Know Your Beholder: A Novel (11 page)

“And the light?”

“What about the light?”

“What’s its source?”

“Who knows?” Harriet said. “Maybe you are.”

That’s where she lost me. Harriet Gumm liked being provocative for the sake of being provocative.

“You should seriously pose for me,” she said.

Again I asked her why.

“Because I think you’d make a good subject. I’d pay you twenty bucks a sitting.”

“Nude?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the surface of the stool and imagined all the large black men who’d sat upon it, their anuses and perinea, their bulbous testicles dangling. Did she disinfect the top of the stool after each sitting? Was there like some special disposable doily that was utilized?

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

We were quiet for a moment. Harriet wouldn’t take her eyes off me. It was like she could see me naked. My atrophying muscle tissue and fish-belly skin. My average, flaccid, circumcised penis. The strange mole in my belly button that Kent used to say was Nestlé Toll House’s lost chocolate chip.

Her buzzer sounded. She crossed to the front door, let in whoever it was.

“A subject?” I said.

“Keith. Final session.”

“Time for the noose?”

She didn’t answer.

Before I let myself out, I said, “Should I shave?”

“No,” she said. “Keep the beard.”

And then I glanced at the triptych again and asked if she’d made a snowman in the past few days.

To which she answered: “I’ve never made a snowman in my life.”

I didn’t want to run into Keith, so I exited toward the second-floor aft staircase. From the stairwell window overlooking the backyard, I spied Mary Bunch on her way to the alleyway Dumpsters with a bloated black Hefty bag. With great effort, she lugged it through two feet of snow. I had an impulse to scream out to her. From behind the double-paned window she likely wouldn’t have heard me, but I still had to cover my mouth to stop myself.

What the hell was in that Hefty bag? I couldn’t contend with the dark possibilities, so I went down to the basement and started pacing the laundry room. There was a load tumbling in the dryer. Was it a load of the Bunches’? Were they washing bloodstains out of their clothes? I couldn’t quite get myself to open the dryer door and check.

After I heard Keith’s heavy feet pad across the second-floor hallway and disappear into Harriet Gumm’s apartment, I headed to the front porch to check the mail. Bradley was coming up the steps, wearing the black trench and skullcap, carrying a bag from Ace Hardware.

“Bradley,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Hey,” he said, the
y
barely resonating.

His beard had really cool cowlicks in it. Sort of silvery-blond whirlpools that seemed to have their own little fairy-tale universe. I imagined Lilliputians emerging, stealing crumbs, and diving back down into the depths. He could probably store things in his beard. Like almonds or match heads or even a mailbox key. He was almost fifteen years younger than me and his beard was teaching my beard a serious lesson.

For someone so low-pulse he seemed a bit agitated. It could have been the simple fact that he’d been walking and was out of breath. If he’d hoofed it all the way to the Ace Hardware and back, it meant that he’d covered some four miles.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He didn’t respond, so I said, “Long walk?”

“Longish,” he replied, hardly hitting the
g
.

He wore old mustard-yellow Chuck Taylors, which were soaked from the snow, and no socks. All of the buttons but one were missing from his black double-breasted trench. He kept it closed with a brown extension cord. Underneath the trench he wore a white thermal not dissimilar to the one I was wearing.

I pointed to his footwear and told him that he was going to get trench foot walking around in all the snow.

He didn’t respond.

He was starting to look homeless, a little malnourished. I could sense that we were about to start another awful, thick silence, one that contained the sad realization that I was the loser whom his sister had left and that I was even more of a loser because I tried to access her vicariously through her younger brother who didn’t even like me. For a second it felt as if our beards were communicating animalistically, independent of their owners, like two dogs sniffing each other’s asses on the street. Bradley’s beard smelled like weed and nacho cheese Doritos and some other faint but ripe moschatel odor I can only describe as deeply wrong.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked, worried about power tools, drywall anchors, carpentry nails, etc.

“Supplies,” he answered obliquely.

“Home improvements?”

“Yep,” he said.

I asked what needed improving, and he said nothing major. I said, “Anything you need help with?”

He shook his head.

