Yeah, it’s like yellow healing stuff.
Oh, she got brown eyes and beautiful, looks a lot like you.
Nice teeth, yeah.
I told you we’ll get the candy.
Three in the morning maybe.
But Angie. Angela.
You shoulda seen those little red ends going through the air.
* * *
He watches the patterns the paper clips make. He straightens the bends fully out, holds the elongated metal over the flame from the gas stove.
The metal heats and reddens and he uses tiny pliers to bend the metal around. It curves very slightly, and he blows on it to let it cool and harden. Clarence Nathan swipes a hair back from his eyes. He must be careful; it is easy to break the paper clip. He uses the pliers to hold the clip over the gas flame, makes patient curves in the metal. When he is finished the clip looks like the body of a slinking snake. There are other patterns too: the shape of a boat, a tiny eye, a pyramid, a shovel.
Clarence Nathan moves away from the stove to the kitchen table — bare feet feeling the cold nailheads in the wooden floor — where he sits and smokes, watching the spirals of blue air above him. In the corner, a television sizzles with gray snow. All else is fabulously quiet. He lays the paper clips on the kitchen counter to cool, and when they are ready he heats them individually until they are red hot and glowing. He puts the clips to his arms and presses down on them with his fist until the pain shoots itself through him.
Closing his eyes, he clenches his teeth and the tendons in his neck pop and a massive roar comes from his throat. Dancesca has heard it often enough that she doesn’t even stir from the bedroom anymore.
His heart doesn’t feel in any way involved, only his body. The sensation of it. The deliciousness. He welcomes it, greets it: the body as his form, the pain as its content. His skin looks like a desert scape of these imprinted patterns, equally scorched on both sides of his body, burnt on with the curiosity of an onlooker.
He has even melted them into his feet, so that, at night, when he walks barefoot along the floor it looks as if these patterns are moving all over him. He tries to remember how many months it has been since Walker’s death — and if it is three, he decides that it’s four; and if it is five, he decides that it’s six; and if it is September, an odd month, he decides that it has become October.
Outside, when he walks on sidewalks, he always makes sure that his feet don’t touch the cracks. He counts as he walks; his footsteps end on even numbers. Occasionally he even retraces his steps just to get the number correct. Then he must go back and forth to make sure there is even pressure on his left and right foot. At the entrance to a grocery store, he steps up and steps down. The clerks watch him closely. After buying cigarettes, he says to them, “Thank you thank you.” He returns home to his paper clips. Continues to scrimshaw his torso.
Dancesca creates big dinners to punctuate the evening hush. He sits at the table and taps his forks against empty plates. Lenora asks him why he eats with two forks. He tells her that it’s a special game and she too begins it, until her mother whispers in her ear.
Later his daughter says, “Daddy, are you crazy?”
“Go to the bedroom, girl, right now,” says Dancesca.
She looks at Clarence Nathan and says, “She just gets these notions.”
At work the foremen have noticed something curious: he must touch everything with both hands. On his thirty-first birthday, in 1986, he insists that he is thirty. They have heard about the cigarettes. It has become a ritual now. They fire him and, in the unemployment office, he fills out the forms twice.
At home, he turns off the television set. He needs to turn the knob with his left hand for balance. But the knob won’t turn any more, so he switches the set on. Then turns it off again. Realizes that his right hand has been neglected. He reaches out for the knob once more. The screen flares to life.
On off on off on off.
On.
Off.
Until he can’t remember which was first. Was it on? Was it off? He grabs at his hair. He lies on the floor, puts on his boots, laces them equally tight, and then smashes the television with both feet. The glass splays. He reaches inside the set and is delighted to count an even number of shattered pieces. Taping them back together, he smashes his feet through the glass once more.
Clarence Nathan sits on the floor, rocking back and forth, his head in his hands.
In the morning he must prepare two cups of coffee. Drink them alternately. Paste butter on four slices of bread. Make sure the strawberry jam has an even number of seeds.
There is a gentle throbbing in his brain if he doesn’t portion himself out equally. Return and collection, return and collection.
In the room, there is something about the couch that makes him uncomfortable. He sees a ghost there and he avoids it.
“Now swear on it,” he says aloud to nobody.
“I swear.”
“Swear on your life that you ain’t gonna give her another dime.”
“I swear on it.”
All repeated twice.
Once he dials Information and gets a number for a Nathan Walker in Manhattan; he hears a voice answer and he replaces the receiver without saying a word. Then he picks up the receiver with his left hand, dials, lays the phone down a second time. For a moment suicide scratches the side of his brain. He lets it rest there and gouge a ditch into his thoughts.
* * *
We had a nice apartment, see. On West End Avenue. Up on the fifth floor, except we didn’t have a view or anything, but it was nice. I’d been making money on the ’scrapers. Back then an ironworker could make fifty grand a year. We had money in the bank. We were doing okay, even though the money’s going down some. The union had good insurance.
Thirty-two or so.
Now? Thirty-six, I think. How old’re you?
Take it easy, don’t crash.
Anyways, I was staying in Lenora’s room. It’s with this yellow wallpaper and the aquarium and all, and she’s getting older; she’s got movie stars in there now, boys from school, singers too — Stevie Wonder, Kool & the Gang. She don’t like being away from the aquarium, but the room is for me to get my head together; that’s why I’m staying there. So she’s sleeping with Dancesca. But Lenora, she comes in and visits all the time. I rig a blue light there above the aquarium and it goes shining down into the plastic, and she likes that. It was bright at the top and darker at the bottom, just like a real aquarium. Even ol’ Faraday woulda liked that. Once we went together down to Penn Station, me and Lenora, and we got ourselves one of those photos in the photo booth with the swivel seat, four pictures of her and me, and they went on top of the aquarium. See, I still got one, see?
Yeah.
And, see, every day she brings in plates of food to me. Sandwiches and coffee and all. Milk in a nice little jug. Even the crusts cut off the sandwiches. And she’s there, looking at me and asking me, Daddy, why can’t you have any knives with your food? Daddy, how come Mommy says you can’t have shoelaces?
Sometimes Dancesca comes in too, and she sits on the end of the bed and she cuts my hair and says to me, she says, It could happen to anybody. It weren’t your fault. And she’d bring Lenora in to kiss me good night and all. She’s the best child. I mean, she got that aquarium on her wall, right? And there’s Walker, at the very top. I found the negative in the kitchen cupboard, went to the photo shop, made another copy, then another and another, until he was swimming all around me. I made I don’t know how many copies. I suppose I shoulda gone to the nuthouse but I paid a couple of visits, outpatient. And they was telling me that I was fine, that I was just inventing this all for myself. They had all these speech people and psychologists and all saying how I’m very interesting, ’cause there’s no chemical imbalance, when they give me drugs it just gets worse, so they don’t give me drugs anymore, and Dancesca, she tells them she’ll look after me. And she does. She looks after me real good. She makes sure I’m okay. And dinnertime, she lays out the table real nice with a cloth and she doesn’t say a word even though I’m doing that switch with the fork still. And we’re talking small talk and happy enough, I’m getting my head together. But I’m drinking some, getting the money from Dancesca’s purse. Going up to the liquor store where they got it cheap. Sometimes a bottle a day.