The Underneath

by Melanie Finn

  Once, in rural Nigeria, Michael and I had witnessed a traditional dance involving full body masks. The dancers came out, the central dancer wearing an eland mask made elaborately of grass. The dancer was completely encased in the mask—only his feet were visible, scuffing the dust. The eland strode and shied, bucked and turned, elusive, all power and elegance. I had mistakenly thought the point for the dancer was to become the eland, to take on its qualities—as with warriors who used to eat the heart and brains of their vanquished foes. But Michael told me it was more beautiful: wearing the mask, the dancer ceased to be a dancer—he shed his human skin—and leaving his human-ness was able to enter the plain of pure being where all living things existed as spirits. All were equal on this spirit plain: there was no rank and file, no leaders, no predators nor prey, no ego, no desire.

  And what if we somehow might transcend to that other plain, stripped of our physical encasement, human or animal, some High Catholic idea of Holy Spirit—ego dispersed, and all of us become all evil and all good, undifferentiated, the molecules blending. And in this way I might finally understand General Christmas, I might be him, and he me. Not nirvana, not some painted-up sop to the lonely and the bigoted and the suffering, but a complete neutrality of being, like the atoms in an acorn or a stone.

  The water was cold in the bath. I had not realized the passage of time. Time felt like a tunnel that I could look through and move through, from the first glimmer of human consciousness a million years ago to my own present—my own miraculous hand against the white porcelain of the bathtub. It was the same tunnel for all of us, the same way back, the way down, and we were running with fear, trying to escape ourselves, the cages that we build; sometimes we were putting on masks and dancing, sometimes we were raping and plunging ourselves into the bodies of others, all of this a frantic attempt to escape: to shed our wretched selves.

  While I was convulsed with thought—so self-important, so proud of my existential adventures, my bravery, my steadfastness under Santa’s scrutiny—my body, my mortal body, the manufacture of millions of years, was betraying me. I stood up and felt dizzy, saw myself briefly in the cracked mirror across from the bath, hideous and bloated, and I saw myself fall, heard a sound like firecrackers which I later understood to be my head smacking against the wall and the side of the tub on the way down. Because the tub was only half-full I did not drown.

  44

  YOU YOU ALWAYS YOU NEVER you never you never you you you don’t love you don’t love me me me—

  Ben heard the voices through the wall, the voices slamming like bricks. All the loathing and self-pity. People dwelt on the wrongs done to them, attentive as dogs licking and licking wounds to keep them open. They became their wounds.

  It was nearly 4:30. Dawn began its slow stalk across Ed’s fields. A single chickadee, like an over-eager chorister, announced the day, then fell silent, and the humans resumed their complaining. You you you always you you you never. The shame, the blame, the bewilderment at life’s mundanity. Hadn’t love been promised? Roses, beauty, a prince on a white horse? Ronaldo! Brianna! Whatever the show, it had an exclamation mark, a host in a bright tie with a shaved head or a hostess, plump and comfy, your less pretty best friend.

  You always you always I hate you I wish you were dead you never I hate you don’t love you never listen never we’ll be right back—

  The motels, no matter how wretched, always had TVs. Motels with their ceiling stains, their paper bathmats, their child-sized towels. He’d loved the soaps, the plastic cups in their wrapping, the white altar that was the bathroom sink. He’d had the impression these had been put there especially for him: gifts. He learned to bring a pillow and the bed cover into the bathroom with him before the grown-ups shut the door. Don’t open that fuckin’ door. He counted the tiles on the floor, he listened, he was like a blind boy interpreting sound. You can shut your eyes, you can shut the door but you can’t un-hear. The TV, the delicate pffff of the lighter, low voices, his mother murmuring-laughing with Billy or Joey or Wheezie or Pete or Honey Baby, the stink of their unwashed jeans, their unwashed hair, their cigarettes, their farts. He hoped they’d ignore him. He prayed they did not see him, he was a pile of laundry, he was a floor tile.

  Don’t open that fuckin’ door. As if the door was sound proof, fist proof, boot proof. Count the tiles, 98, 99, and hear the sound of a zipper, of sucking, oh yeah baby. They always wanted a piss afterward and he would hide in the shower, the smell of their urine, its confident fizz in the toilet water. They didn’t care if they missed or splattered.

