Bright Shards of Someplace Else (11 page)

He slapped open the door with his forearm and crawled, curve-straight-curve, like a snake, toward the main office. When he was a few feet from the desk, he grabbed the line and pulled the phone off the desk. It was a heavy old mechanical Princess phone, and it chimed
in protest as he dragged it towards him. He had two calls to make. He punched the first number with his thumb and began talking the minute he heard a voice. “I've been attacked,” he tried to say, but his voice seemed to be dropping vowels and extending consonants, so much so he could hardly understand or decipher for himself what he meant to say. “Need help,” he said more simply, and then he mumbled the name of the business and ended with “bu-butterfly” and another help or number or some other SOS sound. Dr. Bajpai, on the other line, was yelling into the phone: “Who is this? What's wrong? Is that you, son? Have you been in a car accident?” Dr. Bajpai kept asking questions, his voice rising even as Aaron passed out, jerking an arm out and flinging the cradle across the floor.

He came to already dialing. It was time to let Dr. Bajpai know. A voice answered, a strange voice, but it was likely Bajpai playing a trick. “I discovered it,” he began, utterly lucid, he thought, though the sound that issued from his lip sounded more like a series of underwater bicycle honks. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”

“It's really quite elegant,” he went on, then began his brief and careful explanation, answering every question before it could be voiced. “What has happened? Have you been injured? Is anyone there with you?” Ah ah ah, you are not too quick for me, Dr. Bajpai. He laughed and realized he loved it when the old man played dumb. What a wonderful thing that was. “Can you tell me where you are? Please stay on the line, sir, please …”

He dropped the receiver, rolled so that his arms spread wide, and waited for what he was sure would come.

There is a country woman now among us. We can see her from most of our backyards. Whatever you lack she will exemplify in your view—that is, if you are slothful and prone to depression she will be whistling and weeding in the single place in her yard that you can see from the recliner you have not left since last night. If you are needy and rattled when alone you will catch a glimpse of her through her window sitting down with a three-course meal she made for herself. You might even hear the music on her radio—old bluegrass—and hear her sing along. If you are lacking in purpose and passion, you need only see the peppy flick of her muck boots on the sidewalk as she heads out for the day.

“With these two hands and a day's time, I can move a mess of earth,” she likes to say, but only to those of us who become impotent thinking of the brevity of days. She is referring to the koi pond she's digging, which she plans to stock with “offspring of her daddy's fish farm salmon,” a losing proposition considering salmon's need to migrate, but it seems like a dreamer's envious boldness to those that hear this particular detail. If only they could throw themselves into something so hopeless with such aplomb!

She is at all the parties. To invite her is to send the message: I can face up to my faults. A kind of sweet torture is to engage her in conversation in a corner after having a few glasses of wine. The country woman speaks of many things: her family, the farm, weather changes, ham hocks, apple butter, the orneriness of old roosters as opposed to the sass of old hens … None of it means anything to you—why should
it?—but the telling is full of charm and homespun wit. Things you clearly lack, if she's displaying them. The only recourse is to keep listening until she loses her charm, thereby affirming yours. It is a convoluted game, and the longer you listen, the more you are entertained and delighted, the more you wince at your own delight, and the more the country woman tries to amuse, sensing your discomfort and trying to alleviate it … you end up drunken with your arm around her shoulders, drooling compliments in her ears, as if by foisting your admiration on her you will somehow take on her traits. It is like taking a rubbing of a gravestone with a pencil and paper—the closer you press the better impression it will leave.

It might seem most logical just to avoid her, to keep the shades down and the eye averted, and this we try. One neighbor invests in heavy drapes, tightly locking blinds, and tall wild hedges for her front walkway so she can avoid seeing the country woman in the few steps from the driveway to the front door. And indeed if you walk fast with your head down you need never see the country woman in full. You might hear her whistle as she reams her gutters with a toilet brush or peripherally see the flash of a tartan plaid work shirt through a thicket, but the county woman herself is never again manifest.

