“It’s just that, usually, when I went to an office, I had an appointment,” she explained, “or if not an appointment, a purpose in visiting, a question to ask or a disciplinary measure to fulfill. That makes it easier, in the beginning of the visit at least, when you’re warming up. You don’t have to work as hard to explain yourself.” She risked another glance at Don Pond. He stood so close beside her that the smallest rotation of her head brought their faces into shocking proximity. His eyes still shone, gaze fixed upon her. She inched her body to the left, rotating her head carefully back to center.
“The rules might have changed,” she admitted, inching yet farther. “I haven’t been to an office since I was a girl. This looks like a doctor’s office, but if it were a doctor’s office wouldn’t I have had to sign something? A consent form? Or is it different now? Maybe if you consented once, no matter how long ago, that’s enough.” She caught sight of the framed picture on the wall and started.
“I drew that!” she said.
“Why, so you did,” said Don Pond. Forgetting herself, Melba rushed to the wall. The wall was smooth, windowless, painted green, a far paler shade than the linoleum, with an eggshell finish. The drawing was the only decoration. Melba touched her forefinger to the thin gold frame. She stared at the drawing behind the layer of glass.
“But it isn’t any good,” laughed Melba. “It was the worst picture in the whole class! Mrs. Page didn’t put in the display case with the others.”
“Maybe that’s because someone else took an interest in it and put it somewhere else,” suggested Don Pond. Melba squinted at the picture and tried to imagine someone taking an interest in it. She couldn’t. It was too difficult to imagine. She shook her head.
“I can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be,” said Melba. “The assignment was to draw a picture of your family, but that’s not my family. It’s only one figure, but with too many limbs, or maybe it’s a figure holding an animal? Joe Moore sat next to me in drawing class and he ate the colored crayons, that’s why it’s all black and white and gray. This doesn’t belong on an office wall! Even an office with no secretary outside and nobody in it.”
“We’re in the office, aren’t we, Melba?” asked Don Pond. He dropped into a rolling chair and pulled the chair forward with his legs until he was just in front of the drawing, gazing up at it. Melba had to step aside to make room for him. She moved over into the corner and her elbow touched something cold, the metal basin of a sink.
“It’s my favorite drawing,” said Don Pond. “Do you want to wash your elbow?”
“Oh no, thank you,” said Melba hurriedly, folding up her arms and touching both elbows together in front of her, hands clasped. It wasn’t the most comfortable attitude she had ever assumed. Don Pond’s keen gaze missed nothing.
“You’re not comfortable,” he said. “It’s important to make yourself comfortable. Lie down,” said Don Pond.
“Would that be alright?” said Melba. “Sometimes lying down when you’re not absolutely by yourself can be construed as rude, or presumptuous, or just strange! I can stand here. It’s very pleasant. What a nice sink.” She realized she was grinding her elbows together. Don Pond rolled slowly toward her.
“I do like lying down, though,” said Melba. “Particularly on top of tables. I like sitting under tables too, but you couldn’t sit under this one.” She didn’t turn her back on Don Pond. Instead she sidled along the wall then darted into the middle of the room. She hoisted herself onto the narrow table and lay back. She crossed her arms behind her head. Her neck felt stiff, tipped up. Her hands introduced too much space between her occiput and shoulders. She had the uneasy feeling that her head might pop free. She put her arms at her sides. She wiggled and the paper that covered the table’s layer of thin, hard cushioning crinkled.
“The paper on this table is just like the paper I used for my drawing,” Melba murmured. “Mrs. Page had rolls of it in the closet. I could have made my drawing much longer. I could have taken the roll and found someone to turn it, Joe Moore even, and I could have kept drawing as he turned, drawn on and on. Then we’d have the whole drawing instead of just a square of it. You can’t tell much from just a square of something. I’m sure there should have been more to this drawing, on either side of it. There’s always more on either side of something. Except maybe it’s always more of the same thing, and the tiniest square tells you everything …” Even with her hands at her side, Melba felt that the space between occiput and shoulders was getting larger. Soon her head would be floating. Her thoughts came from farther and farther away.
“You don’t need more than a single moment to understand time, do you?” She wasn’t sure whom she was addressing. The question wasn’t for Don Pond. The question hovered, like her head, detached from everything. She pushed more air through her lips, struggling to form the words.
“I tried to think about time all at once, was that my problem?” Her voice was a whisper. “Was that what I was always doing wrong, over and over again, every moment?” Melba’s next words slurred and dispersed. She couldn’t make them out. She heard a hissing. It didn’t come from her, or from animals. It was a different kind of hissing, a sound shallower and more sustained: the sound of gas escaping from a valve. She tried to detect an odor, the odor of the gas, but the gas was odorless. The room was filled with an odorless gas; it had to be. There was no odor in the room and the hissing did not stop. The hissing continued. Melba blinked against the strong light that beamed from directly above.
“I can’t see the drawing at all from here,” she said. She shut her eyes. She heard the chair rolling toward her, the clunk of the trucks striking the bottom of the table. Her face felt hot and the darkness behind her closed eyelids bloomed red, the redness widening, yellow corollas pushing out from the centers. She knew the light source had been swung closer and she jerked, almost rising, but her fear of the burning bulb restrained her. She gripped the padded edges of the table.
