Our Baby

Our Baby

For a while I lived with Frank and Marilyn in a small townhouse on the north side of town. I don’t anymore. They weren’t married yet, and I don’t think they ever planned on getting married. If they ever changed their minds I can’t tell you. The two of them did have a baby, though, just about a year after I moved in with them. Frank was working at a second-hand bookstore downtown. Marilyn worked as a waitress in a locally owned restaurant not far from the bookstore. They got along pretty well for the most part, and probably they didn’t need me to rent their extra room at that time. But I wasn’t doing much at that point. I was working part-time at a thrift shop somewhere on the west side of town. Living with Angela didn’t work out like we both thought it would. When she told me that I had to leave I needed a new place. Frank and Marilyn and I had been friends for a couple years, and they told me that I could rent with them for cheap. So I did. I rented. For a long time it went about as well as it could’ve.

I didn’t see much of Angela after we broke it off. We split in April and I moved in with Frank and Marilyn right afterward. In about October of that same year I ran into Angela while I was walking around downtown. I found out that she was working nights as something like a nurse in a home for people who needed constant care. What she did I never really understood. I knew where the place was and I’d drive by there at nights some of the time when I was done working. Then I drove by for a week straight.

For months I couldn’t build up the courage. But at the start of the next year I found myself going to our old home to wander around and check up on things. Angela worked the same hours on the same five nights of the week. I had seen it when I drove by the place. I knew when she would be gone.

Getting in was easy. I knew how to get in. I’d lived there for months, and I’d known her for longer. There was a window in the back that always had a problem closing. It wasn’t a real nice house. It was good enough, though. The way I saw it, I deserved a chance to see my own home every now and again. Angela and I hadn’t worked out, but it wasn’t over. We just hadn’t worked out yet. Couples that work really just work because they have it. If you don’t have it, then the relationship doesn’t go anywhere. Some people work at the same store and have that. Other people like to eat Thai food three times a week. For some it’s more than that, like having it in a baby. Angela and I just hadn’t found our thing yet, but it was out there somewhere. I would find it.

That’s partly why I started going by the house when she was gone. I wanted to see what she had been doing with herself. There had to be clues around the house that led to the it that I needed. I thought I would find a magazine on biking or a new puppy. Then I would show up on a bike with a dog in the basket by the handlebars. I would dream of it that way. It would be grand. Angela would see it and tell me that she had thought of the same things, and I would tell her that life is full of surprises, right, and wow what a thing.

I didn’t really find much at first, though, so I kept going back. Three or four nights a week I would go while she was at work.

Frank and Marilyn didn’t find out about any of it while I was still going to the old house. They wouldn’t have understood what was going on. Frank and Marilyn had something to go off of. I didn’t have that. Frank told me about their thing one time while we were drinking. This was after they had the baby. Frank still worked during the days, but Marilyn had to start working at nights so that one of them was home with the baby at all times, day and night.

I said, “How is it?”

“How is what?” said Frank.

“How is seeing Marilyn only a few hours a day?”

“You see her a few hours a day,” he said. “Tell me how it is.”

“It’s not too good,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “It’s really just pretty bad.”

“But you’ve got that baby,” I said. “You’ve got that holding you together.”

That baby was lying on a pile of newspapers gurgling or sleeping or something. The thing just loved doing that.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “We’ve got that.”

He paused.

He said, “It’s hard with some things but other things get better this way. When we see each other we just fuck around all the time. Even when we’re tired from the day, we just fuck around until we have to sleep. Then we just sleep forever. On the weekends too, when we don’t work so much, we just sleep and sleep. The baby too. The baby just sleeps.”

“The baby sleeps like that too?” I said, excited by it.

“Yeah,” said Frank. “It came from us. It sleeps like us. The baby is just a sleeper and it’s ours.”

“Jesus,” I said.

So they had that. They had fucking and sleeping. Angela and I didn’t really have either of those things. We didn’t sleep like Frank said he and Marilyn slept. We didn’t have the kind of falling through stars sleep. We had something harder than that. Frank and Marilyn would sleep like giant mountains. They would grow up out of each other and hold steady and breathe deep down out of their mountain cores. They would float on oceans and dream deep. When I slept with Angela I would feel rugged and wrong. I’m sure she felt the same. And it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It just was what it was. We would wake up in the night and get angry with each other because we woke up in the night. Still it’s an anger that is hard to recover from.

I said, “Angela and I never really slept like that. Ours wasn’t really even sleep, really.”

“It’s hard,” said Frank.

“We just have some other thing,” I said. “Something like sleep that isn’t sleep that is ours.”

“You must,” said Frank. “Sure.”

And the other thing was that Angela and I didn’t fuck around. We just didn’t. Angela liked me to hug her from behind, just wrap my arms around her. I would bury my head in the back of her neck, and she would rub herself for a while. I would do the same. When we were done we would just lie there for a second. Then we would try to sleep but never fall hard enough.

I pretended that it was enough for a long time. I honestly thought it could be our way. It wouldn’t be sex, but it would be our way. I thought it could be, but it wasn’t. I wanted more. I wanted to curl up into each other and be seashells. I wanted to bite her hair and spin around until I was wrapped up nice and good. She never wanted to be curled up shells. I never told Frank about it. He asked me about Angela and me in bed together once. I tried to sound soft and knowledgeable like Frank was.

“You know,” I said. “It’s hard sometimes.”

I imagined Frank was steady because he worked in a bookstore and had stuff to read. He had to be full of words and romance. I thought that I was full of something too. Of what I didn’t really know. It was something. I thought that maybe Frank wasn’t aware that he was full of calm wisdom, like I imagined a horse might be if it could talk. Maybe Frank just had stuff and used it because it was there. But that meant I had something too, and whatever I was using it wasn’t making a big difference. I guess I wasn’t sure of any of it.

He listened to me answer him and seemed to get it.

“Sure,” he said.

That was what I had.

***

On the first night that I went to Angela’s house to break in, I was nervous without knowing why. I used to accept donations at the thrift store where I worked then. I would stand out back and collect the many things from people who drove up to see me. There were things that I wasn’t supposed to take, though. I mean, if we had too much of something in the store already, or if it was a donation that didn’t fit the season, like skis. But that day I was just taking bags left and right. I didn’t know what I was saying or what I was doing. I seemed to know that I was in for something that night.

I’ll go to Angela’s, I thought. I’ll go and find something there and use it.

I knew I would go. I wanted to. Still I felt rotten and on fire all day long. It wasn’t that I knew I was doing something wrong. I thought I was doing right. It was something else. It was like the nervous feeling before climbing a tree as a kid, because you know you’ll do it, but you aren’t sure how easily you’ll get down again. Once you look down, like once you look back over your life to where you’ve been and what you’ve just done, there’s a chance that you’ll fall, knowing that the fall will be bad and desperate. Or worse yet you’ll just look and know you have no choice but the fall. I think now that that was the feeling I had, the feeling of looking down deep and knowing that you’re high up and far away. You’ve got a hole full of air, or maybe just full of nothing at all, just empty and motionless.

