Fragile (17 page)

With the loose precision of a practiced hand, Tris slots the head of the Stillson wrench over the joint, prodding the oily thumbscrew to clamp the jaws against the fixture. If they weren't about to sell this house, he would replace the warped and waterstained wood at the bottom of the cabinet. As it is, he has
has decided to wait until the inspection. If they note it and ask for it, he can repair it then. No sense spending time or money on something that may not matter; it can merely be lumped into the odds and ends they will cover by tossing an extra thousand or fifteen hundred dollars to the buyers at closing. Dollars on paper they never really had and never will see. But this can be repaired, this leak. This can be easily repaired and so can the damage the termites have done, whatever it may be. Rotting boards, corroding pipes, water seeping through broken ceramic tiles high above his head; mildew blanching the carpet by the door to the garage: These are of no concern. They can all be replaced and repaired—every last nail of the house can be. He keeps trying to tell her: There is a buyer out there waiting for this house to come on the market, and the buyer is not buying boards and beams, plumbing and wiring. They are buying their own preconceived idea of this place—the sun that bears down on the swimming pool in the waning afternoon, the view across the valley towards the dusky smog-blurred mountains. The Spanish mission feel of the houses stacked like dominoes against the side of the hill. When the buyer walks through the sliding glass doors to the patio and hears the quiet slosh of water spilling into the pool from the hot tub with the high clear light of the garden gleaning in the arbor, then, only then, will the house be sold. And none of the rest will matter.

“Everything can be fixed,” he says, calling out to her from the recessed echoing space under the sink. “Even the termites.”

Her reply comes back at him like a shot.

“You wouldn't know the truth if it hit you in the face.”

The woman is dense, bitter and dumb. She carries her practical negative thinking around with her and waves it like a banner to proclaim how much more sane she is than anyone else around her. She likes to prove her point and always, always must have the last word. These things he has known for years coalesce into a vision that finally clouds and obscures the idealized remains of his earliest attraction to her. Surely that idea of her he created when they first met must have been based in some reality—an elegant, attractive woman imbued with the easy grace of an upper middle-class childhood—but over the years it has been corroded by exposure to words such as the ones just now, choked by a slow process of oxidation, building up layer upon layer. That old Laura is gone, replaced by this indignant, severe, worrying person. She is gone now.

He clenches his fist around the handle of the wrench and pushes it away from him, locking the seal of the joint tight. It closes shut with a creaking groan of metal upon metal. The final drop of water forms at the lip of the seal, its source shut off once and for all. He watches the water shimmer there, a layer of liquid pulled downward into an elongating sphere, a tiny mountain growing down from the sky. A piece of him is dying. A piece of him falls broken into darkness blown upon me, rushing into an empty night, suffocating and vacant. The clear cold nothing ever growing, rushing millions down around a doorway, until there is no anywhere or anymore. This is the death of the body.

I am swimming rigid, rolling in ink, amidst the weary crushing rocks which shimmer down upon me, pressing all my adoration out. Clocks unravel the sea of cherished space, flat upon the vast and looming fundament, beyond what never was or claimed to be, gone to cold and deep and empty rendering. My very same releasing globe of Spirit grows as vast as every spreading galaxy beneath the spiral night askew. Passing noiseless ocean floor, floating in the gems of sinking waves of sun, askant and bloodless beams, never splendid, never silent. Swirling wisps of smoke surround me as I fall through this frightful dark and suffocating place, vacant and abstaining.

A hand, formless and opaque, cold and clutching at the top of my head and pulling me out into spinning majesty, pulling me out of the lifeless veil. The hand that grasps and bodily pulls away my form and essence, beyond a great and desolate wind and leaving behind the jaw-muscles, the clenched and shivered form in numb pneumonia. The hand keeps pulling, clutching me cold through the top of my head, stretching beyond a ceaseless ringing as of church bells, pealing noise profound. The crucial last beginning and no end, the spinning of all colors. Climactic peals of dirges, arpeggios of meaning, an idle chorus wild beyond all keening.

