Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 5

  He finally climbed off the machine. Fran was quiet as she watched him descend. Her brown-gray hair was dotted with dry felled snow, as if her head was sprouting small white blooms down the length of dropping stems. Her mouth, so thin-lipped that it seemed a fissure in her face, blossomed outward, quivering and wet. She put a fist, clad in a thick winter glove, up to her mouth and sank to the ground, her back against the machine, the snow piling on her bare, bent neck. Her sobs were so quiet they could have been the tiny pings of snowy sleet on the backhoe, could have been a laugh three properties away carried in and altered by the winter wind.

  His mother’s house and stables, the fence line, Fran, the driveway—these images seemed to bulge with an aggressive particularity, it was as if the dead horse was an accent mark, changing the emphasis and making everything foreign. He looked up at the falling snow, so hushed and composed, and felt a sudden vertigo, as if the snowflakes were actually still and he was slowly levitating upward, giving the illusion of their fall. He sat down. A red drop from his reactivated bloody nose hit the snow like a burst of fireworks on a horizontal sky. After a moment, he pulled himself along the icy ground so that he was sitting next to Fran. Her profile was slack, her face collapsing into her chin, which receded into her neck, as if her whole head had originally been nothing more than a feat of complex origami, a series of flat folds popped out to resemble a face.

  Fran was unmoored, and he was afraid. He thought of something that had happened with his mother. Right after his father moved out, while his mother sifted through her hobbies for some distraction, an orange tabby cat appeared, wormy and starved. His mother had been convinced it was their long-missing cat Sorbet, and she took the cat’s return as a reversal in her fortunes. See, you lose one thing and something else comes back, she’d say, doting on the cat with a pleasure he had not seen since the split. But the cat was obviously not Sorbet, who had left eight years prior and was two shades darker, and he laid out the evidence to his mother. She replied I knew it and sunk down and in as if being drawn through a straw at her feet. What had troubled him most, he recalled, was not the impression that his mom had indeed known and permitted herself to believe otherwise. What most disturbed him was how easily she gave in, and the haunting tone of self-reproach as she shooed the cat away.

  He stood up in front of Fran and lifted his hands in the air several times in front of her as if trying to whip up the wind to pull her to her feet. She rolled her head toward him with a heavy looseness; regarding him and the icy pasture beyond with the sardonic gaze of someone who had been awoken from a deep sleep by the tail end of a bad joke. There was a lethargy in that look, a somnolent dark wisdom that seemed to echo the dead horse in that it was both disturbed and irrevocably in repose. He did not let himself be stalled. “Fran,” he said, bouncing a bit on the balls of his freezing feet, “I think the massage might work. It probably was working before I interrupted.” He swung his head back toward the hole where the curve of the horse’s hindquarter still peeked above the edge, a half-moon of hide arched like a doubting brow.

  “I bet you just didn’t do it long enough. Or maybe you forgot a step. Didn’t my mother have another step in the massage?” He gestured frenetically over her; he mimed a more perfect massage. His face flushed with impatience and a building panic; restoring Fran seemed the key-stone to getting free of this bizarre business. He thought again of his mother making that trek from the car to the house, nurse and daughter guiding her every step, and it seemed essential that Fran, at least, still saw a powerful sage, a spellbinder. “Maybe you missed a pressure point, or maybe you started at the wrong place.” Fran’s hooded flinty eye rolled either in dismissal or in a circular assessment of the scene: snowy ground, house and stable, his stricken face, the backhoe bucket-edge, the horse just out of sight.

  He squatted down in front of her and began to rattle off all the ways she might have mishandled the massage in a ragged low whisper. Though she remained silent, he kept repeating himself, like a refrain, but soon even that disintegrated into a wandering monologue about how his mother must always be trusted in these cases, though this case had never, should never, and possibly was not occurring. The idea that a dead horse floated a mere ten feet away made everything he said seem, at turns, superfluous or courageous—what could he say in the face of such a cosmic aberration, and listen to how boldly he spoke despite the aberration. Fran’s eyes had the buffed sheen of faraway thoughts, and she gave him a pitying look, as if he was the one operating under a harmless, but poignant, delusion. That look—though perhaps he had misread it—frightened him more than the dead horse itself. It seemed to indicate this grand shake-up in the world’s logic was just another disappointing fact of reality to be faced, another test of one’s maturity, one’s grace.

  “Think about it—you must have missed a step.”

  He walked back to the hole, kneeled, and saw what they had missed. Under the dead horse, an ice shelf zigzagged, leaving parts to dangle down, a photo-negative of a darting ice crack, a rent in the loose open air expressed as substance. The horse’s tail fanned upon it. He was sure it had not been there before, he could not be sure it was there now.

  “You just tell me what to do,” he said, his hands already on the horse.

