Dan

by Joanna Ruocco

  “Does Mayor Bunt know you’re talking like this?” asked Melba. “Sort of zany and avaricious?”

  “I’m sure he does,” said Don Pond. “His spies are everywhere. I can’t look for them in more than one place at a time. It’s against the laws of physics. If I check under the couch, who’s to guarantee they haven’t darted into the corner, or run all the way into the kitchen?”

  “I heard something under the couch,” said Melba. “And noises were coming from that corner as well. I thought it was animals making the noises but it could have been spies.”

  Don Pond looked at her incredulously and Melba blinked, her cheeks mottling with a deep, irregular blush.

  “Oh, you must think I’m daft,” said Melba. “I hadn’t realized until now …”

  “What did you think the animals around Dan were doing if not spying?” asked Don Pond, chuckling. Generally, his modesty prevented him from indulging his sense of superiority, but this was a special occasion, ripe for merry condescension, which could be easily attributed to a spontaneous overflow of protective tenderness rather than self-congratulation, the more immodest option, and so Don Pond chuckled on, not bothering to check his glee.

  “Every animal you see in Dan is one of Mayor Bunt’s henchmen!” said Don Pond. “You must be the only person in Dan who didn’t know that. Hadn’t you noticed the way people talk in Dan? Always skirting around the most important issues, never coming to the point? It’s because we can’t speak freely, not with spies in every nook and cranny.”

  “Did Bev Hat know?” asked Melba. Don Pond’s face darkened until skin and beard seemed to run together, forming an unsuggestive blot.

  “There was never any Bev Hat,” said Don Pond. “She was a fabrication, invented by Mayor Blunt to stir sympathies. The young mother who died tragically in the service of our glorious mayor! It’s perfect isn’t it?”

  “If there was never any Bev Hat,” Melba caught her breath as the implication struck her. “If there was never any Bev Hat, then she can’t have returned from the dead as Melba Zuzzo! I knew I hadn’t become Bev Hat, but I was still so disturbed … the very idea that I might suddenly be someone I didn’t think I was before. A wife and mother at that!”

  “I’m glad you’re relieved,” said Don Pond. “Some women would be disappointed. Bev Hat was the feminine ideal. No man was immune to her charms.”

  “I am glad,” said Melba. Don Pond dropped the hand vacuum on the table. It clunked. Melba looked at the hand vacuum then back at Don Pond. His eyes bore into hers and he pulled a small pad out of his back pocket, making a note with a tiny pencil.

  “How would you rate the gladness?” he asked. “On a scale of one to ten.”

  Melba began to feel uneasy.

  “It’s average gladness,” she said. “Maybe that means I’m not glad at all? I’m just existing without actively ruing anything in particular. I suppose I’m numb rather than glad. But given how much pain there is in the world, I should think I’m glad to be numb? So maybe numbness is a form of being glad after all.”

  “Five?” asked Don Pond. Melba inched forward on the couch. It had grown humid in Don Pond’s house and the vapors in the air pushed against her. She felt as though she was wading through a pack of damp Labradors. The dim light that came through the windows illuminated the suspended water molecules, which had grown larger, and Melba saw the graininess of the air more distinctly than the objects she hoped to see through the air: the room’s furniture and wall-hangings, its doors. Everything around her was gray and somewhat obscured.

  “At first I thought there was an obscurity inhering in my perceptions,” murmured Melba. “But it’s coming from the room, I’m sure of it. The room is making a cloud.”

  Don Pond seemed to be approaching, but she could not see him any more clearly as he neared; the graininess was growing more marked between them.

  “I wonder what you’d look like without a beard?” she asked.

  “Why do you wonder?” Don Pond’s voice was steady.

  “I don’t really wonder,” said Melba. “It’s just sooner or later, if one person has a beard and is in the company of another person, the beard becomes a topic. I should have said something else about the beard, a statement and not a question. I should have shared a fact maybe. Did you know that growing a beard that’s a different color from the rest of your hair is an expression of weakness in the genes? Oh no, that was somehow still a question, wasn’t it? Well, the point is that the brain of the man with this kind of beard tends to go soft. Your beard is very uniform in color and very small and thick, and it matches your eyebrows and your head hair quite exactly, and, you know, it doesn’t look quite real, not for a man, it looks like it was produced by a mink and then cut into the shape of a beard and stuck onto your face, and I was just wondering if you could take it off, oh,” said Melba, flustered. “I’ve done it again. Leave your beard on, I don’t care.” She smoothed her own hair with damp palms, then smoothed her apron, then moved her shoulders up and down as she’d seen her mother do so many times, limbering.