What could he possibly be up to? I wanted to look in the bag. Was he making something? A new kind of bong? A nursery for growing weed? A pipe bomb?

Just then Mary Bunch walked onto the front porch and stomped snow off her boots. She was again in her many layers, the hazard-orange vest and conical winter hat. Her nose was running and she held two grocery bags from Econofoods. She said hello to Bradley, but her eyes bounced off me like I had a huge raised facial birthmark with fuzz. Then she keyed into her apartment and shut the door, turning the deadbolt on the other side.

I pointed to Bradley’s Ace Hardware bag and said, “No holes in the walls, now. That Sheetrock was expensive.”

He replied, “Okay, Dad.”

Somehow I liked Bradley calling me dad. An absurd notion, I’ll admit, but it made us feel related again, which meant that in some ludicrous reality burbling in the sad part of my mind, I was still in his sister’s life. I said, “You’re free to go, son.”

It came out way more paternally than I’d intended. I didn’t even recognize my own voice. I sounded like a high school principal who wears chinos or something. Bradley pushed past me and up the stairs.

It nearly gave me a heart attack to stray from the back porch and forge out into the alleyway, but I had to see what Mary Bunch had left in that Dumpster.

For the first time in a month I actually ventured from the house, trudging thirty or so feet through twenty-two inches of snow. At first I took baby steps, carefully lifting out of the depths of snow. It was slow going. My teeth chattered uncontrollably in that weird way that has nothing to do with the cold. My heart triple-timed in my chest, as if I’d been injected with some stimulant intended for racehorses. My mouth went dry and my tongue seemed to shrink. I thought my throat would close. I might as well have been teetering on an ancient mountain precipice.

I had stupidly worn my wool slippers and my bathrobe. A sudden gust sent a snow shower from the branches of the copper beech into my face and eyes, and a blackbird flapped wildly, as if on cue, and disappeared over the garage. It was as if someone had planted the bird. My blood pressure spiked. My heart beat in my mouth. I could feel my dick shrinking.

The tar-paper shelter over the Dumpsters gave me the false sense that I was at least partly enclosed, so that made it a little easier. Hands on thighs, like an oxygen-starved, postrace miler, I breathed through my nose and tried to calm down. I honestly thought I might have to go to a knee. I’d left my cell phone in the attic, so aside from shouting out to the snowbound neighborhood, there was no way to call for help.

What a terrible way to die this would be. A heart attack at thirty-six. Out back by the Dumpsters. In thermals and wool slippers. In not even two feet of snow. Literally scared to death for no good reason.

After I regained what was left of my composure, which wasn’t much, I worked quickly. Inside Mary Bunch’s Hefty bag, scattered among household refuse, were children’s clothes: a pair of navy sneakers with rainbow stickers on the sides; white T-shirts; old bibs with food stains; a few pairs of cotton pants; a denim jumpsuit with an elastic waistband; socks so small they seemed more suited for a doll; a baby bonnet; cotton turtlenecks; and a set of pink poly-blend mittens, joined with a clip.

Panic seized me again. The only thing that mattered was getting back inside.

That night I dreamed there was a basement under the basement. A subbasement, if you will, whose floor was soil, black as pitch. A distant crying lured me down there. Crying from a child, muffled and desperate. I had to enter the washing machine and shimmy down a flagpole, fireman-style. The pole was slick with a kind of warm, gelatinous substance and during my descent I had the distinct dream-mind thought that it would be impossible to climb back up, as the flagpole was without ruts or anything to grab hold of.

My mother was standing in the center of the soil floor, in her hospice gown. She was thin from her cancer, the bones in her face sharp and prominent, her collarbone enormous, a wisp of hair matted over her soft, pale skull. Bethany Bunch was pulled into her, held close, and my mother was covering the little girl’s eyes with her hands. Bethany wore only a diaper, though she seemed old enough for clothes. Her hair was a dirty-blond galaxy, almost pulsing with life. The room was very warm and humid. They were both covered with a film of sweat, both filthy from the soil. It was as if they had walked hundreds of miles and had nothing left, too tired even to sit.

