by Maria Flook
His stomach roiled at the sight of the drenched flower. He had certain aversions and sensitivities to different phenomena without the cushion of alcohol. He shivered if he walked past a lawn sprinkler. He couldn’t take a foot bridge over a busy highway without severe pain in the testicles, and he didn’t ride escalators if by chance the rubber tread was white like jagged molars. Recently, someone had put a spindle on his desk. A spindle! It was just another stimulus for one of his attacks. He asked Pauline about it.
“That spindle? There was a whole box of them. I handed them out. Everybody got one,” she told him.
Selby mentioned the spindle to Thaddeus who assured him his random aversions and fears were universal. “We all have our fair share of the jitters,” he told Selby.
“Good as new,” Pauline said when the flower was rinsed. She went back to her desk and replaced the stalk in its vase. She pulled her headset over her ears. She did not look up as he walked back to his chair. He studied the dewy hybrid again; the bloom looked harsh, its color magnified by the beads of water that trapped the office light.
The next day the flower was gone and in its place was a small glass aquarium which held a speckled mouse.
“Isn’t it cute?” she asked. “When I told my friend about the anonymous flower, he sent me this mouse.”
“What friend? The UPS driver?”
“Not him. A real friend gave me this pet. It’s against the rules, I guess, but I’ll take it home tonight. It doesn’t eat cheese, you know. It eats these pellets.” She picked up a plastic bag of pet food and handed it to Selby.
“I guess it’s more nutritious than regular cheese,” he said. He put the rat food down on Pauline’s desk. “Your friend is very imaginative,” he told Pauline.
“Yeah,” she looked at him straight in the eyes, and he stopped prying.
The afternoon went on. The sun moved downwards at a hard angle, then rested outside his window. It seemed painless staring at the dying thing until he closed his eyes and saw it stayed with him. Then he heard voices, and he heard Pauline laughing. Her laughter was airy, with a few throaty catches, like the sound of pastel tissue being torn into strips. With the laughter, he heard the short, high squeaks of the mouse. He went to see what it was and found three young men standing before Pauline’s desk. One held the animal by its tail and dropped it into the palm of his hand; as the mouse walked forward, the man tugged it back by the tail. The boys were all dressed the same, in huge, baggy trousers. He saw it was the uniform of the day, something resembling North African pajamas made from one bolt of cloth tugged loosely between the legs and cinched imaginatively at the waist.
“These are my friends.” Pauline stood up. “The City Editors.”
“A group?” he asked.
“You must have seen the piece about us in Boston After Dark,” one of the men said.
“I’m sorry to have missed it,” Selby said.
“You didn’t catch it?” the boy was incredulous.
“They’re playing tonight at the Living Room,” she said. “They’re the greatest.”
“It’ll be packed,” the boy said.
They leaned against the files and the office equipment. One took a Xerox of his hand. Another picked up Pauline’s phone and punched through the lighted buttons. They gathered at the fax machine daring one another to try it.
“They like electric stuff,” she told Selby. “Come on, guys,” she said, but she was beaming.
Selby wondered about the young men. He saw Pauline, tilting her face from one to the other and even towards him as he was asked to agree about rock-’n’-roll—that it was finally an industry like any other industry; it had its tycoons, its slaves, its gal Fridays. The group laughed and hugged Pauline around the waist. One fellow grasped her by the hips and lifted her up, lifted her above their small circle as if she belonged to them all.
It was the end of the day. Girls drifted by in twos and threes, calling to their friends over the partitions that separated the desks. He had not been invited for a drink in quite some time. He didn’t like to be surrounded and preferred to hide out beside Thaddeus when he indulged in his routine. They gave up asking and the girls started to call him “Mr. Gloom.” He didn’t mind their joke. He had once heard them call Pauline a name. They called Pauline “Miss Hopeless Case.” Once he listened to the late afternoon talk and was pleased to hear the two of them paired. He didn’t catch the explanation, but he heard one of the girls say, “Miss Hopeless Case and Mr. Gloom,” as if, at least in the minds of the office girls, they were linked. So what if the others considered them outcasts? It only intensified and made bittersweet their unavoidable connection.
