Centuries of June (6 page)

L
ost in her story, and feeling strangely responsible for its outcome, I averted my gaze from her shining face and studied her toes, which heretofore I had failed to fully appreciate. Her feet were beautiful and soft, as if newly sculpted, and I scrutinized their graceful lines, imagining all kinds of sensual activities, with a devout attention.

“Bup-bup-bup-bup.” The old man sang out a warning, and I looked up at the war club poised in her two hands lifted over her head and the mad glee in Dolly’s eyes as she prepared to smash my bean. With startling alacrity, he jumped next to her and shot out his right arm like a piston and clamped his fingers around her wrist. For all his ostensible frailty, the old bugger displayed an iron grip, and the club did not budge an inch.

“Vengeance is mine,” she hissed between her teeth.

“Sayeth the Lord,” he corrected her, nose to nose. “You are excluding one-half of the quotation, which utterly destroys its intent. Partial quoters are the scourge of debate, and selective citation is the refuge of manipulators and charlatans. ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth
the Lord.’ Leviticus, I believe. Not your place, surely, to seek revenge, and I encourage you to surrender this shillelagh of yours before it accidentally goes off. Honestly, Dolly.”

Locked in immortal struggle, the two figures bristled with tightly wound energy, like two locomotives butting on the same track. Whispers of steam escaped from the corners of their clamped lips and the curlicues of their ears. Had I the slightest reflexes, I would have joined him in the fray, but some flaw of courage or instinct kept me stationary, a stoic witness to both my threat and my salvation. She panted and sneered at him, the anger pulsing at her temples. A small but distinctly metal squeak followed the tightening vise of his five digits, and she cried out sharply and let go the club, which landed with a clunk in the sink. Cradling her wrist, Dolly slumped back against the counter. She would not look at me and turned her head, though the bitterness in her eyes reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror.

My head ached again, either from my ancient wound or the complex implications of her story. The pain was not only in my mind but also two or three spots on my chest and shoulders, phantom aches of an empathetic nature. Given the tenor of her story, I found myself oddly drawn to X’oots, the bear man, and his self-sacrifice, and totally appalled by the dog Chewing Ribs. Somewhere in the house, my gentle cat practiced his diffidence. Behind the cabinet doors, pharmaceuticals promised hope and relief—an aspirin, perhaps an ibuprofen. As I was debating over which to take, it occurred to me that an hour or so must have passed since Dolly entered the room and began her story. A sleeping pill might be in order, but I did not want to take one too close to the hour I was supposed to be awake.

“Excuse me,” I said to them both and left to find the correct time. Without a word, they waved me off into the darkness just outside the bathroom door. The overhead light, which I had certainly turned on when fetching the bottle of whiskey, had been flicked off. Playing with
the switch illuminated nothing, and the hall dripped dark as a tomb. From the bathroom, snatches of conversation rode the air. “… the sixteenth century,” she said. He asked, “So what have you been doing with yourself these five hundred years?” Surprised by the old man’s question, I looked back and saw him standing close in front of her, nearly pinning her to the counter, his left arm extended and his palm against the mirror, and Dolly leaning back, her shoulders squared, a coy smile parting her lips. Distracted by their flirtations, I tried to fathom how and why I was alone in the darkness. The light switch failed again, but the household stairs could be negotiated even if I were blind. Closing my eyes, I grabbed the railing and lifted my toes over the abyss.

With no difficulty, my left foot found the first step, and my right the second. Thirteen to go. I remembered the thousands of journeys up and down these stairs, and the house was a great relief and shield against the aura of doom that had threatened me since I fell. In
The Poetics of Space
, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” As long as I am in my own house, there is nothing to fear, for it seemed to me that the house could be trusted when everything else posed nothing but mysteries and questions. I love the
Poetics
and at the architectural firm where I work, when no one else was around, I would read it furtively at my desk. The book sort of just landed in my hands at a moment of particular despair over my future as an architect. For the life of me, I can’t remember who gave it to me. Someone important, who has escaped through the hole in my head.

Despite the utter gloom of the staircase, I made it to the bottom step without tripping and killing myself. The switch downstairs had been positioned between off and on, so I corrected the situation and illuminated everything. Pupils dilating, I stumbled into the kitchen. On the digital clock built into the stove, I punched in one minute on the timer and waited. While the digits did not regress, the beeper sounded its alarm
after the appropriate interlude. Certain that some electromagnetic catastrophe had stopped the power, I went to the window but saw nothing but the dead of night, not the least hint of the dawn that should have been there. I scratched my head and suppose I would still be doing so had not a sudden clunk, like a chair losing a leg or a Tlingit woman staving my father’s skull, sounded in the room over my head.

The urge to flee tugged at the hem of my bathrobe, but I ignored it as one might a pestering child. This is my home after all, and I was determined to figure out what was happening here. Moreover, I had the dim sense that I was missing someone else in the house, someone dear to me, whom I should protect from harm. I could not quite place her name at the moment, but my short-term memory may have been hampered by the concussion. Someone I love may have been at risk, so I screwed on my courage and marched to the stairwell, now shrouded in darkness again, with the switch at the top stuck in the middle position.

More comfortable in the shadows, I took the steps in pairs and reached the top in no time. All doors leading off the landing were closed; behind each, dead silence. I thought of one other clock and entered my office, sat down at the desk, and pushed the start button on the computer. The flash of light and trumpeting notes that the machine played as it came to life nearly scared me to death, and I momentarily wondered if the noise had awakened anyone else in the house. A blue screen gave way to corporate graphics, and the icons popped into view like blooming flowers. In the corner, the time remained fixed, and though I could not fathom why it was still 4:52, I was pleased to know that all of the clocks in the house were in sync.

