The Rest is Weight

by Jennifer Mills

  Muggy day, he says.

  I nod twice, stare beyond him at the water. He wants something from us. But we have no room between us, the baby and me.

  The baby begins to snivel. That does it. He wanders back to his car with shoulders heavy. To look for what’s missing elsewhere. Maybe he’ll find it out on the bay, in the too-bright light.

  Two days ago, I was walking to the train station. I had just knocked off work for the afternoon, my early shift that ends at three – designed for working mothers, I thought when I was rostered on, and I am the right age, they needn’t ask. It’s an enormous bookshop and no one really knows anyone else who works there; we keep our private lives private, our relationships as casual as our hours. I know if I don’t show up for a few days they will manage. They will probably assume it’s a sick child.

  I never wanted children.

  I was walking the same way I always walked, down the back streets to the train. Past a row of terraced houses, joined at the edges, closed to the outside. At one of them, a pram had been left on the doorstep. I glanced into it and saw the baby. The baby was asleep, a neat little package.

  Something in me fell open like a book dropped on its spine – open at the right page, the quotation you were looking for. The reference that makes sense of the text.

  The front door of the house was made of steel. The door opened onto the street, with only that little pram-sized alcove, that small step as threshold. I hovered at its edge.

  The door was almost closed. I could hear someone pacing inside, talking on the phone. It must have rung just as she got home. The chances of this were so slender. The circumstances so precisely right.

  It took no stealth to pull the pram off the step and push it towards the train. No skill at all. The baby didn’t cry. People didn’t stare at me. Police didn’t stop the train at the next station, or board and search the carriages. I smiled down at the baby with so much pride that no one could mistake me for a stranger.

  I rode to the end of the line and then started walking.

  I fuss in the pram for the benefit of the man, who won’t be able to see us clearly from his small tin boat, which is out on the water now. Small for his age. Next time I will say eight weeks.

  I look down at the baby. His fist lies curled against his side like a shell. He still won’t cry. I am ashamed that I wanted to leave him in the empty lot. I am sorry I thought of water. I lean over the pram, shielding him from the glare with my body. His eyes open and close, open and close.

  He doesn’t look back yet. He is too small. But when he does, it will be with the face of amazement, the wide-open face of first-time seeing. It will be with unconditional love.

  The air you need

  This is how I imagine it:

  like a funnel-web spider, he lies enclosed in a bubble of private air at the bottom of the pool. Seen from below, the water’s surface is flesh, smoothed to stillness. When the grey-blue light creeps in at its edges, he pushes against the tiles. The pool skin dapples to a patchwork of pores. He breaks through.

  He lifts himself at the edge. The black suit makes the exit quiet, almost silent from the inside. The water slides off, returns disturbed to its bed. He watches the wave-forms break and scatter for a moment, then walks across the dark lawn to where the small white car is waiting. From inside the mask he cannot hear the squeak of his flippers against the grass. She opens the hatchback with the button and it pops up. He lifts the hatch and climbs inside, presses himself against the rubber mats that line the confined space. The last beads of water break their tension and settle between the black grooves. He pulls the hatch down over himself from the inside and it is dark. She begins to drive.

  Coiled in the small, insulated space, he releases the mouthpiece, pulls off the mask, and allows himself to exhale into the car’s stale air. Ringed by a red line, his eyes blink and close. Despite the car’s seals, he tastes the tickle of a few dust particles against his tongue. His mouth returns to the oxygen like that of a blind puppy, biting down gently on the hose. He inhales.

  At the house she presses another button, then drives into the garage and closes the roller door behind her. The plastic sheeting on the inside of the door ripples back into place with a noise like tearing. She opens the hatch again, and stands to watch her son slowly unfurl himself from the dark like a worm.

  She unlocks a door and they enter the house. He pads along the burnished stone floor to his room, waits patiently for her to open the seal. Once inside, he stands in the centre of the room, his mouth on the oxygen, his eyes on his mother’s feet, her clean sneakers covered in surgical overshoes. She does not touch him. They do not speak. She stays a moment, then retreats.

