Everything You Need: Short Stories (10 page)

It was blank. Dead air.

I needed to fill it somehow. I’d been hoping an idea would come to me, a way of spending the evening that might seem an appropriate means of honoring him. It did not. I wasn’t feeling in an inspired mood. Tomorrow would be the last day of my trip. Of his trip. The day after that he’d left the hotel just before eleven in the morning and drove through town (buying $152.50-worth of gas and some bottled water on the outskirts) before heading onto Highway 17 to start the journey to San Francisco airport. At 13:47 a poorly maintained truck lost its load across both lanes, resulting in the random and pointless death of my father and five other road-users. His death was logged at 14:22.

Superstitiously, perhaps, I was intending to drive to the airport via another route. I wanted to replicate the trip, but I’m not a total nutcase.

I
sat
in the hotel room for an hour getting bored and sad. Then I realized this was dumb.

I left the hotel intending to simply go for a walk. My dad liked walking. That could well have been what he did that night – missing out on his supper by accident and figuring he could stand it for once, before winding up back in the room and munching the free cookies they provided, before going to bed early again. Traveling by yourself can be interesting and is good for the soul, but there comes a point where you’ve read as much as you can read for one day. None of the e-readers on his phone showed a log of having been used that evening.

As I stood outside the hotel I remembered seeing it had a bar somewhere, and decided I’d go for a beer first. The bar turned out not to be in the main building, which was how I’d missed it so far, but in a meeting facility attached to it by a corridor. When I walked in I wished I’d come the night before, whether it was on the itinerary or not. It was quiet and calm and empty, with dimly lit tables in front of huge plate glass windows giving a great view onto the wharf and the ocean.

I sat up at the bar, for the moment deserted. A few minutes later a woman came from out back. She was in her mid forties, I’d guess, blonde hair pulled back in a pony-tail. She looked like she ran, or mountain-biked. Probably both.

When she saw me she frowned, and seemed to hesitate, before coming over. I ordered a beer and turned to look out over the sea.

A
s sometimes happens
, the first beer made me decide a second would be a good idea. The bar had started to fill up in the meantime, people in suits, and I had to wait a while because the woman seemed to be running the place single-handedly. As she eventually pulled my second Sierra Nevada I caught her looking at me again.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

She smiled hurriedly, shook her head. Then evidently decided to say what was on her mind. ‘You look familiar,’ she said. ‘Been here before?’

I shook my head. ‘My dad came here once, though. About five months ago. We look alike.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Rick Motz.’

Her reaction to this was hard to interpret. She went down the other end of the bar to serve a customer.

Half an hour later I ordered another beer. In the meantime I’d watched the sun go down over the bay, eaten a lot of peanuts, and come up with a question I wanted to ask.

As she handed me the drink I asked it. ‘So — did you and my dad talk at all?’

‘Sure.’

‘Just a few words, or . . . ?’

‘Oh, more than that. It was a really quiet night. Most of the evening he was the only person in here.’ She shrugged, as if it was all no big deal. It was not completely convincing.

‘He died,’ I said. It was clumsy and graceless, but I didn’t know how else to say it.

She looked shocked. I told her how it had happened. ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. She said it in a way that seemed sincere.

I drank a mouthful to let the moment dissipate. ‘So, you guys chatted?’

‘Quite a bit.’

‘What about?’

‘I don’t remember. Something, I guess. You know how that goes. He made me laugh. A lot.’

‘He
did
?’

‘For sure. He was funny. He was a good listener, too.’

She left to deal with a new party of raucous business people, fresh out of a brainstorming session. I drank my beer slowly and looked out through the window at the remaining hints of the view of the beach.

I thought about my dad and wondered whether all the time I’d been growing up he hadn’t been not-speaking after all. I wondered if he’d been listening, instead.

I
ordered
and drank one more beer, and was about to autopay by TABapp when I realized that was wrong. I got out my wallet and paid with cash from the ATM instead. As, I was now guessing, he had done.

When I got up to leave the waitress came over. She was carrying a tray of dirty glasses and she looked tired, but nonetheless she came the length of the bar to say goodbye.