And so the names of all the angels sing. Asrael and Jezrael and Uriel and Jesus, all spinning tight into one sound, unspeakable and all consuming, stretching me out beyond the lifeless veil. Not touching yet not leaving, part of me still pegged in time, in one place and another, the hand that stretches me spreading wide a cord, a shimmering diastema, clear and
smooth. This taffy cord of shivering light releases and snaps, returning part of me to my body, to my skin and hair and veins, part falling loose to nothing.

This glossy night unraveling is the death of the body. A cunning dimmed evasive hand pulled back and parted glossy night, oppressing the hollow stamp of my fear. Arpeggios are broken chords: Release the polished pearls, dissolving sound. I draw near to birds ensnared within a wall of galleries that rise like towers upon towers, traversing stars and suns and moons. My hands fall apart, they flutter like wings and flail apart, unbound from prayer, unbound from full and fleshly feeling.

The world has fallen away and with it every fearful stunning net and snare. The bells celestial rip the lap, the arm, the lip. Forlorn and spiral dwelling, cast about and throw the pieces round the vaulted stars so cold and dim and few.

This wretched scourge of wind now carries me onward to another place. This unyielding wind that whistles along, snapping, flapping, undulating wires, the wind rips loose the bonds, the lacquered surfaces, the inlaid neon tubing tied and tortioned into knots arrayed along a grid. This is the death of the body, ripped asunder now by wretched scourge of wind. I disappear on swift dark motions, tired and shaking through the doubtless reckoning of night.

A piece of me, those several million pieces fall apart and glide beneath a dim horizon never seen by light-winged smoke or thought or word. A broken shell of porcelain time betrayed, each second split apart, each second drenched and sucked into the sea of
nothing ever seems as bad after he leaves the house for a while and escapes the confining rigor of her frustration. Each time, after a bit of unguided reflection, he comes to understand that it is merely her frustration with him simply being the way he is that leads to her bitter outbursts. After he has driven around the neighborhood or to the auto parts store or the coffee shop and had time to make this realization once again, he is then able to decide calmly and without remorse that he cannot change, that these outbursts and her grievance towards him will continue as long as they remain together. She would be frustrated with anyone. This is the conclusion he reached at some point early in their marriage. Anyone who wasn't her, who didn't do things exactly as she would have them done, who didn't share her viewpoints or accede to them would sooner or later infuriate her. Early on, in the days of their first studio apartment back east, he made an attempt to fold his clothes the certain way she recommended, to care as much about the tidiness of the place, to let her win every disagreement. But it didn't last. It couldn't. At some point, he simply had to be who he was or get out. And she has been struggling against this with him ever since.

“I must do what I must do.”

Tris says this to no one in particular; he startles himself when he realizes he has spoken the words aloud and sees a woman across the aisle fingering the chain of a lighting fixture look up at him and stare. The woman startles him even more by being exceedingly attractive, peering over her shoulder at him from her position squatting down to examine what looks to be
a dining room lamp relegated to a lower shelf of the massive hardware store—or, home improvement center. They don't call them hardware stores anymore. By squatting down on her haunches and bending forward to get a closer look at the lamp, the waist of the woman's tight-fitting blue jeans has buckled out to reveal the frilled elastic band of her underwear as well as a sizable swath of the creamy smooth skin of her lower back. This, combined with the perfect double roundness of her bottom and the flashing of her eyes, provokes him to return her stare for a moment longer than his embarrassment would have otherwise allowed. That skin … soft and pliable. Perfectly pale. The moment stretches, edging to the verge of discomfort. Finally, he turns away, repelled by her continuing closeness.

At the end of the aisle is a display selling children's books. It used to be that he could come to a hardware store and be consoled by the rough oily smells of sawdust and paint, soldering irons and forty pound bags of true-green fertilizer. Now every thing is everywhere. He once came to this mega-store when Laura was out of town with her friends and cobbled together dinner for himself from the two aisles of packaged processed foods near the checkout. Beautiful women such as the one he just passed have invaded this place, goaded into becoming erstwhile carpenters and plumbers by cable television shows that glorify and simplify the burdensome chores of remodeling and maintaining a home. Whole networks are now devoted to what were once dreaded mundane tasks. Yet there are still sections of the store where women rarely venture. He knows of an aisle—and this is one of the advantages of the modern big box retailer
—that contains nothing but plumbing valves. Valves for pipes; a huge aisle with stacks and stacks of them, all makes and models.