  “And who do we have hiding in here?”

  “That’s just Ben. He’s all right, aren’t you, my Benben. You’re cool with Momma partying.”

  Sometimes they did not see him, sometimes they did. Sometimes they smiled before they hit him. They spoke in soft, low voices. They gave him candy from the vending machines.

  The twilight of drapes, brown as late fall, dead leaves; the world outside, bright sun, the humming interstate or banks of dirty snow. The light through slats, vertical, in small pieces only, as if there wasn’t enough. Sometimes the men stayed, Nick, John, Moose, Goose. They strapped up, the magic needle, oooohhhhmmmm, like a little kitty-cat walking up my spine his mother said. Sometimes they pissed and zipped up and left, his mother running into the bathroom to rinse out her mouth, turning her face this way and that in the mirror.

  Ben sat up. He was sweating though the dawn was cool.

  He will get rid of the TV. He and Jake will take it out to the woods and shoot it. He and Jake, he and Jake, me and Jake.

  Jake was sitting six inches from the screen. A woman, over-exercised as a freakish greyhound, her skin stretched across her face like vacuum-sealed jerky, spoke in rapid, un-connected exclamations. She was selling a miracle lotion of some kind—my skin doesn’t just look younger—Jake watched passively.

  Shevaunne lay on the sofa, fast asleep. Her t-shirt rode up her belly, revealing the striations of stretch marks. Her bare arms and ankles were pocked with needle scars, some blistered with knots of tissue where infections had set in. Her body was a road map of her life. He should pity her, the narrow class-4 road that ran directly from her shitty family to his shitty home. It was a straight line, the ink indelible and black. But she’d made no effort to veer off or double back, she’d taken the path of least resistance, and down it she was sliding still, down down the mire and mud, she was taking her son with her, holding him fast, simply, simply because she didn’t want to be alone when she at last stopped sliding.

  Ben sat beside Jake. At first, the boy did not acknowledge him, fixated on bodies that were now flying through the air, a soundtrack that resembled a circus calliope. What was this, re-runs of Jackass? No, it was the human condition, a messy splat upon the pavement.

  Then Jake began to blend into Ben, to lean his arm on Ben’s thigh, his palm open, his body tilting, so that Ben scooped him up and brought him fully onto his lap. He felt the weight of the boy and a fierce stabbing in his heart. He’d never understood why love should be felt by that organ, as if it had anything to do with the pumping of blood, the circulating of oxygen.

  The feeling of love, this irrational, unreasonable love for a child, this sacred child, pinned him to the floor so that he could not move and could scarcely breathe and his eyes filled with tears. He rested his chin on the top of Jake’s head. He held the boy.

  Just this moment, this perfect, unstirred moment, before the inhale, before the exhale. But the time always came, the task was always at hand, it had to be done.

  “Jake, I’m going to turn the TV down and we’re going out for the day. You and me.”

  Ben could see the TV reflected in Jake’s eyes, the images printed directly onto his retina. “Jake, I’m going to turn the TV down now. Are you listening? And we’re going to be quiet so we don’t wake your mom.”

  Jake nodded. Ben reached out his hand. All this was part of it, all this was meditated, his hand reaching through the air, a seq
uence. What if he stopped now and left on the TV and the boy in front of it? But he did not. His fingers reached for the remote. He felt as if this had already happened, a long time ago, maybe even before he was born—old-timers in frock coats and calico who believed that if you spare the rod you spoil the child. They made sure not to spoil the child.

  He pressed mute. Jake blinked and looked up at Ben, almost surprised to see him there. Ben smiled, mouthed, “Let’s go.”

  On his way out, Ben pulled a spindle from the back pocket of his jeans and left it there upon the counter, just where the dawn light caused the plastic wrapping to glow and luminate.

  45

  Sad bunnies.”