‘I’m real sorry to hear about your dad,’ she said.

I nodded, not knowing what to say, and feeling — for the first time on the entire trip — completely empty, and as if I wanted to cry. ‘Thank you.’

‘You miss him?’

I nodded, and she nodded too.

She looked out of the window, into the blackness over the ocean.

‘He was a nice man,’ she said.

N
ext day
I followed the itinerary. Coffee shops, another bookstore, this and that. The day after I went home, driving up to SFO via the coast road rather than taking Highway 17 inland. I made it back in one piece.

I’m glad I was able to trace the trip I didn’t take. I’m glad he went on the journey he’d always wanted, I’m glad he stayed at the Dream Inn, and I’m glad he decided to head down to the bar. I still don’t know for sure where my father spent the missing hours after that — maybe in his hotel room, maybe not — though I suspect I know how, and with whom.

I’m happy for the hole to remain. I no longer feel the need to fill it. There have always been silences in the world, and that’s the way it should be. There should be gaps. Sometimes it’s in those moments of silence, of dead air, that the meaningful things happen. It’s good we have things listening to all our stories now, keeping track of everything we have been and done.

It’s even better if, like the best listeners, they turn a deaf ear from time to time.

A
t last
, Metcalfe saw it. It was very hard to concentrate by then, and the speck was extremely small. But in the end he spotted it, and knew where it should be.

Careful not to alter his own position, he reached out to it.

T
he book
on Feng Shui had not been the beginning; more the beginning of the end. He’d known for years that his environment and the positioning of the objects within it could affect his state of mind. He couldn’t seem to settle if a room was untidy. The newspapers strewn on the table or the mug left on top of the television set would impinge on his field of vision and affect his ability to work. He had to get up and move them. It was one of the reasons that he’d had to stop living with Diane. Her tendency to leave things where they lay meant countless wasted minutes tidying up before he could get down to work. Not just work, in fact: he couldn’t relax properly either, unless everything was just right.

He came across the book by accident when browsing in a second hand bookshop off Charring Cross road. Metcalfe had pulled down the volume almost at random and had been inclined to dismiss it without another glance: Feng Shui, so far as he’d gathered, seemed a mechanism for charlatans to relieve the gullible middle classes of their money. He soon saw he was holding no gaudy pamphlet, however, but a well-produced old book, and after perusing the text on the back cover he bought it and hurried home.

The ancient Chinese, the book reminded him, had developed a science around the relative placing of natural land formations and man-made objects. Originally applied to the positioning of graves, it had come to be an all-encompassing system which issued guidelines on where best to place a house, or business, and how to arrange furniture and other internal objects to best direct the flow of “ch’i.” The life force.

Although he was not terribly convinced of the existence of a life force, Metcalfe quickly saw there were parallels between the habitual tidiness he’d developed and the advice given in the book. A lot of it was common sense, of course, and possibly no more. A carefully-placed plant brought a corner into a room; a wind chime or mobile broke up empty space and seemed to bring the air to life. Some of the remedies, however, were less easy to discount. Metcalfe moved the position of his bed to bring it into better conjunction with the shape of the room and the location of the door, and immediately found that not only did he feel more at home in his rather bleak bedroom, but he seemed to sleep better too. He rearranged the furniture in the living room too, again working from guidelines in the book, and hung a mirror on the wall to counter the building opposite, the corner of which pointed aggressively through his window and directly toward where he usually sat.

He even made such changes as were possible to his office at work, and while the slightly eccentric layout caused some of the others to look at him oddly, they seemed to make the long days spent selling his time easier to bear.

T
he shaft
of light coming through the window was obscured for a moment by a passing cloud, making the speck of dust harder to see. Metcalfe paused, bided his time, waiting for it to come back into clear view again.

H
e’d quickly learned all
he could from the book, and outgrew it. He knew where it was — he knew the position of every object in the flat now — but hadn’t referred to it in weeks. It had been useful as a source of rough principles, but Metcalfe soon realized that ‘close enough’ wasn’t sufficient. Although he was less distracted in his rearranged room, it still wasn’t perfect. Now that the major objects were in the right places, and the disturbing influences from the outside world were deflected or absorbed, it became easier to discern the small imperfections that remained.

