Kathryn Davis - Duplex

Before he got taken away, he’d been a nervous boy. He had trouble sleeping unless his mother read to him. There was the pestering sound of branches on his bedroom window, there were eyes suspended in the rose trellis. At first getting up to pee was more than he could handle, but the physical therapist had a urinal. When he was a boy sometimes he wet the bed.

Now it was the therapist who was reading to him. “Your biography,” she said, jokingly. She flashed him a quick look at the book, which did in fact have his name on the cover. A fairy told a boy that the piece of fabric she cut from the hem of her skirt and gave him as a special present could be stretched to any size imaginable, but that he should never stretch it unless he knew what he wanted to make with it, because if he just started doing it for the fun of it, it would go on stretching and stretching forever. Of course like all fairies she was counting on the fact that the boy would disobey her.

“What kind of a special present is that?” Eddie asked.

“This is not just any world,” his therapist told him. “Haven’t you been listening? It’s thy world. It’s my world. Don’t you remember?” She opened the book to show him a picture of someone dressed in a pale green cloak with a crown of lightning bugs in her hair, sitting in a blue boat being rowed into a dark grotto by a boy wearing a red cap. “I’ve been with you ever since that day, Eddie,” the therapist said, and she tapped him on the chest in the place where the pocket would be if he were wearing a shirt.

“That’s very kind of you,” Eddie said.

“It’s my job,” the therapist told him. “Kindness has nothing to do with it.”

He had been a boy when he was here before, that much was clear. When he came back his mother and father were sitting at the card table in the living room, playing canasta the way they did every night.

“Are you thirsty?” his mother had asked. “There’s some lemonade in the fridge.”

“I’m going to meld,” his father had said, like someone preparing to do something shameful.

Eddie fell asleep and when he woke he was lying in the same bed. The bed was unusually large, or maybe it seemed that way because there was no one else in it with him. For some reason he could see the wall hangings better than he had earlier. They stretched from near the roof all the way to the floor and showed scenes of events from the Great Division — the Descent of the Aquanauts, the Rain of Beads, Space Drift, the Seven Dormant Birds of Winter. The arched window, covered by a curtain, was no longer visible. To Eddie it felt like being inside a tent; he had no idea whether it was day or night, though he thought he could hear chirping sounds, wheels creaking, a voice raised giving directions.

After a while his therapist reappeared to take his temperature. While he was lying there with the thermometer in his mouth she ran her hand through his hair, smoothing it off his forehead but without looking at what she was doing, moving her lips and staring into space like a typist. When he asked her how he was doing she told him he was doing fine. When he asked her when he could go back to playing baseball she laughed.

“Am I going to have to tickle you to get you to laugh, too?” she asked.

“I didn’t think I was being funny,” Eddie said.

“Well, you were,” she said. “You rascal.”

Sometimes she pulled aside the tapestry that showed the Rain of Beads to reveal the console in the wall behind it. The images on all the tapestries were disturbing, but Eddie thought the Rain of Beads was the worst. It was as if you were lying on your back on the ground looking up at the sky at the exact moment the rain began to fall, the weaver having created the illusion of a three-dimensional pyramid of many-colored drops, the bigger drops forming the base of the pyramid, which was coming right at you, and behind them increasingly smaller drops, rising to the very tip of the pyramid, which was also the silver base of the scow.

The therapist would activate the console so Eddie could watch the Rockets. He would lie there and look at the picture — mostly he loved it when the camera showed the ballpark from above, touchingly small and brightly lit, carpeted in bright green grass his teammates jumped around on like fleas. When the camera shifted to show them closer up, swinging at the ball or diving to catch a line drive into center, he was less interested. It was unclear whether his therapist wanted to lift or lower his spirits when she did this — her motives remained a mystery to Eddie, as did her program of physical therapy, which consisted of rubbing first his feet and then his calves and then his thighs and when he was fully aroused, taking him into her mouth.

It seemed like it was always sunny in the ballpark, the stands completely filled with happy cheering fans. The Rockets had adopted a new way of wearing their hair, with razor-straight side parts and triangle-shaped sideburns. Occasionally the picture on the console would switch to show the box where the team owner sat with his wife and their little girl, who had ended up being quite cute despite the way she started out. The owner’s wife looked exactly like Mary, only older.

She was Mary — Eddie knew this because the therapist had made fun of him the first time he mentioned the resemblance. Mary wore a paisley scarf and sunglasses; sometimes she was eating a hot dog, sometimes she was drinking a beer. The little girl seemed unable to sit still. Once Eddie saw the team owner yank the little girl’s arm hard, making her cry out. Then the picture switched back to the field, where one of Eddie’s old teammates was stealing second, and by the time it returned to the box, Mary and the little girl were gone.

But that had been another lifetime, the therapist reminded Eddie whenever he grew melancholy. Another lifetime and not even the same ecosystem.

He had no idea how long he’d been on the disabled list — the DL, as they referred to it. Usually if someone was on the DL long enough it was as if he’d died. At some point Eddie noticed the Rockets stopped having his number printed in commemoration on their sleeves. He had been number 24, in honor of the house where he grew up.

One day he woke to find a large white dog on the bed beside him. It lay facing the foot of the bed, its forepaws extended in front of it sphinx fashion, its mouth open, panting. When Eddie made a move to sit up the dog let out a low musical growl, not exactly threatening but not encouraging either. He could feel the warmth of its body against his own through the sheets; when he moved to get closer it craned its head around and looked him in the eye, meaningfully, the way an animal does when it wants a person to do something.

Eventually the dog jumped from the bed, nudged the door open with its nose, and disappeared. Eddie could hear its toenails clicking down a flight of steps. It wasn’t a real dog — he knew that. It was very old, maybe even a thousand, older than a breastplate of hammered bronze or a virus. With the door open Eddie could see the inside of the stairwell, which was made of stone like his room and had a tall thin window in it showing a slit of cloudy sky. Cautiously he lowered himself to the floor — the bed was quite high, the floor also made of stone.

The stairwell was chilly, the window without a pane. Eddie walked over to it and looked out. He hadn’t left the room since he first arrived; everything he needed, including food and a slop bucket, was brought in while he slept and removed while he slept. “You are barking up the wrong tree,” his therapist informed him tersely the first time he tried thanking her. “I am your physical therapist.” She seemed to be implying that any other activity was far beneath her.