“Positive pain,” Tutti says. “Pain with a purpose.” She grunts.
The apartment building speaks. The walls speak. It’s this apartment we are living in that’s telling our story, and we are deep inside it, hardly listening.
~
This is me leaving the house. This is me not looking at the door when I’m home, and here I am not looking back when the other side of the door is behind me. Here is me not thinking much about the door.
Here I am lifting up off the bed, hearing my thoughts drift away, falling suddenly when they reach a certain radius of existence.
I was either inside the house, or on my way to being inside the house. I kept track of my time inside the house.
~
I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.
3
THE WOMAN who sits at the desk across from me was typing something on her computer. She would type something on her computer and then she would stand up and do some kind of a little dance. Then she would sit back down and start typing again. Each time she did the dance, she did it a little different. She would wiggle her hips a different way. Or put her feet on a different part of the floor.
~
We were all sitting in the car. There was Harold, who could not hear out of his right ear since his father hammered him in the head one night when Harold was asleep in his bed. There was Ronnie, the mechanic, who could fix any car and never charged anyone for his work. There was Bill, who had no car of his own and would ride around in anyone else’s car any chance he got and who always talked about how any day now the deal was going to come through and he would have a car of his own. The guy in the driver’s seat was J.B. It was J.B.’s car. He had had the car for three weeks, but so far he had not been able to scrape together enough money to put gas in it. So we all just sat around in J.B.’s car, parked in J.B.’s driveway.
~
Tutti and I used to watch Star Trek reruns together every night. We got them on video from a guy at my work. This guy videotapes all the new Star Trek episodes, numbers the tapes, and indexes them on his home computer. I would bring home three tapes, with five or six episodes on each, and then a week later I would bring them back and get three more. This was during the winter. We were working our way back to tape number one.
~
Is it my imagination, or did we all, at one time or another, spell “center” the same? The Americans and the Canadians I am talking about now. Was there not, at one time, a single spelling for the word “center,” just as there was, at one time, only one God? I am thinking now of grade three. Did we not all spell “center” the same in grade three?
~
She used to go up and down the aisles not looking at anyone, just going up and down the aisles, past everyone’s desk, telling everyone how to spell certain words, like “gravity,” and “pulse.”
~
She wasn’t a beautiful girl. He didn’t think she was beautiful. She had acne and acne scars from old acne, but from a distance you didn’t notice the acne because her skin was very dark. Her hair was dark also. She wore a black skirt and a yellow blouse and her legs were bare. He felt as though he were walking with someone who had no clothes on. He could smell her skin and feel her breath and he saw the way she let her arms fall, as though she were through with them forever. But then she would hold them up again at the last minute, just a little, and he would wait. When she blinked, her eyelids fell like torn rags in the wind.
~
Dad took the bike out of the car and set it down in the parking lot, and I put my leg over the bar, but I couldn’t reach the pedals. So Dad picked up the bike and put it back in the car.
The next week he did the same thing. He drove over to the mall, got the bike out of the car, and set it down in the parking lot. Only this time he brought some wooden blocks, and he strapped the blocks onto the pedals so I could reach.
4
WHEN WE first got married, Tutti bought us a queen-size bed and now everybody is out in the hall and all the lights are off and I am lying alone in the queen-size bed and all I can see are the red lights on the clock radio.
~
“You see that space in the clouds?” he said.
“What space?” she said.
“That one,” he said, “shaped like a rabbit.”
“I don’t see it.”
They were sitting on the couch.
“Right there,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” she said.
“It’s shaped like a rabbit.”
“It looks like a warship to me,” she said. “A Nazi warship.”
“A Nazi warship?” he said.
“There’s the swastika.”
He looked out the window. “But look at the ears,” he said. “One of the ears is flopped over.”
“Those are anti-aircraft guns,” she said. “And see those little ridges?” She moved her finger back and forth across the air. “Those are little lifeboats.”
They stared out the window for a while. The space changed shape and eventually disappeared. Now the sky was solid cloud, and the wind was picking up. She went back to her book. He kept staring out the window at the sky.
5
IT WAS dark. Mom was running the back end of her car into the trees. I could see the taillights of her car as she backed up and then stopped, and then backed up a little more.
Sammy won’t let me come into his room anymore at night. It’s as though we are involved in a great, big, dangerous experiment. My idea is, you can’t give them enough. You have to give them everything.
When Mom was getting ready to leave, she said, “I can’t find my keys.” She had been standing on the beach, looking at the sky, as though this was everything she ever wanted to see in the world.
Sometimes my mom says to my sister, “Don’t touch my stuff.” She will have all her stuff out of her purse — her little pack of Kleenex, her wallet, her pack of gum — and she will say, “Do not touch my stuff.”
~
Tutti said, “I never ate my salad. I got it out and put dressing on it, but I never ate it.”
“Where is it?” I said.
“I looked at it, but I couldn’t eat it,” Tutti said.
“Where is the salad now?”
“It’s in the fridge.”
“You put dressing on it?”
“I couldn’t eat it. It’s in the fridge.”
~
Like a bedroom at night, with the lights down low, maybe just the television on. Your eyes glow, you can feel them, little coals of warmth.
She’s in the bed beside me. I can feel her there, feel the rise and fall of her chest. I can see the shape of her body, the line of the covers. Beyond that, I can see the world. The world is waiting for me. She’s asleep.
That winter was hell. You couldn’t get out, it was so cold. The car wouldn’t start. Sometimes you would get to work, put in your hours. You couldn’t go for a walk after dinner.
We would do the dishes. She would maybe throw one at me, a plate, usually Corning. She knew it wouldn’t break.
I would get her down on the floor. She would scream. She would bite. She would end up giggling. As I was tickling, I would have to hold back. My hands were like aliens. I had to tame them again and again, and still I would never know.