Without opening his eyes, David reached both hands up and grasped Aileen’s face. He pulled her toward him and kissed her, his mouth so wide that it seemed more like his mouth was in a competition with hers, his tongue a wall on her lips, spackling their gloss, removing her lipstick and absorbing it. The acid mess on his face smeared her cheeks and immediately melted the first two layers of her makeup through the foundation, leaching the color off her face. She pressed her face down with the idea of crushing him and kissed his tongue and teeth, sucking the fluids there, tasting bitter coffee and mouthwash, internalizing his mouth, pressing her face harder and licking the strangely flat surface of his back teeth, wishing for a moment that she could take his teeth in her mouth and chew on them, feel the foreign against familiar, his teeth embedding in her cheeks like cloves in an orange. She kicked back her rolling chair and moved to the center of the reclined treatment chair without separating from his mouth. She unbuttoned David’s pants, straddled the chair, tugged her underwear to the side under her skirt with her thumb. It was old underwear, she remembered while pulling him out of his pants, the kind that was once an optimistic deep purple and had since bleached out, slackening elastic at the edges, like webbing between the fingers of the retired women who came in for bleaching and injectables, their hands puddled together on bloated bellies, smiling into the light. He was almost completely soft, but she stuffed him into her with sticky fingers. He groaned, and instinct bucked his hips. The acid that had been on her hands burned their genitals. They were still kissing, eating bitter enzyme. She spit onto his shirt. Her eyes stung. He tried to shift their position but couldn’t move in the small chair. He slipped out of her and she piled him back in, squeezed his body between her legs, held him completely still, digging her nails into his stomach. One of them was crying. She kissed his neck and left a trail of slime. When she bit him he cried out and looked up at her for the first time, his eyes red and swollen nearly shut.
She climbed off and left the room without comment. He lay on the table waiting for her to come back, but she didn’t. After he was sure she wouldn’t come back, he buttoned his pants and stood.
He couldn’t find her in the lobby or at any of the hair stations. One of the girls told him that Aileen had gone home early for the day. “She’s not here,” the girl said, “right hand to God.” She was twisting and pulling at the twin lumps of fat above her hips, pinching her body like an unbaked loaf.
70
DAVID didn’t like going into the backyard. Stickers burred into his ankle hair. Franny had always done the work of clearing brush and splitting fire logs, and there were times when she vanished out into one of the two acres beyond and returned with a handful of berries or a flattened soda can. Sometimes she found slivers of stone that she thought were arrowheads, though it seemed as if she had never seen an actual arrowhead. The rocks she brought in had been smoothed by time. She kept them in a bowl on the bathroom counter.
Out back, the earth looked differently trampled. A gum wrapper fluttered in a spiny bush, silver paper shivering against the red berries. He thought of what Aileen had said about all the people who had died in the history of that place, after the spiny bush had grown there but, more important, before the bush and the stream beside it and the house and the old farmer’s fence made of barbed wire and splintered posts that rotted lower every year. David had been meaning to remove the old fence. He had not gotten around to it. Before the fence and the ash trees, or when there were different trees, or perhaps when it was all underwater, when strange and ordinary aquatic creatures floated and consumed one another and left their remains buried under five to ten feet of silt that hardened into stone and was covered with pieces of flint and slate, which his wife mistook for arrowheads but were wholly unremarkable rocks after all.
On the far side of the farmer’s fence, he found a frozen pear and beside it a sock trampled into the ground. It was one of David’s gym socks, mealy from the earth that had been pushed into it, half hidden under a root. He bent to pick the sock up and found that it was folded around its mate. He used the toe of his shoe to unearth them and found another pair nestled alongside. Crouching down, he found another pair underneath, black dress socks next to a larger pink-striped variety. A sandwich bag stuffed full of hosiery lay underneath and under that, a pair of insulating socks David had been missing for years. He dug away at the top layer of earth, thinking about stopping and going to the garage for a shovel but certain that if he returned, the socks would be gone, hundreds of them, the collected effort of many years. There were his father’s trouser socks with their gold-stitched toes. He found a shoebox underneath a stratum of unpaired single socks. Moisture and age had worn away the box’s distinguishing marks. There was some difficulty in clearing it from the frozen earth, which hardly yielded against his digging gloved hands. He wedged the tips of his fingers against the side of the box and then got a grip on the side of it and pulled it out. The box had been laid over three pairs of small faded pink lace socks. They looked like mice huddled together. He could hold all three pairs in the palm of his hand.
David put the baby socks in his pocket and laid the shoebox beside the shallow trench. In it he found the pair of woolen socks he had bought Franny for one of their anniversaries, the anniversary when one buys wool. She had bought him a leather-bound desk set for his office at home, with a leather tray for papers and a pencil holder and a protective desk cover and a small file cabinet that also was somehow leather, the stitches so fine he could barely see them. He had put it at the reception desk at work, and the receptionist said she felt like she was less of a receptionist and more of an executive secretary, so fine was the leatherwork. The receptionist’s demeanor improved over the phone, and patients seemed more relaxed when they got to the chair. Franny’s gift to him had been the best gift he had ever received, and in return he handed her a pair of socks, because he was confused, and he thought it was to be the anniversary when one buys wool. It was a gift he had been ashamed of, but she wore the socks faithfully for years. She washed them carefully in the sink and wore them for anniversaries in the years following, until one year when she did not wear them, and David felt a secret sense of relief and didn’t mention it out of fear that she would apologize and bring them out. He had forgotten about them. But there they were, alone in the box. They were a speckled gray and black with points of white. He thought of her burying them. If she had been sitting next to him at that moment, he would say a great many things, but he was alone. There was a page in the sock, but he was tired of knowing how to read, so he opened his mouth and inserted the page. The paper he had packed into his teeth rolled up and allowed for the new intrusion. His jaw popped and widened farther. The page was warm on his teeth and felt natural against his tongue. His lips cracked and bled into it, but he kept opening his mouth wider, pushing it toward the back of his throat, twisting the paper to corkscrew it in farther, breathing hard through his nose as it reached the back of his throat, pushed against his soft palate, caressed his palatine uvula. He gagged and clenched his teeth, and the page compacted and became a part of him, there in his mouth.
71
THE SUGAR CEREAL was not in the break-room cabinet nor under the sink. It was not in the reception desk. It was not in the large lower desk drawer belonging to an officer who hoarded sweets. It was not in Chico’s office and it was not in the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. It was not in his aunt’s bag of clothes, folded beside her. The boy had made a detailed list of where the sugar cereal might be and had crossed off possible options. Behind one of the chairs in the reception area, check. Tucked within the fire extinguisher’s glass case, check. He checked the break room’s refrigerator and freezer, opening all drawers, moving aside forgotten baggies of spoiled sandwiches and frozen-over potpies, looking for the slightest clue. He attached the list to a clipboard, which he carried under his arm.