  KEY PHRASES

  I had to fire Mol. Today was the day. The regional director had called me and told me, apologetically, that they had received enough complaints about Mol over the last six months to necessitate it, and that the previous person in my position had issued her several warnings, none of which had made any difference. “I’m sorry you have to be the one to do it so early in your employment,” he had said, “but at least you don’t know her too well yet. That should make it easier.” He was right; I did not know Mol at all. She was simply an unkempt and increasingly occasional presence in the office next door.

  I’d been working for Journey’s End Memorials for only two months when I heard from the director. Our company made videos of deceased loved ones to play at funerals or wakes, but I was assured, during my interview, that the workplace was nonetheless “youthful and upbeat.” To demonstrate, I was invited to a family fun picnic by the upper management the first weekend after I started. I’d been to enough company fun days in my working life to know this could be a cheerful drunken group-vent or a snake pit of office politics, where every ketchup pass represented a subversive uprising or an affirmation of an inexorable power dynamic. But the picnic was, instead, a desperate counterbalance to what I would discover was as morose a workplace as it sounded. The paper plates were cut to resemble gravestones, and different managers roasted each other by delivering mock eulogies; the speaker with a beer in hand and the roastee standing on a picnic table, a bedraggled funeral wreath about his neck.

  During this display of forced gallows humor and impenetrable inside jokes (“Paint the dove, Georgie. Paint it!”), a youngish woman, laughing and splotched-faced, stopped to say hello. “Isn’t this a riot,” she said, as she unwound a piece of corn silk from her teeth with her pinky nail. In truth I found the proceedings disheartening—I was hoping Journey’s End might feel different from my old job, more real and involving. I had just left a job managing a team of secret shoppers, a group of six men and women who practiced being invisible, the kind of customers a business would mistreat with impunity, since their personhood seemed in question. As I coached them on how to be ever more unobtrusive (while still making enough demands to put the supermarket or whatever through its paces), they would move down the scale of presence—from coworkers, to strangers, to movie extras milling in the frame, to flat images, to simply thoughts. Even when I had their attention, I found myself tapping shoulders and grazing forearms to confirm all of us were there. I hoped to get away from that.

  The woman began glossing the jokes and references. “You see, George once dumped a live dove in a bucket of food dye, since he needed a clip of a cardinal flying …” She asked me where I was from (downstate), if my family liked it here (I lived
alone), and then she asked how that was working out, and it was here that I began heeding the training from my former job. I let my eyes focus on a middle distance, past her face but short of the snorting, bald manager wearing the wreath like a puffed-up Cesar. I hunched my shoulders slightly, and pulled my arms inward, compressing my physical presence. When I told her living alone was fine, my preference really, I flattened my slightly eastern dialect into that of a bland midwestern, midcentury broadcaster.

  It was only when I let my thoughts stray to my new apartment (alert distraction is what we’d called it, think of something else but still pay attention to when and how you’re served) that the woman herself began to disappear. The heavily furnished rental, full of antiques and personal baubles from the owner, made me feel like an intruder, and I was careful not to take up too much space, sitting on only one of the easy chairs and never opening the second bedroom closet. This woman was like all that musty furniture—oppressive while ostensibly offering hospitality and comfort. That was my first, and longest, interaction with Mol before I was told to fire her.

  I was hoping to leave a message on her voicemail, rather than having to do it in person, but Mol had inexplicably shown up at work, dressed sharply and full of heretofore unseen passion and competence for the job. All day I heard her answering and making calls in a crisp and comforting tone—a must in the business of memorial videography. All of us were supposed to use a list of euphemisms for death, funerals, and the bereaved, but few of the workers I oversaw bothered. Yet all day I could hear Mol using the key phrases: “memorial gatherings,” “remembrance festivals,” and “celebrators.” I even heard her refer to funeral-goers as “loving reminiscers”—her own inspired creation.

  But Mol was terribly unreliable and had seemed, in the few exchanges I had had with her, to not even register what she was doing wrong. “Mol,” I had said to her, “you’ve come in late for the last three days. Do you want to tell me about that?” We were in my office, which I had taken over from someone who had papered the walls in complimentary notes from happy customers. Many of the notes were written in the same hand; I suspected he had written at least a quarter of them himself. “You really made Harry’s passing a wonderful memory in and of itself,” I read over Mol’s head as she replied. “Have you ever just had one of those days when you feel like you’re still living in the previous day and you have to spend half the day convincing yourself that there is a noticeable enough difference between yesterday and today to warrant going through it?”

  Mol was clearly a clueless woman, but from what I understood she needed the job and expected to keep it. It fell to me to revise this belief. Like anyone, I stalled. I found work that I convinced myself was more pressing; I watered all the plants in the office, de-headed all the dead flowers, shuffled papers, then steeled myself to do it. I saw Mol bent down at the copy machine, her curls shiny from some kind of spritz, the back of her pumps slipping off her heel as she crouched and spun a knob to dislodge a paper jam. Introducing a dramatic new element—the sadness, questions, and finality of her firing—into the blandness of a workday struck me as needlessly disjunctive.

