The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (28 page)

After it seemed no more news would be reported on a given day, Ben would go to bed, relieved that at least for now there wouldn’t be worse charges for Tremaine than the ones the cop, Braun, had predicted.

As time went on and still nothing else came out in the media, Ben allowed himself to breathe easier, to actually expect nothing worse would happen—that no other shoe, as the expression went, would drop.

One afternoon, his wife still asleep, Ben wandered into the living room. He stopped and looked at the family pictures on the piano (an instrument Miriam used to play beautifully but which she had been abandoning in stages even before the accident). Feeling a little lighter, with something from him lifted, he picked up a snapshot taken on a bridge above the Thames on their first family trip to Europe.

His son was then about twelve, already starting to leave childhood but still waiting to enter adolescence, where temptation and rebellion awaited. He certainly was a long way from where he was today, living uneasily as an adult, restless and with a self-destructive anger, as well as a ponytail, a “soul patch,” and—though Ben wasn’t sure, could only imagine—tattoos. The sense that he had failed as a parent overwhelmed Ben now, but before he could bury the feeling—for otherwise it would bury
him
—he experienced a rush of self-justification. How much more could he have done? He had not beaten, molested, or otherwise harmed the boy. Were we not responsible for ourselves, all alone in the world? And what did we really know about what anyone did and why?

Then—this idea not keeping the other upsetting one at bay—Ben felt something new, his fingers pressing tighter and tenderly around the frame of the photo. He secretly felt (and don’t tell Miriam, though she never listened to him about anything now) proud of Mel, for even if the boy had taken a violent turn—turned the wheel for the wrong reason, not to get somewhere but to get
back
at someone—at least he had done it in a righteous cause, to defend those who went without and to punish those who took from them, like the rich young man killed in the other car. This idea, misguided as it was, had been good and was, Ben knew as he pressed his lips to the boy’s face behind the glass, one that he had instilled in him. He had not failed, it turned out, as Mel’s father.

Ben would take the car to do some shopping—Miriam had done nothing for days; there wasn’t even coffee in the house. As he left the house, he saw a sign upon the door he hadn’t noticed, even that morning when picking up the paper. The notice might have upset others, but it made him smile. It said: “Foreclosed.” It was the truest sign of solidarity with his son, gave him a total sense of identification with him, with someone else in the world. He left the door ajar.

Then Ben drove, forgetting where he was headed, wondering: whom might he hit? Who might hit him? Who would be guilty or had been all along? He would never know the answers, and neither, he thought, would anyone else on the Earth.

He didn’t know that someone was inside his home; he sensed it, the way you sense when you’re coming down with a cold, a subtle shift in how you feel, like fatigue or a stuffed nose (his usually started with a pain in his left ear).

When he stopped being utterly disoriented by the idea, he found that he was afraid in a way he had never been before. (And wasn’t being disoriented a way not to feel afraid, to replace it with a more acceptable emotion? He thought he’d seen a report about that once.) Living isolated for so long had sharpened his perception of any alteration in his routine, even in the routine “aura” of his apartment, yet it had also given him no way to adjust to change, and certainly no way to accept it: there was no explanation that wouldn’t be awful; no one would have broken in with
good news
, would they?

Quickly, surprising himself, he segued to a preservational instinct, a desire to beat back any threat—not to himself but to his “roommate,” a word he had never thought to use even ironically, but one which he now employed to give himself a perceivable “companion” to protect, a conventional sense of someone he could save. The image was invigorating or at least less paralysing than fear. He found it even enlivened him physically, made him swell his chest as if in anticipation of a fight, the way he’d seen athletes in stories “suck it up.” Whoever was hiding—lurking, that was the word—in his apartment (and now he swore he not just sensed but actually saw the shadow of someone scramble across the floor) would have
him
to contend with!

Daring to move, he made his way to where the potential target of the intruder was. He stood sentry-like before the object he suspected was about to be damaged or destroyed by his uninvited guest.

But why would he, she, they want to do anything to the Centre? (Centrepiece was, of course, its full name, “Centre” being one of the many nicknames others had invented for it, not out of affection necessarily, but simply from restlessness that resulted from always having to use one name for something so ubiquitous in human life, the nicknames ranging from “Centre” to “CP” to “Ciece” to the “Erp” or the “Earpiece,” depending on the mood and maybe the age of the speaker. He was middle-aged, typical, and somewhat timid, so he always used the most common and least comic “Centre.”) He had long since forgotten the meaning of the name, how it described the
central
place it took in people’s lives, yet as he considered whether to use the thing to call for help, he was reminded of the totality of the Centre’s functions and this made him reconsider the intruder’s designs. She—and it was a she, he was suddenly sure; there had been something about the small shape of the darting figure—wanted to
steal
his Centre, not disable it. And realizing this gave him a new clue to her identity, or at least the kind of person she was.

Who else would want to swipe it but someone who didn’t have one, who lived outside, underprivileged, “at risk,” or whatever they called it, deprived of all that the Centre could provide? On Centre talk shows, he had often heard of break-ins committed by these types—urban legends abounded about them, some describing committed atrocities so awful they could only be apocryphal (or were they?)—and now it had actually happened to
him
. It was hard to believe—yet now he heard the sound of steps in the near distance, barely audible as if taken by bare feet (which would make sense, for these “outsiders” had no money—or shoes—dispensed by a Centre), dragging toxins or whatever all over his polished floor. This made him even more afraid—no, angry, and that gave him more energy.

Now he channelled (which was an unconscious pun, given the dialled adjustments on the Centre) his anger into indignation, for the break-in was making him late to work, even though, of course, he made his own hours working for the Centre and filed his own time card at the end of the pay period to get his groceries, medicines, etc., from it. This gave him a new thing to feel—high dudgeon—instead of fear.

