Depression is a word I’ve never heard my mother use. I wonder if she ever used it once in her entire life. I think the closest she ever came was years ago on my graduation night. She was driving us to a “surprise” graduation party. The body and I were strapped into the back seat as usual, but I kept catching my mother’s eye in the rearview mirror.
What’s wrong, I said.
Does it ever bother you to carry the body around all the time.
I can’t imagine life without it, I said.
It’s just that sometimes you seem a little down. She bit her lip. You know we are so proud of you.
I think when she said bother and down she meant depression. I would tell her now: it’s not depression, it’s just a dead body. I think she was afraid I couldn’t handle it, carrying a dead thing around all the time.
Another time she said, Oh my son, what did we do to you.
When I find a rock in the woods, I prop the body against it and sit down. Its clothes are a little dirty. It has also been a while since I have shaved the body’s face. Or mine. I make a mental note: wash clothes, shave.
I wonder if the body’s mother ever used the word depression. If the body’s mother is still alive, maybe she is depressed right now. Maybe when she dreams of the body, it is young and alive. In her dream, maybe she picks up the body after it has fallen asleep in front of the TV, carries it to its room, lays it in bed, tucks it in, pulls the covers all the way up to its chin, and puts a little glass of water on its nightstand.
Sometimes at night after I put the body into its sleeping bag, I run my hand through the body’s hair. Its hair is very stiff. It almost feels fake. But I kiss its cold forehead anyway and smile like my parents used to do to me.
When I do, I hear the body’s mother’s voice, or at least what I imagine her voice sounds like, in my head. Goodnight sweetie, she says. The body’s mother sounds just like my mother. I hear their voices blend. Goodnight sweetie, they say to both of us.
Most Nights
On the nights when we do not go to the park or drive around aimlessly, the dead body and I stay in and watch a movie or a boxing match. Sometimes we put on special headgear and box with each other, or I have a bowl of cereal while I feed the body its special formula, or I put the body on the couch and I sit in the chair farthest away.
From that distance, the body almost looks alive in the blue light, like it is very bored or sleeping but not dead, not gone. This is when the distance between us is greatest. The dead body across the room, with me imagining the body is alive. But it is also the closest we ever get to being alone.
Every now and then, I try to take us out to a night spot or to a party, but I always turn around and take us home before we arrive. Even though I’ve never gone, I always get invited to the parties. I am a living conversation piece carrying a dead one. But everywhere we go feels so crowded. I imagine if the body could talk, it would tell me it feels the same way. It would say, If we go out, we will only run into people. Or we will only end up standing in the corner of the room watching everyone else. Or worse.
The Sunlight is So Bright
When I look out my window, there is a man on the sidewalk scraping mud off his shoes with a stick. He is really scraping hard. The flesh on his face jiggles when he scrapes. His face and clothes are splattered with mud flecks and sweat.
I do not have to scrape mud off the dead body’s shoes. And I don’t ever have to buy it new shoes since it never walks and never rips holes in its shoes or wears the tread down or outgrows them. And unlike a pet or live roommate, it never eats my food if I accidentally leave it out. It never takes the last cookie and then puts the empty box back in the cabinet. It never drinks all the milk, leaving me milkless when I have already poured a bowl of cereal, or plays loud music or television shows at night.
Now the man outside is knocking the shoes together. And now he is wiping them in the grass. And now he is grumbling. And now he is wiping them faster. And now he is tearing up little clumps of grass, he is wiping them so hard. And now, even after all of this, the mud is still not coming off.
And now the dead body slumps over on the couch, its head cocked in an uncomfortable-looking position.
Taste and See
I have not given the body its special liquid formula today or any other day for the last week. It began as an experiment. Just to see what would happen. Now the body smells terrible. Much worse than usual. Its hair is starting to fall out, and its skin is oozing a sticky oil. The oil makes it difficult to carry the body.
It has become so difficult to carry, we have not left the house for three days—we just sit across the room from each other and stare. Every now and then I get up to get a bowl of cereal. I keep thinking about the bottle of formula on the windowsill. I still have no idea what is in the formula or how it works. I only know that sometime before they died, my parents gave me a lifetime supply of it in unlabeled bottles.
Promise your mother and me right now that you won’t ever taste the formula. That you’ll only feed it to the body, my father had said.