He passes by an area with a selection of monstrously large gas grills. One Jen-Air model employs a 68,000 BTU burner. The cardboard sign propped on the open grilltop boasts of a 946
SQUARE INCH COOKING SURFACE
. You could roast a whole pig on it. Beyond this, a snack bar with a cordon of vending machines beckons. He didn't eat the breakfast she set before him. But he avoids the candy bars and sodas and heads directly to the aisle he wants. A
ISLE
18–P
UMPS
V
ALVES
P
IPES
.

Tris has been fascinated by the dynamics of fluids since he was in college, the way things flow from one place to another, the swirling patterns of clouds on satellite pictures of weather, color infrared photos of the flow of water in rivers with their evasive, recursive coils and bends. He picks up a Threaded End 1 ¼” Industrial Ball Valve and hefts it in his hand. The metal is slippery, cold. In a way, he thinks, human beings are like valves for deflecting energy. Like the jet engine on the plane he contemplated yesterday, itself a giant valve, we suck in food, water, oxygen, and convert them into motion.

From the hip pocket of his jeans, a poignant jumble of classical notes emanates, muffled by fabric. He hopes it isn't Laura, though apologizing this soon would be unlike her. He flips the phone open and sees it is Hal Pope, his disgruntled customer in New Jersey, and decides to answer. What the hell … may as well take his medicine now. There is no weekend in this business any more.

“Tris Holloway.” He answers the phone as if he doesn't already know who's calling, as if it is a Monday morning, not Sunday. A decade or two ago, most God-fearing Americans would have been expected to be in church right about now.

“Yeah Tris, hey. Hal Pope here.”

“Hal. Good to hear from you. How's it going out there?”

Tris mentally cringes, expecting the worst. An image flashes through his head of a warehouse full of thawing food that his server should have been monitoring, releasing its foul odor of decay.

“Fantastic. I just wanted to let you know, you bailed my ass out the other day. Your guy, Teddy. He got the sonofabitch running again in less than ten minutes. You know, I have to say we don't usually get someone busting their balls for us like you guys. And when we do … well, I just wanted to thank you.”

For now, Tris thinks. For the moment. Just wait; there is a time element to everything, an expiration date. The system is working now, but it will falter again at some point. We see the other three dimensions clearly, height and width and length. We see the color and texture of things; we feel and hear and smell them. But we don't see time. Well, we do see it, when we allow ourselves to see change. Change equals time equals impermanence. Nothing is as it ever was. The valve he holds in his hand—solid, heavy, thick—even as he holds it, it is decaying. We cannot experience this, so we imagine having things that are permanent, owning them, expecting them to continue working. His relationship with Laura has dissolved into practically nothing. It will end one day, if it hasn't already this morning, when
he dies, or she dies, or he goes away. Nothing is as it ever was—this is what we cannot abide.

“Thanks Tris, you saved my job. It's working perfectly, blessed altar dawning clear upon the light imperial. Vast and wide and going on in all directions dawns a brilliant light. But not a light, a vast clear nothing, more clear than the sun mirrored in the sky upon itself, refracting all beams myriad. I glimpse this searing light for an instant. I see for a moment and understand that I am One with this, and this is God.

Within, without, with calm majestic voice of all the angels sounding every tone at once, a noise magnetic lifts vibration through each particle of light and sound all boiling one the same. A billion suns compressed into one orifice of sound, it commences hot and touches me, a single crashing oneness. Searing open, naked as the sky devours a wisp of cloud: and I am gone. I am nothing now, not even face or hair or nails, nor anger, fear, desire. I am swallowed up by nothing, and every soft explosion centers on my heart, which is now mirror-smooth, splicing each and every part of me within its infinite expanse.