The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology

by Chamber Four

  “Where were you?” she asked Munro when he came along the gallery to their room. He walked between two men who were helping him, the same men—or men who looked like the men—Sharon had seen on the beach. They didn’t speak. They helped Munro to his chair on the veranda and left. Munro sat heavily in the chair. Sharon knelt before him and looked up at him where he sat.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Had some calls to make,” said Munro.

  “Calls? You mean telephone?”

  “Like a telephone,” said Munro. “There’s no real telephone here.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Down there,” Munro waved his arm toward the gallery. “Patrick’s set up for it.”

  “Who were those guys?”

  “They’re Patrick’s guys.”

  “The security?”

  “Well,” said Munro, “one of them’s a doctor.”

  “A doctor?”

  “That’s right,” said Munro. He reached to her and touched the side of her face. “In fact,” he said, “I might have to cut it short down here.”

  “Cut it short? You mean go home?”

  “That’s it.”

  “You mean, to a hospital?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, sure,” said Sharon. “Fine. When do we go?”

  “Well,” said Munro, “the best thing might be if you went on ahead.”

  “You mean by myself?”

  “That’s it,” said Munro.

  “Leave you here?”

  “That’s it.”

  “No,” said Sharon.

  “No? Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sharon. “I’m here. I came here. I came with you.”

  “So you did. Why?”

  “Because you asked me to.”

  “So I did. Now I’m asking you to go.”

  “No,” said Sharon. “I’m with you. I’ll leave when you leave.”

  Munro smiled at her. He put his hand on her knee and patted her. He leaned forward, bent his head, and kissed her bare knee.

  “You’re a good kid,” said Munro.

  “When are we leaving?”

  “We’ll ask Patrick.”

  * * * *

  “Miss?”

  Sharon woke in the dark. She was alone in their bed. Patrick stood beside the bed, speaking softly, not much more than whispering, trying to wake her. He didn’t touch her. Sharon sat up and covered herself with the sheet. Where was Munro?

  “Quickly, miss,” said Patrick. “Quickly, now, if you please.”

  She got out of bed and dressed. She heard voices on the veranda. Whose voices? Not Munro’s. She didn’t hear what they said.

  “What time is it?” she asked Patrick.

  “Past time, miss,” said Patrick. “Quickly, now.”

  He hurried her out of the room, across the courtyard, and down the path that led among the trees. The night was black dark. Once Sharon tripped and fell to her knees, but Patrick picked her up and practically carried her to a vehicle she hadn’t seen before, hadn’t realized was on the island: a kind of Jeep or Land Rover, with open seats and no top. Patrick got her into it and started the engine, and they bucketed along the road away from their quarters, then turned off onto a sandy track. When Patrick stopped and shut off the engine, Sharon could see the surf in the distance, and a beach, and she could see, closer, a tower rising dark against the sky ahead.

  Patrick got her out of the car and led her through a clearing, past the tower, which she now saw must be some kind of smokestack, past a couple of vacant iron buildings, toward the shore. The tall woman from the other day, the Christian woman, was waiting for them there. She had a rubber raft pulled up on the beach. She held it by a rope, but when she saw Sharon and Patrick coming, she pushed the raft into the surf, splashing into the water after it. Her long dress was soaked to the waist.

  “Go, go, go!” the woman said.

  Then Sharon and Patrick were in the raft on the water. She sat at one end, looking back at the island behind them. Patrick rowed. They were heading out into a little bay. Benefit Island lay like a long shadow on the water behind them. There were no lights on it that Sharon could see. Not one.

  Patrick quit rowing. They were nowhere. They were between the bay and the open sea. The island might have been half a mile off. Sharon sat in the raft. She was barely awake. She had promised to stay with Munro, and here she was in a rowboat in the middle of the sea, without him. Patrick had plucked her from her bed and pushed her right off the island, and she hadn’t fought him to stay. She hadn’t pushed back. They had given her nothing to push back against.

  Now she saw ahead a little float or buoy, the size and shape of a champagne bottle, bobbing on the low swell, with a blinking green light on its end.

