Circling the Drain (2 page)

To her left, down the hill just a little ways, she could see the fleabag hotel and the 7-Eleven. She watched Gary come out the door of it, lighting a cigarette. She thought: Just another minute and I'll walk back. Just another minute of this fresh air and I'll head back to the hotel and Gary.

But something was wrong. The air was brittle and she realized she was listening to the hum of idle engines. That right in front of her, across the very wide, tree-lined street, was an elegant stone building—also snowy—with a parking
lot beside it, full of running cars: police cars, their red lights like laughter in the cold white quiet.

On the lam and in this unfamiliar town, Gary had holed them up down the hill from a police station. Without breathing she looked back down the hill. Against a backdrop of pale gray sky, there were distant streets and houses, roads and trees and lives. The land spilled into a valley, then rose again. Roads swept up, swept towards her and away. And there, against the enormous sky, was the low roof of the 7-Eleven and the small shape of Gary.

She saw him drop his cigarette and grind it into the frozen ground. She imagined its hiss. Then, as though sensing her there, he pivoted and looked straight up the hill and at her and neither of them moved. She felt the colored lights play over her face, felt the hum of the motors inside her. And she realized quietly, there on the bench by the cops, that Mama's hopes had come true. With Gary just down the hill, she had woken from him, but it was a little too late. What she carried with her, she would carry with her, even after it thawed. There was nowhere to go.

Fat ladies floated in the sky like balloons.

That was the year we forgot our dreams and woke, bewildered, muttering. It was spring when I noticed them turning above me, this way and that, drifting gently on a breeze, bright splashes of color against the pale blue sky. They looked lovely from a distance but somehow I knew it was a bad sign. It could mean only one thing: my ex-boyfriend was back in town.

Sure enough I ran into Fred Luck later that day. I was walking home from grooming the dogs when there he was on a bench by the town square watching the fat women twist against the cloudless sky. You! he yelled and leapt up. He was a man of surprises.

It's been a long time, I replied. I couldn't quite look him in the eyes. I kept thinking
don't do it don't do it
but somehow I sensed it was only a matter of time. He had eyes like licorice, shining and bitter—they never failed to suck me in.

Eloise! Fred called again though he was only inches away. I've been waiting for you to walk by!

You can't just march back into someone's life, I tried to say, but it came out: Oh, yes, well.

We stood for a moment studying each other, each with our motives tucked just out of sight. Actually mine weren't
very well-hidden. Fred, when he could take the time to focus on me, had been an incredible lover and I was feeling a little bit lonely.

Fred, I started.

It's Jack now, he said, I changed my name.

Jack Luck, I asked? I was thinking
with noodles
. I was thinking
with duck sauce and white rice
.

He nodded. I think I look more like a Jack than a Fred, he told me, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets.

It was true. He did the name Jack justice.

You were bringing up the property value of Fred though, I said, and blushed. Redeeming it, kind of.

Thanks, he said, and smiled.

 

That part was simple. I brought him home when I knew my house would be empty and made dinner. On the way there he told me how wrong he'd been to leave, how much he'd missed me. I knew his words were empty, the empty husks of beetles long wandered off, the shell game I always lost. Still I let him touch me. Gentle now, I said.

He had his problems. Disappearance wasn't the worst of it, nor was the plight of the innocent fat ladies. Fred couldn't control himself. He was what Florence, my godmother, called bad news.

He's natural disaster and you're trailer city, Florence rasped, then took another drag of her cigarette. He's an itchy rash, a pimple under the skin. He's a toothache and you're just numbing the gum, girlie. You need to pull his mean self out and toss it away.

But I love him, I said in the smallest voice those words could afford.

Oh girlie, Florence said, that's the worst of it.

