The Gnome Stories, page 4
The feeling spread, reaching everywhere. Growing, kowtowing to nothing, maybe, like that cat, which had gotten even bigger after his dad had finally died, like it absorbed some part of him, if it was possible, if his dad’s death had even happened. The more he thought about it the less he could recall. He could see scenes recorded in his memory, but what good was that if you didn’t have it on tape or etched on paper somewhere?
He had agreed to take the cat, but now it might as well have always been Annette’s.
And besides, did she get off or was she playing? It sounded like it did, and suddenly he was ashamed, sort of.
That feeling could power a plot: of that he was sure. He could feel its wringing in him even now, even if he didn’t know how to hold or shape it yet. Who knew how big it could get if he let it grow?
There was a light suddenly on outside and Annette closed her eyes. Motion detector probably. She could hear a shriek, maybe human, maybe not.
The cat jumped off her suddenly and silently, no claws, the movement surprising them both. Nothing was light out there except the occasional passing car. Would it be better if it was daytime and they could both see the world for what it was? she thought. It was a wreck, but harmless. Everything was there right in front of them, suspended in the air between them like in one of many strong magnetic fields. Annette felt sick, and wondered if this was the beginning of a child inside her or just another stupid feeling. It was possible—you had to admit that it was in spite of everything—and what would that mean? The word made flesh made flesh forever, a harder memory to erase.
Harry stood and left the room like he was the wounded one. He would sulk, maybe, go interior; he would leave her alone. The owl pictures on the walls leered at her and his retreating back. They had nothing good to say.
She wouldn’t tell him yet of this spark of sickness unless she needed to deploy it. It could be her body in revolt. It could be her anger, or a curl of the cancer in her, suddenly reawakened. Wouldn’t that teach him something, she thought, and regretted it immediately. He could lie in his bed thinking of it. The adolescent thought: maybe it could be something to remember her by when she was gone, that story unreeling in his mind. She could feel an action in her body. Did he watch, she thought: that was the question. He must have wanted to, to see what it could be like. How much of that could he take? Annette asked herself. Would Harry be the kind who wouldn’t watch, who would take some solace in that dignity, or the kind who would bludgeon her with his virtue? He was awfully visual. She knew all about what flashed on his screens after she had gone to sleep—and knowing, she could feel herself getting in a rut, and what did that say about her marriage, if that’s what you could call it, now.
But she had done what he had asked, and maybe she had wanted it too. Obviously some part of her had relished the act or its effect. It was a kind of ugly satisfaction, like Terence’s scarred thumb stumps: Was it a fetish feeling she was having? Was it at Terence’s expense? It did contain him a little when she thought it, and she liked the way it felt, so she continued.
He had lost them years before in an accident with a printing press, he had said, and after, his scarred body being the first thing others would notice, he focused entirely on his body, covering himself with tattoos of hands and stars and hands on stars and stars on hands. It was something to see, she had to admit. It had power, which was part of why she’d consented—eventually. Terence had become all flesh, trim, a stock car—muscle, torque, and movement—nothing like a Harry, maybe, if you even had to make that comparison, which she never admitted to, or if she did, she wouldn’t tell him. She turned her head. She could still see him and the marks he’d made all along his body. She could still feel the way he felt above her.
From his office Harry could see the grill on the patio below, hunched under its expensive cover, and beyond the trees there was the arroyo, and he couldn’t see past that. The grill cast a little shadow from the security light that flicked on when something passed through its field of vision. It was usually an animal, he presumed, but often he was too slow to see what had triggered it.
Harry’s hands were in motion on the keyboard, trying to make himself a memory, trying to metabolize it or pass it through him like a stone. It was his father’s grill: another artifact of his passing. It was shiny chrome, or steel probably, one of those distinctions that had never come easily for him, and it was charcoal with a gas starter, and if left uncovered it seemed to glow, even at night. The effect was creepy, almost unearthly, and had unsettled him enough that he’d bought a custom cover to stop its shining. The grill was no longer in production, and a generic cover (he’d tried a few) just blew off when the wind came up. He wondered if his father had ever contemplated this same light at night, maybe looking down from a window like this one in the old house, and if he did, what he’d made of the effect. Harry had never known to ask until it was no longer possible to, and now he couldn’t shake the question. Was it a talisman, a portent, or just how light worked in the dark? He wondered about this, to no end, at night, in circles, until he took the pill that shut it down. This was perhaps his problem, this tendency for overanalysis, possibly also inherited or learned, this worrying over the problem with his hands, with his mind. It did no one any good, but that didn’t change anything at all, he knew.