  “Where’s Duncan?” she asked Patrick.

  “Mr. Munro’s not ticketed for this trip, miss,” said Patrick.

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  “It’s already happened.”

  “What has?”

  “We haven’t much time, miss,” Patrick said. “You’ll be all right. They’ll want to have a word with you at the other end, but there won’t be anything to it. You’ll soon be on your way.”

  “What about you?” Sharon asked Patrick. “Are you going back? Are you going back for Duncan?”

  “Go home, miss,” said Patrick. “Go right on back home and pick up where you left off. Carry on. Forget what happened down here, or if you can’t forget it, at least don’t talk about it. Not ever, miss, not to anyone. Do you think you can do that? Ah.”

  “Ah,” Patrick said. They heard, overhead, the heavy thumping of a helicopter approaching quickly. It came from the sea, flying very low, circled the blinker buoy once, then again, then settled on the water at a little distance from them. It showed no lights. Patrick rowed them to it. A door in the helicopter opened, and Patrick helped Sharon step from the raft onto one of the helicopter’s pontoons. An arm reached for her there, took her hand, and pulled her into the cabin. The door closed. Sharon turned to look out a little window. She saw Patrick begin to row away, toward the island. When he passed the marker buoy, he reached for it, cut its line, raised it from the water, and laid it down in the raft.

  The helicopter’s rotors began to turn. When it rose into the dark sky and began to make off, Sharon could see, on the far side of the island, a row of lights, running lights, in fact two rows, three, advancing toward the beach. Many running lights, coming in to the beach.

  * * * *

  Sharon wishes that the police in Miami—if police is what they were—could have simply put the question. She wishes that some one of them could have taken a minute, only a minute, could have laid down his pencil and brought her a cup of coffee, or a drink, and sat down beside her and simply asked, What in the world was going on down there? She couldn’t have told him, but she would have liked to have been asked.

  Nobody asked.

  She’s back home now, back in the city, back at work. But things aren’t quite as they were. When she’d been back a couple of days, Sharon walked down the block past the St. John. The place looked dead, it was dark, and when Sharon went up the steps nobody swung the door open for her. The door was locked.

  She called Wanda; Wanda had at least known Duncan Munro. But Wanda’s number was no longer in service. Sharon even called Neil. Why? Neil hadn’t known Munro.

  But he’d known Sharon. She called him one evening. A woman answered, and Sharon told her she’d called the wrong number and hung up.

  Then one day in the spring Sharon was waiting for the light on 76th Street on her way to a client when she saw Patrick getting out of a taxi on Madison Avenue in front of the Carlyle. It was Patrick, all right. His hair was a little longer, he wore a blue suit and carried a briefcase, but it was Patrick. Did Sharon call out to him, did she catch up with him and say hello? Did they have a cup of coffee together and talk things over? What do you think? She stayed whe
re she was. She watched him, though. She watched Patrick as he shut the taxi’s door, paid the driver, turned, and went into the old hotel.

  The Night Dentist

  by Ron MacLean

  from Drunken Boat

  The night dentist has one cold hand held near his heart. He wakes to taillights on the Longfellow Bridge. He rides above the water on the day’s first Red Line run. Subway brakes scream. Mirror fingers flex frigid—bone white. His eyes burn. He blames his patients. He seethes silently: feared, resented, ill-conceived. He dreams of bicycles. Professionals in flight. In transition. His face mirrored in the window is not the face he remembers.

  He is not prone to accumulation. He is accustomed to a captive audience, a mouth frozen open, admitting his hands (one warm, one cold), his increasingly sterile tools. The burden of conversation, the opportunity, is his. He has questions he wants to ask: why it is always dark; why he is sentenced to nostrils stained from antiseptic mouthwash. Thoughts and half-truths: no man achieves all he wants; we all make some accommodation with the night. A thin band of orange light burns at the horizon. Faces not his reflected in the pre-dawn window.

  The night dentist protests innocence. Untucked misfit in a middle school library no different at 51. Why do you hunger for what does not satisfy? He dreams of fish scales. Electric fence games. To caress a cheek. A tender gum line.

