Dan (12 page)

“Dr. Buck warned me you would ask about that,” he said. “He told me that you would become agitated whatever answer I gave and so I shouldn’t say anything. He recommended that I assign you to a part of the house where your mind would be occupied by a form of entertainment.”

“I’ll go,” said Melba. “I’ve heard that entertainment is a cure for being tired and for being wide awake as well. It might be exactly what I need. I didn’t know there was any part of Dan with a functioning form of entertainment.”

“You haven’t been paying much attention to the candidates if you think they’re making promises about entertainment,” said Don Pond. “Haven’t you been listening to the speeches?”

“Only when I can’t avoid them,” said Melba. “When someone calls me at the bakery or at my house or bikes along next to me with a megaphone.”

“I like that you look at my head when you talk to me,” said Don Pond in a rush. “Dr. Buck told me not to say that to you either, but I couldn’t help it.”

“Thank you,” said Melba, looking at Don Pond’s head more intently, although she knew that she did not deserve his compliment. As a girl, she hadn’t given heads their due, until one day her father took her to the Dan Diner. There she was reprimanded by the waitress, Barb Owen. Barb Owen had slammed mugs of coffee on the table, jostling the pink tablet settling into Melba’s drinking water. Melba stared at the bubbles streaming up inside the tall glass of drinking water. She skimmed the surface foam with the tip of her spoon then placed the spoon carefully on the napkin beside two other spoons. She wondered what to order. She thought she might like something with gravy. Meanwhile, Zeno Zuzzo was talking about the landbridge.

“In conclusion, crossing the landbridge was a beleaguering experience,” concluded Zeno Zuzzo. “I would have swum! But land was the new thing then. It was like a fad! Walking on land was the big thing.”

“Were there shoes yet?” asked Melba.

“No shoes,” said Zeno Zuzzo. He ordered the lunch special and Barb Owen brought Zeno and Melba Zuzzo each a Turkey Dinner. She slammed them on the table. Melba watched the gravy slowly lap the rim of the gravy boat. After finishing her Turkey Dinner, Melba waited at the door while her father brought the check up to the counter. Suddenly Barb Owen was beside her, bending over her, pushing her face close to Melba’s face.

“You are an anarchist, Melba Zuzzo,” she shouted. “You’re always looking at people’s hands or talking about their feet! Why can’t you pay attention to heads like a regular person?”

Stunned, Melba shrank back, but not before she had looked closely at Barb Owen’s head. She understood in an instant why Barb Owen was upset. Barb Owen had a sensational head, a head that warranted inspection. Melba had never thought of herself as an anarchist, but whatever term you put to it, her behavior had been wrong: looking down all the time, introducing shoes into conversation while sitting down at the table to eat turkey and gravy in a public venue. If it wasn’t anarchism, it was something very close, and Melba felt deeply ashamed, a feeling that stayed with her no matter how much praise she received. It felt good, receiving praise from Don Pond, but it could not alleviate the shame. Barb Owen deserved the praise, not Melba. Melba’s smile was bittersweet.

“Anyway,” she said, “I don’t care very much about politics. Mayor Bunt is as good a mayor as any other, so why we have to go through an election is beyond me.”

“I know someone who might change your mind,” said Don Pond. “He’s a candidate and if he wins the election he’s going to transform Dan completely.”

“Is that what you want?” asked Melba, curious.

“Depends on the kind of transformation,” said Don Pond. “This candidate will make us all rich. I don’t care so much about being rich myself, but it would be nice to be a citizen in a town of millionaires. Everyone in Henderson would go green with envy and everyone in Gerardville and Manstown and Wilma too, everyone in every town everywhere, once they hear how high on the hog we all are. We’ll have to fill all the warehouses in the hosiery district with our riches. I don’t know if you’ve noticed Melba, ensconced in the bakery like you are, but there’s a dearth of jobs in Dan. Unemployment is more enjoyable if you’re rich and this candidate I mentioned, he figured that out. And what a personality! Everything he says redounds to his credit. There is absolutely nothing I wouldn’t do for him.”

“Does Mayor Bunt know you’re talking like this?” asked Melba. “Sort of zany and avaricious?”

“I’m sure he does,” said Don Pond. “His spies are everywhere. I can’t look for them in more than one place at a time. It’s against the laws of physics. If I check under the couch, who’s to guarantee they haven’t darted into the corner, or run all the way into the kitchen?”