Soon the place was empty. He was sure of it. He hunched down in his seat, but he couldn’t see any point in staying longer. He had avoided the chattering crush, that was it. At five-twenty Pauline came to the doorway. “Still here?” she said.
“What about you?”
She shrugged. He felt an odd lightness and he turned to look out at the sun, which was setting. He saw some spots before his eyes and he could not be sure if the sun he was facing was the real sun or just its savage aftereffect. He started to tell her that she had awakened his feelings, but she interrupted him. He thought he heard her saying she liked a clear conscience.
“I just wanted to tell you I found an item of yours—”
“You found what?”
She opened her purse and unfolded a crinkled piece of paper. She gave him the instruction sheet. “I saw it on the floor,” she told him. “At least it was me. Imagine if someone else came across it—”
“Who else?”
“Maintenance,” she said. “They might have collected it. You know, same as every night.”
She didn’t paint the whole scenario; he was grateful for that.
She told him, “Don’t think twice about it. It’s got nothing to do with me. But since you’re feeling so down, I thought you might like to go hear my friends tonight.”
“It’s ridiculous,” he said.
“They are not. They’re very serious artists.”
“I mean the other thing. The fact is—” He pushed himself back in his chair. “The thing is—”
“Please,” she told him. “Don’t say anything.”
He looked at the printout that had accompanied the noose. It was a poor translation from the Chinese manufacturer, but he guessed it explained itself. He was relieved to change the subject and said, “The City Editors? Tonight?”
“Do you want to go with me or not?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“Those fellows with the Arab outfits?”
“Yes.” She was grinning. She must have seen it from his point of view. “It’s true, they’re pretty clothes-conscious,” she said.
“Those fellows are creepy. They’re using you. Maybe they’re dangerous,” he said.
The sun had liquefied and rested like a full saucer on the horizon. The sky had neither the glare of day nor the rich substance of night. They stood for a moment outside their building, where the Astroturf carpet led to the curb and the taxis.
Selby saw him first. He was standing on the opposite corner.
“Oh, shit,” Pauline said. “He looks worse and worse.”
Her ex-lover had not yet changed his clothes, but this time he wore the short, quilted company jacket with the shipping firm’s logo on the breast pocket.
Selby told her, “Look, we’ll cross at the light. Just ignore him.” He put his arm through hers and steered her to the crosswalk. They walked right past the young man. Selby could have reached out and touched him. The man stared at Pauline as if she were an apparition, a holograph image that he himself had conjured and therefore could not intercept. The man had emerged from the first phase of his grief, in which he had sorted his emotions by tossing electronic appliances around, to his new station, which seemed to be a fully paralyzed remorse. Selby was no longer frightened by the loner and he told him, “Go climb back under your ro
ck.”
They marched beyond the ruined soul and left him weaving behind them on the sidewalk.
“Let’s go eat somewhere first,” she said. He took her to the Steeple Street Bar. They stood at the rail and waited for a table. Thaddeus attended to Selby, but she declined a drink. At last, they shared a camel-humped booth, which pitched her close. She ate chowder. He watched her use the heel of her hand to crush saltines in the cellophane packet until it became a fine white powder which she then poured over her soup. Every gesture she made seemed to wait for his response. She wasn’t testing him, it was her way of an exchange. Her small perceptions, her very mannerisms encouraged him to say something, and she in turn was pleased, assured by his flat remarks. He grabbed the waitress and ordered more scotch. He told Pauline, “Try it. A little budget psychiatry. The golden therapist.”
She didn’t like the taste. He strained her scotch into his own glass, leaving a tower of ice cubes in her tumbler. He imagined taking it further, then he thought about a time when he was traveling with his wife. He remembered a motel, its six yellow doors facing the highway. He left his wife in the car when he went up to ask for a room, but before he reached the motel office a neon sign flicked on at the window. The sign said Sorry in pink script. How far did they drive after that, and where did they sleep? He remembered their bodies entwined for hours in one sunken place. They hardly spoke then, as they never did now. Yet his wife liked to mention the story of the neon sign from time to time. Whether she thought it was a sad, foretelling detail or a simple amusement, he still did not know. Out of the blue, she would say, “Remember that motel?” and she didn’t mean the motel where they had spent the night together, she meant the initial place, where they had been turned away, the motel with the sign that said Sorry.
