C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag
Issue 2: Fall 2011
Editors
Sean Clark
Eric Markowsky
Marcos Velasquez
Nico Vreeland
Published by Chamber Four LLC
Cambridge, MA
2011
Smashwords Edition
Published by Chamber Four LLC, 2011
Smashwords Edition
Direct inquiries to:
C4: The Chamber Four Lit Mag, Issue 2, Fall 2011. “Truly Madly, Deeply Madly,” Copyright © 2011 by Hairee Lee. “Stranger,” Copyright © 2011 by David S. Atkinson. “In Hope We Find This Nation,” Copyright © 2011 by Chris Linforth. “School Bus,” Copyright © 2011 by David Williamson. “Fakie and Switch,” Copyright © 2011 by Tracy Hayes Odena. “Amanda’s Garden,” Copyright © 2011 by Eliza Horn. “Headache,” Copyright © 2011 by Tunji Ajibade. “Tok,” Copyright © 2011 by Joshua Willey. “Your Siren’s Running on Empty,” Copyright © 2011 by Abigail Grindle. “Landscape with Young Gourmand,” Copyright © 2011 by Ben Miller. “Troades,” Copyright © 2011 by Jason Newport. “Whatever Normal Means Now,” Copyright © 2011 by Joyce Tomlinson. “Scowler,” Copyright © 2011 by Ron Spalletta. “This Is What Faith Looks Like,” Copyright © 2011 by Derold Sligh. “What Remains,” Copyright © 2011 by Ed Tato. “Outer Casings,” Copyright © 2011 by Daniel Aristi. “Golem,” Copyright © 2011 by Heather Elliott. “Tetherball,” and “Note to Anne,” Copyright © 2011 by Kate Ruebenson. “What Insomnia Teaches Us,” Copyright © 2011 by Neil Carpathios. “Now I Can Tell You,” “Not Thinking About My Mother,” and “Driving to Arizona,” Copyright © 2011 by Samantha Ten Eyck. “The Accoutrements,” Copyright © 2011 by Robert Spiegel.
Cover Art by Nicholas Naughton.
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Table of Contents
Fiction
Truly Madly, Deeply Madly By Hairee Lee
Stranger By David S. Atkinson
In Hope We Find This Nation By Christopher Linforth
School Bus By David Williamson
Fakie and Switch By Tracy Hayes Odena
Amanda’s Garden By Eliza Horn
Headache By Tunji Ajibade
Tok By Joshua Willey
Your Siren’s Running on Empty By Abigail Grindle
Nonfiction
Landscape with Young Gourmand By Ben Miller
Troades By Jason Newport
Whatever Normal Means Now By Joyce Tomlinson
Poetry
Scowler By Ron Spalletta
This Is What Faith Looks Like By Derold Sligh
What Remains By Ed Tato
Outer Casings By Daniel Aristi
Golem By Heather Elliott
Two Poems By Kate Ruebenson
What Insomnia Teaches Us By Neil Carpathios
Three Poems By Samantha Ten Eyck
The Accoutrements By Robert Spiegel
Sylvia receives a last minute email from Babs saying she can’t attend the classical music concert with her tomorrow. Would Sylvia like to pick up the tickets at, say, six so that she can attend the concert with someone else?
Sylvia and Babs met in a continuing studies class at a local college—Contemporary Music Appreciation—and discovered their mutual love for the London Symphony Orchestra. Every few weeks or so they ride the tube together from the Finchley Road Station to the Barbican to watch Prokofiev, Purcell, Elgar, Beethoven, Monteverdi, Rachmaninov, Gershwin, whatever happens to be on the program at the time. For a couple of hours at a concert, the uniform silence of a large group of people paying attention, paying to pay attention, to a single point of interest, makes Sylvia feel as if they each belong to one another, or more accurately, to her.
At Babs’s home on Queen’s Grove in St John’s Wood, a very lovely part of London, Richard answers the door. Sylvia wonders if he’s been standing behind it, waiting. He looks flushed and his eyes dart about. Babs is running late, he says.
From a distance, Babs and Richard, both in their early forties, make a handsome couple: she a petit waif with a hazelnut face and a conservative bob of fine beige hair, he a perennially khaki-and-button-down-shirt clad man with a decent build and tall frame. Closer, Babs looks birdlike with a frenetic way of speaking that makes her sound like her vocal chords are always straining at the upper end of her treble range. Because she gesticulates when she speaks, one cannot help but notice the knobby joints between the arthritic arrangement of her fingers. It reminds Sylvia of chicken feet, the old maid in the gingerbread house, decline.
Curious still, Babs and Richard are not a couple. The brother and sister live together, cook meals for each other, work at the same university library, launder each other’s clothes, open each other’s mail (bills mostly), and share a joint account. Sylvia is fairly certain they are virgins.
Sylvia takes off her glove to check the time, but realizes that she forgot to put on her watch. Impatience makes her nearly sigh aloud.
It’s Thursday. Sylvia is scheduled to rendezvous with Sean—Irish, handsome, law enforcement officer Sean—at eight o’clock at her apartment. She has bought him a box of chocolates shaped like miniature knobs from a sex shop in Soho. It is uncharacteristic of Sylvia to do anything extra for her lovers, particularly in this weather, but Sean cancelled the week before. He did not even pretend at an excuse. What bothered Sylvia more was not that he didn’t explain—in fact, had he done so, she would have likely become impatient and wondered at his motives when they shared a tacit agreement to owe each other nothing beyond her bedroom—but that she had suffered anxiety. She would never admit his cancellation as a slight against her ego. So she feels the weight of the candy in her purse with ill-defined resentment.
Richard asks if she’d like to wait inside. Sylvia would rather not, but the meteorologists seem to have gotten it right for once—it is actually snowing in London and in increasing volume.
Richard stoops in that way some tall people, usually women, do, curling in his shoulders as if apologizing for his bones. Sylvia thinks he could have been attractive with his dark hair and bright blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. Unfortunately, his queer and sad unawareness of his assets, his painful shyness that overstrains the muscles around his eyes and cheeks, gives him a look of a man in agony, nullifying any quality of magnetism afforded him by the happy and neglected accident of his genes.