I left work a little early and bought a pack of cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked in a while, but I thought I should go prepared. I smoked one outside of the convenience store where I bought it and felt burned out and good. After going home for a few minutes to make sure that Angela would have enough time to be absolutely gone, I drove there, making sure to park a few blocks away and walk the rest. I didn’t want to raise suspicion.

I had had the window in mind all the while that I was building up my courage to go to the house. It just came to me when I thought about getting inside. I just envisioned it without thinking. There the window was to use.

So I walked around the side of the house to find the window. Sure enough, there it was. The window slid open without problems, even from the outside. I had to grab a flower pot from the other side of the back yard and stand on it to get a good enough grip to climb in, but everything worked out. I was inside the house.

When I was inside I felt odd. For a while I had been back and forth between feeling that the place was mine and Angela’s. Being inside I felt different. I felt like I’d walked back into my parents’ house or something. The house didn’t resemble my home. It was something else. Angela had changed it somehow. Things were dustier, I thought. It didn’t seem fuller, but it did appear to have less space.

I walked along the hardwood floors, holding my hand out to the walls, looked at the photographs of landscapes hanging there. There was just the kitchen, living room, single bedroom, single bathroom, and dining room. I stood in the middle of each of the rooms and turned in circles.

Then I remembered the spot in the bedroom where the floor seemed to dip down into a little pocket. Dust would collect there. It was hard to see, and we didn’t really notice it at first. But when we first cleaned the house the pocket was inescapable. I walked there and took my shoes off. I sat down, then got up again to put my shoes by the front door, thinking that I was stupid for tracking in the house.

Then back to the bedroom to sit down and finger the kind of half-made hole in the floor. I dreamed there, with my hand in the hole. I thought about my entire body roaming around the house and then pooling here in this one spot, just like the dirt and grime and hair. I became part of the waste that collected. Then I became part of the house for Angela to walk on.

I stayed like that for about an hour and then decided to go back home. I got my shoes from the front door and didn’t put them back on until I was outside again. It was dark. I checked to make sure that nobody was watching me. I knew there wouldn’t be anyone watching. No one seemed to watch, or if they did, they didn’t care about what they saw. It was just the act of watching that was important.

I would come back the next night and do the same thing. It was all I had in me for the first couple weeks of going to Angela’s. It took time to build up to more.

It wasn’t until about a month later that I started bringing things from work to Angela’s place. Just little things, really. I would bring a towel and put it in her bathroom closet, under the other towels. Or I would bring a wooden spoon and put it with the other wooden spoons. I put pencils and pens in her desk drawer. They all were little pieces there that could stay hidden but mean something. They became real important.

***

I guessed that sometimes things get lost for a little while. I was working at the store one day, taking in donations and handing others back out. Angela was rattling around in my head for most of it. After I closed the gates to the donations area, just after lunch, I started throwing the bags of unsellable goods and clothes in the back of the truck. We had a lot of stuff back there that was no damn good. The truck was packed full, until it looked like the back door was just bulging out with stuff. I stood there looking at it dreamily until my boss came out.

“You’re taking that to the dump,” she said.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“That’s what I said,” she said.

So I opened the gates again and drove the big white truck the few miles outside of town to the dumping area. The truck was big and wild. I felt like a giant bird riding through the stoplights. It was a good feeling.

The dump was beautiful in its own way. Red dirt covered the entire place. Wind blew everything around in circles and seagulls floated stationary in the air, moving their wings only slowly to keep them up against the wind.

There were stations. One for tires and rubber, one for electronics, one for miscellaneous worthless bags of trash. I stopped at each one to unload what I had in the back of the truck. Sometimes while driving and unloading that truck I would feel sorry to see things go. Other times I would relish the task, just a constant draining of energy. I felt sorry for the things this time without knowing exactly why. It was work, so I kept going.

When I got back in the truck, ready to drive back to the shop, I saw that I hadn’t changed my shoes before going outside. They were covered in red dirt. Just covered all over. This wouldn’t do, especially not at Angela’s. Red dirt would give everything away.

Back at the store I parked the truck and heard that an old couple had bought some furniture. People from the store were waiting outside to load the stuff into their van, but apparently the old husband had gone off on his own to get the van and had never come back. They asked me to go look for him.
“Because you don’t have anything else to do,” said my boss.

“You don’t need to tell me,” I said.

“I know that,” she said.

So I went out looking for the guy. I walked around the west side. His van was white, his wife had said, so I looked for that too. I didn’t really find much at first. I wondered if this was what Angela was doing at the home where she worked, just wandering around in circles looking for people. Or maybe that was what the people she took care of did.

There was a shoe store in that area, among the other shops, so I stopped to get some new shoes. I tried to trade my newly red ones in, but the young girl didn’t accept them. She looked so young that I was amazed she worked there. They get younger and younger.

“Do you have boots here?” I asked.

“Is this a shoe store?” she said. “Yes.”

So I went over in the direction she steered me and tried on some boots until I found some that fit. There were so many boots in that place. There were boxes of them, just overflowing with boots. I thought of them being worn and then coming back to me at the thrift shop, where I would take them and put them inside and watch nobody buy them. Then I would take them back outside and put them in the back of the truck until it was full enough to take to the dump, where I would bury those boots under gorgeous red sand.

I felt good, like a real working man, wearing and getting boots. Back at the counter the girl took the boots from me. I mean, she looked real young.

“Just the boots then?” she said.

“Do your parents own the store or something?” I said.

“Just the boots then,” she said.

I wore them out, left my old dirtied shoes hidden under the bench by the boxes of boots. I walked around some more but didn’t find the old man. Maybe he was better off lost. I don’t mean away from his wife. I mean maybe the newness of everything to a senile old man is the best thing in this world. He would be a baby again. He would walk around and watch people pass, then forget them and forget himself just in time to forget being alone on the street. Yes, I thought to myself, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But when I got back to the store he was there with his wife, who was scolding him in a friendly sort of married way. They got their furniture, the furniture that didn’t really fit into their dirty white van. My boss tied down the back door that opened straight up and then tapped on the side of the van. After a few seconds they drove off with their stuff. And for days, I thought, they would have something to fuss over.

I was jealous, then scornful. Then I got tired and went back inside. That night after work I drove over to the restaurant where Marilyn was working and sat at one of her tables. I ordered a bottle of wine and drank the whole thing. I tried to chat up Marilyn, but she was too busy to get in much conversation. I told her she was beautiful after getting good and drunk off of the wine and meant it in my own little way. She took a swig from my glass and said thanks and gave me my check. I tried to walk to Angela’s but felt bad and ended up falling asleep in the grass of a park nearby. In the middle of the night I woke up and thought about sleeping the rest of the early hours in my car. I went home instead.

***

One weekend night Frank and Marilyn didn’t have to work. I had the day off too, so we decided we would cook a big dinner to celebrate being alive and well and free for a few hours. I thought it was a good idea, and so did they, but through the afternoon I ended up drinking a few beers and getting sleepy. By dinnertime Frank and Marilyn didn’t want to cook anything at all. Neither did I, so I drove out to get some more beer while Frank drove out to get Chinese food. We took separate cars because we thought it’d be quicker. Marilyn, she stayed home with the baby.

