Super Flat Times (7 page)
“DEAR PRELL,” it said underneath the crude thumbnail image, “When I look down I will always see the top of your head, the feature you let me maul most frequently. I can remember each divot with a phrenologist’s precision. Remember how I wept when they finally smoothed it all over? How I held your tender head in the recovery room, knowing, even then, even after the accident, with your face like a blunt mallet, that I would never fully rid myself of you? I will admit now what I would not admit then, that it was my fault, that I was tipsy and that I told you I knew how to drive the pram out of spite. But the fog that night, the animals in the road, the half-naked farmer — how could I have planned that? Please, understand at least that much.
“Your head, now, from up here, couldn’t be measured in pixels. A grain of sand would crush you, Prell. You feel, nightly, the tugging, insistent member of a man straining against the small of your back, when my only mistake was actually leaving when I finally got the idea to do so. I am still here, Prell, PRELL, groaning with fossilized desire. You shit.”
I looked the letter over once more. I hadn’t said anything more or less than that I was unprepared to make any statements on my own behalf. I was a career coward, unfit for the rigor of even the most childish, underdeveloped day. The sky stopped for a break. Chunk went for his cigarette box. I tied the note to a small brown pebble of hard air, poked a small hole in the cloud, and dropped it right through.
I
made them for the Museum of Real Estate and Finance. They sent me out with a special microphone and a tape deck. People wanted to know what kind of lives had molted and languished in the places where they would like to file away their own blustery, overwrought experiences. I’d spend a day or two in different areas of a house, using the long, fluted horn of the microphone to record the billion fluttering tones, the way different angles of sunlight on the walls colored reflections, memories of footsteps embedded deep within the wide slats of the floor, the places where the last people who lived there grieved and sprawled, shed tiny, creped flakes of life. On a certain frequency, I could pick up fragments of a conversation between two people who had perhaps long lost touch with each other by then. Another frequency might unveil the stuttering wow and report of a coital episode occurring in the kitchen. You could modulate the pitch so that even the soiled breath of the couple was audible from inside the oven. The bathroom was a particularly fertile site. I would sit cross-legged on the floor of a house’s bathroom for hours, listening carefully through headphones at the timbre of the different silences, how they cascaded into and breached one another. We used to think that houses had no memory at all. But now we understand.
Though it was not my job, I would sometimes go around a certain house, fixing up some of the minor imperfections — a dangling shade, perhaps, or an unhinged door. Who could
not
fix something that was just lying there, broken to the world? How could you just leave something out like that, hanging like some fibrous, gangly appendage?
I worked part-time so that I could spend the rest of my day listening to houses that were currently inhabited. My wife’s home, for instance, was a place I was very familiar with. She brought a child and a waffle iron into our relationship; I brought nothing but a lifetime of pouting and relentless self-indulgence. Nevertheless, I was given a set of keys to her place and permission to use the bed and washroom, but not a towel or soap. “For a person that has never heard of self-reliance…,” she’d say, face brought into sharp relief by some base cosmetic arrangement. Consequently, I washed during the day, using a dingy, thirdhand set of linens I kept in a plastic bag under the tub, long after she had trudged off to the job that rubbed her bricked, shuttered life away, paycheck after paycheck.
She had lots of little things around — a smirking, Bakelite cat clock, two tall reed baskets of seemingly foreign origin, a lone ski pole with the word
champ
written in squidgid, blocked Magic Marker script — objects that stood for various times and places in her life, the relevance of which she vigilantly kept from me. When I sensed one in a room, I would check it with the house machine and, sure enough, all kinds of sound would come rushing out of it.
