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boxofscarabs · 2 years ago

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“THIS ONE IS ABOUT THAT PHOTO OF ME, THE BLURRY ONE SET APART FROM THE OTHERS ON THE STUDY WALL,”

this is a story that has five parts. all five are below. the first part is called

FATHER-IN-LAW

This happened very early in my marriage, before I felt properly and independently masculine, which could explain a few things. It also happened to me in Mongolia, which is not where I live and not where I lived at the time. This entails a little bit of preamble.

A decade ago, ten or twelve years, I was more or less between jobs. While I wasn’t just moving from bed to the couch and back I was becoming increasingly aware of a perception, a perception of me, taking hold amongst the in-laws. It had been a few weeks. That was enough down time for them, this is the kind of people they are — I love them for it, but at the time, you know. Maybe you know. At the time, from this perception, from the hints of layabout that wafted up from a fruitless and, sure, maybe a little half-hearted job search, there came a certain amount of pressure. Expectation, unspoken obligation, cocked eyebrows appearing in the faces I imagined when I learned that my name had come up. Pursed lips in the same. The component parts of disappointment, anecdotes and observations and attitudes — all about me — inching automatically toward one another, conversation by conversation. My wife had been going to bat for me on routine visits home — which felt good and not so good. Maybe you know how it is. Pressure.

Contrast was a factor. The kind of man at the head of my wife’s family made a certain kind of thinking come very naturally to people who were otherwise not particularly traditional. Success and non-success were factors. The source of the pressure, ultimately, was an observation of generational trends, the kind that mostly lands pretty weakly, very kids-these-days, but in this specific case I had a hard time shaking it. It goes, Men don’t provide any more. People don’t want to work these days. Good times, weak men, bad times, so on and so forth. It was a very good-old-days kind of thought, but very sticky. And this is a period when my father-in-law was very successful, my wife’s family was comfortable, uniformly ambitious, they were situated on the sunny crest of a wealth curve before a comfortable American plateau, a 90’s-era retirement, expenses not quite equalling investment yields, kid sisters touring colleges. A lot of expectation. My father-in-law had money. He had a few things, actually, things I didn’t. This is what I mean. He had things. He has most of them still and he had them all when this happened to me. He had an important job; had obligations; he had a full calendar populated with high-stakes engagements that took him all over, mostly all over the states but not infrequently all over everywhere; he had experience with travel, with negotiations. He had anecdotes that never failed to go off. I didn’t have these things and these were lacks I couldn’t help but feel. The result is that this is a person, my wife’s father, my father-in-law, this is a person that I felt obligations to. Maybe these obligations went beyond what’s typical; I can’t say with certainty.

He also had a bad heart. A compromised cardiac muscle, physically damaged some decades ago by a surgeon whose career was promptly and fully truncated by the error. It was an injury that matured or maladapted into a Condition, a syndrome with a dozen syllables, one that required counterbalancing in the form of chemical maintenance. He had an elaborate schedule of medications that nevertheless didn’t slow him down a bit. He had that kind of career; this is what I mean when I say ‘The kind of man,’ it’s his posture towards the professional spheres. He didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He set goals and achieved them. What might be for the rest of us a rare and serious undertaking was just another week. Just routine. There were plane commutes. There were many flights. Before and after the surgical botch, the syndrome, the advent of the formidable medicinal schedule, important enough work sometimes took him overseas, and that meant flying.

In this instance he had a high-stakes engagement in Mongolia, something involving land rights, or a sexual assault case, or a satellite, or some combination of all three; I never knew the particulars. He’d nearly finished his business there, something like day seven of nine, when a hotel burglary deprived him of, among other things, some portion of his medicine stock. The extra fill that followed him out of the country as a matter of necessity, as a matter of life and death, was in the wind — and because of a few factors the pills were not replaceable through commercial means, or they were, but not on a timeline that would allow him to see his work to its desired end.

So I got a call from my mother-in-law. She told me about the burglary. She told me their grown sons were not at liberty to fly for professional or logistical or meteorological reasons. She told me that her husband’s firm was also unable to intervene in a timely manner due to obscure legal obstacles, an unacceptable amount of liability they claimed came from pharmaceutical regulations or from a misplaced permission somewhere in their human resources system. My wife’s mother called me. Do you get this? The mother of my wife. She asked me in a pained and hopeful timbre about the current status of my passport.

The rest happened very quickly, out of necessity; I paid forty-five dollars for a certain specific pre-approved medical bag and forty-five more to expedite security clearance at the airport; I drove to their house to collect the pills; I waved off thanks from my wife and her family; I arrived at the airport four hours early so as to leave nothing to chance; I took three flights over the span of twenty-five hours; I partially ejected a prepackaged sandwich during landing turbulence on the final leg of the final flight.

Disembarking, I felt a tremor of something, of human gravity or a new authentic strain of importance. I was shaking with nerves, so much so that I nearly missed the trash can at which I thrusted my paper-shelled mess, but at the same time I felt sure of myself, confident and competent and relieved to have a function.