When I got back Frank was still gone. I opened up a beer and sipped from it, let the cool drink move down my neck and chest. I offered one to Marilyn, but she refused.

“The baby,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

I tried to sound like Frank but knew that I couldn’t.

Frank got home then and set up the boxes of food. I opened a beer for him, and he took it gladly. On the table was fried rice and chicken, vegetables and egg rolls, soup and sauce. It all smelled just like a dusty old house from long ago. We sat down and talked about how good the food looked, then started eating.

“Where’s the baby?” said Frank. “The baby should come on out here and just hang around with us.”

“The baby’s in the bedroom,” said Marilyn. “The baby,” she said, “is dreaming with the angels.”

“You don’t want to wake a baby,” I added.

“No,” said Marilyn, who laughed. “No, you don’t.”

“You don’t wake our baby,” said Frank. “Our baby is one that doesn’t wake up easily. You got to know how.”

“How’s that?” I said with interest.

“You don’t say a word,” he said. “Talking to our sleeping baby won’t wake it up. That’s not enough. You got to walk over to the baby and touch it on its side. Then touch its head gently, maybe nestle your cheek against the baby’s face.”

Frank paused to sip at some soup. I drank a big drink of my beer and waited impatiently. I didn’t know why, but I was so interested in hearing about how to wake the baby.

“Do you kiss the baby?” I asked.

“You can kiss the baby,” said Marilyn.

She looked at Frank and he looked right back. They stared into each other for a moment and smiled. I drank at my beer, thinking about the baby.

“Can the baby eat Chinese food?” I asked.

“No,” said Frank. “Our baby isn’t ready for Chinese food.”

He said it with such force and stability that I was in awe. He looked at Marilyn again and touched her on her leg. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t supposed to see the touch, but I saw it. I watched it real hard and kept thinking about the baby. I wanted to be able to say “our baby” with Frank and Marilyn. I wanted to be part of it with them. They had it and I didn’t, but I wanted it. I thought about whether they would fool around later, right there in the room with the baby who wouldn’t wake unless touched.

We ate in silence for a little while longer. I got up to get some more beers. The food and drink all went well together. I was getting full, but I never wanted to stop eating and drinking beer with these people.

“I miss Angela,” I said. “It’s hard.”

I looked at Frank.

“It’s hard,” I said again.

“Sure,” he said.

I drank from my beer. He did the same from his.

Marilyn said, “Do you want to watch the baby for us in a few weeks?”

“Sure,” I said, imitating Frank.

I wanted to ask where but felt that I should keep quiet a little longer. Frank looked so wise when he did that quiet sort of thing.

Marilyn kept on, “Frank and I are going to go camping for a weekend here in a few weeks. We thought we could take the baby, but we decided that maybe we should just go out there alone.”

“What’s our baby want to do in the forest?” asked Frank.

“So we thought that you could just stay with the baby for a few days,” said Marilyn. “You would maybe have to take off of work, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” I said real quick. “I’ll do it. I’ll watch the baby.”

“Thanks,” said Marilyn.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, yeah.”

“It’ll be great,” said Frank.

“Real great,” I said. “Yeah.”

That night I stopped by Angela’s for just a few minutes to drop some red sand on her lawn. It was some of the dirt that I’d kept from the last time that I was at the dump with the big white truck. Why I wanted to leave her some dirt I don’t know. Part of me thinks now that I wanted to leave her an inkling of my work, just to let her know how hard I was working and how much I was getting done for the community. I really was doing things, I thought. I was making a difference.

I didn’t even go inside her place this time. Instead I laid myself down near a tree in the backyard and looked at the sky. Buried deep in the darkness up there were bright white stars, ones that you could see and ones that you couldn’t see. They were everywhere. I watched the moon big and white halfway up the sky.

There was a grayish streak in the sky after a while. It wasn’t attached to anything that I could tell. Just a little streak, like the seams of the universe had split. I thought about God for the first time in a long time, thought about him reaching down with a knife and cutting open the world. And for a second I dreamed of all the stars falling through that cut seam and landing on top of everyone on Earth. After all this waiting, we little people would find out for certain if the stars were good to us. We would find out if they burned or soothed. My guess was that they would do a little of both.

I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed. And I stared at the streak until my eyes cracked. The moon was higher then, almost right up straight above me. I knew I had to go home.

***

I don’t think things now matter like they used to. The weekend came when Frank and Marilyn went camping somewhere south of town. They left me with the baby. Throughout the first day with that baby I didn’t know what to do. We watched television together. I fed it from a bottle while I had myself a beer. Then I thought that I shouldn’t be drinking near a baby. I remembered what Marilyn had said so coolly about the baby and beer. So I had water instead.

I felt vaguely like other people. I felt like Angela taking care of people. I felt like the woman whose husband was lost after buying furniture from our store. I had responsibility somewhere inside of me that was bubbling to the surface finally. I was glad that Frank and Marilyn had gone, even for just a little while.

In the middle of the day the baby fell asleep for a good long nap. I talked to the baby to see if it would wake up, but it didn’t. Frank and Marilyn were right. You needed to either let the baby wake up on its own or you needed to touch the baby a certain way. I let the baby wake up when it was ready.

Then the baby wanted to play. Night was rolling around, and the baby maybe had slept for too long. It just wasn’t tired. Frank and Marilyn never told me what to do in this case. I figured the baby would just go to sleep again when it was ready. That was fine by me.

And then I decided to take the baby with me to Angela’s house for a little while during the nighttime. It would be fine. I needed to go, and I couldn’t leave the baby at home alone. Probably the baby would like an adventure anyway, a car ride out into the world. I didn’t think that the baby got out into the world enough.

I asked the baby.

“Do you want to go to Angela’s, baby?” I said.

The baby gurgled.

“You want to go to Angela’s, don’t you, baby?” I said.

The baby smiled.

“Let’s go, then,” I said. “Yeah.”

So I cleaned the baby up and put it in its little baby-rocker. I got some extra blankets in case we were outside, and I put plenty of water for me and milk for the baby in the car. I even got a bag of apples and a loaf of bread from on top of the refrigerator, just in case. It was a picnic.

I strapped the baby into the front seat of my car and then went around and got in myself. We were ready, the baby and me. We were ready to go out into the world. I looked in my mirrors and then looked at the baby. I looked at my hands. There we all were.

I parked a few blocks away from Angela’s, just as I always did. Carrying the baby was easy, but on the way to the house I was worried about getting the baby into the house through the window. When I got there it turned out that it was too difficult, so I had to go in myself and then come out through the back door to bring in the baby that way. It wasn’t bad. In the dark the baby seemed to think that it was back at home or something, not out in the back yard of some stranger’s green stucco house. I locked the back door behind us and showed the baby around the house.

“This is where I used to live,” I said.

The baby didn’t do anything but lie there in its rocker.

“Baby,” I said, putting down the rocker and looking in. “This is where I lived before I moved in with Frank and Marilyn. They’re your parents. You’re their baby.”

