Plow the Bones (17 page)

She thought about laughing, decided against it. She listened to the grumbling and bubbling of her monsters, trying to figure out why she’d started this story in the first place. “Thing is,” she said, picking at the cuticle of her left thumb, seeing how deep she could stand to drive her house key into the soft skin, “it was just so desperate. I could see how angry he was, how aimless and scared and angry. I’m not dumb. I felt… insulted. How can you pretend that anything is normal?”

Pushing deeper with her house key, pushing the dry white ridge of her cuticle backward, back as far as it could go. It hurt, but what else was new? Lots of things hurt. Not smoking hurt. Looking at your checking account balance hurt. Watching your husband pretend not to hate you hurt. Walking by your diploma hanging on the wall hurt. Not acknowledging the bulk boxes of diapers or bottles of formula or untouched toys and baby books hurt. Pain stopped being such a big goddamn deal after a while.

A head close to the ceiling hissed, writhed, coughed up thick mucus the color of mustard, and said, “Turkey–fingersssss.”

Every muscle in Abigail Quatro’s body tensed. Her eyelids retracted, her throat went immediately dry. Her key slipped, sliced a jagged reservoir across the knuckles of her thumb. She gasped, more in shock and recognition than pain. She said, “That wasn’t fair.”

Now all twenty–six heads were still and silent, pointed at her, their nostrils flaring rhythmically as though some olfactory homing device had lighted upon its target. Her breath was coming faster than her lungs could handle comfortably and her brain screamed for nicotine, and she reeled. These emotions, this
fear
, was stronger and more manic than anything she’d felt in almost a year. What were they doing now? Why were they quiet, why weren’t they moving, what did they smell with their terrible misshapen, uneven, grown–together nostrils?

In the silence, she could hear blood pattering from the gash on her hand to the naked floorboards. And with each drop, the twenty–six heads (oh God, no, no, perfectly choreographed, synced) twitched. She sat up straighter, snagged the moleskin from her back pocket, readied her pencil.

Turkey–fingers — 3:somethingPM March 3
^rd
(WHAT???)

They sat there for a long time, and the only sound was the syncopated drip of her blood and the matched rustle of her rotten monsters straining toward it.

§

The only sound was the syncopated tick of the cat–shaped clock above the television, a relic of an era of silliness and kitsch, as Jim tried to figure out what to say next. He thought,
Stop talking to this asshole. There’s something wrong with him, this hairless little freak. Have you stopped to think for one fucking second about why he’s here? What he intends to do? What he has to do with the putrid secret cancer growing upstairs?
What he said was, “They’re like… mole–rat people. Have you ever seen those? Mole–rats? They’re hairless and wrinkled and blind and… ugh… ugly. And these mole–rat people… their skin has grown together and now they’re just this big wall of mole–rat men… In a room we never knew was there until ten months ago. Ten months ago! How do you live in a place,” the words spilling out of him as though tied to a string tugged by the skinny fingers of his uninvited houseguest, “for seven years and never see an entire room of it? How can that happen?”

The doorbell man pulled a face, a bawdy parody of empathy, and reached out and patted Jim’s knee. Jim lurched away from him, his pulse swelling and pulsing below his jaw. He wanted to scream at the man, to attack the man, to light a fire underneath him and remove him like a tick from his house. Except this didn’t feel like
his
house anymore, and hadn’t for a long time. His nerves quaked and rattled, and he curled into himself on the edge of the sofa thinking,
I look like a junky. A quivering junky going through withdrawal.
He said, “I’m sorry. Just… I’m really sorry, I just don’t want you to… to touch me, okay? Just don’t… fucking touch me… sir.”

The doorbell man smiled, bit his bottom lip. His teeth were too long, too white. He looked like a theatrical mask. He said, “Mr. Quatro… homeowner… have you ever heard of the Rattenkönig phenomenon?”

“No. Nope. I, uh… no.”

“Hmm,” said the doorbell man. “It is said that rats, when isolated together in small spaces, will fuse together at the tail. Can you imagine, homeowner Jim Quatro? A nest of trapped rats, isolated from food, from sunlight, as their tails tangle together and eventually become… one. Amazing, if it’s true, although I myself have never seen any compelling evidence for its veracity. Imagine, then, homeowner, that a nest of some other animal becomes trapped. An animal that survives by different means, adheres to different rules.”

The doorbell man stood up, stepped onto the coffee table, kicked aside the photo albums, crushed his coffee cup beneath his heel. Jim stared, open mouthed, and thought,
You’re standing on my table. You’re standing on my table. I don’t know why, but you’re standing on my table and gesturing at the ceiling like a professor lecturing to the ceiling fan.