They walked into the rock club. Its walls were draped with black velvet curtains. “For the acoustics,” Pauline told him. He knew that, of course, but he was pleased by just the look of it. It had the aura of a wicked shrine or underground crypt. The City Editors climbed onto the stage. The music started. It’s good, he thought. Even if he didn’t know the standards, it was a wonderful sensation. The wall of noise created a mild pressure as in jet takeoffs, a resistances; then he was lifted, buoyed. The crowd was crammed in shoulder to shoulder, and the kids decided which way he should lurch and dip as everyone weaved forward and backward with the music. Pauline was jumping up and down to the bass line. “Cheer up, cheer up,” she might have been saying. She looked content in that environment, but there was nothing heightened or alert in her face. Once or twice, despite the crowd, he saw his own face reflected in the mirror behind the tight stage. He expected to see himself as someone wedged between the furious energies of youth and an embittered calm ahead. The music penetrated like a microbe or bacterium pushing through a cellular membrane. He surrendered to its contamination, its primary symptom being a weakness in his knees. He began to enjoy the song. The rhythm guitar was wonderfully scratchy, slurring. The audience responded, breaking off into small, ragged clusters of movement.
In the mirror behind the band, Selby recognized the heartsick deliveryman standing not ten feet away from them. The man waited, ready to exchange his place each time someone hip-hopped and freed a space nearer Pauline. He wasn’t responding to the hiccuping bass line but wiped his hair out of his eyes and stood like a pillar of stone waiting for his next opportunity to close in on his ex-girlfriend.
Selby considered the dangers of such a face-to-face in that crowd, perhaps precipitating a stampede situation. He begged Pauline to leave with him. They squeezed through the crowd and went outside. A light snow glazed the street. Her leather flats didn’t grip and she was totally helpless if she didn’t cling to him. He walked Pauline to her loft apartment in a renovated textile mill. He made love to her in her platform bed, fighting a sense of vertigo. Pauline sensed his discomfort and she lifted her hips and moved over to the side with the rail. “Don’t worry. No one has ever fallen off yet,” she told him. In the dead silence, after the act, he heard the mouse on its exercise wheel, a constant lisping complaint from across the room.
It was snowing harder when he went back to the garage to pick up his car. He drove home to his wife. He was only a half-mile from his ranch house when a big, buff-colored dog jumped in front of the car. The headlights scrolled over the dog and Selby braked hard, skidding on the snow, expecting to hit the animal. Then he saw it on the other side of the car, clear of him.
As he walked through the dark house, he noticed a perceptible veil of clove perfume rising off his shirt collar. He unbuttoned his oxford and tore it off. He padded around the living room in his socks. He went over to the sideboard and poured a drink. He swirled it around in his mouth. The spicy residue of his night fought with the alcohol’s standard smoky taste, ruining its effect.
The bedroom was black as he climbed into bed. His wife pretended to sleep. The sheets were warm, as if his wife had recently rolled from his side onto her own. He decided this detail described her kindness and sorrow for their predicament. They were falling asleep when it was at the bedroom window, level with them. A bold snarl announced its presence, followed by a steady, angry barking. Selby got out of bed and folded the curtain back from the window. He recognized the buff-colored dog he had avoided hitting on the street. The dog barked in a hateful rhythm, the same one or two grim tones. Its teeth snapped at the end of every tearing phrase. It was not the sound of hunger, or longing, or pining.
“A stray,” his wife said. “I’ve seen him prowling around.”
Selby watched its big chest heaving, its fur clotted in yellow tufts where its belly rubbed the deep snow.
“Maybe he’s cornered a cat or a possum?” his wife said.
“It’s lost. It saw our lights. Fierce bugger.”