I listened to her things for hours while she was at work, carefully running over each surface with the slim, troweled orifice of the microphone, scanning the frequencies for some meaningful tone. On hot, dry days swatches of fabric tended to surrender the most vivid signals. At times, the sound was clear enough to evoke a kind of sightfulness. One morning a nettled tuft of hair brought about a striking tableau of her child, Janet. She was just starting to walk. There were some sounds of her feebly traversing the corner of an apartment that I had never seen or even heard of but that had very nice things in it, much nicer than the things we had in our house. On another frequency I could hear the child handling some plastic figures and blocks, trying to paste together some sort of world out of the cheap talismans. Her head shook like one of those big-headed figurines with springs for necks. By the time I started wedging myself into her life, the girl could already put on her own shoes and say things like “We’re going faster.”
The end of each day had the habit of getting right up in my face, with little or no advance warning. I locked down the house I was sounding — a massive, interbred structure buttressed by haughty, overdesigned columns and balustrades — and hauled the tapes back to the Museum of Real Estate and Finance. The foreman had a disagreeable face and body, as if it had been preempted by terminal indecision at an early stage.
“What there — you?” he asked from behind the marquee. He was blind by choice, just like my father.
“A couple of instructive loops. Some business about a fancy dress, a boating accident, Ibiza.”
“Clean?”
“So far.”
“So far, so far.”
It was a job that did what I wanted it to. It stayed wherever I put it. Where I lived, though, was massive and untenable, an emotional dumping ground — a house whose thin meniscus trembled and brimmed with discontent.
The relationship my wife and I kept taking stabs at didn’t slip through my fingers so much as level itself sloppily against them. We were still passing back and forth a virus I had picked up years before. It became part of what we did together — the life we fostered in lieu of a child of our own.
I was rarely satisfied with what I had heard in our house, so I continued on through the bedroom every morning, taking samples from anything that resonated. Each fragment of my wife’s memory left a hole where another one started. One by one they began to pull me along into the other side of her life, the part that happened before I had started greedily busting it up at every available opportunity. I’m not sure what I expected to find — probably some clear confirmation that the time in which she had known me was intense enough to invalidate her past experience. I did not know the people that had trespassed into her life before me, and was interested in what they had to say for themselves.
One morning, after a few cursory passes around the bedroom, I found exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. In one of her closets, wedged in behind a box of china, was a red plastic sandal. It resonated at a near perfect B-flat, though the signal was tainted by frequent, intense arpeggiated bursts of vibrato. The sound was my wife, before she was my wife or even a person I had ever known, sitting next to a baby pool, inside of which were the kid, Janet, and her father. I had met this man a few times in real life — he was the kind of thing you’d expect to see — underbaked, corn shaped, toothy. He made a lot of money in the city designing cloud advertisements, so that everything he said was either from a commercial or soon to be one. He was already into his twenties, and hadn’t yet been unwelcomed. My wife, this person she was, you could see she was trying to hold things together. She held Janet’s hand to keep her balance and poured water over her back with a small plastic cup.
I didn’t like what the sound was doing to my body — I went cold, and there was a spot in the center of me that glowed like a car lighter, but it didn’t stop me from listening. I held a finger over the teardrop-shaped mute button in case there was something I didn’t want to hear. There were lots of things that I might never want to hear. When I was a schoolboy I took this girl up to the city to make a dirty movie. Only I wanted it to be a silent film. I told her she wasn’t allowed to make a sound — not even the rustle and bond of her skirt and top as she peeled them slowly from her body, a noise that I can only refer to as “stez.” I put a belt around her neck and worked at her pasty, splotched body from behind. The headboard kept banging into the wall, so I had to stuff some pillows in the crevice between. She parried and lurched like an understudy for some lanky, newborn animal, skinny legs canted in the hideous lamplight. Watching that tape now, after about ten years, is a shameful and embarrassing procedure. Seeing myself swagger around in silence, holding my breath, cock dipped and pitted, my hands in places that hands shouldn’t go, is like having your own worst time in your life and someone else’s all at once.
