Sample

Two Step

 He was sitting at one end of the table, his chair turned towards the small mirror fixed to the side wall. The mirror was too high for him to see himself in it. He looked at his bare feet; he moved them and stopped with them up in the air; the soles faced each other. Then he lay his feet flat on the floor in the shape of an open fan. He looked closely, as if he were trying to focus on something; to see something… something which was not there… He felt his feet were different; his right foot looked sharp and imposing, it was mottled with veins and the toes were close to one another. His left foot looked massive; it was lily white and the skin had a pearl-like glint to it.

Left foot, right foot…he mused over this and then heard a dry knock at the door.

“Hello Lucy.”

“Hello. How are you doing?”

“Great. How about yourself?”

“I heard the news. I am so sorry. That’s quite something, I was in shock!”

He took a deep breath through his nose. His nostrils flared and pulsed. “Oh, well. Please don’t be. There’s nothing to worry about. Tell me about yourself. How’s the world going with you?”

“I could never have imagined such a terrible thing would have happened.”

“Please go on. Really - I don’t want to go faster than events do. They have their own way.”

“But the doctor was positive, wasn’t he?”

“As much as she could be; maybe there’s less to it than meets the eye this once.”  He laughed. “I’ll bet on your decency for a change, if not on your positivity. Desperate bet as it is.”

“Yes. You know it is…just…so…weird. Not knowing if you’ll wake up in the morning.”

“Do we ever Lucy? One day at a time, if you don’t mind. You see I did marry time; it’s just that I might have to let it down some day. And today is a steady ground to throw a lifeline, isn’t it?”

“How do you….” She swayed her wrist and hand as though they might say what she hadn’t.

“I am not doing anything, that’s the bottom line. If I were to write my autobiography, I’d focus on what I did not have to do. It would fill up many more pages than what I had to do. But I would leave that to someone else as well.”

“Maybe you do and you don’t know it.”

“And would it be of any help to know?”

“I feel so sorry. So Sorry.”  She strained her brows.

“Who the hell do you think you are, to be sorry? Oh, great God, let me learn from you, please, please.”  He stretched his neck forward and clawed his eyes closer to each other in a taut cupping of his palm and fingers. Her eyes were wet and a teardrop was stuck in the corner of her right eye. He sighed and raised his head as he let his lower jaw fall into his chin.

“It’s fine. Cry over your own despair if you will, I don’t mind. I’ve got enough on my mind.”

She quit crying, transfixed and puzzled. “I hate you” she said after a while. She frowned, on the verge of crying again.

“See, you should not bother. You hate me.” He grinned

“Serves you right then.”  She bit her lip till the blood came.

“Thanks. I have no time for your pity.”

“I’m out of here” she said.

“Where to?” he said in a wondering tone.

“Anywhere else would do” she said with her eyes shut and a deep breath.

“Careful baby; it’s dark outside” he said in a tender voice.

A metallic smile forced itself onto her lips. She dashed out. He tipped his chair onto its back legs, inclined his head to the right and sucked his cheeks in, staring at the doorway.

Three days later, he was lying on the blue couch in the living room – he had sunk back into polyester filled cushions; his forearms crossed above his crown, his hands and wrists jutted out over and above the armrest; the bottom of the floppy socks he had slipped on post-haste flapped about – and he was dozing when he heard another dry knock at the door. He rubbed his bleary eyes, stretched and scratched his privates as he went to answer the door in his stocking feet, eyelids unflaggingly half-lowered.

“Hi. How are you doing?”

“Hello Tina. Good. How about you?” he drawled.

She nodded. She walked a few paces into the living room and left the door wide open. They faced one another; she could see his stubbly chin and his chest in the mirror.

“What I have to tell you is not easy but…” Silence broke in. Her eyes examined the room quickly.

“Well, to tell you the truth I have a hunch why you came around and I understand. I do. And I hope you understand too.”  He started to laugh...

“I thought it over and over and over again and I always come to a dead end. I just can’t go any further. I cannot stay” she said from under her curled black lashes.

“Am I asking you to? In any way?” he said with a surprised look.

“No, you are not” she said.

“You just look after yourself” he said “I am not asking for more.” 

“What do you mean?” she said perplexedly.

“I don’t mean anything. I am just saying” he said in a threadbare voice.

She took out a tissue from her bag and held it. She was petrified. Then she turned her head slightly and looked out the window; she did not notice she was digging her nails into her thigh.

“Ah” went a muffled shout as the pain ran up to her neck. She left the room without looking at him, her nails still digging in.

