Dog Dentist comes home, takes off his shoes, puts his feet up on the table, and says in a voice too loud, “Man my feet are B-A-R-K-I-N-G, if you know what I mean!” He laughs uproariously to himself. A joke intended only for one.I’m fixing up his favorite: meatloaf and mash. After a day of grinding down dog teeth, he’s only in the mood for food that is barely reconstituted. My meatloaf is a special recipe that’s super moist. More “fudgey” than “cakey” so the enamel faces zero resistance on the way down. I can tell that sometimes Dog Dentist barely chews, just lets the food dissolve a little before swallowing it whole.Dog Dentist started his business by posting flyers around the neighborhood. Super grisly pictures of canine’s canines all rotted out. A crusty black molar against a shock of labial gum line. The flyer didn’t make any sense. It was formatted all crazy so you didn’t know it was advertising for dental hygiene services until the very end (“Ever woken up to put the coffee pot on and water in the dog bowl and when you bent down to pet his furry old head realized that WHEW your dog’s mouth is RANK?”).Somehow, though, calls came in for Dog Dentist. Some were super out there calls. From people who were probably mentally ill, he would say to me. You really start to wonder who is walking outside and sees a flyer and thinks it’s ok to call the number on the paper when there’s no website or any way to confirm this dog dentist is an actual human. But I guess there are some real loonies out there.Business is good and Dog Dentist is happy. One night, he decides to go all out and make me spaghetti and meatballs. He cooks the whole box of Kirkland pasta until they’re way past al dente. Like no more dente left. And he styles the noodles in these two crooked towers with one enormous meatball at the top of each. “What’s the occasion?” I ask. “I’m making money, baby!” he says, wagging around in an apron that says “Trust Me, I’m a Dentist.” He bought it off of Redbubble last week for some reason. “We got funds, we got the goods,” he says as he motions to the bounty of pasta before us.“How’s business, daddy-o?” I’m tapping the table like a stick to a cymbal.“Amazing,” he says. “Never been better. Dogs come in a-howlin’ and leave me a-whistlin’. I’m getting referrals on referrals from people who’ve come in to see me.”I’m about to brave the pasta tower when Dog Dentist leans in and adopts a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll let you in on a little secret.” I set down my fork and knife and crouch low to meet his face. It’s all a big show. I know with his timbre he’s not capable of whispering to anyone. “I put BOTS in their teeth.”Now I’m genuinely surprised. “Bots? What do you mean bots?”“Robots, babe. It’s mind control.” He’s tapping his index and middle finger up against his temple like a loaded gun“Fuck out of here,” I say.“No, for real, babe. This is what’s really gonna make us rich. Like filthy stinkin’ rich. I’m gonna plant all these dogs with bots and when they activate it’s gonna be insane. They’ll run away from their owners and be able to talk to each other. But the GPS is programmed for our place so they’ll show up here first and then I’ll take them on a traveling roadshow. People love dogs who do tricks. And I got the key. The button’s in my pocket and the receptors . . . they’re in their mouths, babe.”I’m sitting there looking at him slurping a strand of spaghetti down. It’s snaking around the spaghetti tower and it’s setting the whole plate spinning like a record player in a cartoon. No way I’m seeing this. No way I’m hearing this.But with Dog Dentist, it’s best to just keep laughing and chum around and be all “That’s amazing, babe.” And he really is in a good mood with his spaghetti—it’s a good sign that he’s cooking anything at all. Much better than the alternative when Dog Dentist doesn’t get out of bed for weeks on end, dour as all hell, basically melting into the bedsheets. When he’s saying he wishes he was dead and had finished human dentistry school instead of being a no-good back alley dog dentist. Better than when he gets a call later from one of his “patients” about their dog spitting something out after dinner, some screwy piece that came out of a hole where a tooth used to be. Better than when the mail comes in from the Better Business Bureau and they’re seeing red and they know he’s been practicing dog dentistry without a license for months. Better than when he’s screaming that he’s going to do it just hit “ACTIVATE” and then the world will see—I’ll see—that he was right all along and his dogs are gonna come running and he’ll sit there on the front porch with his bowl of spaghetti waiting for the call of his hounds because when they show up they’ll answer to he and he alone. They’re gonna stream in like the cavalry and help build his case against the BBB and they’ll publish a story about him in Scientific American oh how amazed the canine science community will be at this feat Dog Dentist accomplished pushing dog dentistry forward by 100 years maybe 150 if you’re really keeping score.
