Thomas Pierce - Hall of Small Mammals - Stories

He cannot be the real Alan Gass.

Walker feels idiotic for coming and tries to think of the best way to extricate himself from the situation as quickly as possible. The man wears a starched red shirt with pearl buttons tucked tightly into a pair of gray corduroys despite the summer heat. He is a small man, shorter than Walker. His eyes are gray, almost translucent.

“I think I’ve got the wrong Alan Gass,” Walker says. “But just in case, do you know a Claire?”

Alan licks his bottom lip. He says that he knew a Claire once, way back in middle school, but he hasn’t heard from her in decades. So, no, currently he does not know any Claires.

“That’s all right. Like I said, wrong Alan Gass. I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.” Walker turns to leave.

“Before you go,” Alan says, “now that you’re up here, could I get your help with something right quick? I got a kid coming later who’s supposed to help me, but he’s not the most reliable.”

Walker nods and asks what Alan needs from him. They go into the kitchen. The refrigerator has been pulled away from the wall and unplugged, the door ajar. A towel dropped across the floor absorbs the water as it drips from the defrosting freezer.

“I’m selling it,” Alan says. “Got a good price for it. Only catch is that I gotta have it downstairs by noon.”

Walker has never moved a fridge, but he knows the job will not be easy. Looking at the refrigerator, he’s not even certain that it will fit through the front door. And then there’s the matter of the staircase. But Alan says he has a dolly for that. He promises that it won’t take long. He’ll even throw in a few home-brewed beers as a thank-you. Walker says that won’t be necessary. He rolls up his sleeves. He’s ready to do this. Alan goes into a back room and returns wearing a back brace.

“Old injury,” he explains. “You don’t need to worry.”

They tip the fridge backward so that Alan can wedge the dolly underneath. Slowly, they wheel it out of the kitchen. The doorway is tight. The entire wall shakes as the refrigerator passes through the frame.

“So you’re looking for some other Alan Gass, huh?” he asks. “Never really think about there being other Alan Gasses out there.”

Walker nods. The funny part, he says, is that the Alan he’s looking for might not exist.

“Might not exist?” Alan asks.

To his own surprise, Walker tells him everything — about Claire, about the other Alan Gass, about the dreams.

“Huh,” Alan says. “That’s wild.”

They wheel the fridge out the front door of the apartment and then take a break on the landing at the top of the stairs.

“So what if I’d been him? What would you have done?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t plan that far ahead.”

“Pretend I’m him.”

Walker remembers the ghostly man in the Lexus. The white shirt. The blurry face. “I suppose I’d tell him to stay away?”

“But she’s my wife,” Alan says. “I’ve been with her longer than you have. I should be telling you to stay away. I love her and I’m never letting her go.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“You think she loves you like she loves me? She married me. That’s a sacred vow.” Alan smiles. “Whoa, you should see yourself right now. You look like you want to hit me. Is this really bothering you?”

“You’re making me feel a little like he’s the real one and I’m the dream,” Walker says, trying to make himself laugh.

“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re no dream. Look, you want to know my honest opinion? You got nothing to worry about. We all got an Alan Gass,” Alan Gass says. “We all got our fantasies. In high school, my Alan Gass looked a little bit like my Spanish teacher, only she was so… How do you say sexy in Spanish? I forget. She had this shiny dark hair and a little vine tattoo on her back and this amazing accent. I can’t tell you how many times I thought about her late at night alone in bed, if you know what I mean. But she had no blood in her veins, you follow? There was nothing to her. Her skin was made of the same thing they use for movie screens. You can project whatever you want onto someone like that.”

They lean the fridge back toward the stairs on the dolly and slowly lower the wheels down onto the next step. Alan has the dolly handles; Walker is below it, keeping it balanced. They lower it another step, and then another. Walker is sweating. On the next landing, they take another break.

“I wouldn’t care about a fantasy,” Walker says. “Fantasies I understand. But Alan Gass isn’t a fantasy. Fantasies don’t have faults. But he does, and she still loves him. That’s what’s so unnerving.”

They rock the fridge back on the dolly and drop it down another step. Walker counts off the steps as they approach the bottom. Three, two, one. They are in a very small space.

Walker opens the front door with his backside. They try to roll the fridge through, but it’s too wide for the door by almost five inches. Alan can’t believe it. He says he measured the frame. Walker glances at his watch. He has to go soon, he says. He’s already almost an hour late for work. They’re in the middle of a new production, a play that takes place on a cruise ship lost at sea. He needs to be there soon to meet with the costume designer. Alan looks exhausted. He says he understands. Even if he has to take the whole goddamn fridge apart later, they’ll get it through that door one way or another. He tells Walker to wait right there on the stoop. He’s got something for him.

Walker fixes his sleeves and wipes the sweat off his forehead. When Alan returns, he’s holding a small boxy tape deck. He pushes the Eject button and extracts a gray cassette with a thin white sticker across the front. It says I MONICA KILL DEVIL HILLS SPRING BREAK SISTER GODDESS, but that is scratched out. Below that, it says ZZZZZZZZZ.

“This is going to save you,” Alan says.

“An old mixtape?”

“Ever heard of sleep suggestion? I audited a class at the university a few years back and made a tape to listen to while I slept at night. Don’t laugh. It really did the trick. You can have this. I think it needs D batteries. Press this button, and you can record. Create your own tape. Tell her she’s married to you, not Alan. Tell her whatever you want. Once she’s asleep, press Play. Few weeks of this, you’ll never hear another word about this marriage thing.”

The machine is heavy for its size. Walker holds it like a handgun in a paper bag. He tries to give it back, but Alan refuses to take it from him.

• • •

Claire gets some bad news. A lab somewhere in Europe has constructed a black sphere and plans to flood it with something called K-matter. She emails Walker about it at work with a frowny-faced emoticon. If the experiment in Europe works like they think it will, she says, then particles cannot half exist. The researchers will have effectively disproved Daisy Theory.

That night he gets home late and finds Claire already in bed under the covers with her grandmother’s rosary beads. She isn’t religious. He’s never known her to even set foot in a church, but she loved her grandmother. The beads are wrapped so tight around her white palm that they leave small indentations when Walker pries them loose.

“Say they disprove it,” he says. “Where does something go when it stops existing?”

“Where does it go?” she asks. “Nowhere. It doesn’t exist.”

“But nowhere is somewhere.”

“This isn’t where versus somewhere else . This is being versus nonbeing.”