 

When we first met I was more trusting. I had just begun to groom dogs and I thought it sweet when Fred showed up at the shop to meet me. I was so swept along by his sexy ways that I didn't complain when he launched the Apesons' poodle into the highest branches of the sycamore in front of the library, or somehow elevated the Hendersons' Affenpinscher and left it running circles in the air above the kennel roof. I thought to myself
he's an unusual guy, soul of an artist, I'll have to smooth some edges is all
. Then he impaled the Lorsinskis' cat on a lamppost and dropped a city bus on the Lawsons' Dalmatian.

How the hell did he learn those tricks? Florence had asked me, sucking on a cigarette, curled in smoke.

I don't know, I told her, twirling my hair.

Well, why can't he stop it?

I don't think he knows what he's doing until it's too late, I answered. I was looking out the window of her house at the Meyersons' puppy, romping around in their yard. I don't think he means to, I said, but I wasn't entirely sure about that.

 

I'm leaving something out. See, the other thing is my laugh. I have a terrible laugh, all my life a wretched, horrible laugh. When I laugh sounds come out of my throat that violate the rest of the world. My laugh causes injury: it makes people nauseous or crazy. Stop that awful sound, they scream, running from my vicinity with their hands clamped over their ears. It's so bad that the movie theater wouldn't allow me in to see films. That's a violation of my rights, I told them until they set up private screenings. The projectionist would leave the building and sit on the sidewalk. I went and got him when each reel ran out.

So you can imagine what it meant to meet a man who
didn't mind. The first time I laughed around him—we were sitting on my porch when a nervous frantic giggle escaped and I tried to snatch it back with my hand, to stuff it back down my throat—he just tucked a curl behind my ear and whispered, You are so beautiful.

And like that I was putty. It didn't even bother me that the potted plants that had been resting so quietly beside us on the porch were floating near our heads. It didn't even bother me when they smashed to bits during our first kiss. All that mattered was Fred and the way he held me. All that mattered was the idea of watching a movie with someone else.

 

Now by the time Fred became Jack, I had married a guy named Steve. So of course I brought Jack home to meet him. Steve wasn't his real name—his real name sounded like a kind of sausage—but he'd paid me a lot of money to become his wife, and felt Steve made him sound like a naturalized citizen. Though he didn't like my laugh, he'd hired me to be his wife so he wouldn't be deported to the gray, depressive country that spawned him. When Steve learned of Jack it seemed to upset him, though his inner life wasn't always clear to me. We had trouble communicating.

You and me are bloodletting, he said while Jack was in the bathroom.

You and me are bouillabaisse, he tried again. Bakers.

No, I said, flipping the pages of a shiny magazine. I didn't even look up.

Borrowing, he said. Burrowing.

Blowing? I offered. I enjoyed frustrating him.

No! You are not understanding. You and me like tree, he tried.

Bush? I flipped a page.

No!

(Flip, flip.) Brain!

Jack is borrowing wife, he began again, his desperate hands flailing about. Husband forgets husband is forgotten.

I threw down the magazine and rose from the armchair as Jack reentered. Back later, I said.

See, love was not part of the bargain. I know love never is, etc., etc., but I expected more respect. I'll be your wife, I had told him, professionally. Like a job, I'd said. You hire me and that's my job: wife. Nothing else.

Right, he'd said, beaming. Wife.

It wasn't until later that I realized how little he understood.

So he didn't like Fred. But everyone liked Fred. It was part of the way of the universe: people met and liked Fred. That was how the world was formed. But not Sausage Steve. The first thing he said when he met Fred was: He is not the good man. He is not the husband for you.

Right, I told him, you hired me.
He
disappeared. He's just my obscenely perfect ex-boyfriend who has a strange effect on people.

Steve didn't get it. He is the no good, he muttered, and glared at Fred.

 

Jack née Fred was many things, I must agree, but not really a
bad
person, exactly. I mean he acted irresponsibly, sure, but generally because of a helpful impulse, I thought, not a malicious sensibility.

