Dan (13 page)

Melba squeezed the phone receiver as hard as she could, hunching, and did not respond. She heard Mark Rand sigh.

“Melba,” said Mark Rand. “You may not know this, but many landlords do not provide their tenants with washers and dryers. Tenants don’t launder their clothing, say these landlords. Tenants are unkempt, disorderly people. They refuse to better themselves. I always disagree with these landlords. I provide my tenants with washers and dryers, I say. I give my tenants the opportunity to launder their clothing. I don’t want to see my tenants licking their coats on the street, I say. My tenants are men and women of quality. My tenants smell fresh, I say. It’s a pleasure to stand close to my tenants. Touching my tenants poses no significant risk.”

“I was planning on laundering my clothing just as soon as I could,” said Melba. “I’ll do it right now. I’m on my way home and I’ll launder at once.”

“No!” Mark Rand’s voice was hard. “I don’t want your explanations and promises, and if I did I would want them in writing. Sometimes I think the telephone was invented by a jealous manufacturer with an anti-landlord agenda as an instrument of torture. Manufacturers loathe landlords! Do you know why? Because landlords defy the mercantile system! Instead of obeying the dictates of the market and pursuing their self-interest, landlords selflessly pursue the interests of their tenants! I am speaking of true landlords, naturally, those who dedicate themselves to the broad human purpose of providing their fellow men and women with the benefits of roofs and walls, and in special cases, windows, doors, indoor plumbing, electric lights, etc., etc., and in the rarest cases, washers and dryers, dishes and cutlery, house plants, and precious antiques. True landlords expect to find enemies among the merchants, but it is more than the true landlord can bear when a tenant comes under the sway of manufacturers, plays into a manufacturer’s hands, uses the telephone provided by the manufacturers to plague and harry the landlord just as the manufacturers intended! Tenants should side with the landlord
against
the manufacturer, but tenants rarely act in their own best interests, which is precisely why they need landlords to begin with.”

“I know I need you!” Melba cried. “I’ve never even met a manufacturer, at least not that I know of. Don’t they wear tall hats? I’m sure I wouldn’t side with a person like that. I wouldn’t have called at all but Don Pond suggested it, I think as a formality, because it’s always polite to call home, not so as to plague or harry you!”

“Don Pond,” said Mark Rand. “Why are you taking suggestions from Don Pond?”

“I’m a guest in his house,” said Melba. She glanced over her shoulder at Don Pond who stood in the attitude of a man who was not overhearing a nearby telephone conversation but was rather immersing himself in his own thoughts, thoughts that were thoroughly amusing. His head was tilted to one side and he was looking up toward the ceiling, smiling steadily through his beard. “When the landlord is not present, shouldn’t the guest take suggestions from the landlord’s tenant? Isn’t that the chain of command?”

“And how do you know that the landlord is not present?” asked Mark Rand. “Is Don Pond’s house so small and devoid of mystery that you can be certain the landlord does not lurk undetected, perhaps in order to test you, and in so testing you, test
me
, to ascertain what kind of tenant I produce? Taking Don Pond’s suggestions, Melba, you are no doubt failing a test on my behalf. The only way to distance myself from this failure would be to terminate your tenancy.”

“Leslie Duck is Don Pond’s landlord!” said Melba. “Leslie Duck is not present. He left Dan to buy a banana plantation. He must be a thousand miles away, on an island, maybe on the exact island I drew as a little girl. I have no idea where that island is but it was the farthest thing I could imagine from Dan at the time I drew it. I didn’t know anything about the moon back then, or the wormholes that lead you through the galaxy into something entirely unknown and maybe nonexistent, that is, according to the instruments we use to determine if something exists. I’m sure the other side of wormholes exists for the creatures that live there. Leslie Duck probably isn’t as far from Dan as that, who knows if bananas grow on the other sides of wormholes, but he’s nowhere nearby.”

“Who told you that, Melba?” asked Mark Rand. “Think carefully. Who told you that Leslie Duck was far away, farming bananas?”

“Officer Greg,” whispered Melba at the same time that Mark Rand cried out “Officer Greg!” in a tone of exultation.

“That’s right!” said Mark Rand. “Officer Greg, who, as you well know, sleeps on a cot in the Dan Police Station. Who do you think owns the Dan Police Station?”

Melba hesitated.