Their semi-detached two-story house is on a fairly posh, quiet street lined with centuries old trees and pruned bushes. When Sylvia steps inside, Richard waves to the sofa. She perches on one end, leaving her coat on.
The living room is tastefully decorated with one long wall of built-in mahogany shelves filled with books. The floor space in front of the shelves is taken up by more books. Neat piles of journals keep them company. Three knee-high stacks of the Guardian and Observer Magazine are nearest to where Sylvia sits. The date on one of them is over three years old. They do, however, appear to have been read. An enormous grandfather clock stands in one corner of the room—it says five to six—behind the aubergine colored velveteen sofa. Beside the curtain-drawn bay windows, on the other side of the room, is an upright piano. The keyboard is exposed. On the coffee table are more magazines and an open book, faced down, Madame Bovary, and a mismatched collection of coasters strewn willy-nilly. Oddly—odd because neither of the residents smoke or drink—an ashtray made of unpolished quartz rests on the table, filled with wine corks.
Sylvia makes no effort to relieve the silence though she knows that Richard does not know how. Irritation makes her ungenerous. She watches him squirm, standing in the middle of the living room, unable to speak, unable to sit, unable to decide. Watching him struggle, she finds herself enjoying it and takes off her coat and stores her gloves in the pockets. Richard’s infatuation with her is a foregone conclusion and having her alone with him in the same room seems too much for the virgin to bear. Yet he is unable to leave the room or dissolve into the carpet. The awareness soothes Sylvia’s bruised ego like a balm. Several more moments pass in delicious, awkward silence.
“Would you like some wine?” he says abruptly.
She looks at him, tilting her head. “Wine?”
“White,” he says.
Through the closed kitchen door on her left, she hears him struggling to remove the cork and wash and dry the glasses. She pulls out a Benson & Hedges from her purse and lights it. Several noisy minutes later he walks into the room with an overfilled glass of white wine.
“Aren’t you going to join me?” she says, deliberately trailing her gaze from the glass at level with his groin up to his face. He looks away, too late to hide his flush, pretending to be occupied with pulling down the sleeves of his jumper.
“I don’t like to lose control.”
“I guess I’ll lose control alone then. Chin, chin.”
She takes a sip and another longer sip.
And then pulls a long drag from her cigarette.
Richard stares at her openly now. The blue of his eyes practically glitter behind his glasses. She looks away, disconcerted by their brightness, and stares instead at the long cylinder of ash forming between her fingers. Again, she looks down at her wrist.
“Bugger.”
“Do you mind? The language,” says Richard with a hard edge to his voice.
She stares at him.
“How’s the wine?” he asks, after clearing his throat.
She shrugs and says fine.
“I think it’s the same kind that you brought to Hyde Park,” he says reminding her of an outdoor concert that she and Babs had attended, Richard joining them unexpectedly.
“Oh? I don’t remember.”
Sylvia leans over to tap her cigarette into the ashtray full of wine corks. Almost lunging, Richard scoops out the corks just before the ash falls into the tray. He kneels on the rug and sets down his treasure carefully on the corner of the coffee table farthest from Sylvia.
“You don’t mind me smoking, do you?”
She looks at him lazily through the smoke.
“It was a Riesling,” he says fingering one of the corks. “The other white wine.”
If she didn’t know better, Sylvia would have thought he was being funny. She turns to look at the Grandfather clock behind her. Five to six.
“It’s only five to six, by the way,” he says. “What’s your hurry?”
And though Richard has nothing to do with the memory, Sylvia recalls her mother, on the rare occasion she had time for her daughter, teaching her to read a clock made of a paper plate and take-out chopsticks, one snapped in half for the short hand. She was six. Long hand at twelve, short hand at one, then two, then three. One o’clock, two o’clock, three. “See?” her mother said, looking at the digital clock on the stove, and then saying, “Where the hell is he?” The lesson, forgotten. Five to six: long hand at eleven, short hand at six.
“It was either that or the vintage I saw you drinking with your date on Monday,” he says and holds up another cork from the pile.
She doesn’t understand immediately.
“I saw you at Grafton Pub. Monday? Supper?” he says.
“I didn’t see you.”
The hard edge in Richard’s voice returns. “No. You don’t.”
Sylvia stares at the corks now and she tries to count them.
“He’s just a bloke,” she says deliberately, lightly. “A mate from uni.” The muscles between her shoulder blades pull together.
“A mate.” Richard spits out the words. “Is that how you kiss mates?”
A forgotten memory: Richard walking by happenstance while she waited at the bus stop as usual for Babs. Oh, hullo! What are you doing here! Oh! A concert! Here!—taking out a chocolate bar from his trouser pocket and thrusting it at her so that Sylvia grabbed it to keep it from hitting her chest—I was walking home from work! And bought it at the store! Looking at his shortening form as he walked away, she noticed the absence of a work bag or briefcase. Then she forgot about him.
“Well? Is it? Like... like some slapper.” Then he slaps his thigh hard and says, “Sorry. It’s just you know what they say. Keep your enemies closer. Not so much your mates. People could get the wrong idea.”
She puts down her glass and looks again at her bare wrist.
Another memory: seeing Richard at the local Sainsbury’s, local for Sylvia. She spotted him in the cereal aisle with a box of Wheetabix in his hand and kept going, not wanting to endure an awkward conversation, which was inevitable with Richard. She saw in her peripheral vision his head turn.
“What time is it?” She stands and her body tips, but she catches herself on the arm of the sofa. “Bugger.”
“I said you shouldn’t swear.”
Piss off, says Sylvia, but only in her mind because her tongue is a slab of lead.
“You should sit down.”
