Dan

by Joanna Ruocco

  “Do you want to know what he’s saying?” asked Gigi Zuzzo. Melba heard muffled laughter.

  “Yes,” said Melba.

  “Melba!” barked Gigi Zuzzo. “Did you really mean to call a man, a landlord, at his private residence, so as to demand a report on what he is at that moment saying in a private conversation with a female visitor?”

  “No,” said Melba. “That is …”

  “Good,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “It would reflect badly on me. It would embarrass me in front of a landlord, and Mark Rand and I have just gotten past all of that, our differences in status.”

  “There’s a fume,” said Melba Zuzzo. “In the house.”

  “I should hope it’s in the house if you’re calling Mark Rand,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “A landlord has a great deal of responsibility, it’s true, but he can’t be expected to go about looking into every stray fume that attracts a tenant’s notice. Have you heard of the atmosphere?”

  “Yes,” said Melba. “But …”

  “Well that’s the source of fumes, Melba. Now do you think it’s Mark Rand’s job to upkeep the atmosphere?”

  “No,” said Melba. “I …”

  “Whose job is it?” asked Gigi Zuzzo.

  “Astronauts?” guessed Melba. She heard a faint pop.

  “Did you hear that?” asked Gigi Zuzzo. “I snapped my fingers! Yes, Melba. Astronauts. The division of labor gives us landlords and astronauts, thank goodness, or men like Mark Rand would never rest. He’s overworked as it is. You don’t understand what it’s like. Mark Rand does rest, make no mistake, but rarely. He has a bed for nodding off now and then, but it’s impossible for him to spend an entire night in his bed. For one thing, many people use it and not all of them use it at the same time. You sign up for particular timeslots and pay accordingly. Mark Rand is a landlord in the first instance, so even if he is so tired he’s swaying on his feet, he would never do anything irregular. He would never evict the people in his bed without the proper notice, and by the time he gave the people proper notice, they would be out of the bed anyway, and new people in their stead. Now why would you bother Mark Rand when, for practical and ethical purposes, an astronaut is the appropriate choice?”

  Melba considered. Like most people, in the course of her life she had come into contact with an astronaut, but only briefly, in a controlled setting, and she had no idea where he might be now. Of all people, astronauts can be in the most places—anywhere on earth, but also anywhere not on earth—and so it is especially difficult to guess their location. Melba tried to summon a picture of the astronaut as she had seen him in the auditorium and later the cafeteria of Dan Elementary. It was so long ago! Had he worn a powder blue tunic and white boots? She thought that he had.

  In the auditorium, he had stood before the gathered students with Principal Benjamin. After the cheering died away, Principal Benjamin had spoken, not into a microphone, but into an intercom, so that his voice boomed from above, both in the auditorium and in the empty classrooms, perhaps for the benefit of the terrariums. Melba remembered that he had spoken on the topic of color—color, according to certain professionals, is not a part of things, not even things known chiefly for their colors, flowers and tropical birds and the most delicious of the cartoon-themed boxed cereals, but rather color gets attached to their surfaces later on, and Principal Benjamin must have had plenty to say about when and how the colors are attached, and Melba felt certain she had asked perspicacious questions about methods used to detach the colors and whether or not the detached colors could be stored, and if they were scented or had particular tastes, which seemed likely based on everyone’s experience, for example, of red—but as she devoted more energy to remembering and began to hear the voice transmitting over the intercom, she discovered that the words did not bear out her initial thought that Principal Benjamin had spoken about color, unless of course he had spoken in code, which was not impossible. No, the more Melba thought, the more she remembered that he had not spoken on the topic of color. She could hear his voice as he spoke on another topic altogether:

  “Force and motion, my buckaroos, there’s no escape,” boomed Principal Benjamin. “Surrender your illusions. No one floats, not even in space. Astronauts are falling! Does this make you sad? It shouldn’t. Are you cowboys or tintypes? Wake up! Die on the ground, with your boots on. Do you have goldfish?”

  “Yes!” called Melba. She was sitting in the front row and Principal Benjamin pointed a finger at her, nodding gravely, before going on.

  “Is the bowl spotless, suffused with radiant energy? Is there a light shining in the castle window? Do you change the water? Do you keep fewer than two-inches of fish per gallon?”

