Know Your Beholder: A Novel (32 page)

Baylor spent most of his time in the bathroom, shitting and puking and hocking loogies, by the sound of it. I have no idea how he’d managed to negotiate his mass into that cramped space. He would periodically emerge and apologize to the group, his voice hoarse and somehow deeper than its usual baritone. The hangover seemed to have shaken him in some existential way, as if he’d glimpsed his own mortality for the first time in years.

Emily sat on the sofa, a worried expression on her face. She managed to exchange a few texts with the assistant stage manager of the play, which had been canceled for that evening.

I sat on the bunk underneath which I’d discovered my mother’s manuscript and spent the first hour or so rereading Cornelia’s novella while the tornado siren continued.

Again, I was stunned by the storytelling, impressed with the prose, and convinced that my mother had spent a long time working on it. Nothing this good could be done quickly or impulsively. I imagined her hoarding her private thoughts, walking slowly around the house, working out the narrative complexities in her head, daydreaming about the two characters for years. Had she ever told anyone about it? Had she ever had hopes of publishing it or was the pure act of writing it enough?

Occasionally, in between paragraphs, I would glance over at Emily. I wondered if she remembered our time in the car or if getting high had erased it. I found myself searching her eyes, craving that flicker of recognition, but Emily was clearly preoccupied with her ailing father, a stitch of worry knitting her brows together.

The Bunches had yet to make an appearance and I was worried that they’d been swallowed by a funnel, their bodies divulsed, their skeletons cartwheeling through the apocalyptic skies.

Halfway through my mother’s manuscript I was seized by the terrible thought that I could murder someone. Even with all the infuriating things I’d gone through with Glose, I’d never been visited by a homicidal impulse. I’m not sure if it was my mother’s story working on me, the madness of close quarters, my erratic anxiety about the outside world, the sound of Baylor’s intestinal suffering in the small bathroom, the chaos above us, the general downward spiral in which I had been engulfed, or the combination of all of it. But like the character whose name I shared in my mother’s story, I could feel a murder in my hands, the thrill of it pulsing at my wrists.

The tornado siren seemed to be in cahoots with these thoughts. Like the Francis in the story, I imagined using a hammer. A classic iron carpenter’s hammer, well balanced, with a long hardwood handle. But whom would I kill? And why—to what end?

Nevertheless, there I was, sitting with my mother’s manuscript, actually seeing myself staving in some faceless person’s head, the nauseating pleasure it would unlock. It made me sick to my stomach and I lurched toward the toilet, spilling my mother’s pages to the floor.

Baylor was just emerging from the bathroom, having left a terrible smell in his wake, which I endured as I vomited into the toilet. Not much came out, mostly bile and air and a foul bitter taste. I flushed the toilet, vomited again, flushed once more, then just stood over the commode with my elbows on my knees.

I felt a hand on my back and turned.

It was Emily. “Are you okay?” she asked. Her warm, soft hand radiated between my shoulder blades. “You’re shaking,” she said.

The winding note of the siren keened above us, faint but certain. You could also hear the distant sounds of things cracking, like old ships tossed around in some epic sea storm. Perhaps houses on our street. Trees being ripped out by their roots. The pavement being halved.

I told Emily that I’d probably eaten something that didn’t agree with me. I rinsed my mouth in the sink and wiped my beard.

“Here,” she said, offering a cup of water from the cooler.

I drank the whole thing and thanked her. The space between us was charged with desperation. Our faces were so close that I could feel the heat of her sweet breath.

“Thank you for last night,” she said. “I had a nice time talking to you.”

Her throat looked so vulnerable, the skin above her collarbone soft and marked with a small dark mole. I raised my hand to touch it, placed my fingers beside her Adam’s apple, where I felt her pulse. She placed her hand over my fingers. I felt intoxicated—both confused and enlivened by my dark thoughts of a few minutes before.

“Me too,” I replied.

When we emerged from the bathroom, Baylor was sitting on the floor beside the water cooler.

