Gutshot (2 page)

My partner suggested that she change into something more comfortable. We led her to the bathroom and she removed her dress before us on the hemp bathmat and stood quietly while we anointed her with oils. I rubbed her feet and legs and my partner did her back. The oil was a jojoba blend to which I had added fresh sage and rosemary. She was tense under my hands. There seemed to be a thin layer of glowing light just under her skin, a scratch away. I began to feel calmer as I rubbed and was able to hear more of the conversation my partner was having with the girl. He talked about how honored we were that she joined us on her journey through life. He asked her the question he had read that morning on his Questions calendar, which was What are you doing to make life more beautiful for the next generation? She said she wanted to be a physical therapist. He moaned a little.

The preparations over, he led the way to the air-conditioner intake duct in the hallway. I passed him a screwdriver and he began to remove the duct’s grate, handing me the small screws. He said that becoming a physical therapist was very much like playing House Heart with someone you trust. She said that she didn’t understand. She stood between us with her arms crossed over her breasts, each hand holding the opposite shoulder. The oil made a small pool around her toes. I held her hips and kissed her face and tried to tell her a joke but she didn’t laugh. She asked what we were doing in the hallway and I told her that my partner and I have a game we like to play and it’s a special game to us, very special, but we never have had a chance to share it with someone else, and it would mean so much for us to take that step with her help. He was prying the grate from its spot and so I hushed the girl and patted her round bottom.

The duct’s main supply area was large enough for a crouching man to spend a few productive hours on the controls behind locked panels inside. There would be plenty of space for our girl. When we kissed her and coaxed her in, she barely had to bow her head and then stood comfortably. Her feet were bare but I had swept the spot many times before, and that morning had scrubbed it clean with a vinegar-soaked rag. When my partner moved to affix the grate she made a whine of protest, but he explained that sealing her inside would allow us to truly play the game, and that we would be so pleased if she would help us finally achieve this milestone as a couple, a romantic goal for which she would be well compensated, enough to focus on her studies for the remainder of the year. Finally she was silent and the grate was quickly secured.

For a while, nothing happened. I worried for a moment that she had vanished. Then we heard her scraping around, feeling the boundaries with her feet and hands, no doubt discovering there wasn’t room for her to sit. My partner said that she would find a duct at her head and one at her feet. Those main lines would branch into smaller channels leading to different rooms; one would end up over the kitchen and another would terminate in the living room, one over the chandelier in the dining room and the other three in the bathroom, bedroom, and office. She would be able to hear us at different points of the ductwork, thanks to the happy accidents of design that allowed for such echoes. In a small voice, the girl asked if we could maybe just let her out. I found my purse in a closet and fed a few singles through the grate. The money stayed stuck or floating there for a moment before she took it. She would have to stand there with it in her hand since she didn’t have anywhere to put it.

The scratching continued, the thumps of her body bracing against a confined space, then a sharp kick against the metal. She was crying softly. My partner knocked on the wall and told her to calm herself, that she would earn five times more than she would if she had made love to us in a traditional way. He said there was no danger to playing House Heart, that there were secrets to be found.

Her noises became more frantic as she felt along the corridor. We heard her clamber up to the high duct, finding a place for her bare feet in the metal’s slim niches. She had stopped crying, the effort of movement distracting her enough to focus on her task. I put my eye to the grate and saw her legs dangling before they vanished upward. My partner held my hips and we did it right there in the hallway. We licked each other’s faces, listening to the girl above us. At that moment, she was learning that she could crawl on her hands and knees in the main passage, but that in the smaller lines, she would have to slide on her belly, arms outstretched, pulling herself forward blind. At the system’s smallest points, it would surround and press her from all angles.

After we were finished in the hall, we retired to the bedroom, where he rubbed some of the jojoba oil into my breasts. He rolled out of bed, arranged a stepladder under the vent, and stretched up to feed cash through the grate. He knocked on it so she would know. After a few minutes, the money disappeared and we heard her moving backward, the metal shuddering above us. I dipped my head down onto my partner’s genital, savoring the girl’s energy as I worked. Once I was finished, he handed me a warm towel and began his preparations for work.

My mind was once diseased with the strange and heady ambition that I might somehow improve the world by living in it. The reality of the world ruined this ideal; or rather, the fantasy of the ideal ruined its reality. It took some time to soothe myself from this truth. Eventually I found that keeping close to home and pursuing a daily practice helped to ease the stress. Making terms with my lack of true utility required a kind of physical therapy, as if I were treating a sprained ankle.

This was my daily practice: I would throw open a door and imagine the ideal world. Opening the pantry, I might declare what a fine day it was, how the morning sun glinted so kindly off available glinting things. At the door to the bedroom, I spoke of a green and placid lawn. I held out my palm in a closet and noted that it was about to rain. It was soothing. I practiced with the doors after my partner left for work. As I opened and closed the medicine cabinet, I wondered idly if the girl had a partner of her own. Seeing as we hadn’t heard from her employer, it was safe to assume she was alone. I took only slight pleasure from this.

*   *   *

The girl slept up there each night, turning over every few hours. There would be no space for her to curl her legs up to her chest. One night, my partner left the bed and I heard him whispering to her in the bathroom. In the morning, we heard her noises change as she lifted her elbows and slid on her belly. My partner rolled atop me and said that the girl had begun to trust the surfaces she was coming to know. It was very exciting for him, which made it very exciting for me.