I kept giving the tour to the baby.

“This is where we used to watch TV,” I said. “This is the bathroom, where we showered and brushed our teeth. This is where we cooked and ate. This is where we slept.”

The baby seemed uninterested. But that was okay. In the bedroom I took the baby out of its rocker and put it on the bed. The baby seemed to like this. I leaned over and looked at the dent in the floor. I picked up the baby and showed it the little half-hole. The baby just giggled, so I laid it back down.

I thought of baby things to say.

“Who’s my baby?” I said. “Who is the baby? Where is the baby?”

Eventually the baby turned on its back and looked at the ceiling. I did too. The ceiling was rough and textured, the way a lot of ceilings are. I looked for pictures in the texture of the ceiling, and I imagined that the baby was doing the same. I tried and tried but didn’t see much. I mostly saw clouds there in the ceiling. Maybe a few faces of people I didn’t really recognize fully.

Then I turned to look at the baby and saw that it was asleep. It had just fallen asleep, that perfect little baby. I turned back to the ceiling and imagined the baby crawling around up there, looking down at me, saying here it is and don’t worry.

And after a while, I fell asleep too. I fell into the deep and wonderful sleep that I assume was the sleep Frank and Marilyn had together. The baby and I were one in our sleep and it was grand right then.

I woke up to the front door making noises. I sat up and sleepily listened to the sounds of the door that made me dream of flowers. Then it hit me that someone was home, that it was brighter out than it should’ve been. Sunlight came in through the windows, and all that upset me right at first was that I had woken up to sound. The baby was still asleep, because it needed to be touched. I wanted to be touched awake too.

Angela came into the bedroom and saw us there. She didn’t look happy. I mean, she looked real uncomfortable and then real angry.

“What is this?” she said. “What the hell is this?”

“You don’t have to be quiet,” I said. “The baby won’t wake up.”

“What are you doing here,” she said. “Who is that?”

I paused and thought about Frank and Marilyn for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said, imitating Frank’s best voice. “This is our baby.”

“What?”

“Our baby,” I said.

“Get out,” she said.

Angela just wasn’t getting it. I had it there for both of us and she wasn’t getting it.

“Angela,” I said. “Angela.”

“There’s nothing for you here,” she said. “Go.”

She grabbed a phone and started dialing numbers.

I supposed she was right. It was day now and it wasn’t the right time for any of it. I turned to the baby and touched it the way that Frank and Marilyn suggested. Eventually the baby just started to wake up. It yawned lazily and rolled around a little bit. In the rocker it kept making pleasant and quiet noises.

As I left, Angela said pretty much nothing. She didn’t need to. Things were still over for now. We just hadn’t found our thing yet. It wouldn’t be over forever. She was on the phone when I was walking out through the front door. I dreamed she was talking to herself about me.

Back in the car I drank some water and ate some bread. I was far, far hungrier than I thought I would be. I thought about what Frank and Marilyn were doing. Probably they were out in the woods somewhere fucking around and sleeping through their lives in the best way. I was jealous of them. I would have to move out.

The baby took some liquid from a bottle and started to doze off again. I started driving north to our townhouse. But as I got closer and closer, I started to think about grand things. I started to dream again. Then I had passed by the intersection that led to the townhouse. Then I was closer to the interstate. Then I was on the interstate, driving up through mountains and through the trees. The baby was it, was all there was. I had seen the way Angela looked at that baby, like it was ours. I wasn’t ready to give that up.

So I drove and drove and drove. I drove to the state line and kept driving. Frank and Marilyn wouldn’t be back for at least another twenty-four hours. I hoped that they would understand. I just needed the baby for a little while longer. Then I would come back and move out and have my it with Angela.

I was somewhere in Illinois when everything started to get dark. The day was ending with a grunt. I was tired. The baby was awake. That was good. We had things to do.

“Don’t worry, baby,” I said. “Things are on their way.”

That night I took a motel room and lay on my back with the baby next to me gurgling and dozing. I looked up at the ceiling and so did the baby. I knew that in the days to come we would all be back in the green stucco house with the hardwood floors. We would curl up in the bedroom and in the living room. We would wash our hands in the bathroom and then cook in the kitchen and eat in the dining room. And then at night we would all collect our thoughts and twist together like dust in the lowest part of the floor. Like tornadoes we would blow around and make things fresh.

Then we would ravage what was left of our silly lonely lives.

An old one that I like because I haven't finished the new one

Birds

They came today. The birds! Through the closed window I could hear them, singing as sirens sing. But it was still cold out—it’d been freezing for weeks—despite the arrival of the birds. It was February. Nick was pulling on his thick socks, moving through the bedroom door. He didn’t shut the door after him.

“Nick,” I called. “Nick, you didn’t shut the door.”

He said nothing but reached in and closed the door. The gas heater in the apartment isn’t working like it used to. We had to put a small electric heater in the bedroom—we keep the door shut always. The rest of the apartment feels twenty degrees colder. It feels like changing continents, just moving through the doors. In the one-inch gap between the floor and the apartment’s front door we put as insulation the alpaca-wool sweaters that Nick bought in South America. The sweaters match.

A few days ago I heard Nick call the landlord about the heat. The landlord hasn’t come yet. This landlord I met only once. He told me to call him Pinky. He didn’t knock when he came in the apartment—Pinky just came into the apartment, saw me without socks, saw my bare feet! He has his own key, he explained to me. Pinky’s voice was quiet, like the student’s voice in the back of the classroom.

So I asked Nick to call him about the problem. Nick was in the bedroom when he dialed.

“I don’t want you to listen to the call,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

“Okay,” I said.

I heard him through the door, figuring he was talking louder than usual because, on the other line, Pinky was using his normal voice. I brushed my teeth. Nick came out and opened the closet door to get to the heater. He turned some switches and flicked a fingernail on some steel frames. I remember thinking it sounded like coins falling on a counter. Coins by the million! Nick came in and touched my head with his palm, put his fingers to his lips when I turned up to him. I looked at him and touched his stomach. He pointed at the running water. I turned off the water.

Into the phone Nick said, “What?”

I left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. It was so warm! I pulled off my clothes, looking forward to waking up naked and sweating. I looked forward to Nick pulling up the covers—sweating himself so terribly—to turn off the electric heater. He’d be careful not to wake me. But I’m pretending to be asleep, he knows. Then he’d lie down and look in my direction, and I’d hide my eyes like every other night, slowly revealing them to him. I’d watch him do the same.

“It’s hot,” he’d say. “Fuck, I’m so hot.”

And I’d laugh like the night before and go back to sleep touching his foot with my own.

That night when he talked to Pinky Nick said into the telephone, “I don’t see anything like that. I see a green light. The light’s blinking. I’d need tools to get in there.”

I heard him through the door. I heard Nick waiting.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see anything like that. Really, Pinky, I don’t. I see just the green light.”

After another minute he came in.

“That man speaks like a child,” he said. “He speaks as though it’s wrong to hear him speak.”

“I know,” I said. “Oh, Nick, how I know.”

