American Innovations: Stories (17 page)

“I feel kind of elated,” J said.

“Sure you do,” Real Humans said.

It was as if Q’s secret wasn’t that she’d lost her home, or lost her money, or was secretly ill, but that she actually knew what she was doing. Or maybe she had lost her money, and her home, and maybe she was ill, but she was able to handle it. All these partygoers seemed able to handle their lives.

“He was just scratched up a bit,” Norm’s lover said.

“Who was scratched up?”

“Gene Hackman. He wasn’t really hurt at all.”

“That’s what I thought,” Q said. “I thought he would be fine.”

Everyone admired Gene Hackman.

“Hasn’t he had a sad life?” J asked. “I thought I’d been told that. That his mother had died in a fire started by her own cigarette?”

No, no, his life had worked out. He had a great life. He joined the navy. He was a failure in acting school. When his old teacher saw him working as a doorman in New York, the teacher said that he’d always known he’d amount to nothing. He was retired from movies. He had three kids. He had paired up with an underwater archaeologist to write three adventure novels. Maybe four adventure novels. Or one was a Western, maybe. It was titled
Justice for None
.

ONCE AN EMPIRE

I’m a pretty normal woman, maybe even an extremely normal one. Especially now as I’m entering my mid-thirties, which are among the most normal of years. I live—I used to live, that is—in a small lofted studio apartment on the top floor of a six-story building on a tree-lined block, across the way from an abandoned police station. I bought that studio with an inheritance from, well, it doesn’t matter from whom. I bought it because it was time. My mother no longer tenderized meat with a hammer, I had failed to become the cabaret singer or CEO she once might have become; the termination of our roommatehood had become essential. This was many years ago. I love my apartment so much. Its window looks out onto the Jehovah’s Witness Watchtower building whose enormous lightbulb billboard broadcasts the temperature in Fahrenheit, the time, then the temperature in Celsius, then the time again, then the updated temperature in Fahrenheit, and so on, unto eternity. Having sight of that billboard: it used to make me feel like neither time nor temperature would ever change without first petitioning my approval.

As a normal, stable adult with an ordinary life on a quiet street in a peaceful neighborhood, I never thought I’d be the victim of an especially unusual crime. Or of any crime, really. If it was a crime. A middle school counselor once told me that she didn’t know if as a child, she was, or wasn’t, beaten with a belt one or many times because, she said, we never really know what happened in the past. Only what we dread or long for in the future. And often not even that, she added. OK, sure.

It was a Tuesday when what happened happened.

Every Tuesday night I go and see whatever is playing at the movie theater nearby. I’m not choosy. I’m happy to see whatever everyone else is going to see. That way I stay in touch without having to talk to people, which is great, because even though I very much like people in general, I find most people, in specific, kind of difficult. I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Like the movie theater. I love the popcorn there, which makes me feel ever so slightly asthmatic. And I love the heavily patterned carpet that recalls the slot machine section of a gas station out West. And that fateful Tuesday evening I saw a movie that was
about
love. If also about Japan, and kind of about dinnerware, too. The movie ran late, past midnight, which is when—this is what they said in the movie anyhow—the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest.

Its being the witching hour didn’t spook me, I want to be clear about that. One time the Watchtower displayed a static LL:LL, and
that
spooked me, but little else has ever spooked me. Which is to say, I wasn’t out of sorts that Wednesday morning. (Because now that I think about it, that fateful Tuesday night was actually a Wednesday—as kids we used to call Wednesday hump day—morning.) After that movie I was walking my regular walk home, past the now nineteen months’ static construction site that sits at the corner of my very own block, right next to the abandoned police station.

I turned the corner, past the plywood barrier, on around to the front of the abandoned police station. From there I saw the six stories of my own building. I saw my window. My lights weren’t on. Which was wrong. I always leave the lights on in my apartment, day or night. I’ve never shaken that childhood fear that in the dark things cease to exist. Maybe that is what really happens, if briefly; science these days keeps confirming the strangest things.

