Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Daddy?”

  Molly stepped out of the bright light and into his reach. She carried her violin folded into her arms like a baby. Her eyes were wide, frightened, but they did not blink, did not avert from him even for a second as she looked at him, looked at him.

  He pulled her to him and the three stood close together, not hugging—none of them good about hugging in public—but making sure they maintained contact as the world spun and jerked and solidified in its slow return to the real.

  *

  Molly hardly spoke on the way home, turning away their compliments with uninviting syllables, grunts, and nods, even refusing her father’s proposition of hot dogs and sundaes at a neighbourhood shop. She retired early, but they could hear her playing her romantic classical CDs softly, rearranging furniture, “doing her inventory” as Janice called it, packing for college and the life to come. She’d been packing for more than a month, trying to decide what bits of her old life to bring forward. The plan was she would leave in three weeks for a summer job at a music camp in upstate New York, and from there to school in the city. They had argued for months over whether they would drive her—it felt wrong not to be there with her for the big transition. It seemed all terribly too grown up and recklessly premature to Ray, who already missed her to the point of physical pain. But something about Molly’s determination that she do this alone finally persuaded him, and Janice reluctantly went along. Now Janice refused to speak about it.

  The most difficult part of it all was that he was almost thrilled she was leaving. He imagined her going north, being absorbed into the life of the city and coming out of it a success, a famous person who had escaped the sick anonymity passed down from her unfortunate parents. In his imagination she became a fabulous, soaring star, and even as his heart was breaking in anticipation of her absence, his lost, invisible voice inside was saying go, go, go, don’t look back.

  Even with that sense of hope, however, they could not escape what their lives had become. An hour later Ray and Janice were ready for bed. They lay down together in loose-fitting pyjamas, pushing off the bedclothes lest they bind and constrict. They both could feel the pain approaching, as if from a long distance gathering speed, its mouth open and the night wind whistling through the narrow gaps between its needle-like teeth.

  They clasped hands as their spasms began, Janice’s rocking her body almost off the bed. She clutched his hand until he cried out, which triggered even worse convulsions in the both of them, bodies snapping at the ends of whipping arms, mouths pulled back in fish-expression grimaces, tears and sweat burning across their faces and softening the roots of their hair. He willed his body to stay together, to remain solid, begged it to stop its flow across the bed and onto the floor, as every skin cell fought against transparency and his mind battled evaporation.

  They bit their lips until they bled, clamping their mouths to prevent the escape of their cries. They had decided long ago that Molly must not know, that if she weren’t told she might even escape this. And if she were to overhear, what could they say to her? For how do you explain the terrible pain of invisibility?

  *

  A month later Molly was gone as planned. Another week and she’d still not called to check in. It bothered them both, but perhaps Janice the most. Now and then he would catch her visiting in Molly’s room, but she would not speak of any of it.

  Eventually Janice quit her job without notice. She’d been there fifteen years, but she said she’d “never felt welcome.”

  “Never? Not even in the beginning?” Ray couldn’t quite believe it. He was a little angry with her—they needed the money, and she hardly seemed ready for job hunting.

  “In the beginning I pretended. I don’t know why, but now I can’t pretend anymore. I go in and I shut my office door and I cry

  all day.”

  “All day?” He wanted to be sympathetic, but he was too shocked. He’d believed she’d been happy until the last few years. She hadn’t been like him—she’d seemed to have friends, she talked as if there’d been a camaraderie at work, her opinions were respected. He’d always suspected that the invisibility she’d felt these few years had been something she’d contracted from him. “I’m so sorry … I had no idea.”

  She collapsed in his arms. He wanted to tell her he understood, that he knew how she felt.

  Finally, a few days later, Ray decided to call the place Molly worked. At first the person on the other end claimed never to have heard of her. Ray sat down on the edge of the couch, holding the phone to his chest. Then someone else came on who knew her, then finally it was her voice, distant yet energetic, interested in a way he’d never heard in her before, and yes she was all right, she’d just been busy, yes she would write, but she was just so busy.

  Ray didn’t tell her that her mother had quit her job. He said they were doing wonderfully; they had so many things to do they couldn’t fit them all in. He went so far as to make up the name of a couple they’d recently met, with similar interests, and the events they had attended together.

  Molly responded with a few stories of social events of her own. He had no idea if she was telling the truth, but he decided to believe her, and she did sound convincing. She sounded as if her parents had no further place in her life. Although this brought a note of genuine sadness into everything he said to her after that, he still cheered her on, and actually hoped, God help him, that she stayed as far away from them as possible, for her sake.

  He told Janice about the call, making it seem that he and Molly had talked far longer than they actually had. She nodded as if disinterested, but he could see the wetness of her eyes, the stiffness in her features. She wouldn’t talk about it.

  That night the spasms were more violent and painful than ever before. Janice’s sweeping arms broke a bedside lamp, and he spent half the night comforting her and bandaging her wounds.