The family sat in the pool for a long time. This father had a little squirt toy and started to use it on the child and my wife. “Honey, she seems thirsty,” my wife said to the father. He turned and squirted my wife’s upper thigh, marking a trail up toward her crotch. He stretched out his arm, holding the nozzle of the gun over her midriff, soaking the entire region. There was something sad and groping about the sound of the water splashing against her beige stove pants — a lostness, the collapsing wheeze of a flaccid and forgettable overture. My wife only looked at him. The father continued spraying her crotch, grinning like the wide, unseemly grille of a truck. I had never heard of someone so completely oblivious to his surroundings.
But I promised myself, there in the bedroom, sound machine in my lap, that I would not malign the father. I would keep my feelings to myself, where nobody has any business with them anyway. I don’t like it when people can tell what I’m feeling, and I don’t like it when they try. That is why I don’t say anything to anyone. My wife preferred it this way — she could get more done.
This business with the pool continued for some time, with these characters who had barnstormed the periphery of my life sitting around in the heat with pinched, dumbfounded expressions. I’d had enough, and put everything back the way I had found it.
The house I went to that day was loud, filled with the dull, inlaid memories of a hundred lives. The clients would be disappointed in the reels — none of these people were especially upstanding or even had anything of interest to contribute to a conversation. Light hit the walls and floor in strange, unanticipated waves of grief. The bedroom keened softly the whole time I was there. Ancient prints of bodies lolled and shifted in the adjoining hall. The tone of the place was marbly, clotted. This would drive the price down considerably, although the tub made an exquisite sound. It was the centerpiece of the whole place, probably because nobody had chosen to mark it with the indelible effluvium of her life.
The foreman asked me what I’d gotten.
“You know when people ask you to think of a bad thing and multiply it by ten?”
I handed him the envelope with the reels. He felt at it for a long, self-absorbed moment, speculating on the relative value of the contents.
“This fucks us.”
I told him that the house would never be sold, that the whole place was caked over. He filed away the envelope in one of the big diagnostic machines. I went out and had a cigarette. The day, with all its bitter, ridiculous interstices, had been killed.
The next morning that unnamable sense, the thing that made me take out the microphone the day before, was back. My wife was up again, in the bathroom, preparing her face for work. The girl had wandered in during the night and was sleeping cross-wise on the bed. I held my stomach, thinking about the father, that place she had made in the world that was now gone. Where was I, then, on the morning they squatted in that cheap pool? How would my own life appear on that day from someone else’s perspective, from
his
perspective? How did I tick away those hours, useless and alone in South City? Could I have those gestures, that day, back again?
I got in my car and circled the neighborhood a few times, waiting for my wife to leave. Everything was curiously dead in the sharp streets. When I was sure the house was empty, I went back and turned on the machine. There was a narrow crack in one of the floorboards, from which I extracted the yellowed flap of an envelope, glue and all. Something about the offhand way it had been discarded drew me to it. Under the slim trowel of the microphone’s horn it seemed to shimmy and buck. It took longer than usual to draw out a signal — what did come was brittle and insubstantial. I was hard-pressed for detail and clarity. By interpolating the middle C with a B-flat, though, I was able to conjure up the sound of the father. He stood naked to his socks in a dim, brownish room, talking to a couple of people sitting on the couch. It came at me fiercely, out of the late morning. His body, barely distinguishable from the washed-out, underlit background, was thin and frail, and the way he moved suggested the palsied antics of a small boy. I couldn’t follow the thread of his talk — he said things like “The greatest fucking year I’d like to fuck.” Occasionally the noise would list toward the couch, where the other couple was laid out, shamefully distended and half dressed. The father danced by the empty cavity of a fireplace, the bowed tine of his dick swaying, half erect.
I listened, cradling the lozenge-shaped recording deck like a tender football. Forgive me for saying that it was something that couldn’t
not
be heard. It flickered before me, monstrous and immense, the realization of some deep, long-choked fear. Here was the soft, purloined limb that had held my wife’s time and energy hostage for nine years, braying at the entrance to her unwitting, shadowy womb. Something inside me broke like a glass vial. I got it all over myself.