The Normals

by David Gilbert

  "I'm not normally called sweet."

  "Maybe I'm screwed up enough to consider you sweet. And I like you too. But my project here, I don't want it following me home. I'm not interested in strays. It seems to me this can only work if it stays my own secret. Otherwise, it becomes part of my past. I don't want that. And you're sweet, funny, and smart, but you're young, and you're looking for something big, something huge and special, something life-changing, whereas I'm looking for something much, much smaller, something I don't think you'd even notice." Gretchen stretches and yawns like tiredness is a waterfall she's stepped into. "Now I'm exhausted and need to get some sleep." She turns off the TV, the bedside light.

  "So that's it?" Billy asks in darkness.

  "What?"

  "You have no feelings for me?"

  "It's not that. It's more a matter of scale."

  Billy gets up. "It's so cold, your little history project."

  "The past is a cold fire but at least it burns." Hearing herself, Gretchen can barely contain—not glee, Billy thinks, her lips are too lopsided, her eyes too bright with understanding, as she curls up in bed and begins gathering sheets to her stomach, hugging them the way some people sleep, Gretchen alone, Billy standing by the door, hand on handle—no, not glee, he thinks, and not melodramatic snickering though the words certainly slant in that direction and she knows it, and he knows it, as he glances back in the style of a forever-leaving lover, but there's no ridicule in her face, only—Billy opens the door and is greeted with light which slants into a third of the room, never touching Gretchen though the messy edge bleeds into her like a distant tucking-in—what, he wonders, what is there, as he waves more good-bye than good night (fingers frozen in half-mast), and steps into the hallway, gently closing the door behind him and walks back to his room, passing Rodney Letts who insinuates cunt-licking with his tongue and looks hell-bound for Gretchen's room and his own piece of history—what was he feeling, sad, lonely, sympathetic, thinking of the past coldly burning in Gretchen and her barely contained resignation.

  "Rodney," he says.

  "Yeah?"

  "In all honesty, if you go in there, I'll break your leg."

  36

  THURSDAY AND the AHRC is giddy with lasts, every hour kissed good-bye and every minute tied up with a bow, the air outside, the life surrounded by that air, beckoning like a memory soon to be revived. Billy stands by the pay phone. Twenty dollars bought him fifteen dollars in change from the usurious Nurse Clifford/George, plus he has his own meager pocketful. All totaled, he has nearly seventeen dollars. As he slips in the quarters, he can smell the heady odor of the U.S. Mint, the thousand touches of commerce, the daily transactions between customer and till and the laughable inconsequence of such tender.

  He dials (513) 555-1313, the number like one of those movie numbers that instantly bump into the elbows of the audience—That's fake —but in this case puts Billy in contact with Cincinnati information which then passes on the number for the Whispering Pines Assisted Living Center. Billy dumps in the rest of his change for credit. A receptionist answers and he asks for Doris Schine's room. "Is this Abe?" she asks pleasantly. "No," Billy says. "It's his son." The receptionist embraces the moment with quick connection. Billy waits, waits, waits for his father to pick up. He's determined to say nothing of value—no rolling his tongue around suicide, no final sentiments, no explanations, no teary good-byes. Nothing is on the menu except hello. He just wants to hear their voices, have a sense of Mom and Dad, be in the same room with them even if telephonically. He wants to feel the weight of what might soon happen.

  Finally, the phone—dropped-knocked-dragged-banged—is answered.

  "Hello?" Billy says.

  Silence.

  "Hello? Hello-hello-hello?"

  Breathing, Billy hears labored breathing, or not labored but dismissed with groans, as if every lungful is a small disappointment.

  "Mom?"

  Still nothing.

  "That's you, isn't it?"

  There's licking, or lip smacking.

