Know Your Beholder: A Novel (17 page)

Harriet said that at some point, after x number of revolutions, we would switch positions; that at this important flash point of the exercise she would take her clothes off and sit on the stool herself, and this would be my cue to begin circling her. In terms of deep-sea imagery, there was a sharks-zeroing-in-on-prey kind of thing going on.

She started walking circles, sylphlike and confident. “The only rule,” she said, “is no touching.” She told me to close my eyes and I did so. “And while I’m circling you, just be sure to keep breathing and connect to your breath. And later, while you’re circling me, only breathe through your nose. The person on the stool keeps their eyes closed until the other person is done circling.”

An interesting, not entirely logical set of ground rules. Sort of a child’s made-up game.

I asked her how many times she intended on circling me and she said she wasn’t sure.

“Like hundreds?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe twenty-seven. Maybe three. Keep your eyes closed now. Remember, trust.”

I could hear her bare feet padding around me. Her refrigerator hummed. The low-wattage light buzzed overhead. We were quiet for what might have been thirty seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

Thoughts were suddenly skittering through my head. Thoughts about quantities of Percocet and the Bunches’ new door, which was way more expensive than I thought it would be, like $478, and thank God Home Depot delivered and my dwindling supply of canned food and was I maybe starting to eat like a man stranded in an Arctic wasteland who’d happened upon a crashed propeller plane and the madness of astomatous snowmen that might be existing only in my mind and I was really pleased as punch that I hadn’t needed to fart thus far and Detective Mansard’s hearing aid and his bristly nicotine ’stache sort of floating independently through space like it had its own wandering intelligence and why all of the sudden is there this sort of constant intestinal gurgling going on in my lower depths and can Harriet actually hear that and was I going down low enough on my push-ups and was my bad molar releasing an odor and my mother in a white hospital gown walking through a field of blood-orange poppies sort of half doubled over because Lyman the abstraction of him at least had forgotten to reload her morphine plunger which she’d dropped somewhere in the sea of all those poppies and Sheila Anne sleeping on Dennis Church’s tan, fit chest and less-than and greater-than signs coming out of nowhere and storming my thoughts guerilla-style and what the hell is Bob Blubaugh doing with his life anyway and the sound of a lone tennis shoe knocking around in the dryer unit and Baylor Phebe’s almost grotesque kindness and will this winter ever cease or has the environment finally surrendered to the inevitable demise of the planet and Bethany Bunch flying upside down like a high-end chess piece flipped on its crown but traveling at some unbelievable speed through dark starlit skies and never stopping and why am I so overly concerned with my tenants’ lives when I should be trying to hunt down the three members of my former band and maybe solve some problems of my own, mainly this thing of not being able to step away from the actual structural confines of the house without feeling like the world is tetrahedrally closing in on me—

“Your turn,” Harriet’s voice issued from the darkness.

I opened my eyes. She was standing before me, naked. She was so beautiful that I almost barked like a seal. I’m not talking about parts. I’m talking about the whole of her. Harriet Gumm is Beauty Incarnate in the way that Hershey’s is Chocolate or a Mustang GT 5.0 is Horsepower. Her youth is astonishing, the quality of her skin crushingly, intensely perfect.

Again, it was all very touching, not sexual.

“May I?” she said, pointing toward the stool.

I dismounted and she took my place, crossing her legs. She closed her eyes and I started circling her.

She reminded me to breathe through my nose.

I asked her if it was okay to look at her.

“You can look wherever you’d like,” she replied.

I walked exactly twenty-seven circles around her. I know this because I counted them, half under my breath, all the while breathing through my nose.

Harriet has a faint reef of acne across her upper shoulders, sharp bony points to her elbows. She also has a small brown mole perfectly assigned by some higher power to live at a point between her shoulder blades that almost seems like the actual center of her being. I imagined our moles sort of docking, which made for an interesting physiological composition, my stomach joined to her back, our congenital markings informing each other, causing something miraculous to happen, a volcano birthing a tornado of hummingbirds in some distant land.

I wanted to lie at her feet. I wanted to place my head in her bare lap and breathe in her scent and moan like a cow.

“Okay,” I said, and stopped circling her.

“Okay,” she said, opening her eyes.

I replaced her on the stool.