Laughter from the bathroom filtered through the ventilation ducts, a disembodied titter that sounded like a happy memory, and upon opening the bathroom door, I discovered its source. Dolly sat on the edge of the tub and standing inside, behind her, the old man ran a brush through her long black hair. Mild surprise registered on their faces for
an instant when they saw me, but then they resumed without the slightest show of modesty. He appeared to be taking some sensual pleasure with each stroke, and she relaxed under his gentle attentions. Pangs of envy poked at my stomach.

“Was there an accident?” I asked. “There was a thump a while ago, like a chair that toppled over.”

“A chair would be a provident addition to this room,” he said, and now caressed her hair with his fingers. “Where have you been all this time? Dolly here was regaling me further with the erotic version of the ‘Woman Who Married an Octopus’ and other tales of her Tlingit cousins.” As he spoke, his eight arms encircled her and withdrew when he came to the end of his sentence.

She opened her eyes, and on her night-black irises, two moons rose and arced across the sky, changing phases from waxing to full to waning to no moon at all. “Old stories are best,” she said, “for love and truth.”

“I’m not sure what to make of your story,” I said.

The old man stepped out of the bathtub and interjected himself between the girl and me, and then he laid a fatherly hand on my shoulder to walk us a few paces farther. She began to sing in her native language a kind of chant that, while confined to a repetitive rhythm and scale, possessed a certain hypnotic charm. Under the sound, he spoke in a confidential whisper. “I wouldn’t bring up the matter of personal tragedies, Sonny. She’s been brooding over a grave injustice forever, and it’s quite a grudge.”

I replied in a soft voice, “But what’s that got to do with me?”

“Best to change the subject.” When he winked, a third eye appeared on the shut lid. Not a working eyeball, but rather a crude approximation in the thick line drawn by an eyebrow pencil or similar crayon. “Follow my lead, if you please.” He ushered me back to the toilet, and we resumed the positions of our initial encounter, the sole exception being
Dolly’s presence on the bathtub edge to my father’s left. She finished her chant to polite applause. “You were telling me,” he spoke in a loud, artificial voice, “about the bicycle girls.”

My face wore a befuddled expression, a look I have seen more than once in official photographs of myself, such as those required for a driver’s license or international passport, the kind of picture snapped at the subject’s worst moment.

“The ladies and the bicycles,” the old man insisted. The furrows of his brow, carefully etched by decades of worry and frustration, deepened to a row of crevasses, and the blue of his eyes whitened to ice. “The naked women in your bed. You were about to establish causation, man. Surely, you are one of the most forgetful little bastards I have ever met.”

His clues, verbal and visual, sparked nothing. Dolly rolled her eyes. “Mind like a sieve.”

“Holier than a Swiss cheese,” he rejoined. “An empty beehive.”

“A bucketful of holes.”

Rubbing the bristly top of his hair, the old man was at a loss.

Dolly assayed another. “He uses a salmon net when fishing for herring.”

“Well done,” he said. Raising her fingertips to her lips, she played the coquette. On her left eyelid, the same third eye had been drawn, to match the old man’s. What antic games, I wondered, occur in my absence?

He turned to me. “Your line, I believe, was ‘When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the something something sky.’ ”

“Mirrors to the sky,” I said. “On the chrome handlebars and bumpers, a million little suns reflected. But that’s all I can remember.”

“The opposite of the elephant,” Dolly said, “who never forgets.”

“A leaky cauldron.”

“An unwound clock.”

“The cyclical amnesiac.” He bowed.

“Well played.” Now, she addressed me directly. “Whenever I lose something, I always retrace my steps beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Or until what’s missing is found. Shall we look for your mind? What is the last thing you can recall?”

Falling. My face smashing against the bathroom floor, a tsunami of blood sweeping across the tiles and washing against the white wall of the tub. “Checking the time on my watch.”

“Good,” the old man said. “Progress. So, you arrive home this afternoon at eight minutes till the hour and there were seven bicycles heaped in a tangle of spokes and chains, and then what happened?”

“I have never seen bicycles out in front of the house, but then again I am not usually here at that particular hour during the workweek, and I thought perhaps they belonged to some schoolchildren who left their bicycles and ran off to play. They looked chained and locked together, the bicycles, not the children, and there were no children. Nobody was about despite the fineness of the hour, the warm weather returning. You can feel the change in the air.”

“The days are on the mend,” the old man said.

Dolly patted his leg and deposited her hand upon his knee. “June. The birds and the bees, the scent of love a-bloomin’ yet again. Maybe you left work early because of an assignation?”

“An illicit rendezvous with delight,” he said.

“Love in the afternoon,” said Dolly, and the point was won.

I was reasonably certain that was not the case, though this talk of love whipped another chain of images through my brain. A woman, surrounded by fireflies, and something I intended to do or say to her. Love, yes. I knew I was in love with someone I could not quite remember. On a spring afternoon when I opened the door of a taxi for her, she touched my arm and smiled when she got in and drove away. After she
was gone, she lingered in the air. A different story unfolded in the pea of my brain.

“No, not a tryst. It was a day like every other single day. I was a bit fatigued and bored, nearly fell asleep at my desk, so having nothing pressing, I left the firm a little early. The bicycles waited in the yard in front of the house all jumbled together like a knot, and I just stood there wondering when the singing began—”

“Singing bicycles!” Bemused, he clapped his leathery hands together, sending a talc of dead skin puffing like a cloud.