  “Mol,” I began, and she turned to face me with a torn piece of copy paper in her fist. “I wanted to ask …” Her face—unawares, guileless, scrubbed—stopped me up short. “How has it been going with the Halson account?” Halson was a particularly difficult client who seemed to have an endless string of aged, distinguished relatives, one of whom seemed to die each year. His dead relatives were invariably sour-faced and sickly in all the source materials he provided us, yet he expected us to conjure up a video program that showed them as hearty, hale, and good-natured. In all the pictures and home videos he left us, the most recent loss, Great Aunt Halson (a “deeply respected cartographer”) had been mostly slumped in a wheelchair or bedridden. In every image, the corners of her mouth were pulled down by deep ruts, and her forehead was wrinkled in an expression of affronted confusion, as if blaming the viewer for her befuddlement. Mapping evidently had taken a hard toll.

  “It’s going good,” Mol replied, straightening her skirt and smiling. “I found this one video of the aunt being lifted from her wheelchair and lowered into a carriage ride in Central Park.” The collar of Mol’s white button-down shirt was yellowed like the soiled cloud a head makes after years on the same pillowcase. Her skirt, which looked so sharp when I glanced at it earlier, had a broken side-zipper, which Mol had remedied using a row of small gold safely pins. “Sounds great. Like a wonderful moment with the grand old dame seeing the city.” I was enthusiastic out of guilt; I saw nothing praiseworthy in her find. Mol gave me curious look, then went on to say that during the moment the aunt was being lowered onto the carriage seat, she had winced broadly in pain. That wince, Mol continued, looked a bit like a smile when spliced against taking-off doves and crashing waves, common motifs we used to transition from scene to scene. “It really looks like a real smile,” Mol insisted. “Halson will be so happy.”

  As Mol jabbered on about the Halson video, explaining how she planned to integrate a map graphic to represent life’s journey and kept absently crumpling and flattening out the paper in her hand, I could feel a tightening in my throat. I began to yawn, like I always did when nervous. Once, twice, three times in a row. Mol looked up at me and crinkled her eyes, sucked on her lower lip. “It’s not too much, is it?” I shook my head and Mol kept talking. She had a thready bit of lunch around her left incisor. Her right eyelid drooped. The part in her hair was askew. She looked like somebody who was born to be fired. I gave her a little wave with my fingers and excused myself.

  I walked toward my office, pausing every few steps with the idea of turning back and giving her the news in mind. I was transfixed by the sheer idea I was on the cusp of action. Whenever I was young and had a boo-boo, and a Band-Aid had been in place for, say, a week, and it was time to let the wound breathe (as Ma would say), I would sit and stare at it, readying myself to remove it. My breath would get short. “At the count of three, I’m going to do it,” I would say and then become dizzy with adrenalin as I watched my own hand sitting inert. Moments of truth, as I considered them back then, came and went. It had nothing to do with being afraid of the pain. It was the thrill of knowing that with a single jerk of my wrist I would go from the condition of being deeply Band-Aided to irrevocably without. That was what held me in thrall. Then my mother would invariably walk by. “Wake up, kid.” Still walking, she’d snag the Band Aid and rip it off mid-stride. “Go outside and play already.”

  I hovered around for a while, trying to work up the courage to ask Mol to see me in my office, but then I decided to change tactics. Better to leave a note for Mol and let her approach me, rather than seeking her out. That way, I would be ready, and she would be ready. I headed toward her office, which was at the end of a long hallway that very slightly narrowed the closer I got. It was like being drawn down a chute. I had pointed this out to the building manager, who said it was an optical illusion from the old wood paneling warping, but I didn’t believe him. Her office was open. I stepped in and shut the door behind me.

  Her office was a mess. The desk was covered with papers, some of which looked as if they had been used to clean up a spill. There were flowers everywhere and in everything—some fresh, some dry as old boutonnieres, some thickening into a soup after being left in water too long. She must have collected them from the various funerals she had been assigned to attend. They were in every kind of container—coffee cups, cereal bowls, single flowers in pen shafts with the ink pulled out, a few clipped blossoms floating in an open eyeglass case. Gladiolus spears with their blooms long gone collected thirty deep in one corner, knobbed and curling like a stand of spines. Clouds of fruit flies cycled around the more rotted specimens. A file drawer that was specifically required to be locked was open, and the files were covered with dry, shredded petals and dropped flies. I sifted through Mol’s papers for a scrap to write her a note on. Among her papers were reprimands from
the former boss, complete with comments Mol wrote in to amuse herself—Windbag, baloney!, over my dead bod, schlub—up and down the margins of perfectly reasonable requests to show up to work and keep company property unharmed. I found a clean sheet: Come see me at your earliest convenience.—H.F. I figured I should add something sterner to foreshadow the news that was coming her way. Please clean out all dead florals from your office, as they constitute a fire risk. I seemed unable to strike an authoritative enough tone so I added by 5:00 p.m. tonight. Then, to soften it, I added that it was because the fire marshall was coming to inspect the property tomorrow in the a.m., though this was untrue. I stood the note up in the keys of her computer and went back up the widening hallway to my office.