Maybe you know how this is.

I sat in a taxi in traffic for a long time. A brief sunrise blurred out of sight over the stop-and-go trail of exhaust. It was probably close to noon when I got to the address. The building was a squarish four-storey structure the same color as the overcast sky, not very different from any of its neighbors. In the first-floor lobby, I refused to turn over the case with the meds until I saw my father-in-law in person — as per the instructions he’d passed along. After a half hour standing wait he stepped out of a stairwell, brisk but never rushing, not a hair out of place. He was a lean man, then, though less so than now, inflexible but with good posture. His tie wasn’t loose, his jacket was unrumpled. He’d trimmed his beard. The only clue he was tired was an edge in his resting expression, lines of age not normally noticeable, a painted sort of angel-to-a-sinner‘s-eye treatment. I kept my cool and strode to meet him with a handshake in the center of the room. No sweat. He thanked me with his eyes, with a few beats of silence while our hands were clasped. He said, “This is a critical moment.” He said it softly, crisp consonants, grateful and self-consciously dramatic, knowing I already knew. His free hand clapped my shoulder and I started, I felt a tremor, the entire building seemed to lurch in my periphery. I felt my pulse in my eyes. I cleared my throat and lifted the bag with the medical pouch inside it into the space between us. He released me to accept it. “Are you flying back right away?” he said.

My flight was in twelve hours. He clicked his teeth in acknowledgement of the inconvenience, cast a glance at the tile, then looked back up with a lighter expression.

“We can have dinner tonight. The other party,” and he lifted a hand towards the ceiling, “is more-or-less aware of what’s happened, of my situation, so on. Actually, it turned out to be something of a source of leverage. The sense that time was a factor. Windows closing, you know. Good you came when you did, obviously, but we made real headway. Couldn’t have gone too much better, things considered. I’m confident things will be stitched up entirely before too much longer,” he said. He nodded, so I nodded. “We’ll have dinner and I can drop you off.”

We made arrangements to meet nearby in a few hours. He gave me a firm smile and another shoulder clap, then disappeared up the stairs. Once he’d gone, the employees to whom I’d refused to turn his medication over promptly steered me out to the street.

7.5

I ambled for an hour, doing nothing, half-lost under the sky gone ice-colored, separated from it by a scatterbrained web of power lines. I had just found a place to duck inside and use the restroom.

Then the third tremor; the third foreshock woke me up to the true nature of the first two. First, when I’d touched down, and then when I’d made the handoff, I’d felt the quakes only distantly, missed the reality of those moments in the confusion of vestibular sensation and emotion, of time-crunch worry and relief, but the third rolled under and through me without any insulating distraction. I had stepped into an old building. It was a storefront with a flash of english signage in the window and a low-tide spread of miscellany on the shelves. I’d bought, it escapes me now what exactly, but I’d bought an envelope-shaped package of something, plastic parts, something like gaskets or rubber bands, so that I could use the facilities. The toilets were behind a curtain at the back of a smallish laundromat, a wide room itself situated at the rear of the building. At about the same moment I zipped up my fly, an engine noise closed around the dinge of the laundry room. The exposed pipes on the wall vibrated, the washers and dryers shook, a fluorescent tube that had been dim when I’d entered rattled back into its contacts and lit up a dark corner. A dustfall hung in the air and I heard a minor clamor from the front room of the storefront. Believe this or don’t, but I said — out loud, to no-one but me — “Jesus Christ, an earthquake?”

And I sensed the main shock coming, heard or felt it in an animal way. Maybe you know. There was a single second of quiet and stillness, or a fraction of a second, the barest organic articulation of instinctual fear — a silent alarm, a twist in the gut. I thought of a sudden leveling in an open ocean scene. The dust from the ceiling had sunk to waist-height in a thin sheet, just barely coming to rest on the surfaces of crooked laundry machines, curls of fine powder disappearing and reappearing in the fluorescents’ light.

The quake came grinding, in growing locomotive noise. My stomach dropped as it arrived. The gestalt experience was that of an explosion, or of what the movies train you to expect of an explosion — in a blink, the wave bludgeoned the entire area. The lights went out. Hollow sorts of car crash sounds came from the machines, beveled metal crumpling against itself. I was bucked into the air, touching ceiling and floor twice each in rapid succession, ragdolled, knee-slamming back to earth after each kick. Once back on the tiles, I managed a fetal curl, hands and elbows around my head, rode out the quake bouncing on the ground on my right side. Angular shapes battered my left flank and upper shoulder. I heard brief, rapidly receding screams, then thunder, a closer rumbling, gravelly collisions and metal scraping noise all backed by a tinnitus whine. That was it. After the impact the sounds gave way to irregular tin roof precipitation as smaller rubble sifted down onto the machines and tile.

I sat and listened and shook. I was stunned, physically stunned. It had been maybe the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life at that point. I was shaking badly enough that I couldn’t make heads or tails of the main shock’s passage at first, but at length I unfolded and got to my feet. Walking hurt, not much, but I couldn’t move easily. I felt for my phone to shine a light, but my pockets were empty, I suppose for my having been tossed around. I knelt back down to put my hands on the surface of the ground, but ultimately came up with nothing, even after my eyes adjusted.

