Bright Shards of Someplace Else (12 page)

What is your relationship with Jillian? That seemed to be the cops' favorite question, and he found it was one he liked considering. For what was his relationship with this troubled former student? They were both citizens of existence (that phrase being the name of his first slim volume of poems), their physical selves made circles around the same city park; they walked over each other's tracks, they were hit by the same sunlight, slightly altered by the curve of the earth. When he saw her that evening she was staring at a new sign in the park by the pond—No Dogs Allowed in Pond Area. She was wearing a beige shirt and pants and evening was falling, so from behind her figure curved in a hand-worn way, like a bone letter opener eroded at the middle from a frequent grip. For some reason, that evening, he decided he'd talk to her again. Everyone needs some shaking up. The poems blinking on his screen at home could use it. This mopey girl could use it. In fact, he thought, the night itself could use it. He used to love walking around alone in the park in the evenings, thinking of his poetry or his lovers (hadn't had one of those in a while), breathing in that sense of promise. Now the nights just seemed like a time when life went subterranean and damp, a plunge into black that left the next day dingier.

He walked up behind her just as she reeled her head back to spit. She was a good aim. The street light caught the saliva as it slid into the grooves of the sign. When she turned to him he could see, in the light, a froth of spittle on her lower lip. She smiled, widely, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Bullshit,” she said, “All those dirty Canadian geese get the red-carpet welcome, but my dog can't walk ten feet from the thing? Ah yes, it's just
so
pristine.”

He recognized in her voice the sound of someone off the rails, a sound he occasionally heard in other students over the years. There was so much variety, he thought, in how people veered off the path. The mumbling student of today who writes only about vegetation is the bipolar addict of tomorrow. The young man who always breaks in without raising a hand now collects bottles and plasters the town with political ads for a long-shot independent. The chubby girl with the immutable stanza length grows up to be a cloying and obsessive mother to a brilliant child-songstress who leaves the earth a thief and runaway. He had heard updates like these, along with updates of book deals and teaching gigs and happy scribblers and the like. He laughed at the goose comment warmly. He'd like to hear her keep going, watch her bounce off one irrational thought to the next. Prose-poem wild.

Had she ever visited his home? He drew a breath before answering, liking the effect. They walked through the dark park together, sort of. Jillian and the dog followed him as if it were happenstance. He looked behind him several times to confirm they were coming. “How is the journalism coming?” he called out in a rich, loud voice. Sometimes he enjoyed being loud around his more gossamer students; he liked to let his voice rip through them and leave their delicate sensibilities flapping in the breeze. She just laughed, and baby-talked to the dog. They left the park, wove through the neighborhoods with their little jockeys on the lawn and eagles above the garages. When he unlocked his door and turned around he expected her to be gone, but she and the dog bounded up the stairs and past him. He sat on an old wood rocker and she on the couch. He produced a drink and she sipped it and looked up.

The two cops leaned forward, almost imperceptibly. He could feel them becoming especially alert, as if someone were slowly turning a tuning peg on them and drawing them taut. This was a feeling he longed to produce in his readers, longed to produce in students, and longed to produce in himself. When had he really paid attention? He
had when Jillian was there. He wanted to split through the muck of her hyper-private mental ills and have her listen to him.

This had been a bit of an obsession with him over the years. Once, visiting New York City on a self-funded book tour years ago, he engaged a street performer (a man spray painted in white posing to match a variety of statuary—Michelangelo's
David
,
The Thinker
, The Discus Thrower, even the Venus de Milo, which he recreated by clever contortions of the shoulder and elbow). He dropped a ten in the coffee can at the man's feet and then started talking to him. The man was happy to take a break and have a willing ear, and he told the accused all about the symbols inscribed inside every statue all over the world (yes, marble statues, despite the heft, are hollow), the scattered code that foretold of stock market secrets and the end of the world or some such thing. The man coughed a white cloud of dust and wiped his mouth, exposing a lushly pink inch of lip. Then he talked about the cops, how he performed only in their blind spot, the one part of the city where their surveillance fell short.

