Drowning In the Next Room
Section One of Three
Summary
: In the morning you're a child, happy and free. In the afternoon, you're an adult and you're breathing but the life inside is fading. In the evening, well, in the evening you lie down to die. That's your life in one day. That's one day of your life. An exercise in style [stark/dreamscape/anon]. [future:lit.rambler]Note
: Stark means that certain details were kept skeletal. That makes the prose more visceral. That makes it all more rigid, and somehow still able to have an intense emotional impact. Dreamscape is the use of more otherworldly-sounding words to describe things, like calling baby blue something like lullaby blue. Anon is the technique in which the main characters have no names, but clues are given as to their identities. It should be pretty easy but whine all you want if you can't figure it out.*
It was easy when you were younger. You could put it back together.
The coffee table pushed up against the wall had an odd, if not quaint, assortment of things stacked or grouped meticulously upon it. There was a stack of those expensive cooking magazines, strange, because no one in the house much liked to cook. Beside those was a remote control to the broken stereo in the opposite corner. A small can of paint with a dry scarlet drip down its side but no accompanying paint brush. A small, dirty hand mirror. A shoebox half-filled with old black socks, half-filled with small plastic baggies that contained two sky-blue or two pale yellow pills each (that would be Valium). A coiled leather dog lead, wrapped around a small, chipped porcelain teapot missing its lid. Several dollars in change inside the teapot. Two stacks of twenty-dollar bills, each about two inches high. The bills were varying stages of newness, so the exact amounts in each stack was probably different. Underneath the table was another shoebox, this one with a lid masking its contents.
A little boy about five years of age, wearing green footed pajamas with moose and gift boxes on them, sat Indian-style on the floor three feet to the left of the coffee table, a messily-wrapped Christmas gift in his lap. The shiny blue-and-white paper was still whole; he was staring out the sliding glass door that led out a small concrete terrace and looked out on a distant corner of the city. He was thinking about the future, as much of it as he could fold to fit into his five-year-old brain. He wasn't thinking about his parents, his father, the writer slash drug-dealer-to-the-stars; his mother, the saddest, prettiest woman he'd ever met. He never thought about his parents much, since they didn't think about him much.
His mother wasn't home, not even on Christmas Day. Neither he nor his father knew where she went when she left, just that she was almost alive when she came home. The life, however, would fade gradually with every breath she took, and then she would be back to the woman sitting on the futon in the corner with a book on her lap, open but pages down against her jeans, vacant desire in her eyes.
His father was in bed still, though it was past noon, sleeping off the hangover he'd accrued the previous night at whatever club he'd gone to set up his shady business in. Before sitting down in front of the artificial, silver, 1950's relic tree they'd bought at a garage sale when the boy was three ("It's important for a kid to have a tree once he's old enough to remember," his father had said. His mother had just nodded and stared out the car window at the bleached-out winter scenery), he had peeked into his parents' room to see his father lying on top of the covers. His father's dark hair was too long again and covered his hollow, pale face as he slept on his stomach. He hadn't bothered to change out of the previous night's clothes. The boy's mother hadn't come home at all that night.
The boy had opened three of his five presents. The first was a huge box, all shrink-wrapped and gorgeously plastic-packed, full of a few dozen die-cast cars. The second was a vintage GI Joe doll, its submachine gun pointed out at its new owner from the inside of the plastic film. The third, a book whose pages the boy had no desire to read. It was from his father, an avid reader, and not his mother, who probably didn't have any cognizance towards her son at all. His fourth present sat unopened in his lap, his fifth lay under the space-age tree's boughs, awkwardly on its side.
He had his father's dark eyes and heavy brow, his mother's light brown hair and delicate chin. He was built like his father, lean and small, like a miniature greyhound. He had watched his parents his entire life and he wondered why they were still together, since neither of them paid a bit of attention to the other. He was in school; there were plenty of kids in his class with broken-up parents. Then again, what he had was better than some. His friend Corey's father and mother had screaming matches when Corey had friends over; another friend, Maxie's, father was doing twenty to life for raping and then killing her older half sister. His teacher Mrs. Wimberley had horrible bruises on her arms and legs and more than once had come to school with a black eye (just since school had begun in August).
He had his father's quick, shallow temper and his mother's cool understanding of everything. His father's disregard for authority and his mother's insane compulsion to do everything right. His father's icy incapability to understand other points of view and his mother's quiet oblivion to other people's feelings.
He started and took a deep breath. He looked down at the box in his lap with a fair amount of surprise, wondering how it had gotten there since he didn't remotely remember picking it up in the first place. A typical five-year-old boy for once, he tore off the paper; a miniature chemistry set with real chemicals. The little bit of index card on the top said, "Love, Mum," in her precise, spidery handwriting.
The story of his sad little life.
He put the chemistry set down and cleaned up the wrapping paper. He left the fifth present unopened. After he'd put the crumpled wrapping paper in its proper, trash can grave, he went back to his bedroom and changed out of his pajamas. After carefully folding the green moose-printed flannel, he put on jeans and a striped tee shirt. He put on woolly white socks and combed his hair. He pulled a light jacket on and glanced out at the lonely palm tree that grew outside their building. Its fronds were still, so he didn't bother with a hat. He pulled sandals onto his chubby, five-year-old feet and opened the door to the terrace. A rush of salty, Pacific air hit him and he smiled. He left the door open and went to the front door.