His desk was in the correct position relative to the wall, and his armchair angled properly to the table, but as long as the books on the bookcase weren’t right, and the curtains were slightly too long, the overall effect was marred. Not only that, but while an ashtray could be positioned correctly so as not to jar with the table it rested on, it might be out of alignment with a mug on the desk on the other side of the room. There was more than one level, more than one set of relationships.

It would have been easier if straight lines and consistent angles were involved, but they weren’t. It was often, at least to start with, a matter of trial and error, distance and angle and bearing and height all needing to be experimented with. Although Metcalfe found that he was getting even less work done in the evenings, now that he was spending hours fine-tuning the positions of everything in his room, it was worth it. The new relations created a much better atmosphere, and he found himself feeling more and more relaxed, less distracted, less prone to anxiety and doubt.

Leaving the house in the morning started to become difficult. Giving up the serenity and calm of his carefully arranged room and having to undergo the jumbled chaos of the outside world, increasingly made him almost cry out in discomfort. Fighting the noise and unreason of London, of the office and its endless meaningless demands, eventually became too unpleasant to contemplate — and one morning Metcalfe simply failed to put himself through the trauma of leaving the front door.

He didn’t know if the office had ever tried to contact him. The phone’s irregular shape had proved impossible to align satisfactorily with the rest of the objects in the living room, and Metcalfe had thrown it away with little regret.

T
he sun came
out from behind the cloud, and he reached slowly towards the speck. It was very hard to move his arm now, and he could feel its correct position crying out to it, but he persevered, believing the effort — and temporary misalignment — would be worth it.

T
he breakthrough had come less
than a week ago.

Sitting in his armchair one evening, facing across the room, Metcalfe had forced himself to concentrate. He knew he still had more to do, but was finding it increasingly hard to puzzle out what it might be.

The initial position he’d found for the desk, though an improvement, had turned out to be wrong. Now it stood on its end, partially obscuring the door to the hall, and that was perfect. He could feel the utter correctness of that corner of the room, as he could of all the others. The pile in the carpet was brushed in the correct directions, and the thin white line he had drawn at a certain angle on one wall had been, he was sure, a conclusive touch. After painting it he’d had what he could only describe as a blackout. For half an hour he’d lost all sense of time and place, even of self. Everyday thoughts and worries had left him, and for that brief period it was almost as if he’d become simply an object.

Coming to, taking back his customary relationship to the world, had felt like an unwanted weight settling back onto his mind. It was while remembering this feeling that Metcalfe realized it was not enough simply to arrange objects in relation to each other. Harmony between them was most of the work, but not all. They were not the only things in the room.

There was one more, and its positioning was just as important.

C
arefully
, Metcalfe wiped his finger on the carpet to pick up the speck of dust. As he moved his arm closer to where he knew the mote should go, he felt the proof of what was coming, the quiet joy of knowing he’d been right.

He dropped the speck.

A
n easy thing to forget
, his body. Thirty years of believing that the thing he lived in was somehow different, somehow special, had blinded him to its essential similarity to everything else in the world, to all the other things that took up space. As he experimented over the following days, first finding his ideal position within the room and then readjusting other objects in line with the altered relationships this caused, he came to realise what a sham the body’s individuality was.

As he fine-tuned and got closer to the truth, it became harder and harder to think of himself as different. It became difficult to think at all, in fact. His mind relaxed, relinquishing its accustomed difference to the outside world and slowly feeling its way towards dissolution. If he could have brought himself to believe it still important, he would have liked to tell someone what he’d discovered.

That all things have a place, and that a man is just a thing.

M
etcalfe watched
with wonder as the speck fell into position, everything becoming white before his eyes.

His breath slowed, the movement of his lungs and other organs ceasing to beat a rhythm.

As the mote came to rest, he stopped, became still; merely one object among many, in an untidy room.