“Let us theorize that this species travels through secret corridors, makes its way toward new feeding grounds via an entire sequence of tunnels, much like your… ugly… hairless… wrinkled… blind… mole–rats.” He was smiling now, the doorbell man, breathing fast, haloed by the ceiling fan, lost in his lunatic sermon. “Let us further theorize that the way is one day blocked by some means, homeowner! Let us now hypothesize what might happen to such a marvelous species over decades, over centuries, homeowner, in the dark! In the bloodless, skyless dark, homeowner!”

A pause. The doorbell man stared longingly at some distant point beyond the house, out in the cold dark bloodless, skyless universe, and caught his breath. Jim realized he was digging his teeth into his tongue, gnawing on that same fat ulcer he’d made earlier when the doorbell had interrupted his thoughtlessness. It had been a very long time since he had’t felt angry. But now he did not. Only scared and confused and unbearably sad. He thought,
You’re the same. Same as the things in the Sudden Room. Something with a barely functional understanding of human behavior, something doing a bad impression. And you exist. The universe is huge and cruel.

The doorbell man smoothed his suit and stepped down from the table. He took a seat, crossed his legs, adjusted his fedora. “What do you suppose would happen then?”

§

This was what they wanted. What they always wanted. Just this slow thick leak, these fat droplets spattering against the floor and sinking into the woodgrain, staining the teeth of her house key. She squeezed the meat of her thumb with her opposite hand, milking the blood from the wound and speeding the drip. The monsters (
No,
she thought,
not quite monsters, are they? Or not just any kind of monster. I know what they are. I know their name. They have been understood and catalogued and thrown behind a partition marked with their species and phylum
) shuddered and salivated and gnashed their rotten broken saber–teeth to match the new tempo.

“I know what you want,” she said. “I know what you are.”

One of them hissed, “Paaaaaglia. Sssssteinemmmmm.”

Another growled, “Behhhhind the hhhhhedges.”

Another, its face fused into profile, its mouth almost filled with the metastasized flesh of its fellows, said, “Ennnnjoying the view?”

“I could give you what you want,” she said, and wondered what would happen if she did. Wondered if it could somehow erase the bad decisions and the worse luck, the tense and unpleasant marriage, the dead baby that never lived the ghost of which floated between her and Jim. She wondered if she’d finally feel like she’d done something worthwhile. Each of the faces in the wall salivated in expectation, wet from lips to chin with thick foamy spit. Could she refuse them? Could she disappoint them like that?

She would tell one more secret. And then she would see.

“When we were in college,” she said, squeezing the gash, “Jim asked me what I wanted to do. With my life, I mean. We were spent, exhausted. We had just finished, you know… fucking, I guess. Making love. I don’t know. We were satisfied with ourselves. We felt philosophical. So he asked me… ‘in the cosmic sense,’ he said, whatever that means, what I wanted to do. And I took a deep breath, and I imagined that I was inhaling the whole universe, the stars and the planets and the dark matter, and I told him what I wanted to do. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted the world to bend a little under my weight. To never be the same after me.”

She lifted her thumb upward, offering it to the chomping mouths in the wall of the Sudden Room. They strained and gurgled and roared, and the house shook.

§

Jim could hear them gurgling and roaring upstairs, louder than they’d ever been. And here he was, downstairs, listening to the doorbell man, whatever he was, stumble through his best estimation of what human conversation might sound like. He wasn’t sure how much more of this his brain could take.

“Now imagine,” whispered the doorbell man, “that some homeowner just… stumbled onto the secret corridor where that Rattenkönig had become stuck. It would have to have been a sleepwalking homeowner, a homeowner catatonic with despair and disappointment. Sound familiar, homeowner? Sound like anyone you know?”

“Okay, enough!” He was standing. “Enough, man, alright? Now what?” He was leaning over the doorbell man, shaking his fists, gesturing, shouting. “Why are you here? Are you here to help? Can you help us? Can you, what, kill those fucking things?” He grabbed the doorbell man by the lapels, shook him. “Can you do fucking anything? Huh?” He crumpled, came down onto his knees before the doorbell man, buried his head in the doorbell man’s chest, wept.

The doorbell man caressed the hair at the nape of Jim’s neck and shushed him, rocked him back and forth. “No,” he said. “No, I’m not here to kill them. I just wanted to… see. I wanted to see, homeowner. I’ve never seen a Rattenkönig before.”

Upstairs, someone screamed.