  "It's me, Billy. Is Abe there?" Stupid to ask a question, Billy realizes. It's miracle enough that the rare synapse fired and she answered the phone. Embrace that, he thinks. But the licking is disheartening, like a treat gone sloppy, so Billy talks against that sound, talks despite the empty sound of his own words. "Abe must be at the airport, or on his way from the airport. Do you know that? He hangs around the airport when he's not with you. Strange, huh? Yeah. So. Anyway. You know I'm sorry about all this. Really. If I'd known earlier I would've done something, or said something, but I didn't know earlier, I didn't know until it was too late. My fault, probably. I'm sorry I'm not by your bedside or something, but Abe's there, or usually there, and I think I'd be in the way. I'd spoil it for the two of you. I'm just calling to say . . . I hope what you're going through doesn't hurt much. I hope you're not feeling anything, you know. I hope it's like sitting on the beach and looking at the ocean, something like that, though I'm sure it's not, but I hope it's quiet, peaceful. You know Abe wants me to come home to help with the, well, the end, I guess, move it along for the two of you, but I was calling to say I don't think I can do that. Not that you can leave a message. Besides, I might beat you to the punch. But I wanted you to know that I've been thinking about you."

  Yes, he has been thinking about her, thinking about her face in particular and how it must've changed over the last few years, Billy aging her in his head, like those children who go missing for years and are beckoned with computer renderings of how they might look right now, after adolescence, the softness gone hard, the parentless life. Doris was never beautiful but she was shamefully vital, the sort of woman who would never complain unless all the air was gone and even then she would muster a deep breath and make due. Stout, red-haired, and easily freckled by the burning sun, she would've survived the Oregon Trail without a word. But Doris in bed, holding the phone, lives without context. For Billy, her face is only a concept of time, like a pumpkin opened up for Halloween and enduring the front porch until New Year's Eve. He can no longer remember what was carved. All he can recall is the blade.

  Billy huddles the pay phone, his breath fogging nickel. "You know what my strongest memory of you is?" he says. "I'll tell you and then I'll hang up because all I wanted to do was say hi. But my strongest memory, the memory I can close my eyes around and fall right back into, is when I was eleven years old and the next-door neighbor, their daughter, Becky, Becky Malone, remember her, remember when she had chicken pox and you insisted that I go next door and play with her so I might get chicken pox too and be done with it. I was like no way because she was older and maybe I had a tiny crush on her, having her so close, you know, as a neighbor, even though I never said a word to her, but I was kind of in love with her. I always thought one day we'd talk and she'd have that oh-myGod-you-were-under-my-nose-the-whole-time sort of reaction. Anyway, I remember you dragging me next door, you ringing her doorbell, me squirming under your grip, and Mrs. Malone answering—she was not a fan of our family, then again, who was. You know people called our house the crypt because they thought of us as being sealed up inside. Every time the doorbell rang and nobody was on the other side, that was a dare. Well, Mrs. Malone, she sees you, sees me, has a sick daughter and dinner to fix and she's annoyed with what-do-you-possibly-want. That's when you ask if I can play with Becky. She's like, no, she's sick, and you tell her that's the point, that you want me to get chicken pox and be done with it. I'm old enough to be painfully embarrassed and I also know that Mrs. Malone has a good mouth on her and this is going to be her gossip, those crazy Schines, nothing you'll ever hear, but I will at school, through the trickle-down of scorn. You tell her—"

  "Younger is better with this sort of thing." Billy's mother leveled her practical green gaze on Mrs. Malone.

  Mrs. Malone defended her own brand of sensibility. "But Becky's in bed."

  "It'll be just a minute."

  "I don't think so."

&nb
sp; "We'll be in and out."

  "She's feeling miserable."

  During the exchange, Billy became intimate with the rhododendron by the front door. Its natural beauty seemed like an outcrop from the world inside that house. The plant's leaves were as waxy as Mrs. Malone's skin and when in flower matched the woman's preferred eye shadow.

  "Any older and it gets serious," Doris continued, undeterred. "And God forbid he goes into adulthood without being exposed. So if you wouldn't mind, it would be a favor for his future health."

  Mrs. Malone stretched her lips around her teeth and clicked, "I don't suppose I can say no." She moved inside as if a salesman had worn her down and she'd suffer the pitch but buy nothing. The house was clean and bright, decorated up to the minute instead of the Schines Cuban missile crisis hue. Though the two houses had the same design, Billy took in the rooms wondering how they possibly translated next door. A sunken living room? A sun room? This home spoke French. Every inch of wall space was covered with photographs of Becky and her older football-hero brother, pictures matted like an advent calendar revealing all the days of skiing and sailing and the big game in 1982.