Still, I felt stuff in the back of my head, forgotten dreams maybe, fleeting thoughts, the sense that I had a running list of things I was losing, things left behind. When we walked out of the house, I looked at Fred but he had his hands in
his pockets and was staring at the night sky, the fat ladies blocking the stars like black holes, like gasps of breath, like forgotten clouds. I shook my head at the way that I felt, yearning for his touch, the anger I'd been storing hidden somewhere distant. He waited for me to catch up, then he put his arm around my shoulders, kissed my forehead and I followed him home.

In the morning we had breakfast at a diner near the park. I sipped coffee and Fred gnawed a banana muffin. The staff watched us, frightened—they had seen the damage Fred could do. This probably isn't such a great idea, I began in my head, but what I said was, Nice day.

On the radio there was much debate over how to get the fat ladies down from the sky. They waved happily in the daylight but I imagined they must be hungry by now.

Then I thought maybe this was the evolution of things, the way the world spun. Maybe this was the way things changed and maybe that was true for the fat ladies also—that one minute something was an orange and the next it was a peach. One minute the world holds you down and the next it lets you go. And maybe they would drop quietly as they lost weight until they landed here like the rest of us, drawn, haggard and dreamless, all their glorious roundness gone.

1.

In the city there were trees outside my window but they were very far away and small. Mostly I saw apartment buildings, housing projects, people struggling through their day. The city was a vigorous place, and at first it suited me.

I moved there after my brother, Jack, died. I wanted words, a voice, something, and I quickly became addicted to other people's prophecies. Most of them were dark dreams that I read on the Internet: dreams of doom, or slow disorderly destruction. Not many were hopeful, but in the gray light of my bedroom, the green glow of my computer, they felt intimate and familiar.

As I wandered through the visions night after night, I saw lines weaving and dipping: war, anarchy, rubble. I collected these threads, strung them across my apartment, confused myself in their web and slept hard and dreamless.

My co-workers would have been surprised to learn of my fascination with prophecy. At twenty-nine, I worked in a bookstore, buried myself in words and mostly kept to myself. That's what I did on the normal days, the days like other days. I listened for salvation, but pretended to get on with things. I worked and watched and waited.

2.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon on a late autumn Friday that I saw the woman. She was draped in shawls. Mauve, gray and dusty blue cloth layered and piled around her, so that she moved through the store like a stuffed sock. Experience with shoplifters made me follow her, but she took nothing, just drifted from New Nonfiction to Cookbooks, then quickly pivoted and dashed into New Age/Self Help. Was it something in her movements I recognized? Familiarity prickled me, but who was she?

I stayed in Geography and peered over one of the new pine bookshelves trying to get a better look.

Her face was slack and uneventful. Her features slid softly, as down a mud hill. She was not pretty: her mouth was a garnet slash of uneven lips. Her hair hung in straight gray wisps. I had never seen her before, but I knew her. I knew, somehow, that she posted her dreams on the Internet and
that I had read them. I felt it like a shudder: a current she gave off, or a barely perceptible shift in the world's gravitational clutches. I stepped out into New Age/Self Help as though I could say something that mattered, could redeem both of us. Then I balked and charged past her into Women's Studies and stood there cursing myself for being so clumsy, so insecure, so invisible.

3.

The symptoms were obvious. Thinking back, I see old driver's ed movies of our lives with red lines around the warning signs: Beware, car turning without signal. Look out, there are voices living in your brother's head.

With Jack, there were no absolutes. Rules dissolved in the vicinity of my brother: places we were not allowed to go, curfews, strict guidelines for conduct—all delineations evaporated in the glow of his laugh. Exceptions were always made for Jack. My big brother was the king of exceptions.

People gravitated toward him. He was thoughtful, responsible, meant what he said and unfailingly did what he promised, but he was never normal.

Then the definite, unmistakable episodes began.

In our quiet house, while my mother, father and I slept, Jack rearranged all the furniture. Lined up the couch and chairs as though giving a presentation. He took all of the dishes from the wooden cabinets in the kitchen, put them in the bathtub and covered them with syrup, or once, with potting soil. He took the clothes from his dresser and lay them out in the backyard so that they carefully covered the grass. He disconnected all the appliances and pulled them into the center of the kitchen.