The shapes of the room lifted out of pure darkness into angular vagaries, odd corners and jagged rubble shapes and wire tangles. There was a faint light from somewhere, a tiny crevice in the wall or ceiling, not enough to light up the room, but more than nothing. I steadied and began to grope around. I stumbled more than once — the floor had become a slope. The entire room, maybe the entire building, had canted up at something like a twenty degree angle. Every surface had a powdery texture and the first deep breath I took set off a series of coughs. I sat back in a crouch until the dust seemed to me to be settled, then limped my way up and across, towards where I thought I remembered the doorway. The only sound apart from my shuffling was an intermittent liquid noise, one or more severed water lines emptying out in the dark, and I thought of my little emetic episode on the plane, hours earlier; a sunny memory in comparison to the bruises, the ligamentary tweaking, the hints of disbelief and mortal fear in my crossing.

It was a long, braille-seeking search, and a disappointing one. The door was completely blocked by rubble. There was a long rack from the store, a crumpled mass of several pegboard shelves and their contents, collapsed into a barricade across the lower half of the opening. Pressing into it from above and behind, filling the remainder, was the drop ceiling of the store’s front room — square tiles in a bowed metal grid, familiar even in the flimsy light but fallen to a nearly-vertical surface. Neither the shelves nor the panels had any give whatsoever. I touched them and knew at once, but couldn’t accept it. I exhausted my arms and legs pushing, then slumped in the dust. I sat in the dark for some time.

I lost some time here, maybe drained by the initial adrenal surge. I gasped awake, from darkness to darkness. I’d felt, or I convinced myself I’d felt, a whisper of air over my left shoulder. I flinched from empty sleep and reexamined the lower portion of the rubble. There was indeed a triangular gap, a crease near the base of the shelves. I dropped. I put my face nearly to the floor and screamed out for help.

A voice that wasn’t my own answered from within the room, before I’d even finished the sound. It was hoarse and surprised, a noise you’d expect from someone deep asleep the second before. My breath caught mid-shout and my cry jumped to a yelp of alarm, then of pain — I scrambled to my feet and stood into something hard and smooth, a pipe or a support that had been displaced by the quake. My teeth clacked together and the tinnitus ring in my ears was renewed. I doubled over, cradled my head. I craned my neck to keep the room in view, but it was only the same indefinite shapes of the washers, the battered plumbing, the compromised walls. I shouted, searching in a panic for the glint of human eyes, for a shadow shape that I’d previously skimmed and dismissed. I called out — “Hello? Hello? …” — but it wasn’t until I gave up and let my voice disappear into the rubble that I got an answer. It startled me again; it was a man’s voice. It was flinty, a rasp, the phonemes were clipped. I couldn’t tell where he was and I didn’t understand what he was saying. I started babbling, I said “English? English? Hello?” and he was quiet again.

“English,” he said. There was a rustling noise, a sound like my own shuffling footsteps, but I still couldn’t see him. I couldn’t make out any movement at all within the room. He spoke again, words that I thought I just didn’t catch at first, but amidst the sounds he repeated the word — “English,” — and I realized he was speaking another language.

I heard my own disappointment, a lilt of uncertainty on its way to fresh fear. “Oh,” I said, the word escaping like a sigh. “I don’t speak… Mongolian.” I trailed off. In fact, at the time, I didn’t know so much as whether or not Mongolian was what they spoke in Mongolia. In the moment the ache from my head seemed like a physical manifestation of my stupidity, of my lack of worldliness, a justification for my place in the disaster. I powered through. “Are you hurt?” I said. “Do you understand me?”

He took a long time to answer. I was tense, stock-still, straining my ears. I didn’t understand where he’d come from. I hadn’t seen him in the room before the earthquake, hadn’t seen anyone else behind the curtain that separated the commodes from the rest of the room. That is to say — I had a sense that something was wrong from the start. His presence changed the texture of my distress, flipped a switch somewhere — I couldn’t have explained why — from ‘natural disaster’ to ‘human malice.’ I was scared in a more active way; a discrete and immediate fear came over me. His being there was a threat, my doubts of that fact internally appraised as weakness. On some level I knew that the moment where survivors meet had certain features, that it was supposed to be a certain way that this was not. I didn’t have experience with this kind of thing but something struck me wrong. There was an undercurrent of something aberrant that I could detect even through the pain and shock, even in dire novelty: I wanted to see him. I wanted to be able to see him, but I couldn’t.

When he answered me, he said “Yes,” and then he repeated it, he formed another elastic ‘ee-yes,’ a drawn-out syllable as if he was considering his answer after the fact. “American?” he said. His voice seemed to be moving, though I didn’t hear more footsteps.

“Yes,” I say. “Are you hurt?”

Another beat passed. “No. No, okay,” he said. “Okay. You are okay?”