“Leslie Duck!” said Mark Rand. “Officer Greg is Leslie Duck’s tenant. Officer Greg and Don Pond haven’t failed their landlord the way you’ve failed me, Melba. Leslie Duck is enjoying my defeat, let me tell you, and not from afar. From right around the corner!”

Melba clutched the receiver to her chest and looked up and down the corridor. She could see nothing Leslie Duck-like in the murky distance, but the murky distance might conceal any number of corners around which Leslie Duck crouched, enjoying Mark Rand’s defeat to the utmost, which was a word that made Melba pause.

Utmost.

Had she heard Principal Benjamin discussing a planet Utmost with the astronaut in those few seconds she’d hovered above the desk in the cafeteria, before the hand closed upon her neck and yanked her back?

“Melba, I have no choice,” said Mark Rand. “I can’t be your landlord under these circumstances. It wouldn’t be in your best interests to have a failure for a landlord. Consider yourself evicted. Your possessions revert to me in lieu of my collecting monies against damages to the property. Do you own anything of particular value?”

“No,” said Melba, slowly.

“Once again you’ve gotten the long end of the stick, Melba,” said Mark Rand. “Someday you may accumulate enough of those sticks to build yourself a shelter, and then you’ll be done with landlords altogether. Until then may every clemency attend your slumbers in the open fields of Dan.”

Melba returned the receiver softly to its cradle. Don Pond started, as though until hearing that click, he’d been so absorbed in his reflections he’d quite forgotten that Melba had been engaged in a heated telephone conversation mere inches to his left. He blinked at the telephone.

“Nice phone call?” he asked.

“Nice enough,” said Melba. “I can’t go home though.” She spread out her arms, palms slightly upraised. The gesture expressed a sentiment similar to that expressed by a shrug. It expressed the same sentiment, but amplified to a power of 1.5.

“I have nowhere to go,” said Melba.

“It’s a problem in small towns,” said Don Pond, sympathetically. “The only way to leave is to go nowhere. But that takes a certain type of resolve.”

“Like Principal Benjamin,” said Melba. “He didn’t go anywhere anyone knows of, and so he’s just gone.”

“You can’t get over him, can you?” asked Don Pond, sadly. “He’s always been there between us. In a way, he’s the least gone man in Dan. He looms larger than life every time I meet your eyes.”

Melba slid her eyes as quickly as she could from the vicinity of Don Pond’s. She was unemployed and homeless and had failed who knows how many tests. She could not now meet the eyes of a man who moped and spoke of looming.

“Let’s not meet eyes,” said Melba. “I’m too grim and I wouldn’t want to curse you inadvertently. Don’t lead me by the hand either. If you start walking I can follow you easily enough. The terrain isn’t rough.”

“Fine,” said Don Pond curtly.

“The floor slopes,” he said over his shoulder, continuing down the corridor.

Melba murmured something indistinct and assenting. They entered a small kitchen. A man was standing at the kitchen stove stirring a large pot. He turned when they entered. The man’s coloring was not particularly dark but he gave the impression of darkness, most likely due to his crowded features, and the long, dark, well-tailored coat he wore even though kitchen work is not cooling. Melba felt that the heat stifled, but the man breathed lightly and his skin bore no sheen. The kitchen smelled powerfully of vinegar and damp grains.

“Dinner is a surprise,” said the man, holding out his wooden spoon to prevent their approach.

Don Pond nodded his small head vigorously.

“We’re passing through, Helmut,” he said. “We absolutely will not peer.” To Melba he said in a loud whisper: “It’s always entertaining to pass by a European. They take offense at the least thing and want to duel you with swords or pistols or else they burst into storming sobs or give you ominous counsel and if they’re feeling expansive they present you with oddments from a storied cigar box of oddments which they claim to have taken with them on many journeys by boat.”

“What kind of oddments?” whispered Melba dutifully.

“Sheep vertebra, digestive biscuits, potsherds, triangular coins,” said Don Pond, waving his hand vaguely to indicate “and so on” or “things of that nature.”

“Ah,” said Melba. The man had returned his attention to the pot on the stove.

“He’s really from another country?” asked Melba.

“That’s what we assume,” said Don Pond. “Dan has its homegrown Europeans to be sure, but Helmut Pirm doesn’t mix with them. He says they speak gibberish and if you allow them to take your coat they fill the pockets with mothballs.”

“I’ve seen his mansard,” said Melba. “Does he make good dinners?”