  “Well,” she said, brightly. “I think I’ll be going.”

  Don Pond raised his eyebrows, which looked very much like two wedges cut from either side of his beard, rotated 180 degrees, and stuck on above his eyes.

  “Where will you go?” asked Don Pond.

  “I’ll go home,” laughed Melba, aware that the sound of her laughter and the convulsions of her diaphragm were out of sync. One or the other was delayed. She felt vaguely nauseated by it and stopped laughing abruptly.

  “Isn’t that where people go?” she continued, uncertainly. “When they … go? If they’re not already there? Home, I mean?”

  She slid closer to the cushion’s edge and caught her breath. The couch seemed higher. She tried to grip the black vinyl. Slowly, she stretched out her legs, straining, pointing her toes. The carpet was somewhere below, out of reach.

  “You should call first,” said Don Pond. He circled around the table and reached out to Melba. Don Pond’s hand was cool and pale and unnaturally smooth.

  “That’s skin?” asked Melba, rotating her fingers in his grasp.

  “Oh,” said Don Pond, and tugged so that Melba’s feet thudded down.

  “It wasn’t so far, after all,” she said, straightening her knees and standing upright. “But if you’re afraid of heights, it doesn’t really matter how high up you are, does it? It’s like how you can drown in an inch of water? My mother told me about a schoolmate of hers, Josie Pride, who drowned crying in bed. You should never cry in bed, face down obviously, but even face up or on your side, it depends on the planes of your face, how the water runs, but really, everyone’s nose and mouth is downhill of the eyes, and when Josie Pride was discovered she was scarcely recognizable. Her parents thought at first she’d been abducted and some puffy dummy had been jammed under the bedclothes as a decoy, because abductions do happen in Dan, all the time, said my mother, and the abductors have been known to leave dummies in place of the abducted children, not as decoys, but as poppets designed to tempt the parents into pagan acts of sympathetic magic, just for fun, said my mother, because abductors in Dan are those listless types who turn to devilry to stay awake, trampling circles in people’s yards, using the blood of children to raise chthonic gods of madness and corruption, and they told my mother they wanted me in particular, because my blood is tainted and tainted blood is more compelling to chthonic gods than untainted blood, and my mother had to hold them off by giving them the allowance money she would have given me otherwise and sometimes threatening violent retaliation, and if I exhausted her too much with needs and wants she would have gotten tired and stopped holding them off altogether, so I had to leave her alone and not bother her about snacks and shoes and new dresses with pretty smocking and things of that nature or she’d have let them drag me away and open up my chest on an altar that would have just been an old telephone cable spool so I’d have gotten splinters too, but don’t cry about it, my mother s
aid, or you’ll drown, like Josie Pride, who wasn’t a dummy after all, but was herself, wet and dead on the bottom bunk, and …”

  Melba suspected that she was blathering. She couldn’t make out what she was saying but her voice droned on and on. Don Pond was leading her by the hand, that was the reason. Melba hadn’t been led by the hand in quite some time and had forgotten the loosening effect it had on the tongue.

  Don Pond led her through thickening mist into a narrow corridor.

  “Did you leave the tea kettle boiling?” asked Melba but Don Pond didn’t answer. Melba slid the fingers of her free hand along the dark paneling that seemed to press in against her. It was damp and rough and when she hooked her fingers they bumped and snagged again and again on little dips and rises. The animal sounds were louder, coming from both sides of the corridor, and from above: chirping, rustling, mewling, rapid, wheezy breaths.

  “Here’s the phone,” said Don Pond. It wasn’t a wall phone, the kind one finds in a business, but a phone installed on a horizontal surface, in a small alcove in the wall at chest height, the kind of phone one finds in a house. Melba had never dialed her own number, but it happened to be one of the most common sequences of numerals, and she dialed confidently.