“I’m okay. Well — no, I’m okay. But the door is blocked,” I said. I paused, and when I spoke again I could hear the nerves in my voice. “Where are you?” This made him laugh, which I didn’t appreciate. It was a smokey, phlegm-thick laugh, louder than his speech. He sounded like he was right next to me, and for all I knew he was. I’m not proud of this, but I cried out “Oh, come on, stop that!” on an impulse, waved an arm blindly in front of me. My face felt hot.

His laughter ebbed. He parroted my question, sans affect, his accent flattening the vowel sounds. He said it twice in an uneven rhythm. “Where-are you. Where-are you,” and then he let out a low humming sound. The next words came as if they’d just occurred to him. “Where are you from? What place, what state?”

“What?” I said.

“What, what, what. What, what, what…” he said, and the echolalia was almost a chant, almost sing-song. This was also something I could have done without. When I didn’t answer, he came back. “Oh, I scare you?” He said, then there was a stifled breath like a snicker. “Ooh, Sorry. We just wait. Just wait, just wait.”

“Yes,” I said, gathering breath. “We’ll wait. I’ll wait over here, and…” I trailed off. He said nothing, but I felt him watching me.

A WORM

No new sounds, no motion. The day disappeared, the entire day, I just sat with my back to the barricade at the doorway. I felt already-dead. The beating I’d taken during the quake had sunken in and my entire body was a regular throbbing ache, lines of tension and pressure all in conflict. It hurt to move, but then it hurt to sit still, too. As an additional treat, back on the unentombed city surface, the sun set. It took all of fifteen minutes, or it felt that way. The temperature plummeted and what little light there was gave out. The room became pitch dark. In the blind quiet, I had the kinds of thoughts you might feel obliged to. I thought about my parents, my older sister, the last old family dog. I thought about my wife and the in-laws — about my father-in-law. I wondered if the man himself had escaped the quake somehow, or if my coming had ultimately been all for nothing. I wondered where we’d have had dinner. I shivered, and my body ached, and together the shivering and the ache expanded across my whole sensory horizon, deprived of sight as I was. I rolled onto my side and the only thing I could focus on was that image. I pictured them finding my body that way, hoping in a distant and half-shaped thought that I wouldn’t be completely destroyed by an aftershock or by a collapse between now and my eventual exhumation.

I was crying, or making crying sounds, at least, because he heard me. A pressure gathered in the room before I heard his voice — somehow I knew. He hadn’t been a Mongolian, you see. I’d been imagining someone like the many older folks I’d seen out on the street earlier that day: slight old men with capable-looking faces, the kinds of guys you might guess had been a pipe-fitter or a carpenter for sixty years. I blame my foreigner’s mindset, I don’t know. When I heard, I knew. I knew even without seeing him, because when he spoke — he heard my heavy breathing, I guess, and it got his attention — when he spoke, it was totally accent-free. The rasp in his throat was transformed, still present, but the vocal posture was changed; it was the same hard voice but shaping the full, rounded syllables of American English. “No, they’re not coming,” he said. His voice hovered over the darkness of the room, and it sucked up all of the oxygen. My breath caught, I mean, I went rigid, I didn’t breathe. I felt an impulse to flee and, well, I did nothing with it. I waited. He said, even-toned, still phlegmy, “There’s a window for this kind of thing, and we’re past it. Breathe it in. Mm. Last air. Yes, sir. That doorway was our last. One door in, zero out, incredible, like a magic trick, like a trick room. I knew it an hour ago. Welcome to the fuckin’ party.”

I might have said, ‘What the hell.’

Whatever I said or didn’t, he went on. He floated through the room and my eyes blinked or they didn’t, searching for him, it didn’t matter in the dark. His voice riled as he spoke. I’d assumed he was old, but I was less and less sure of his age with each word. “You live a wrong life? Is that why you’re crying? You waste your time? Answer me. Crying. Curled up, an insect, a baby. You’re crying like an animal. No, it’s worse. You’re crying like a bitch. Answer me. You afraid to die? Afraid to go bad? You deserve to be afraid. Behaving like that. Like a worm. Son of a bitch.” He spat in the dust.

I was on my feet again, as much as it hurt. I asked him what the hell was wrong with him. My eyes were fighting to escape their sockets, bugged out, wide open and desperate for light. I was fists-in-a-ball, tense. My pulse was up, my inner man shambling back down from the well with more adrenaline, one last fight. I was shaking.

“It’s an insult,” he said. “Unbelievable. Stuck like this, at the end, with someone like you.” An afterthought slipped out with more of the same edged disdain. “I bet you look French.”

“No — or, no, what? I’m American — I told you I was,” I said.