Emily led me to the sofa and then got me some more water. When she handed me the cup, I asked her if she wouldn’t mind bringing me my mother’s scattered pages, which she was kind enough to do. Because they weren’t numbered, I spent the next hour or so getting them back in order. Emily sat beside me on the sofa, trying to use her phone to field any news about the tornadoes. But the Wi-Fi had been down since the storm began and cellular networks were sketchy at best.

Though I’d never actually seen him cross to the other side of the room, Bob Blubaugh was now sitting near Baylor, fiddling with the ham radio. After a few minutes, he was able to tune in to a report that said the family of tornadoes—four in total—had moved some twenty miles south, toward Jefferson and Franklin Counties, but regardless, the siren continued.

“We should stay put,” Bob suggested calmly, and we all agreed that it would be wisest to wait until the siren ceased. He was the most poised after all, and even though I was perhaps the only one who knew of his Olympic background, there was something about his vibe—the calm confidence—that suggested a quiet heroism.

Baylor’s face had gone so gray it was practically green. We met eyes for the first time. It was strange that we were both throwing up, albeit for very different reasons.

“I think I damn near poisoned myself last night,” he said, his back against the cinder-block wall, stomach spilling out in front of him. His sweatshirt now had several stains on it. “I hope I wasn’t too much of an idiot,” he added.

I congratulated him on opening the play and told him that his performance was already being called legendary.

“I probably killed so many brain cells I’ll be lucky if I remember my lines.”

His daughter told him to keep drinking water and he nodded and filled his cup and drank.

In the corner, Harriet Gumm continued to keep to herself. I found it curious that someone so self-possessed and provocative in a one-on-one setting was so withdrawn around the other tenants. At one point she opened her eyes, removed the earbuds, and said, “Where are the Bunches?”

We looked around at one another. Not a single word was uttered.

“I pray they’re okay,” Baylor finally offered.

This was the first time I had been in a forum with my tenants, but I wasn’t about to broach the topic of little Bethany and start soliciting opinions. It was clear that, instead, it would turn out to be something we conspicuously
wouldn’t
talk about. You could almost feel the subject braiding itself into some enormous knot of Unit 1 angst right there in the middle of the shelter.

Emily found a deck of cards among the board games and dealt herself a round of solitaire. I wanted to reach out and take her hand as I had the night before, but I was still stuck with those dark thoughts of violence and felt my stomach tightening once more.

After I finally got the manuscript arranged, I placed it in the stationery box and secured its cover. I decided that for the time being it was best to get a healthy distance from the sneaky, haunting prose of my mother’s story.

At six thirty the siren finally ceased and we all rose and filed out of the bomb shelter. Harriet was first, with her large black cylinder, followed by Bob Blubaugh, with his hardcover book, and Baylor lurching behind him, Emily’s hand on his back. I made sure all the lights were off and headed up to the basement. Then I lowered the shelter door and locked it.

I half expected to find the roof blown off. Or a tree driven through a wall. But there was no evidence that the tornadoes had even touched the house. Everything was in its right place. There wasn’t even a cracked window.

We walked around the porch as a kind of forlorn, confused unit. The air coming in through the screened-in panels was thick, rich as earthworms.

Next door to us, the Coynes’ Tudor had been all but completely demolished. The joints of the house were on full display now. The original beams and joists were exposed—ancient, discolored. The walls were torn here and there, revealing the skeletal lath-and-plaster. Conduit snaking every which way, like some giant android’s circulatory system flung at the house in protest. Absurdly, a bedroom on the second floor appeared to be the only thing left intact, the bed still made. The living room sofa was abutting the space where the front door used to be. I imagined the door being sucked into a funnel, centrifuged, and spat into the Blackhawk River. There were parts of bikes and seemingly hundreds of books splayed, flayed, and heaped in an enormous pile. Broken glass glinted like gems. Their cat—an Abyssinian with yellow eyes—was slinking through the debris like a thief.

I would later learn that when the tornadoes touched down on our street, the Coynes were safely in the basement. Apparently, Neil Coyne pulled his shoulder out of its socket rushing his two children from their rooms.

We stood around the wicker furniture, staring at the wreckage in disbelief. It looked like a war zone.

