The Key to Everything

by Alex Kimmell

  “Open yourself for me …” His eyes open with the white of no irises. Veins glow with the red of sunset during a forest fire. “Well, keep looking.” The skittering and scratching resumes to an ear-bleeding volume as Sgt. Harmon continues to sing. “Let’s play for a little while.”

  -44-

  Emily: Questions

  Emily leans her head back against the wall. There isn't enough energy left in her body toEmily leans her head back against the wall. There isn’t enough energy left in her body to complain about the jagged brass teeth and hooks digging into skin hidden beneath her sweat-drenched hair. She watches Abram pour the bright orange molten metal from a heavy black cauldron into the small mold that looks exactly like the shape of the drawing resting on her lap. This would be a dangerous job for someone not as familiar with the technique as Abram. His motions are patient and graceful. His muscles strain under the weight of the lever in his hands. In the glow rising from underneath his face, she spies a hint of a smile across his lips. “A man at work is a man in love,” she thinks, remembering the hours she spent in recording studios watching Auden make the same expression working on his music.

  Abram releases the lever carefully down to rest on the top of two short, knobby logs fashioned into a rudimentary stand. He slips his gloves off, nodding his head briskly after taking a glance at the mold cooling on the table in front of him. With a tired groan, Abram thumps down on the floor next to Emily.

  “Now,” he turns to her and winks. “We wait.”

  “What exactly are we waiting for?” Emily sits upright, speaking through her exasperation. “Can you tell me what the hell is happening here? You tell me my husband’s disappeared into a book. Then you tell me he was in the mirror in my bathroom with your wife. My children…” Her breath catches in her throat, but she shakes her head and continues, “…my children are gone, who knows where or why. We get chased through my house by rabid rodents, and the Vice Principal from the elementary school down the street is trying to kill us.”

  “Emily…”

  “Oh. Then magically, you open a secret room in my house that you somehow use to make all these…” She stands up, spinning around in a circle with her arms spread wide, throwing tears from her face.

  “Emily.”

  “No.” She rips a handful of keys from the wall and throws them at Abram. He lets them pelt him in the chest and fall to the floor, ringing in high dulcet tones. “You don’t get to speak unless you tell me what the fuck is going on here.”

  “Emily, please calm down.” Abram lifts his hands, pleading with her. “I don’t understand everything myself. All I can tell you is what I know, and what I think might be happening to us.”

  “So tell me.” She crosses her arms and leans back into the table, defiantly not sitting down.

  -45-

  Abram: Blueprinting

  “I’ve been fascinated by keys as long as I can remember. Not just what they can do, but what they are. Each one has a different shape, a unique feel, a singular density and heft. Holding them in my hand, I can feel their potential—their personality, if you will.” Abram reaches above and behind his head to brush his fingers absentmindedly across the keys hanging closest to him while he speaks.

  “My parents used to tell me that when I was little, it was impossible to get me to fall asleep.” He smiles and looks up at Emily, then quickly gazes at the floor. His eyes betray the truth of what he holds back inside. “They sang songs and took me for rides in the car. Even warm milk didn’t work. I even cried when my mother put me in bed next to her. Nothing worked unless I was holding onto my favorite toy.”

  Turning his head to look at the key in his hand, he pauses for a beat. “I still remember that key. It was bright yellow and thick. It had three large, rounded teeth that I used to like chewing on. Apparently our dog did, too, because there was a big hole torn out of the bottom that I used to push jellybeans into.” Emily tries hard to suppress a grin. “It came in a set along with a blue six-sided die, a little orange baseball, and a white-rimmed mirror. I never paid attention to any of those other things, though.

  “As I got older, I started making my own toys. Instead of the mall or the toy store, my dad would take me to the hardware store where, along with wood and plastic pieces I needed, I would pick out the smallest padlocks they had.”

  “What kinds of toys did you make?” Emily slides to the floor along the leg of the table so she can see him eye-to-eye.

