Tim Horvath - Understories

Me, I write. Though I’ve made this rind of a building my base for the past few weeks, I’ll move again, as I always have. I don’t sleep in the same place for long. And one day, maybe I’ll slip across the border. Maybe I’m Maz, or maybe I’ve just studied his columns long enough to have usurped his name and style as my best bets for survival. For now, I bide my time and vie with the four- and three-legged for scraps. I still can’t bring myself to talk about the food that’s in front of me, no matter how simple and crumblike it is. Instead, I walk the length of an endless table of memory on which reside the imprints of the thousands of meals I’ve savored, each having done its turn on my tongue and fading to a spectral place, flaring up momentarily in words and then passing briefly, if I’ve done my job, to your own buds. These memories — more, even, than my city, my writing hand, my life, even my sense of taste itself — are what I fear losing most.

SIR PLAYALOT! reads the long sign across the front. It is a cold, rainy Wednesday. This is where Pete brings her on cold, rainy Wednesdays — you might say that this is The Place to Be on Wednesdays of a chilly, precipitation-ridden disposition. His weekday with Sasha, and every other weekend. Not the most conventional custody arrangement, not that Pete has researched the History of Custody from top to bottom, but because Bethany fought for a teaching schedule where all of her classes clump on Wednesday and had to go all high noon with the dean about it and him working out of the apartment these days when he works at all, he figures it’s the best arrangement. So here they are.

Sasha disappears into the series of semitranslucent tubes that form the “crawlbyrinth” that must cover about a quarter of the surface area of the place. He exhales — it’s been a long morning, rain never a boon to parenting. It feels like the gutters are funneling through him. He turns toward the woman nearby, who is watching what must be her son. The boy is Asian and she not evidently so. On a chalkboard the boy’s drawn a dragon that you can actually tell is a dragon, and he is young enough that this is noteworthy, unless the dragon was there to begin with and he is just coloring over it, in which case his achievement is far more modest. Either way she is dirty blond and wears formfitting jeans and a tight black petticoat, and he senses that she wouldn’t mind talking to him, either. They have not actually smiled at each other but have presmiled.

Her son inverts the chalk and begins a series of stabs at the dragon, yelling, “Die! Die!”

“Hanh, Hanh,” she calls out — he sees the kid’s tagged his name in giant letters next to the dragon — and she shoots Pete a look which he interprets as “Respect me in spite of and possibly a bit more for my son’s crazed rambunctious streak?” And he tries to shrug and nod in a way that conveys “Hey, just us parents in here, all figuring out this parent thing together.” Since becoming a dad he talks less and gestures more, and he wonders if this is the case for all parents, too fatigued to form words but able to speak volumes in a shrug, a twitch.

Rain pummels the roof, concentrating, it would seem, directly above his head. With weather this grim and his apartment’s disarray, it was a no-brainer to come here after he swung by to get Sasha at half-day kindergarten. Her second week — everything still so new, the hermit crab still known as “the crab.”

It’s irksome that Sir Playalot! doesn’t have more to offer. Months ago, they exhausted the snail slide, the light-up sound-off hopscotch courts, the crawlbyrinth, the mini-mini golf course, the plastic castle, the climbing web forged from high-tech materials (from a local company — Pete recognizes their suspension bridge logo; he knows a guy that works there) with just enough give so that they can dangle without drooping such that Pete himself clambered up and would’ve stayed on if Sasha hadn’t started screaming because her braids, the ones her mother’d tied that morning, were coming, in the unconscionable way of things done distractedly, undone. Like he’d minored in the braidal arts.

If Pete were in charge of Sir Playalot! he’d do things just a tad different.

He says as much to Hanh’s mommy, what the hell. Not solely because he sees that her T-shirt exposes if not her actual nipples, then at the very least a brassiere that implies nipples in the sense that boarded-up windows in a building strongly indicate poverty or the aftermath of a fire.

“Oh yeah?” She laughs. “What exactly would you do?” Her tone — part conspiracy, part challenge — feels like a gift.

“Do you want the short list or the long one?”

He glances toward the register, making sure that Tru, the irrepressible Trudy Renfro, won’t hear him. He doesn’t want to impugn either her business or her humanity. No doubt she opened the place partly out of the need to put food on her own table, a motive with which Pete can wholly identify, and partly because she loves kids and parents and knows that in this community their options are limited, have been since the toxic glaze was found slathered onto wood at the playground, glaze that, however pretty it made the wood — and make no mistake, this was a playground that made out-of-towners slam their brakes, risking the minor fender bender for the prospect of giving their kids the opportunity to hone their playing muscles there — was leaching onto children’s bodies as they were sliding and monkey-barring and playing video game tag. To this day, one could forgive but not forget the local headline, a single glaring insult-to-injury typo: leeching. The playground, after sucking bone-dry a bond issue that’d already had neighbors nearly in fisticuffs, remained fenced off. Thank goodness Tru had cut the ribbon on Sir Playalot! just a month later, rushing in to fill the void.

What would he do differently?

Better yet, what would Angus do differently? His brother would look at a place like this like a shark set loose in a shad tank.

“For starters, I’d rename the place Runaroundandscreamalot! I mean, look around.” It’s what he always calls it with Sasha — not like he came up with that on the spot or anything.

But she smiles, so he rolls with it. “And that castle? A little bland, wouldn’t you say?”

“How would you spruce it up?”

Spruce —what a lovely word, all gum and old-growth forest. “Okay,” he muses, trying not to betray how much thought he’s given it already, that since the first time he came here that it was no longer an adult video shop, he’s sort of been redesigning it in his mind like “Sim City,” one of the exercises Angus has taught him to keep his mind sharp. “How about a moat? One filled with little balls or something squishy you could dip your feet into. Or keep it simple — water. And a cave of some kind. Who doesn’t love a cave? With stalagmites, stalactites, and perhaps some Paleolithic paint so that Hanh”—he thumbs toward the lad as if he’s known him since utero—“can throw up his best bison.” What else? “A zip line, maybe just a small one that goes from here to — oh, you go deal with that.”

Hanh has seized cardboard bricks from a tearful blond girl. Mom materializes at Hanh’s side, laying hands on the bricks and efficiently guiding them back to their rightful owner. She choreographs an apology from Hanh and then directs her own to the girl’s mother in a manner so unnervingly familiar to Pete that it reminds him he’d better check on Sasha.

The crawlbyrinth looks kind of like a greenhouse in which human children are being cultivated. It is not quite big enough to get fully lost in. When he and Bethany were still married, he’d been in a corn maze with her and three-year-old Sasha, and they’d gotten completely disoriented. You think corn is wholesome and don’t think about getting seriously lost, the same way you don’t think about corn syrup as pulverizing the liver unless you find yourself listening to NPR a whole lot. Unless NPR becomes your best pal-o. Remembering that maze, he recalls Sasha starting to stamp and grimace, and his growing certainty that they weren’t anywhere near the exit, and how it appeared to repeat itself like low-budget animation, the corn starting to look ominous and spiky. Thankfully with the crawlbyrinth you can see in and out, which is nice, but you still have to figure out which tube goes from A to B, and it’s not like he can go and rescue her without a great deal of contortionism, and he’s not sure Tru would be A-OK with him traipsing atop the contraption. Luckily, he spots Sasha from the edge, but less luckily, she is chasing some boy, who looks like he is past the enjoyment stage of their tête-à-tête.