Two weeks have passed since the tornadoes.

The arrival of May has been a blur. Delayed no doubt by the local environmental confusion, the bees have finally appeared—the bees and the morning birds, chattering in the trees like church ladies gossiping in the parking lot of the cathedral I no longer attend.

There’s a hornet’s nest just outside my finial window. The deep slow buzz of their heavy wings is ominous and mechanical-sounding. They are industrious, a militant force. They have no faces, only soulless, malevolent, giant eyes. I fear they are geniuses and will somehow work their way through the screen and attack me in my sleep.

The governor of Illinois has declared Pollard an official disaster zone and the American Red Cross from all over the state has descended on us. Their Windbreakers, crimson with white letters, are a welcome sight. Relief workers have been picking through the remains of the neighborhood. The National Guard set up camp at the high school gymnasium, where they and the Red Cross and the Pollard Fire Department have been helping the displaced and the homeless. The gymnasium has been functioning as a kind of community checkpoint. If you can’t find your home or your family, this is where you’re urged to go. If you encounter a stray pet, bring it to the YMCA.

Current reports hold that fourteen people are dead, but several more are still missing. The death toll gets updated every day or so; it’s gone from an initial three up to fourteen. One child, a four-year-old from Doheny Street, was crushed by a felled telephone pole. An elderly deaf woman, working in her garden over by the Blackhawk River and unable to hear the sirens, was sucked into the turbulent skies and has not been found.

The Red Cross is walking around, making calls on their cell phones, comforting the vanquished. There is something missionary-like about their presence in Pollard. It feels like they believe in God or some other mythical higher power. They are benevolent. They nod a lot and make concerned faces when they listen. They are huggers and shoulder squeezers. I suppose where devastation lurks God can’t be far behind, the old cagey Trickster.

I keep thinking that this is what war must look like. This is what it must be like on a daily basis for people in Gaza, Syria, Cairo, Islamabad.

The images on the local news have been dizzying. One home was so annihilated that all that remains is the foundation, a pond of gray concrete. There are slain trees and far-flung telephone poles. A lone chimney, the house blown to smithereens around it. A granite public library lion sent through the storefront window of the H&R Block across the street. An automatic dishwasher planted two feet into a front yard, as if birthing itself from the soil. Two churches, St. Bart’s and Annunciation, lost their steeples. The Pollard Little League fence, with all its hokey local business signage, wound up in a cornfield twelve miles away, hardly a buckle in its arrangement, hardly a placard out of place. A German shepherd was found on the roof of the Cineplex. A number of disparate birds—swallows, crows, doves, a pheasant—were discovered under a porch, huddled together as if from the same flock.

People are bivouacking on their front lawns, living in RVs and aluminum camper-trailers. Pup tents have been cropping up all over Pollard, Illinois, like dandelions. The Target, untouched, has been donating supplies to the Red Cross.

Surveyors and insurance representatives and city planning officials continue to mill in the middle of my street, drinking boxed coffee and eating donuts with sprinkles, matter-of-factly speaking into walkie-talkies as if they’ve done the drill a thousand times.

My neighbor Neil Coyne wears a sling, returning every so often to wade among the ruins of his home like someone encountering artifacts from another planet. At one point he bent down and picked up a toy train—obviously his young son’s—only to drop it in exasperation onto the wasteland of debris.

The Coynes’ unscathed second-floor bedroom is astonishing to look at. The king-size bed is, in fact, still made, two weeks into the cleanup, preserved perhaps as some defiant display of survival. At a closer look, one can see a framed family photo perfectly centered on the wall: the Coynes and their two children, no doubt done at the portrait studio in the mall. There is also a bureau with a small lamp on it, and a rectangular mirror, unscathed, over the bureau. Somehow this room was pardoned. Everything else was decimated. Their antique French snooker table, however—the late-nineteenth-century prize centerpiece of their family room—was discovered two blocks away with hardly a scratch on it, seemingly parked in the driveway of the Deardruffs’, with the cue ball miraculously cradled in a side pocket.