  He releases the mouthpiece and sits on the bed. The synthetic mattress, covered in the manufacturer’s plastic, squeaks against his diving suit. The sound is too loud, and he leaps up as though burned. Slowly, he peels the suit from his skin and rolls it neatly, furling the roll of his night self into a cupboard, closing it away. Naked, he stands in the centre of the room until he feels that every drop of moisture on his skin has evaporated.

  He takes the oxygen tank and rolls it to the edge of the room, breathing very shallowly. He inhales deeply, holds it. Opens the door, rolls the tank into the hallway, closes the door, and allows himself to breathe. He doesn’t need much air. He is an expert in conservation, in minimising what he displaces. The bottom of the pool is an exercise in containment.

  I imagine this: his mother lying on her own bed next door. She is saving for a pool of their own, but after the psychiatrists’ bills, the medication, the plastic, the seals, the oxygen, twenty years of it, there is very little left to live on. She flattens the covers and thinks of him lying in the effortless bubble of her womb, tiny, coiled, unmoving, an intimate stranger that she thought – despite the reassurance of ultrasounds and heartbeats – would come stillborn. Dreams of the blue child, merman, ghost. The psychic dread that went unsatisfied until he revealed himself, in life, to be this absurd fish-boy, terrified of air.

  After a short sleep, she collects the tank, along with the other six empties in the garage, and drives to the hardware store to have them filled. The man has stopped remarking on the amount of welding she must be doing. He leaves her be. She stares out into the heat haze. Out here in the world, alone, there is nothing wrong with her boy. In the open air, I imagine she lets herself hope.

  Some mornings she sneaks in to watch him sleep, his small breath moving in and out, his thin blue ribs contracting. Some mornings she believes that he is growing gills. One night he will forget the surface, leave her in the car with the crossword and the radio. He will become amphibious and pale, an albino axolotl like the one they used to visit at the aquarium when he was small, a lumpish monster settled weightlessly at the bottom of its tank. I imagine she believes, until the very last moment, that she will be the one who remains on the surface, the one who is left behind.

  The father’s side, she sometimes thinks. There was an uncle who studied dugongs, lived up north somewhere, but she doesn’t know any more. She herself was a water baby, they said; she loved to swim. But there’s no point thinking about the genetics of it, the inheritance of certain tastes. The father left them long ago. The daydream of responsibility halves and splits into infinity, regressing like a double mirror, infinitely small but always the same face, the same hands, telescoping into nothing.

  The tanks filled, she places them in the boot of the car. One tank for each night. Her arms, unlike her son’s, are strong and brown. She returns to the house. He will sleep all day and she can get the housework out of the way. The electronic noises sometimes send him into fits of panic. The high whine of the washing machine has been known to make him scream. She got a quieter one, then soundproofed the laundry.

  She works through the motions of a normal life, then eats at the kitchen table. She takes him a carefully wrapped me
al: pureed and solidified oats, an apple skinned, cored and sliced, perhaps a jar of maraschino cherries or whole dill pickles. He seems to like food preserved in liquid.

  In the evening she drives, her son in the passenger seat, until he finds a pool. Each night he selects one through some urgent and mysterious necessity. When he knows, he points. His trembling hand might be lifting the weight of his whole body, slight and small as it is. Weight could be the problem to which he directs his stillness. The experiment in displacement.

  It is cruel to know she will never understand it. It is cruel to know he will never touch her, never thank her. I imagine she is glad that the painful trial and error it took to reach this routine will never have to be repeated. I imagine she finds comfort where she can. Practises gratitude. Breathes.

  One morning he watches the daylight enter the pool’s surface by the corners, pleased at the stillness, the predictability. He lifts himself out and rises. He walks across a stranger’s lawn, deaf to the squeak of rubber on turf, deaf to everything except the absence of one thing, the silent hole like a bubble of air where the low hum of the hatchback’s engine should be.

  The street is empty. His mother is nowhere in sight.

