Rise Page 8

  There was a poster beside the coffeemaker in the employee kitchen. It said to take the stairwell in case of fire and to turn off your cell phone if somebody is shooting. Turn it to vibrate so the shooter won’t hear and then wait until he reloads. That was the time to run. Active shooters and suspicious behavior and all the tips wouldn’t help. They were sitting at round tables. They were wearing headsets, and there wasn’t any place to run. The doors were at the end of the room, and the stairwells were too narrow. One day it would happen. Someone would come through the double doors. Someone with a loaded gun, and he needed to keep Deepa safe.

  Deepa kept her hairbrush in a sandalwood box beside her keyboard. It was half past three in the morning, and the office was empty. That’s when he liked to look. He swiped his card and opened the doors, and he walked between all the tables before coming to her spot. He opened that box, and she had chewing gum in there from Cadbury’s India and extra hairbands and a photograph of a little girl standing next to a carved stone wall. Elephants and dancing ladies with long long hair and the girl stood right between them. Little Deepa when she wore knee socks. She looked straight at the camera, and he knew her from her eyes.

  He pulled a few strands from the hairbrush. She would never know. That heavy hair that spilled down her back. It shone even under the fluorescent lights. Imagine her in the water. Just think how it would shine. He pulled the strands out from the bristles and cupped them in his palm. The old security guard was gone. He never made his rounds. He was probably sleeping down at his desk. Sometimes he left for Denny’s and ate nachos instead of watching the doors.

  Deepa’s chair was too small for him, but he sat down anyway and looked around the room. It smelled like coffee and microwave popcorn. The monitors glowed blue. This was where Deepa sat, and it wasn’t right how she couldn’t see the window. He needed to bring her a present and leave it on her chair, a box of caramels or a bromeliad from Safeway, a purple phalaenopsis like the ones she knew from home. He needed to hurry. He wasn’t getting any younger. All the girls and he remembered where they sat and how their voices sounded. Before Deepa there had been Marta, whose family was Italian. Marta and Pilar and Tina with her strange gold eyes. They came, those girls, they came with their long dark hair and then they went away.

  The widow who cried when he asked for her dead husband and the man who shouted about acid rain and mercury in the water. One old lady thought he was her son. Freddy, you never call me anymore, she said. Don’t you love your momma? The babies wailing and the sirens through the line and all the people who cursed him for interrupting their supper. A man who laughed and laughed at the sound of Leonard’s voice. Maybe he was Armenian. Te zent tartakuti, he said, and it sounded like a curse.

  Deepa was wearing a new locket on a thin gold chain. She touched it with her thumb. He was coming back from the men’s room when he saw it. His hands were still wet from the sink. It was a present, he was certain. Somebody had bought her that engraved locket, and she’d lifted her hair so he could put it around her neck. She touched it with her thumb and her eyes were closed while she worked her call. He wanted to stop beside her table so he could pull it off her neck, but he kept on walking and sat down in his chair.

  The woman who answered couldn’t see his shaking hands or how the carpet tiles were stained. How the new girl across the table chewed her nails and spit the pieces in the trash. Her hair was so short she might as well shave the rest of it off. She was probably a lesbian. “Who is this,” the woman said. There was yelling in the background and the sound of the TV.

  “It’s Leonard Spivvy at Peak Marketing. We’re an investment information. . . .”

  “Jacob, put that marker down.”

  “We’re an investment information service,” he said.

  “Do you hear me? That one’s a Sharpie and it won’t come off.”

  “We provide courtesy investment information for you in the form of a prospectus.”

  “Who is this?” she asked again. Her voice was even sharper now. Someone was banging the walls at her house. Someone was really shouting.

  “Basically we work with a group. And we offer folks like you the chance to participate in a real estate project or a trust possibly with a new company just starting—”

  “Jacob Oren Goodman, if you don’t come here this second I swear I will take away the controls. No games for a month.”