It’s an involuntary reflex, like how looking at the sun can make some people sneeze. Whenever Harding drives past a 7-Eleven, he has to turn around and buy a pack of cigarettes. To be clear, he is not a smoker. He buys a cheap pack of whatever color looks most appealing in the moment, regardless of brand, then smokes exactly one cigarette in the parking lot before stuffing the pack in the glove compartment and driving to his destination. He particularly likes packs in yellow. And sea-foam green, because they look clean and soapy. If he had to explain it, he’d pin it on the parking lots. There’s something about the 7-Eleven parking lots that makes him want to pause and tether himself to the landscape. But Harding is not a teenager anymore and needs an excuse to loiter. Cigarettes are the obvious choice, because they give him the appearance of having a habit.Harding is not a man of habits and this makes him very difficult to latch onto and describe. A man should have one or two habits so that he can be known by them. A man could play poker or refurbish guitars. A man could take evening walks around the neighborhood. A man could stretch, habitually.But Harding is not a man of habits, and so he must simulate them. How does a man pass his days without habits? That’s for him to know.Today, Harding is smoking blue. Because they were out of seafoam and yellow. He was on his way to visit his sister when he saw the 7-Eleven sign and had to pull over. His sister is dying a slow and discerning death. The nearness of her death has given her an uncanny sweetness; her words are full of import. Harding does not like to be around it. It makes him feel threadbare and immaterial. She has always been more substantial than he.Harding has many dreams for a man with no habits. Last night he dreamt the world was a campground and everyone he knew lived next to each other in little tents, each zipped up and doing important research on screens that glowed and buzzed. Having nothing to research, he passed from tent to tent, making sad little visits of himself. One tent had a lava lamp inside. Another had a baby and some posters. When he woke, Harding tried but could not remember the images on the posters. Those sorts of things never make it out of dreams. Harding is smoking blue, halfway to his dying sister and her menacing wisdom. He tries taking deep yogic breaths through the cigarette, then looks down at the shrinking butt between his fingers, a wet heat settling beneath the skin around his eyes. He drops it, steps on it, returns to his car. It takes him 17 minutes to arrive at the house where his sister is dying. Her room is full of flowers Harding can’t identify. She’s propped up in bed, wearing an expression he refuses to identify.Harding attempts conversation: —What are you dying of again?She smiles the infuriatingly patient smile of the near-death. —5G.—Be reasonable. —All right. An infection, then. —Right. What do you want done with the, with your body?—Cremation, please. It’s all written down somewhere. Did you know that the cremation chamber is called a retort? She laughs at her own remark. Harding tries not to cling to the sound of her laughter. Her cheerfulness is an insult. It’s easy to laugh when the burdens of life and loss have turned to vapor. —What will you do when I’m all gone?Harding considers telling her about his dream; the lava lamp, the baby. This is his final offering.—I hadn’t really thought about it. I had this dream…She interrupts.—I still remember our first phone number. —It had too many zeros. They agree about the zeros. His sister looks tired now, and possibly a little bored. Healthy people never imagine their dying words will be wasted in this way, tossed absently about without catching on anything. Her breaths grow shallow and dissembled. Harding stares at his boots and contemplates his dream, passing in his mind from tent to tent, never bothering to zip them up again when he departs. Of his sister, his last referent on earth, he has made another sad little visit. Maybe it is rude to inflict your dreams on a dying person; maybe they are supposed to become the dream. He takes her hand in his and administers the lightest pressure. She squeezes back. And just like that, Harding zips his sister closed.
This guy, Bobby, called asking for money. He was with three hookers at the hot dog stand and they needed to be paid. He had enough to buy them each a hot dog, but that would only hold them off for so long. Soon they were going to find out that he was broke. The skinny one was almost done with hers, he was telling me, and, lowering his voice to a whisper, he said he knew she wasn’t going to ask for another one. She ate as if she had other things on her mind, like where’s my goddamn money, stuff like that. Even if she did want another one he didn’t have the cash for it, the three dogs had wiped him out. He was lucky to have enough for those three, he said. He was lucky.I paced around the dark apartment, phone to my ear. I could see how he was lucky.Playing off my silence, he mumbled some more into the receiver, fast talking, while I was trying to figure out how to react. He said he met them online. He had been under the impression that they liked him for who he was. After all, he confided with me, he had been a little famous. He said he didn’t know they were hookers and now he owed them for the entire night. Actually, maybe, he said that again—maybe—he didn’t need to pay all three of them. The skinny one was totally his type and, he could be wrong, but maybe there was something there. Something real. She looked French, and it had always been a dream of his to have a French girlfriend. He starting talking about this TV show they’d watch in French class back in middle school about a Parisian family with a beautiful teenage daughter, and he had been floored by how she looked so at ease with her boyfriend as they’d stroll down the street in spring and discuss going to the boulangerie or the supermarché and buy some fucking pomplemousse, the entire time while