Then as sudden as “sow-to-trough” (her saying) she is gone. The flash of her yellow raincoat through the gap in the drapes, the squelch of her Wellington boots, the sound of burning, cooking, nailing, feeding, mucking, whetting, basket braiding, carcass cleaning, pie frying, and meat baking (her order): all this came quietly to an end, as if the country woman had scuttled away in secret though she was the one from whom we hid. We listen for her like the clear tone of a bell long after being struck, a kind of warbling vibration that held us in thrall while we waited for it to cleanly end. Had she gone back to the country? Would she be back? Hers is the most palpable of absences, a not-aroundness so forceful that even her yard, left intact, is ragged, as if something had been rent from it—the pond and roosters and wheelbarrows seem too small for the space they take up, rattling
stand-ins for something larger that once fit flush. The neighbors open their windows and beat their drapes with brooms and look around as if relieved but there is a great unease: one could avoid the country woman but not her absence. It was more here than what remained.

The accused was excited. They walked him down the halls of the police station with the absurd gravity he had expected, but he had not been ready for how intense and real it seemed. My god! The more powerful man—that guy the rookie cop called Sergeant Ron—walked next to him with magisterial bearing, a rolling of the foot in leather boots that was positively, quintessentially, justice performance art. All the details were tuned just so—from the dull green walls to the bored receptionists with the tattooed eyebrows. The halls rang with all their shoes. When they flicked the light on in the interrogation room, the two cops split up, as if the long, white table had cleaved them. The accused sat at the head of the table with a cop on each side, and he had the funny thought that he should say grace, give thanks for this sparkling situation on which he could already feel himself feed. He put his elbows on the table, awaiting their questions.

The alleged victim in this case—raped, bound, left for dead in the brush along the accused's jogging route—was still open on the autopsy table, ten miles from where the accused now sat. That woman—Jillian—was his former student. Ten years earlier she had been in his poetry class. She had sat in the back row and rolled her eyes at nearly everything he said. Her short, red hair was cropped close to her skull and her hair line flamed with acne. One of her ears dripped with jewelry—hoops and turquoise bobbles—while the other was always naked. Sometimes he would fix his eyes on that bare ear while she spoke. She argued with him in workshop in a fast, pushed-out voice, as if there were a gun at her back and she were being made to speak.
Mostly, she defended the worst student poets in the class. If he gently criticized another student's too-easy resolution or tired imagery, Jillian would pipe up in defense. She would claim the bland imagery was refreshingly spare, the facile ending crystalline. Her own work was impenetrable, seeing as it primarily consisted of strings of gerunds, lacking both subjects and objects.

Had he ever seen her on his runs? He had. She always trailed behind a little dog that looked like mop head spread over a football. That dog was found a few days after Jillian went missing—speckled with blood, rooting in a fast food bag—a few blocks from where her body was found. Patches of the dog's fur were then shaved off and put in an evidence bag. Had he ever talked to her? A few times. She had stayed in town after she graduated, and for several years they were in the comfortable habit of looking past one another, an agreed-upon invisibility, since nothing could come of speaking again.

One afternoon he thought he'd spring out of the scenery, out of the backdrop of near-forgotten acquaintances he had no doubt become for her. He imagined she'd look startled or guilty when he spoke to her, but she simply looked bored and moved her lip ring (that was new) around with her tongue from the inside as he spoke. He was sweaty from running but noticed a smell coming off of her, a kind of stems-melting-in-the-flower-vase scent. He ran his hands through his hair, feeling a sudden urge to impress her. “I'm still teaching,” he said, which made him sound old, “the students are fabulous. So many promising young poets, so invested in the books I assign, so willing to look to the established forms for guidance yet still so able to genuinely subvert—”