  If you were to commit crimes, what crimes would you commit, and why.

  He tires of latex and cynicism. He longs for fresh fruit, non-nutritional salt snacks, fried fish. All night, every night, he fingers sterile tools. Flexes for circulation. Coveted warmth that always, somehow, eludes him. He surrounds himself with half-lies, rusted metal, sheared plastic. Quasi-recyclable. Translucent technology he can trade in at a moment’s notice. He prefers slippery sentences that leave room for escape. He sits sifting among the spoils. Eats recycled chicken from a paper tub.

  The night dentist’s tools include, but are not limited to: reamer, burnisher, merlam pliers (serrated), forceps (standard), carver, excavator, universal tofflemire.

  A man across the aisle talks into a cell phone. Unshaven. Insistent: i want them in one bag, and they have to not be moving. you have to figure out a way to pack them so they’re not moving. Silverfish crawl into cavities. Frigid fingers flex, bone-white in harsh fluorescence. The smell of wet cement. Tired cynicism. A woman in the next row faces forward, says to some hidden camera: flight is the country i came from. The train presses forward, darkness to darkness. Through the window, the night dentist sees fruit trees. Well-greased bicycles welded weightlessly in flight. In formation.

  Alone in a fruit field, he dreams of soft tissue, silverfish, sound sleep. The night dentist says, “these are the things I keep in my heart.” The night dentist says, “open wide.” The night dentist says, “this won’t hurt a bit.”

  Pool

  by Corey Campbell

  from Anderbo.com

  Inside the dark living room, Darla waited for the bathroom. She counted more than 64 photos of a child on the walls, shelves, and piano. Many shots the same but in different sizes—the Sears pose with marbled gray background, the unknowingly sweet smile. The child belonged to Trevor and Mandy, who were hosting a pool party. The couple had set up house in the Valley, in a neighborhood of small square houses, many guarded by iron fences, the homes of car thieves and newlyweds in their twenties still renting. Their living room carpet crawled with Winnie-the-Pooh toys and bright plastic objects shaped into keys and school buses. Darla herself, just older than the couple, had been pulled to the party by her boyfriend Jon, Trevor’s pal since eleventh grade.

  The pool radiated in the heat, its sides cracked by the ’93 earthquake, a lone inflatable zebra lapping against the far wall. Jon lingered outside by the pool, beer in hand, just close enough to get his legs wet when someone cannon-balled in. The heat of the day had just come, so a thick yellow mugginess had settled onto the patio, making limbs heavy as if filled with sand. White empty plates and plastic forks stood on the small metal table, used and smeared with ketchup.

  Darla and Jon had been together just under a year. Already his mom bought her sales clothes from Macy’s and invited her to family dinners on Friday nights. What she liked best about him, Darla had realized earlier in the car, was that it wasn’t going to last, so she didn’t have to care that much really. She walked back out to the patio, pulling a small puff of air-conditioned air behind her. It took a minute for her eyes to adjust again to the brightness.

  Jon touched her arm. “You OK?” he said. She could almost see behind his mirrored sunglasses. His purple board-shorts just grazed his knee.

  She nodded. Their condom had split the night before, so they’d spent the morning going to two different Rite Aids to get the morning-after pill. The pharmacist didn’t say anything but had the same gray hair as Darla’s dad and looked just as disapproving. For lunch Jon had taken Darla to a Belgian restaurant on Ventura much too expensive for him, and she let him eat his mussels while she swallowed the first pill at the bathroom sink. When she came back, they both pretended everything was normal, and turned up the radio loud once they hit the freeway.

  On the patio, Trevor was wound up in conversation. He was short, built for the military, compact frame, trimmed hair, muscley back. He was a cop, patrolled mostly shopping centers and the community college campus. “The guys with the best job,” he told Jon, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Those helicopter cops. They fly over the big houses in the hills where chicks sunbathe topless.”

  Darla looked over to Trevor’s wife. Mandy was an ex-hostess of chain restaurants and now wore Keds and was still round with baby fat. She was out of earshot, fitting the baby into a swimsuit with a mermaid on it.

