The Waiting Room

Waiting was the worst part. The chairs had crooked legs. You wouldn't know it but someone checked them every night. Made sure they were sufficiently uneven, unthreading one a few turns. That was a whole job. So was Doorknob Greaser. The staff all wore gloves for a reason.

The waiting room was as inhospitable as the Sahara. The waiting room was a masterpiece. An hour in the waiting room felt like five. Five crooked hours with nothing to do but watch the clock that hadn't worked in years. Truthfully, it hadn't ever worked. Before they installed it, they deactivated it. Then there was the plant. Clients—as they were patronizingly called, officially-speaking—could content themselves with watching the leaves cling to life. Crisp, withered casualties speckled the floor around the pot. It leaked water. A pale brown stain spread out from the pot and left a loathsome flim, a scum the color of dried blood. The stronger-willed in the waiting room could use the stain as a springboard: How long had it been there, Who would clean it up, Didn't that look a little like Florida? But even the strong-willed didn't last long. A few hours, maybe.

Legend has it that one tenacious old crone stayed all day once, then went home and died in her sleep. No one was surprised to hear that. They didn't care one way or the other. The waiting room ground on, flattening everything in its path. Just the way the waiting room was. You couldn't fault it for that. No one faults the shark for its appetites. No one worth taking seriously.

Last year, someone introduced a buzzing hum into the waiting room. The staff thought it was working out well. It kept clients uneasy. They looked around, shifted on their sticky chairs. They tried to zero in on the sound. But it moved. That was the brilliant part. A computer turned micro-speakers off and on randomly.

So Jealous

She couldn't say it out loud or even quietly in her mind's corridors and sealed rooms. She was so jealous of Caitlyn she sometimes couldn't be in the same small space with her. A car. The kitchen. The porch. No one knew she felt that way. She hoped no one knew she felt that way. She had told herself when she was a girl that it would be different one day when she had a daughter of her own.

Her mother hadn't understood anything. He mother had sailed through her own life six inches above the ground. She left no tracks. When her mother had landed in adulthood, she was unscathed. She knew nothing of her blindfolded journey. She was an incompetent mother. Childhood was lost in the fog of her near-perfect amnesia. She never said, "When I was a girl" or "Oh, I remember what that was like," some hurt, some pang of regret. Because her mother didn’t remember.

So she had told herself many times how things would be different. She imagined long talks about the things that can flatten a child's outlook and weigh on her shoulders. The low, muttering magic that can unlock unwelcome places inside. The quicksand. She saw herself in the future as a wise mother, of infinite patience and empathy. She would learn from her own mistakes and her mother's. But almost as soon as Caitlyn was born, she felt things whose shape she didn't like. Caitlyn had a sunny hand at her back. She was born with it.

Caitlyn didn't suffer. Caitlyn had a reflex for landing on her feet. Caitlyn didn't need help from anyone. Caitlyn loved learning, on her own. Setbacks thrilled her, because she felt this was life talking back. Occasionally she would ask her mother for her opinion, or some token of her girlhood. But she didn't need it. She would never say it out loud, but Caitlyn almost pitied her own mother.

Murmuring

I thought I'd heard it several times before, only at night, and last night, I heard it for sure. Not whispering, really, but murmuring. Low, wordless, and—from my vantage point—unbroken. A steady stream of distinctly human sounds.

The thing that makes the hairs on my arms stand erect is that I heard it coming from my basement. I was in the bathroom. My aging bladder had gotten me up at four o'clock again—its latest trick—and when I turned the tap off after washing my hands, I heard it. There was no mistaking it this time. Those were human voices, heard through the bones and skin of the house. I couldn't make out any words, and as I walked slowly around the room, to find a spot where I could hear better, my heartbeat filling my ears, something in the floor creaked and the murmuring stopped. I stood, hands dripping like water clocks, and a few minutes later the sound returned. Someone was in the basement. Someone was living there, murmuring. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to leave the bathroom. I was afraid to leave Mary alone in bed, soft and sleeping and helpless. I was trapped. My feet were lead weights.

Finally, after two or three hour-long minutes, my hands still wet, my heart still jumping up and down in my chest, I left the bathroom noisily. The murmuring people already knew I was up here. There was no reason they had to know I knew they were down there.

I went into the bedroom and shut and locked the door behind me quickly. I had to grab Kong roughly by the scruff and drag her back inside with us. And then I fell into bed and strained for the murmuring until I drifted into a murky sleep a couple hours later.