  His hands were starting to shake harder. He wasn’t sure why. That boy was screaming when he should listen to his mother. “You need to whip him,” he said.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “You need to use the strap—”

  She hung up so hard he felt the concussion through his headset. He rubbed his temples because that’s where he kept his tension. The girl behind him was using her flirty voice. She was laughing like somebody on a date. Thirty people talking on the phone and they were all following the script. Somebody across the room had found an investor, and a few people were applauding. This is how his days would go. The weeks and months and years. He’d sit there from noon until eight in the evening. He’d push the numbers as they came up, and he’d make his calls until somebody stopped him.

  It was the seventh of March the last time he held his mother’s hand. It was half past eight in the morning. The flakes were falling outside. All night it had been snowing, and the roads filled faster than the plows could clear them. There weren’t any doctors in the halls. The hospital was quiet. He held her hand and she lay there breathing. There was a bandage on her scalp from where they’d made the incision. She was sixty-three, but she looked ageless beneath the blanket. Like a girl. Like an ancient woman and her skin had lost its wrinkles and its color. It had gone completely smooth. The world was white outside the window. The sky was white and the dead grass in the courtyard and the mountains were hidden behind clouds, and he sat on a stool beside her bed. He held her right hand because the left one had the tubes. It was eight thirty in the morning and the snow was falling and he held that hand. It trembled and went still.

  Deepa deserved better than those motorcycles in the lot and the rusty green dumpsters. Sagging sofas on the curb stained black from the melting snow. Soldiers lived there, young GIs who looked fifteen in their uniforms, and it wasn’t safe a girl alone like that with all those men around. They drank beer on the weekends and did pull-ups on the clothesline posts just because they could. They walked around in summertime with all their muscles showing. He sat in his car and watched her window. He knew the best places to park. Sometimes she stood on the balcony and looked out toward the mountains.

  He turned his collar up. Snow was coming in again, he could feel it in the air. He’d have to scrape his window before he left. People still had their Christmas lights up. It would be March before they took them down. Some people would leave them up all year, and there was nothing sadder than Christmas lights in May. The world was full of lazy people. His mother said loneliness was a disease. She said it was catching like the flu, but loneliness was a blessing. There were people everywhere he looked.

  A man stepped out on the balcony where Deepa kept her bike. He wore boxer shorts and a white T-shirt, and even from across the street Leonard could see how his arms were ropy with muscle. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. Deepa came out in a robe. She was holding a coffee mug, and she pulled him back inside. The man laughed. He pretended to pull back before letting her win. They went inside and he could see them through the glass, how they pushed and pulled each other in circles. Deepa smiled and threw back her head. She laughed for this man who didn’t deserve her. She told him all her secrets. They were dancing in her kitchen, and one day that building would burn. It was made of wood and the roof was, too, and it wouldn’t take much, just a rag and some kerosene, and somebody would do it and he wouldn’t save her, that man with the muscles. He wouldn’t lift a finger.

  Hotel fires. Steam pipe explosions. Twenty-three dead on Weber because somebody was frying a turkey. A special ed bus overturned when th
e driver had a seizure. Stampedes at Walmart. A little boy at Fort Carson who found his daddy’s gun. A coffee cup wedged under a brake pedal. Acre upon acre of forest gone. A lady park ranger had been burning her husband’s letters. Girls abducted from the swimming pool. Patients at the nursing home smothered in their sleep. Christmas trees going up like torches. Especially those Scotch pines. The billboards, everywhere the billboards, and there wasn’t any quiet and there wasn’t any peace, not even when he tapped the walls or rocked in his mother’s chair. Everything ends, that was the lesson. The city was burning and nobody noticed. There wasn’t any place left to go.