  The shed door cracked ajar, the white electrical cord trailing out. Why should the half-open door be more frightening than one that’s fully open or closed? Kay turned up the radio, Adele still moaning on about the guy she’d known five years ago. Jesus Christ, just get over it, Kay thought. If there’s one thing she could teach Freya it would be about moving on, not wasting years sobbing into a hankie about a guy.

  “Did you know a blue whale is the largest animal that ever lived?” Tom chirped.

  “Hellooo,” sang Freya with all her heart.

  “Did you know that many moths do not have mouths?”

  At Kamp Wahoo, they fledged from the car, giving her the briefest of kisses, off toward the warm Pop-Tarts and dodgeball and Phoebe Figgs with her clipboard and her certainty.

  In White’s, Kay roamed the aisles, hunting and gathering, pasta, eggs, peaches, cheese, ice cream. At the checkout, she tossed in a copy of The Caledonian-Record. Then she took it out. It was just a newspaper. She held it, light in her hands, words and paper, the headline, “BARNET WWII VETERAN CELEBRATES 100TH BIRTHDAY.”

  “Ma’am?” the woman working the checkout was poised. “Do you want that?”

  “Sure.” And so the belt slowly conveyed the paper toward the bread, the butter, the corn-on-the-cob, and it occurred to Kay that the half-open door suggests the moment of just before the decision, the commitment, the this or that. Like a De Chirico painting: what is impending but has not yet arrived, threat or promise, salvation or annihilation, too soon to tell.

  46

  BEN GLANCED BACK AT JAKE in his car seat, unnerved by the precision of DNA: Shevaunne’s eyes and forehead. But the jaw line of some unknown junkie fuckwit.

  “I’ve got a surprise for us,” he said.

  Jake beamed. “Walmart?”

  Walmart. Strawberry. The total of Jake’s vocalizations. Ben wondered if it meant anything—these two words held some clue. They were positive, glimmers of light. “Better than Walmart, way, way better.”

  Ben parked outside the museum in the cool, spreading shade of a spreading maple. A bright banner read:

  What’s Up Down Under! A roving exhibit of the unique flora and fauna of Australia.

  Ben couldn’t remember what he and Frank had seen at the museum, only that there had been wonders, pink flamingos and a polar bear, the world’s biggest butterfly, a giant tapeworm in a bottle: the first inkling they’d had of the world beyond the Kingdom. They had raced from exhibit to exhibit, pressing their greedy faces against the glass. There was somewhere else, they’d finally understood. If you drove south on I-93, you didn’t just get to Boston, you could keep going to the Amazon or Tibet or Alice Springs.

  Their plan for Australia began there and then, aged 13, amid the colonial plunder of taxidermied animals and bats in formaldehyde, it grew up around them, a wild, exotic plant fed in equal measure by their despair and their hope. Frank had found a book in the library, A Pictorial History of Australia. They’d sat on the cabin’s porch and turned the pages, smudging the images with their sweaty adolescent fingers and beheld the opposite of everything, the opposite landscape, opposite colors, opposite side of the world. The people looked tanned and open and happy, the sea, the bleached and eternal outback, the red earth. There was a huge desert area called the Nullabor Plain, which sounded at first like a native name, like those on the map, Wagga Wagga, Wollongong, Ulladulla; but Frank read the caption, it was Latin for No Trees, null arbor. The Plain of No Trees. Imagine—they had imagined—driving for three days, straight, and not seeing a tree or a person, only the sky and the horizon, stars and earth and the sounds of the planet: wind, insects, your own breathing.

  They worked out they’d need five grand each, a small fortune, but attainable if they worked two jobs over the summers. Visas, airfares, and they’d need to buy a car when they got there, have enough money to drive around until they found the right place. They’d burn their passports, blend in. “G’day! G’day, mate!”

  “We could kidnap rich people,” Frank had said. They’d laughed.

  “Yeah, and bring them to the cabin.” Ben added. Because, maybe.

  “We wouldn’t even ask for a million. Just, like 50 grand.”

  “And we’d be nice to them. We wouldn’t hurt them.” Frank’s eyes had glowed. “Flatlanders pay serious money to stay in cabins like ours. They might even like us and just give us the money.”