And then today the wind stopped after two straight weeks of horror. And the birds—the birds sang as birds should sing.

A Manager

A Manager

I am the manager. That’s why Diane called me when she needed help. I live in the apartment closest to the front door of the building, and there’s a wooden sign that hangs just below my peep-hole that reads “manager” in big, block letters.

When I hung up the phone I went right up to Diane’s door. I had been sitting in my place, just sitting there on the couch looking out the window on the south of the building. It wasn’t raining, but I was hoping that it would start soon. I was dreaming of the wet people that would be outside, running and searching for a place to take cover. I could dream like that sometimes, sitting on the couch and just dreaming. That’s when she called.

She lived on the second floor of the building, had a plain straw doormat that sat on the carpeted floor just outside her place. Woven into it was a scene with some puppies. Whatever in the world that doormat was up to is something that I can’t tell you. I just tried not to stand on it while I knocked.
“Come in already,” she said from inside.

I hesitated for a moment and then tried to open the door.

“It’s locked,” I said back.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s not, just try it again.”

So I tried it again. I pushed harder on the door this time. It wasn’t locked after all. I walked in, closing the door behind me. I stood there breathing hard right in front of that front door. I couldn’t see Diane anywhere. She was a ghost in there. And for a few seconds I felt relieved to know that that’s what she was.

“Hey,” she said from somewhere inside. “Come here. Come on.”

In our building there are counters in the apartments that separate the kitchen from the living room. The counters don’t stand very tall. She was on her hands and knees behind it. That’s why I couldn’t see her.

I came up behind her and coughed without meaning to. She was picking up glass pieces from something that must’ve fallen from the countertop just above her.

“Hey,” she said again.

“I’m here,” I said, startling her.

She looked around her shoulder and then nodded. Then she went back to picking up the pieces and piling them together in one space.

“Okay,” she said.

I waited, but she didn’t say anything else right away. So I just stood there looking. I started by watching the back of her head, with her red hair all around. Then I started looking around her apartment. It was so bare. In the kitchen there were dishes that were piling up on top of newspapers. Empty wine bottles lined one of the countertops. I didn’t really know anything about Diane, except that she lived somewhere above me. Sometimes she and I would cross paths in the hallways, or by the front door if I was wiping smudges from the glass. She had glorious red hair and the hands that a statue would have, with long fingers and short nails. She usually wore sandals or went barefoot in the halls. Her apartment taught me nothing more about her than what I already had seen.

“Come here,” she said while I was looking slowly.

I walked around her so that I could see her face.

“Take your sandals off,” she said. “Please.”

I took them off.

“Put them by the door if you want,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, and did.

I waited by the door again, without knowing the reason. I looked down at my feet. There they were.

“Come here,” she said.

So I did. I knelt down to face her. She looked at my feet for a second, so I did too. Then she looked back at the floor in front of her.

“I broke this statue,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “It was a statue?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I got it when I was in Mexico the last time. I’m not sure what happened.”
I looked at her hands as she spoke. They were the greatest hands. Then she made a noise and brought her fingers to her mouth. I kept staring at her. She looked back at me eventually.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, are you okay?”

She got up and walked around the counter to the kitchen sink, then started running water over her finger. She came back to me, to where I was still kneeling.

“Can you look at this?” she said. “Tell me if it’s fine.”There was blood running down her finger still. I could see it, like a sunset coming down on her hands, there was deep color everywhere. She got closer and closer and nudged up against me, holding her hand out in front of us both. It was there in front of the two of us, a spectacle. I could feel her hair brush up against my shoulder. Then she moved away a little. I moved too. I could feel dust or crumbs sticking to the skin underneath my feet.

I wanted to tell her that her hand was fine, but I wasn’t sure how. It was fine and white, I was sure. I started to feel dizzy with more than just the shock of the blood. It was dizziness but all reversed, like I was coming together instead of coming apart.

“Why did you call me?” I said.

“Tell me I’m fine,” she said.

I waited for a second.

“You’re fine,” I said.

She smiled and looked back at her finger. God, there was that blood.

“I should wrap this up,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“Get me a band-aid from the bathroom closet,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

I got up and walked to the bathroom. It was yellow and looking rotten, like someone hadn’t been in there in a really long time. In the closet I couldn’t find any band-aids. I told her so.

“They’re in there,” she said. “Just look.”

I looked.

“Or check the mirror above the sink,” she said.

I found the box and pulled it out of the cabinet behind the mirror. While I was getting a single band-aid from the box I caught sight of her bathtub. In the drain was a clog of hair, red like a cardinal would be red. Sometimes around the building, near the mailboxes or just on the carpet in the halls, you would find strands of this hair. She just had so much of it all the time. I would be cleaning and then I’d find it. It’s not as hard to spot as you would think.

I studied the hair in the tub for a second. It looked redder than usual, probably because it was so damp. Then I walked back to give Diane her band-aid. She put it on and smiled.

“I called you to help me put the air-conditioner back into the hole in the wall,” she said. “Can you do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I can’t do it, and I don’t have someone to help me.”

I paused.

“You live alone?” I said. “Well I can do it.”

“Do you?” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Live alone?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said.

Then silence.

“I’m going to have a cigarette,” she said. “Do you mind? I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t smoke in here,” I said. “I mean, please don’t. We like to live in here.”

Then she left. I started to put the big white machine into the empty space in her wall, just below the window. It was sitting under a card-table that was across the room. And I started by carrying it over to the window. It was heavier than I remembered the machines being. I mean, it was really, really heavy. Then as I was taking the cover off of the conditioner’s space, I thought again of the hair. I looked back at the front door and then back to the window. Her window faces north, I thought. I thought, I didn’t ever realize that she lived on the other side of the building.

With the cover off I could feel fresh air come into the room and blow against my skin. It made me feel sick and happy and then just sick and tired. In the air is something that does that.

And then I did it. I went into the bathroom and left the machine on the floor. I knelt down by the drain in the bathtub and ringed a big finger around the rim. I got the hair, still wet and grimy with that kind of greasy scum that you get in tubs. I pulled it up and looked at it. I imagined that it was a piece of her flesh, from the finger that she had just cut open. Of course it wasn’t, but it didn’t matter.

I walked back out into the living room and looked at the window. It was a dirty window. I should go, I thought. I can go and come back, I thought.

But while turning toward the front door, I heard footsteps down the hall. I panicked, thinking it was Diane, so I turned and ran into her bedroom. I found very little in the bedroom, just a bed and a lamp. There was a window in there too, though, just like in my bedroom, and I had dreams of breaking it with my shoulder and jumping like a hero into the alleyway below. I had dreams of climbing the nearest tree and looking around the town like I was needed. I had dreams that there were people down there walking past the tree and walking past my building and talking about me and what I do every day. They all had questions that only I could answer. And they would have to come inside.

I wanted to keep dreaming for the rest of the day. There was no time for that now, though, so I turned again and looked at her closet. It was a walk-in closet. I had one too. I knew how the closet worked. I knew just what to do with it. I opened the door and slid inside.