What made this night’s event special was that they had actually made something new, even if none of them could know it now. What were their obligations to Terence, and what should he know later, and when? Terence was obviously just a guy, an interloper who had agreed to play this role. And it hadn’t taken much, had it? He could see that even when he agreed, and what did this say about him? He had guaranteed that he was clean, which he was not, but that’s what you get from a situation like this, Terence told himself later. He had left as quickly as he could because something was clearly happening between the two of them. Annette he would remember, of course, as he did most of his conquests, if it was fair to call her that. Maybe he was the conquest, he thought immediately but let it drop, and even so, even with her husband in the other room, okay with it, or even spitefully okay with it, trying to prove something to the two of them, or to the three of them: even then he counted it as his. He didn’t notch his bedpost, though he did take a kind of pride in the performance, though that wouldn’t last, it never did, and he would be returned to what he was before. Still you took your pleasure where you could get it, and so Terence left them to the remainder, the whatever that it was: he could feel himself growing in the room, his body cool, fresh with disappearing sweat, becoming monstrous the more he waited, until he couldn’t bear it, and he left.
Harry and Annette were not the first he had played this role for. It was a niche, he guessed. It seemed more and more likely that it was, as it happened again and again, and what should he take away from that, from this fact that people could just read it in him—maybe it was a mark he bore or in his countenance?
His specialty was accepting propositions. He would be the wedge the couple would drive into itself. He was literally the wedge. He would open them up, those couples, those legs, sometimes both sets of them in the same bed, or in dreams after, and he would be happy with it, or if not happy, then it wouldn’t bother him. He had sometimes been recorded, and existed now on tape or in tens of thousands of scattered bits across hard drives, people wanting something to watch for a while, an actor standing in for them or for whatever was between them, could come between them: he didn’t care what they’d made, and didn’t care why he was chosen, why he played this role and not others. He was filled with light, he felt. Made of it increasingly. He drew it from the world when he went out in daytime, and gave it off in the later portion of the nights when they’d done something like this. Maybe he’d even be famous if they released the tapes on the net as someone would surely eventually do, and he would be admired years from now for the quality of his thrusting or something similar, the marks all along his body, his particular commemoration of his old pain, the dimples in his cheeks, some outstanding, shining trait, and he would be embraced in this way, too, and maybe even redeemed for the things that he had—that we all had—done.
What they had made was not a baby exactly.
Would it surprise them to know that it had risen, or perhaps been summoned, in their triangle of electric pull and disregard? It came to life down in the arroyo where the trash collected when it rained. At first the size of a comma on a page in an instruction manual for home wiring projects, it bent a little, then it bulged, and then it grew and split: a semicolon, then a letter, an en dash, and then an em, and then a word, and then it stretched into a sentence.
Nothing registered its first movements. It wouldn’t have seemed like much by then anyhow: a string of sentences glued or hinged together. You know how a stick bug only looks like a stick if you see it on a stick, and otherwise it looks like nothing? This too. It looked like something you’d want to stomp, and maybe you should if you’d noticed it. All there was down in the arroyo were teenagers anyhow, engaged in pursuit of sex or violence or fuckoffery, some dissenting or just drug-fueled adventure out of sight of their parents and their friends. By definition, what happened down here in the runoff didn’t matter, they figured, and whatever they were interested in, it was the opposite of books. Break, fuck, or fuck with what you want. Burn the rest. There was nothing to believe in except for trash and fire. The rest of us rightly didn’t think about it that much.
An hour later, unnoticed and unstomped, the thing took its first step off the page. It simply lifted itself up perpendicular to the page’s surface and left it behind. Now it was out and in the air.
From there it climbed over a Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 DVD and peered over the junk pile toward the electric towers through which ran the lines that connected the development to others.
Peered may not be the word. It surely wondered—and likely comprehended—nothing. It thought nothing. But it did seem as if it took stock of its new dimensionality, and it did seem to be looking for something. Then it began to walk—really, it shuffle-dragged—in a direct line to Harry and Annette’s house.
It was still dark. They had by now settled into a detente, each of them grooming their own hurts and thinking about what the other would have to say to be forgiven.
Terence nurtured his story, too, in another house, surrounded by his memories of the event: how it felt, not what it meant. He masturbated to stop the feeling of thinking about it. If he understood more about what had happened, he didn’t say. He’d seen some shit, of course. He knew what went on in homes.
He didn’t call, and didn’t expect a call. He kept his phone on just in case.
Hours passed in this way. Each of them slept some.
The thing approached Harry and Annette’s house. It had grown again. Thigh-high now, it had been partly torn in a bother with a dog, so it dragged a dangling clause behind it like a chain. It circled the house, pressed its face and hands to the bay window in the living room. It began to spread. Beginning there, it papered over each window and door while they slept.
When Harry and Annette awoke in separate beds and saw no light, they still thought it night. In the room they had once hoped to make a nursery, Harry cracked an eye, seeking a little moonlight reassurance. Finding none, he closed his eyes again. Annette, restless in the bedroom, stretched out an arm toward the side where her husband usually slept. Of course the cat was in his space. She ran her fingers through its fur. She could feel it look at her. It would always look at her.
None of them would ever leave the house again.
When it had completed its bloody work, Harry and Annette and the history of their marriage and all their angers and ambitions, all their thrills and spells, had been reduced and bound to a series of sentences on a page.
When you have finished reading it they will be gone.
