David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

She stares at the candle flame as it strains in a current of air. It’s so nakedly obvious that matter’s changing to energy before her eyes that it seems strange people ever thought Einstein was strange. If anything is strange, it’s her husband’s refusing to get rid of his dead mother’s wheelchair. Also strange that there’s just the one candle. This is Holly’s thirty-second birthday; so this lone candle must stand for celebration in the abstract. They’re all looking at her. Right: this is a ceremony. She’s in a ceremony inside a celebration.

She closes her eyes and makes a wish: for her and Seth to stop smoking weed, or at least for her to. Because she’s been having these anxiety things (which is what this is) since around the time Seth started talking about leaving New York and buying a house here in Connecticut. Which just so happened to be right around the time she found herself beginning to ease into having a stupid affair; the only surprise is that she failed to see the connection when she first rested fingertips on Mitchell’s forearm. Well, so now she’s stopped having the affair, and maybe if she stops smoking weed too she’ll eventually get back to normal. She opens her eyes and there’s the candle. Okay, that’s her wish. And it’s possible that wishes actually work — like visualization, which has been shown to work. More clapping as she blows out the candle, then lights come on and the dining room springs back into place.

“So what did you wish for?” says Seth.

“She’s not supposed to tell,” Tenley says.

“ We never had that. That’s fucked up — you just wish to yourself?”

“Come on, everybody had that. I mean, I’m not making this up —God, am I? Whew. Speaking of fucked up, this stuff of yours, Jesus.” It doesn’t escape Holly that her husband and her sister have just said fuck to each other.

“That is amazing shit,” says Tenley’s new boyfriend.

“Actually, I have a wish that’s not secret,” Holly says. “I wish Seth would get rid of that wheelchair before his father gets here.”

“Shazam,” Seth says, and bows from the waist. “Or what’s that thing? Not ‘abracadabra.’ Anyhow. Okay, tomorrow, boom, out she goes. Salvation Army. Hup, hup.” He turns to Tenley. “So there goes your don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy.”

The boyfriend takes a loud breath as if he’s about to say something, then shakes his head.

“Um, why are we all standing up?” says Tenley.

“I think it’s because we’re stoned as pigs,” Seth says. “What the hell does a genie say? This is driving me out of my mind.”

“Well, I’m sitting down,” says Tenley.

“ ‘Your wish is my command,’ ” says the boyfriend.

“Carl, what the fuck are you talking about?” says Tenley. “Oh, right.” She looks at Seth. “Is that the thing?”

Seth cocks his head. “Say again?”

Tenley shakes her head. “Too complicated. Why am I not sitting down?” She sits. Seth and the boyfriend sit. Holly sits, and somebody puts a knife in her hand. She can’t help but picture slicing right across her wrist, but technically it isn’t a thought about suicide: just a thought about something so extreme it would have the power to put a stop to this.

“So you going to cut the cake or what?” says Seth. “You look like you’re ready to go postal over there.” He opens his mouth in a silent scream, raises his fist with an invisible knife. “Okay, who am I? Famous movie.”

“Oh-oh-oh,” says the boyfriend, as if he’s about to come. “ Texas Chainsaw. ”

Tenley looks at him. “You’ve just canceled yourself out.” She turns back to Seth. “Listen, say hi to your dad for me. Not that I know him or anything. But he was great at the wedding. When he was dancing with Holly? Amazing dancer.”

Holly slices down into the cake.

“Yeah. He’s the last of a dying breed.” Seth looks over at Holly. “Smaller piece. Okay, who says that? What movie?”

“ ‘Last of a dying breed’?” says Tenley.

“No, ‘smaller piece.’ ”

“I heard you,” Holly says.

“I’ll give you a hint,” says Seth. “The movie was both a sequel and a prequel, and the actor who—”

“Wait, so what was the other movie?” the boyfriend says.

“If I told you that, I’d be telling you—”

“No, he means the other movie, Seth,” says Holly.

“Yeah, I know, but if—”

“Forget it,” Holly says. “Does anybody want this?”

“I’m lost,” says Tenley.

“Me too,” Seth says. “God, I love the shit out of it.”

After they get Tenley and her boyfriend settled in the guest room— one of the guest rooms — Seth talks her into having one more hit apiece; by now she’s come down enough to think she might not freak out this time. Not only do they still have sex after moving to Connecticut, but it seems to her that Seth actually goes after her more, as if in compensation. She gets into bed; he lights a candle and puts the metal flask of massage oil from the Gap on the nightstand. But when he reaches over, she’s right back in that thing. Shit. He brushes the back of his hand along her left breast, nails scraping the nipple. She can’t get her mind to stop. How weird that she’s been doing this with somebody else. But she’s not anymore, so shouldn’t this now be okay? Seth takes the nipple in his mouth. Holly begins to play with his balls, as she should, but they seem like some primitive carryover the human race could well do without. She senses the wheelchair’s evil presence still down there in the darkened dining room. “You’re going to get rid of the wheelchair, right?” she whispers. “Or put it somewhere?”

Seth stops; her nipple feels cold. “Put it somewhere? Mmm. Be glad to, ah, put it somewhere. Where might she have in mind?” One of Seth’s endearments is speaking to her in the third person. She still hasn’t figured that one out. Yes, she has.

“They can hear you.”

“How?” he says, just as loud. “They’re down the other end of the hall.” True: she forgets how big this house is. “Anyhow, they might learn something.”

“But you’re going to get rid of it, right?”

“Aw. Old Man Wheelchair’s bumming her out.”

“I hate it.”

“Somehow I don’t think this is about the wheelchair,” he says. “Could you keep doing that?” She resumes. “ Yes. But listen, you’re right, he doesn’t need to see it. I’ll bring it up and stick it in the hall closet.”

“I thought you were taking it to the Salvation Army.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I don’t think they’re open.”

“But he’s coming tomorrow.”

“Right, which is why I’m putting it in the closet. You’re not following what I’m saying.” He takes her wrist and moves her hand to the place he likes her to go but won’t ask for. “Listen, do you feel like, maybe, not putting your thing in tonight?”

She pulls her hand away. “I don’t think that would be too smart.”

“I think it might be really smart.”

She rolls away from him onto her back, each hand gripping the opposite shoulder, elbows bent so she must resemble one of those big paperclips. She closes her eyes but has to open them when she starts seeing stuff like screen savers. “I’m too stoned to deal with this now,” she says.

“Would you ever want to talk about it?”

“Not now,” she says.

The wheelchair is called an Everest & Jennings. Holly understands the Everest part— Towering above all other wheelchairs —but why Jennings? It must just be a name. But since she can’t seem to let anything be anymore, she’s made up her mind that Jennings makes her think of journeying. So it would be Forever rest from journeying: her own little formulation. Except the whole idea of a wheelchair is to keep you journeying. As this one kept Seth’s mother journeying her last years on earth. Her husband put her in it and wheeled her places. Even aboard an airplane, to move her to Florida — the state whose very name had once been a snobby joke with them — so he could wheel her out into warm ocean air every day of the year. He’d been a dean at Yale; she’d taught life drawing. After her stroke, he’d had to bathe her and help her when she went to the bathroom. Help meaning “wipe.” Holly saw her only once: three years ago, at the wedding. Seth’s father had wheeled her up the ramp into the church and all the way down front to the end of the first pew; when Holly did her walk down the aisle, she had to step around the wheelchair, and her big stiff skirt brushed against the woman’s motionless arm. Seth’s mother was like a big doll: couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t feed herself. Well, could cry. A continuous whine punctuated by sobs and gasps: when the organ stopped, it filled the silence.