“Okay!” he yelled, blocking the Centre’s screen just in case she suddenly jumped out. “Let’s do this! You and me!”

There was no response. He began to feel foolish, as if he’d imagined the whole thing. Then, slowly and it seemed timidly, a young woman peeked out from behind the packing crate for the new exercise bike he’d ordered from the Centre and hadn’t yet thrown away. Her features were as small and delicate as a kitten’s, her short hair crudely cut as if by her own hand with a rusty knife. She spoke a word he of course couldn’t understand for she had not learned her language from a Centre. Yet the intensity of her tone and the tears she shed afterward made him perceive it to mean, “Help!”

That was the last he saw of her for a while. He didn’t fool himself into thinking that she’d left: he heard her breathing heavily from her crate-hiding place whenever there was no other noise. In fact, that night, he kept all noises off—music or stories from the Centre—out of a perverse desire to be sure that she was still there. He didn’t shift the crate and reveal her, in the way you kept a cereal box or a spoon in place to hide a cockroach you knew to be there, in order to timidly maintain the status quo—not to have to kill it, in other words. Was it this kind of compassion (or cowardice) that made him refrain from even reporting her now? Or had the sight of her and the sound of her frightened voice made her seem less intimidating? She wasn’t there to rob him. Despite what he’d heard, there were apparently people from the outside who just got lost and stumbled their way inside, like that fly the other year, banging against a window it didn’t know couldn’t be open and which he had to kill with a rolled-up tax form sent by the Centre that he hadn’t filled out.

It was more than that, of course: the woman’s breathing was the first real sound of another human being that had ever been inside his home. So he listened to it rapt, as he might a professional singer on the Centre performing a hit that he himself had hummed. The sounds were sort of the same but completely different. And that’s why he sat up, suddenly, in his chair, when her breathing stopped.

He realized that he had fallen asleep, lulled by her inhaling and exhaling. The silence awakened him like a warning.

He walked cautiously to the crate, but even after reaching it still heard nothing. With a foot, he knocked it to the side and saw, to his surprise—and he had to admit, relief—she was there. She was curled in a ball, her chest barely rising. He realized that she was wearing rags. While he’d been unconscious, she had not risen to secretly get food or even water from the Centre; a thin crust encircled her white lips.

With the first feeling of panic he’d had since she arrived—panic was different from fear—he ran back, hands shaking, and dialled the Centre’s adjustment for dinner. Then he brought back his own favourite: fried chicken, peas, and a Diet Fresca. He left the steaming food near her nose, unwilling to so much as tap a part of her bony frame. As he pulled away, he was stopped—stunned—by a gesture of her own.

Her eyes still closed, the woman slowly reached out and took his hand in thanks. The second she glanced his palm, he felt a heat so savage that he began to scream, and black smoke wiggled from the circle of skin she had immediately burned away.

In the days ahead, he didn’t pay much attention to his job or the countless distractions the Centre provided. He was more engrossed by the spectacle of the woman’s reawakening, her growing less scrawny and stronger—her face, even her hair, filling out—as he tended to her. He even experimented with the kinds of meals he served, something he had never done by himself (the Salisbury steak with cooked carrots and Strawberry Yoo-hoo was one he’d have to remember).

Of course, he kept a distance from her, putting the plates down as if for a dog ever since their terrible encounter. She felt guilt she couldn’t disguise (especially since she had remained unharmed) and smiled with obvious relief the day he put on a smaller Centre-dispensed bandage, forcing herself to stare as if as penance at the sphere of red wet welt that had replaced his palm and was only now starting to scab.

He thought she was being hard on herself. He didn’t blame her. She didn’t know—as neither could he—what effect the outside would have on those shut-in. Was it the air or whatever environment was out there? Or merely the contact itself for which he hadn’t been prepared, against which he had never, like an infant, developed an immunity? He didn’t know.

They couldn’t discuss this, of course, having no common language. But that didn’t stop her from talking anyway, once she started to recover, charmingly indifferent to his understanding, chattering away as if fully comprehended. He began to get an idea of what she was expressing—and she eventually added physical gestures, standing to mime swimming or fighting or struggling to do
something
. It was her own recent life story she was telling, he realized—how she had arrived by accident, fallen in and entered through some section of pipe that led to an air duct, maybe. It was a gripping tale, far better than anything that might have been on the Centre at the same time.

Also entertaining—and even moving—were the little tunes she softly hummed as both were starting to sleep, she still behind the box where she insisted on staying as if not deserving better accommodations. The music was not exactly what he was used to hearing on the Centre, but still interesting once you got used to it.

One day, he verbally admired the strange little bracelets (made of, what, shells? Stones?) strung around her wrists and ankles. She explained with a few words and concise movements that she’d made them herself—she sold them to others on the outside; it was her job. She was industrious—you could be out there. It was fascinating to him.

That night, he stayed awake as she slept. He watched her from his chair, a slice of her back visible from neck to knees behind the box. Her shirt—one of his own, actually; her ragged T-shirt now sat in a pile of his laundry waiting to be washed in the Centre—had ridden up, exposing the side of her bare waist, which was pale, freckled, and slightly fleshy now that she had begun and not ceased to eat. Fidgeting in his seat, he could not stop staring at it. The wound beneath his bandage began to itch, as if to warn him. He averted his eyes from her. Then he could not help it—he sprang up.

He approached the Centre. He set the adjustment and, three different times, made love to it—two times more than was his usual nightly practice. At the end of the last event, he lingered with his arm around it, thinking of it now as “Ciece,” the friendliest and fondest of the nicknames, before going to sleep. He realized it was the first time, except to eat, he had used the Centre in days.