she wore a sweater with no bra underneath. They’d hang out with her little sister and help her with her homework, not giving a rat’s ass about who’s getting stoned without them in the Genovese parking lot. The show was so wholesome that it was pornographic, filthy, foreign propaganda and his adolescent brain was confused about whether he should buy it or not. The part of his mind that dreams, or maybe it was his heart, invested in the girl, big time, and it tore him apart. Each episode was a new way to desire her, to fall madly in love with her, but also a new way to understand that he was trapped in his blue-collar pain cave, growing up out on the island, smoking stolen women’s cigarettes on the playground, giving kids wet willies and purple nurples for looking too pensive. He had forgotten about it until just tonight, had completely buried it in the scuzziest corner of his soul, until right now, talking to me, but he realized that his love for her had been there all this time, propelling him forward in life, yanking him backwards, closing doors while opening up others, kicking him to this dirty curb, right here. The shit we learn in school, you know what I mean? But it’s not too late, right? For a French girlfriend? He just turned forty-five, he reminded me.The poor guy had the wrong number. I didn’t know who he was. Before I could speak up he was off again.Ah, bitch finished her hot dog, he said. It’s now or never. Maybe it would be safer just to have all the money. What did I think? He was asking me for three thousand dollars. Three thousand or two. My choice.A desperation had creeped into his phrasing and it seemed to throw him off. He must’ve sensed I wasn’t who he thought I was. I sat on my couch, then got right up. I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. It was one of those moments where the act of speaking was more important than what words you chose. Say anything just to keep him talking. “Let’s play it safe, Bobby. Three thousand.” My voice didn’t match whoever’s he thought he was talking to. He let out a knowing groan, like he got a punch to the gut. “I fucked up again,” he said. I stayed on the line and walked around a little, waiting for him to hang up.But he just breathed into the phone. Heavy, middle-aged breaths. A half a life’s worth of heartbreak pushed those breaths out of his inner organs. “Dans ces affaires . . .” he said to himself, recovering from his bout of nostalgia. During our conversation I had paced around my entire apartment trying to picture a world full of famous people and hookers and hot dogs, midnight playground dates with middle-aged Frenchmen smoking stogies. My mind was getting spun around. It was late and I was up only because of a text I received from my friend, Jay, claiming that he had met an old high school acquaintance of mine, who turned out to be someone I didn’t remember. He remembers you, Jay wrote. He reenacted your jump shot from memory. Right outside 7-11. And he nailed it bro. A moment passed, maybe while he sipped from a Big Gulp, then one more message. Looked so pure. Unsettled by the compliment and reunited with dead memories, I dug in my closet and found a videotape that I knew was there, the only remaining recorded proof that I had once played ball, saved for future children that might never appear, and I reconnected my VCR. There was a rumor that the team manager had a crush on me so he had zoomed in on my ass for most of the game. Between the auto-zooming in and out, his nervous hands, and the fact that it had been recorded by an ancient camcorder on low batteries, there were streaks everywhere, as if we all played while on acid. The artifacts overrode the facts. The tape had transformed into shit. When the phone rang I had paused it precisely at the height of my jump, the ball ready to be released by my fingertips. My head streaked like a comet. Bobby was still on the line. I stood in front of the TV again, staring again at my fiery face. “What are you doing, Bobby? Watching them eat their hot dogs?”“Yeah.”I backed away and turned the thing off. Black dots sparkled my vision and I rubbed my eyes, giving up, letting go. “Tell me about the girls. They beautiful?”He dismissed my question with a snort. I could almost hear him shaking his head on the other end of the line. I got it. He had been answering that question the entire time. All of it. Everything he told me was about the beauty of the three hovering hookers.“I was duped,” he said. “I thought I was back, you know what I mean? I thought I was back.”I already had my coat on and was heading out the door, my cell phone cradled next to my head. I patted my pockets to locate my car keys. I didn’t have three thousand dollars in the bank, but I had something.
Yesterday I met the bad cat. He was lying on our neighbor’s driveway, sunning himself in the last of the day’s warmth. He had gray fur, slightly mottled with black, and white paws. His eyes were closed, restful. When my family and I walked past, the cat yawned and stretched his tongue the way cats sometimes do. The cat blinked at us for a moment, curiously—pleasantly, I thought.“Here kitty-kitty!” I said. “Psst-psst!”“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t do that.”“Do what?” I said. “Cats love that sound.”“Please, Dad,” my daughter said. “It’s embarrassing.”“Plus,” my son said, “I think there’s something wrong with that cat.”“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, and lowered my hand to the ground, as if I were cradling food, a trick from my childhood that had never failed to lure our cat, Pumpkin, out from beneath my bed. “Psst-psst! Here kitty! Hungry for a little snack?”The cat blinked his eyes once more at me, and stood. Interested.“Dad,” my daughter said, “don’t trick him.”“It’s not a trick,” I said. “He thinks you have food,” my son said. “He’s not going to be happy,” my daughter said.“The kids have a point,” my wife said. She’d been checking out her new iPhone for the past few minutes. The walk had been her idea: we’d take a nice selfie of us walking in the neighborhood and then post it when we got home. This time of evening, the light was soft, perfect. “That cat looks a little scraggly.”