And she sits down as she’s told, but against her will. Her lips stitch together and the wine glass, which she looks at fixedly, is filled with the weight of all the wine in the kingdom. It’s a wonder she did not drop it before. It could flood the entire neighborhood. There are little atoms of white settling in gravity-defying slowness to the bottom of the glass, each particle, paradoxically, weighing whole worlds.
She does not see Richard bending down to take the still lit cigarette from her fingers and put it out in the ash tray. But she can hear him talking some distance away.
“Your body starts to make promises, Sylvia. However much you try to keep the heart and body divided, the interface is porous. Eventually, if you repeat the act of making love often enough, whether you think of it as love making or not, nature trumps will. The heart, even yours, begins to sway to the rhythms of the body. Its longings and its satisfactions, its hopes. I couldn’t let you go on making those promises to them.”
The last words were but the faintest echoes from miles away.
“Don’t you see? The act becomes you.”
* * *
When she regains consciousness, Sylvia is on the sofa. Her arms are extended to either side of her over the top of the back cushions. A complex system of tension cords pin her wrists to the sofa and connect her wrists to her ankles. When she tries to pull down her arms, her feet get tugged under her, and when she tries to rise, the chords stick hard into her wrists. The only light is from the table lamp to her left that casts deep shadows into all corners of the room.
“You’re awake,” says a voice from one of these corners.
The sound of music, one note then another, issues from the piano.
“Richard?” C-major arpeggio. “What the hell is going on?” Her head throbs.
Crashing G-minor chord. “Really, Sylvia, it makes me uncomfortable when you swear.”
She says, staring in the direction of the piano, “Try tension chords.” Her tone is cool and condescending. “Get these things off me, Richard.”
He moves out of the shadows to stand six feet from her; Richard seems to wilt a little under her iron gaze.
“I just want to talk to you,” he says, brows knitted.
“Get these things off me, Richard.”
“You walked in here.” It almost sounds as if he’s pleading.
“Kidnapping to talk?” she says incredulously.
“I never forced you to come inside, I didn’t force you to come.”
Richard stands sideways to her to keep from having to make eye contact.
“I didn’t force you to come?”—enunciating every word—“I wanted to talk to you? And so that must mean I wanted you to drug me? And tie me up?” Sylvia’s tone nears hysteria.
Richard pulls on his index finger as if to pull it off his hand.
Lowering the volume of her voice she says, “Untie me, Richard.”
He whispers, begging, “I can’t. I love you.”
As a girl, Sylvia watched her mother bring home men who would come out of her bedroom early in the morning before her mother could notice them leave. Sylvia waited in the living room. She wanted to watch them tip toe, let them know that someone witnessed their exit. Some didn’t even pretend to be friendly and left without a word. When her mother awoke, she would cry over the stove as she fried Sylvia’s eggs. Why couldn’t she ever keep one with her? her mother had often cried.
“Untie me, Richard.” And then, “Untie me, Richard. Untie me. Richard, untie me! Right now! Untie me, right now! Untie me, Richard!” She yells, “I have someone expecting me, Richard, and when I don’t show up he’s going to know something’s wrong and then he’ll come looking for me!”
Up until that point Richard has been pacing in random lines around the room, from one corner to the sofa to the curtains to the other wall to the shelf and back again, but at Sylvia’s last remark, he stops, looking at her askance.
“Who? Sean?” He doesn’t wait for her to answer. “That’s who you see on Thursdays, isn’t it?”
He crosses the room, picks up her purse by her feet, and rummages inside.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Texting Sean.”
“What are you writing?” she shrieks.
He puts her phone back into her purse and sets it down by her foot again.
“He won’t believe it. I’ve never cancelled on him before. He’ll be suspicious. He’s a police officer.”
He resumes his pacing and runs his fingers through his hair several times so violently Sylvia feels the tug on her own roots.
“There’s always a first time,” Richard mumbles.
“Even if you manage to trick him, how do you expect to hide me from Babs? She’ll be here any minute... ” Sylvia’s voice trails off as a thought occurs to her.
Richard stops pacing, slips his hands into his pockets, and looks up at the ceiling.
“Babs doesn’t know I’m here,” she says.
Richard drops his head and looks down at his feet.
“There’s no concert tomorrow.”
He licks his lips and shrugs his shoulders, bending his neck right then left like a boxer going through his pre-fight tics. The gesture, schizophrenically uncharacteristic, disturbs Sylvia like nothing else that night, not even discovering she’d been drugged, not even waking up bound.
“Where is she?”
“You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul. Have you heard that one?”
“Where is she?”
“On a plane.”
Then and only then does escape become a vague necessity in Sylvia’s mind. It comes hand in hand with the now first detectable fumes of terror. Where incredulity and exasperation had been her guiding emotion, survival becomes uncertain. She isn’t yet fully afraid, but for the first time that night she can foresee a future, the real possibility, of danger.
“Florida. For her arthritis and the chemo.”
“America?”
“For the warmer climate.”
An image of Babs’s claw-like hands flashes in Sylvia’s mind and she feels remorse. She didn’t know, she says.
“How could you? You’re selfish, Sylvia.”
Sylvia laughs. Loudly and it feels wonderful. The sound makes her feel more powerful because the scorn in it reminds her of her anger.
“Don’t laugh. It’s true. You are selfish. But I love you anyways.”
Sylvia laughs louder, throwing her head back.
Richard takes two long quick steps and strikes her cheek. When Sylvia regains focus, she sees his face very close to hers peering at her with apology. He has dropped to his knees, putting his hand on her leg and he says he’s sorry. The blue of his eye pushed to the very limits of its circumference. His pupils were like two gigantic holes on his face.
“When Babs finds out, and she will find out—”
“The truth? What’s the truth except that I love you?” He sighs and says, “I know about your other men. I’ve been following... making sure you’re all right. Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Always Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays.” His expression is stern, but tender. In a low voice he says, “You’re a slutty, dirty, slutty slut. But I know you’re better than that, Sylvia. I love you. I could love you.”
“You missed Tuesday,” says Sylvia in a cool, lying hiss.
