Threats (2 page)

He looked to the firefighter occupying his body and saw that her left foot had retained its slipper, but the other foot was bare. The second slipper was forgotten at the base of the stairs. The firefighter was still swaddled by the blanket. The smell rising from the stairwell and steaming from her was an embarrassment of childhood odor. It made David dizzy to experience it, and he tried to focus on the thin face blurred behind the oxygen mask.

“I'm sorry,” she said. She was crying. David had never seen such emotion from a public servant, other than the time a post office clerk was informed of his daughter's death via telephone in the midst of a Christmas rush, and now he was observing it happening in his own body. He had seen the post office clerk take the phone call and put his head in his hands, sobbing, resting his elbows on an electronic scale. David had been there to mail a package of documents to his mother's lawyer, but he was touched by the display and later sent flowers to the post office. He didn't know the clerk's name and addressed the lilies to the office in general. It seemed like the right thing to do from a taxpayer perspective.

The firefighter clutched the blue blanket and took shallow breaths. She tried to touch her face again and felt the oxygen mask and moved it out of the way. David reached his glove out to touch her arm, then removed the glove and touched her with his bare hand. He moved the mask back over her face.

“Get it all out,” he said. “Would you like to talk about what happened?”

The firefighter scrubbed at her face and mouth. “I can't talk about it,” she said. “I'm so confused.”

David felt like a dog peering dumbly into the darkest moment of his owner's life. “That's normal,” he said.

He noticed a pain in his arm and saw that he was taking fluids intravenously. He was inside the dimensions of his own body again. The oxygen mask lined his face and the calming smoothness made his eyelids heavy. And there was Franny, resembling a piece of modern furniture under the police tarp. Her body had vacated its bowels beside him at some point in their time together on the stair. He cherished the life implied by that action, the odor of a living thing beside him, pulsing bacterial life that had once been harbored by her body, not unlike a child, ejected now into the dimming light, bacteria feeding on itself and fading. He wondered if a florist might deliver lilies to the stairwell. Franny's body had grown stiff and then soft again beside him on the stair, and by then it must have been as pliable as a wax figure. In the police business of securing the area, she was forgotten on the floor. A paramedic stepped over her.
Sweet Franny
, David thought.

 

6.

DAVID WAS FAMILIAR WITH DECAY. When his father died, the house's basement was the unspoken casualty. His father used to head down there even when he had trouble walking, holding on to the banister and taking breaks between steps, breathing heavily, examining imperfections in the wall. When he reemerged, he might say, “Underfoot and out of mind,” but he would always go back. David heard his father in the basement almost every evening in those last days. It sounded like he was riffling through boxes and tapping nails into boards.

After the man's death, the basement had become submerged in neglect. What had once been a guest bedroom, bathroom, den, workshop, and concrete-floored storage area became a single entity of waste. Dust drifted from the unscrubbed vents and made a soft layer over the tools in the workroom. The guest bedroom clogged with rot. The water in the bathroom's toilet dried and created a mineral line on the ceramic. A bird built its nest on the cracked basement window, and twigs scattered onto the floor inside. With no other source of fresh air, mold populated the damp walls. Pipes grew an ecology of rust. A single green shoot emerged from the bathroom sink's drain. The walls seemed fuzzed. Cardboard softened in the damp. A pile of leaves in the guest bedroom resembled a squirrel drey. The closet in the bedroom held coats made lighter by moths. One member of a row of canned peaches on the wall in the storage area had burst, leaking fluid down the wall, attracting ants, which attracted lizards, which attracted a cat, who scratched through a basement screen and left the squirming reptilian tails of its prey behind. The cat vacated before David found any of the damage, but it left its ammonia-rich urine on a stack of cookbooks in the corner of the storage room. He covered the books with more cookbooks, which he had moved down from the kitchen because he didn't want to see them anymore. The flood from a water heater explosion only served to unify everything as a solid, decaying layer.

A highlight of the basement collection was an inversion table, a symbol of the last victory of David's mother. In his middle age, David's father bought the table. It looked like an ironing board split in half and propped on four sturdy legs. He would strap his ankles into the supports at the base, then release a lever and push back, turning himself upside down on a horizontal axis at waist level, allowing him to hang by his ankles, his head and arms swinging between the supports. The purpose was spinal decompression. As a child, David would come downstairs in the morning to find his father inverted in the center of the living room, craning his neck to watch television. “Gravity,” his father would say. “Take a cue from the planets.”

David's mother hated the device and refused to dust it. Before she went away, she made a daily case for its move to the basement, where it would be out of sight and less of a general hazard. David's father tried to sell the table in order to help pay the bills after she left. Finally he moved it, and it remained, almost hidden under a carload of old road atlases, in the basement.

David went down and surveyed the scene a week after his father's funeral. He saw the lizard tails and the evidence of sagging rot and then closed the door behind him on the way out. He couldn't bear to gather what he had been looking for, the old organized dental files and contacts that had once been a proof of his value and were becoming the hallmark of his personal depreciation. He liked to look at them in the way that similarly sentimental people liked to look at their own baby pictures and the baby pictures of their parents. When he closed the door to the basement behind him, an old, dry fountain pen fell from over the door frame and rolled into the hallway.

 

7.

IT WAS EASY to stand in line at the post office. The action required walking for thirty minutes beside the road, but David walked. Three buses passed him. It was a comfort to know that every footstep was possible. Earlier, he had let workers into his house. They arrived with proof of license and an order to clean the stairs. He wasn't sure who had sent them, but his own presence in the house while they were there made him feel uneasy.