  Ben felt Jake’s hot hand buried in his. He always left it to Jake to give him his hand first, so that it felt like a choice—Jake seeking the physical connection. Thus, hand-in-hand, they toured the exhibits. Jake loved the interactive video on the outback. “Kangaroo,” he said.

  Kneeling down, Ben put his arm around Jake. “Would you like to go there?”

  Jake nodded.

  “We could see the kangaroos and the koalas.”

  “Kooka—”

  “The kookaburra bird.”

  Ben looked at the boy; Jake was expecting him to pull it all back, to sneer, Stupid, dumb kid. The years it would take before Jake’s first reaction was something other than a flinch.

  So he cupped Jake’s face with his large hands: “We’re going to Australia, you and me, I promise.”

  47

  Kay opened The Caledonian-Record on the kitchen table.

  Fire Guts Concord Home, Cat Saved

  Single-Payer Healthcare Back on the Cards

  Bed Bugs Force Urgent Care Closure in Barnet

  Perhaps she could convince Michael to move here. She could get a job, she could write about quilting competitions, the grand openings of feed stores. It wouldn’t be so bad, the quiet Vermont life, a small school for the kids. There might even be Ben. From time to time. Or someone like him. She flipped through the pages, obituaries, the police log, a story about the refurbishment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars building, another about the director of a food assistance charity arrested for the theft of $42,000 worth of donations, a state symposium on the opiate crisis. There were right-wing columnists on the editorial page, and a smattering of national and foreign news toward the back. She almost tossed aside the sports section.

  But: it’s a strange thing how the eye works, identifying a pattern, hurling a message to the brain, which lumbers on, still mulling Dear Abby’s answer to ‘Frustrated in Des Moines’ several pages back.

  Steiner.

  Like an arrow in the backside. Paul Steiner. Kay leaned in:

  Local Couple Peddle Donated Bikes for Youth

  East Montrose—Paul and Trudi Steiner bought a weekend house in the Northeast Kingdom because they loved the mountain biking and the community. “But the more we biked and the more we got to know the community, we found there were many, many local kids who couldn’t take to the trails because they didn’t have bikes,” Steiner said. “Trudi and I put out the word and within days collected more than 100 bikes from friends in the Boston area.”

  All the bikes are of good to excellent quality, and are available through the East Montrose Bikeway in East Montrose. Those seeking the donation of a bike must be between 8 and 17 years of age and have parental permission. They must also commit to volunteering eight hours of their time to work on the extensive Montrose Bikeway trail system.

  Jim Maddox, head of Public Relations at the Bikeway, said: “We discussed this idea wi
th Paul and Trudi, and agreed that rather than a free giveaway, we’d like to get the recipients involved in what we do, so that they not only value the gift but join the East Montrose biking community.”

  “We just started asking around,” said Trudi Steiner. “So many people have great bikes that they never use or their kids have gone away to college and left their bikes; it doesn’t make sense to throw them away. Not everyone needs to sell stuff on Craigslist. It feels good to give!”

  Kay folded up the paper. The groceries were not yet un-packed, the ice cream just beginning to soften.

  *

  The lane made a dash toward the hills, past several small cabins, an open field, and into the woods. Kay measured the distance in her head, comparing it to the property map she’d photocopied in the town hall. In London it was almost impossible to find out where anyone lived, but here she simply went to the East Montrose town hall.

  And there indeed was the driveway, graveled, ironed flat and straight under dark, heavy maples. It was a new house, a glorified cottage—over-designed, Kay thought. The windows were too big and sealed shut suggesting the use of air conditioning. An Audi TT with Massachusetts plates was parked in front. Kay pulled up behind it, slamming the door loudly as she got out. She walked to the front door, rang the bell. A thin blond woman in an athletic tank and hot pink biking shorts opened the door a few inches. In her arms was a small, sharp-faced dog, yipping. “Ssshhhh, Lily, naughty dog,” the woman murmured, then her voice hardened at Kay: “How can I help you?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you like this.” Kay summoned an apologetic smile. “Are you Trudi Steiner?”

  Yip yip went Lily. Yippity yip.

  “I’d like to know who you are.” Trudi was appraising her, noting the bandaged hand.