Sylvia watches Richard’s upper lip twitch. He moves his hands to his side, but remains genuflected.
“You don’t have a Tuesday.” His voice is too defiant.
“You know nothing.”
He changes tactics. “You’re out of touch, Sylvia. Out of touch with what you need. Why are you so afraid of love? Do you know what they do when they leave you? One goes home to his wife, another goes to a strip club by Camden, and another always stops by Burger King and gluts himself with crap. These men don’t know the meaning of worship, of loving you, and keeping themselves pure and clean and innocent for you. All they want is to get their knobs in your cunt and pretend that you love them. Of course, you don’t love any of them. You’re afraid to love. Isn’t that it? I guessed the truth? But you’re looking at the wrong men for salvation! I know that’s what you want, to be saved from your fear. To be delivered into love. I’m pure, Sylvia. I am innocent. I would be faithful. I would never betray you.”
He places his hand just above her lap and moves his palms slowly up the length of her thigh without touching her.
“Do you think I don’t know why you go to these concerts? No one adulterates your experience or your personality or your independence. That’s what you want in love, isn’t it? That’s what you want in love. I can do that for you, Sylvia.” His face is now so close she can see the pores on his nose. Leaning so that his lips are by her ear, he says, “I don’t even have to touch you.”
Twice, her mother dated men who returned and even stayed for eggs over the course of several months, and Sylvia watched her mother dye her hair and lose twenty pounds for one of them and leave Sylvia for a week while she went to Biarritz with another when Sylvia was twelve. But they all left her in the end. And for months her mother would weep, lying in bed or slouched in the arm chair in front of the living room window and smoke several packs of cigarettes over the course of the day. Love made women like her mother messy. Sylvia looked at her mother’s broken form and felt only disgust and determination not to be that sort of woman.
And though his proposal is ludicrous, Richard himself probably insane, Sylvia can see beauty and solace in it. He would be devoted to her from a distance, devoted to her as she saw him capable of devotion with Babs. The one man who had ever told her he would never try to get in her pants would be the one man who could take care of her heart.
“Kiss me,” she says.
He looks at her suspiciously. He cannot conceal the quick glance at her lips. It’s the same kind of glance shot at an abandoned cocktail by an alcoholic, tormented by fear and yearning. She tells him to kiss her again and he shakes his head. I want you to, she tells him. I want you to, she tells him again. With his mouth ajar, his shallow breaths lingering nauseatingly around her face, he puts his mouth on hers. He pulls away quickly for a moment as if she burned him. In the next instant, he crushes his face against hers bruising the inside of her mouth with her incisors. He screams and falls backwards when she bites his upper lip.
His fingers are covered in blood when he looks down at them after touching them to his mouth.
“You slut!”
Expecting another blow, Sylvia shuts her eyes. But instead she hears Richard stand. He picks up her wine glass from the coffee table and sends it flying over her head. It shatters against the wall beside the grandfather clock that says five to six. Hoisting the heavy quartz ashtray with her lone cigarette butt inside, he pivots to his right and throws it on the coffee table. It lands with a crack against the wood and rolls toward the living room archway off the front foyer. Sylvia is unsure if the noise is from the ashtray or the table, which Richard overturns—the coasters, magazines, a book, and the wine corks, which he only recently set down ever so carefully on one corner, scatter at high velocity across the room. Now by the window, he yanks once, twice, three times before ripping down all the curtains. Books are pulled from the shelves and fly behind him, landing on top of each other, bending pages and covers; a few volumes, some heavy, land on top of Sylvia. There are so many of them. This goes on and on.
And when Richard is done, finally, he stands facing the hollowed wooden recesses of the shelves, panting, a dark line drawn down the center of his back from sweat. The air smells of old paper and perspiration.
Slowly he turns to look at Sylvia.
“Richard.”
She means to make it sound like a warning, but even to her ears it sounds like a whimper for mercy.
His face is blank. He is not angry, ashamed, or uncertain. It’s the same blank, denuding expression she’s seen a thousand times when men have looked at her in lust. The blood around his mouth makes him look like a wild animal. She tries to scream, but finds her throat clamped shut with Richard’s fingers. His other hand is fumbling frantically below the sofa. There’s a loud snap. And the whole tension cord contraption springs back onto itself and Sylvia is free. And breathless and trapped. Her hands tingle from the sudden rush of blood into her extremities and her arms fall stupidly, uselessly to her sides. Richard’s hand moves roughly up her top. Her arms can’t move to fight him off. Losing patience, he’s about to tear open her blouse when he freezes. He clamps his hand over her mouth to stop the guttural protest and terror issuing from it, which Sylvia does not recognize as coming from her until his hand stops it from escaping. And then everything is silent.
She doesn’t recognize the sound immediately. A tinkling far away—an ice cream truck, a child’s bike ringer, a set of keys. Her eyes dart wildly in her head with recognition.
“The flight was cancelled! Can you believe it? Snow! In London!”
It’s Babs. A thud from luggage being dropped on the foyer. She walks past the living room archway and up the stairs. From the second floor Sylvia hears her continue to talk.
“And I forgot my pills! I was in the cab back home and looking in my purse for it. I found all these”—her voice is faint and Sylvia pictures Babs in a bathroom, looking inside the medicine cabinet—“Lactaid pills, but not my prescription. Just as well, I suppose, about the flight”—voice suddenly louder as if she’s calling down the stairs from the top landing, then moving away once again; the pills weren’t in the medicine cabinet—“The one thing I need to make sure my arthritis doesn’t act up from the altitude! I would have had to come back...”—a moment of silence and then a muffled—“Ah ha! Found it!”
Richard flings himself into the kitchen. Sylvia begins to regain some of the feeling in her arms and hands. She hears running water. Sounds of footsteps coming down the stairs.
“I can’t believe this weather!”