  This is his mystery and his necessity. He stands dripping in the street for minutes, until the day is up and the tank is heavy on his back. An early jogger runs by, ignoring him. A car passes. Still he waits. Finally a man comes out of one of the houses and stands beside his fence.

  You son, are you all right there? His voice is kind and sounds to the man in the diving suit as though it comes through a thickness of water. The mask. The man from the house comes closer, lifts one hand to touch his shoulder. The man’s hand comes down on his diving suit. Even through the rubber the pain shoots down his arm, branches across his back like lightning. He can’t take out the mouthpiece so he does not scream. He turns and walks down the road, flippers slapping, fast as a penguin. The other man stands, his hand unmoving in the air. He looks around for the cameras.

  The man in the diving suit sucks at his air, exhales through the valve. The tank is growing light on his back. He walks at a contained speed to the end of the road, a T-junction. There is a small suburban shopping centre opposite, a car park half-full of newish hatchbacks. He crosses the empty street and makes for the nearest small white car, approaching close enough to touch, but not touching, moving quickly to the next. Each one is wrong in some way. He moves through a nightmare of unpredictable detail. His air is low. He stands in the median strip and bangs his sharp fists into his thighs until he can feel them bruising, even through the rubber. Until he can feel nothing, only the perfection of the rhythm.

  And that is how we find him, my son and I. Standing there hitting himself. My son finds him first. Fistfistfistfistfist, he says, and shakes his head. Fistfistfist. Or it could be fishfishfish. He is four and I am only beginning to understand his specific language, his mysterious necessities.

  The fish man lives upstairs now. I am glad someone uses the pool; Aiden is terrified of it, as he is terrified of most things. He follows the fish man as far as the gate and watches him through the pool fence. I drive to the fish man’s mother’s house every day, knock, leave notes. I imagine she has gone to another country, another town, somewhere cold, where there is not a swimming pool in every second backyard. I imagine she is having a break. That soon, she will come back. Because I cannot imagine she has really gone.

  I do not have to imagine her leaving: she drives off one day into the dawn, alone, taking an hour for herself, two hours to remember who she was before the oxygen tanks and plastic sheets. She drives with the window down and the dust and smog blowing into her lungs, and soon she finds the day open to her, a vast blue.

  We all leave like this at some point. It is a question of displacement, of taking the volume of air you need. I imagine the fish man knows this more than anyone. My imagination is my greatest ally.

  The taxi driver

  sits in the dark bar, his broad nose hovering over the matching hollow of the bottle he is emptying. Clear glass that shucks its foam. He sniffs at smoke-machine air and tastes the mountains: burning plastic in a tin stove, the phlegm of children that crawl and beg at him when he gets home, if he gets home before they are in bed, which is rare. Sometimes they wake to find he has returned in the night and teeter out wide-eyed to witness him, like a saint’s visit. These sweet-shit-smelling children maul him, ignorant as dogs. He swigs the cheap yellow malt to rinse the taste.

  watches the city-style boys work something up in this sad small town, boys with shine and wings trying for glamour. His eyes are shaded under a cap in the dark, he hopes the check shirt doesn’t show its dirt marks. The tear in the shirt tail carefully tucked into his jeans at the back. He’s traded the woven belt his mother made for a plastic one bought at the market, changed in the taxi. The barstool’s thin foam layer hardly protects from the metal frame and his arse hurts after two hours. Two hours he has been sitting on his one beer smoking half a cigarette at a time. The beer’s long warm and the cigarettes are tinny.

  feels his eyes stick to a chest here, hook on a silver-edged shirt, trimmed like a mock cowboy’s. An angel’s wings in the corner, the floorshow, but it’s still too early. The performers are mixing, getting the jóvenes to drink up; they don’t bother with him. He is too old to be beautiful and there is a smell on him, a mountains smell of heavy lifting and bad schooling.

  watches the angel wings molest the air, little breezes like a hummingbird, now behind, now straight ahead of him, talking to the cowboy shirt, muchacho silverado. A shimmer close enough to smell the animal under the bright perfume. The boy’s neck exposed above the collar. Tiny jewels of moisture cling to the stubble of a fresh haircut, he can see where the clippers have trimmed around a mole, almost feels the buzz of the machine against that part of himself, the neck muscle, and reaches for the itch.