  “The fish don’t stay still,” said Melba. “I think—”

  “Or is there slime on the bowl?” said Principal Benjamin. “Are the castle walls over-grown? Is there everywhere darkness and filth? Are there sheets of living tissue in the water? What if you purchased an algae-eating fish? Have you considered it?”

  “Yes,” whispered Melba.

  “Yes!” crowed Principal Benjamin. “Of course you have. Who hasn’t? Imagine this algae-eater. You’re holding it up in a small plastic bag. It’s skinny. It’s hungry. Now let it go. Drop it in the bowl. Let it feast. Let it begin by devouring the proteinaceous film on the surface of the water. Let it move on to the slime on the walls. Below, every rock has a beard. So much shag, so much sludge. What a smorgasbord! Do you think your algae-eater can swallow all that muck, all that gunk, all that fuzz? Do the hairs tickle its throat? Does it gag?”

  Melba held her breath. She felt, in her own throat, a tickle. She shook her head. Her eyes watered. Principal Benjamin’s eyes were watering too.

  “No!” he cried. “It explodes! It explodes into bits and every bit needs to eat. Every bit eats until it explodes. Don’t you see? There are infinite bits exploding infinite times until there’s nothing else left to eat. The biosphere is all bits eating bits! We’re all done. We’re all ooze. I’m sure our guest, Mr. Gray, would tell you as much, if I hadn’t exhausted the subject. And now let us adjourn to the cafeteria. Thank you.”

  Melba had joined the flow of children out of the auditorium and through a tiled corridor where she waited in line to scrub her hands at a long trough before walking on, filing with the others through the cafeteria doors, each child pausing before Nurse Nathan to receive a spoonful of dark paste doled from a colossal jar. Melba swallowed her paste, scanning the cafeteria tables. The astronaut, she saw, was in the middle of the room, seated across from Principal Benjamin at Principal Benjamin’s desk, which Lester Crane, the custodian, had carried into the cafeteria for the occasion. Melba hovered near the desk anxiously, but Principal Benjamin and Mr. Gray were studying their trays and did not acknowledge her. She stepped closer to Mr. Gray and noted that his tunic smelled of ozone. She opened her mouth to speak. Suddenly, she felt a hand clap down on the back of her neck and she was steered away from the desk, reprimanded harshly, and sent to the Principal’s office, where she cried a little, cross-legged on one of the clean squares of linoleum formerly concealed by Principal Benjamin’s desk.

  Try as she might, Melba could not recall what happened next. When she attempted to reconstruct the sequence, her mind jumped from the image of the barren office to an image of the area below her kitchen sink, dark and cluttered with pipes, pale bottles, and a tall, dented box, one corner savaged and spilling blue powder. Principal Benjamin’s office and the area below her kitchen sink, envisioned one after the other, did make a kind of sequence, but not the sequence Melba wanted. That is, they didn’t make a linear sequence, but rather an associative sequence, which perhaps told her something about her consciousness but told her less than nothing about the order in which the events in her life unfolded. But was there an order? And if so, was that order chronological? And if so, chronological in which direction? Melba knew these weren’t fit questions for a landlord, but could they be considered fit questions for an astronaut?

&
nbsp; Well, thought Melba, no use wondering. Only Principal Benjamin might have had some insight into Mr. Gray’s whereabouts, and Principal Benjamin had disappeared. Melba had no way to contact an astronaut on her own.

  “I do not have the telephone number for any astronaut,” replied Melba, primly.

  “I do not have the telephone number for any astronaut,” mimicked Gigi Zuzzo. “So Mark Rand must receive every telephone call intended for a person whose number you do not have? How many telephone numbers don’t you have? Why it’s an unconceivable amount. Boggling. Do you see what kind of burden you place on Mark Rand? Even a landlord of his caliber couldn’t bear up under it, and that’s supposing you were his only tenant, which you are not.”

  “I didn’t mean,” began Melba, but Gigi Zuzzo cut her off.

  “Of course, you didn’t mean,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You never mean anything. You never anticipate, Melba. You don’t understand the concept of the future. What’s the future? Tell me.”

  “What if I don’t tell you?” asked Melba desperately. “Will it just happen?”