She could have called out to Babs. She could have done that a hundred moments ago. But something stopped Sylvia. All she could think about as she tracked Babs’ movement upstairs was how she could still feel Richard’s hand prints on her chest, how at the moment when she knew he was about to rip off her buttons, she’d felt her heart flailing against her ribs almost as if it wanted to escape and have Richard squeeze it. The blood on his lips had made her want to clamp hers over the wound, which she had only moments before inflicted, and suck it to health. Terror of his hunger to take what he wanted without reflecting on his own ego or the consequences of his actions turned out not to incite terror at all, but an uncontrolled excitement, so primitive and uninhibited that it scared Sylvia to paralysis.
She had wanted what was coming.
She’d wanted to be taken by a man who believed he loved her so much that he would risk everything to have her, even risk her hatred.
And Sylvia realizes that she had never been loved till then. No longer was it Richard’s fervid grip on her throat that took her breath away.
The sound of water in the kitchen stops. Babs appears beneath the transom of the living room door and gapes at the destruction wrought in her living room. Still in her coat and muffler with snowflakes in her hair on the brink of melting, Babs manages to slowly turn her head to look at Sylvia.
“Sylvia?”
Sylvia coughs when she tries to say hello, but manages to say, “Babs.”
“What are you—”
Richard enters the living room with a kitchen towel in his hand.
“Richard?”
“Did you find your pills?” he says, wiping his hands and then taking off his glasses to wipe the lenses. He moves slowly, too methodically. Sylvia sees that he’s washed his mouth, but his lip is beginning to swell. Sylvia blushes with satisfaction.
“Yes, yes I did. But—”
Richard cocks his head to one side.
“Richard?” Babs says again, voice high and thin. She takes a step towards him and she hits her foot against the hard quartz protrusions of the ashtray. She lets out a laugh that sounds like a shriek. The vein on her temple moves so vigorously, Sylvia can see it throb from where she sits.
Following Babs’ gaze, Sylvia is momentarily mesmerized by the reflection of the room in the naked bay window: her sitting on the dark purple velvet sofa with Richard off to the left and Babs to the right; the belly of the coffee table partially obscured by the books thrown from their shelves; great mounds of books all over the carpeted space between her and the bookshelves; a bright speck of light close to Babs’ foot distracts her—it’s the overturned ashtray; the grandfather clock, which in the reflection looks as if the arms point to six and one. Five to six.
And then, against her will, she looks at Richard, who is standing before the gutted mahogany shelves. In the reflection Richard seems to be standing amid a great dark space, a black hole. It transfixes her, this abyss. She forces her gaze back to her reflection and sees her mouth open and close and open again.
A thought occurs to her: people could see her from the outside while she cannot see anyone. Her hands begin to shake and her face burns.
“Sylvia,” says Richard before Sylvia can answer, “came by to... she came by to...”
They look at one another, Richard and Sylvia.
And Sylvia makes a choice that she doesn’t understand. All she knows is that this must not proceed any further. It’s not fear of Richard, but of her own response to him only moments before that she must suppress. A loving Sylvia is a possibility she has managed to keep buried. The urgency to remain as she has been overwhelms all other considerations. She must not scream or, worse, cry. She must get out of there; she must, she tells herself, keep her self to herself.
She reaches down into her bag, clenching and unclenching her hand to get it to work, and pulls out the box of chocolates she purchased for the night with Sean. Turning her gaze towards Babs, willing herself to look directly at her with a composed expression, she says, “Chocolates. I found out you were leaving and came to drop it off, but”—she shrugs for levity—“I was late. But here you are.” Sylvia tells herself to get up. Get up! “Here you are,” she says walking, one foot in front of the other, extending the box of candy towards Babs, who takes it from Sylvia and blinks several times quickly, unable to recognize the enlarged photo on the box of the candy to show the detailed image of the pieces within.
“Well, I better run.” Sylvia returns to the sofa and can feel Richard’s gaze on her as she picks up her purse from the floor and grabs her coat. “I’m meeting someone,” she says raising her eyes to meet his gaze with a look of determination that is almost tender. “I’m already very late.”
Before Babs can say another word, Sylvia is out the door.
The world is white and silent and strange. She needs a moment to orient herself. She must get home. Just get yourself home. She puts on her coat; her gloves are not in the pockets, but nothing could tempt her to knock on the door to see if she misplaced them inside.
As she walks past the house, she looks up and sees through the snow and the curtain-less window Richard staring at her, and Babs, working her arthritic hands and frantically gesturing at the room. She cannot move beneath his gaze. Then she realizes that he cannot see her at all and, in fact, is staring at his own reflection, the destruction wrought on his living room, the figure of his sister gesticulating wildly, perhaps even contemplating the black emptiness behind him.
Only once she begins to walk away does Sylvia realize that she has been holding her breath.
* * *
At home, she strips and showers. Reaching for the bar of soap, she sees the twin bands of red across her wrists. She holds up both of them and touches the nascent bruises in turn where less than an hour ago she had been held captive. Bound, loved madly. Madly most of all. Sinking down, sitting beneath the ablution, she brings her arms to her chest and hugs her wrists, kisses them tenderly and holds them to her chest once more, rocking back and forth.
Stranger
I was waiting in my room. I sat on my bed and stared down at my lime green shag carpet. My little blue plastic TV, the one with a handle like a lunchbox, was on my desk. I thought about turning it on, but it only got local channels and there wouldn’t be anything on but news. Besides, I was supposed to wait for my dad to come in.
My bedroom door swung open, hiding the Mr. T poster with all the spit wads on it, and my dad walked in. He slowly shut my door. At first I thought he was going to sit next to me, but then he seemed to think and pulled out the metal folding chair at my desk and sat there instead. I didn’t know why my dad wanted to talk to me right after school. The school year had just started. I couldn’t be in trouble this soon.
“Peter,” he said. Then he stopped. He looked tired. “Peter,” he said again, “what have you heard about Arthur Gowen?”
I blinked and tried to think. I couldn’t remember who that was.
“The boy that lives behind Steven’s,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “The house that has dark brown stucco falling off. Next door to your little friend Joy.”
“Oh.” That was the one where that ugly old black car that looked like it was part truck parked. “He’s the kid that got expelled.”