He went to check on his son, but the barking was muted on that side of the house and the boy slept through it. Selby picked up a shot glass from his son’s bedside table. Its contents flamed bright fluorescent green. The SLIME had absorbed enough daylight to be successfully activated. He swirled the jigger until the sluggish gleam coated its rim, and then he put it down. The glowing substance seemed as miraculous as it was ridiculous, and Selby felt giddy.
He returned to his room and got back into bed. The dog barked. His wife rested her head in the crook of his shoulder. Together they listened to the dog’s harangue; it was becoming familiar, an intimacy, a balm.
In the morning, Selby cleared his car windshield, then he walked around the house looking for any trace of the mysterious beast. The wind turned back and forth over the snowy surface where it had stood. Right then, a municipal snow plow went down the street. The vehicle was bright yellow from a recent steam cleaning at the city hangar. In the tight cab, beside the uniformed driver, was the buff-colored dog. Its tail brushed the ceiling as it nosed the driver’s face in wild affection. The driver studied the curb as he lowered the blade. Selby watched the plow for sparks, but the driver was expert and took only the fresh white snow.
PRINCE OF MOTOWN
That April, Marvin Gaye was murdered. Maurice Greene, the father of Iris’s six-month-old baby, went to his old shooting den at the Linville Projects. In mourning, he bought a spike and three hits of dope for the weekend. He came home fully schmecked. His shoulder brushed the doorjamb and pitched his torso the opposite way.
“You’re gooned,” Iris said. She watched him lift his feet to fanciful elevations before dropping them down, picking his way over to her as if he were negotiating cross ties in a switching yard. His spinal column was unhinged, and Iris knew he had put something in his arm, but Maurice exhibited a new and mystical flex, a curious exoneration: Gaye was dead and Maurice was released from all his routine duties. His part-time job at Benny’s Home and Auto, his fatherhood responsibilities, all his tasks were shirked, while he paid whacked-out homage to the murdered singer.
For two weeks. Iris had watched Maurice crucify himself on piggyback needles, trying for a copycat ascension t
o mimic Gaye’s transformation. High on tar, he spoke to her only in snippets from Gaye’s discology, quoting lyrics completely out of context. “I ain’t got time to think about money or what it could buy, and I ain’t got time to sit around and wonder what makes a birdy fly,” he told Iris that morning as he walked out the door.
While Maurice was supposed to be working at the Home and Auto Supply, Iris left the older women in the apartment and instead of taking a cab, wheeled the umbrella stroller to the clinic. The clinic was nine blocks into town. Iris remembered to stretch a plastic dry-cleaning bag across the handles of the stroller for a windbreak, but even so, the baby’s eyes were tearing from the cold when she arrived.
Her baby wasn’t gaining. The clinic wanted to get a blood sample before Terrell could get his DPT shot on schedule like the normal babies waiting outside with their mothers in the Well Baby Room. Iris was never asked to wait in the cozy, divided area, which was well-stocked with bright toys and ladies’ magazines. Iris heard the happy jingles and buzzers of a Busy Box, the cascading notes of xylophones, and taut plunking beats of skin drums. Above this din was the high warble of infants and toddlers amusing themselves, and the occasional singsong of their mothers. Iris was pulled into an examining stall as soon as she arrived. Her baby was scrawny. A nurse pricked his heel with a disposable stylet, which she then discarded in a bright red cylinder for needles and hazardous medical refuse. Next, the nurse wanted to test Iris and get her numbers. Terrell was fussy during the procedures, discomforted by the noisy sheet of crinkled paper on the examining table, and Iris lifted him off.
Afterwards she wheeled the stroller to Classical High School, where she tried to catch her old girlfriends when they came outside to switch classes. The girls huddled around Iris and the conspicuous lemon-lime baby stroller. They chatted on the walkway between buildings for ten minutes. When the bell sounded, the girls ran off in different directions. Sometimes, one of her friends brought Iris a drink from the cafeteria, where Iris wasn’t permitted to sit down. Iris fancied a local Rhode Island dairy item called Coffee Milk, and her friends brought Iris an eight-ounce carton. They peeled the straw for Iris before trotting off to typing or advanced algebra class. Iris sipped the drink slowly, trying to make it last forty-five minutes, until the bell clanged and the girls reappeared from the classroom building.