“He’s not scraggly,” I said. I crouched to the ground and made eye contact with the cat. “Psst-psst! Here kitty!” But the moment I said it, I noticed the weeds and sticks and briars clinging to the cat’s underbelly. “Dad,” my daughter said.“Honey,” my wife said. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”“You guys are being ridiculous,” I said. But, as the cat clicked closer—one of his rear legs tapered to a wooden peg that clicked atop the asphalt—I saw that his teeth were preternaturally large and that his left ear was held together by what seemed to be industrial staples and barbed wire. “Dad, don’t,” my son said. But I wouldn’t let up. I made the “psst-psst” sound even louder, and pretended to dip one hand into the other, then place something presumably yummy into my mouth. That had always worked with Pumpkin. Do that with Pumpkin, and ten seconds later he’d be purring at your feet, only too glad to have you pet him with your not-actually-holding-food hand.“Honey,” my wife said. “I think that might be a bad cat.”“He’s not a bad cat,” I said, as the cat approached. Up close, I could see that his fur wasn’t actually black and gray: the black was really a little leather jacket studded with rivets, from which something I would soon learn was a switchblade bulged. The cat was smoking a tiny cigarette, which sent smoke into his crusted, bloodshot eyes.“Here kitty-kitty,” I said. “Dad,” my daughter said.When the cat nudged my hand with his nose ring, I opened my fingers to show him that there was nothing inside.“Ta-da!” I said. There was a moment I would like to dwell upon here, if I might. A moment when the cat looked at me with genuine surprise and perhaps even more genuine disappointment, before everything else unfolded. I felt, in that moment, as fleeting as it was, that the cat understood something about me, about my lonely childhood, those long summer days playing umpteen bazillion games of hide and seek with Pumpkin, or persuading Pumpkin to watch cartoons with me on the family room sectional, or me reading all of my old Hardy Boys books to Pumpkin, who often needed me to point out the clues. It was, I would like to think, a special moment, one I know I won’t long forget.And then the moment passed.The first cuts of the switchblade weren’t too bad; it was the nunchucks that really smarted. What with the way the bad cat struck them expertly against our ankles, to get the most pain. He was good at working them with one paw while thrusting the switchblade with the other. When the bad cat bit my hand while simultaneously stabbing and nunchucking the rest of my family, I knew I should have been angry, but I couldn’t help it: I felt a little proud.
My boyfriend is a plant enthusiast: the more exotic the better. Old man’s beard, elk horn, fishbone. The bedroom is particularly full of them. They hang from curtain poles, draping down like Rapunzel’s hair. Distressingly phallic cacti loiter in corners; succulents take up space where they shouldn’t.Cacti are a type of succulent, he tells me.Whatever, I reply.You’re succulent, he says, and bites my neck. I roll my eyes.I go along with it, because it’s easier.When I get back from work, more seem to have appeared.Did you buy more plants?No, he says, flipping through channels. I squint at each wall, the table, the windowsill, unconvinced.The other day, practically cooing, he’d shown me a time lapse of plants moving over a twenty-four-hour period, wiggling their little arms wherever the sun went. Disney versions of plants. Cute. Not like the ones in here, which seem to writhe and moan during the night, creeping tendrils into my dreams. When I wake up they’re in different positions to when I went to sleep.Are you fucking with me? I ask.What? No.I wasn’t talking to you.The next week I’m reaching into the bookshelf when one of the cacti stabs me. That’s the only way I can describe it: it skids along the shelf and plants its spiny arm into mine, deliberately. My boyfriend is coldly incredulous, the way he tends to be whenever anything unusual happens; as if the unknown is personally offensive to him. He said that I must have slipped when I was getting the book, and was I on my period or something?The paramedic said she’d never seen an allergic reaction like it.I call in sick for the rest of the week, burrowing under the duvet and then abruptly emerging again as I come into contact with something lumpy and unexpected. I pull a fat little succulent out from down near my feet. Soil scatters over my arm, which has started to turn green.When I wake up, more of them are in bed with me. My boyfriend has started to believe me, because last night he rolled over onto a cactus and now he’s on the sofa, sulking. I keep trying to move them out, but as soon as I turn my back they’ve jumped in again, snuggling in close and giving happy little sighs. The swelling has started to go down, but my arm is green from shoulder to wrist, and soft spines have started to grow from where the little hairs used to be. The next time I wake, the old man’s beard has moved from the curtain rail and is now perched directly above me. A seaweedy frond has snaked around my wrist and grips iron-tight.Get off me! I shout, struggling.I think I hear it say no.My boyfriend left a few days ago.Those plants are taking over your life, he said.I know, I said. Sorry.I haven’t been able to move from the bed for several weeks now. More plants have gathered around, eager to join the fun. Each limb bound with strong vines; my body tapestried to the mattress and woven over with flowers. Kindly souls drip nectar into my open mouth and allow me sips of water. I am leaf-skeleton light, but alive. My spines have hardened into dangerous points. I no longer know where the plants end and I begin. Together, we begin to creep back to the perimeter of the room, to breathe and grow. Waiting for the next one to join us.