My dad ran his fingers through his mustache, cupping his hand over his chin. He’d been shaving his beard for a while, but he still let his hair and mustache go all shaggy. “That’s him.” He paused. “But that’s not what I meant. Have you heard anything recently?” He was talking all weird. All proper, like he’d rehearsed.
I shook my head and my bed creaked. The bed was really old. Not the mattress, but the bed. It was dark and metal, painted with some sort of black metal paint, and the headboard had these faded dark wispy flowers on it. It’d been mine longer than I could remember. I didn’t even know where it came from.
My dad looked down at his leather slippers and hunched his shoulders. “Arthur has been arrested.”
I tried to remember what Arthur looked like. I could only remember seeing him that time playing in Steven’s backyard way back. He kept doing this weird thing where he’d come out looking for his crazy brother. Said he’d escaped from that attic they kept him locked up in. Then he ran inside and changed his clothes and came outside with a cut up t-shirt wrapped around his head, pretending to be the crazy brother. Me and Steven didn’t fall for it and we told him.
My dad cleared his throat and tugged at the neck of his shirt. It was his black Huskers one. “Arthur has been sneaking his father’s car and driving around.”
“Where?” I asked.
“He tried to get other boys, younger ones, to go with him,” my dad went on, like I hadn’t said anything. “Apparently a couple did. Arthur parked behind someone’s garage and made them do things. Sexual things.”
I swallowed.
My dad looked up at me. Then he looked away, over at my brown curtains with the tan jungle scenes and no animals.
My stomach hurt. I thought about training.
“One of the boys had to go to the hospital. The police were called. Arthur won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore. He’s going to jail for a long time. That’s what you have to do to molesters. Lock them away.”
My mouth tasted throw up. Steven and me just trained for when we got girls. Nicky too. We didn’t do that sick stuff. I wasn’t one of those molesters. They were worse than anything, worse than people who killed people. Training was Steven’s idea anyway. I couldn’t go to jail for that. But Nicky, what if he told somebody? What if he said it was my idea? They might put me in jail and tell everyone I was one of those.
My dad put his hands together, almost like he was praying. “Peter,” he said again. His voice cracked a little when he said it.
I waited and tried to swallow again, but it felt like I couldn’t. Maybe he knew already. Maybe Nicky’d told.
“Did—” He stopped again. “Did Arthur ever try to get you to do anything? Anything that made you feel uncomfortable?” His head was down, but his eyes were looking up at me. He looked terrified.
“No!”
“You have to be able to tell me, Peter,” my dad pleaded. “You have to know you can talk to me. If something happened like that, it isn’t your fault.”
“He never did anything!”
My dad took a deep breath and exhaled loud. “Good.”
I tried not to look at him, but he was looking at me. I just wanted him to stop. I already told him nothing happened. It made me keep thinking of training. My head wouldn’t stop twitching, like I couldn’t get my neck to sit right.
“You know what to do if anybody ever tries anything like that, right?”
“Yes,” I said too quickly.
“Run and tell an adult,” he said. “Tell me. Don’t do anything that makes you feel funny. That’s how you know. If it makes you feel funny, then it’s bad. Right?”
“Right.”
He sighed again and stood. Then he walked over and hugged me. Hard, hard enough to hurt a little. Like he was trying to keep me from running off. I went limp, waiting for him to let me loose.
“All right, then,” he said when he finally let me go. He stood up real straight and backed up a step, hooked his thumbs in his pockets and took another deep breath.
I was still sitting on the bed. I hadn’t moved.
“Your mom should have dinner ready soon,” he said, looking over at my bedroom door. “She’s making roast.”
I nodded. He nodded too. Then he turned and walked out of my room, but he didn’t shut the door. I ran over once he was gone and shut it. Then I sat back down on my bed.
In Hope We Find This Nation
Pym Dark came into my office and sat opposite the potted bamboo and Seurat print. His notebook, he said, contained ideas, proposals, contingencies for a new aesthetic—although, when I saw it, they were crossed out, leaving sequences of black oblongs and irregular circles reminiscent of Morse code. What his book had once held, he said, was connected to the persistence of vision, a long-debunked theory that argued perceived motion originated from the afterimage. To muddy the situation, I’d been a proponent of the theory, albeit a modified version that incorporated Freud’s ideas about repression.
In our meeting, Pym recited a line from his mother: “Art is a figment of the intellect.” He hadn’t thought much of these words when they were originally spoken. Even months after experiencing this idea in bodily form—a woman—he was still wary of what it meant. Sometimes, he said, he could smell the woman’s faint scent: a mix of liniment oil and body salt. This recurring sensation could be described either as a manifestation of a hope that he would see her again or as a symptom of his condition.
After another unsuccessful semester at Harvard he’d taken the train to New York to stay with a high school friend, Philip Lomez, a grad student at Columbia. Pym thought Manhattan would be the ideal place to develop his theory of aesthetics during the summer break. Years before, he’d visited with his mother, taking in the sights and staying in a hotel near Times Square. They’d seen the Statue of Liberty and a man vomit on one of the pedestal walls. The man tried to scrape the vomit off with a branch, but instead he left odd markings that resembled a cave painting: a bison or perhaps an auroch.
In Philip’s one-bedroom walkup in Morningside Heights, Pym slept on the couch. For the first week he rarely left the building. Instead he sat in Philip’s vinyl recliner, smoked Philip’s cigarettes, and drank Philip’s coffee while leafing through immunology textbooks from the living room shelf. Between them was a book he’d never read, a paperback edition of Le Temps Retrouvé. As he held the novel and tried to decipher the cover—an Impressionist watercolor of an alleyway—he challenged himself to get through the four hundred or so pages in one or two sittings. Occasionally, when he took a break from reading, he would look out onto the street, where he could see a busy deli and a hair salon at the bottom of a large gray tenement.