She cut him off. “I renounced poetry. I don't need that falsity in my world. I'm a journalist now.” She bent down and rubbed the mutt at her feet. Its small jaws opened and it panted and drooled, sucking at its chops. Later, he researched and found that her “journalism” consisted of a few letters to the editor at the local rag. “Preserving the Dog Park for Living Art's Sake”—a screed about the beauty of running
dogs as opposed to the corruption and greed of local lawmakers. “Signage Should Be Azure”—a passionate and rambling plea for the city to lighten the street signs by a shade or two. He printed off these letters and read them while drinking a single-malt scotch. The phrasing had an evocative kind of incoherence that left him wondering if there was some meaning he was missing, some subterranean brilliance that he, with all his background, should be able to pick up. When his glass was drained he threw the letters away and turned to his students' work.

Could he retrace his activities from March fifth? The accused turned a clear eye on the investigators. He knew he should have his “counsel” with him—a lawyer who would hold up a hand and stop him from speaking. Counsel was like the muse, a quietly authoritative presence that slowed and directed the flow of expression. The accused thought of his own work. The muse had not been with him lately, maybe never. He still churned out books of poems with lovely matte covers and abstract cover splashings at regular intervals. Lately his poems consisted of short, erratic lines spread over the white page like scattershot. The words had started existing in isolation for him. The poetry, it seemed to him, was in the word itself, surrounded by white. Why tart it up? Critics (the few that bothered to consider the work of a vaguely noted academic poet) described his latest efforts as “laundry lists.” When the cops had showed up at his door he'd been playing with that notion: Cling. Short Cycle. Press, Permanent.

He'd taken off his reading glasses and rose, with effort, to get the door. Everything lately was with effort. He seemed to sigh and grunt as part of his normal breath now. The accused assumed his ex-wife would be at the door, bringing him cookies left over from some volunteer function at the animal shelter. Theirs was a comfortable relationship of light mutual contempt that drummed on them bracingly like a light rain when they were together. The old demons of their relationship were soggy but still smelled alluringly like hellfire. As he walked toward the door he looked forward to seeing her, to possibly offending
her, to maybe arguing a bit about their son (a psychology student who avoided seeing both of them, except on holidays).

Instead, it was two uniformed officers. They wanted to talk to him about a woman named Jillian. Would he come to the station? Jillian, he thought. How exotic of her to appear at the door, in this guise, in the mouths of these two strange men. He could hear his heartbeat for a moment, the blood rushing in his ears. The two men watched him and he nodded, keeping his lips tight over his teeth. Trouble was, he was getting a light, heady feeling, a bubble of euphoria that would break over his face in a weird short laugh or some out-of-line comment. He climbed into the cop car like a five-year-old being driven around in a cruiser as a wish fulfilled. Did he bounce a bit on the seat? Run his hands over the cage that separated him from the officers? He may have.

The scenes of his town—the gas station where he filled up, the coffee shop where he read the Sunday
Times
, the park where he jogged—all seemed transformed through the windows of the cruiser. He felt like a posthumous version of himself taking a tour of his old earth-bound life. When they stopped at a red light by a corner bakery where he often ate a midmorning cinnamon roll, he looked in the window and could have sworn he saw himself, staidly working toward the center of the pastry (for he was like that—taking his pleasures in careful increments). He laughed as the cruiser thrummed forward and took him farther away from his daily circuit.

He sat in his recliner with a pile of poems and thought back to the station. It had been fascinating. The way they looped their questions around, asking him the same thing two or three times from different angles. How long have you known Jillian? When did you last see her? You last saw her on Friday? So after seeing her Friday, you did what again? Three days after that you got the Sunday
Times
? Where did you go Saturday? He liked the repetitive tattoo of the questions, how each one would pick up a theme from the last and give it a little twist. The two officers traded off so smoothly, and their voices and
faces registering nothing the whole time. That flat affect combined with the inherent urgency in their long line of questioning struck him. “Hold back here,” he wrote in the margin of one overheated student poem. “Try repeating this,” he wrote on another. “Put this part behind a mask,” he scribbled at the bottom of a long stanza. These were better comments than he usually gave.