  drops the cigarette in the ashtray and scratches it out like a mistake. It’s the lack of alcohol that makes it seem like he’s wasting his time here, that time is not passing at the rate it should. Thinks of the comfort of the meter ticking over, the bottle of tequila in the cabinet at home, bought for special guests that never arrive and drunk alone in increments coming off a late shift, avoiding bed. The boys are so close now he can smell the limes in their drinks and feel those hummingbird flutters with his ears. His throat is dry. Too many cigarettes.

  lunges in slow motion for the edge of the silver boy. The wings beat and scatter broken feathers. Un ángelo. His own hands, sober, pass the air over the boy’s shoulder. As he leans out, foot braced against his stool, he wonders if they’re real or artificial feathers. Probably real. There are more than enough birds. At home chicken feathers line the yard, always creeping into the house, saddled on some child’s sandal. The human smell of burning them among the rubbish. His hand returns to him. It has touched air and the boys have felt nothing.

  slides off his stool and goes to the bathroom to piss. Aware of his body’s smell, cheap soap, or that is the urinal cake, sharp and sweet as the act. There is chilli sauce on his jeans. It is stupid to have this need to put it inside something that is not his wife. Though sometimes she will do, like a pressure, a tap needs to be opened. He has heard of men and cattle, men and pigs.

  zips and returns to his seat. He knows she will smell the smoke machine on him and think it is mountain trash, or the cigarettes will cover it. The customers, he will tell her, a late fare to the next town over, a drunk – no, a drunk and his novia. His noise, her innocence. In the morning the children will get on his lap and wipe their snot on his chest, and the weight of desire will not be lifted, it will stay in his body like a great fat cyst. He will not come here again. When he was small he would eat his mother’s moisturiser out of its flat tin. The chemistry of perfume, fat, and sugar still works on him. His mother took the tin away and beat him. It was the flavour of trespass he loved. The heart n
estled in its cushions. What fixes him to this specific body.

  shifts the napkin, sops the pool of condensation under the beer, examines the last centimetres of warm foam. The angel and silverado laugh, pushing at each other’s shoulders, leaning close to shout some remark about the music, their futures spun between them, or a word about the weird taxista on his stool, still nursing one warm beer. Basta. Déjalo.

  drops the sodden napkin in the ashtray, where it hisses on the ember of a cigarette. He takes the last sip of beer, rises to leave, resists a final look across the room into that winged air. At least he is not numb, can leave with that comfort stuffed in the gaps between his ribs. As he goes down into the street, he leaves them behind, leaves them where they might remain whole in their perfection.

  stumbles on the third last step, trips and slides from the open door. A moment’s flight, and then the concrete. His head rests in the gutter, collarbones and hands grazed against the raised pavers. A car slips past without slowing, dangerously close to his face. Then hands come to lift him, young hands scented with perfumes, and a feather falls beside his one open eye. The boys have followed him down the stairs. They raise him by the armpits like a child. Silverado hovers over a winged shoulder. We will give you a lift, says the angel boy. I have my taxi, says the taxi driver. No, I’ll drive you, your head is bleeding, says the angel boy. Raúl will take your taxi.

  passes over the keys and feels his legs swim. A small knock on the head, it’s nothing. No alcohol, one beer, but his thighs feel made of stringy quesillo. Blood trickling over one eye and in the crack at his nostril. He needs the strength of both young men to get to their car, and is thrown across the back seat, where he sleeps.

  wakes to lines of sunlight across his face. Some small bird chirping in the rafters. He is in a room. A house? A shed. Steel frame, aluminium, a concrete floor, his eyesight bitten by the sharp edges stuck with light. Aches in his legs from lying bone-hipped against the hard ground. His head throbs where he landed on it, the heels of his hands too. Nothing else in pain, only stiffness. His hands go to his back pocket. His wallet is missing. He probably left it in the taxi. The taxi.