By the second week, Philip had set for Pym a new schedule: every day at nine he left the apartment to catch the D train to Bryant Park from which he walked one block to the Public Library. That building, Philip said, would be a distraction-free and scholarly location where Pym could write down his theories. Pym was glad for the change, as he’d not got past the opening section of Proust’s novel—the dense and alien French prevented him from making any serious progress.
Most days he was first in line at the main entrance. Sometimes an elderly man with a short, graying beard and a white shirt lashed with faded black suspenders stood near the steps, studying the patterns of dried gum that littered the pavement. Pym sat on the low wall facing the library and pretended to read the Daily News. The man ran his finger over the bumps and petrified tooth marks. When security opened the doors, the man wouldn’t move; he didn’t seem interested in what was inside. He was only focused on drawing imaginary lines from one piece of gum to another.
One morning Pym spoke to him. He sat beside him on the steps and pointed to a headline in his newspaper.
“Odd that,” he said.
“What?”
“This phrase: ‘Double Bind Receives Grant.’”
“I don’t trust words,” the man said, standing up. He paced around in a circle, making sure to avoid the gum. “Give me your coffee.”
Pym felt sorry for him. The man’s shirt cuffs had thick dirt rings and his pants had large ketchup stains near the crotch. Pym found three-dollars in his wallet and offered them. “This should be enough.”
“No, your cup.” The man took it from Pym, removed the lid, and poured the coffee on the ground in a strange zigzag motion. Geometric shapes, crumpled trapezoids and wonky parallelograms were set off from one another like a child’s version of the Nazca Lines.
They both stared at the patterns, which evaporated a few minutes later. Pym gestured that he was going inside, but the man ignored him, his focus still on the ground.
On the third floor, through hallways and marble flooring that smelled of Clorox, was Room 315. People knew it as the Rose Reading Room, a century-old public area to sit and study. As Pym entered he liked to look at the ceiling with its three murals of swirling pink clouds and light blue skies. Below, a line of offices and help desks divided the room. Each side was a fractured mirror image with slight, almost imperceptible differences. Both had rows of oak tables with bronze reading lamps and leather-bound reference books stationed at the ends.
He sat at the tenth desk, on the right-hand side. He preferred it because the sunlight stayed there longest, from morning to late evening. The corner position suited his wish that everything should be in front of him. He laid out his notebook and pencils, making sure to cover the 369 on the desk as the multiples made him uneasy. During the day tourists appeared; they took pictures, then exited sharply, leaving the room in silence. Their appearance and abrupt disappearance usually went unnoted; only when they spoke loudly and their voices echoed did they receive a cold stare or a roll of the eyes from an annoyed patron. One time he heard a woman complain that, “Non-members are moving the books.” He could only see her jacket, the rest of her obscured by a tour group. Her voice, though, seemed familiar, like he’d heard it before, perhaps in the coffee shop near the library, or back at Harvard, or even from his childhood. As the group left he noticed the woman was no longer there and that the room was being emptied by a burly attendant who twirled his finger in the air and said, “Ten minutes. We close in ten minutes.”
Like always, Pym wrote until the last second. His ideas were not constructed in the normal sense; instead he relied upon a series of repeated descriptions, one replacing another with only minute changes. These passages of text were only approximations of intent, word-images that signified the crux of his theory: enlightenment through repetition. Later, he didn’t relate his strange ideas to Philip, relying, as he did, on his generosity and the contents of his icebox. Pym was unsure of what Philip sought in return, apart from a signed copy of the treatise. It was possible Philip thought more fondly of their years together in high school or perhaps he empathized over the health of Pym’s mother.
As the days passed at the library, Pym saw, on each occasion, the same people. None of them knew each other by name, but they created a community separate from the tourists with its own space and code of nods and shrugs. Every morning a middle-aged Korean woman, dressed in a business suit and with dyed hair tied up by a red band, would sit two desks away. She had a black notebook in which she worked on an art monograph for an exhibition at the Met. On the table she would lay out 10x12 photographs of naked men and women stretched, hung, crushed, and ripped apart—the bodies bruised and tattooed with khafs, dalets, and gimels. He recognized these Hebrew letters from a linguistics class taken sophomore year, but the purpose of the letters’ placement eluded him.
The second member of Pym’s triad was a well-dressed man in pin-stripe pants and a tightly pressed blue shirt, who took a seat close to the dictionary on the lectern. He would arrive at noon with a thick sheaf of paper and a mechanical pencil. On the quarter hour, he took the list of words he’d been jotting down for the previous few minutes and looked them up, scrupulously writing down their meanings. Once, as Pym passed the man’s desk, he found a list left behind: diactinism, diad, diadelphous.
He wasn’t sure of the significance or what exactly the project entailed. The first word had something to with physics and the sending of radioactive waves; the second, usually spelled with a Y, concerned the unification of a man and a woman; and the third referred to plants, in particular the joining of stamens. Three branches of investigation: physics, sociology, biology. The words seemed to encompass a compendium of knowledge and lexicography. Each came from Greek and related Latin roots pertaining to the idea of two-ness. The purpose, though, remained obscure. It occurred to him that, perhaps, the man was a college professor or an academic crank completing his magnum opus.
Unlike his classes, the man’s investigations inspired Pym to learn more about the nature of intellectual inquiry. In turn, Pym’s behavior reminded me of one of Freud’s early cases and I double-checked Frampton’s Methodologica to aid my analysis. After I compared notes, I watered the bamboo and pulled out some dead shoots. “The plant’s dying,” he said. I’m not sure these were his exact words as soon after, when he noticed the Dictaphone underneath my paperwork, he convinced me to delete the tape before he would continue his account.