She was sixty-nine, he was seventy. In the kitchen she baked two halves of an apple sprinkled with cinnamon. He drank iced coffee and did his Sean Connery impression. She pulled down a shoebox from a shelf in the closet and read her old journals. He took photos of their Pontiac and tapped on his phone and in a few minutes it was officially for sale, online, a part of their history up for grabs. She got a root canal that cost more than three mortgage payments, back when they had a mortgage. He bought a new phone that cost more than his first car. She received another brochure in the mail about twin cemetery plots and headstones. He wondered if, when people looked at him, they thought he was still in his sixties. She watched the neighborhood kids wait at the curb for the school bus. He scraped the dead skin off his heels. She stopped watering the house plants. He didn’t notice. She watched 7 Eyewitness News at Noon while dust particles danced in the light. He stalked his great-niece’s Instagram looking for photos of his estranged brother. She bought an old typewriter and displayed it on the mantle. He planted broad beans in the garden. She took the cordless phone into the bathroom and called back interested buyers and said the car was no longer for sale. He voted straight-ticket Democrat. She watched liver spots appear overnight like crop circles. He quit red meat, cold turkey. She read the newspaper and told him she was glad she never had to be a reporter in this economy. He said he kind of wished he were still teaching, just to have something to do. In bed she paused the movie they were watching and said that adult children seemed like the worst, don’t they, just the most ungrateful people. He nodded toward the TV and said he liked that Kristen Wiig, and is it pronounced wig or weeg. She dreamed that a tiger was always walking away from her. He read the comments. She watched the snow melt and wash away winter’s brown slush. He watched the flowers bloom and the grass grow. She sat in the Bonneville and inhaled the scent of its interior, still impossibly cinnamon. He wondered if it was too late to father a child.She suggested they try something new and sleep on different sides of the bed. He rinsed with blue mouthwash and said yes. She settled into his spot and wondered if, by doing this, she would learn how his mind had been working all these years. He cleared his throat. She thought he sounded like he was going to say something. He rolled over and looked at her. She looked back. And in the dark they knew each other again as ageless, pre-human things.
Sometimes brown girls can wear black. Not the colour, but a mood, a presence, a halo. I hold my aunt's hand as she struggles with the chain. I want to tell her there’s no use, it can’t cage her spirit, but I stop myself.The Ward smells of grudges and longing. What is madness, if not a pile of lost love and mercy? There is something about blue that’s retrograde. It's the colour of sky fading into evening, the colour of hospital bedsheets the severe cases lie on. Scratch on the walls suggest a previous occupant might have had claws. Blue is the look in my Aunt's eye that means a vacuum, the hotness of tears rolling down her caramel onyx face.The perfume of catarrh and puss-filled wounds is close to disinfected avocado. These markings on the wall remind me of history class. After this no one can convince me cavemen were completely sane. Everyone here is brought in with a sense of urgency, like preparation for a carnival. Their escorts try to make sense of the nonsensical, to explain how the patient went from drinking coffee to grabbing their niece’s collar bones and picking dirt off the ground. Suddenly dust tasted like coca and stones turned to bread, their grin turned to the devil’s.This is a home of monologues. Here, the self is both actor and spectator; the protagonist, an extra, a prop forever tied to insanity. My aunt is still struggling, she is remembering objects. Says we should bring her the basin of eggs she bought decades ago. Says I should return the bus fare she gave me for school. She wants to microwave a can of water.I know beauty can distort the truth. That evening she wore a mustard top and grey shorts. Her curls blew out bouncy like springs. I should have sensed her stream of consciousness when she climbed onto six-inch stilettos to go to the market? I can’t forget that evening. The phone rang nonstop. When I picked up, a stranger described her nakedness. Said she stood sulking like an offering, ready to bolt at the sight of clothes or a helping hand.Emergency is an efficient teacher. The first time I got behind the wheel of a car, was to drive my aunt to the hospital. I buckled the seat belt and evaded turns like the plague. A doctor pulled her from the backseat; she believed it was a kidnapping. He assumed my novice driving was from shock, but any ignition will start when a vein of worry inserts a key.The nurse pumps liquid into her bloodstream and she lays sly like a toad. She wakes up a wilding, hence the chain. She calls for the husband who swallowed her sanity as sleeping pills, the one who murmured 'I do' on the altar with his diseased mouth. She asks for her purse, the one she left at the mercy of the road, the one waiting there for thieves.Maybe new memories will grow when we abandon the old ones.
Because of the heat, she decides to sleep downstairs. “This old townhouse funnels the stuff upwards like acid reflux,” she says. She slips from the sheets, props the standing fan under her arm.
It’s fine by him; he relishes in spreading out on the bed without her. (Starfishing, she calls it.) He listens to her footsteps recede on the stairs and unfurls his limbs to the four corners of the mattress. Above him the ceiling fan carves circles in the air, striving to please.
Two days ago an ambulance came down their street at an un-ambulance-y pace and pulled its left two wheels up onto the sidewalk in front of a house three doors down. The paramedics brought out an old woman and tucked her into the back. One by one, as if on bad knees, the wheels clunked gingerly back onto the street and the ambulance pulled away. The lights twirled without spirit. No siren.