These fits happened at night and were nearly always discovered when Jack was in the act of trying to undo whatever he'd done. At first we ignored it. He was a remarkable person, and no one wanted to admit he was broken. It challenged our faith in everything: that the sun rose continually, that the earth rotated on its axis, that the sky was held firmly above us.

My mother mentioned sleepwalking and cheerfully crossed the lawn gathering Jack's shirts and trousers. But when the frequency increased, my parents asked Jack to come with them to a psychiatrist. He refused.

I'm sorry
, he said,
I really am. It won't happen again. It was a bad dream. I dreamt I had to rescue the plates. I dreamt I had to hide them underground
.

I was ten when he finally came to me and begged to be tied to his bed at night. I refused and told my mother, who put her head in her hands and began to cry. We were in the living room. My father was out in the garage trying to remove the glue with which my brother had filled the toaster. His quiet curses drifted in through the open door.

I touched my mother's shoulder.
Maybe he doesn't want to go to college
, I said, needing to find a way to escape what wrapped around all of us. My brother had been accepted to Harvard for the fall. My mother's shoulders shook under my hand.

He has to go to a doctor
, I said, surprised at my own words but believing them, just the same. We did not protect him from himself, I knew. I left my mother and went upstairs. Jack lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

You here?
I asked, trying not to sound afraid.

Erin
, he said.

What?
I stood at the foot of his bed. Above his head a poster of the Beatles curled at one corner.

Erin
, he said again, softer this time and I went over and sat by his feet.

You're sick
, I said.
I love you, but you're sick
.

I know
, he whispered.
I know
.

4.

What did I want from her, that bedraggled lumpy customer? I wanted to find that she was a prophetic dreamer, connected to time in an intimate way. I wanted to ask about my brother, about myself. I wasn't a Christian lunatic afraid of the world ending, either. I just wanted context. Why else would I scroll through other people's dreams? Maybe because I had none of my own.

I didn't mind, really. It's hard to miss what you've never had. I'd always felt different, being dreamless was just more evidence that I was. My mother, alarmed that I never woke on my own, slept on demand, and seemed rested and refreshed whenever she roused me, took me to doctors. I lay on a glass table. Wires attached me to monstrous humming and beeping machines, lights blipped and flickered. I was terrified of them. Dr. Lathere came into the room and tugged at his gray beard.
Erin
, he said in his gravelly voice,
I want you to go to sleep
. I was a good kid, accustomed to oddity, and accustomed to Dr. Lathere, who had been treating my family as long as I could remember. I complied.

I woke when my mother smoothed my hair back from my head. The wires were plucked from my skin and I was free to return home. No REM cycle, was what Lathere told my folks. Highly unusual, the subject of studies, etc., etc. And dreamless. I didn't understand, really. But even at that early age I knew that Jack had all my dreams.

5.

Later I came to believe that God talked to my brother Jack. Whispered things he didn't want to hear and asked him to do things he found difficult or horrible. No one talked to me. I lay awake nights, waiting, but heard only the murmur of distant crickets, the whisper of air. My head was empty of voices except for Jack's.

No prophecy. No secrets. No holy words. Unfair, I thought, since I wanted them so much, yearned to be a vessel for truth and mystery. Jack wanted none of it. I guess you could say we were different that way.

And that wasn't the only way, but most essentially: Jack was chosen. I was not. I loved Jack, believed in him, but could never live up to him.

My brother was a brilliant man. A brilliant boy first, and then a gifted, unbelievable teenager and then a man who people turned to, followed without a question, worshipped instinctively.

How can I tell the story of a velvet voice if mine is one of burlap? I am eight years younger than Jack. I was eight years younger. Now I am twenty-nine and Jack is still twenty-seven.

6.

