The Entire Predicament (21 page)

The next day I bought a cardboard wedge of poison granules and placed it near the sink pipes so they’d land beside it upon entry. I put a safety lock on the cabinet and within two days the house was littered with radioactive-looking mouse pellets. Two weeks later saw an influx of large slow-moving flies that I knew came from inside the walls and inside the bodies of the mice that had died, growling flies that I thought could rupture and a squirming new mouse would leap out. One by one I swatted them with a newspaper. By afternoon the president’s pixilated face was obliterated by the deaths of insects. How dare you, I thought to the president, come into my house and make my wife crazy. Indeed, how efficiently I am able to swat flies. How within my nature it has always
been.The paint on the kitchen walls was slightly discolored in spots from where I’d sprayed disinfectant. Angela followed me around as I completed all this. She was intrigued, or she was oblivious. I swept the bodies into the dustpan and flung them into the garden. I sang, “Fly, fly away!” but Angela didn’t crack a smile. I said something about fertilizer, about natural cycles of life, and she remained unamused. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said, Let Freedom Rain, with a picture of a gingham puppy, leash dangling, peeing on a fire hydrant and holding an umbrella. I stared at the tee-shirt but it remained both silly and incoherent. I began, again, to clean the house.

And my wife was—what? Brimming, as if I could unzip her and it would all spill out. What would it be? Cells in the shape of her, the many from the one. Now as she read books of histories and revolutionaries, and moved through the dark house and the internet with a swooping grace I knew only from certain shots in movies, she did so with a large spiral-bound notebook that I never saw unless she was writing in it. She remained not unfriendly and she remained remote. She offered little jokes about mice, my desire to “get them” and my recent success, having “got them good.” One night, while Angela and the dog were sleeping, I stood at the counter polishing silverware and looking out the window over the sink to the moon. She came in and took a glass from the cabinet. When I saw what she was after I rinsed my hands and took the water pitcher from the fridge. I met her in the center of the room and poured it for her. I stood with the pitcher and watched the water move in waves as she drank it. I admired the perfect communion of
the water, the glass, and the force of her mouth. The kitchen smelled of faraway spaghetti. Under that, the only animal scent came from the dog’s bowls.The romance of domesticity swept into me, I put my arm around her waist, and we embraced with our symbolic vessels hovering in the air behind our heads. We moved a little. My wife has sleek reddish hair and I put my nose into it. I thought about cells multiplying, and my body filling with myself. I thought about men who go to Alaska and shoot sheep—sheep that are so wild they’re as dangerous as bears. Those people think they’re facing themselves but I think they’re not, they’re just being assholes. I’ve seen a photo of a man with a gleaming white ram sunk into his arms and reclined like a woman on a fainting couch, eyes open and behaving in death as it never, in any possible contortion, would have behaved in life, which is precisely what makes the man feel what he is feeling, which is satisfied, and
right
, perhaps even with God. It’s so ugly. I know it’s natural, but still. “I just really want to fuck my wife,” I said into her ear as sweetly as any words can come from a mouth like this.

“I know you do, honey,” she said. I backed her toward the counter for a step before what she meant sunk in and we released our embrace. I put the pitcher in the refrigerator and paused to let its air push into me. Then I closed the door, leaned on the hulking white thing, and listened to the scraps of paper struggling under their magnets in the breeze that came from the window and the ceiling fan.

I would never get anything right.

I could feel my teeth in my mouth. “I think you should tell me what you do all day with my daughter and my dog,” I said.

She crossed her arms over her chest and let her head fall to the side, thinking.

“Balance,” she said.

She extracted a rubber band from the pocket of her jeans and worked to pull her hair back with it. Don’t touch that hair, I thought. It flowed from her. I wanted to say,
mine
.

I said, “You need to be more specific.”

“Entropy,” she said with the band in her teeth. “The opposite of you.” Heat expanded in my body, idiotically, like a campfire marshmallow. She looked at me in a way that you could say she
considered me from afar
. With her head tilted, her eyes precise, the tone of her gaze forthright, I watched her take in all my available dimension.

She said, “You big, sweet, hairy baby.”

I moved toward her knowing that my face was shifting, in the static half-light, from moonlit to monstrous. “I deserve to know—” I said. She rolled her eyes, let the band snap into place, and disappeared into the darkness of the house. “What are you going to do?” I called after her. “Are you going to blow something up? What? Are you going to blow yourself up?” When I heard nothing back, I called: “You know what? I dare you! You know what? You should just come on over to my office.You should just come on in and blow us both up!” Then I plunged in after her.