I still had the hair in my hand. I don’t know why I did. It was too late for any of that now anyway. I put my hand into my pocket, felt the wetness and grime of the hair on my hands and keys. It was seeping through the fabric of my clothes.

And then Diane came back inside. I heard her slip off her shoes and shut the door. I waited for her to lock the door. She eventually did. I heard her walk into the living room, pause, and then tap her nails on the countertop. She sighed. Then the sounds of scraping glass pieces from the floor, and then the drop of a sack into a trash bag.

Before I could help myself, I coughed again without meaning to. All of those sounds had got to me. They reminded me of changing channels on a television. Then I could hear Diane shuffle across the floor and come into the room. She did the whole thing slowly, though, like the kind of slow that meant she knew what she was doing.

I had closed the closet door in the hopes that I would be buried. At that moment I wanted to be buried forever. She didn’t make a whole lot of noise then, so I waited.

“Is someone in here?” she said, like she was a bird singing to a child. “Is someone hiding in here?”

I wanted to answer her but knew that I couldn’t.

“Someone,” she said. “Yes, someone.”

And then light filled up around me as she opened the door. Before she could say anything I told her that I had her hair. She didn’t look confused by any of it. Like a dog I pulled the goop of hair from my pocket and shoved it out to her.

She just looked down at her hand and picked a bit at the wound she’d got just a few minutes earlier. She smelled like smoke and like human. I never thought that those would smell the same, but they did just then.

Without saying anything she gestured toward me.

“Can I come into the closet?” she said.

I hesitated, still holding the hair out to her.

“Can I put the cover back over the hole in the wall?” I asked.

“Let me.”

She left and then she was back. She pushed aside all of the hangers with all of the clothes. I stepped back to give her more room, and I thought about dreaming by the window, looking outside at the people, pressing my hand against the glass and wanting to fall through into another silly world, the one where I’m on the north side of the building. She closed the closet door and it was dark. When it’s dark like that I can imagine that I’m back at my apartment or back at home or back at an old job that I used to have cutting meats in a deli or north, south, east, or west. I could imagine that I was away or here in Diane’s apartment, sitting in the closet. I could do all of those things. I picked one and assumed that I was westward bound. That’s the beauty of dark. It’s full of possibility, where the signs on your door don’t matter, despite everything.

After she was inside and nestled in, she spoke. The sound was just something else.

“Come here,” she said.

I scooted closer to her. I could feel some part of her brushing against my foot.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Just something. You’re in my closet.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, sure.”

“Great,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say, and I coughed before finding something. Then I coughed again. In the dark I thought about how her hands must’ve looked when she was a child, before the work of being alive. I imagined they were bright and pale and smooth. I thought about them running through her hair. I thought about her letting it grow long and get dirty so she could wash her hair in a river somewhere. I imagined her hands holding water. I wanted to give her the hair, but didn’t.

“I have dreams,” I said finally.

“Tell me about them,” she said.

A Ray Carver imitation:

Janice

After the baby things were different. It was like the windows were open all of the time, but you couldn’t shut them even if it was cold. That’s what it was like. Janice was struggling around that time, I could tell. I was struggling too in my own way. And it made everything real difficult.

I came home from work one day to find her staring oddly at the wall above the sink. A big pot was sitting on the stove. It was full of a dull yellowish liquid. It was starting to bubble up, so I turned down the heat.

Janice, I said.

She kept staring dreamily. I touched her hard on the shoulder.

Janice, I said. Is this soup?

She turned toward it.

Oh, yeah, she said. With some vegetables and rice.

Brown rice? I asked.

Yeah, she said.

She turned the heat back up on the soup and started to stir with a big wooden spoon. I took off my shoes near the front door and walked around the apartment. Things were quiet around there and everything looked okay. The smell from the soup was strong in the entire apartment. I could smell it in every room.

I went into the bathroom and washed my hands and face. They were dirty from working all day. It was hot out too. Outside it was hot under the sun and inside it was hot because the apartment manager had rented out all of the air conditioners and we couldn’t afford to get one of our own.

The bathroom felt real warm, and after washing my face I still felt wrong, so I undressed and got in the shower. For a moment I was upset that the tub and curtain were dirty. This was supposed to be the place where I got clean again. The walls were yellowing and the white curtain was turning dark with mold. I let it go though as the cool water calmed me. I was real tired then, and the dirt didn’t matter so much after all.

Janice came in and flicked the light on and then off.

Ben, she said. What are you doing?

Ah, Janice, I said, I’m real, real tired. Just give me a minute.

You want to eat soon? she said.

Yeah, I said. Just as soon as I finish here.

She opened up the shower curtain and looked at me inside there. It startled me when I saw her. She smiled in an odd way and made a gesture.

I’m real tired, I said.

And then Janice left back to kitchen. I kept smelling the soup that smelled so good. I mean, it got better and better. The smell of the soup started to make me feel good again. I began to feel less sore.

When I got out Janice was still in the kitchen stirring the soup, putting on the last touches. I got some plastic bowls from the towel next to the sink, where we let the dishes dry. I got a glass of milk for myself.

What do you want to drink? I said.

Wine, she said.

We had a big glass bottle of wine, bigger than most bottles, in the refrigerator. The wine was a deep red color, and it smelled good too. I put some in a milk glass for Janice and then took the drinks to the table in the dining room.

Thanks, she said.

Yeah, I said and patted her on the neck.

I sat down at the small round table and had a cool drink of milk. It went down nice. Janice came over finally with some bowls of that soup. Then we sat down to eat.

The soup was hot but I didn’t care. It felt warm in my chest and I started to sweat. It was still hot in the apartment but I was hungry so none of that mattered anymore.

We should get some bread, I said.

I got up and pulled a loaf from the top of the refrigerator. I got some slices out and laid the rest of the loaf on the table between us.

Here, I said, handing her one piece.

We dipped the bread in the soup and sucked it down. When I finished my bowl I got up and got another one. I was glad to see that there was a lot of soup left. I felt like I could eat the entire pot.

I sat down and ate more bread with spoonfuls of the vegetable soup. I looked up at Janice and she smiled. She got up then and went to the refrigerator and came back with a jar of pickles.

Good idea, I said.

She opened the jar and gave me one. The pickle was crunchy and hard and tasted good. The brine was cool and was good with the warm soup. I drank a big drink of milk, then got up and got some more.

Wait, I said when I was sitting again. I have an idea.

I went to the kitchen and got the one big glass platter that my parents had given to Janice and me awhile ago. It was yellow and huge and it was real special to me because I thought it was so nice. I brought it over to the table and set it down. It looked like a giant sun there.

Let’s put some pickles and slices of bread on it, I said.

Janice laughed.

And get me some more wine, she said.

What the hell, I said. I’ll have some wine too.

The wine tasted odd after having so much milk, but I didn’t care anymore. With the platter and the feeling of being full I didn’t care. We sat there drinking wine and eating more and more soup with the bread and pickles until I felt good and ready to end the day. The soup was just about perfect, and it was all that I wanted right then. It felt great knowing that we would have more soup leftover that I could have another time.

When we finished Janice started to clear the table.

Wait, I said. Let’s have some pie or something.