  Gigi Zuzzo growled long and low, and Melba clung to the phone, sweat breaking out along her brow.

  “Does the future have something to do with snow?” she asked. “How it doesn’t fall from the sky all at once, crushing everything below?”

  “You’re just like your father,” said Gigi Zuzzo bitterly. “You always think things are so much rosier than they really are. Let me tell you, the future never kept anyone from getting crushed! I’ve noticed that you never buy depilatory creams, Melba. Your arms are fuzzy, don’t deny it, matted with little hairs, like tennis balls. Now listen to this. One day you’re going to see something startling and not in a good way. You’ll see a piece of straw driven like a skewer through a man’s neck by gale force winds. How awful! Who wants to see such a thing? Not you! You’ll throw your arm across your eyes and those little hairs will act like Velcro on your eyeballs. You’ll rip out your eyeballs. They’ll be stuck to your arm! That’s the future, Melba. That’s what not meaning gets you, eyeballs on your arm. Why won’t you buy depilatory creams? They smell wonderful, like scorched lemons. They’re cheap! You never shop, Melba. It’s killing you, not just in the future, right now.”

  “I had a bad experience with depilatory creams,” said Melba. “My skin started to smoke, the skin above my upper lip, and the smoke went right into my nose. I had to wear your snorkel and sleep with my face in a bowl of water. I couldn’t possibly go through that again! I don’t even have my own snorkel, and …”

  “It’s not about the depilatory creams,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “It’s about shopping more generally. When you shop, you expand, Melba. You stretch out your hand and also your psyche to compass the thing that you desire, and then, when the moment is right, you clamp down, you squeeze around the thing! Expansion and contraction, Melba, that’s shopping. It’s a spasm! A special spasm. You’ve heard of these spasms? Not just a pleasant jolt. Jolts don’t penetrate to great depth, and they have no duration. A spasm is different; it’s a rippling that works the fascia to keep your inner linings from drying out. Have you ever seen a person with her inner linings dried out?”

  Melba considered.

  “You have,” snarled Gigi Zuzzo. “Think, Melba. She never shopped! She worked in the bakery before you. How can you be so callous? You are her successor!”

  “Lisa Cucci,” said Melba. She had succeeded Lisa Cucci as the bakery’s employee.

  “But Lisa Cucci’s inner lining didn’t dry out,” protested Melba. “She married Seton Holmes and started a new life.”

  “Lisa Cucci was spurned by Seton Holmes!” said Gigi Zuzzo. “The Business Council decided that the story should be suppressed. They kept it from you, Melba. I disagreed, but I’m not on the Business Council. I had no vote. What do I know about business? Nothing. If you’d been informed about Lisa Cucci’s being dried out and spurned, a husk of her former self, you might not have performed ably as her successor. You might have feared acceding to her position, knowing how it turned out. In that sense, I see the wisdom of the Business Council’s decision. In another sense though, I see the fallibility of the Business Council’s reasoning, because in not knowing Lisa Cucci’s situation, you have made almost exactly the same mistakes. It doesn’t bode well for your longevity as a bakery employee! But I suppose the Business Council made calculations about all of that, about your rate of deterioration under Lisa Cucci-like conditions. They are already training your successor!”

  “If Lisa Cucci didn’t start a new life with Seton Holmes,” whispered Melba. “And she isn’t living her old life as a bakery employee, then what is Lisa Cucci doing?”

  “She’s existing in a kind of limbo,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “She doesn’t do anything. She can’t. She’s neither here nor there, this nor that. You wouldn’t recognize her. She’s a wispy, pale thing, a tuft. It’s as though she’s been reduced to a single eyebrow. I bid you good day, Melba.”

  “Good day,” said Melba.

  “You don’t raise me?” snapped Gigi Zuzzo. “You see my bid and that’s all? Melba, have you no loins? No spark? Don’t you aspire?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Melba.

  “Good day,” said Gigi Zuzzo.

  “Good day,” said Melba.

  “Don,” called Melba now over the moan of the hand vacuum. “Don.” Don whirled, hand vacuum pointed at Melba’s head. For an instant, Don Pond and Melba Zuzzo stared at each other, Melba’s eyes flitting between Don Pond’s eyes and the dark slot of the upraised hand vacuum. Then Don Pond lowered the hand vacuum.