  ”Little houses for stuffed animals, or garages for my toy cars.” He puts his hands down in his lap, picking at a thumbnail. “None of the neighborhood kids liked to come over and play because they could never get at my toys. I always locked them up. I never let anybody else have the keys.” He wipes his nose on his shoulder, forcing a cough so he won’t start to cry.

  “One time we were throwing a party.” Abram clears his throat. “I think it was for my seventh birthday. I sat there in the living room, looking at the brightly colored streamers and balloons that my mom hung up. I waited for all my friends and the presents they were going to bring me. I sat there on the edge of the coffee table, kicking my feet and bouncing around. I was so excited. I remember the phone ringing, a lot.”

  “I remember Jason’s seventh birthday party.” Emily speaks softly, but Abram continues as if he is alone with his thoughts.

  “Dad was at work, so mom kept heading back into the kitchen to answer it. Every time she came back into the room, her smile was a little bit smaller. I don’t think she said anything. She just sat there on the sofa and watched me take all the decorations down. I didn’t cry. I was sad, but I didn’t cry.” Puffing up his chest at the last. “Instead, I went up to my room and stared out through the keyhole.”

  “They keyhole?” Emily’s voice makes Abram jump, as though he is surprised that someone else is here with him. “Why?”

  “I’m not sure, really. I didn’t know what I was looking for, or what made me decide to look there. I wanted to find something different than where I was, I guess.” His eyes drift off, clearly not here in this present space.

  “I pushed my eye right up against the cool metal. Not just close to it, right up on it. My eyeball was pressing against the edges of the hole.” His thumb and forefinger make a circle that he holds up in front of his face. “It hurt at first, and I couldn’t see anything. Then he was there. He was standing right outside the door. I recognized his curly blonde hair. He looked as surprised to see me as I was him. I leaned back and opened the door, but of course there was no one there.”

  “Who did you see?” Emily speaks after a long silence, trying to get him to continue.

  “I had a brother. When I was still very little, he died. I was probably around two when it happened. No one in my family ever talked about it, so I never found out how he died.” His voice quiets down. Just above a whisper, he continues, “It felt really good to see him. So I started to spend more and more time looking through that keyhole.

  “I never thought about how he got there or where he’d been. Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was press my face against the door and say hi.” His right hand waves quickly back and forth. “The last thing I did before I went to sleep was tell him goodnight. Then one day, my dad opened the door on me. I was face-pressed right up to it, so when he came in, it knocked me back onto the floor. When he asked what I was doing, I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong, so I told him.”

  Emily leans forward and puts her hand on his knee. “What did he do?”

  “I tried to get him to look, too, but he just stood there staring at me. The next week, we moved to Chicago. They didn’t let me pack any of my clothes or any of my keys. They came to school, pulled me out of class, and we drove off. I cried for days. I stayed in my new room and hid under the covers. My dad took all the doors off their hinges and put them in the basement. He didn’t allow locks on anything anymore. Not even the front door.” Emily reaches forward to take his hand. “He stopped speaking to me around
that time. I try, but I don’t remember what his voice sounded like.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Mom became our translator, our interpreter. Now that I look back on it, what she really became was a wall between us. I don’t know if it was to protect me from him or not. I think she was protecting him from his memories of my brother.”

  Abram stands, brushing dust from the back seat of his pants. “Since I didn’t have privacy anymore, and I wasn’t allowed to play with locks or keys, I spent most of my time out in the backyard.” He points his finger at the ground, twirling it in circles as if he was drawing something. “I picked up twigs and traced patterns of simple locks in the dirt. Over time, the patterns turned into giant, complex mechanisms that snaked their way around the entire house.”

  “They must have been huge.”

  Abram looks up past the rows of hanging keys to the ceiling. “I would spend hour after hour on my hands and knees, mapping out the most minuscule details of the internal structure of a mortise lock. The gears would morph and blend into a warded lock, then into tumbler into pin-tumbler into an abloy, then finally, a few feet away, it became a double-acting lever.” His fingers interlace together, changing shapes.