Across the street, the roof of the Grooms’ house was ripped off and sent to another neighborhood a half-mile away, where it landed on the roof of another house. A roof on a roof. Go figure.

The other day, as Hazard Groom stared up at his temporary tarpaulin roof riffling in the wind, I heard him telling his insurance rep that he wanted his old roof back. “I don’t
want
a replacement,” he bemoaned in his front yard, where his ancient oak had lost half its girth, as if reduced by chemotherapy. “I want the godforsaken
original
!” he shouted at the insurance rep—a black man in a white shirt and tie who wore an orange hard hat, as if he was one of Hazard’s former football players.

Eugenia Groom, a pole of flesh with a hairdo and arms, stood a few feet away, the devoted acolyte to her husband’s wrath.

A few hundred feet east of the Coynes’ lies a car in the middle of the street, an overturned silver Hyundai, perfectly centered like some undergraduate practical joke.

A basketball goal hangs in the Schefflers’ oak tree—the pole, the backboard, the breakaway rim intact, the whole thing looming high in the branches as if a giant plucked it from their driveway for his personal use.

In my backyard, there is a birdbath that no one has claimed. I have no idea where it’s from. It simply appeared as if summoned by the copper beech. Harriet Gumm righted it and placed it in the shade of Cornelia’s favorite tree. My mother would approve, I think.

Bob Blubaugh, who did a quick reconnaissance of the neighborhood, reported that two blocks away an aboveground swimming pool had somehow moved from backyard to front yard. There is a toilet beside it, the cistern cracked in half like a skull.

Since the catastrophe, the weather has been stunningly beautiful, with high blue skies and little wisps of clouds—watercolor skies, really—and temperatures in the low seventies. The trees are in bloom. The ivy in the Schefflers’ gable is ripening, indifferent to the devastation. It’s as if God is plying Beauty simply to stick Pollard’s nose in the mess.
Don’t you see what I’m capable of
? he cries out in a sinister, wiseass falsetto, mocking us.

Mine was one of three houses on our street that the tornado missed. As I watch the Coynes and the Grooms making sense of their annihilation, picking among the detritus, helping to direct upstate volunteers and Red Cross officials and men driving eighteen-wheelers who are strategically unloading land barges and positioning them in front of their homes, I can practically feel a spur of shame boring into one of my kidneys.

In the case of the Grooms, they’ve been paying off their mortgage for almost thirty years, only to have the roof of their home blown to kingdom come—or at least onto another roof—in a matter of seconds. The Coynes are decent people who keep to themselves. Their children are polite, if not creepily so, and they’ve lost just about everything. But in all honesty, lurking deeper, in some despicable hidden recess, I am joyful, almost maniacally proud of my luck.

Baylor Phebe has been going from house to house, transporting things in a wheelbarrow, befriending the neighbors as if he’s running for a spot on the Pollard City Council. He returns to the house invigorated and in a full sweat.

The Miller play has been delayed, but there are plans to resume performances imminently. There was no damage to Bicentennial Theater, but the place next door, home to a local beloved hot-dog stand, the Willful Wiener, is now merely a gravel lot with a slab of concrete and several pipes jutting from the surface, as if there’s some sort of surreal industrial snorkeling activity going on.

Emily went back to Milwaukee the day after the tornado. I was sleeping when she left, but she taped a note to my door.

It read:

Below her name she’d included her phone number and e-mail address.

The strangest news of the aftermath is that the Bunches are nowhere to be found. Their car, a white Dodge Neon, which they always parked in the back lot, is gone. I called the DMV, and their license plate number doesn’t match any accident reports or unpaid tickets.

I also called over to the Pollard firehouse and spoke with Chief Hannity, who said that Todd Bunch hasn’t reported for duty since the tornadoes. “It’s really unlike him,” he said. “The guy never missed a day. He was always on time, first guy here, last guy to leave. And he worked his tail off.”

Next I called their bank, First Federal Savings, hoping to get the skinny on whether their accounts were still active, but the branch manager said she wasn’t at liberty to disclose that information.