My window dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something. Something pretty normal.

I looked down at my feet, as if to remind myself of them. A breeze blew, carrying an ever so slight scent of burning leaves and an industrial shoreline kind of mildew. I felt myself growing dim through inexposure. Maybe a fuse had blown. A very important fuse.

Some sort of sound. I looked back up, toward my unlit window. Some …
thing
was emerging from the darkness there. At first, it looked like a nothingness that had acquired an outline on the cheap. But as it descended—it was descending—it became more fully ontologically realized. It was my ironing board.

I’d forgotten that I even had an ironing board. It was an old family thing, all wooden. It used to collapse unannounced, and often. I and a series of dogs had been afraid of it when I was a kid. I’d forgotten it to a closet. I would never have said I cared for it. But when I saw it there on the fire escape, out of its context, a great tenderness unearthed itself, flowing from me to it.

The ironing board’s gangly back legs hooked over the fire escape’s final edge; its front legs made gentle, almost elastic contact with the sidewalk below. Having landed confident as a cat burglar, the board then continued east. Its progress wasn’t awkward or zombielike. It moved supplely, playfully. Kind of like a manatee.

Next, with surprising nimbleness, my brown velveteen recliner climbed down, then passed by me in a stump-legged gallop. My wood-armed Dutch sofa shuffled graceful as a geisha. My desk chair seemed to think it had wheels, which it doesn’t. A green-globed desk lamp went by. An ordinary plastic dustpan. A heavy skillet, scorched. My things. They were all heading east. With an enviable sense of purpose. An old set of Russian nesting dolls from my father, the ladder I used to reach my storage loft, a forgotten feather duster (blue), a pine cabinet with round hinges, two high kitchen stools I had painted, one of which had a yellow splatter from another project, which splatter I liked to run my finger across. My dresser whose drawers squeaked just so, a faux-colonial laundry basket, a blur of white dishes; a checkered ceramic vase, downy throw pillows, three folding chairs, a harem of kitchen utensils; a video projector, a yarny bath mat, a striped shower curtain, perky Tupperware labels, a corkboard with its map pins, chewed-on chopsticks, a crystal-like vase that makes a finger look cut in half if held in just the right way. “Stuff” is such a childish word. Sheets passed as if floral ghosts. My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She’d said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they haven’t committed.

The parade of my things, I was almost enjoying it. I didn’t hate my life, as it left me.

Then my miniature pink plastic-handled two-tined fork, which has
COLORADO ROCKIES
engraved on its handle in golden letters and is the surviving half of a souvenir set from a truck stop, and which I’ve had forever and ever: then she went by. Not even among other silverware. On her own. Amid that witching hour crowd of my life, it was she—she who had shared so many bowls of noodles with me, so many scrapings of extra sugar onto plain yogurt, so many steaks cut by another into tiniest bites, she for whom I would refuse as a child to eat my dinner until she was found—it was for her, my fork, that my heart beat wildest. Until the moment of her exodus, I had been too mesmerized even to think of moving. What I watched felt no more personal than that cartoon movie with the brooms, a movie I’d never much liked because it had no words. But my little fork. I wanted to follow her. To beg her to stay or to ask her why she was leaving. Why didn’t I run after her or shout out to her? Why did I feel so limbless? Maybe it was terror; I could barely move. And she—she receded beyond my field of vision, as my old ally the Watchtower did not stutter in telling the time, the temperature, the time again, and the temperature again.

Oh, fork. How does it feel to be a bat? I don’t know. Sleepy, maybe? Hungry? Yearning? Content? I don’t know how I felt that Tuesday night. Or hump day morning. Whatever it was. I barely even know how I didn’t feel. I didn’t feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I didn’t even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn’t feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn’t feel like talking to someone who would understand.