A last glance back at the silver tree, the socks, the teapot, and the shoeboxes, and he went out into the skinny vinyl tiled hallway between the two apartments on their floor. The old woman who lived across the way had her entire family there with her to celebrate the holiday. Her surly teenage grandson Curtis, who lived with her, was sitting on a milk crate outside, smoking a cigarette and looking very James Dean in his red leather jacket.
"Hey, little man," Curtis called. "You getting the paper?"
"Don't have a subscription any more," he told Curtis. "My dad forgot to pay it again."
"Bummer. I'll see if Grams wants to give you ours when she's done, but I warn you, she might use it to line the bird's cage." The batty old woman had an African Grey parrot who would be outliving all of them a few times over. His name was Gino and he was intolerably spoiled.
"Nah, don't worry about it. Nobody in there reads it anyway. They like fiction better'n reality." He was five, but he'd been fed a steady diet of words and culture since before he could remember. He had a better vocabulary than Curtis, who spoke English sluggishly and reluctantly as though it was his second language.
"Where you going, anyway?" Curtis asked, a tow-colored eyebrow raised. "It's, like, ten o'clock on Christmas morning."
"I'm going down to sit and watch cars go past and wait for my mom to come home. Dad's passed out again and my presents are so typically from them." His parents had no idea who he was. His parents had no idea who the other was. He had a perfectly clear image of who they were, though. That's why he didn't bother buying them presents. He didn't suppose it was wise to buy things for walking corpses.
Curtis stood up. "Mind if I come, too? There's way more Christmas cheer in there than I can stand and I think my head might go 'boom' if I don't get away from this door." He flicked his burnt out cigarette down to the rusted coffee can beside his grandmother's doorstep.
The little boy nodded and smiled amicably. "Sure."
The made their way down to the badly painted bench in front of their building. It was a disgusting mauve color and rather looked like someone had eaten some perfectly nice petunia petals and then regurgitated the mess onto a metal bench frame.
"D'you bring a book?" Curtis asked.
"Do you want me to read today?" the boy replied, an eyebrow arched. Honestly, he hadn't brought one because he didn't feel like reading. He didn't feel like doing anything; his grandmother, who he'd only ever spoken to on the phone, would have laughed that tinkly laugh of hers and said that he was too little to be a punk rocker. He didn't think he was apathetic, his current 'big word,' but an entire lifetime of apathetic parents and Christmas presents for someone who wasn't really him had taken their toll.
"Well, duh," Curtis replied. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his bomber jacket and looked at the little boy expectantly. "Dude," he said when he didn't move, "it's okay if you don't want to. I'm sweet with just watching cars."
The boy's lips quirked into an odd smile. "Are we thinking comic, short, or novel?" he asked, giving in.
Curtis grinned. "I think something hard and simple." He looked thoughtful, incongruously so. "The Hobbit."
The boy stared at him. "The Hobbit?" he asked incredulously. "You want me to read you The Hobbit?"
"Well, yeah. I mean, you're all small and I know your dad's got hairy feet--am I right or am I right? - so it just seems right, y'know?"
"If I'm going to read you anything it'll be the Council of Elrond in the actual trilogy because it takes place on December twenty-fifth," the boy replied calmly. He wasn't an incredibly festive person but some things just happened to be sacred. His mother had taught him one thing: always read something that happened on that day or that season. You read White Oleander in fire season, she told him, because so much of the book is about surviving ashes. You read Bridget Jones in the winter because it's snowy through half the book. You read Hemmingway in the summer because it's hot in Spain and Italy's prettiest right before autumn comes. Et cetera.
Curtis gave him an odd look, like he couldn't quite catch up to where he was, the look a drowning victim must give an Olympic gold medallist. He sighed and nodded. "Yeah, Curtis, I'll go up and get my dad's book."
"You rock, kid," Curtis told him, ruffling his hair.
He hopped off the bench and hurried up the stairs to his haunted second floor apartment. He pushed the door open gingerly so as not to wake his father up. The man could sleep through an earthquake above seven on the Richter scale (and had) but the slight sound of a door opening could wake him up. He glanced around the living room, at the ruinous future tree and its Spartan glass ornaments (jewel crimson, canopy green, and Nassau blue), the cold symbolism of his unopened present, and the table supporting every scrap of what his father was. His father's books were in the kitchen cupboards, a logical place since none of them cooked and the boy was the only one who didn't survive on nothing but coffee and sighs or painkillers and cigarettes.
He found a ratty copy of The Hobbit in the "World Lit" cupboard next to the one under the sink, sandwiched between something Voltaire and The Prince (his father wanted to be Machiavelli). He glanced at the one-volume edition of the trilogy with a bit of regret, but didn't touch it.
He walked past his parents' closed bedroom door on his way out of the kitchen and to the front door. As he passed, and although he didn't realize it, he felt the first tendrils of his father's ghost escaping, the first atoms flew screaming into oblivion through the particleboard door. The boy wouldn't notice what the shivering spell that fell over him at that moment actually was until much later, sitting on a metal stool in a chemistry class in a Connecticut high school. He would go home and ask his mother about it, and she would stare at him in wonder and sadness and then look away.
She always looked away.
*****
posted boxing day '03
[t. henneth]