  “I was obsessed. I went out there every morning before school and drew more. As soon as I got home, I went straight outside and picked up where I left off. I never did my homework. I didn’t care about making friends and refused to play sports or go to the movies. I stopped eating. I got into trouble with my teachers because all I did every day was doodle gears and pins and keys in the margins of my textbooks. They would send notes home, but I never gave them to my mother. I threw them away as soon as I walked past the nearest trashcan.

  “Mom didn’t seem to mind when the principal called to find out why she never responded to their letters, so I stopped going to school altogether. It took me months to notice that my dad never came home after work.” Emily turns her head with a surprised look. “Mom and I never talked about it.”

  “Wow.” Emily whispers. Abram raises his eyebrows.

  “One day, I was outside of the bathroom window. I heard something strange from the house. I stopped drawing and sat back on my knees. Mom was laughing. It sounded like her hand covered over her mouth to muffle the sound. I stood up and grabbed onto the edge of the window box. I looked inside.” Abram mimics the motions of a little boy climbing up a window. “The water was filling up the tub, and clouds of steam fogged up the vanity mirror. Mom was on her knees, leaning her face against a door. I guess that she brought it back up from the basement and put it back on by herself.

  “Her skin was moist from the steam, but her hair was still dry. She pressed her hand against the wood of the door spreading her fingers wide.” Abram looks out and through the wall in front of him, deeply lost in his memory. “I can still see the chips in her dark red nail polish. She was talking, but I couldn’t hear what she said. So I let myself down and started drawing again.

  “A little while later, I heard her drain the tub and shut the door. Mom cried herself to sleep that night. The next day she came out in the yard with me, pulling weeds and trimming the bushes out of my path.” He smiles. “She even dragged the old lawn mower out of the garage. We both worked our asses off to get the damn thing started. It sat unused in there for a long time, so when we tried to start it, it coughed up huge puffy brown clouds over the whole neighborhood.”

  “Sounds like you two had fun.”

  “In a manner of speaking, we did. For a little while, anyway.” Abram walks back to Emily and sits down in front of her again. “After a few hours’ work, the grass and dirt coming out of the side ejector suddenly turned to a thick, wet red mist. Over the roar of the engine, I remember hearing the animals screeching and howling.”

  Emily cringed at the thought.

  “Blood and fur was everywhere. It dripped from the sides of the lawnmower, but she didn’t slow down at all. The tall grass shook in front of the machine blades. This family of squirrels was trying to get out of the way… they ended up as streaks of red splattering the walls of the house.” He rubs his hands down across his face. “I wiped the blood from my face. My knees hurt pretty badly, but I didn’t care. I got back down and started drawing again.

  “When she finished mowing, she picked up a rake to drag everything out of my way. Then she pounded a hoe into the ground and softened the dirt to make it easier for me to keep going. After a few months, the entire yard was completely covered over.

  “Occasionally I would have to stop and pick up a small shard of bone or some bits of loose, fur-covered pelt that was stepped on or rolled over.” Pinching his fingers together in front of his face, he squints as if he can still see it. “Every time I touched one, a cold chill ran over me, and for a few minutes, all I could hear was static.” He puts his fingers into his ears and shakes his head.

  “There was no place left to work out in the yard. I felt relieved. But I also felt hollow at the same time. I needed to keep going. Mom moved the sofa and the rest of the furniture out of the living room and handed me a marker.”

  Checking beneath the fabric wrapped around her calf, Emily draws in a sharp intake of breath and winces. She readjusts her sitting position to give her leg more room to stretch out. “I’m okay. Go on. Please.”

  “While I covered the hardwood on the floor, mom took the pictures down from the walls and tore at the wallpaper. After a few months, every inch of the house was covered in gears and bolts and pins.” His arms lift up over his head, and he stretches his mouth in a wide yawn. “Excuse me.” Emily smiles and covers her mouth, yawning in response.