He left for work and I opened and closed a cabinet for a while before putting on water for tea. I could hear the girl rumble above me in the kitchen. She said Could you let me out of here? I replied that the world which had been created for her was out of my control. She said it wasn’t true, that if I might call an authority, everything would be solved.

An insolent silence followed. Pushing aside my desire to cut the duct open with one of the heavy steak knives and plunge the knife into her neck, I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we would not be held accountable. As I spoke, a drop landed on my shoulder. She confessed that she had wanted to be let out because she didn’t know where else to use the toilet. I took my tea into the living room, annoyed. She banged away for a while but eventually calmed down. A few hours passed and I cleaned the mess from where it had landed on the kitchen floor.

From then on, she made waste in that area, directly over the stove. We couldn’t convince her otherwise, even though my partner did his best to startle her as she did it, pounding the duct with a broom handle. It must have been her small idea of insurrection. My partner shouted that she was lucky to be where she was, that the world was a terrifying place for anyone and particularly terrifying for a girl like her, and that when she toughened her softer skin and grew out some more of her body hair, she might understand her own strength and power. Eventually, without a word to me about it, he rigged up a tarp and bucket under the kitchen vent. And at night, they whispered.

*   *   *

We were sleeping late one morning when the girl began to knock above us. We tried to ignore her with some mutual masturbation but the knocking grew louder and she cried out without words. My partner got out of bed and left the room for some time. When he returned he spoke to her, saying he had opened the vent over the study and left his watch inside. She stopped knocking and slid away.

It was his father’s watch, I knew. The man would drive his family cross-country every few months to observe the passing seasons. They watched leaves and local rock formations and various beaches, blissfully unaware of the part they were taking in the destruction of the very environment they enjoyed. He drank gas station coffee from Styrofoam cups and when he finished the coffee, he would bite into the cup itself, chewing it thoughtfully, usually consuming the whole thing before the next destination. On one of his later birthdays, he bought himself a fine watch and enjoyed it for a few years before he died. It was one of those things that my partner had long wanted to get rid of without knowing exactly why, along with his own graduation photos and a motorcycle helmet he had acquired from a friend.

A scraping noise from the far side of the house meant that she had found the watch. I imagined her spreading her fistfuls of money in front of her, slipping the watch over her thin wrist, and tucking the cash into its silver band.

That night, my partner waited until he heard my even breath and rolled from bed. I followed him and saw him unlatching the vent. He stepped in and replaced it so quietly I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t watched, clutching the doorframe.

*   *   *

In the morning, he brought me a slab of toast with fresh butter. I could hear her above the bathroom while I washed my hair. She remarked that she heard the water running and asked if she could come down for a quick scrub. I responded that we only used baking soda and white vinegar and that I could make her a cup to take in the duct if she liked. She declined but was polite about it. She had become sweeter to me as the days wore on. I suspected she had developed a plan of winning me over through feminine duplicity. As if to corroborate this theory, the girl made her period and a few drops fell onto the floor by the bed. Every room was replete with blood-bearing potential.

While she was over the kitchen, I dragged the stepladder into the office and climbed up with a handful of radishes from the harvest box. I said that lunch was served if she could find it, that I had opened a window so we might have a little air. But I would not be fooled.

*   *   *

The girl created a method by which she could live with relative order. A few times a day, she would crawl into the standing-room area where she had first entered the system, finding the footholds and lowering herself. She could store her money and empty dishes there, or stand and stretch her legs. A clatter when she crawled suggested she was wearing the watch around her wrist or ankle. I listened for her while opening and closing the bathroom door, which stood next to the entry grate. My continued practice was growing strange; it was harder than ever to imagine what green grass would look like up close. My best image was of a stagnant field, like what one finds in an old pond, but even this image was fading along with my knowledge of ponds. The girl and I spoke less and less to each other.

My partner arrived home with groceries and I put them away. I prepared dinner and climbed the stepladder to serve the girl after we had eaten our share. Playing her part in the order, she ate quickly and then crawled to store her dish. Each of us had our individual function and hers was to embody the house, which had begun to smell like a hot scalp.

She had grown silent around me. I mentioned this to my partner while he was feeding me dessert. He spooned fat curds of cottage cheese into my mouth and said that it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall. He wiped my chin with a napkin and kissed the napkin.

The next morning, he was in the duct with her. He must have been watching me sleep from the vent above the bed because when I woke up, he requested I replace the screws and tighten them.

He phoned the girl’s employer while I was sweeping up in the kitchen. Over my noise, I could hear her say that she had decided to quit. There was a silence. At first I stopped my movement and strained to hear, but there was nothing. I tried to forget the silence and my hatred of it, opening a cabinet to put away the clean dishes.

In the back of the cabinet, over the plates, there was a portal through which I viewed the windless void of a new ecosystem. I could almost hear it breathing.

The Lark

William was a puker. His expulsions—the color, consistency, and volume of a baby’s—occurred after every sentence he spoke. This unfortunate fact of life began innocently enough during his infant coos and babbles, but by the time he was barfing onto his coloring books, the doctors were stumped. He had to carry a paper cup throughout middle school. By high school he didn’t have to worry about direct ridicule any longer, because he had no friends. And then everyone in his peer group graduated and left town and he was blessedly, blissfully alone.

After William was done with school he took a job at the local post office, where customers tended to be enfeebled or insane and everyone had larger problems. He would spit up into an empty soda bottle. His coworkers assumed he chewed tobacco and gave him tins of it on his birthday.