I managed the short crawl to the stoop of the familiarly abandoned police station and then rested there. Above me: one flagpoled balustrade where surely, at one time or another, a flag had hung. Had that been twenty-one years ago? One hundred and one? I didn’t know. Maybe no one knew. An old police station. Hadn’t I seen a crime? I smiled, a little. A dew was breaking.

Time had blinked or I had fallen asleep. I saw a few skid marks on the sidewalk, as if from a bicycle. I don’t have a bicycle, I thought. I don’t think I do. Though I have a toolbox with rubber feet. Or had one. The sun washed out the face of the Watchtower’s lightbulb billboard in brightness. Where my window was I could see only reflected light.

Britain, once an empire, now a small island off Europe—that was my thought.

A sound then like the Apocalypse. The superintendent, vacuuming the lobby of my building, with one of the front doors propped open. The super’s name sounds like that of a Roman emperor. Advertus, I think it might be. Or Nero. He knocked on the glass of the unopened front door of the building—but you’re
inside,
I thought briefly—and waved at me, half friendly-like.

I waved back. Then I beckoned him.

“I’ve forgotten my keys,” I found myself calling out in a childish tone as he crossed the street toward me.

Claudius offered me his enormous paternal hand. After a brief moment of hesitation I realized the hand was to help me stand up, not just to wonder at. “Was there,” I asked as casually as I could, dusting off the back of my skirt, “some kind of electrical blip last night?”

“Something happen?” he asked, laughing, showing teeth.

It is in the nature of a dream that we can’t stub our toe against it. I was told that more than once, by my mother, or maybe by my father. Inside my apartment, which the emperor kindly opened for me, was only my ancient stuffed animal dog, Jasper. Him, and a stray leaf, and a to-do list magneted onto the refrigerator.

“Did you move? Are you moving?”

I shook my head. “This is a surprise,” I said. “I mean, this is terrible.”

“Yes,” he said, and his lonely word echoed against the high ceiling.

I couldn’t tell him what I’d seen the night before. He seemed like a nice guy, but still, I couldn’t tell him.

“I’m sure no harm was meant,” I said, when Nero insisted I file a police report.

“For the other people in the building,” he preached.

He walked me to the station. I knew that if I reported the truth of what I had seen, I’d soon be under the fluorescent light of an intake room at a nearby hospital. Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of the abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate. I signed a sheet attesting to an inventory of objects. I felt as if
I
had committed the crime. During the brief interview, I broke into tears, though they may have been fake, I’m not sure. I even said, “I feel so guilty!” A hand went to my back; I was told that people forget to lock their doors all the time, that I shouldn’t feel bad about being trusting. I would be called were anything learned of my objects, or of my objects’ thieves.

I went to eat lunch at a nearby Italian place.

Maggie, one of the waitresses there, knows me as a regular. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

I’d intended to order spaghetti with meatballs. Maybe my eyes watered because Maggie unprofessionally took the seat across from me and patted my hand.

I told her that my apartment was empty.

“You mean you lost somebody?”

I explained that all my stuff was gone. Not just my TV and stereo and cash, but everything. “Lamps, sweaters, my toothbrush, my backup toothbrush, my ironing board. My favorite fork.”

“What kind of thief takes everything? That’s so weird.”

I shrugged. “Or normal. I don’t know. Who knows about crime, really?”

“Do you have insurance?”

I said yes, though I didn’t know if I did or not.

She gave a little laugh and then pursed her lips, like thinking cartoon style. “Who really loves you?” Maggie asked. “Loves you like crazy. Or like really, really hates you—”

“Besides myself?” I said. “Yeah, no, it’s not like that.” I sipped some water.

“Have you ever broken dishes?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I mean, out of anger,” she said. “I always wanted to do that.”

“What’s weird,” I ventured, “is my stuff just went and walked out on its own.”

Maggie was lost in thought, in dish-breaking fantasies maybe.

“Just left,” I continued, “like kids running away from home—”

“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “But I have to get back to work. You’ll be OK. I promise.”