She picked up her clothes off the floor and put them on matter-of-factly, layer by layer, as if we were in the locker room of a same-sex gym class. Then she reached into the apple box of chalks and charcoal stubs, stood before the easel just to my left, took me in, biting her lower lip, presumably deep in thought, and started to draw. I never mentioned the rent.

When I returned to my apartment, the attic door was ajar.

I slowly pushed it open, half-expecting to see Todd and Mary Bunch holding their DVD player or one of my body hairs, forensically confirming my burglary. But that’s not who I was greeted by—no, not even close.

Glose was asleep on the bearskin. Or appeared to be. Was it really him?

Had my session with Harriet Gumm unlocked some metaphysical slipstream and somehow conjured the Third Policeman’s troubled, meta-destructive drummer?

He was asleep on his back, per normal, which I’ve always found to be incongruous with his insane unpredictability. You expect someone who thrives in chaos to sleep as if he’s been thrown from a speeding car, but Glose always sleeps with perfect, sublime stillness, no matter how cramped the quarters or noisy the conditions. In waking life he is a human disaster. In sleeping life he’s like some sort of Zen master of unconsciousness, transcending all circumstances. It used to really piss me off, especially when band funds were low and the four of us were forced to negotiate a thirty-dollar motel room—say, for instance, the Rodeway [
sic
] Inn, just off Route 26 in Ogallala, Nebraska, where the carpet smelled like a breakfast burrito. If I got the floor I would toss and turn all night, practically wrenching my shoulders out of their sockets. I’d often wind up sleeping in the van. If Glose got the floor he would lie on his back, tilt the bill of his Mao Communist cap over his eyes like some Dust Bowl hobo on a freight train, and sleep like the dead for ten hours. He wouldn’t even bother taking off his shoes.

His hands were crossed under his chin now, like a vampire in a coffin, his disposed figure perfectly still, as if carefully arranged for a viewing. His black hair had grown long. It was dry and unhealthy-looking, graying in splitting, wayward strands. He had a few days’ growth of a beard going, dark like his hair. His beard starts way high up, like almost under his eyes, and when he doesn’t shave, it gives him the air of an irritated bandito. He was thinner, his big-boned build looser now, whereas normally it was overly fleshy, usually a little flabby. His fungal toenails were extraordinary to behold, with so many colors marbling their thick yellow carapaces that they seemed almost artistically manipulated.

He must have felt the air shift when I opened the door, as his eyelids separated in that strange, indifferent mechanical way of crocodiles. It was downright fucking spooky. I almost thought he was still unconscious, between planes of existence.

After a quiet moment he said, “Francis.” His voice was soft, weaker than I remembered.

“Glose,” I replied. “What a surprise.”

“I would’ve called but I lost my phone.”

I mentally scrolled back to the last time I’d seen him. I couldn’t place it. Was it before or after Kent had moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? For the life of me I couldn’t locate his last day in Pollard. Glose was like that. He never said good-bye, would just disappear, abandoning IOUs, dirty laundry, drumsticks, percussion toys, half-eaten sandwiches, unresolved arguments, etc.

“I really like this bearskin,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s yours.” I told him he’d left it in a box in the old rehearsal space. “You found it in that weird thrift store in Joplin,” I added.

He said, “Joplin…” as if the town itself was a confusing half-memory.

“Joplin, Missouri. We were on tour. You bought the bearskin and Kent bought the little taxidermy bird. I think it was a finch.”

This didn’t seem to register. It hurt me deeply that Glose was forgetting things band-related. This was real history, spent in rented vans and cheap diners and venereal-smelling roadside motels. We crashed on friends’ living room floors when we were way too old to be crashing on friends’ living room floors.

The anecdotal stuff is the beautiful part of rock ’n’ roll. Like when Kent, because of his cat allergy, slept on a pontoon boat, where he was attacked by the same dander-rich cat that had driven him sneezing and teary-eyed from the lake house in the first place. All these weird experiences on the road. The strange conversations at three a.m. The incessant two-lane highways. The water towers and farmland architecture. The bizarre small-town mom-’n’-pop thrift stores. The flea markets and pancake houses. The post-hangover conversations with teenage cashiers at gas station snack bars.

About the bearskin I said, “I had it flattened and cleaned. Figured you were through with it.”