The post office was a low brick building. The handrails that flanked it looked as if they'd been painted blue a thousand years before. Standing beside them meant becoming intimately linked to a moment in history.

Inside, individuals entered their personal information onto slips of paper. A woman smiled at David and pointed at a change-of-address form in front of him. He passed it to her and she accepted it with a slight, half-bowing nod. Everything seemed possible at the post office. The customers brought canisters and tubes and small cubes to the counter, and the men and women behind the counter accepted these objects and affixed them with stamps and stickers indicating their destination and contents, and at that moment they were in America, everyone in that room was in a city in Ohio in a country called America and the packages were in America and they were all a part of that.

David looked for the postal clerk who had wept but could not find him. He thought about how each of the postal clerks had likely wept at some point in time, though he had not witnessed it. When it was his turn at the counter, he produced a piece of paper that he had found in his mailbox.

The clerk accepted and examined the page. “You've got to be checking your mail every day,” he said.

David didn't very much like the idea of speaking, but the man seemed kind in an unsmiling way. “I'm sorry,” David said. “Things got out of hand.”

The man tapped the card once on the counter and began to enter David's information into his computer. “I'll need some identification,” he said. David saw flashes of lateral incisor. He handed over his driver's license.

“You can always come down here and stop your mail,” the man said. “We'll hang on to it for you.”

“Thank you.”

“No thanks necessary, sir. It's the duty of the United States Postal Service.” He tapped David's license on the counter again and slid it across the table. “I'll fetch your mail.”

He went into the back room and returned with a bundle of junk and bills. A card banded to it bore David's name. David accepted the gift and felt that it would be possible to survive. It was good to be out of the house.

 

8.

WHEN HE RETURNED HOME, the workers were still there. They were pulling up carpet on the stairs. They had seemed kind enough when he let them in before, but after he left, they put on hazmat suits and masks and stood on the stairwell, where he had recently spent a concentrated span of time. It had been enough trouble to get around them on the way up the stairs, and David didn't want to do it again. He sat in the bedroom and smelled its occupied smell. He imagined that the comforter was packed with particles of skin, and stretching out on it made him feel cradled in a hand. He rolled to his side, opened the compartment on the back of the digital clock, and ticked out the battery with his fingernail.

The workers were listening to classic rock from a portable radio. David heard one of them singing along. The music sounded filtered or reversed. Still, it felt good to have some activity in the house. He remembered the sound of his mother announcing breakfast.

He didn't remember calling the workers, but he did remember letting them into the house. He was glad they were there.

It was hard to leave the bedroom. He heard them calling out to one another over their machines in the stairwell. Their voices came to his ears as a comforting hum. David moved to the floor and sat with his back to the bed.

Eventually they came to speak to him. One of them helped him up and brought him to the stairwell, where he saw that their work was done. The human waste was gone, as was the carpeting. They had cut a clean line in the carpet at the top of the stairs and ripped it all out, removing nails, sanding down what remained. The walls and wood had been cleaned with a solvent. The men had taken the hoods off their hazmat suits, and their faces were ruddy and flushed, suggesting a fine day of accomplishment. He couldn't understand what they were saying behind all the buzzing, but they seemed pleasant and kind to him, and he nodded. It did register to him that they were speaking in English, but they were saying things he couldn't follow. One of the men reached out with a gloved hand. David felt confused. He heard a ukulele. The men looked at one another. They seemed very kind.

When they didn't leave, it occurred to him that they might require some form of payment. He found a set of silverware in a velvet box and gave it to them, smiling. He bowed slightly, the way the woman in the post office had bowed, a gesture of respect.

The men left through the front door. David had been holding the digital clock battery between his cheek and his right maxillary second molar. Once they were gone, he ejected it into his hand. He observed it, whole and unconcealed, with no small amount of satisfaction.

 

9.

FRANNY had been an aesthetician, specializing in pore extraction and deep chemical peels. She talked infrequently about her job, becoming vague about the details like she was afraid to give away too much. “It's more complicated than that,” she would say, and change the subject without elaborating.

About a week after the workers took out the carpet on the stairs, five women from the salon came by and offered to cut David's hair. They wore matching tank tops and salon aprons and arrived unannounced. One of them laid a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor and put a chair from the dining room in the center of it. They had brought clippers and products.

“We can do something about this salt and pepper,” said one, yanking on a fistful of hair. “Update the look a little?”

David felt the paper band stretched around his neck like a cleric's collar. He thought of ways to politely refuse.

“Let's keep foils out of it,” said another girl, and David realized that the first girl hadn't been talking to him before, despite looking at him and speaking to him, and that this was a thing that would continue to happen.

“It's nice of you all to do this,” David said. “Franny always said you were so generous.” She had never said such a thing about anyone, but he felt it was important to get her involved. A young woman sat on the floor and painted his toenails with clear polish.

“Frances always bugged us to come here and cut his hair,” one of the girls said, brushing clippings from his shoulders. “We figured we ought to. She didn't want to do it herself and she said it was getting pretty bad, since he never leaves the house.”

“Even up the ears,” said another.

“I do leave the house.”

“Aileen said.”

Franny had one close friend while she was alive, a coworker. Aileen was a nice woman but strange, and she held what David felt was an excessive interest in the salon.

“These toes,” said the one on the floor.

“She said I never leave the house?”

“I don't like this spot on his neck.”

Another leaned in and began plucking the hair between his eyebrows. “Frances said he likes things to be a certain way.”

“Who doesn't like things to be a certain way?”

They looked at one another and shrugged, a wave of shifting tank top straps.

“She said that a man can make himself busy around his home,” one said.