  She was wearing silver shorts today, and her nails were painted white. The others called her Bibi, but he never said her name. He shouldn’t have come. Three months resisting the pull and he needed to be stronger. He should be home filing his bills. He had entire folders waiting to be shredded, but he parked his car in the gravel lot and walked inside to find her. She led him down the hall. There were girls dancing in the mirrored rooms. He tried not to look as he went by. Those girls with their ironed blond hair that looked stiff even in the flashing lights. Their skin was too pale or too orange from the bronzer. Their nipples were too pink. They moved their hips and they took their bras off and the men sat in their chairs as if crippled by the sight of them. Like paralytics at the gates of heaven. The women danced and touched themselves. They leaned close to the men and pulled away. They crouched like cats across that sticky floor and their backs were always arched, and he wanted to cover them.

  She had chicken pox scars on her temples. He knew each one. He knew the tattoos on her hip and he wished them away. Her hair was wavy, and it came to the small of her back. She took him to the room and sat on a metal stool. There were mirrors on three of the walls and a sagging velvet couch. He combed the spray from her black hair. He started at the bottom and worked his way upward through the tangles. He divided her hair into three parts when it was ready, feeling them by weight to make sure they were even. He braided the plaits. He started low at the nape of her neck so it wouldn’t hurt her or pull at her skin. The music went quiet as he worked. The room was full with the sound of his beating heart, and for a little while he wasn’t fat; no, he was slender the way he used to be, and his hands stopped all their shaking.

  She sat still for him when he was done. He watched her in the mirror. The ovals of her breasts and those chocolate-colored nipples. Big as half dollars and her chest rose and fell with every breath. He stood above her and looked at her fat braid and it was perfect how it dangled. He needed things to stop for a while. He needed to close his eyes. It was three o’clock and the sun was shining off the water and the concrete was rough beside the pool so people wouldn’t slip. The smell of coconut lotion and chlorine from the water, and she was getting up. She was always getting up. Their time was done, and she was looking at herself in the mirror. He would have given her a hundred dollars, but she asked only for twenty.

  Dead Languages

  She hadn’t put down the grocery bags when her boy finally began to talk. She hadn’t even closed the door. He stood there sure as the pope and pointed at her with sticky fingers. Apo, her little Nicholas said. He looked at the ceiling, and his eyes were shut. Apo tou nun epi ton hapanta. It sounded like a song. It sounded like the martial arts movies Gary liked to watch. She dropped her bags at the sound. She let them fall to the kitchen tiles, and the eggs broke and seeped through the paper.

  More than two years she’d waited for him to speak. She’d checked all her parenting books and wrote in her journal, and she waited for a syllable, for any sound at all. The Binghams’ little girl was putting whole sentences together. She was singing along with the TV, and people said not to worry. Boys can be slow that way, Holly. He’s not a talker but look how he walks. Look at his sturdy legs. They only made her more nervous how they tried to comfort her. She worked harder to coax the syllables out. She talked to him while she pushed his stroller along the streets. She pointed to the maples and the mountains and bulldozers on the street. She asked him questions, and he looked at her with those shiny eyes and his mouth made a perfect pink O. She answered her own questions and talked some more, and she sang even though her voice was awful. At night while he slept she whispered things into his ear. With Gary’s long hours and only her voice in the house, she was getting a little strange. She wondered more than once if she was helping him. But now her boy was standing there, and the words were coming out in a jumble.

  “Look at you,” she said. She went to him and knelt. She didn’t touch him or reach for him. Better not to scare him.

  Sebastou, he was saying now. Sebastou Germanikou, and a little bubble of spit formed in the corner of his mouth. It didn’t sound like Spanish, though the gardeners shouted every afternoon just outside his window. It didn’t sound like any language she knew, but it didn’t matter because he was making sounds. Thirty months of silence in the house and now her boy was trying to tell her something. Soon he’d be talking like Emily Bingham and all the other children who toddled in the park. He’d be pestering her for toys. He opened his eyes, those dark eyes that were nothing like hers and they weren’t like Gary’s either. He clenched his little fists and smiled.