“No, I know, I heard you,” he said. His tone swerved, softened ironically. “You just sound so delicate, is all. There’s no way you’re not. I bet you cook. I bet you bake.” I was floored. As you know, I do bake — I did then, too. It is not a good feeling, to be clocked this way, whether or not it makes any sense. I was confused, afraid. In the logic of the moment, he had one on me. He couldn’t have known, but he did. I shouted at him. I didn’t have words, but I felt an outrage at the whole situation, at my trappedness, the strangeness, the purgatory cellmate with the dropped mask and the inscrutable chauvinism. But it came out too surprised, a prey noise, a joke, and his laugh rocketed around the room again. I couldn’t even drown out his noise with my own. I screamed myself dizzy, flattened myself against the rubble in the doorway, and he was right in my ears the whole time. He was laughing, closer and closer, louder step by step despite the laugh graveling towards its finish. I felt the pressure in the room increase as he came closer.

Then I was blinded by the pin point of a flashlight bulb. He had my phone. The light glared down at me, held aloft, and I let out a gasp — frankly, I mean, I knew in the moment this would not help matters, but frankly I yelped. It was a yelp. He laughed again, laughed at me, laughed to the point of coughing. I lifted one arm to block my face. Past my spread fingers, the source of the starburst made brief fly-flight patterns in the darkness as he buckled, laughing, close enough for me to feel vapor heat from his breath. I took a blind swipe and whiffed, but the movement brought the noise to an abrupt stop. The flashlight stabilized, then disappeared. All I had internalized were a few disintegrated swathes of color and texture that might have been limbs, legs, clothing, an approximately man-shaped surface. When the light was gone, he went quiet — I could hear a sound like grinding teeth. Then he spat on me; the hock and release were so quick that I couldn’t register it for what it was. I just flinched. It stuck on my collarbone, stringy and body-warm but rapidly cooling. I was stunned.

He waited for something that I couldn’t recognize. It came and went. The pressure lifted. When he spoke, the undercurrent of bully enthusiasm was gone from the rasp. He sounded tired. “Son of a bitch,” he said. The words came out on a sigh. “I had a good run, I guess. Worse ways to go. Like a magic trick, but real, two men enter, zero men leave.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I know you’re afraid. It’s the real deal.”

I didn’t answer. I stared at nothing.

“I know you are. Freezing to death. Starving. Better than crushed. Better, but it’s the real thing. I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid to die and you’re afraid of me. Damn right, too. This is how I am. How I was. I dominated. I lived right. I did it, you know. I had it. See? Look at yourself. It’s dark, but you can always look at yourself. You’re every guy I ever met. You’re a different species. Every meal I ever had.”

“You’re a cannibal?” I said, maybe stammered. It didn’t seem so implausible.

“No, you midwit. Use your brain. Come on.” He coughed. I heard him step back, settle against one of the washers. After another pause, he sighed. “This is really it,” he said. It had been directed to no-one in particular; it seemed to me to be a sign he was done with me. I sank back to the floor, exhausted all over again, loogie under my collar. In the same distracted tone, he said “Supposed to be, twelve hours and basically you’re done for. Missed the window. Odds drop to nothing.”

“I’ve never heard that figure before,” I said.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. The room was silent; the trickling sound had stopped. “You look like, what are you, Ashkenazi?” he said, but then, just as quickly, “Don’t answer that.”

So I said nothing. I asked for my phone, but he ignored me or somehow didn’t hear. The thought occurred to me — I wondered if he had a head injury. The thought came and went. He spoke up again. “I have to tell you something. I have to tell someone something, and you’re it. You’re all that’s here,” he said. “Unbelievable. But if I don’t — Well, I have to tell someone. That’s just how it is.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but he cut me off.

“Because if I don’t,” he said, but stopped short. There was a twist to his breath that made me shiver.

THE MOON ROOM

“I was in procurements, not too long ago. Do you know what that is?”

He seemed to be waiting for a response, but he cut me off again; as soon as I opened my mouth, he went on. “Seven figures, some months. You’d shit if you saw my bank account. Bankrupt your local government with an invoice. Everything I want and everything I didn’t want anyone else to have. Do you get it? My wristwatch was worth as much as your house. My shoes, your car. My car, well, forget about it. My drip would make you believe in god if you didn’t, and it would make you stop if you already did. This is who I was. I had property and I had sex. Those were my principal behaviors. That was my life, my lifestyle. You, your kind, you want more. I had more. I had all the more I wanted and I had all of yours, too. Property. Sex. Diamonds gathering dust. Diamonds on everything. Diamonds, get this, on cock rings. Cock rings I didn’t even need. My erections are already, at baseline, a scientific marvel, cock rings you’d need a mortgage for I had in triplicate, just because. Property. Sex. Wealth, okay? I could have bought your mother. I did buy people’s mothers. Procurements.”