We have ice cream, she said.

Great, I said. Just great.

She rinsed out the plastic bowls at the sink and then put a little chocolate ice cream in each. With the wine the ice cream was just fine. I even poured a little bit of wine on my ice cream, which made Janice laugh.

We sat at the table for a little while after finishing, without saying much. Our bellies were full and I wanted to laugh but didn’t. Janice gave me an odd look after a few minutes and then came over to me.

What’s wrong, Janice? I asked.

She knelt down next to me and put her hand on my thigh. I wasn’t ready for it.

What are you doing, I said.

She kissed me then and tasted like alcohol. Her mouth still was cold from the ice cream. I stopped her.

Come on, she said.

I’m tired, Janice, I said.

I want to, she said.

The baby, I said.

After I said that she got up and looked down at me. She just started to clear away the dishes, putting them in the sink and running the water over them. When she got to taking the platter into the kitchen she stopped. She dropped it on the kitchen tiles and held her hands up to her face. She had tears in her eyes but she wasn’t crying real bad. I jumped up and walked over. On the floor I saw that the platter had been chipped along the edge.

God, Janice, I said. You chipped it!

I’m sorry, she said. I’m sorry, really.

She started to explain but I stopped her. I told her I didn’t want to hear about her apology yet. I told her to pick it up and that I was going to have a cigarette outside. When I came back I was feeling worse than before. Janice wanted to fool around and I was tired. That was all. But then after a great meal she broke the plate. I knew she was struggling and everything but that was a big deal to me, the breaking the platter. I told her so.

Then she turned her back to me and I felt warm again inside, but this time warm with something terrible and vague. I just sat watching her from behind. She took the pot of soup and started to pour the broth out into the sink.

Stop, I screamed. For God’s sake, stop, what are you doing!

What? she said.

Janice, I said.

What? she said.

Janice Janice Janice, I kept saying.

I didn’t know what to do, so I slammed my hand on the stove. It was still pretty hot, and I ended up burning myself a little bit, which made me angrier.

When Janice didn’t respond to my burn I lost it, and before I knew it she was on the ground and I was on top of her chest, her arms under my legs. I was spitting on her and grabbing her, pulling her hair. I hit her once.

This, I said. This, this, this.

I didn’t know what I was saying. I hit her again. Everything was coming all at once. The alcohol was making me feel odd. I could feel it in my blood and in my head. I was dizzy with many things. And Janice didn’t say anything, which made it all worse.

Say you’re sorry now, I said. Say it.

I’m sorry, she said.

She wasn’t even crying yet. I kept going.

I don’t care that you’re sorry, I said. It’s time.

I’m sorry, she said again.

I don’t care, I said. I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care.

Basement

Basement

When it came time to do the laundry, I would just do the laundry. I would carry the laundry in my arms, propped up stale and wrinkled against my chest, and down the elevator to the basement of my building where there were machines. Because of the wheelchair I couldn’t take the stairs. But still the feeling of carrying clothes down the two stories and out of your apartment is one that’s good, like, if anything else, what you absolutely have is the clothes you need.

I didn’t live in a big building, so there weren’t a lot of people who had to share the two washers and two dryers—just about ten of us all together. But most of us worked during the days and either did laundry in the evenings or during weekend afternoons. Sometimes things would get crowded at those times.

Running into each other in the basement wasn’t much. No one said much of anything to anyone else, because there’s no real reason to talk in the laundry room. That basement was a place of dirty and vulnerable things. If it was anything, it was a whorish ditch of the city-world. And the good thing about that is nobody has any need to lie.

On Tuesday I stopped by a supermarket after work to get quarters for the machines in the basement. I took them home in my shirt pocket, a small hard piece that made me think about carrying a gun somewhere under my arm like a soldier. At home I took off my tie and nice shirt and pressed my clothes to my chest and rode the elevator down two stories to the basement. I would look at the stairs in front of the elevator sometimes, the ones that wind around, first this way and then that way, like most stairs. In the elevator I supposed things were much different. It was a small thing that moved slowly. And the lighting was bad there so you’d have to be careful with pressing the right button for the floor you wanted.

And then there I was, in the laundry room, putting clothes into the two washers and four quarters into the game-slots on the tops of the machines. I didn’t have much trouble reaching the top of the machines. If I needed to I could lift myself a little. I usually did this to press the start-buttons and get the clothes out of the washers.

When everything was ready, I realized that I didn’t have enough detergent for both loads of clothes. It was okay, there was a convenience store just a block or so away from my building. I left my clothes, riding the elevators up and then down again, and got some soap for three dollars at the store, then came back to the basement.

The basement was still empty. My clothes were still there. I rode to the machines and dropped in the soap, then lifted myself up and got the machines going. They let off a lot of sound, like they were the engines of the entire building. In some way I suppose they were.

I settled myself in the corner of the basement to read a magazine that I had put in my chair earlier that day. I didn’t read much around that time, and sometimes I felt I should. So I used the laundry time to get it done. I would take these magazines full of people and things down into the basement, let the constant sound of motion clear my head, and study the words and pictures. I could usually get through half of a magazine or so by the time the washers were finished. I’d do the other half while waiting for the dryers. All in all I would spend about one hour down there, then go back up to my place feeling much better about what I had just done.

Either I was reading faster than usual, or the machines were going slower than usual, because I felt like I was there for a really long time. I quit reading when I got halfway through the magazine, and just sat, saving the rest for the dryers.

While I waited I heard a sound that wasn’t the machines come on, like someone had just flushed a toilet extra hard. In the sink next to the washers some water started to come up. I thought about pipes and plumbing, realized I had no idea how something like that would happen, but assumed that it happened whether I liked it to or not. The water kept coming, so I rode over quickly to take a look. It was about to overflow out onto the floor, so I looked down under the sink for a lever to pull or a knob to turn. I didn’t see anything, so I just sat there still watching the water rise and rise.

When it got close to the top I still didn’t move. I didn’t move until the water started to come over the sides. Then it all hit me. I pulled on my wheels quickly, moving back away from the coming water. But when I got to the middle of the basement floor, where the floor dips deep down and turns into a drain, I had come so fast and at such an angle that I got off balance and tipped over. The chair just seemed to stop and I kept going back, turning slightly to try to catch myself but failing anyway, then hitting my head, just above my right eye, on the concrete.

I opened my eyes after I don’t know how long. Not knowing the time or the length of the lapse upset me first, and only then the fall and the pain came to me. I remembered the fall fairly well, and I noticed that I had been moved from the center of the basement floor to the corner where I had been reading. I tried to focus my eyes and look around. My chair was folded up and sitting on a high shelf above the dryers. Just what are you doing up there, I thought.

Near the sink, on the other side of the room, was a man working with water. Oh, I thought. He was working under the sink. No more water was coming up from anywhere. The floor was mostly dry. And the washers were still going. I tried to talk but couldn’t really get any words out quite yet, so I tapped on the floor.

He didn’t hear me at first, so I did it louder and louder until he finally turned around. He showed no surprise or concern on his face.

“Are these your clothes in the washer?” he asked.