Then I was suddenly barefoot and could feel between my toes the damp, cold earth, where worms wriggled.

“She’s blind, Francis,” my mother told me. Her voice was tired. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. From somewhere and everywhere. Below and above me. “The little girl is blind.”

I had the strange sense that there were other subbasements below this one, going on for infinity, with other lost children. A threnody of children’s voices sang from some recessed place. Ugly, unresolved, incomplete harmonies, wailing and feral.

The copper beech was suddenly in the little room. My mother and Bethany Bunch were gone. I had the horrible, certain feeling that the tree had swallowed them.

I woke up with such tenacious cottonmouth I had to check to make sure there wasn’t actual cotton in my mouth.

After instant coffee and some unamplified guitar noodling (unamplified guitar noodling always seems to help rid a bad-dream hangover), I called Mansard and told him about the Hefty bag.

He said, “Children’s clothes, huh?”

I mentioned the snowman and the pink scarf, the matching mittens.

Mansard said, “The mittens were in the garbage?”

“Yes.”

“And the scarf was on the snowman?”

“The scarf was on the snowman.”

“And you’re certain that it matched the mittens.”

“The mittens were pink and the scarf was pink.”

He said he would come by and take a look.

Later today, Baylor Phebe, a man in his early sixties, is coming by to have a look at the available basement unit, opposite Bob Blubaugh. According to his e-mail, Mr. Phebe is a retired junior high school teacher from down in Little Egypt—Cairo, Illinois, to be exact. He’s attending continuing ed classes at Willis Clay and is interested in a two-year lease. Mr. Phebe’s been staying in a local motel, paying a steep monthly rate, and is ready to make a larger real estate commitment. He has an authentic Southern accent, as do most people who hail from the lower third of the state, and the deep melody of his voice alone inspired me to move his request to the top of the small pile of three candidates, the other two being an undergraduate junior-college transfer student and a guy from Arkansas named Reggie Reggie. Both had poor references and nothing to speak of in terms of guaranteed income, and the landlord part of me is loath to offer a lease to someone who calls himself Reggie Reggie. Sirhan Sirhan comes to mind, or some homeless drag queen with third-degree burns. I think having a senior presence like Baylor Phebe around could be good for the overall ecology of the house.

“You’re going back to school, huh?” I asked him over the phone.

“Spring semester,” he said. “Just a few classes.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“I was,” he said. “My wife passed away three years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a formality. I have to ask.”

“Oh, no offense taken,” he said.

I asked him if he had kids.

“I have a daughter, lives up in Milwaukee.”

“Pets?”

“No pets,” he said. “No wife, no kids, no pets, no attachments whatsoever. It would just be me and my fishing poles.”

I called Dr. Hubie and spoke to his secretary, Julie Pepper. I told her about the pain in my tooth. I think I actually pretended to cry a little.

“Dr. Hubie doesn’t do house calls,” she said. “Most dentists don’t.”

I told her about my back. I was starting to really carve out some good fiction regarding the injury. A slipped disc. A “hot” disc fragmented onto one of my sciatic nodes. Shooting pains radiating down my left leg. A terrible snowballing ache. I learned about all of this on the Internet.

“I really can’t get down the stairs,” I told her. “Can you at least ask him to call me?”

“I’ll put you on the list,” she said.

Around noon, Todd Bunch knocked on my door. I was rotating thermals, sending the under layer to the laundry basket, replacing it with the outer layer, and adding a new set on top. I also had changed into a new pair of wool socks, probed my ears with Q-tips, applied Mennen Speed Stick, musk-scented, and trimmed a few nose hairs that were on the verge of autogenously braiding themselves into my mustache, à la Detective Shelley Mansard.

Tying the terry-cloth sash around my bathrobe, I said, “Mr. Bunch.”

He was sporting a crew cut, which, in sharp contrast to his former floppy head of spaghetti-sauce-red hair, made him look like a young Marine in training. Either that or a counselor at a Christian youth camp. Was the crew cut an attempt to change his image? To avoid being publicly recognized as the evil father of little Bethany, the prevailing media opinion of him?