  His arms went tight sometimes when the words came. His eyes rolled back in his head. All those words, all those musical sounds. Their boy said them with conviction, and none of them made sense. Gary who never frowned and never worried had started to pace the floors. He hadn’t looked this anxious since taking the bar exam. “It’s like The Exorcist,” he said one evening. They were standing in the kitchen, and Nicholas was babbling in his chair. “We’ll need a busload of priests to straighten him back out.” Gary tugged at his spiky black hair. He made jokes when he was nervous. It was no different from a twitch, but still it wasn’t right. She lifted Nicholas from his chair and carried him to his crib because she didn’t want him to hear what his daddy was saying. She was mad when she loaded the dishwasher and when she wiped the table clean. It wasn’t until Gary touched her hand that she began to cry.

  They went together to the doctor. Even Gary had to admit it was time. Their pediatrician sent them to a psychiatrist and that doctor sent them to somebody else, and everyplace they went the doctors used the same words. ADHD and expressive vocabulary delays and phonological disorders. They talked about autism, all of them. They talked about its wide spectrum, and these words meant nothing when she saw her sweet boy’s face and how his fingers curled around hers. He wasn’t even three yet, and the specialists took blood samples and family histories and scanned his brain, and it looked like a watercolor against that black screen. It looked like a butterfly caught in a bowl.

  The speech pathologist sent him to a young therapist who frightened him with her bulging blue eyes. There were toy trucks and bouncing balls and stuffed bunnies along the shelves, and he began to cry as soon as the therapist touched him. He wailed like a child being whipped. His arms went stiff again. He arched his back and shouted in his special language, and he didn’t stop not even when Holly came running. He panted against her cheek.

  A professor named Anastas had heard about her boy. His cousin was an X-ray technician who’d listened to Nicholas sing. The professor came to visit just before Christmas and sat in their family room. Holly held Nicholas on her lap. He rocked back and forth and talked in a low low voice. He was in his dream world again. He didn’t even notice this stranger who leaned in close to hear.

  “It’s Greek,” Anastas said. The light reflected against his glasses so Holly couldn’t see his eyes. “It’s Greek the way it must have sounded. He pronounces it with tones.”

  Anastas was too excited to drink the coffee Holly had poured. He stood up and sat back down. He tugged at the threads along his cuffs where his sweater was coming unraveled. It lost its tones over the years, he explained to Holly. Two thousand years ago it must have sounded something like Chinese. That’s how Nicholas was talking. Like someone come from a time machine. He was reciting
inscriptions. He was reading from letters that soldiers wrote. Greek soldiers in Egypt who wrote back to their wives.

  “He’s not reading,” Holly said. “My boy is only two, and he’s just talking. He’s making up sounds in his head.”

  “The soldiers’ letters are down in Tennessee.” Anastas reached for his laptop. He shook his head as if to clear it. “They keep the papyrus in special rooms. The archeologists didn’t know at first. They thought the letters were worthless. They were looking for gold and glass and pottery and not some scribbled notes.” Anastas shook his head again. “They burned the papyrus for that sweet smell. That’s why there’s only a few left. A few when there were thousands.”

  “We’ve never been down South,” Holly said. “Nicholas was born right here in the Springs.” He was born at Penrose Hospital, and all the nurses said they’d never seen a better baby. Almost nine pounds and his eyes were already clear. They shone like the moon on water.

  Anastas was setting up his recorder. He was opening up his laptop and untangling the cords. “He’s a miracle. And it’s not just Greek I hear. There are other languages, too.”

  “You need to leave,” Holly told him. She pulled Nicholas closer to her chest. “You won’t be recording him today.”

  She wasn’t polite when she held the door. She didn’t take his card. And though she needed to make dinner and the dirty laundry was mounded in front of the machine, she held Nicholas for hours that afternoon. She turned on the lights on the Christmas tree and rocked him until he slept. She sang to him. Sleep, little boy, sleep. Your father’s tending sheep. Your momma’s shaking the tree and all the dreams fall deep. She sang, and his little face went slack. She thought of burning paper, of smoke wisping round, and all the traces those people had left. They’d lingered for two thousand years, and with the strike of a match they were gone. She nuzzled her boy in the crux of his neck. She breathed in his sweet smell.