She had left the door open and he moved to the doorway. “I have some champagne –in the fridge – thought we – could celebrate…Or not…” he said with short pauses to her red and blue back while he pointed up and waggled a vague forefinger like a stellar-eyed worm in a daze. He then gave a little jerk of his shoulders and shut the door slowly.

He flounced along the carpeted upstairs corridor. His feet felt springy and undecided and his heels rose in a beating, regular movement as his legs swished the air in a trembling balance. He stretched out his hand into a star, covered the doorknob with it and turned the knob with his palm. He left the door ajar and the light off. Everything in the room was clad in the soothing faintly luminous rays of twilight which slanted through the blue-grey shutters. He sat down in the middle of the bed, parted his legs widely and laid his feet flat on the floor. He looked at his black suede shoes. His eyes were used to the darkness around now and he fancied he could see dazzling dots of light frolic over the velvety suede, like opalescent tadpoles fluttering their monstrous and disproportionate tails, and darting about in all directions to disappear in a convulsive silence before collision. He wrinkled his eyes shut and when he opened them again his fingers were unlacing his right shoe. He turned his head to the red and black dartboard on the wall above his desk. He stood up and faced it casually, legs spread. The image of two sweaty glazy eyes melted forward in a gauze-like lava; snaky, wobbly cracks outlined by the black lines appeared to be moving, spewed forth by the mouth of the board – a gigantic mouth. It was slow. It was so slow that it was hypnotic. He winked in a twitch and closed his eyes; he shook his head and burst out laughing. The heck with it…

He went to the door and opened it a little more. On his way to the bed he dipped his hand into the top drawer of his chest. It was a chaos of socks – some rolled into balls, sometimes with a tongue budding out, some thrown in – in disarray. He waved his hand through and mixed the chaos with an amorphous smile. He was giving the chaos relief. The top three drawers were half-open.

He planted his bottom back on the bed, and took his shoes off. He wriggled his toes and slipped off one sock. He held the top of the material up between his forefinger and thumb. He tossed the sock into the air and watched it fall back. He repeated the movement with the other sock and then turned on the reading lamp and shone the light on the pillow. He reached down to the floor to pick up the scrap of paper which lay by the head of the bed and read the few lines he had written a couple of days before.

Clocks on time, clocks in time, timely clocks reveal what they conceal

Hear the tick, hear the tock, and tear the tears up into instants

Ebb the tide on my outside – and over the held burden pass

Whatever’s lost in me I’ll look out and see in the near distance, aside

Let me have an inkling of the limitless, less than this, or over; motion takes over and on

I would leave my head alone – Let it be, come tomorrow

Still if my head won’t leave my head alone, this will be that I become

The concrete screed has evaporated – Into thin air – hee-hee, ho-o, ho-o, ha – ha

Time ran out long ago; its gilded skin a patchwork of tufts of space of time of

The breach into the self is now at work towards its multiple ways to oneness

And life laughs with my throat as I stand half an inch from myself -

Gazing at me with Dionysus’ smile on my roused onlooker’s lips

He then lay down on his back and dropped the scrap. He stared at the ceiling with drying tears over his temples. Ah, insomnia. Feel the irresistible call of life in it. Even restless, it makes you sense how hopeless all the imaginable worries are before two eyelids which inexorably close, how the circles which might have been believed to be able to drag you along endlessly find their remedy in the laws of natural exhaustion. Some other time his tears would be the epilogue of repeated and heavy yawns. This was what he thought before he turned to his side and let his arm cross down the edge. He fell asleep without undressing, a cosy smile on.

Three days later, he had another appointment to see the doctor, for more information, so to speak.

He was now sitting on the porch floor, in the doorway, fronting the outer world. He pulled his feet from his shoes without unlacing them and removed his socks. He was now barefoot. He clasped blades of grass in his toes, rather loosely first then tightly. They felt damp. He felt he was hanging by his toes. He curled up onto the lawn, joining his feet and he balanced on his whiskered toes. He lay on his side and held his head barely higher than the lank grass. He looked cross-eyed between the blades of grass. Grass, which grew from the middle and at what speed…Not heading for beginning or end, and starting to grow on as soon as it was cut. No way had been marked through it; no path had been clearly trodden.

After a while he sat up; his eyes stared blankly at the horizon – past trees and neighbouring houses. He closed his eyes and his attention was set on the breeze. Its sound softly conversing with the rustling of the leaves on the trees was pouring into his ears, hardly audible at first and now thunderous. He started to whistle. His whistling, erratic as it was, waded through the air to meet the stream of wind; it was weaving its vibrations into some wave of un-deciphered music. It wafted movement in its wake. The two sounds intertwined.