  “Yes, Melba,” he said.

  “Do you notice anything about my eyebrows?” asked Melba. “I mean, do you recognize anyone?”

  Don Pond shrugged.

  “Dr. Buck warned me you would ask about that,” he said. “He told me that you would become agitated whatever answer I gave and so I shouldn’t say anything. He recommended that I assign you to a part of the house where your mind would be occupied by a form of entertainment.”

  “I’ll go,” said Melba. “I’ve heard that entertainment is a cure for being tired and for being wide awake as well. It might be exactly what I need. I didn’t know there was any part of Dan with a functioning form of entertainment.”

  “You haven’t been paying much attention to the candidates if you think they’re making promises about entertainment,” said Don Pond. “Haven’t you been listening to the speeches?”

  “Only when I can’t avoid them,” said Melba. “When someone calls me at the bakery or at my house or bikes along next to me with a megaphone.”

  “I like that you look at my head when you talk to me,” said Don Pond in a rush. “Dr. Buck told me not to say that to you either, but I couldn’t help it.”

  “Thank you,” said Melba, looking at Don Pond’s head more intently, although she knew that she did not deserve his compliment. As a girl, she hadn’t given heads their due, until one day her father took her to the Dan Diner. There she was reprimanded by the waitress, Barb Owen. Barb Owen had slammed mugs of coffee on the table, jostling the pink tablet settling into Melba’s drinking water. Melba stared at the bubbles streaming up inside the tall glass of drinking water. She skimmed the surface foam with the tip of her spoon then placed the spoon carefully on the napkin beside two other spoons. She wondered what to order. She thought she might like something with gravy. Meanwhile, Zeno Zuzzo was talking about the landbridge.

  “In conclusion, crossing the landbridge was a beleaguering experience,” concluded Zeno Zuzzo. “I would have swum! But land was the new thing then. It was like a fad! Walking on land was the big thing.”

  “Were there shoes yet?” asked Melba.

  “No shoes,” said Zeno Zuzzo. He ordered the lunch special and Barb Owen brought Zeno and Melba Zuzzo each a Turkey Dinner. She slammed them on the table. Melba watched the gravy slowly lap the rim of the gravy boat. After finishing her Turkey Dinner, Melba waited at the door while her father brought the che
ck up to the counter. Suddenly Barb Owen was beside her, bending over her, pushing her face close to Melba’s face.

  “You are an anarchist, Melba Zuzzo,” she shouted. “You’re always looking at people’s hands or talking about their feet! Why can’t you pay attention to heads like a regular person?”

  Stunned, Melba shrank back, but not before she had looked closely at Barb Owen’s head. She understood in an instant why Barb Owen was upset. Barb Owen had a sensational head, a head that warranted inspection. Melba had never thought of herself as an anarchist, but whatever term you put to it, her behavior had been wrong: looking down all the time, introducing shoes into conversation while sitting down at the table to eat turkey and gravy in a public venue. If it wasn’t anarchism, it was something very close, and Melba felt deeply ashamed, a feeling that stayed with her no matter how much praise she received. It felt good, receiving praise from Don Pond, but it could not alleviate the shame. Barb Owen deserved the praise, not Melba. Melba’s smile was bittersweet.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care very much about politics. Mayor Bunt is as good a mayor as any other, so why we have to go through an election is beyond me.”

  “I know someone who might change your mind,” said Don Pond. “He’s a candidate and if he wins the election he’s going to transform Dan completely.”

  “Is that what you want?” asked Melba, curious.

  “Depends on the kind of transformation,” said Don Pond. “This candidate will make us all rich. I don’t care so much about being rich myself, but it would be nice to be a citizen in a town of millionaires. Everyone in Henderson would go green with envy and everyone in Gerardville and Manstown and Wilma too, everyone in every town everywhere, once they hear how high on the hog we all are. We’ll have to fill all the warehouses in the hosiery district with our riches. I don’t know if you’ve noticed Melba, ensconced in the bakery like you are, but there’s a dearth of jobs in Dan. Unemployment is more enjoyable if you’re rich and this candidate I mentioned, he figured that out. And what a personality! Everything he says redounds to his credit. There is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”