  At work Ray made himself say hello to everyone in his office every morning. It was part of a plan to make himself present. Never mind that he had tried similar tactics before. He used to keep a journal of such attempts: times he’d said hello with no response, times he had been ignored in conversations, obviously excluded from invitations. Stores where he had been unable to get sales assistance, restaurants where the waiters ignored him even when he waved menus in their faces, times cars had almost struck him in pedestrian crosswalks, days in which he’d had absolutely no human contact before the daily escape home to Janice and Molly.

  Now he pulled this journal out of his desk and threw it into the trash, determined once again that these things wouldn’t happen to him again or, if they did, he would ignore them. He would be his own company, if need be. The best of companions.

  That afternoon the building had a fire drill. He walked out with the other employees, offering up his own jokes to match theirs. He couldn’t be sure whose jokes were being laughed at, and whose ignored. Too much noise and confusion. But he at least felt like part of the group.

  Out in the parking lot the group of employees separated into two groups, one on either side of him. He looked around: he was at the exact centre, the point of separation, standing with neither group. He turned to the group on his left, listening to the general conversation, seeking an opening. Finally he offered up some comment about the hot pavement. He could almost see his words slide by their faces, catching on nothing, drifting beyond the group. He turned to the group on his right, wondering aloud how long the drill was supposed to last. The group appeared to stare up into the hot sun, preferring to blind themselves rather than to acknowledge him. When the all clear sounded, the other employees returned to work upstairs. But Ray climbed into his car and went home.

  Another month passed and he noticed Janice seemed to have less and less to say to him when he called home. Then there was a period of days in which she didn’t answer the phone at all. After work he would walk into the house to confront her, and her excuse would be she must not have heard the phone ringing, she’d been out workin
g in the yard (their yard, layered as it was with gravel and wood chips, seemed to have little to work on), or she’d been out shopping (but what did she buy?).

  Then there came the morning Ray called home every ten minutes with no response.

  A few minutes after his last call he found himself loitering outside his boss’s office door, coughing, trying to look as ill as possible. He felt like a kid. He winced dramatically as he walked through the door, then looked up to see his boss hadn’t noticed. Of course.

  Ray cleared his throat. No answer. “Excuse me, Jim?” Jim appeared to be hypnotized by whatever he had up on the screen. “I’m feeling really ill. I have to leave!” He practically shouted it.

  His boss looked up in surprise, said, “Sure, do what you have to do,” and turned back to his computer.

  At first he couldn’t find Janice. She wasn’t in the kitchen, and the living room TV was cold. He called her name from the bottom of the stairs, but there was no answer. He went outside and walked around the yard looking for signs of her supposed gardening activities. The yard looked as sad and neglected as he’d expected. He felt compelled to look into the shrubs, pull back weeds and search the ground for her body. He found some of Molly’s old toys: a yellowing Barbie and a toy ice cream truck. They must have been hiding out there at least a decade. He looked up at the house. It appeared abandoned. The roof was badly in need of repair. How long had it been deteriorating? He looked at his hands, half expecting them to be an old man’s hands. Had he been asleep? How many years had he lost?

  Finally, in their bedroom, he found her.

  She writhed in pain, an insect pinned alive to the bed. Her arms and legs wriggled, her mouth opened and closed silently. He’d never imagined she did this alone—this was something they’d always shared.

  He looked more closely. Some distortion of the body. Then he realized she had no hands, no feet.

  *

  Ray called in sick the rest of the week and stayed home with Janice. The week after, with her no better, he applied for two weeks of sick leave. On the phone his boss again seemed nonchalant. Do what you have to do. As if Ray really had a choice. Did his boss even know Ray was married? Ray didn’t think the man had ever asked. Ray wore a ring, but it was pale yellow, blending into his skin. Invisible if you weren’t really looking.

  He saw no evidence, however, that his remaining home did her any good. During her better times she would lie there, staring at the ceiling, her skin glowing with the grey of fish in shimmering pools. Now and then one piece or another of her would fade into shadow, or bleach to the colour of the surrounding sheet, making of her body an archipelago as she slept. These bits would fade back into visibility as she awakened, and sometimes she would be reinvigorated, getting up and walking around, fixing herself something to eat.

  At her worst she shuddered and convulsed, gripping the sides of the bed with hands that weren’t there, the skin on her arms and legs flickering in and out of existence like quick bursts of lightning. Despite his growing horror at touching her, he would lie down next to her and embrace her, hold her tightly as if to anchor her to the world. The irony was that he rarely convulsed himself during this period and had not been aware of his own painful invisibility for some time.

  “I’m taking you to the doctor,” he said one morning. “It’s ridiculous that we’ve waited this long.”

  “You can’t,” she said from under the covers. She’d pulled them up over her head, so that all he could sense of her was her frail voice, a few rounded shapes, stick-figure limbs beneath the quilt. If he went over and pulled the covers back, would he see anything?

  “Why can’t we try?”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “Maybe there have been other cases, and they’re not letting on because it would cause a panic. Besides, he’ll see the spasms, he’ll see what happens to your body, your skin.”

