Furnace (15 page)

He’s just going round and round in a circle, the blond girl complains.

It’s just like a big paper airplane, says the mother.

Why doesn’t he just come
down
? the dark girl says, but nobody answers.

I can hear my breathing, like the air’s scraping the walls of my chest. Tiny and high, the glider swings out of the sun again.

Hey, says the blond, what if he had, like, explosives tied to him and was looking for something to fly into?

Hush. That’s not funny, sweetheart, the Latino’s mother replies.

Well Pastor Parks, he said Arabs could buy nuclear bombs now which would be small enough so you could like carry them in a baby buggy, and it would be totally worse than 9-11.

Yeah, the Latino girl broke in, like it was a baby. To fool people and get into places.

What’s there to blow up here? the mother says, and stares up again at the tiny circling figure in the sky, shading her eyes. Anyway, how about we think about something a little happier
now?

But that weirdo up there, he could carry something like that in his arms, the blond girl insists.

But how would he steer? the Latino says.

Maybe that’s why he’s going round in circles, the mother says tartly, and the blond girl giggles.

At closing time, Francis stays behind on trash duty. I leave, circle the block, then he lets me back in. He takes me to the walk-in store cupboard, snaps the light on and locks
the door. I sit myself on a wholesale carton of Clorox and peel off his damp trunks. You’d better put this on, I say.

Wait, he says, and everything stops except the blood knocking in my head. You just being cute, or pos?

Pos, I say.

Shit! he whispers. Any second I expect him to pull away, but he doesn’t. He stands there, not moving a muscle. I can smell the chlorine trapped in the flat coils of his hairs. Okay, he
says in a tight voice. Put it on. Then he says something else I don’t catch, and I can’t say anything.

The next day he skips work and we get drunk in his apartment watching re-runs of
Bonanza.
He tells me he’s starting a PhD in philosophy and looking at the stacks
of heavyweight books all around the apartment, I believe him.

How’d you get that scar? I ask him, in between episodes.

He laughs and shakes his head.

I’d like to know more philosophy, I tell him.

He laughs again. There’s philosophy and there’s philosophy, he says.

We avoid the other subject for most of the day but in the end he says: so how long has it been?

I tell him I found out last fall.

What you taking?

Can’t get anything, I say. I’m not supposed to be here.

He snorts. So go home. Get treatment there.

I like it better here, I say. This is home now. Anyway, I feel fine.

Christ, he says, and goes to the fridge for more beer. When he comes back to the couch he’s shaking his head. He hands me a tin, then moves away to sit in the armchair opposite. You
don’t feel anything yet?

I don’t know. I get pretty tired some days. But I think I always did. It’s hard to tell.

It could be years before it shows.

That’s what they said.

Hm, he says, and chews his lip. Well, man, any of us could go any time. None of us knows when, I guess.

That’s right. That’s my kind of philosophy, I say.

You should go back, though, he says, still serious. You’re fucking crazy not to go back. You can get retros and all that shit for free in the UK, right?

If I start to feel it I’ll go back.

You should go before the winter comes in. Once you get sick you’ll need looking after and shit. He narrows his eyes, like he’s examining me. You can’t get help around here, he
says, then sighs. I don’t want to talk about it, he says.

Me neither.

He squints at me again and runs a hand over his hair. Listen – no more fun, okay? It’s freaking me out. He opens his beer and takes a few long, loud gulps.

Okay, I say, but later he asks for it anyway, so long as I’m careful.

By Wednesday I’ve got my job back at the record store. The first few times I call, Jesus puts the phone down, but in the end he lets me speak and ends up taking me back
with another pay cut. Listen, he says. I’m hanging my dick out giving you work without a card. No more games. You got that?

Okay, I say.

Okay. See you at ten, he says. He sounds tired.

That Friday the weather breaks at last and turns to rain. Jesus pays me part cash, part Quaaludes just arrived from Jalapa. You know, he says, no-one up here even knows about
these babies any more. No-one even knows their name. It’s a tragedy,
mijo
. Me, I’m old school. He rattles them in their canister. Like a slow ride down the river, man.
Padrisimo
. He tells me there’s a storm blowing in, coming up from Virginia.

