“Not in your world,” the firefighter said. David noticed that the firefighter was a woman. He felt the world shifting to the point where he was wearing her uniform. His straw-blond hair, which was hers, was pulled back into a ponytail. He had never experienced a ponytail. It felt as if his head was weighted from behind. The weight terminated at a single point, which gave him the sense that there was an opening back there that might allow fluids to escape. His lips felt thin, and he watched her, as him, sitting on the stair. His face had sunk around its bones like soft earth, and the oxygen mask protected his mouth like a clear carapace sheltering his organs.
David wasn’t sure how to tell her what needed to be said. He needed to be brave and gather his emotions for the sake of professionalism. It wasn’t the first time he had called upon this professional bravery, though it always felt like the first time and in fact currently felt like the very first time. “Your wife is dead,” he said.
The firefighter swallowed something. She looked as helpless there as a fifty-year-old man, and David felt pity. He reached toward his pocket for a tissue before realizing that he was wearing a firefighter’s uniform and there were no pockets, only reflective strips that would glint against traffic lights and fires.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
She held her hands on the oxygen mask as if it were an extension of her face.
“We’re going to have to ask you a few questions,” David said.
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. Her voice was muffled by the mask. “I don’t understand. What happened?”
“That’s normal,” David said. “What you’re feeling is normal.” He could see her eyes inside his, even as he occupied her body. It felt warm in the retardant uniform. He took on her memories. He felt a strong desire to sit with her in a bathtub and wash her shoulders. He clapped a gloved hand on her pale, cold thigh, which was half covered by David’s filthiest robe, a green-and-black flannel that always looked as if it had been crammed into the space between the water heater and the wall.
David and the firefighter crouched in the stairwell. He felt as if he was looking down from the position of an angel who could not get much vertical distance over the scene. He turned awkwardly in the bulky retardant suit to observe the base of the stairs. It was caked with the fluid and gunk sloughed from the mess of a living body and a dying one. His pajama pants rested in a filthy heap below.
He looked to the firefighter occupying his body and saw that her left foot had retained its slipper, but the other foot was bare. The second slipper was forgotten at the base of the stairs. The firefighter was still swaddled by the blanket. The smell rising from the stairwell and steaming from her was an embarrassment of childhood odor. It made David dizzy to experience it, and he tried to focus on the thin face blurred behind the oxygen mask.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was crying. David had never seen such emotion from a public servant, other than the time a post office clerk was informed of his daughter’s death via telephone in the midst of a Christmas rush, and now he was observing it happening in his own body. He had seen the post office clerk take the phone call and put his head in his hands, sobbing, resting his elbows on an electronic scale. David had been there to mail a package of documents to his mother’s lawyer, but he was touched by the display and later sent flowers to the post office. He didn’t know the clerk’s name and addressed the lilies to the office in general. It seemed like the right thing to do from a taxpayer perspective.
The firefighter clutched the blue blanket and took shallow breaths. She tried to touch her face again and felt the oxygen mask and moved it out of the way. David reached his glove out to touch her arm, then removed the glove and touched her with his bare hand. He moved the mask back over her face.
“Get it all out,” he said. “Would you like to talk about what happened?”
The firefighter scrubbed at her face and mouth. “I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I’m so confused.”
David felt like a dog peering dumbly into the darkest moment of his owner’s life. “That’s normal,” he said.
He noticed a pain in his arm and saw that he was taking fluids intravenously. He was inside the dimensions of his own body again. The oxygen mask lined his face and the calming smoothness made his eyelids heavy. And there was Franny, resembling a piece of modern furniture under the police tarp. Her body had vacated its bowels beside him at some point in their time together on the stair. He cherished the life implied by that action, the odor of a living thing beside him, pulsing bacterial life that had once been harbored by her body, not unlike a child, ejected now into the dimming light, bacteria feeding on itself and fading. He wondered if a florist might deliver lilies to the stairwell. Franny’s body had grown stiff and then soft again beside him on the stair, and by then it must have been as pliable as a wax figure. In the police business of securing the area, she was forgotten on the floor. A paramedic stepped over her. Sweet Franny, David thought.
6
DAVID WAS FAMILIAR WITH DECAY. When his father died, the house’s basement was the unspoken casualty. His father used to head down there even when he had trouble walking, holding on to the banister and taking breaks between steps, breathing heavily, examining imperfections in the wall. When he reemerged, he might say, “Underfoot and out of mind,” but he would always go back. David heard his father in the basement almost every evening in those last days. It sounded like he was riffling through boxes and tapping nails into boards.
After the man’s death, the basement had become submerged in neglect. What had once been a guest bedroom, bathroom, den, workshop, and concrete-floored storage area became a single entity of waste. Dust drifted from the unscrubbed vents and made a soft layer over the tools in the workroom. The guest bedroom clogged with rot. The water in the bathroom’s toilet dried and created a mineral line on the ceramic. A bird built its nest on the cracked basement window, and twigs scattered onto the floor inside. With no other source of fresh air, mold populated the damp walls. Pipes grew an ecology of rust. A single green shoot emerged from the bathroom sink’s drain. The walls seemed fuzzed. Cardboard softened in the damp. A pile of leaves in the guest bedroom resembled a squirrel drey. The closet in the bedroom held coats made lighter by moths. One member of a row of canned peaches on the wall in the storage area had burst, leaking fluid down the wall, attracting ants, which attracted lizards, which attracted a cat, who scratched through a basement screen and left the squirming reptilian tails of its prey behind. The cat vacated before David found any of the damage, but it left its ammonia-rich urine on a stack of cookbooks in the corner of the storage room. He covered the books with more cookbooks, which he had moved down from the kitchen because he didn’t want to see them anymore. The flood from a water heater explosion only served to unify everything as a solid, decaying layer.
A highlight of the basement collection was an inversion table, a symbol of the last victory of David’s mother. In his middle age, David’s father bought the table. It looked like an ironing board split in half and propped on four sturdy legs. He would strap his ankles into the supports at the base, then release a lever and push back, turning himself upside down on a horizontal axis at waist level, allowing him to hang by his ankles, his head and arms swinging between the supports. The purpose was spinal decompression. As a child, David would come downstairs in the morning to find his father inverted in the center of the living room, craning his neck to watch television. “Gravity,” his father would say. “Take a cue from the planets.”