She says, “I hope when I go they put their back into it. I want to scream through the streets. Blast through red lights. I want the people to know that death is in their midst.”
“It’s the heat,” he says. “This almost visible heat, creeping through the neighborhoods and stripping life away.”
“This heat,” she says. “This sludgy, quicksand heat, with nowhere to go but into us.”
He can almost taste it: like a membrane on his tongue, hints of moist metal and decay. She can almost hear it: the vibrations in the space between the molecules, the science-fiction throb of radiation.
They hear of toddlers desiccated in the back seats of SUVs; dogs too. They shake their heads at these distant tragedies. “This evil heat,” he says. “You can almost smell it, can’t you? It’s like, it’s like . . .” He doesn’t finish the thought.
In the morning she is gone before he awakes, the pull-out couch a swamp of sheet and pillow. Her scent is there, her residue, among the creases and stains. He lifts the edge and folds the evidence of their sleeping arrangement back into itself.
At this moment she is in their car, among other cars, waiting for a light to change. Sweat beads on her temples, her dress shirt already translucent with moisture. She shields her eyes against the rising sun. The radio tells her not to hope.
She gets home at seven.
“Two more ambulances today,” he says.
“They’re dropping like flies,” she says.
They sleep apart again.
“It’s on you,” she says. “It’s coming off you in waves.”
In the silence, he hears the clunk of the couch being pulled out. When he stretches out his joints creak and tingle and sigh.
He surprises her by getting up when she gets up. He is sitting in the kitchen when she emerges from the shower. He says he wants to get a start on the day. She has told him: you need to attack life, you need to be proactive. Lately, she tells him: you need to find a job. She is pleased to see a stack of resumes on the table in front of him.
“I’m only going to apply at places with air conditioning,” he says.
While she waits for a light to change he sits on the couch where she sleeps and watches the ambulances come up the street. They clamber onto the sidewalks and swallow up the bodies the paramedics present like offerings. The bodies are not all elderly—one is a woman no more than forty.
The resumes are still on the table when she gets home. He tells her about the ambulances, about the younger woman. She can see it has rattled him. “The traffic is getting lighter,” she says.
The next morning they awake in their separate beds to a line of ambulances blocking the street and she stays home from work. The electricity is off. A battery-powered radio tells them to expect rolling blackouts. Together they sit on the couch and watch the parade of corpses: elderly, adult, teenaged, infant, wheeled one by one towards the ambulances, placed gently inside. He imagines the bodies dissolving, like a candy on the tongue.
Their sweat is permanent, a second skin they never shed. They eat crackers and tuna for lunch. “Weird,” she says, “without the hum of the house.” The silence spreads out beneath them. Its depth makes them uneasy, like open water, like anything too vast to have an edge.
There is a flurry of activity at the end of the street. One paramedic is fighting another paramedic because, it seems, one paramedic has stolen the corpse out of the back of the other paramedic’s ambulance. They flail at each other and tear their uniforms. The first paramedic throws a punch and knocks the other one out. A third paramedic scoops up the unconscious paramedic and places him in the back of his ambulance.
“This heat,” he says.
The next day there are no ambulances.
She says, “I wonder . . .”
They knock on their neighbor’s door and it swings inward. They take a box of cereal and a bottle of soda from the pantry before they go. In each house, they snatch a sort of treasure: a can of soup, a pair of slippers, a book of piano music. It feels both right and wrong. It feels to him like they are following instincts now that they had long ago suppressed. They are in the eighth house and she is standing in the living room with an umbrella propped under her arm when she announces she doesn’t feel well.
He checks the last few houses on his own. In one he finds an aquarium with two orange fish swimming around. He gets it halfway home before the sweat on his hands causes it to slip and crash to the sidewalk. The fish twitch on the concrete and are still.
In the kitchen, he pours them glasses of warm soda. She sits at the table with her head in her hands. They use the resumes as coasters.
That night he stretches to the corners of the bed. His shoulders grind like unclutched gears, hips scream like ocean liners colliding. He stretches further than he ever has before. His fingers and toes flick in the air over the lip of the mattress and he thinks how easy it would be to simply break apart.
But then she is there above him. He moves over and she climbs in. She runs her fingertips over his chest, paints pictures of glaciers and mountain valleys and coral reefs and low clouds. Above them, the ceiling fan is still.
In the morning her hand is on his chest, except it isn’t. It’s just her heat that is there.
He finds her in the bathtub and she is mostly gone. He puts his hand on her forehead. It’s cooler in the porcelain, she says. He turns the tap and water comes out. Not warm or cold, just water. There is no answer when he calls for an ambulance. He leaves the water on but it does not cool her, nor does it wash her away.
That night he is stretching on the bed when the power comes on. The house spasms, resuscitated, the current rushing in like blood returning to a sleeping limb, tingly and hopeful. Above him, the ceiling fan resumes its half-hearted ambulations. He curls his limbs back into himself and blinks in the midst of such sudden life.