  “Do you really think he’ll see anything? Do you think he’ll notice anything at all?”

  Of course not. But he would not say it. “We have to do something. I have to do something.”

  “Stay with me. That’s doing something.”

  And he did.

  One night he awakened to her coughing. He lay watching her, her naked back glowing, pulsing with each cough. There was a pearly green aura he thought strangely beautiful, and he felt guilty that he could think it beautiful. She sighed. The coughs grew softer, the colour shifts more subtle, a gauzy, greenish cream. She seemed to recede from him into the other side of the bed. Cough. Into the wall.

  And then he was looking at the bare wall, the empty plain of bed beneath it. He held perfectly still. And waited. He gave it time, gave her time to come back to him. Waited an hour. Then waited two hours. And then began to cry. And then began to sob.

  *

  He did not leave the house for several weeks. This was a conscious decision. Not out of grief. He wasn’t even sure he was grieving. His reasons were investigative. Experimental. Since she had vanished so suddenly, couldn’t she reappear suddenly as well? He could be sitting at breakfast, and she might suddenly be sitting in the chair across from him, sipping her coffee and reading the morning paper. Or perhaps she’d show up at the front door, knocking, since she hadn’t had her keys when she disappeared. Or perhaps he’d wake up one morning and she’d be lying in bed beside him, her face nuzzled against his arm, because their bed was the last place he’d seen her.

  Ray worried that if he wasn’t in the house when she arrived, Janice might panic. It made perfect sense to him that she would arrive back in this world in a state of some confusion. He couldn’t let her go through that alone.

  He didn’t bother to call work. It certainly didn’t surprise him that they didn’t call him. He imagined going to work as usual, then disappearing out of his cubicle leaving a half-eaten sandwich behind. How long would it take them to realize something was amiss?

  But it seemed less funny after four weeks with no one calling. The automatic deposit of his paycheques continued uninterrupted.

  Each day he spent an hour or so sitting in different chairs in different rooms. He saw things he had never noticed before: a small truck in the background of a painting, a birthmark on the ear of an anonymous relative in one of the photographs in the living room, a paperback book he’d thought lost under one side of the couch. He developed a new appreciation for the pleasant home he and Janice had created together.

  After that first month he considered whether he should come up with a story to explain her absence to the curious. For the first time he realized how suspicious the circumstances of her disappearance might look to the police. He thought it fortunate that Janice had quit her job. She had no living relatives that he was aware of, and no friends out of her past (had there even been any?) ever bothered to call. Wouldn’t the neighbours be a bit curious, wouldn’t they notice that now he lived alone? Of course not.

  Molly had to be told eventually. The next time she called he would offer some sort of explanation. He owed her that. But what if she never called? Should he track her down, introduce this sad twist of physics into the life of the one human being he still held dear?

  Ray could not bear the idea that his daughter might never look into his face again, making him feel, at last, recognized. But it seemed as inevitable as his wife’s fade from the world.

  *

  Four years later Ray was walking past a church a few blocks from home. It had become his habit each night to walk the nearby neighbourhoods, not returning home until sometime after midnight. Each house window was like a dimly-lit television, the people inside moving about with unexplained purpose behind partially drawn shades and curtains. The noises could just as easily be sobs or laughter, and he had no responsibility for knowing which was which.

  Sometimes he attended nighttime lectures at this church, sitting near the back to observe. The lectures were usually nonreligious or at least nondenominational. Usually on a social issue “Of Concern To Us All,” or a recount
ing of some overseas trip or expedition. Never anything he hadn’t heard a hundred times before.

  “Spontaneous Human Invisibility,” it said on the church activities sign. “8 PM Wednesday.” It was five after the hour. The lights inside appeared dim, and he thought for a moment the lecture must have been cancelled. A woman his age, greying hair pulled back, a pale brown, unflattering knee length dress, appeared suddenly out of the shadows and turned into the church, disappearing through the doors. Without thinking he hurried after her.

  “In every case the person was physically present, but according to reliable witnesses of good reputation and standing in the community, the person could not be seen or heard.”

  The man at the podium wore a stiff white shirt, striped tie, black pants. Black shoes that gleamed with a high gloss, plastic-like finish. He reminded Ray of a Jehovah’s Witness who had once come to his door, except the fellow at the altar wasn’t smiling.

  Perhaps eight or nine people sat in the front rows and an equal number on the sides. He could see movement in the unlit overflow seating sections off to either side behind rows of pillars: a fluttering as of birds trapped in shadow, a jerky nod, a gleam of cuff link or teeth. It seemed odd that people would sit in the dark, unless they were embarrassed or didn’t want their attendance noted.

  Then there was the lady he’d followed in here, sitting a few rows ahead of him. Particularly noticeable in that she was the only person in the room smiling.

  “Besides these third party witnesses, we have limited testimony from the victims themselves, limited apparently because of embarrassment, or because they could not believe anyone would listen to their stories.”