Moving through the house, quickly, quickly, I brushed against wallpaper and caught my robe on a sconce, glided down a hall and then scraped my feet on something like legos. At first I tried to listen for where she could be, but the rush of organic heat in my head was so loud that I couldn’t hear past myself. My flesh thumped furniture and I kept my elbow
trailing along chair rails until they ended and I flailed in a chasm. I swiped walls for switches and gave up. I moved in gushes and spasms. I heaved along and I heaved inside. I felt the press of my toenails. I gushed forward and forward—as if I were moving down one long passageway, scaling boulders and leaping craters, as if I had traveled for miles, for days. When I stopped to listen to my breath in the dark, the carpet hummed under my feet—I could feel its wormy shapes on my soles—and my arms reached like zombie arms, and my face, it seemed to me, in the darkness, had let itself loose; I couldn’t imagine what I could be wearing, only my lumpen body like a formation of lava left to millennia of stasis: crude, elemental, both alien and utterly of my core. I waited, panting, listening to the muscles in my face come into focus, and by the time I spied what looked like a light in the distance I knew tears were forming in my dumb eyes and traveling along my slack cheeks. I pushed one foot forward and then another, moving myself like a dead bear or an armoire, and finally I stood again in the kitchen with the disappointing moon tippy behind the perforated skin of our window screen. I looked blankly at the screen, at a loss as to what could possibly be out there.

I’d run and run, but I couldn’t catch her.

I could feel her, though, filling the walls of the house.

In the dark, in the kitchen, I breathed for an amount of suspended time.

After a while, my wife hovered in my mind, illuminated in darkness like a dessert in the dramatic display cabinet of a very
self-important restaurant where I remember being taken, as a child, to eat.

What would she say if she said something?

She said, “I’m trying to protect you.” I suspected she was full of shit, but I couldn’t tell. I said she could not possibly be doing any such thing because what she was doing was killing me. She said,“I am protecting you in a
small
way, because, trust me, you don’t want to know. And I’m protecting you in a
big
way too, because I am doing the right thing, and you are part of the world.”

I wanted to shake her, to move her physically, as if that would move her mind. I tried to remember what she had been before she allowed the world to take over our house and I wanted to
strangle
her, as if I could squeeze something real from her throat and her lips, because even in my mind she continued to give me nothing. But then all I did, even in my mind, was put on an insolent voice and say, “Angela’s part of the world!” and then Angela appeared, so that my wife could pick her up, spin with her in the spotlight, cuddle her, and say, “She is!”

Angela, imaginary, opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out except bubbles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I didn’t say anything.

In madness there is conviction, a direct and mechanical thing that comes from visions. I had witnessed this in literature even if, as yet, I had not been acquainted with the phenomenon in my literal life. It hurt a lot to picture all this, and I was so confused, but then I pushed it to a considered distance. From this distance I thought about it—my wife, her perspective, the
life in her arms, the certainty of madness, the impossible things she might actually do—turning it into a cookie and then into a flat stone in my mind, then turning the stone over as if in my hand, looking at it with eyes of glass. I thought, Dear God, the problem is I think she’s
right
.

When the room ticked into dawn I rinsed my face in the sink, dried it with a dish towel, and pulled my shoes onto my feet. Something had happened between night and daylight, something physical, from science, the way that at the far edge of the big bang theory the universe returns. In this way, microcosmically, I’d changed direction. I’d sucked every aspect of myself from the rooms of the house I lived in and back into the cave of my body. This allowed me to do what I did next, which is that I took my wallet and my phone and I left.

I did the very thing I would never think possible.

It’s just what I did. I went out there. To look. As a camera would look.

Out there, morning air glittered with sprinkler water. I squinted at my neighbor’s basketball net, a giant insect with one compound eye. Mailbox after mailbox wasn’t breathing. Then I watched my feet walk. I filled my frame of vision with my shoes and the slope of the curb. I followed the curb, which could have been moving in any direction but as usual was moving forward, as I was moving forward through the world, not flinching when a car passed blowing tingly particles. I followed the curb forward through morning.

When I reached the burned field at the edge of town, I lifted my eyes and moved them across its speckled pattern of golds,
taupes, grays, blacks. With a tilt of my head I could shift the whole acreage from two to three dimensions and then back. The act relaxed me. I entered the stubby field with easy strides. Grasshoppers leaped in an automatic rhythm. I saw hares, and I saw mice. Mice smell of old straw, and old straw smells of mice, and the field smelled of burned straw, burned mice, fire and mice, I was able to think without laughing. That day, though, no crows; someone must have lifted the negative spaces they’d made and tossed them away, so that I walked through the simple space of the air that had been behind them.

In the center of the field I turned myself around. All directions appeared equal. Then I took out my phone and called Mike. Nothing happened on the phone except it was as if he already knew what I was doing, which is a lot to happen, because it’s inexplicable. I think I thought something like, Oh, this must be what they mean by
magic
. But I was a camera, so I let it go. “You bet,” he said. “I’m on my way.” I continued across the field. My shoes crunched and animals sprung around me in arcs. I fell into a rhythm that included all my senses and then, as I approached the cement on the other side, Mike’s triangular silver car pulled up.