  "Becky won't be pleased," Mrs. Malone said. "Girls this age can be so vain."

  "We could blindfold the boy," offered Doris.

  Mrs. Malone thought she was joking, though Billy knew better. His mother was simply being reasonable, this reason often reflecting a naive no-nonsense manner. Her son was a series of problems to be solved until the problems were no longer hers. She never complained, never bitched or moaned, but she went about him like he was a minimum-wage job that offered barely enough.

  Becky's door was painted pink, like an Easter egg. Inside the room the theme of pastels continued, with frilly curtains and a princess bed holding a scratching beauty no suitor would kiss. Becky Malone looked medieval in her plight. Pustules, red and angry, some raw, some white-tipped, some bleeding together to create a superpustule, covered her skin. How she might recover seemed impossible to Billy. On her hands were large skiing mittens, a soft defense against nails opening up craters. Billy noticed they were taped on, like boxing gloves. Becky had no chance of slipping them free unless she used her teeth. "Mom, why are there people in my room?" she asked, attitude masking hysteria. Her throat was smoky with chicken pox.

  "This is your neighbor," Mrs. Malone said.

  "So?"

  "Well, he wants to get chicken pox so he can get them over with."

  "So?"

  "So he's going to spend a little time with you."

  Becky's eyes burned brighter than her skin. "You've got to be kidding."

  "Chicken pox can be serious with adults," Mrs. Malone explained.

  "You don't think this is serious?"

  "I don't mean it that way."

  "Look at me!"

  "I know, honey."

  "And you're letting in visitors."

  "It's just—"

  "Are you charging admission?"

  In the midst of this squabble, Doris whispered, "Breathe deeply," and scooted Billy toward the infectious bed. He obeyed against his better judgment and future schoolyard repercussions, obeyed, as always, because he had little else to offer his mother but gentle compliance. He drifted toward Becky, blond Becky, thirteen years old, who often wore her hair like those long pretty streamers that hung from the handlebars of her bike that she pedaled around the cul-de-sac, circle upon circle, whirling the air pink. But today she was furuncle red. Billy apologized with his eyes. But he was also in Becky Malone's room, which was kind of exciting, near Becky Malone's bed, which was kind of exciting, in the presence of Becky Malone's nightgown, hundreds of flowers and the cutest frill, which was really kind of exciting, her exposed scoop of chest covered in nipplelike bites. Billy breathed in deeply. Oatmeal, he smelled, and balm.

  "What're you looking at?" Becky spat.

  "I'm sorry," Billy said.

  "Get closer," Doris whispered.

  Scabs were drying into scars and Becky Malone screamed.

  "Oh honey," Mrs. Malone said, going toward her daughter.

  "I can't stand this another second."

  "Honey—"

  "How could you have done this to me."

  "I was just being neighborly."

  Billy turned toward his mother. Often, when eye-to-eye with her, he'd wait for some recognition of affection—this was his mother for heaven's sake—and when nothing flashed between them, he would look away. However, today, as mother and daughter embraced in front of them, with shame and anger and abiding comfort, Billy thought he recognized something in his mother's face, a sense of inarticulate regret. Doris offered him her hand, not out of warmth but out of escape, that we should leave this world and return to our world, and Billy went toward fingers that, once found, gave up the clutch for the sake of hustling him along.

  "Hopefully the chicken pox took," she told him on their way home.

  "Of course," Billy says on the phone, "I didn't get chicken pox. And Becky's face never quite recovered, and that girl had the most beautiful skin. Not a pimple throughout high school and she was covered in pockmarks." Billy listens for a sign of change under his mother's breath, a rhythm of subaerial understanding, but nothing is different. His story was far from fluent. It was nothing like his memory which could open the door of that house, that room, where Becky cried, a butterfly finding herself inside another chrysalis, unexpected and cruel, where Doris held out her hand for him. His words fumble from intention, spiral away from sentiment and land hilt-wise against its target. Just another strange story about dear old mom. "Anyway," Billy says. "I'm just calling to say hi and maybe I'll—"