He had tried to engage the performer in some other kind of talk, something other than street-person raving. It wasn't that he wanted to talk sense into him—he didn't care—but he wanted to break through what seemed to him the man's disturbing sovereignty. The performer spoke as if he were reciting a poem pulled from memory. It was as if the accused wasn't even there. He argued with the performer at first, tried to anger him, then agreed with everything he said, attempting to shock him with sudden empathy. But nothing could faze him. Eventually the accused's now ex-wife grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and made him leave.

He envied crazy people, he realized, as he watched Jillian sip her drink. They really
bought
themselves. They bought their own logic, their own readings of the world, their own selves, regardless of how damaged they might seem to outsiders. “So,” he began, unsure of what to say, “do you ever consider going back to poetry?” This wasn't
the question he wanted to ask—he had no idea what to ask—and he hated his professorial tone. Jillian said nothing. She hummed to herself and wiggled her left hand at the dog. It was then he decided he would not say another word to her. Surely she expected him to speak, to do the work of the encounter. She probably thought he would talk poetry, or try to seduce her, or mentor her, or some wretched combo. All his actions, in her mind, were a foregone conclusion. He hated the thought of it. What could he do that would tip the picture?

Without a word he left her in the living room and walked into his office to think. The books of poems on the walls were no help. No stanza would be of use. There was an old-fashioned heavy iron used as a doorstop on the corner of his desk. Certainly, in the moment before one dies, her true face is shown. Who knows what insights might be glimpsed? That's probably what drove killers as much as the power or thrill or money or anything else. That ability to see into someone at the moment of supreme vulnerability. But he hadn't touched the iron—a goofy kitsch thing his ex-wife had gotten him. Janice liked to give him a gift on every anniversary of their divorce, usually something that had to do with a woman's woeful role in a marriage. She tied a bow on the iron and left it outside his office door at work, where he tripped over it while talking about the risks of frequent line breaks to a student with a long blond braid who had followed him so he could finish his thought.

But here in his home office, he could think of no next move. He kept scanning his shelves and noticed the Scrabble box, nearly obscured underneath a stack of files. He couldn't remember the last time he'd played—perhaps it was when he and Janice were still together and Henry still lived at home. Theirs was not a game-playing family, though, at least not in the wholesome sense, and he could hardly recall a time when the three of them sat facing one another. He grabbed the box and walked back to the living room. Jillian was still there, drinking and looking serene. In the indoor light he noticed a spray of moles across her cheekbones, like paint flicked off a brush.

“Back already?” she asked, and he simply nodded. The vow of silence felt good. He opened the box and laid out the Scrabble board at her feet. He divvied out her letters and his. Inexplicably she left the chair and dropped to the floor on her side of the board. The dog settled into the carpeting as if readying himself for a long night. When she touched the first letter—an I—their
DNA
mingled on her skin. And when he began telling the cops about the silent game of Scrabble, he could feel the exchange of glances between them, like a ripple of heat off summer pavement. So the two of you just played Scrabble and didn't speak? the boyish one asked, in a peevish and doubting tone. The sergeant tempered the question with a sotto voce request: Tell us about the game.

The accused shifted his feet. His shirt felt sweaty against the plastic chair, and the overhead lamp, while not as glaring as in the movies, still shed a stark bluish light that made his head hurt. Yet he didn't want to give up the chance to explain the game, its languid oddity, and its right-note-ness. He began the game with a weak word—something like
tea
—and Jillian crossed it with
taille
, an archaic tax, and he laid down
lathe
and she
egret
. He kept watching the words, feeling a pattern was about to emerge, some message or something. It felt like he was watching the pointer move around a Ouija board. At any moment he would be struck with some shocking reference. Jillian chuckled lightly to herself and ran her hands through the dog's fur over and over, so that her fingers disappeared and resurfaced like twin bottlenoses at the base of the dog's tail. Alright, Mr. Gelt, you're telling me you said nothing? I tell you what, you can't play a silent Scrabble game. What happens when you need to argue that something is really a word? You're telling me that didn't happen this game?