“He makes surprising dinners,” said Don Pond. “Watch me sidle to that door then do the same.” Don Pond sidled to the door. Helmut Pirm stirred his pot. Melba tried not to investigate Helmut Pirm or his vicinity as she sidled after Don Pond but she noticed that he had lined up a row of spices and a bird on the counter.

She stopped behind Don Pond who had stopped before the door. The door opened inward and Don Pond stepped back and sideways, as though he too were a door, a door that opened outward. He gestured Melba through the door and she went through it, feeling uncomfortably aware that she had passed through the Don Pond door to reach the kitchen door—the second door, Melba said to herself.

The room she had entered was narrow, no windows, walls of recessed shelves bearing boxes, bottles, sacks, and jars of foodstuffs rising to the low ceiling. Across from the door, at the other end of the room, there was a wooden ladder. Don Pond was crowding her forward so that he could shut the kitchen door, the second door, behind them. The room was so small that Melba was soon pressed against the ladder. She put her foot on the first rung. From the second rung, she could press up on the hatch in the ceiling. She pressed up and began to climb through the hatch. Her head and shoulders emerged into the amber air of the upper story, and she saw the pant legs of many men. Tilting her head, she saw entire men, ranged all about.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. A few of the men glanced over but most took no notice. A fair number of them were grouped together with their backs to the hatch, studying a wall. Melba squinted. There was an image on the wall, dots and lines either drawn across its dull surface or drawn upon a large sheet of wheat-pasted paper, but as Melba peered, ascending a rung on the ladder and craning her neck to get a better vantage from her position, halfway out of the hatch, she realized the dots and lines were not drawn at all. They were dimensional. She saw that there were pins in the wall, dozens of pins, some long, protruding far from the wall’s surface, shanks stacked with beads, others short, more like tacks, their wider, flattened tops covered in plaid cloth. Colored strings stretched from pin to pin, although some of the strings might well have been wire, Melba thought, heated piano wire, or perhaps fishing line, so often purposed for other things, Zeno Zuzzo had once explained, coiling the line from wrist to wrist, such as the looping of a garrote, and the pins and strings created a vast web, with, it seemed, infinite hubs, radii, spirals, and frames, and Melba fixed her gaze, straining to look through the wall, wondering if a picture might resolve in the foreground, rising out of the hopelessly irregular design. Her eyes watered and she blinked. Her eyes felt spent, limp, and the water continued to drip from the incontinent ducts.

Suddenly, a man broke from the group. He stepped closer to the wall, pressed the point of a black pin against it, and sank the shank deeply with three practiced blows of a lozenge-shaped eraser. He stepped back and another man sprang to take his place, wrapping the end of the pin again and again with gold embroidery floss. Melba watched, curious as to what the man would do with the other end of the floss: attach it to another pin presumably, but which?

She felt a knocking on her calves. Don Pond wanted to ascend the ladder and Melba remained half in and half out, stalled between rooms. She tried to whisper down the hatch, “I believe it’s some kind of club, Don. A private men’s club. I’m not a member. I don’t think I should …” but the knocking on her calves sped up and began to sting, even through her skirts. Sighing, Melba struggled through the hatch, bracing herself with her arms then dragging up her knees.

A moment later Don Pond shot up through the hatch. Melba hung back as Don Pond circulated. She stood, fidgeting, a few paces from the open hatch and its lid, a hinged square of raw wood. She stepped forward once to toe the lid over, intending to close the hatch and reseal the space, feeling guiltily as though, by leaving the hatch open, she was allowing a kind of leak to persist, a leak which might eventually deflate the private men’s club altogether, so that the room and everything in it shriveled. She lifted the lid an inch with her toe then reconsidered. Was it better not to meddle? She stepped back, trying to detect in the room and in the men any sign that in fact the club was leaking, looking about for increasing flaccidity, listening for a high whine.

The hatch had not opened into the middle of the room. It had opened into the middle of the bottom right square of the room, if the room could be thought of as a four-square court, with the men studying the wall occupying the top left square. Melba suspected that the kitchen was beneath the bottom left square of the room. She sniffed and smelled no vinegar. The air was dry and tangy. Everywhere she looked there were men: men pacing, men standing, men sitting, men crouching, men lying on their backs, men lying on their stomachs, men lying on their sides. Melba swallowed, hesitant to seem as though she studied these men. She cast about for objects upon which to drop her gaze. Everyone knew that men in private men’s clubs preferred to protect their identities.