He neither thanked me nor confirmed his ownership of the bearskin. He simply watched me with his crocodile eyes.

I asked him how he’d gotten into my apartment and he said that the door was unlocked. “I knocked,” he said, “and it just sort of opened on its own.”

I never leave the attic apartment unlocked. It’s one of my more responsible adult habits. But I had to believe Glose. My lock is a Sunnect Advanced Protection digital deadbolt. And my attic door is made of steel. There’s no way he could’ve picked the lock.

I asked him how he knew to look for me in the attic and he said he studied the mailboxes. I asked him how he got into the house and he said that the front door was ajar.

He said, “I’ve come a long way, Francis.”

I wasn’t able to engage with him about his personal journey just yet. I was still dealing with the possibility that he might be a figment of my imagination. Or here simply to ruin my life.

He told me I had a righteous beard and I thanked him. He told me I’ve always been so clean-cut.

“Not so much anymore,” I offered.

Then he slapped at something on his neck and said that he keeps having this recurring dream that
he’s
grown a full beard. “But it’s a beard made of almonds,” he added. “And I’m on the run from the Almond Pickers.”

I asked him who the Almond Pickers were and he said he wasn’t entirely sure but that they wear these safari hats with the words
Almond Pickers
on them. “And they’re chasing after me with sacks to put the almonds in and they’re fucking fast as cats.”

I told him that it would be really weird if he was on the run from the
Almond
Brothers. “Like if they were really the
Allman
Brothers but changed their name just slightly for the purpose of hijacking your dream.”

We laughed and that made it official: I wasn’t hallucinating. In our finest hours, this was the way the band came up with song ideas. We were at our best when we were goofing off. And we were at our very best when Glose was at the center of it.

His teeth were dim, his tongue chalky white.

“Homonyms,” I said.

“Homonyms,” he echoed.

He propped himself up on an elbow. He wore a gray hoodie over his signature kelly-green Girl Scouts of America T-shirt and old split-pea-colored Levi’s cords with holes in the knees. Black hair was tufting through the holes. No winter coat. No socks on his feet, not a pair of shoes in sight.

“Can I get a hug?” he said.

I approached him and he stood. Getting to his feet was maybe a seven-part move. I suspect his body carries so much survival inflammation that he probably suffers like an old person with rheumatoid arthritis. His breath smelled like the back of a garbage truck and his clothes stank of body odor and stale feces and mold. I worried about acquiring bacteria, but we hugged nonetheless. At the height of our embrace he sort of sighed. Something felt irretrievably lost about him. Like parts of his soul had gone missing. When the hug was over there were tears in his eyes.

I asked him where his shoes were.

Clearly embarrassed, he said, “I don’t seem to have any at the moment.”

“You’ve been walking around barefoot? In this crazy weather?”

“Just for the past few days.” He said that he’d been wrapping his feet in newspaper and plastic bags.

In addition to the psychedelic toenails, he appeared to have trench foot. Both feet were cadaver white, wrinkled, maligned with crust and abscesses.

I went into my minicloset and pulled out a pair of old Doc Martens that I hadn’t worn in over a year. They were still in pretty good shape, a bit scuffed up, but with solid soles. I also grabbed a pair of winter socks for him. I handed him the shoes and socks.

He said, “Thanks, Francis.”

I think it was the first time he’d actually thanked me. As in ever. And when you’ve been deprived of that from someone, no matter how much bitterness and vitriol you’ve stored up, it can still be touching and it was.

But then he followed it by asking, “Would it be too much trouble if I crashed here for a coupla days?”

I noticed that I was crossing my arms in front of my sore chest, sort of defensively. I asked him if he’d called his mom.

“I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

At nineteen, after one semester, Rodney Daniel Glose dropped out of Waubonsee Community College to join an eight-piece Chicago-based stunt-band called the Spirit Dicks, whose shows would often devolve into paintball wars with their fans. They had two drummers, one who’d bite a beat and one who’d enact a kind of mathematic score of war. Glose was the latter drummer. The Spirit Dicks died after the band’s lead vocalist was sent to Cook County Jail for stealing high-end Winnfield executive chairs from the Libertyville office-furniture warehouse where he was a part-time loading dock worker.