I looked at the washer and shrugged a little.

“They were here when I got down,” he said. “I think I might’ve come for the sink too.”

I coughed. I tried to respond, then I coughed again. He waited there patiently until I could get going.

“They’re still going?” I asked. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Things there have been going a bit differently.”

I didn’t really know what any of that meant.

“I’ll fix it,” he said. “I will.”

“Okay,” I said.

I started to move toward him, in a crawling sort of way.

“No,” he said. “Oh, no, just hang out right there.”

“I don’t recognize you.”

“Nope,” he said.

“All right,” I said.

I assumed he was from some company, some plumbing place that could send over a repairman during an emergency like this.

My head was really hurting me at that point. I felt above my eye. There was definitely a bump there, and a little bit of blood. It wasn’t a terrible wound, just a small one considering the fall I had taken. But still I was in pain.

The man was tall and wrong like a bear. People like me aren’t used to seeing people like him. He moved to one of the washers and stood there like a tower. Then he opened up the machine, stopping the cycle.

“Wait!” I said. “It’s not done yet.”

He said nothing. He walked over closer to me and grabbed the small table that was nearby. He carried it over to the machine and started putting my wet clothes there on the hard and dirty surface of the table. He rifled through them.

“What,” I said. “What are you doing?”

He said nothing still. He looked through my shirts and my socks. He held some of them up to me like he was doing some sort of performance. He would smile and then put down the piece he had just shown me. Then he would keep looking through the clothes.

“Oh,” he said from time to time. “Yeah.”

I sat there helpless, leaned up against the corner of the basement.

Then he stopped as though he were thinking. He took off his shoes. He held up some of my white shirts that he had placed into a small pile.

“Look at the stains here,” he said. “Just look at them.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Look,” he said. “Really.”

So I did. The stains were there, and despite it all, and even though I didn’t want to, I reddened while looking at them.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

He took off his socks then, and put on some of mine. Then he took off his shirt and put on one of mine, one of the nicer ones without the stains.

“You keep the others,” he said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“It’s just so hot outside,” he said. “Now that it’s summer. Really, the wet shirt feels good.”

He put his shoes back on. He looked different, with all of the too-small clothes tight against his big body. He had on my socks and my shirt. He didn’t button the shirt, and I could see his hairy chest.

“What are you doing?” I said again, almost needing to laugh.

Then he laughed.

“Well, the sink’s fine, I might just think,” he said.

I couldn’t help myself then, and I lost it. I started laughing, almost to the point where I wanted to cry. I didn’t know what was funny, if anything. Maybe it all was. Maybe in the basement everything was just hysterical and awful and fun.

“There you go,” he said. “Yeah, that’s it. Here’s your chair.”

He took it down from the shelf and opened it up. The magazine, I could see, was sitting on the seat, still folded over and around to the page where I had left off. Then the man came close to me, I mean so his face was close to mine, and just looked real hard. And then he was gone.

Between bursts of laughter I could hear myself say, “Oh my god.”

I touched my head again and slapped myself. I thought that this was what it must feel like to be in another country. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it would be like.

I ran my fingers through my hair and pushed myself up. I looked around again. The man was gone. Yes, he was gone. He’d left me with only some of my things. I got in my chair, though it was more difficult than usual.

I finished my laundry, because it needed to be done. The dryers, unlike the washers, took the normal amount of time to finish, probably because my clothes had had a little bit of time to dry on the table in the fresh, thick air of the basement.

The man I still haven’t seen a second time. I picture him on the streets sometimes, moving back and forth through the other people with stealth and determination. He’s got a weapon hidden somewhere on him. And I’m certain sometimes that he can lead you somewhere.

In the morning I saw that my head, right where I had hit the concrete, had turned a purplish color. In the days to come it would turn blacker and blacker, then back to blue and back to purple and finally to a dull red, just before it looked again like skin.

Where I Live

Where I Live

Elise left through the back door of the apartment building. I watched her through the window on the north side of the building. There she goes, I thought. There Elise goes, right out that back door, I thought.

I sat by the window drinking the champagne that Elise and I were supposed to be saving. In the chair that I’d pulled up I sat looking through the window and drinking that champagne from a dirty coffee mug. She drove her car away like she knew she was going someplace special. After about thirty minutes someone knocked on the front door. I got up from the chair and opened that door. A guy—this young guy—stood there for a moment and then just tried to walk into the apartment. I stopped him against the doorjamb.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“I don’t get the joke,” I told him. “This is where I live.”

“I’m Roger,” he said. “It’s Roger. Come on.”

He tried to come in again. He got by me this time.

“Where is everyone?” he asked.

“It’s just me,” I said. “I’m alone in here.”

“What’re you doing? This apartment stinks.”

“My name’s Nick,” I said.

He looked at me like I was the moon.

“I’m Roger,” he said.

“I’m Nick.”

“Not Larry?”

“No,” I said. “Not Larry.”

Roger walked toward the door.

“I guess I got the wrong apartment,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said.

He left, and I went back to the window. I saw the young girl from the house next door. She was playing some game in the alley just beyond my apartment building’s parking lot. She wore sandals and a pink skirt, and she was jumping around and chasing rabbits.

I watched her. She sat down on the unpaved driveway, right next to her dad’s truck. She was messing with an anthill. The ants, upset, stormed her then, and she let them until the ants started to bite her legs. I could see the redness of the ants on her bare white legs. I could see them even from inside my apartment. They sprouted like pimples. I thought, look how quickly the girl can change.

The sun was going down now. I finished my glass of champagne. The young girl was screaming. She looked like a puppet, like she wasn’t real. I mean, young girls shouldn’t scream like that. Something bad must be happening for a girl to scream like that, I thought.

I quickly walked through the apartment and quickly put on my shoes. I walked past the kitchen, saw the cake I’d made with Elise. I threw it in the garbage, closed the door behind me.

When I got to the girl she was no longer sitting. She was standing. She was jumping like a fish, and actually her whole head looked wet.

“Hold still,” I said. “Stop, you need to calm down.”

I realized I didn’t bring any spray or anything for the ants, but anyway could I put that on a little girl’s bare legs?

She kept screaming. I scrambled to brush the ants from her shins. I hesitated before brushing the ants from her thighs. But there were so many of them. They fell on the pavement where they got squashed under our feet. The marks from the ant bites were devastating. I thought, what terrible wounds! Some of them were actually bleeding.

And then the girl lost it. She kept yelling and clawing at herself, and eventually I thought she began to think that I was the one hurting her. I couldn’t tell by then.

“Where are your parents?” I asked. “Your parents, where are your parents?”

But she just kept up with the voice. She was really keyed up. I felt the champagne taking a great toll on me, and I started to feel dizzy. The girl flailed and kicked at the pavement and then at the dirt. I tried to hold her. I lunged, but I missed her by at least a foot. I fell on my stomach and then turned over on my back, panting. I could see the dark sky. I could see the lights still on in my apartment. I thought, this is where I live. I searched for her then while lying on the ground like a turtle on its back.

“Hold still,” I pleaded. “You need to just stay still.”