“I heard something under the couch,” said Melba. “And noises were coming from that corner as well. I thought it was animals making the noises but it could have been spies.”

Don Pond looked at her incredulously and Melba blinked, her cheeks mottling with a deep, irregular blush.

“Oh, you must think I’m daft,” said Melba. “I hadn’t realized until now …”

“What did you think the animals around Dan were doing if not spying?” asked Don Pond, chuckling. Generally, his modesty prevented him from indulging his sense of superiority, but this was a special occasion, ripe for merry condescension, which could be easily attributed to a spontaneous overflow of protective tenderness rather than self-congratulation, the more immodest option, and so Don Pond chuckled on, not bothering to check his glee.

“Every animal you see in Dan is one of Mayor Bunt’s henchmen!” said Don Pond. “You must be the only person in Dan who didn’t know that. Hadn’t you noticed the way people talk in Dan? Always skirting around the most important issues, never coming to the point? It’s because we can’t speak freely, not with spies in every nook and cranny.”

“Did Bev Hat know?” asked Melba. Don Pond’s face darkened until skin and beard seemed to run together, forming an unsuggestive blot.

“There was never any Bev Hat,” said Don Pond. “She was a fabrication, invented by Mayor Blunt to stir sympathies. The young mother who died tragically in the service of our glorious mayor! It’s perfect isn’t it?”

“If there was never any Bev Hat,” Melba caught her breath as the implication struck her. “If there was never any Bev Hat, then she can’t have returned from the dead as Melba Zuzzo! I knew I hadn’t become Bev Hat, but I was still so disturbed … the very idea that I might suddenly be someone I didn’t think I was before. A wife and mother at that!”

“I’m glad you’re relieved,” said Don Pond. “Some women would be disappointed. Bev Hat was the feminine ideal. No man was immune to her charms.”

“I am glad,” said Melba. Don Pond dropped the hand vacuum on the table. It clunked. Melba looked at the hand vacuum then back at Don Pond. His eyes bore into hers and he pulled a small pad out of his back pocket, making a note with a tiny pencil.

“How would you rate the gladness?” he asked. “On a scale of one to ten.”

Melba began to feel uneasy.

“It’s average gladness,” she said. “Maybe that means I’m not glad at all? I’m just existing without actively ruing anything in particular. I suppose I’m numb rather than glad. But given how much pain there is in the world, I should think I’m glad to be numb? So maybe numbness is a form of being glad after all.”

“Five?” asked Don Pond. Melba inched forward on the couch. It had grown humid in Don Pond’s house and the vapors in the air pushed against her. She felt as though she was wading through a pack of damp Labradors. The dim light that came through the windows illuminated the suspended water molecules, which had grown larger, and Melba saw the graininess of the air more distinctly than the objects she hoped to see
through
the air: the room’s furniture and wall-hangings, its doors. Everything around her was gray and somewhat obscured.

“At first I thought there was an obscurity inhering in my perceptions,” murmured Melba. “But it’s coming from the room, I’m sure of it. The room is making a cloud.”

Don Pond seemed to be approaching, but she could not see him any more clearly as he neared; the graininess was growing more marked between them.

“I wonder what you’d look like without a beard?” she asked.

“Why do you wonder?” Don Pond’s voice was steady.

“I don’t really wonder,” said Melba. “It’s just sooner or later, if one person has a beard and is in the company of another person, the beard becomes a topic. I should have said something else about the beard, a statement and not a question. I should have shared a fact maybe. Did you know that growing a beard that’s a different color from the rest of your hair is an expression of weakness in the genes? Oh no, that was somehow still a question, wasn’t it? Well, the point is that the brain of the man with this kind of beard tends to go soft. Your beard is very uniform in color and very small and thick, and it matches your eyebrows and your head hair quite exactly, and, you know, it doesn’t look quite real, not for a man, it looks like it was produced by a mink and then cut into the shape of a beard and stuck onto your face, and I was just wondering if you could take it off, oh,” said Melba, flustered. “I’ve done it again. Leave your beard on, I don’t care.” She smoothed her own hair with damp palms, then smoothed her apron, then moved her shoulders up and down as she’d seen her mother do so many times, limbering.

“Well,” she said, brightly. “I think I’ll be going.”