He could feel the intangible regularity of his pulse; his natural pulse; life’s ritornello. He felt powerful. He lodged his hand into his crutch; he could feel his pole surge, bulging and stirring under his pants. He went up to his room and began to undress…

He was a little late, yet no more than the doctor was. He rang once at the entry phone and waited. No answer came so he rang again, three short rings this time. The secretary’s voice asked for his identity; he stated his name. She said she was opening the door so he pushed on the door and waited a second or two, then rang again to let her know the door did not open. He did not say a word, only rang. This time he was able to get in so he ambled up the spiral staircase. The stairs were more than polished; the manager had apparently loosed his fury upon them so he clung to the railing and mounted the stairs keeping a cautious and tight footing. He rang at the door and was ushered in by the secretary; she asked him to go and wait in the waiting room then edged her way behind the narrow counter which served as an office, an office which looked more like a closet.

He began counting the people in the room; three chairs were available – one next to a coughing woman in a peacock blue raincoat, a long salmon pink nightgown showing below and slippers with a small check; her hair streamed in disorder and she held a white embroidered tissue smudged with blood to her reddened nose. Another chair was available next to an older woman who held a toddler flushed with restlessness in her lap and who was trying to bridle the bundle of nerves; he chose the third empty chair and sat down in silence. He nodded to a few people sitting along the wall opposite him and whose eyes he furtively crossed – not to the woman with the bloody tissue as she had her eyes fixed on the square cloth though she seemed too pensive to actually be seeing it, nor to the older woman as she was trying to pull the runaway toddler back against her knees.

After fifteen minutes of unrelenting ceiling staring, he slid to the edge of his chair and picked up a magazine from the coffee table. He flicked over the pages, only glancing at the pictures. Page eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen…nineteen – four pages had been torn out. On the crossword puzzle grid a few pages further on, ‘honeysuckle’ and ‘nonsense’ were filled in in ball-point pen. He added ‘pirate’ without reading the clue and was scrawling a bristly handlebar moustache over a woman’s mouth when he felt a hand laid on his knee. He shut the magazine abruptly and saw the toddler balance on one foot, duck his face around, swivel his sticky hand round on his knee and give a precious smile. Even though he just gave a little flicker of a smile for an answer, he was moved and amused to see the toddler’s bright face.

The older woman tugged him by the back of his striped sweater and said: “I am sorry, Sir… Will you come back and keep still for a jiffy! We’ll be done soon, honey.”

Pair after pair the eyes around the room started to look in their direction. The toddler made swimming movements with his arms, drilling away through the heavy air with his tightened, curled fingers; he struggled out of her grip and ran over to the coughing woman’s lap. He clasped her knees tightly and buried his face into her lap. The peering pairs of eyes were riveted on the scene now. The older woman ran after and tried to dislodge him; she tried clenching her hands on his shoulders first, then hooking his hands off the stranger. Whereupon she shrank back sharply, held the kid against her legs, covered his mouth, looked down at the stranger and said, “I am sorry, Mrs, I lost control of him. Come on Chris, be a good boy.”

“It’s quite all right” she said through her tissue, continuing to nurse her nose.

Back to the waiting chair the fugitive toddler was marched; he lay crouched across the older woman’s lap, with his arms clasped her around neck. She rocked the toddler back and forth slowly. He was behaving impeccably now, but when the doctor called for them, the older woman stood up to find that not only did she carry the toddler, but also a large scrap of the wall paper he had been meticulously scratching off and that the floor behind the chair was strewn with wallpaper flakes. They had taken part of a white cloud from the season-patterned paper with them.

“I am sorry, I did not notice anything. This kid will kill me” she said to the doctor as she followed her in.

He waited, waited for his turn. He flicked through the pages of another magazine he had picked up. After a while he folded up the magazine into a half-pipe and tapped his knee rhythmically with it. He was feeling fidgety now, so he stamped his foot for a moment or two, then he threw the magazine across the table back where it belonged and went to the window for a change. He stood at the window with his forehead against the cold pane and saw his breath collapse onto the pane, spreading a shrinking blurry ring of steam. He blew hot air over the pane in small blobs. He pressed his hand against the pane and left a handprint; he wiped out the steam which filled the spaces between the fingers with the ball of his thumb and looked out through the now transparent spaces. He erased some of his ring finger’s lines, and then blew hot air over it again… He did not hear the doctor call his name. She called once, she called twice. No worry, she would call out again. Now!

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