5/9-7/6/11
The sun came through the window a little too brightly. Jim looked at the blinds, willing them to fold up and cut the sunlight into yellow lines on the ceiling. He didn’t move though. That will faded away when aimed toward his limbs. He blinked, but that was his eyelids, not himself. Jim looked down at his hands, wanting to squeeze them into fists, just the right one even. They looked like beggars hands, fingers cupped and ready for coins.
He heard the key rattling around in the lock, announcing her presence. The sound of the front door opening came down the hallway, the rustle of paper bags, her footsteps. After a short amount of time Rachel walked into the doorway and stood there, as if she were the door itself. She took in the scene. Jim still in bed, the way he looked at her, a mixture of embarrassment and fear and relief. She thought of a dog who had fallen in a well, looking up.
“Are you hungry,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Really?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well I got some food and I want you to eat.”
“Okay,” he said.
She said “Bagels and cream cheese, granola, strawberry jam, and yogurt.”
He managed a smile. “I don’t think I’m that hungry.”
“Pick one,” she said. She nodded, an acknowledgement of his attempt at humor, but didn’t smile back.
After a pause he said, “Torture by yogurt.”
She was already down the hall. “It won’t be that be that bad.” When she was gone the smile faded beneath the pressing sunlight. He wished he’d asked her to close the blinds, but he also knew her eye-rolling and sighs would be worse than the light. He closed his eyes, but the red glow of the blood in his eyelids was like the whine of a leaf blower.
When she came back with the yogurt and a spoon and a bowl of cut up strawberries, he asked her about her walk.
“It’s a beautiful day. There’s a little breeze that makes the leaves shiver and the shadows change.” Jim looked up though the window but his view didn’t contain any trees or clouds or anything that the wind could move.
“So,” she said, “Is it something or not?”
“It’s always something,” he said.
“Something you know?” she said.
“Actually, today, I think it is.” She waited. “I was…I was thinking about something. Right when I woke up, like the thought was already there. It was this talk I had with my grandfather. I was playing out in the yard in the afternoon. It had rained that day but now the sky was clear. I was squatting over the earth, watching a worm move along through the surface layer of the dir, which was already drying up. I couldn’t believe how it just kept going! No arms, no legs, it just kept squeezing in and pushing out, using its little bristle arms I guess. I lay next to it and pulled my arms against my sides and my legs together, and kind of rolled back and forth trying to move forward. Tworm was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen! Then I remembered what the other kids at school said, that you could cut a worm in half, and that both halves would become its own worm. Have you heard that?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So I carefully scooped up this little thing that I’d been watching intently for 10, 15 minutes, put it on a flat rock, and searched around for another flat rock to cut it. I kept thinking, I’m going to make one worm into two. It’s going to grow a second brain, it’s going to have a twin, a best friend, forever. I found a thin, sharp stone, returned to my worm and…” Jim hit the bed with his hand. “For a second I was revolted, not just by myself, but by the maimed creature in front of me, as if I’d just cut off a dog’s legs, and there it was, alive, confused and twitching. Well, I…” Jim’s mouth stopped moving, right in mid sentence, the jaw open but not slack. “…I…I tell you both sides were moving and wiggling, the front was moving a bit more…umm…panicked. I realized it was becoming two worms, and in that moment it wasn’t gross or scary anymore. I watched them for a few more minutes, then took them inside to show my grandfather. He shook his head and walked us over to the desk that was my father’s desk, but he’d never used. He pushed aside the yellow pad of paper and ballpoint pens and had me put both worms on the dark brown surface. He pushed the chair in and I was trapped against the desk. He said to watch them, and to call me when something happened. I asked him what. He said I would know. ‘Don’t call til you know,’ he said and left the room. So I crossed my arms on the desk and rested my chin on them and watched the worms twitch and struggle. Nothing happened for a few hours, except once in awhile a worm came near the edge and I turned it around. I didn’t leave or fall asleep because I couldn’t disappoint my gramps. Then I realized that one of them, the one with the head, was changing. The opposite end of the head half was tapering and becoming a tail. The other one, the original tail was slowing its twitching, and soon ceased altogether. It hadn’t been a second worm at all, just a twitchy body part. Instead of creating another life form I’d simply maimed and shortened one that already existed.
‘Grandpa!’ I yelled. His footsteps came behind me quickly. He leaned over me. ‘We’re all like that,’ he said. ‘The body and the soul. When you split them apart, the body dies, but the soul lives on. Now put that poor bastard back where he belongs.’
I took both of them out back. I dug a little hole until it was mud and put the live little worm back into his home. Then I dug another hole and buried its dead former tail.” Jim’s eyes were on the ceiling. As the silence after his story stretched out he brought them to rest on Rachel.
“Hmm,” she said. “You woke up thinking about that?”
“I did. I mean, not all that, just the end, just the part where I buried the live one and the dead one in the same place, and I wondered…”
“Yeah?” she said. She was getting impatient. Jim wanted to say it, but now, because he paused, he thought saying it after telling the whole memory of his boyhood would be anticlimactic.
While Jim tried to figure out if he was going to finish speaking or not, Rachel silently left the room. He knew she had to get to work and didn’t want to wait for him to build up the energy to finish s sentence. A few minutes later her footsteps came back to the door and “I’m leaving.”
“I wish you’d stay.”
“I have a lot to catch up on at work.”