After knocking on the Bunches’ door repeatedly with no answer, I decided to break in again. I had no choice, as I’d never resolved the issue of their changing the locks. Per the last time, I had brought the hammer with me, figuring I’d gently break a window—one of the two overlooking the front porch—but their door was actually unlocked.

They had left their furniture but taken everything else, including their surveillance system. I imagine that the two cameras and small monitor will be a part of their lives for a long time. I wonder how many hours Todd and Mary spend poring over footage, whether they sometimes see the pixelated ghost of their daughter flickering for a few moments.

In their bedroom, the bed was stripped, but the mattress and box spring remained, as did the headboard. The closet was cleared, save for hangers. The dresser drawers were bare. One drawer was actually missing, as if removing it whole had made for a more efficient exit.

In Bethany’s room the bed was also stripped, the bedside stand slightly cockeyed. The diminutive bed made it feel huge in there, as if the room could swallow you up. The closet was empty. I closed the bedroom door and went into the kitchen.

There was a note taped to their refrigerator that read, “NO NEED TO RETURN THE DEPOSIT.” The author of the note had really dug in with the pen. The ballpoint ink was practically etched into the surface, as if Todd had written it with a knife dipped in black ink.

I have no idea where they are, but clearly they’d had enough. I thought they’d at least stick around through the end of their lease. Pollard wasn’t for them, though. Perhaps they’ve returned to the circus? Or maybe they’re heading toward Mexico, where they will reinvent themselves yet again?

It saddens me that they didn’t say good-bye, but it makes sense that they would use the catastrophe as an exit strategy. I imagine Todd gunning the Neon, his teeth clenched, his invisible braces glistening with saliva, Mary on the passenger’s side, wiping tears from her puffy face, the backseat jammed with all the soft goods they could fit from their unit: clothes and bedding and pillows, the Navajo blanket, unwashed place settings, Bethany’s Muppet mobile smashed up against the rear windshield.

Their unit will always be haunted, if not by Bethany or my mother or some monstrous combination of the two, then by something stranger, a thing sadder than death, a weaving of unresolved voices, a dissonant, lonesome keening reverberating quietly. A terrible blankness pervades the first floor now. Lives seem to stop in there. Or slowly get worse. I guess the word is
entropy
. I picture Mary Bunch shuffling around slowly, lost in her own house, approaching total inertia while the dishes in the sink pile higher. My mother losing consciousness, finally giving over to the warm river of morphine or Dilaudid or whatever powerful narcotic has taken over her bloodstream. Todd Bunch, wandering from room to room, moaning out in the middle of the night, opening cupboards, looking under beds, behind the sofa, searching for Bethany as if she were a misplaced beloved pocketknife.

Lyman called two days after the devastation. “I hear things are pretty bad there,” he said. “They say it was the worst tornado in fifty years.”

“Tornadoes,” I corrected.

He asked if the house was okay.

“We got lucky. If anything, we subtly improved,” I said, citing the birdbath. I told him about the Grooms’ roof and the Coynes’ Tudor, which was now part of the vast World of No More.

“You used the bomb shelter, I presume.”

I told him it couldn’t have been put to better use, and that I brought most of my tenants down there with me.

“Sissy and I sent a few g’s to the Red Cross,” he said.

I told him he was generous and he demurred, saying it was an easy write-off.

He and Sissy are planning a visit in August. I told him the first floor was available, now that the Bunches were gone.

“You lost your first tenants,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “they moved on.”

Regret. It sits in you like a dead bird, swallowed whole, indigestible.

“The place is still furnished,” I explained. “I’d be happy to make it nice for you and Sissy.”

“I imagine we’ll be staying at the Best Western,” he replied. “It’ll be better that way.”

I dream of Emily Phebe.

Simple, reliable dreams. We’re sitting on a porch swing, watching fireflies tumble through the air. Or we’re in a canoe, the water underneath us placid, velveteen. The one I can’t shake is where she takes my head, just like Sheila Anne did, and simply lowers it to her lap and I fall asleep there. I fall asleep even in my dream.

Eventually, in the dream, I wake up and she’s not there. And then I wake up in reality and she’s not here either.