§

Abigail Quatro screamed. She tried to pull herself away, but she was trapped, held by dozens of scrambling arms and legs against the pulsing wall of skin. She felt their razor fangs at her wrists, her thighs, her shoulders, felt their dry, sore–covered lips wrap around the wounds and suck, drinking desperately from her, and it hurt, it hurt, God, it hurt. She struggled, kicked, squirmed, but even piled into a single gigantic body, they were stronger than anything she’d ever known. They weren’t letting her go. Her vision was getting hazy, and the part of her with the will to fight back was shrinking, fading. It wasn’t fair. None of this was fair.

She heard the door to the Sudden Room slam against the wall, felt the hall light burst through onto her skin, saw two silhouettes through the haze. One of them was shouting her name, rushing toward her. Jim. It was Jim. It had to be Jim. She was so very tired. And this wasn’t fair.

The other silhouette clapped his hands, bounced on the balls of his feet. It said, “Marvelous. Absolutely marvelous.”

Jim was at her side now, pulling on her, trying to remove her from the wall of mean mouths and blind eyes. He was screaming. He was struggling.

When they finally let her go, she knew that Jim hadn’t saved her. Her monsters just… weren’t hungry anymore.

Her vision was coming back to her now. The pain was receding. She felt numb and betrayed. She kept trying to speak, but her throat wouldn’t let the words pass.

“God, Abby. Oh Jesus, Abby, it’s okay,” Jim, above her, faking his way through normal again, “it’s okay, baby, I’m here. I’m here. Goddamn it, goddamn it. Okay, it’s okay. I’m going to call the hospital, baby, okay? Everything is going to be…”

She hated to be called Abby. Always had.

The other man… the bald man with the sunglasses and the fedora and the umbrella hanging from his arm… put his hand on the back of Jim’s head. She watched all of this from the floor. She didn’t like the floor. It was so dirty. So uncomfortable. The bald man said, “Well, that was fun, homeowner. Bye, now.”

Jim’s head jerked up to stare at the bald man, watched him strolling through the door, down the hallway. Out. She stared at the slope where his jaw became his throat. She watched his pulse announce itself in the throbbing vein there. It seemed to be beating so much faster than hers.

“What?” he screamed. “What?” Loud, raw, unhinged. “What?” A real question. A question to which he desperately expected an answer.

For many moments, they listened to the bald man’s footsteps. They listened to the door slamming on his way out. And then all there was to listen to was the gurgle and slurp of the wall of monsters.

When her voice returned, Abigail Quatro said, “Nothing changes. Nothing is different. Everything is always the same.”

MY FATHER BUILT OUR BASEMENT like a theatrical set. He made partitions and propped them up against the cold stone walls, the real walls, the rough walls that smelled like mold and wet age. He painted the partitions (the paint he used was called “Old Roses”). He added Styrofoam crown molding where the partitions met the ceiling, which he covered in mirrored black glass, and he bought a series of musty faux–Persian rugs to toss over the cracked concrete floors. He built shelves into the fake walls, and a dresser, and place for a television, and he brought in a bed and a recliner. He built a bathroom down there and stocked it with a series of aftershaves and toothpastes. The shower was too small. With bent knees and craned spine, you’d try to position yourself beneath the showerhead, washing the foam from your hair in thirty–second shifts because if you stood like that too long, you’d cramp up and spend the rest of the day with your neck jerked to the side. Or maybe you wouldn’t. But I did.

There was a wall in the fake basement that opened on secret hinges, and behind it, down a lightless hallway untouched by my father’s obsessive façade–building, was his office. His secret office, where things were what they were, and not what they pretended to be. This is where he kept his tchotchkes, the apparently endless collection of shit he had picked up over the years, much of it useless, or broken, or so stripped of whatever had once made it beautiful to look at that it seemed to function only as a reminder that all things, in their essential unadorned form, are basically ugly. The skulls inherited from his oral hygienist father, their teeth capped or replaced with gaudy silver or overlaid with sparkling braces. The grinning cigar–store Indian with the word NIGGER scratched into its forehead a dozen decades past. The whistle from Moscow, shaped like a horse and colored like a children’s story book, glued back together after I dropped it on the floor (I inherited this at some point, as I did with so many of my father’s tchotchkes, but I have no idea where it has gone now; it creeps up on me, when I am vulnerable to regret and longing, when I am alone, and its ghost whistles in my ear and asks me why I didn’t love it enough to keep track of where it went). He would sit at his desk (itself a glass–fronted relic rescued from the alley behind a head shop, a former display counter, its case filled with a cavalcade of other tinier orphans) and smoke his cigars and drink non–alcoholic beer and play with his prizes.