“We could talk. Or just sit.”
“I hope you get up and enjoy the day.”
“I will. I know I can if you stay.”
The door was shutting. Time began to pass.
His thoughts began to dip below the surface of the present, to get caught in the jet streams of things he had said and done. He didn’t fall into reverie, didn’t reminisce, he was simply breathing in the worry about what he had done and what had been done to him. He jolted back to the present with a shiver, shaking the bed. But then the bed didn’t stop. It was the bed that had moved him, or rather, the earth. He jumped up quickly and ran to the doorway. How much time was passing? Earthquakes always seemed longer than they were. What he thought was a momentary scream cut into his ears, and then his bedroom window shattered. The shards caught the sunlight as they fell, and it looked to Jim like he were in a sparkly snowglobe. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. An ache he had always felt but never known pulled him forward. He ran toward the sparkles, to envelop himself in their reflections, but of course, as fast as his mind was recording each detail, his body couldn’t catch up. By the time his watery limbs had crossed the room the window had become a jagged booby trap on the floor. It was at this point that Jim thought he should get out of the house. He jumped on his bed and hurled himself through the empty window toward the backyard. He felt like a superhero. He even landed relatively smoothly with a shoulder roll onto the stone and brick ground. He continued into a standing position and as he came up heard a real scream. It wasn’t the kind of scream anyone ever wanted to hear, and it chilled him to the bone. It was a child’s voice, full of panic, of falling or being cut, confused, afraid, trying to scream away whatever was happening. Jim thought all these things, but his philosophical ruminations came as he was already hopping the fence next door, and then the next fence, to get to the house 2 over where the kid lived. He figured it was her, Maria or Carla or something. She was the only kid on the block and he’d only really met her once right after she was born, when he made her parents a cake and, in a fit of mania, threw most of the childhood toys and books he’d been saving for 20 years into a bag and brought them over. They invited him in but warned him she was asleep. He desperately wanted her to see him there, not that she would understand he had brought her gifts, but so that someday, when she was older, she might see him again and recognize his face, and put it together with all her experiences with the painted barn with the door that mooed when you opened it, the plastic shark, the fisherman with the gaunt cheeks, the tattered copies of Goodnight Moon and Where The Wild Things Are. He had even looked at her, willing the word wake up toward her, hoping to wake her up without anyone knowing it was him. She lay on her back, her head to the side, her flowery lips parted.
She would see him now.
He landed there in her backyard. Near the askew house was a pile of old boxes, the packing tape cut, their bodies flattened and piled up. The boxes where shivering. So were his legs. For a moment he thought the earthquake was still going, when he heard her muffled cries. He ran forward, toward the boxes. He quickly eyed the house. The upstairs window was broken, and the corners of the building had been slightly rhombused, but it looked stable enough.
“Just not a square anymore,” he said. “Not the same, not a square.”
He began to dig, picking up the cold, molding old boxes and throwing them behind him like oversized Frisbees. “Not cubes anymore.” What the hell did they have these for? He saw ants and beetles and roly-polies. Where they crawling on her, even now? In his mind he imagined her as she was years ago, a little baby, unworkable by his thoughts, covered in crawly little legs. Just as he was grazing flesh with his digging fingers, he heard her father yelling. The words were too fast, he couldn’t make them out, were they English? Was he angry, was he afraid? Where was he?
Jim grabbed a forearm and pulled. He almost screamed when he saw the father there. He let go quickly, disgusted, and looked back at the house. The girl, it must be her, stood near the pane-less window, crying, silent now.
“Jim, thank you, I can’t…” The father almost fell, grabbing Jim’s arm and shoulder. Once studied he limped over to lean on the fence. Jim looked down at the ground, down at his hands. “Jim.” The man was breathless. “Jim, I can’t.” Jim felt himself shrinking, his elbows coming into his ribcage, his knees eating up his calves. “Jim!” Jim, shocked, looked the father in the eye. “Jim, listen. I can not walk. Please, Carla, please.”
Jim was already running through the garage. Everything looked like it did when he was dancing. There was a low rumble somewhere, everywhere, and sprays of dust shooting out like hydraulics. The house was just like his, but the stairs aren’t where they should be. He stood where the bottom step was, waiting for them to appear. His body began to slow down, his momentum leaving through his legs straight into the ground. Next to him was a door, like the door to his bedroom. He pushed it open and shuffled in, confused to not see his bed there, the sun splashed across it. Cardboard boxes lined the walls. And old table with the legs unscrewed and lying next to it. A dusty director’s chair collapsed in on itself. In the corner, where his bed should be, the steps came down, cutting into the room. Underneath the steps was a white box, and he knew it was his. He crouched down beneath the stairs and pulled it out, and uncovered his old toys. The little boxy, 1970’s looking metal cars with the doors that really opened, his wand of water and sparkles. He didn’t see a few things, figures and books he liked when he was older. Maybe she still had those, held them to her chest right now. He almost stood up and took the stairs then and there, but he found the barn with the door that mooed when you opened it. The moo still worked. He could hear it over the roar. He opened and closed the door, marveling at the sound, and the painted straw inside. Maybe she would hear the moos and come down the stairs to find him, an oversized x-men doll clutched under her arm. Then he would stand up for sure, then he would gather her in his arms and take her out to safety and see to her father. She’ll be coming any second, any second now.
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