He formed the last word slowly, with a webby rumble in his chest. He shifted and something on the washer protested with a metal noise. “Naturally my women were superior. Not models. That’s childish. Supermodels, maybe, but only when I was slumming it. No, no. I had Olympians, the hot ones. I had women like jet engines. Fighter jets. Women your kind of guy is not qualified for. You’d put yourself at risk, these girls, you’d embarrass yourself if you tried. Women with powerful husbands who I’d fuck in front of them just because I could. The husbands. Like, as an appetizer for the wife. I’ve fucked secret clones of dead celebrities. Women with value. Women with skills. I’d teach gymnasts magic tricks, got them addicted to heroin, and then I’d fuck their holes two, sometimes three at once. Literally. You’ve never fucked two holes at once. You don’t even know what that means. But I do. I had stables. Binders of women, you get it? Harems like from biblical times, okay? You’d shit if you saw my women. You’d shit and eat it for a chance at one, you’d give up your citizenship, you’d sell both kidneys so the last thing you’d do was nut on their shoes. You’d send your balls one-day express to the moon if it meant you could grab tit for six seconds. You would.”

Horrifying, I know. Under the rasp, under his tirade, the darkness swam. And the temperature was still dropping; I couldn’t feel my toes. I drew in a breath and he swooped in. “I had a place, Cali, the not-shit part,” he said. “Ten thousand square feet. Out in the hills. On the coast. I’d flown back in, wealthier than I’d ever been before in my life, same shit as the day before, and the day before that, and et cetera. I had my favorite at the time waiting, I’d flown her in too. We met in Cairo. You never met a woman in Cairo, much less a doctor. A heart surgeon. Soon after an ex-surgeon; she retired thanks to me. She was up-and-coming, a pioneer-to-be. Whatever. I saw her and knew that this was a woman whose true talents were wasted in cardiac medicine. This is a woman who’s counterproductive by her nature, got an ass that will make your heart stop. Can you even imagine? Don’t try, you’ll hurt yourself. In you go to the surgical theater, even one look, a sideways glance, and your whole life is fucked up. Cardiac arrest, just like that. In you go. They open you up and she’s the one person within a hundred miles with the skills to fix you. And she does. Easy. But then you catch a glimpse through the anesthetic haze, as she’s walking out. Ass. Boom, you’re out again. Pointless. This is obviously, I say, obviously not a woman meant to achieve things. I put the moves on; in a month, she’s mine. No, it doesn’t even take that long, in a week she’s in the books, you know, I’ve got her name in a spreadsheet next to her measurements, my remarks next to that. But that column’s the same for all of them: ‘Easy.’”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, but he didn’t stop.

“I buy her permanent nails, as a sign, right, a symbol. Unworkable for surgery. Even you get it. Not that she needs them, but I get her implants — the good ones, the ones you got to get custom, from this company that makes the prosthetic parts and the cluster mines, too. Got to get one that’s the product of ‘horizontal integration,’ that’s the only tell for quality. And for what it’s worth, I solve every other problem in her life, too. Same shit as always. I am in control. I have her on standby. Mansion in Cali. Milk baths, dolphin meat, wine that popes drink on special occasions, but she gets it just whenever,” he paused for a beat. “She has no excuse. Less than no excuse.”

Our teeth were chattering. It was the only sound, a tiny percussion, two points of echolocation in the dark, for what felt like a long time. “So… what,” I said. “She breaks up with you? She escapes?”

He couldn’t even manage any more invective. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, a sigh that shook the room. “She’s got some skinny fuck in the moon room,” he said, his tone that of genuine injury, the rasp close to a voice crack. Another deep breath. “This is a room I had installed that’s supposed to have low-gravity, like the moon, but it doesn’t fucking work, at least so I thought. So instead it just looks like where they shot the moon landing. Whatever. But I fly in, feeling good, wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, you know? I get home. The car I let her have is there. She’s supposed to be waiting for me. But she is not. Not in bed, not in the swing, not on the couch, not in the pool, not in the sauna, not in the tub, not in the hot tub, not in the milk tub. I’m pissed. I’m stomping all over the house looking for her like some kind of — I just mean, it’s a big place. That was the point of the place, but I’m on a goddamn hike trying to find this bitch. And more, I keep passing it, saying, well, she wouldn’t be in the fucking moon room. No point. Doesn’t work. Nothing doing. I go in circles. I’m losing my goddamn head. It’s the one place I don’t look. Hours, I’m talking, at least two hours. I’m calling her, I’m yelling, I get on the PA system. I look in all the dumbwaiters. Finally I kick open the doors, just so I can say I’ve looked everywhere, I know she’s not in there but here I go, moon room, whoop-de-fuckin’-do. And there she is. And there he is. They’ve been hiding. They’re up in the fucking, the special equipment, the low-gravity shit, the big arms and radar dishes and cables and all the goddamn sci-fi bullshit. They were fucking in low gravity, jumped up there when they realized I was back early. They figured they could turn the gravity off, or on, I guess, but you walk in and where else could I even look? Fucking stupid,” he said. His breathing was increasingly ragged. I felt like I could actually see him shrink, a man-shaped bulk of negative space, a nested outline in the dark, shrinking, head-in-hands and ego collapsing under the recollection, curling inward the same way I had. There was misery in his voice. “I just look at this guy. This kid. Hundred thirty pounds, tops. No physique. Pasty fuck. Fucking, acne and shit on his chest. And his dick is out, and I’d have laughed if it didn’t piss me off so goddamn bad. He’s awful. She’s perfect, he’s awful, and the two of them, together, it’s a fucking insult. That’s how I’m feeling. He’s afraid. She’s afraid, too. On the one hand, damn right, and on another, she’s a fucking girl, okay, but then on the last hand — fucking, you know, this guy is embarrassing. Barely a man. It’s an affront to me. How could she do that, when she had me? I ask her, I ask her how she could even fucking stand to look at him. How she could tolerate fucking someone like that. We go back and forth, me on the ground and them wrapped around each other and around the, the fucking, I don’t know what it’s called, the fucking strut or the beam or whatever.”