In the library, he searched the shelves in hope of finding a suitable text. Sorting through hundreds of books on literature, history, and visual art, he found a four volume set half-hidden by a wooden cart stacked with dusty encyclopedias. The books were first editions, vellum-bound with a gilt spine. Each had a similar illustration on the front: an amphora patterned with a geometric shape—circle, triangle, square, pentagon—and the title In Hope We Find This Nation. Written by an Englishman, Edward Lawrence, the books detailed his personal account of New York after the First World War. Volume one contained a scant biographical note: his birth year (1894) and the fact after his wife died from influenza he’d traveled to America on the USS Plattsburg with the returning soldiers. In New York, wary of the recent subway accidents he’d read about in the newspapers, he explored the city by foot, writing in his notebook a lengthy description of the Model T Ford, the prices of bread and whiskey, unusual restaurant names, details from a Ringling Brothers billboard, and observations about parts of the city inhabited by the Irish, the Jews, the Chinese, and the Italians. When he could, he collected items in his buckskin satchel, often completely filling it with bus tickets, medicinal salves, political pamphlets, slick magazines, and stereographs of the Flatiron Building and the Statue of Liberty. During the late evenings, he sat in a Bowery flophouse and wrote up his findings.
Within an hour, Pym had read the first chapter. The prose had an ornate style that let sentences go for pages, clause upon clause building an interior structure that mimicked an adding machine’s computations. The material drove him on so fast he didn’t notice the tears until they hit the page. He told me the pain started as a small irritation in his left eye, a feeling that something was scratching at his sclera, slowly peeling it off in thin strips. Saline eye drops from a nearby drugstore temporarily soothed the discomfort and allowed him to continue reading. My initial note had this down as incidental, but as he explained the later events of that day I changed my opinion to something more unsettling.
In the library, he’d found the lights flickering in an odd sequence of short and long pulses. The pulses were a mix of bright white and soft yellow that somehow altered his vision, leaving a gray film over his sight. No one close to him seemed to be affected, or even have noticed the phenomenon. Somewhat alarmed, he coughed loudly in the direction of the Korean woman.
She turned around.
“What’s happened to the lights?”
She glanced at the chandeliers and then down to the bronze lamp on his table. “They look fine.”
“Are you sure?”
She collected her photographs, placing them into her notebook, and moved to a table on the other side of the room.
In his peripheral vision he could see shadows with no substance, lucid shapes compressed into a dark wafer figure. A stick-thin woman in a cream halter dress emerged. She had a shaven head and stood near the center of the room, but close to the exit, and her gaze was fixed on him. He considered that maybe she was the same woman he’d heard complain days before, that maybe she liked to sit on the other side, where she pursued a similar project to him. He closed his eyes and counted to three. On reopening them, she had been replaced by the attendant who studied Pym with interest and the Korean woman, who whispered in the attendant’s ear and pointed Pym’s way.
* * *
The hair salon outside Philip’s apartment had a strange name. The rusting sign, and the photographs of women in the window, reminded Pym of a typical Lawrence experiment in which he would collect business names and list them to resemble a Surrealist poem. He repeated the name over and over. Something about “A Cut in Time” wouldn’t leave him alone. It seemed to contain remnants of Proust, unstable memories of the past. Perhaps as a diversion he told me the hair salon was populated with a clientele different from the deli next door. The deli attracted a working crowd from the nearby insurance office and the strip of franchise stores half a block away. The salon entertained middle-aged women with graying hair hidden under hats and scarves. They left with colorful bobs, blond highlights on straightened hair, or perms that bounced as they walked.
After hours of staring, the view became a postcard: a solidified image of what he thought was outside. His attention to the scene, to the piqued detail of ordinary life, was a hangover from his indulgence in the printed word. For the old magazines and newspapers Philip owned soon ran out. Even after Pym attempted to translate Le Temps Retrouvé with his poor French he still had too much time to think about the woman at the library and the work of Edward Lawrence. Even when Philip, or his girlfriend, Annie, would talk to Pym, he only half-listened.
“You know I like having you around,” Philip said. “But it’s not good for either of us to have you sit here all day.”
“There’s an interesting view.”
Philip went to the window, looked outside, and then turned to Pym. “So come on, what happened?”
“Writer’s block.”
Philip smiled. “It’s been a week. I’ve got exams coming up and Annie’s complaining about the mess.”
Pym stood and positioned himself between Philip and the collection of wine bottles, yellowing newspapers, and coffee cups with cigarette butts sunken at the bottom. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“You were always like this, even in honors English.”
“Like what?’
“Blind to what’s going on.”
“That’s unfair.”
Philip picked up a cup and peered inside. “I’m just trying to help.”
Pym stepped past him to the window and craned his neck to see the tall buildings of midtown. “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
* * *
The next day he didn’t see the woman. Maybe he’d imagined her, or perhaps she’d been just another tourist, another chance meeting given too much significance. For years he’d believed in coincidence. As a child he wrote his own horoscopes, changing his sign to fit with what happened the day before, showing the typed up and dated columns to his friends as proof. Often they told their parents and he was invited to dinner to talk about his strange gift. He never accepted the offers, though, choosing instead to spend his nights pasting the horoscopes into his scrapbook and thinking about what he should do the next day.
These memories were soon lost to the business of the reading room and the familiar faces of the Korean lady and the man with his lists of words. Pym claimed his usual seat and placed his bookbag and coffee down and retrieved volume one of Lawrence’s book. The text seemed recently thumbed and slightly dirtier than he remembered, with newspaper ink marks and rings of what appeared to be tea on the pages.
The second chapter concerned an analysis of the area Crow Hill in Brooklyn and its change to Crown Heights in 1916. Lawrence detailed the names of the Jewish families to chart any future diaspora to another neighborhood. As a self-taught historian and linguist, he wanted to compare the situation to his own observations in England. The ensuing chapters revisited this data in unusual ways; a red ink graph displayed surname length on the x-axis and years in the neighborhood on the y. A common name like Miller corresponded to 16 years, whereas Auerbach had 22.5 years. In his conclusions, further on, he found a disturbing correlation. Tables of data supported one hypothesis: residents were being forcibly removed. On a topographical map, an elliptical curve had the St. Ignatius Church as point O. The nearby tenement buildings and brownstones were repossessed, or leases terminated, the land bought up by a fronted property company, Allmen Inc., located in Weehawken, New Jersey.
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