Sometimes I wonder if the body would want to taste my cereal.
Or be the one who does the talking and wondering.
Or the carrying.
O Taste and See
The body is in no shape to go anywhere tonight, not even to the woods or for a drive. I put an end to the experiment. I fed the body its formula again. But now the body is only getting worse, no matter how much formula I feed it. I do not know what will happen to us now. I prop the body up in a chair and sit across from it. We face each other, and I say to the body:
You have been my every day for years. You are something like my skin, and I am something like yours. We are a film projector and a screen. A stage and the actor upon it. A fist and the blow it contains. A light passes through us both.
The dead body does not answer me, so I imagine its answers:
Our life will have to change soon. We spend so much time together. In the woods. The car. In this room in the blue television light. A voice passes right through our mind. We are a tall shadow pressed into the pavement. Into the walls.
And then we say:
Look through the dead body, and there is Alex with his aching limbs. He was a born shadowboxer, a real champ. A dead body withers to nothing but a long, sticky shadow. You’ve got the weight. I’ve got the reach. We’re all alone, kid. It’s just you and me.
But soon a new space will open between us. A third face. A face made of both our faces. I can feel it.
A shadow shines on the floor. The refrigerator hums and rattles. I go into the kitchen, and I bring back a bowl of cereal and the bottle of special formula. I sit down beside the body. I open its mouth and feed it a spoonful of cereal. I work the jaw and let the cereal slide down the body’s throat. I imagine how happy the body must be—to finally try cereal after all these years.
It must be as happy as I am when I pour a spoonful of the special liquid formula. When I hold it up to my mouth. When I touch the tip of my tongue to the liquid to taste. When I put the spoonful of the special formula in my mouth and swallow. When I feel the sweetness drip down the back of my throat.
ALI LIEBEGOTT
Shift #6
FROM Shifts, a chapbook of diary poems
eight household candles
twenty-five pounds
of short-grain brown rice
the freelancer was missing his teeth
so slow in the store
I’ve begun to count
each brick and beam
we want our lives
all lined up
we go crazy making order
once an accountant told me:
If we’re crazy, then we have to be crazy
she meant it in a scheduling manner
and I think of it more often than
the accounting lessons I paid for.
Twenty-five pounds of brown rice
and eight household candles—
when those are
the groceries
it’s hard not to profile:
the apocalypse or self-imposed apocalypse,
those candles will burn faster
than that rice will last.
Sometimes when I ring up groceries
I say, Hello
and the customer says, Hello
and I ring up their apples and arugula
and flax seeds and popcorn
at each new thing I think I should make conversation,
but I don’t and I can feel the energy
of me failing pass between us.
I record my failure in front of them
while I wait for a credit card to be run
or groceries to be bagged.
A customer will say:
There are six bagels in that bag.
That’s basil.
Those are apples.
Even though the bags are clear and the bagels, sixly—
there are six bagels in that bag—
I think of that person
watching pornography with his partner
explaining things:
there are two penises in that one vagina.
Sometimes I’m grateful when someone
tells me how many bagels are in a bag
because, in truth, it’s hard to count circular things.
The store sells loose condoms in a jar like penny candy.
No one ever buys a single condom.
They buy at least four, twenty-five cents each.
Marry me!
I would say if anyone ever came
through my line with a single condom.
I would love their humble offering, a single shot at love.
Sometimes, I can’t believe how many
condoms people buy, a mini mountain
moving down my belt
when people buy more than seven
it makes me think, I’m not having enough sex.
Sometimes I’m writing a poem at my register
and a customer behind me says,
Uh oh. There’s an ant here.
I’m in a hippie grocery store
Do you want me to kill it? I ask
and she says, I don’t know if we should.
It’s the safe kind of ant, bigger than usual, from the produce itself
I’m going to kill it, please don’t judge me, I say
I won’t she says, I want to kill it too—
but some people say you should just take it outside.
I take the corner of my towel and smash the ant twice.
You’re free from this world, I say and the customer says,
some people think snails don’t have karma,
my friend who kills them in her garden says so.
I hate people who say animals don’t have souls or karma—
that a fish can’t feel a hook in their lip
I want to scream, Are you a snail? Are you a fish?