  “I filled up everything from floors to windows. She even sat me on her shoulders to reach the ceiling. Mom filled up the tub and climbed in while I worked on the bathroom. I was tempted to put my head against the door and peek through the lock, but I was afraid to now.

  “She scrubbed her arms and washed the dirt from her fingers. I handed her a towel before I started scribbling lines on the mirror. She dried off and put her hand on my shoulder. I stopped drawing and looked up into her face. She didn’t say anything. She just pulled me in tight and held me close to her cold, clammy skin. I remember her tears felt warm on my forehead.

  “It was so quiet in the house. No sound of traffic on the road out front or from the airport a few miles away. When she hugged me, I couldn’t hear her heart beating. Even with my ear pressed against her breast.” His finger traced circles in the dirt on the floor.

  “She let me go and turned down the hall. By then, the sun was down, and none of the streetlights lit up the inside of the house. I watched her walk down the long hallway to her room. When she dropped the towel, I could see her shoulder blades pushing really far out through the skin of her back. They stuck out so far…so far I thought that they looked like wings.” Emily watches him spread out his fingertips and lift them into the air.

  “After a few steps, she was swallowed up in the shadows between our bedroom doorways. My heart started beating really fast when she didn’t come out the other side.” Abram stares up at the ceiling. “I can only guess, but I think she stopped in the shadows so I wouldn’t see her crying. I waited there, holding my breath for a long time. I watched the dust fall through the air and land on her foot when it finally broke the long, straight edge of dim light coming out of my bedroom door.” Emily watches his shoulders let down, releasing some of the tension he obviously still feels. “I started breathing again. Her toenails looked beautiful. No polish or glaze. She never went for pedicures or anything like that. They were just perfectly round and clean, with cuticles that stuck out in a thin, curved line right at the edge of the nail.

  “The rest of her leg materialized from the black into the motes floating around in the airy light. They swirled with her movement and the wind it created around her body. A few small steps in front of her, she vanished again into the next shadow.” His eyes are red and full of tears now. “I remember rubbing my eyes in the dry air of the house.
It only took as much time as it would have to blink, but when I looked up, the backs of her ankles lifted up from the floor and into her bedroom.

  “I ran down the hall to her room. My skin crawled over my body at the edges of the darkness, so I made sure I ran as fast as I could through those shadows.” Abram stands up and starts to pace in circles around the desk. “I watched her sit at the vanity mirror, running a brush through her hair. If she noticed I was there, she didn’t acknowledge it. She went to bed, lying down on top of the swirls and angles that I painted across her bedspread.

  “After I was sure she was asleep, I left her there and went back into the bathroom. I knelt down beside the door. I pressed my eye to the keyhole and waited. I sat there for hours, but he never came. Pen in hand, I drew lines and angles around the doorknob without looking. My hands shook, and my thighs screamed. I kept going. I woke up shivering on the cold floor in the bathroom. I put my eye to the keyhole. Everything was white. I blinked once…and the dryness wouldn’t go away.”

  Emily rubs her thighs to bring some fresh circulation back into her legs again. Twisting her neck from side to side, she feels the welcome relief of her joints popping and cracking. She lets out a long, slow breath along with the pressure in her neck, and hopes the sound doesn’t disturb him and stop his story.

  “I blinked again, and he was there.” He speaks now in hushed tones, his breath shaking. Words stop and start in darts and pauses, like Morse code. “Everything around him…was white. He…was made up of…pale shades…gray and black…no solid edges. He flickered in…the light. A projection from an old machine…built from broken parts…covered in rust. I lifted my hand to…the door…waved. His hand…limply hung in the air…by some invisible clothesline wire. Mom was next to him…but in full color. Her hair piled high and pretty. Flecks of burgundy…yellow and white. Her arm was…around his shoulders. She smiled…nodding her head. He looked at her and…flickered away. Her arm stayed in the air… around shoulders that… weren’t there anymore.