Don Pond raised his eyebrows, which looked very much like two wedges cut from either side of his beard, rotated 180 degrees, and stuck on above his eyes.

“Where will you go?” asked Don Pond.

“I’ll go home,” laughed Melba, aware that the sound of her laughter and the convulsions of her diaphragm were out of sync. One or the other was delayed. She felt vaguely nauseated by it and stopped laughing abruptly.

“Isn’t that where people go?” she continued, uncertainly. “When they … go? If they’re not already there? Home, I mean?”

She slid closer to the cushion’s edge and caught her breath. The couch seemed higher. She tried to grip the black vinyl. Slowly, she stretched out her legs, straining, pointing her toes. The carpet was somewhere below, out of reach.

“You should call first,” said Don Pond. He circled around the table and reached out to Melba. Don Pond’s hand was cool and pale and unnaturally smooth.

“That’s skin?” asked Melba, rotating her fingers in his grasp.

“Oh,” said Don Pond, and tugged so that Melba’s feet thudded down.

“It wasn’t so far, after all,” she said, straightening her knees and standing upright. “But if you’re afraid of heights, it doesn’t really matter how high up you are, does it? It’s like how you can drown in an inch of water? My mother told me about a schoolmate of hers, Josie Pride, who drowned crying in bed. You should never cry in bed, face down obviously, but even face up or on your side, it depends on the planes of your face, how the water runs, but really, everyone’s nose and mouth is downhill of the eyes, and when Josie Pride was discovered she was scarcely recognizable. Her parents thought at first she’d been abducted and some puffy dummy had been jammed under the bedclothes as a decoy, because abductions
do
happen in Dan, all the time, said my mother, and the abductors have been known to leave dummies in place of the abducted children, not as decoys, but as poppets designed to tempt the parents into pagan acts of sympathetic magic, just for fun, said my mother, because abductors in Dan are those listless types who turn to devilry to stay awake, trampling circles in people’s yards, using the blood of children to raise chthonic gods of madness and corruption, and they told my mother they wanted me in particular, because my blood is tainted and tainted blood is more compelling to chthonic gods than untainted blood, and my mother had to hold them off by giving them the allowance money she would have given me otherwise and sometimes threatening violent retaliation, and if I exhausted her too much with needs and wants she would have gotten tired and stopped holding them off altogether, so I had to leave her alone and not bother her about snacks and shoes and new dresses with pretty smocking and things of that nature or she’d have let them drag me away and open up my chest on an altar that would have just been an old telephone cable spool so I’d have gotten splinters too, but don’t cry about it, my mother said, or you’ll drown, like Josie Pride, who wasn’t a dummy after all, but was herself, wet and dead on the bottom bunk, and …”

Melba suspected that she was blathering. She couldn’t make out what she was saying but her voice droned on and on. Don Pond was leading her by the hand, that was the reason. Melba hadn’t been led by the hand in quite some time and had forgotten the loosening effect it had on the tongue.

Don Pond led her through thickening mist into a narrow corridor.

“Did you leave the tea kettle boiling?” asked Melba but Don Pond didn’t answer. Melba slid the fingers of her free hand along the dark paneling that seemed to press in against her. It was damp and rough and when she hooked her fingers they bumped and snagged again and again on little dips and rises. The animal sounds were louder, coming from both sides of the corridor, and from above: chirping, rustling, mewling, rapid, wheezy breaths.

“Here’s the phone,” said Don Pond. It wasn’t a wall phone, the kind one finds in a business, but a phone installed on a horizontal surface, in a small alcove in the wall at chest height, the kind of phone one finds in a house. Melba had never dialed her own number, but it happened to be one of the most common sequences of numerals, and she dialed confidently.

“It’s ringing,” she said. “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Mark Rand.

“Is everything quite alright?” asked Melba. “At the house?”

“You left dishes in the sink, Melba,” said Mark Rand, reprovingly. Melba tucked the receiver more firmly between her ear and shoulder and hunched into the wall, hoping Don Pond couldn’t hear her conversation.

“I didn’t,” she whispered. “One dish maybe. And my coffee mug.”

“Dishes,” insisted Mark Rand. “I’ve documented them. This isn’t the first time, Melba. Have you been watering your plants on a schedule? Don’t answer. You haven’t been. Two of them are dead and the rest are performing poorly. There are no towels in the bathroom. Your bedroom hamper is full of unlaundered clothing.”