Dad is not here, but he should be, soon, from work. He doesn’t drink and he’s not having an affair. He is a big man, I know. He likes red meat and horseradish. My sister’s boyfriend works, too, at the train depot, but him and my sister are both upstairs already.
Mom puts butter rolls in the oven at 425 degrees. Lying on my back in the family room, I have my feet on the grille of our gas fireplace. I test myself to see how long I can rest my feet on the glass part where it’s hot. I’ve seen mom try it. Ten seconds, fifteen. My feet are like tiny sock puppets. I know it’s time to remove them from the charred surface when they curl up. I grit my teeth at twenty seconds.
My feet shrivel like burning plastic melting over a lighter. Over a match. Over a box of matches. Over a bonfire. The protective screen is plagued with black singe marks from the loose threads that burn off and stick.
I switch from the glass to the grille again and the heat follows. I rub my toes from top to bottom between the gold looking bars. A tone sounds as I strum across them like a xylophone from the blue-hot place at the center of the fake logs. From Hell. The notes are too close together. Too similar in pitch. I test the dissonance, louder each time, blaming it on a goblin who strikes the bars using a tiny foot mallet. He crawls in and out with a finger over his mouth, hushing me. I test mom’s patience. She doesn’t want him in our home.
Next, my heels are treated, hitting the hot pressure points and nerve endings. I lie there with my mouth open like a doll’s, arms out, very limp. My cheeks’ spider-leg veins are reflected in the gold paint, flushed and prickly. Mom had to come get me from school early today. But it’s late now, or just dark. I check the clock on the VCR. It is 5:30 PM, in January, in Minnesota. It is dark. Dad should be home soon for a home cooked meal.
KC the Cat misleads me behind my back, going one way, a pirouette, then the other.
“You tricked me,” I say. “Your loss. I was going to pet you.”
KC the Cat is five years old. I am thirteen, but mom says I have an old soul.
Dad walks in and trips on my boots in the mudroom.
“What did I say this morning? What did I tell you to do?” he asks, out of breath from almost falling to the floor on the wet dirt-rug.
“You were supposed to move these! There needs to be an unobstructed walking path!” He doesn’t drink, he’s not having an affair. He is just angry. I think work makes him angry. Mom says that’s just the way he is.
“We have a shoe bin!” He yells.
Dad holds his knee while coming at me, through the kitchen, down the single step into the living room where I continue to stir, slowly. I picture him clumsily dashing on all fours like an injured farm animal.
He slaps the back of my head. I feel my hair get matted up. He orders me to spit on my palm, I do, and then he presses the damp side against the hot glass of the fireplace where I just had my feet. It hisses. Mom screams. Dad is trying to catch his breath. He grabs at his chest. He falls to the floor. All the noise makes my sister and her boyfriend come downstairs. My sister covers her mouth with her hand.
“Jesus Christ,” her boyfriend says.
The fire alarm goes off. The butter rolls are burning in the oven. My hand is burning. My sister’s ears are burning. Her boyfriend goes to fan the smoke detector with a blanket. He is used to furnaces and steam engines and heat. Dad is seizing on the carpet. I get up and open a door. KC the Cat runs out into the snow. I look at the neighbor’s chimney, and the chimney next to theirs. I look at the exhausting smoke and wonder if it’s from the combustion of wood or gas.
I live at the bottom of an old apartment tower and my tub won’t stop filling up with water. The building, weary from a century of American life, funnels its sewage down through my unit’s pipes until it all gets stuck up tight and rises with a fury, bubbling and nasty from the drain. For days, my every waking moment has been spent dumping bucket after bucket of the hot, dim water down the toilet and calling out for help. The calling out is pointless, of course, for what raw marrow remains of my voice gets trapped in my apartment, chipping at the paint on the walls, reaching no one. I know I would be furious—a half-starved monkey abandoned in a foreclosed amusement park—if I wasn’t sure deep down that I deserved this.Outside my bedroom window (left open day and night to minimize the build-up of moisture,) my unremarkable residential street has been overrun with a parade of screamers, all guttural grunts and challenges to fight discomforted passersby. At first the chaos left me unsettled, but as time passed and I dumped the water time and again, as I slept in fitful shifts on the cold linoleum tiling. Their thick-tongued cries sounded less like invading hellspawn and more like troubled family. I now love my feral kin as they howl, piss and rummage through the waste of the decadent, as they rage against society and the water rising quickly from the tub. I sing their praises as they set about their holy work and I mine, drawing strength from solidarity.One downside: there has been little time to eat. If I leave the tub unattended for an hour, the water recognizes my absence and rises twice as quickly. Fine, I think, for what is the body but water? I remind myself of the religious function of fasting; how it forges impeccable resolve within a human soul committed to its lessons. I admit, I am unsure which god can be accredited for flushing my cell phone with the bath water, for the dogged persistence of the cup to runneth over, but there is meaning in this for me, a message I must decode. Everything is water. Life is a cycle. A buried sin grows toxic flowers. I assure you, gods, I am listening!At night, I see-dream a polar bear squatting on a Caribbean