Dandy

Place is falling hard, falling apart. The kids, they come up to the front door, want to know can they play with Dandy? Dandy all supersonic tail making a blur of the air. Stirring it up like a pot of honey. They stroll right up on that busted-up brick walkway, none of them offered to fix it ever. They could have, too. Would have taken them a couple hours, they all worked on it together. They don’t have bad backs. But they don't care about any of that.

Place needs paint, too. I get up on a ladder, I'm liable to fall and break my head open. Be a paint can spilling out Royal Sky and my head spilling out my brains. Do the kids care about that? They do not. Not one lick. And what about the window I know they broke with their football or soccer ball or frisbee plate or what have you? They never said nothing about it. None of them did.

And still they want to borrow my dog for a run in the park. Old pig in dog's clothing needs it, I can't deny that. I say okay, let me get the leash 'cause you got to have the leash. But it's only for the old fat dog's sake. Dandy needs it, I know that. He's hanging low. He's scraping by, just. Got to get some air into his lungs. Got to let him stretch his legs. All he's doing in here is eating my house down to the pit. Breathing on me.

This one little kid, he's down with his hands on his knees, looking in at Dandy through the screen. This one can't wait to take that one out for a run. Would it kill them to help out around the place once in a while? I bend down and hear it in my back and hook the leash onto Dandy's collar. And open up the screen and give the kid the leash. Take him. And don't you forget to bring him back.

Carlos

The whole place stank, to hear Carlos tell it. Roaches as big as your thumb. They'll fight you for the last chicken leg. He thought he was being funny. Which was better than him trying to be tough. Every time I went over there I wound up thinking if the place is awful why does he still live here?

This had been going on for over three years, him complaining about the apartment and the neighborhood he was forced by God to live in. Or else, why else would he be living there? He talked like this was his cross to bear. Like he was putting in the time. The penance. Paying a debt. But he loved it. Made him sag with real style. Place wasn't clean, that was true. And at least part of that was Carlos, and not God. I mean, was God supposed to wash the dishes instead of piling them in showy stacks on the arm of the sofa? So I'm not saying it was a bed of roses and hundred dollar bills, because it wasn't, but he could have moved out.

Connie had offered to give him a room, pretty reasonable, for as long as he liked. Connie was lonely and had not one but two extra rooms he was always trying to rent out. Not a bad place. Had a good-size tree in back, which he claimed produced edible fruit. But Carlos would have to leave his personal hell with the dirty dishes balanced on the arm of the sofa, so try competing with that. Plus there was Connie's sister living there. Unmarried, nothing too rough to look at, so I didn't understand where Carlos was coming from at all.

Still, every time, it was Do you believe this place? and See what I have to put up with? He was in his element, battling it out with the roaches for control of the remote every night. Maybe he thought it excused the shitty way he treated everyone.

The Pitchman

This invention was supposed to change everything. Whatever you wanted changed, it would change it. You didn't want something changed, it wouldn't even touch it. This is what The Pitchman said. He called himself The Pitchman. Always put his hands around what he said, like he was framing it for your memory. Like it deserved its own box in your head. So when (hands up, framing it for eternity) The Pitchman told you about (hands) The Product, you listened. This was important. This was worth remembering. And it was going to change everything.

Someone raised a hand in the back row. Guy in a turtleneck. Sandy brown hair coming over his bulging collar. The Pitchman points to him and click-clicks with his fingers in the shape of a friendly gun. Everything about The Pitchman is friendly. He drives friendly. He sleeps friendly. Takes a leak friendly, is a good bet. The guy in the turtleneck says, from right where he's sitting, doesn't stand so everyone up front—who got to the auditorium on time—“How will this address matters of our worsening environment?”

The Pitchman smiled. He loved that question. He loved the guy who asked it. And he loved the turtleneck he was wearing. The Pitchman loved everything. "I am so tickled you asked that!" And, you know, he looked like something, like, maybe an elf or a little penguin, was tickling him right there. He wanted to laugh, but it was all too serious for that. But he looked happy.

Folding chairs squeaked against the linoleum. The Pitchman was working up to the something and people were shifting around to see it. “The Product” (make a snapshot of that for your mind to enjoy for years to come) “was inspired by that very” (hands) “predicament!” His voice rose up to “predicament” and took everyone's spirits with it. The guy in the turtleneck felt like he was a key player in a very important moment.