I let the moon landing comment go. When I tried to ask him if he was claiming that he literally had a machine that counteracts gravity, though, he only scoffed.

“Use your brain. You know, you have a commoner’s mindset, a peon’s, a serf’s. You can’t even imagine. I’m telling you something important.” He spat again, on the ground this time. “We’re yelling back and forth but I’m getting nothing. She’s got no reason. No excuse. He’s got scoliosis, for fuck’s sakes, he’s got chicken legs and balls like grapes. I’m just getting more pissed. I throw the replica moon flag at them, like a javelin, but it hits the strut and bounces off. I wind up having to fish the manual for the gravity out of the replica moon lander. I don’t know how to turn the gravity down so I can go up and fucking, you know, beat the shit out of them. But even after I read it, it won’t turn on. I’m doing it all, the book tells you how to do it all. But it’s fucked up again or something. I can’t do it. They might as well have been on the actual moon, with me stuck on the ground. I’d tired myself out. I sit in the passenger seat of the fucking replica moon car and I stare up at them. I keep asking, why, why, how could she, how could she, but she won’t answer. Neither of them are saying anything. I’m stuck just staring at their bare asses up in the rafters. Marooned and mooned on the moon. It was the worst thing I’d ever experienced in my life, not being able to flatten them for it. I keep asking. I just keep saying, how, how, why, why, I keep saying it. This is hours, again. Eventually she cracks. She says — You know what she says?”

I didn’t bother answering at first, but it really seemed like he was waiting for me to respond. It was as if he really could see me, as if he could tell when he needed to cut in to interrupt me. I still don’t understand how he was doing it. Just when I gave in, when I was about to ask him, he went on.

“‘He makes me laugh,’ she says. Makes her laugh. I can’t fucking believe it, I flip the fucking moon car over. Makes her laugh. What is that worth? What does that get you? It’s bullshit. It’s a load. It’s disgusting. The thought that she could do anything close to choosing him when she could have me, it turns my stomach. No sense. Nothing on god’s green earth. I have a scientifically significant member, I fuck for entire movie trilogies, I have ten houses each the size of ten smaller houses, more money than her home country. But he makes her laugh. Bullshit. So that’s it, I say, I’m done with it. And I light the place up. It’s easy. It’s really fucking easy. I turn the sprinklers off and I fucking douse the whole place, starting in the moon room, I pour out an everclear that I got from a Saudi prince, one you have to mark as a combustion hazard at TSA. I spark the trail on the way out. I could see the fire from the plane,” he said. After a beat, he sighed. “Fucking waste. Fucking bitch.” And he waited. “Listen, the point is — You can do everything. Willpower. You can live right. That’s what I thought. Control everything, fuck everything, own, dominate. Property, sex, prestige. No fucking reason not to. Except. Except there’s no accounting for dumb bitches with no sense of where her priorities ought to be,” and then there was a thoughtful pause. “Or earthquakes. Ultimately those two things are the main ones fucking up men today, I’d say.”

And the sigh that escaped him after he said those words was one of contentment, of relief. He’d had to tell me, and told me, alright.

EVERYWHERE

But what do you say to something like that? At best a fabulist’s nonsense, at worst the confession of a kind of madman, a sociopath on the run. I was freezing. I couldn’t feel my fingers, my nose. I was hungry and lightheaded and my entire body hurt. I felt what I supposed was an aftershock. It rattled the words out of me. I said, “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

A little laugh, a cough-scoff chuckle. “A minor inconvenience in my life would be the worst thing you’ve ever heard. This would have been apocalyptic. You wouldn’t have survived it. You would have fucked up the arson, or the javelin throw would have bounced back and speared you in the eye. That’s the kind of guy you are.”

I shook my head, pointlessly, feeling deserted. “No, I mean, that’s the last thing I’m ever going to hear,” I said. Another firm vibration shook the dark. I expected a proper aftershock at any second that would pulverize us, put me out of my misery. Honest to god, I was about to tell him what I really thought, let him have it, ‘Why not if I’m dying anyway’ — when the disaster relief people reached the room on the other side of the barricade.