coastline. His fur is matted with oily refuse and he is singing in a language I do not know. I am holding two halves of a coconut filled with milky juice topped with cherry blossoms. I hand the bear a juice and motion for him to drink it. His eyes sparkle with bright pain. The world may be shrinking, but all the good is gathering, I offer. No, he replies, there are just less good things. We drink our coconuts in brotherhood as the black tide comes rolling in.This juice tastes like shit, I think to myself, until I wake up and realize that the tub is flooding again. I rise, my pajama onesie soaked with backwash, and get to work. My back is sore and my senses are foggy and muted, but my muscles have learned their labor well these past few days. Twenty-seven flushes and at last the water is back below the rim, but the floor is drenched and so am I. This calls for towels.The door to the bathroom will not open. It has no lock, nothing to block it shut. It must be swollen from the water, I realize, and start to laugh. I tug and jiggle the doorknob, but the door will not open and I laugh a little harder. I slam my hands into the door, loose palm, closed fist, elbows and shin and forehead but the damn thing doesn’t budge. I’m not laughing but I hear my body laughing wild and loud, laughing like blood and I couldn’t stop it if I tried.Faintly from the other side I hear the glimmering jingle of keys and a shiver plays on my neck. A loud knock on the hallway door, footsteps and a voice, “Hello? Is anyone in here?” Another knock. “There’ve been several noise complaints, reports of howling?” I cry out for help, slamming myself into the bathroom door.“Alright, I’m coming in.” The sound of the keys again. The front door opens. “Oh, my goodness there’s water everywhere!”“Hello! I’m in here! Get me out!” I beg, weeping from relief. I explain the situation with the bathroom door and the tub and the days of interminable hardship and panic through the wood of the door.“I see. We should be able to help you out shortly. Have you filled out a work order yet by any chance?”I explain the fate of my phone, the days of panicked cries for help with colorful yet restrained poetic language.“Uh-huh. Well, I’ll place a call with our plumber, we should have someone out here in a day or two. Until then, do you have a hairdryer or space heater you could use to dry out the space a bit?”No.“Okay. Well stay put, help is on the way. We can discuss the cost of damages once this has all gotten settled, all right?”Outside, the screamers scream in concentrated numbers. The property manager stomps over to the open window facing out into the street. There seems to be a disagreement between the screamers growing in intensity.“Get a job, filthy ingrates!” He yells as he struggles to close the windowpane. He calls back to me, his voice raised, “Next time you get locked in the bathroom, be sure to keep these closed. Don’t want a security issue!”A shout. Glass breaking in the other room. I hear the manager stagger back from the window towards my bathroom door. I ask what happened, what that noise was, why the screamers now laugh with joy. “Help is coming! Stay put!” The front door opens and shuts with alarming speed. I press my hands to the door and feel heat from the other side. I am numb.Outside, the screamers cheer, “Shows that asshole! Throw another one!”A pause. Glass, heat, a sound like a thunderbolt five miles away, the piercing ring of the fire alarm from the kitchen. Above me, the frantic footsteps of evacuation. I take a step back from the door and slip, falling backwards onto the tile, by sheer luck avoiding hitting my head on the edge of the toilet. Thud. Terrible pain in my lower back as it strikes the floor, spasming from repetition, neglect and repetition.I lie there, unable to move. The screamers sing a drinking song as tenants flood into the street. Babies cry, dogs yelp and bark, frantic from the cacophony. I listen for the sounds of footsteps coming my way, for signs of help, but every human sound seems distant. The bathroom window! With great effort, I pull myself up off the floor. If I can get myself up on the rim of the tub, I can climb through the slim bathroom window, I can—The bars. The bars on the bathroom window.“Sure,” I nod and reply. I lie back down on the tile. It hurt to sit up anyway. I take stock of the situation, trying my best to think things through. Everything is water. My clothes are drenched. If the smoke starts entering the room, it’s best to be down on the floor with the oxygen. I should be safe until the firefighters arrive. The property manager will tell them just where to find me. Life is a cycle. The fire’s heat will dry out the bathroom door, enough to get it open. If I conserve my strength, I might be able to make it out. Is this the lesson I’m meant to learn, that a bad situation always leads to good in time? I think of my hard-earned wisdom, the bliss of a potential escape, the new life awaiting me on the other side of cleansing fire. After all, how did I end up here? A buried sin grows toxic flowers. You tricky gods. What sick root compelled me, hardship after hardship, to stay? All your dramatics, all your chaos, your unending parade of thwarted joys and heartbreaks, the whole blue pitter bill of the earth just to show me how powerful I really am! I am in your debt; I am your thankful servant and faithful pupil till the end! There is nothing to fear anymore. Nothing to fight. This is the ultimate freedom, the total liberation of the spirit!I hear a noise like copper groaning from below, a churn and bubbles, and all at once black water starts flowing from the tub, pooling over the porcelain canyon and flooding all around me as the crystal bathroom doorknob shines with the light of the fire. Distantly, my body again begins to laugh.
