the office, and I would take his troubles and his papers from him and help him off with his coat, and he would be just as much fourteen except that he would be wearing a moustache like Sue’s father’s moustache.

  That was how it was in my head then. It was childish but it felt so much like my future and it very well might have been too.

  So when Sue told me that I was bored with Peter I was very angry with her, because it felt as if she had reached into the space between my ears and knocked down the little house which stood there and flicked away the whole rest of my life. But she was right. It annoyed all heck out of me to find it out, if you’ll excuse my language, but I couldn’t deny that I was bored with Peter.

  She told me that even as she had been growing bored of David, she had been thinking how well the two of us would get on together, and if I liked the idea of it then I should take him from her as a boyfriend until at least the summer, when her cousin was visiting, who was a better prospect for me all together. And by the summer, she said, I would be better at kissing because I would have had David as well as Peter to practise on.

  You have to understand, Box, opportunities to pick and choose your pleasure were absolutely not for everyone in those days. They’re still not, I’m sure, but back then they were particularly carefully managed. There are people who don’t feel they can enjoy themselves if they’re not keeping a close eye on how other people are enjoying themselves, and those people like to put themselves in charge of the world. Picking and choosing your pleasures and your lives certainly wasn’t for decent young ladies like us. We were a pleasure for someone else, made to be chosen or not chosen and that was about the limit of it. Only try to tell Sue that. She was always someone who assumed her own freedom, that was just how she came in. And I was lucky enough to know her and she would take the time to talk me into believing in mine.

  So when she told me that I was bored of Peter, if to begin with I couldn’t see past the debris of the little marriage house in my mind and all the years of life swept away with it, it didn’t take long before I began to remember that I had liked David before I liked Peter, and that he was cleverer at school and also a little more handsome. Sue said that she had seen Peter looking at her legs (we both knew they were particularly good legs) and that in her experience David was inclined to go along with anything, so we should just sit them down and explain to them that we were swapping. And that’s what we did.

  She was right that David seemed willing to go along with anything, but Peter spat teeth to begin with oh yes, and called both of us terrible names too, not quite under his breath. She just let him keep at it until he had begun to run out of words for us, and then told him that he could keep calling us any name he wanted but never speak to either of us again, or he could keep them to himself and be her boyfriend. Next day he was walking down the street holding her hand. By the end of the month, though, she’d got bored of him too, and that was that.

  Three years later, when my best friend fell under the wheels of her father’s car and popped, I felt very lost. I spent a summer checking for her in my purse. I saw her haunting me in mirrors like she’d become a cheap ghost as a joke.

  It wasn’t until after I’d had Evvie—to tell the truth, Box, it wasn’t until I’d raised her, and she had gone off into the world and was making her own way with so much grace and determination—that I realised how much of my friend I had been carrying with me all those years, because I saw that I’d passed so much of her to my daughter.

  *

  She takes the apple from her bag and with it a small, sharp knife. Polly peels the apple, watching Box propped at his window. She looks at the strangeness of the device, the stains on his clothes, the armholes in his shirt sagging so badly she can see the chest within: the curve of flesh like a nippled nose, his drooping breast.

  *

  Think back to Lydia and the apartment, in slow, calm leaking thought.

  Their son comes without incident and Lydia is serene throughout, or I imagine her as serene throughout, and their love for their son comes to them so easily, as if they were built for the task. Both can wrap their baby boy in cloth like it’s a card trick, and then once
he’s dirtied it, both are ready to clean, boil and dry his wrapping—both are always feeding or entertaining him, they sit on the steps outside, counting cars together, pointing out colours to him, their love grows with him. It is something to see. It grows over the top of his head, and spills down onto him. He is a boy raised in a continual showering of excess love.

  I sit in the dead apartment that _____ left when he died. I’m not in the fold of anyone else’s intentions, not any more. I’m alone in my thoughts and I pickle in them.

  There’s no _____ to pull on any yoke with me because I gave him to Swagger, and no Swagger comes to shove me from corpse to corpse, or chase me out into the street and shoot me in the back. There’s only Evvie, and as long as she won’t see me or see sense there’s no sense anywhere. I sit in that empty room in that dead apartment for so long I empty, until I’m nothing but limbs I don’t recognise. I try to lift an arm or curl a toe, and the movement comes, but only at the far end of a long commute. I sit longer and I feel myself sever completely from the body in the chair.

  My mind flails for something to be and with a cold horror that cuts through me tooth to tail, I find I’m Holcomb’s Time Traveller and I sit in my machine with my mind cut loose and my body frozen in place. Thrash free and I’m the red triplets, that spin round each other, then round and into each other and separate out and I hang dislocated across these bodies, and to be in all of them means not to be in any of them and the fear cuts deeper, and my mind revolts again, and I’m still, seated. Not the Time Traveller but the fat clockmaker, every shadow in the room stabbing towards me, terrified out of any hope of movement, because I know what everyone knows: that every sharp edge, from a knife’s blade to the ragged edge of a tin can, has in it a desire for the throat, and worse—that your own throat has its sympathy for every sharp edge.

  *