Unmistakable scraping sounds. Distant voices, urgent phrases, counting down from three before a cement noise, grunts of effort. I turned my face to put my ear near the crevice at the bottom of the shelves, and the voices seemed to draw nearer. “Jesus Christ,” I said. I wanted to forget everything he’d just told me. “We’re saved. Give me the phone, we’ll flash them, signal them.” I groped in the dark, shuffled toward where I thought the washer he was sitting on was. I didn’t make contact, so I called again, frustrated, voice like a wire, thin but hard and desperate. “Fine, then, but turn the light on yourself at least, they have to find us!” My hand still raked air, grabbing nothing. Then it went on. I was blinded again, turned my head back towards the corner and squinted. I could make out the constituent pieces of the wall of rubble clearly for the first time, and I saw some translucent something, a compacted mass of plastic packaging or the like, wedged into an otherwise empty space. I started to say, ‘Come on, come and shine it here,’ but the phone was pressed into my hand, flash still facing me, colder fingers even than my own. I twisted, fumbled it around, lit up an oval of the room. I blinked. He was gone. I saw dust-colored grey everything, ducts and pipes and washers and dryers, just what I’d always imagined the site of a disaster would be. I saw that a far wall had partially collapsed, fanned out into jigsaw sections of painted cinderblock fragments. But I didn’t see him. He was nowhere in sight. The empty spotlight circle made me feel hollow, unreal, not entirely sane, but the noise from beyond the rubble in the doorway muted all of that, tamped down all of those feelings. I shone the light through the crease, then through the little translucent wedge, and then I turned it on and off, flashed it. The chatter outside lifted, people made astonished sounds, seeing some trace, I imagine, some secondary reflection coming out of the rubble. The gravel noises intensified, the pace picked up, objects and slabs of material were levered, broken up, displaced.

In the two further hours it took them to breach the barricade, I turned the light off periodically to save the phone’s battery. Each time, the dark returned fully-thick, even darker than before somehow. Each time I turned the light on again, I expected to see him, maybe two paces away with a cinderblock or a length of pipe raised overhead. He never appeared, nor was there any man-shaped hole or shadow in any corner. I edged along the high wall, lit every inch in turn. No-one was there. I thought, in a split second of pareidolia, that a pair of human eyes hovered in the dark at the sunken side of the room — but when I swung the light, it was clear that it had only been a stray reflection of the flash, two errant speculars on the fragments of a commode.

Eventually the squares of the drop ceiling shifted. Whatever was holding them in place fell away and they were peeled up. More light, other flashlight beams, streamed into the room. Shadows of rapid, capable hands. Pry bars, shovels, shouting. There were two rows of men and women, each joined by climbing ropes that were in turn held by crowds at an opening twenty-five feet up or so; the building had fallen into a pocket opened in the earth by the quake. One of their ropes was fed slack, the slack lowered down, and when I had secured myself according to the guidance of the two closest to the remnants of the barricade, they fished me out. I glanced down, past the rescuers spotting each other, on the climb up. Past the squarish hole, the exposed upper half of the doorway, there were two little catches of light, circular, ocular. I started crying. Before I’d reached the surface, I was weeping. I was led, among hurried stretcher caravans and foot traffic, to a tent headquarters where they had first aid bays, and where they had reestablished wireless service. The missed calls and voice messages spilled in. My wife, my parents, my family, the in-laws. I was able to confirm that I was alive, that my father-in-law had himself narrowly avoided being crushed — I spoke to him, but only briefly; he was contributing somehow to logistical support and his time was still very much in demand at that stage in the relief work.

I slept through the rest of that early morning on a cot in a warehouse room in an area less affected by the quake. I woke from a falling dream after midday, probably close to a complete twenty-four hours after the mainshock. I had to queue to recharge my phone, but before long I was able to check in with my family again, to look into arranging a flight home.

I don’t tell anyone about the man right away. But I tell them about the quake, the room, how lucky I was that things happened exactly as they did, especially given the mounting toll. Between calls, in the course of texting my wife these things, I brushed an icon for attaching photos. You’ve probably done the same. Maybe you know. In case you don’t, though, I’ll tell you — when I did so, the gesture expanded a little gallery of photos, right in the messenger screen, and of course it shows the most recent pictures first. This is how I first saw it, in a little thumbnail. It felt like my heart stopped. I’ll tell you now, I can’t explain it. I would later, as you can see, print it out, frame it, hang it in a conspicuous position on the wall. Take a look. It’s a little blurry, and the exposure is what you’d expect, and more than a decade has passed since, but it’s me. Here, take it, don’t worry. The frame is cheap, and the thing itself is just printer paper. I can always make another if I need to. Look. This is the room. Do you see? There’s the pipe, the one I banged my head on, there are the broken shelves across the bottom of the doorway. The ceiling of the other room. That shadow there is the crease I’d tried to call for help through. And, of course, there’s my left hand, on the doorframe, and there’s my right, down next to my knee. He was there; he got me mid-yelp, so you can see, my expression isn’t necessarily flattering. Do you see? He was there.

I keep this where I see it every day. It’s something like an anchor, a specimen pin through the memory of that day, because otherwise I’m sure I would have forced myself to forget it had happened how it did. But he was there. Someone was in that room. Whoever it was, though I never really saw their face, I see it everywhere I look.

#creative writing

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