I take the Quaaludes round to Francis’s place. He’s heard of them, he says, but never tried them. You shouldn’t be taking this shit, he says, but we drop a couple each with
beer and settle down for the evening. It’s peaceful in his little apartment with the piles of deep, meaningful books everywhere, the smell of fried chicken from some other apartment and the
sound of the rain beating down outside. It’s early twilight and looking at the grey window I wonder if we’ll spend the fall like this. The thought makes me feel kind of sleepy and
comfortable.

I need to study for the next few days, Francis says suddenly. I need to catch up. I’m meeting with somebody from the faculty next week to see if they’ll enrol me.

Cool, I say. I kick off my shoes and set my bare feet up on the couch.

Listen, Robbie, he says, but then just shakes his head and goes on reading his book.

For a while I sit staring at the window, watching the rain tap and run on the glass and the dark filling in the sky behind it. The sunburned skin on my stomach is itching so I peel off a few
dead strips and roll them into scrolls.

Don’t do that, Francis snaps, seeing me drop some of it onto the floor.

There’s a wind getting up outside. I can hear it in the scrub oaks. Earlier in the evening, while I was waiting for Francis to get home and let me in to the apartment block, I saw two
black squirrels chasing each other under the trees. They were smaller than the usual grey kind. I never even knew squirrels could be black, but there they were, chasing around. Maybe the change in
the weather made them nervous. I look at Francis in his chair, reading. Every now and then he underlines something or scribbles in a notebook.

Don’t watch me, he says. Watch TV or something.

It won’t bother you?

No, he says. Then he tilts his head and rolls it from side to side on the back of the chair. Those ludes, he says, they’re taking hold of me now. He blinks hard and stares up at the
ceiling, showing the whites of his eyes. I can’t stop reading the same fucking sentence, he says. I finish it, and then it’s there again, where the next one ought to be. He looks back
down at his book and laughs kind of miserably to himself.

I turn on the TV. Leeza’s talking. She introduces a new guest and the audience start clapping and hooting. The guest is some earth-mother type woman, big as a bus, dressed in a long white
kaftan. She walks awkwardly, like her hips are damaged. At the bottom of the screen the words WORLD-RENOWNED MEDIUM keep flashing. The studio sofa’s too little and low for her really and she
doesn’t look happy seating herself down.

They get talking and the medium tells Leeza that the spirit world flows all around us, two feet above ground level. She says that on the spirit side, the TV studio is the site of a great temple.
There are spirits, she says, passing in and out of the temple.

What, right
through
us? Leeza wants to know.

That’s right! Right through us, she says, eyes popping wide.

In the audience, hands shoot up. I would like to ask the lady, a young black guy in a Bulls vest breaks in, why do they need a temple? I mean, if they’re already in the afterlife?

Someone starts to clap but stops when nobody else joins in.

The big lady leans forward, eyes screwed up. The need to worship is not a
fleshly
need, she tells him.

The young guy nods and shrugs. Okay, he says.

She turns on the rest of the audience. This is not more real than the temple, she scolds, waving a puffy finger at everything round about her. This is not more real.

I look at my bare feet laid out on the couch, big and cold and white at the ends of my legs. I can move them but I can’t feel them. I lift one onto the other, heel to toe, trying to
picture how deep two feet is. I think from where I’m lying it’d be over my face. Over my mouth and nose and everything.

Listen to this, Francis says, his voice slow and slurring. ‘To say I think he is in pain is like saying I think my teeth are in his mouth.’ He stops and looks up from the book,
staring at me, like he’s waiting for something. That’s Wittgenstein, he says.

Oh. That’s good, I say. My teeth in his mouth. I like that.

He laughs into his book again.

When I shut my eyes my heart feels like it’s swaying instead of beating. Just a slow, swinging bag of blood, bumping against the ribs. I think about it bursting and the blood coming loose,
flooding me. The medium’s still talking but I’m having trouble sorting one word from another. In my head I’m back at the river, high up, circling really slow, round and round,
just like the guy above the pool, looking down at everyone – Francis, the old man with his dog, teenagers hand in hand, kids paddling – all fixed there under a big, blazing sun. The
brown river looks smooth and still but I know it’s moving. I feel sick with fear. I need to shout a warning, but I don’t know what about, and no sound comes anyway. It’s something
about the river moving, but it’s something and it’s nothing – just panic. Just a kind of dread. Their faces are all turned up to me, white and tiny. Even if I could shout,
they’d never hear a word.

Francis, I say, forcing my eyes open, what’s that river where they put all the dead?