The Reassurances
Sharon had said that it was real goddamn romantic that I’d finally done it, proposed like that, with an adopt-a-road sign with her name writ large, though I couldn’t quite tell if she meant it. I felt I’d chosen a perfect piece of interstate, a long upslope where everyone trailed out of the city on the hottest days toward the cooler mountain promise and had plenty of time to read as they climbed, hoping not to stall. Inevitably cars overheated and pulled off to the side, and the rest of the traffic slowed to take in their failure, and in that moment, I thought, Sharon’s name and my proposal would be there to say oh yea, verily, there is still love in this overheating world.
You could choose up to ten miles of road, but I picked only four: it seemed enough to be a major undertaking yet not ostentatious enough to dominate the commute to her parents’ cabin on the lake that was once a meteor strike some hundred thousand years before, they’d said, and was now a perfect crater finned most days by Jet Skis and pontoon boats and people pissing into the water and the rest of the people trying to ignore the fact of the increasingly piss-filled water. Well, she said, it’s all piss-filled, isn’t it? The job of living is not to think about it too much, since it’ll paralyze you. True, I thought, I was easily paralyzed by exactly this kind of consideration. I thought but didn’t say this is why I need you.
On hot days, which came more and more frequently it felt like, the whole world heating and shifting climate toward the North, the exodus from the city might look from above like bacterial colonies, thousands of them in clumps and globs and slow-motion lines, coalescing and breaking apart and moving away from the equator. I’d never seen it that way but I could imagine.
That she would not say yes I had not counted on, nor that she would shortly thereafter be killed in a car accident, an irony that did not escape me in my self-serving grief (it increasingly approached woe, it seemed), nor that she would—within an hour of her death, or what the outside world understood as death, and scientifically the line between the two, alive and dead, was never quite as firm as we believed—be transferred to frozen storage in Phoenix that her parents had purchased for her instead of a car when she’d turned sixteen. I had not foreseen that she would be cryonically frozen before what was left of her skin had given away its warmth, that she would then be preserved in perpetuity, catastrophically contused but unfortunately not entirely gone.
All this was terrible of course, and it was worse for her to be so near—twenty-two miles away by cloverleaf and car and merge and merge and merge—but so far, kept from me by a wheel of glass and steel and frost and the supercooled liquid she was now suspended in. The preservation cocktail they used changed constantly, their scientists reported, as they conducted new research and improved their modeling, and got access to nanomaterials and therapies until then legal only in shady countries. I only got to see her once, and only by proxy, in a video taken by her mother, shown at the strange sort-of wake they’d held (they called it The Believing), and watching it was weird and hard enough to make me unsure I’d ever want to see her again or that in fact I even could. She was close, but off limits since I had not yet been put on the visiting list, and besides, driving in the city has been getting harder on account of the bombings.
They weren’t big bombs, the television said, but they were enough to bring down a structural support of a bit of interstate. The explosions did not strike terror in my heart, but they did add another thirty minutes to the drive, giving me one more reason not to go see my not-quite-dead former almost fiancée in not-quite-person.
Terry and Charles—Charles, her mother, a dominant woman with a man’s name, which led to no end of awkwardnesses at introductions to boyfriends, past and present, I was sure—explained it to me straight: it was her belief, they said, that the conditions that would presently lead to death might in fact be remedied in the future, not too far off even. I’d never heard Sharon talk about that, or death at all except in the abstract or in the distant past. Only forty years ago, for instance, Charles explained, we were still performing lobotomies, doing electroshock. A hundred years ago we had no cure for polio. Did you know, she said, that scientists were at this very moment supercooling patients in liquid daily to slow down aging? That they’ve successfully frozen organs in order to transport them for transplant? That the average American wood frog freezes solid multiple times every winter and lives to hop again in spring? Their bodies actually turn to a form of glass, she said, and back to flesh when the cold has passed and spring has sprung. Did you know that? And glass is not a solid: made from cooling liquid, it’s not completely finished being a liquid and not yet a solid, so it’s something in between. I mean, we think we know what death and illness is, she said: we think we’ve conquered the body. But so we always had, and we were wrong then. Why not think we might be wrong now? Why not take a shot on belief instead? And isn’t that what a proposal is? Imagine, she said, spreading out her hands in a way I assumed she had practiced many times in private before deploying it in instances like this, what the future might bring for our dear girl.
I can’t, I said.
Exactly my point, she said.
When you put it that way, the prospect did sound compelling.
Her stasis, as they called it, or sometimes cryonic sleep, meant that they could not close off that part of her that they kept alive. For instance, her room at home remained the same, even as her body was preserved in the city. She was their only child, and they had such hopes for her, Charles explained in tears over an exotic African tea she had bought online, we could see it coming, her future, her family, her children, the whole future of their bloodline. Your bloodline, she said. Was it strange to say it like that, she asked, like she was a commodity? She wasn’t and she was, she said. Wait until you have kids. Then you’ll get it. They’re how we leave the world, she said. That’s why they hadn’t done so much as put away the mismatched socks she’d left in the shape of a flower on the bed the last time she’d been home. You never know, they said, if she came back, what might spark her into who she used to be before. The steam curlicued from our cups like question marks.