  Trevor nudged Jon. “Can you imagine? The MILFs.”

  Jon turned to Darla. “I’ve explained to you what a MILF is, right, honey?”

  The first time Darla had met Trevor, he had just tackled a guy at the mall who had stolen a plastic toy camera. The first words he had ever said to her when Jon introduced them, there in the food court just outside the Mongolian barbeque: “I love catching these guys. Gives me a boner.”

  On the patio, Darla said, “Great, Trevor.” She’d already gotten into a fight with Jon earlier that summer about Trevor going to a Hooters in the desert.

  Trevor shrugged, his shoulders already burnt deep red. “Those helicopters,” he said, his accent vaguely reminding Darla of Frank Sinatra. “Some jobs have great perks.”

  “There!” Mandy said, standing her baby up on the concrete and toddling her towards Trevor. “Who’s my baby?”

  Trevor scooped up the little girl and swung her over his head, walking her into the shallow end of the pool.

  Mandy leaned her hips out and picked up a wet dinosaur sponge from the pavement. She said, “Be careful.” Her wide white thighs caught the sun, her skin almost glowing.

  Trevor waved an arm, “Don’t worry. The diaper alone could keep her afloat.”

  Mandy smiled at Darla a smile that said One day you’ll know what I’m going through. “Did you get enough to eat?” she said. “There’s wings in the kitchen.”

  Darla touched her middle, which felt like a void, which felt like static or white noise. “Good,” she said. “But thanks.”

  “OK,” Mandy said, heading back into the cool of the house. “I trust you,” she called out to Trevor, then shut the sliding glass door behind her.

  Jon ran a finger down Darla’s arm. “Does it hurt?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Want a sip of my beer, Darla? Might relax you.”

  “It said no alcohol.”

  “One sip isn’t going to do anything.”

  She put her hand on his wrist. The package said the success rate was 99%. It was a sure thing. And besides, she didn’t know if that one time had really been enough anyway. “Just stop,” she said. Her throat dried up.

  The cooler hung open under the shadow of the house, green and bro
wn bottle necks pushing through the ice. Only root beer left in cans or cream soda that made Darla sick.

  “I’ll be back,” she told Jon, who had taken off his sandals and dangled hairy legs in the blinding white-blue water. Trevor floated the baby on a raft tour of the outer edges of the pool. He pointed out the pump to her and the water filter and the black widow spider web under the diving board.

  “Putting on your swimsuit?” Jon said.

  Trevor looked over at her. “The water feels great,” he said. “Come in and join us.”

  Darla reached a hand into the pool, which was warmer than she’d expected. “A little later,” she said, knowing that she wouldn’t, that she hated others seeing her in her swimsuit.

  * * * *

  The kitchen had that familiar avocado-green tinge, the orange linoleum curling at the edges, the reminder that this was all new in the ’70s. Darla already knew where everything was. She and Jon were house-sitters there a couple of months before, taking the cocker spaniels out to pee, sleeping in the master bedroom which was the only bedroom, swimming naked in the pool and then having sex on a couch covered in dog hair. Darla knew the kitchen had enough snack food to supply a small convenience store. She thought of the bright packages as bags of chemicals, preserving each other, as though they were something worth preserving.

  Mandy sat at the kitchen table, her back to the doorway, looking through a Bed, Bath and Beyond catalog.

  “Sorry,” Darla said. Mandy turned around, raising her eyebrows. Her brown hair hung down her back in frizzy swirls. “For disturbing you,” Darla said, pointing to the catalog and the Glamour magazine on the table next to it.

  Mandy said, “No problem.” She was drinking iced tea, the ice cubes already melted in her tall blue glass. “Just need a break sometimes. With the baby and all.”

  “Sure,” Darla said, looking at a flowering bush just out the window, the lace curtains hanging like bangs across a forehead, the potted violet in soil so dry it was struggling. “Of course,” Darla said. “I’d be horrible at it. I’d probably start drinking. I know I would.” Mandy’s back stiffened. She looked over at Darla. Darla shook her head. “Just kidding,” she said. “Raising a child must be so hard.”