Gripping is good, thought Melba. Gripping is always good. Come what may, it helps to find an edge, a dowel, a hem. It helps to hold it, hold on to it tightly. Even if you are lying quietly, on your back, waiting for everything to pass, you still need to grasp something, with your teeth if you don’t have hands, and if you don’t have teeth, with your gums, and if you don’t have gums …
Melba moved her jaws, felt her teeth work together, uppers against the lowers.
If you don’t have teeth, she thought, if you don’t have gums, if you don’t have jaws, if the top of your skull is lifting …
“You can’t see the drawing?” The voice came from close above, a soft, stroking voice, emanating from the heat and the light, merging with her burning face, forming part of its lid of blooming red.
I can’t speak, thought Melba. I’m already speaking. That explains it. A person can’t speak if she’s already speaking.
“You can’t see?” said the voice. “You can’t see?”
I will be remembered, thought Melba, if I am remembered, as someone of whom too much was asked. Provided of course, thought Melba, that I am the one remembering. But will that ever be certain? That I am the one? The one Melba Zuzzo? Melba. Melba Zuzzo. Melba? Melba Zuzzo? You can’t see? Are you sure? Can you be sure? You can’t see the man in the drawing? You can’t see Benjamin? He’s standing right there, against the wall. He is dressed in gray. You can see him, a gray figure. Behind him: a black wall. The wall encloses the town. You can’t see the town, but you can see the man and the wall.
He’s outside then, thought Melba. Outside the town. And so I am, if that’s what I see, if that’s what I drew. I’m outside. Was I always?
The light hurt. She covered her eyes with her palms.
She felt a crinkle beneath her, like a ripple of water, but of course not like a ripple of water. The crinkle was dry. The paper layer that covered the table was rolling beneath her, rolling and rolling, and she lay unmoving above it.
“Oh!” Melba cried. “Oh.” The frict
ion filled her with shocks. She felt a twinge of pain. The movement of the paper heated her scalp, roughed and tangled her hairs.
“You can stop turning the roll,” said Melba. “I don’t need nearly this much.”
But beneath her the paper rolled on.
“Far away,” said Melba, “on another landmass, there’s a curious river. It has a long, wide meander with carbon black banks that dye the water for miles. It’s a river of ink. Does that ring a bell?”
She had been told of this river, by someone, she couldn’t think who, a pen dealer whose regional aircraft had dropped out of the sky over Dan, crashing almost gently into the swamp.
This river moving under her body—it was a river of paper, not a river of ink. Paper and ink. They were opposites, really. Or on the diagonal, kitty-corner. And what trumped what? A river of paper or a river of ink?
“I used to play a game with my father,” said Melba, “where one hand trumped another. He always shouted to break my concentration. Or he made shapes with his hand that beat everything, mostly bombs or flesh-eating bacteria. I never won a single time.”
She imagined hands all around her, hands encased in latex, pale green and pale blue, hands making unbeatable shapes, bombs and comets and tsunamis and super-volcanoes and the heat-death of the universe.
The room is filling with hands, she thought. There are slots in the walls and in the floor and in the ceiling and the men are poking their hands into the room.
She felt something small and cold press down on her chest.
“Don,” she said. “Is that you? Who’s there?”
Above the hissing, she heard a new sound, a faltering melody, half hummed, half whispered. It was a horrible, haunting little song. She held her breath, listening, but the song didn’t have any words. She felt something cold press into her ear. She concentrated on the paper sliding beneath her, the incessant soft abrasions and electric tingles along her scalp.
“I wish I could levitate,” she said. “Even if it were only with magnets and not truly magical. Would you rather fly or be invisible? Would you rather die, live forever, or never have been born? Or something else? Evaporate? You’d disappear slowly with a sure return?”
She felt a tiny sharp blow on her knee.
She felt a tiny sharp blow on her elbow.
There’s a rate at which I’m vanishing, she thought. I don’t think I’m someone who goes in an instant.
“I’m not getting up,” she said. “Not for awhile.”
The song was already fading. Something prodded her leg, very lightly, her abdomen, her neck, or it might have been an itch produced by her own skin, traveling across her body’s surfaces. Below the surfaces, there were deeper layers to which the itch could not penetrate. The surface sensation traveled, dissipated.
There’s a rate, she thought. But it’s not the kind of thing you can calculate.
How relieved people would be. If only she could tell them.
She felt the paper moving beneath her, and she lay very still on top of it, not saying anything, not moving at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Ruocco is the author of Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (FC2, 2012), A Compendium of Domestic Incidents (Noemi Press, 2011), Man’s Companions (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010), and The Mothering Coven (Ellipsis Press, 2009). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and winner of the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, she co-edits Birkensnake, a fiction journal, with Brian Conn.
DOROTHY, A PUBLISHING PROJECT
1. Renee Gladman Event Factory
2. Barbara Comyns Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
3. Renee Gladman The Ravickians
4. Manuela Draeger In the Time of the Blue Ball
5. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Fra Keeler
6. Suzanne Scanlon Promising Young Women
7. Renee Gladman Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge
8. Amina Cain Creature
9. Joanna Ruocco Dan
10. Nell Zink The Wallcreeper
DOROTHYPROJECT.COM
Table of Contents
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright
Melba Zuzzo stood in the yard chewing tiredly
The bakery’s wall phone rang
The phone rang and she leapt up, lifted the receiver
When Melba awoke she was no longer in the bakery
About the Author
Dan Page 12