  There's a sound, an extended beep from one of the twelve touch-tones, and Billy thinks maybe she's accidentally resting her chin on the keypad, stretching number 7, 8, or 9 into oblivion, obviously not hearing it, or if hearing it, not minding it, this shrillness, not moving away but remaining still. Maybe she's fallen asleep. Maybe she's screaming over him with a well-placed finger. Enough! Or maybe it's something else, a last desperate attempt at saying something. Who knows, but the tone doesn't stop. It keeps going. One obliterating note. And Billy stays on the line and hums along in slight sympathetic vibration until the automated operator informs him he'll need more money, and soon after, he's disconnected for lack of change.

  37

  THAT LAST night, a noise. Around two in the morning, a noise in the hallway, and Billy rustles awake. This is not a place that creaks, like an old house. This is new construction, and after a few days, all the night noises have been cataloged. The central air—ka-duum—pumping in its fresh batch; the toilet communicating with another toilet that's been flushed—chaaa—like a communal cleansing breath; the courtyard spotlight clicking near the window—ki-ki-ki—in a halogen pulse. These are the normal noises, the AHRC's REM. But Billy bolts upright when he hears something, something, he swears, being dragged in the hallway.

  No matter how murderously baroque, Ragnar comes to mind, Ossap and Dullick revealed. There must be a chemical reaction in the brain that brews a killer in a midnight noise. Receptor sites suck up old fears until you're a boy again with your various escape plans. You could jump out the window. You could lock yourself in the bathroom. You could pretend to be asleep. You could hide in the closet. You could cover yourself under the sheets and lie real flat, barely breathing, as if nobody's in this bed, nope, nobody here. Billy calculates the probable order of death, the homicidal feng shui of a psychopath. He'll likely move down the hall, from room to room, and slit throats with the routine of a hotel maid. This would be the fourth room. There should be screams, bloodcurdling, canary-in-coal-mine screams. Unless, of course, he's the only victim. The dragging continues down the hall, fading with a creepy old lady hush.

  And that's the only noise.

  Until now.

  Ninety-three minutes later and Billy hears whistling outside the window, gentle entreaties coming from the courtyard, loving calls, kissing lips, enthusiastic claps, barking�
��yes, he hears dogs barking. All of this seems like midsummer night's dream stuff that sneaks through the heavy curtains. On the other side could be the frantic backstage of sleep. It's the sound of anxious wooing. Certainly better than the earlier hush, but equally mysterious, and while Billy is curious, he's also comfortable and goes through the sort of profit and liability reasoning more often associated with a full bladder and a warm bed. If he gets up any chance of sleep will be squashed. Then again, he's already awake and piqued. The floor must be cold. But not that cold. Just close your eyes and tomorrow will prove these noises ridiculous. But if you get up, you'll be satisfied. And feel stupid for the effort. Either way, do something. As it always seems, this debate goes on longer than necessary, to the point of false countdowns (in five seconds) and mini-motivational lectures (go go go) until finally (fuck it) Billy rolls out of bed.

  Time: 3:23 A.M.

  Parting the curtains (the anticipation in finding the seam and inching back the fabric and peering outside is almost sensual, and Billy lingers, giving the moment more oomph, knowing this is performance, suspense-fill foreplay in the style of edging your fingers along another's waistline even when there's no question the pants will be removed), he catches the source of the noise: nearly a dozen people bustle about the courtyard in chaotic synchronization. It's not far from woodland sprites, Billy thinks, from Puck and Co. if they were clad in black and their heads were sheathed in ladies' pantyhose, if they were incognito goblins scurrying around with ponytails of empty feet. Billy spots two vans parked no doubt illegally near the HAM sculpture. It's like the great bronze finger has finally hailed its ride. A few of the goblins are hunched over, tapping their knees here-here-here, while others run about waving their arms, pointing, giving thumbs up, gesturing come come come quick. All this action is being documented by a goblin with a video camera lashed to his right hand. Sensitive to every jiggle, he seems to be doing a form of cinemagraphic tai chi. The overall strangeness of the scene allays any need for explanation. Billy just watches, dumbfounded but pleased, feeling certain this has nothing to do with him.