  “It’s ringing,” she said. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” said Mark Rand.

  “Is everything quite alright?” asked Melba. “At the house?”

  “You left dishes in the sink, Melba,” said Mark Rand, reprovingly. Melba tucked the receiver more firmly between her ear and shoulder and hunched into the wall, hoping Don Pond couldn’t hear her conversation.

  “I didn’t,” she whispered. “One dish maybe. And my coffee mug.”

  “Dishes,” insisted Mark Rand. “I’ve documented them. This isn’t the first time, Melba. Have you been watering your plants on a schedule? Don’t answer. You haven’t been. Two of them are dead and the rest are performing poorly. There are no towels in the bathroom. Your bedroom hamper is full of unlaundered clothing.”

  Melba squeezed the phone receiver as hard as she could, hunching, and did not respond. She heard Mark Rand sigh.

  “Melba,” said Mark Rand. “You may not know this, but many landlords do not provide their tenants with washers and dryers. Tenants don’t launder their clothing, say these landlords. Tenants are unkempt, disorderly people. They refuse to better themselves. I always disagree with these landlords. I provide my tenants with washers and dryers, I say. I give my tenants the opportunity to launder their clothing. I don’t want to see my tenants licking their coats on the street, I say. My tenants are men and women of quality. My tenants smell fresh, I say. It’s a pleasure to stand close to my tenants. Touching my tenants poses no significant risk.”

  “I was planning on laundering my clothing just as soon as I could,” said Melba. “I’ll do it right now. I’m on my way home and I’ll launder at once.”

  “No!” Mark Rand’s voice was hard. “I don’t want your explanations and promises, and if I did I would want them in writing. Sometimes I think the telephone was invented by a jealous manufacturer with an anti-landlord agenda as an instrument of torture. Manufacturers loathe landlords! Do you know why? Because landlords defy the mercantile system! Instead of obeying the dictates of the market and pursuing their self-interest, landlords selflessly pursue the interests of their tenants! I am speaking of true landlords, naturally, those who dedicate themselves to the broad human purpose of providing their fellow men and women with the benefits of roofs and walls, and in special cases, windows, doors, indoor plumbing, electric lights, etc., etc., and in the rarest cases, washers and dryers, dishes and cutlery, house plants, and precious antiques. True landlords expect to find enemies among the merchants, but it is more than the true landlord can bear when a tenant comes under the sway of manufacturers, plays into a manufacturer’s hands, uses the telephone provided by the manufacturers to plague and harry the landlord just as the manufacturers intended! Tenants should side with the landlord against the manufacturer, but tenants rarely act in their own best interests, which is precisely why they need landlords to begin with.”

  “I know I need you!” Melba cried. “I’ve never even met a manufacturer, at least not that I know of. Don’t they wear tall hats? I’m sure I wouldn’t side with a person like that. I wouldn’t have called at all but Don Pond suggested it, I think as a formality, because it’s always polite to call home, not so as to plague or harry you!”

  “Don Pond,” said Mark Rand. “Why are you taking suggestions from Don Pond?”

  “I’m a guest in his house,” said Melba. She glanced over her shoulder at Don Pond who stood in the attitude of a man who was not overhearing a nearby telephone conversation but was rather immersing himself in his own thoughts, thoughts that were thoroughly amusing. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking up toward the ceiling, smiling steadily through his beard. “When the landlord is not present, shouldn’t the guest take suggestions from the landlord’s tenant? Isn’t that the chain of command?”

  “And how do you know that the landlord is not present?” asked Mark Rand. “Is Don Pond’s house so small and devoid of mystery that you can be certain the landlord does not lurk undetected, perhaps in order to test you, and in so testing you, test me, to ascertain what kind of tenant I produce? Taking Don Pond’s suggestions, Melba, you are no doubt failing a test on my behalf. The only way to distance myself from this failure would be to terminate your tenancy.”