Where’s my poet, Ulysses, Gilgamesh?
Someone come through my line
with a single condom taped to a stick
held high above their head and rescue me.
—8/31/13, Register 7,
8:45 AM – 3 PM
KATHRYN DAVIS
Body-without-Soul
FROM Duplex, a novel
IT WAS A SUBURBAN STREET, one block long, the houses made of brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think when it was new the street couldn’t help but draw attention to itself, inviting envy.
Miss Vicks lived at the lower end of the street, in number 49. Most of the other houses had families living in them but she was by herself, a woman of about fifty, slim and still attractive, with a red shorthaired dachshund. By the time she moved in, the sycamore trees had grown so large they had enormous holes cut through their crowns to make room for all the wires.
She was a real woman; you could tell by the way she didn’t have to move her head from side to side to take in sound. Every day she and the dachshund went for three walks, the first early in the morning, the second in the late afternoon, and the third after dinner, when the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky. The little dog would sniff around the feet of the sycamores and as it did she would stand there paralyzed as all the Miss Vickses that had ever been layered themselves inside her, one atop the other and increasingly small, forming a great laminate like tree rings around heartwood.
Bedtime, the end of summer. The street was filled with children, many of them the same children she’d soon be welcoming into her classroom. School was about to start. “Heads up!” the boys yelled when a car appeared, interrupting their play; the girls sat making deals on the porch stoops, cigar boxes of trading cards and stickers in their laps. Meanwhile the darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water. The parents were inside, keeping an eye on the children but also drinking highballs. Fireflies like falling stars, the tree trunks narrow as the girls’ waists.
Occasionally something different happened. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bending slightly forward, his hands on his knees, nervously waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Miss Vicks, in number 24; the girl was Mary, who lived in the house attached to hers. Sometimes Miss Vicks could hear Mary practicing the piano through the living room wall—“Für Elise” with the same mistake in the same spot, over and over. A fingering problem, simple enough to fix if only the parents would give the girl some lessons.
Headlights appeared; the boys scattered. Mary remained standing at the curb in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, balanced like a stork on one leg. The car was expensive and silver-gray and driven by the sorcerer Body-without-Soul. Miss Vicks didn’t recognize him right away because like everyone else she was blinded by the headlights. The headlights turned the lenses of her and Mary’s spectacles to blazing disks of hammered gold so neither one of them could see the street, the trees, the houses—anything at all, really—and the next minute the car was gone. It was only after the taillights had disappeared around the corner that Miss Vicks realized she had recognized the license plate: 1511MV, a prime, followed by her initials.
Early in their romance the sorcerer told her he took this for a sign. Miss Vicks was not a superstitious person but like most people she was susceptible to flattery. She and her dog had been walking through the ruined gardens of the Woodard Estate when the sorcerer suddenly appeared on the path in front of them, a tall figure in a finely tailored suit, his shadow cast behind him, his face gold like melted sun. It was as if he’d been expecting her; when he circled her wrist with his fingers to draw her close to ask her name, she felt the life inside her leap up from everywhere, shocking, like a hatch of mayflies. He said he’d been hunting but she didn’t see a gun anywhere. “The animal kingdom,” he said, disparagingly, giving her little dog a nudge with the toe of his pointed shoe. He was a Woodard—it made sense that he would be there even after the place had fallen into desuetude.
Now her dog was raising his hackles. Miss Vicks could feel him tugging on the leash, bravely holding the soft red flags of his ears aloft and out to either side like banderillas.
“Has anyone seen Eddie?” Mary asked.
“He disappeared,” Roy Duffy told her, but he was joking.
Everyone knew how Eddie was—here one minute, gone the next. He was a small, jumpy boy; he moved so fast it was as if he got where he was headed before anyone ever noticed he’d left where he started out. Besides, they were all disappearing into their houses—it was only the beginning. The game was over; the next day school started. When the crest of one wave of light met the trough of an
other the result was blackness.
Tonight, as every night, from inside number 24 came the sound of Eddie’s parents playing canasta. “I’ll meld you!” said his mother, raucous with the joy of competition. The two of them were sitting on either side of the card table they set up in the living room each night after dinner, but you couldn’t see them, only hear their voices, the front bow window filled with a lush ivy plant in an Italian cachepot.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 Page 21