Strange things happened all along—way before Jack's night fits. There was the time, twelve and very much asleep, Jack walked three miles through snow in his pajamas to the train tracks outside of town where witnesses saw him lift a thousand-pound cow, near to the act of giving birth, from the path of a southbound passenger train to a nearby barn as though she were made of paper. Two hundred people were on that train and the storm had shoved an old oak through power lines up ahead—the train would have rounded the curve, hit the cow and derailed, slipped into an electrified bank of snow. The passengers would have sizzled and died.

My brother woke in the barn, in damp pajamas, petting the new calf. He insisted he was not cold, but the Janeks gave him a blanket anyway, and drove him home. His picture was in the paper. I remember that.

And there was Avery Gulton in the Waldbaum's. That was before the train, when I was very young. We were shopping for groceries: my mother pushed me in a cart. I dangled my legs and swiped at cereal boxes and cookies while my brother chattered alongside. Suddenly Jack stopped talking and stood still. My mother turned to him and reached out a hand:
What is it, honey?

Jack bolted. We heard people shouting and then a loud, sudden sound: a shot.

No one was hurt. Jack tackled Gulton from behind and the gun in his pocket went spinning along the gray and white linoleum, shot a bag of sugar and the plastic fruit display case. The cops got Gulton and in his pocket they found a list of explosive devices, in his house an arsenal and plans to destroy the state capital.

Surrounded by police cars in the parking lot, my mom asked him:
Jack, sweetie, how did you know? Why did you go tackle that man?

My brother closed his eyes—I was a toddler, but I remember this clearly: the sky was gray and stormy, it was cold and I didn't have mittens, my brother's eyes stayed closed and then he looked at me and then our mom.
God told me
, he said.
He tells me things. I'm supposed to listen
. And then his face crumpled and he began to sob. My mother pulled him to her chest and held him and murmured something, rocking him back and forth. In the ring of blue and red lights, I stood alone.

7.

In the front of the bookstore, the woman began humming. What was the song? It was suddenly urgent that I know. It felt somehow like a message. What could it be? What was she trying to tell me? Just as I almost had it, as the name of the song formed in smoky letters and floated ahead of me, she stopped humming.
No
, I cried out, then cringed and fled to Shakespeare & The Masters. I crouched low, in a corner, protected on two sides by safe, heavy volumes.

My boss, Marianne, walked by, the crisp lines of her white pants making a
whrip whrip
sound as her thighs met. She stopped and backed up. I stayed where I was and stared at
her legs. The lines of her pants had little puckers: dents where her knees belonged. Suddenly Marianne's face floated near mine as she popped down to a crouch.
Erin
, she said,
you okay?
I nodded. Marianne made me nervous. She worked for the Corporation and thought I was a loon. When this place was still owned by Mr. and Mrs. Tyndall, I wasn't afraid of anyone, but since they sold it, I'd watched a lot of people disappear and was always afraid I'd say the wrong thing to Marianne and she'd explode.

She bobbed like that for a minute, then popped back up and began to walk away. Her shoes were shiny and blue, they squeaked faintly.
Erin
, she called back over her shoulder.
This your break?

I scrambled up after her:
No
, I mumbled, and made my way back up front. I was supposed to Meet and Greet. Everyone knew I hated that job the most. They could put me in inventory for days at a time and I was utterly content, but Meet and Greet was excruciating; talking to each stranger who walked in the door, welcoming them in the middle of open space where they could stare at me, when I just wanted to weave through the books where I felt comfortable—it was punishment. People traded me their inventory station for whatever I was assigned. But Marianne noticed I hadn't been on the floor in a while, so she made me Meet and Greet.
Where I can watch you
, she said. Like I was a child of ten.

8.

I was a tearful, unhappy baby.

When I was young, and my mother told me this, I wished it was a sign: that I cried because I knew what was coming. But I was probably just colicky and unable to be comforted.
Except by Jack. Family lore has it that at their most sleepless and impatient, my parents turned to Jack to hold me, and that in Jack's arms I almost immediately went to sleep.