“Does Mayor Bunt know you’re talking like this?” asked Melba. “Sort of zany and avaricious?”
“I’m sure he does,” said Don Pond. “His spies are everywhere. I can’t look for them in more than one place at a time. It’s against the laws of physics. If I check under the couch, who’s to guarantee they haven’t darted into the corner, or run all the way into the kitchen?”
“I heard something under the couch,” said Melba. “And noises were coming from that corner as well. I thought it was animals making the noises but it could have been spies.”
Don Pond looked at her incredulously and Melba blinked, her cheeks mottling with a deep, irregular blush.
“Oh, you must think I’m daft,” said Melba. “I hadn’t realized until now …”
“What did you think the animals around Dan were doing if not spying?” asked Don Pond, chuckling. Generally, his modesty prevented him from indulging his sense of superiority, but this was a special occasion, ripe for merry condescension, which could be easily attributed to a spontaneous overflow of protective tenderness rather than self-congratulation, the more immodest option, and so Don Pond chuckled on, not bothering to check his glee.
“Every animal you see in Dan is one of Mayor Bunt’s henchmen!” said Don Pond. “You must be the only person in Dan who didn’t know that. Hadn’t you noticed the way people talk in Dan? Always skirting around the most important issues, never coming to the point? It’s because we can’t speak freely, not with spies in every nook and cranny.”
“Did Bev Hat know?” asked Melba. Don Pond’s face darkened until skin and beard seemed to run together, forming an unsuggestive blot.
“There was never any Bev Hat,” said Don Pond. “She was a fabrication, invented by Mayor Blunt to stir sympathies. The young mother who died tragically in the service of our glorious mayor! It’s perfect isn’t it?”
“If there was never any Bev Hat,” Melba caught her breath as the implication struck her. “If there was never any Bev Hat, then she can’t have returned from the dead as Melba Zuzzo! I knew I hadn’t become Bev Hat, but I was still so disturbed … the very idea that I might suddenly be someone I didn’t think I was before. A wife and mother at that!”
“I’m glad you’re relieved,” said Don Pond. “Some women would be disappointed. Bev Hat was the feminine ideal. No man was immune to her charms.”
“I am glad,” said Melba. Don Pond dropped the hand vacuum on the table. It clunked. Melba looked at the hand vacuum then back at Don Pond. His eyes bore into hers and he pulled a small pad out of his back pocket, making a note with a tiny pencil.
“How would you rate the gladness?” he asked. “On a scale of one to ten.”
Melba began to feel uneasy.
“It’s average gladness,” she said. “Maybe that means I’m not glad at all? I’m just existing without actively ruing anything in particular. I suppose I’m numb rather than glad. But given how much pain there is in the world, I should think I’m glad to be numb? So maybe numbness is a form of being glad after all.”
“Five?” asked Don Pond. Melba inched forward on the couch. It had grown humid in Don Pond’s house and the vapors in the air pushed against her. She felt as though she was wading through a pack of damp Labradors. The dim light that came through the windows illuminated the suspended water molecules, which had grown larger, and Melba saw the graininess of the air more distinctly than the objects she hoped to see through the air: the room’s furniture and wall-hangings, its doors. Everything around her was gray and somewhat obscured.
“At first I thought there was an obscurity inhering in my perceptions,” murmured Melba. “But it’s coming from the room, I’m sure of it. The room is making a cloud.”
Don Pond seemed to be approaching, but she could not see him any more clearly as he neared; the graininess was growing more marked between them.
“I wonder what you’d look like without a beard?” she asked.
“Why do you wonder?” Don Pond’s voice was steady.
“I don’t really wonder,” said Melba. “It’s just sooner or later, if one person has a beard and is in the company of another person, the beard becomes a topic. I should have said something else about the beard, a statement and not a question. I should have shared a fact maybe. Did you know that growing a beard that’s a different color from the rest of your hair is an expression of weakness in the genes? Oh no, that was somehow still a question, wasn’t it? Well, the point is that the brain of the man with this kind of beard tends to go soft. Your beard is very uniform in color and very small and thick, and it matches your eyebrows and your head hair quite exactly, and, you know, it doesn’t look quite real, not for a man, it looks like it was produced by a mink and then cut into the shape of a beard and stuck onto your face, and I was just wondering if you could take it off, oh,” said Melba, flustered. “I’ve done it again. Leave your beard on, I don’t care.” She smoothed her own hair with damp palms, then smoothed her apron, then moved her shoulders up and down as she’d seen her mother do so many times, limbering.
“Well,” she said, brightly. “I think I’ll be going.”
Don Pond raised his eyebrows, which looked very much like two wedges cut from either side of his beard, rotated 180 degrees, and stuck on above his eyes.
“Where will you go?” asked Don Pond.
“I’ll go home,” laughed Melba, aware that the sound of her laughter and the convulsions of her diaphragm were out of sync. One or the other was delayed. She felt vaguely nauseated by it and stopped laughing abruptly.
“Isn’t that where people go?” she continued, uncertainly. “When they … go? If they’re not already there? Home, I mean?”
She slid closer to the cushion’s edge and caught her breath. The couch seemed higher. She tried to grip the black vinyl. Slowly, she stretched out her legs, straining, pointing her toes. The carpet was somewhere below, out of reach.
“You should call first,” said Don Pond. He circled around the table and reached out to Melba. Don Pond’s hand was cool and pale and unnaturally smooth.
“That’s skin?” asked Melba, rotating her fingers in his grasp.
“Oh,” said Don Pond, and tugged so that Melba’s feet thudded down.
“It wasn’t so far, after all,” she said, straightening her knees and standing upright. “But if you’re afraid of heights, it doesn’t really matter how high up you are, does it? It’s like how you can drown in an inch of water? My mother told me about a schoolmate of hers, Josie Pride, who drowned crying in bed. You should never cry in bed, face down obviously, but even face up or on your side, it depends on the planes of your face, how the water runs, but really, everyone’s nose and mouth is downhill of the eyes, and when Josie Pride was discovered she was scarcely recognizable. Her parents thought at first she’d been abducted and some puffy dummy had been jammed under the bedclothes as a decoy, because abductions do happen in Dan, all the time, said my mother, and the abductors have been known to leave dummies in place of the abducted children, not as decoys, but as poppets designed to tempt the parents into pagan acts of sympathetic magic, just for fun, said my mother, because abductors in Dan are those listless types who turn to devilry to stay awake, trampling circles in people’s yards, using the blood of children to raise chthonic gods of madness and corruption, and they told my mother they wanted me in particular, because my blood is tainted and tainted blood is more compelling to chthonic gods than untainted blood, and my mother had to hold them off by giving them the allowance money she would have given me otherwise and sometimes threatening violent retaliation, and if I exhausted her too much with needs and wants she would have gotten tired and stopped holding them off altogether, so I had to leave her alone and not bother her about snacks and shoes and new dresses with pretty smocking and things of that nature or she’d have let them drag me away and open up my chest on an altar that would have just been an old telephone cable spool so I’d have gotten splinters too, but don’t cry about it, my mother said, or you’ll drown, like Josie Pride, who wasn’t a dummy after all, but was herself, wet and dead on the bottom bunk, and …”