What? he says. He peers at me, squinting hard, like the sun’s right behind me for real. The Styx?

No. A real river. In India.

The Ganges, he says. And it’s just the ashes, ya dumb mutt. He shakes his head at me. And listen – don’t start with that morbid shit. He rubs his eyes with the palms of his
hands. When he stops, he stares at the TV. There’s a strange, ill look in his face.

Right here, the medium says. Right here is a temple.

Turn that off, he says. And listen, Robbie, he says, for Christ’s sakes go.

It must have been rain that brought the pigeon down – a sudden, furious April downpour that overtook and drenched Ahmed just as he drew close to home. He had bowed his
head into the wild drive of it, a fusillade of water and stinging hail pounding the bulging shopping bags that swung from his numbed hands.

Indoors, as he dried his head and changed his clothes in the bedroom, he listened to the rapid march of the storm passing over and fading. By the time he got to the kitchen to unpack the
groceries the wind was already drying the garden outside. A low, late afternoon sun, free of clouds now, was casting a watery, unconvincing sheen across the lawn. The grass was still sprinkled with
white peppercorns of ice and in the midst of them stood the pigeon, motionless and cowed, as if stunned. Slim and pale, almost white, it was clearly not one of the wild scavenger pigeons his wife
often tossed bread into the garden for. It was a racing bird, Ahmed decided, noticing the tin band on one leg and the blue plastic ring on the other. He lit a cigarette and watched the bird for a
while. Every time the wind gusted and swirled its feathers ruffled along its back and nape, but it made no attempt to find shelter. It seemed oblivious to his movements behind the window.

The next day, a cool, blustery Saturday, the bird was in the garden again. Ahmed stared from the kitchen window as it strutted tamely behind Rana when she went out to fill the long tubular bird
feeder she had hung on the garden shed half way through their first, shockingly cold, Scottish winter. Taking up position below the feeder it picked at whatever seeds were spilled by the squabbling
sparrows and finches.

Ahmed pointed out the pigeon as Rana stepped back indoors. Did you notice? he said. It was here yesterday, too.

She nodded. It belongs to somebody – it’s tame and there’s a number on one of the leg-rings.

He sipped his coffee. It’s either lost or resting.

She agreed and washed her hands, then left the kitchen.

Ahmed stayed at the window, watching. He opened it a crack and the sounds of the garden filtered in on chilly air: the cheeping of the sparrows at the feeder and, when the wind rose, a thin
whisper in the bare branches of the nearby trees. More pigeons landed clumsily beneath the feeder. They jostled a little and the racer gave ground to them but in general the heavy, slate and
cement-grey city birds seemed indifferent to the smaller visitor. A sharper gust of wind set the trees hissing and with a slapping of wings the high-walled garden emptied.

Over the next week the bird was an almost constant presence in the garden, either patrolling under the feeder or simply standing alone and still in the middle of the neat
square lawn, as if lost in thought. Just before dark it would disappear to roost somewhere in the near gloom but each morning it was back, unafraid when they entered the garden, but growing more
wary with each day if they drew too near.

Towards the end of the week they noticed its left foot was growing lame. From the window they could see the clawed toes bunched arthritically and as the days passed it moved around under the
feeder with an ever more obvious limp.

Though he kept it to himself, this new development bothered Ahmed. When Rana was out of the house he indulged a growing interest in the bird and would sit the back step to observe it, smoking
and keeping watch for the neighbours’ fat tomcat. It also occurred to him that the lameness might draw the attention of the other pigeons. From the same kitchen window he had once wasted an
afternoon watching a crippled blackbird in the garden, one foot a simple, toeless peg, being harried to exhaustion, and no doubt death in the end, by its own kind. And another worry was the rain.
When it fell heavily and the other birds found shelter the racer, bewildered, hunched on the lawn as it had that first day, easy prey for any cat or hawk, if hawks hunted in Scottish rain. And
underlying all this, more unsettling somehow, was the sense of hopelessness, of doom even, that these occasions evoked in Ahmed. The strange docility of the bird, its passivity, seemed awful to
him, so much so that once he stepped out himself, arms waving under the beating rain and tried to scare it into self-preservation. Reluctantly, it hopped to the far end of the small garden but
refused to fly. Disgusted, his thin house shoes already soaked through, Ahmed let it be and hurried back indoors.