No, they just played. The tiles clicked. The words built. He kept score on a little pad of paper in her sight. He filled her drink once. He filled his twice. When the game was over (she won) she made a smooching noise at the dog, who sprang up as if he had long awaited the cue. She waved goodbye and walked out like nothing happened.
And then? “I went to bed,” the accused said, his face suddenly hot, the room suddenly small.

When Jillian left, he had packed up the game and surprised Janice at her apartment. She was three sheets to the wind and cussing someone out on the phone when she answered the door. “And that's the end of that shit,” she said, hanging up. “Scrabble! Honey, you didn't!” She always acted as if everything was a surprise when she was drunk. The two of them played a raucous game, shouting archaic words at each other until they both lost track of the points. At one point he grabbed her ponytail and made as if to kiss her. The closer he got the more he felt ill; getting close to her was as grotesquely intimate and satisfying as digging out an ingrown hair. She was a part of him, not in a romantic sense, but in the sense that being with her was a variation on being alone.

“I
heard
.” Janice called him when she found out. “How could they …” He heard her voice on the phone, sounding strange in its sincerity. Even when the marriage ended she was exhilarated in the courthouse, as if the divorce was a stage she had been pulled up onto by a crowd-pleasing magician. Her ceaseless levity wore him out, and his poems got heavier over the years simply to keep his mind from floating off into her particular toxic ether. So to hear her concern—the real fear—was a tonic. “Surely you told them about the Scrabble game? Where you were?” He assured her he told them about that night's Scrabble. The game was in a Ziploc somewhere. On some of those tiles the fingerprints overlapped like the same field tilled three times over, starting from different points.

He watched the dark streets outside his window, waiting for the return of the cruiser, the sluicing of slow tires in the damp street, the siren yip as the brakes engage and the car glows with the light of his file on the inboard screen. A man jogged by with a small dog struggling to keep up, its movement more side-to-side than forward, as if it were being twisted on a spit. He turned away, walked to the mirror in the hall. He put his wrists together in front of, then behind, his back.

Which was best? In front implied a willing giving over, an offering. Yet to hold his hands behind him was also a submissive gesture, he noted, since it took both his arms away from him. It would make him more streamlined, like a little blade or fin. He could choose to be pulled forward, or pushed. Either way he would enter the apparatus that would take him to his fate. He imagined it would be like riding in a car as a child, half asleep. He would be bumped and jarred, his head would be heavy, and he might hang from the seat belt in a stupor as the headlights raked over him in cascading geometries. And they would keep asking questions in their sonorous adult voices, about where he had been, what he had done, how things had gone. He always liked that.

The play was a success, and all the actors crowded into the green room, gasping and talking loudly, still projecting as if on stage, their individual voices flung over each other like grappling hooks thrown to opposite ledges. The success was made all the sweeter by all the ways it was nearly not. Rosie, the lead, is grinning and crying with relief and exultation, and a long eyeliner drip changes course as she throws her head back to laugh: “The knocking was supposed to happen
after
Gracie tells me about what happened with the baby. But I start hearing this knocking
before
she even gets a line out! So get this,” Rosie raises her voice—she is taking too long and losing listeners. “I start stomping on the floor! To cover up the sound of the knocks! And I explain it by saying I'm trying to confuse the termites. And Gracie says…”

The rest is lost as all attention moves to John, who is red-faced and sweating, squatting and gesturing at an invisible object that he marks out with two forefingers in the air. “I was supposed to pick up a
vase
on the sideboard and explain how fragile it is … You know, like a damn metaphor.” He looks over his shoulder to be sure everyone is listening. “Well, I get going on my spiel and walk over to the sideboard and … no vase! No nothing! So I'm stuck explaining how fragile the damn
sideboard is
! And let me tell you, that thing doesn't look too fragile.” He throws his hand at the mimed sideboard with a kind of playful faux-despair.