  “Leslie Duck is Don Pond’s landlord!” said Melba. “Leslie Duck is not present. He left Dan to buy a banana plantation. He must be a thousand miles away, on an island, maybe on the exact island I drew as a little girl. I have no idea where that island is but it was the farthest thing I could imagine from Dan at the time I drew it. I didn’t know anything about the moon back then, or the wormholes that lead you through the galaxy into something entirely unknown and maybe nonexistent, that is, according to the instruments we use to determine if something exists. I’m sure the other side of wormholes exists for the creatures that live there. Leslie Duck probably isn’t as far from Dan as that, who knows if bananas grow on the other sides of wormholes, but he’s nowhere nearby.”

  “Who told you that, Melba?” asked Mark Rand. “Think carefully. Who told you that Leslie Duck was far away, farming bananas?”

  “Officer Greg,” whispered Melba at the same time that Mark Rand cried out “Officer Greg!” in a tone of exultation.

  “That’s right!” said Mark Rand. “Officer Greg, who, as you well know, sleeps on a cot in the Dan Police Station. Who do you think owns the Dan Police Station?”

  Melba hesitated.

  “Leslie Duck!” said Mark Rand. “Officer Greg is Leslie Duck’s tenant. Officer Greg and Don Pond haven’t failed their landlord the way you’ve failed me, Melba. Leslie Duck is enjoying my defeat, let me tell you, and not from afar. From right around the corner!”

  Melba clutched the receiver to her chest and looked up and down the corridor. She could see nothing Leslie Duck-like in the murky distance, but the murky distance might conceal any number of corners around which Leslie Duck crouched, enjoying Mark Rand’s defeat to the utmost, which was a word that made Melba pause.

  Utmost.

  Had she heard Principal Benjamin discussing a planet Utmost with the astronaut in those few seconds she’d hovered above the desk in the cafeteria, before the hand closed upon her neck and yanked her back?

  “Melba, I have no choice,” said Mark Rand. “I can’t be your landlord under these circumstances. It wouldn’t be in your best interests to have a failure for a landlord. Consider yourself evicted. Your possessions revert to me in lieu of my collecting monies against damages to the property. Do you own anything of particular value?”

  “No,” said Melba, slowly.

  “Once again you’ve gotten the long end of the stick, Melba,” said Mark Rand. “Someday you may accumulate enough of those sticks to build yourself a shelter, and then you’ll be done with landl
ords altogether. Until then may every clemency attend your slumbers in the open fields of Dan.”

  Melba returned the receiver softly to its cradle. Don Pond started, as though until hearing that click, he’d been so absorbed in his reflections he’d quite forgotten that Melba had been engaged in a heated telephone conversation mere inches to his left. He blinked at the telephone.

  “Nice phone call?” he asked.

  “Nice enough,” said Melba. “I can’t go home though.” She spread out her arms, palms slightly upraised. The gesture expressed a sentiment similar to that expressed by a shrug. It expressed the same sentiment, but amplified to a power of 1.5.

  “I have nowhere to go,” said Melba.

  “It’s a problem in small towns,” said Don Pond, sympathetically. “The only way to leave is to go nowhere. But that takes a certain type of resolve.”

  “Like Principal Benjamin,” said Melba. “He didn’t go anywhere anyone knows of, and so he’s just gone.”

  “You can’t get over him, can you?” asked Don Pond, sadly. “He’s always been there between us. In a way, he’s the least gone man in Dan. He looms larger than life every time I meet your eyes.”

  Melba slid her eyes as quickly as she could from the vicinity of Don Pond’s. She was unemployed and homeless and had failed who knows how many tests. She could not now meet the eyes of a man who moped and spoke of looming.

  “Let’s not meet eyes,” said Melba. “I’m too grim and I wouldn’t want to curse you inadvertently. Don’t lead me by the hand either. If you start walking I can follow you easily enough. The terrain isn’t rough.”

  “Fine,” said Don Pond curtly.

  “The floor slopes,” he said over his shoulder, continuing down the corridor.

  Melba murmured something indistinct and assenting. They entered a small kitchen. A man was standing at the kitchen stove stirring a large pot. He turned when they entered. The man’s coloring was not particularly dark but he gave the impression of darkness, most likely due to his crowded features, and the long, dark, well-tailored coat he wore even though kitchen work is not cooling. Melba felt that the heat stifled, but the man breathed lightly and his skin bore no sheen. The kitchen smelled powerfully of vinegar and damp grains.