Joanna Ruocco: Dan

“No,” said Melba, slowly.

“Once again you’ve gotten the long end of the stick, Melba,” said Mark Rand. “Someday you may accumulate enough of those sticks to build yourself a shelter, and then you’ll be done with landlords altogether. Until then may every clemency attend your slumbers in the open fields of Dan.”

Melba returned the receiver softly to its cradle. Don Pond started, as though until hearing that click, he’d been so absorbed in his reflections he’d quite forgotten that Melba had been engaged in a heated telephone conversation mere inches to his left. He blinked at the telephone.

“Nice phone call?” he asked.

“Nice enough,” said Melba. “I can’t go home though.” She spread out her arms, palms slightly upraised. The gesture expressed a sentiment similar to that expressed by a shrug. It expressed the same sentiment, but amplified to a power of 1.5.

“I have nowhere to go,” said Melba.

“It’s a problem in small towns,” said Don Pond, sympathetically. “The only way to leave is to go nowhere. But that takes a certain type of resolve.”

“Like Principal Benjamin,” said Melba. “He didn’t go anywhere anyone knows of, and so he’s just gone.”

“You can’t get over him, can you?” asked Don Pond, sadly. “He’s always been there between us. In a way, he’s the least gone man in Dan. He looms larger than life every time I meet your eyes.”

Melba slid her eyes as quickly as she could from the vicinity of Don Pond’s. She was unemployed and homeless and had failed who knows how many tests. She could not now meet the eyes of a man who moped and spoke of looming.

“Let’s not meet eyes,” said Melba. “I’m too grim and I wouldn’t want to curse you inadvertently. Don’t lead me by the hand either. If you start walking I can follow you easily enough. The terrain isn’t rough.”

“Fine,” said Don Pond curtly.

“The floor slopes,” he said over his shoulder, continuing down the corridor.

Melba murmured something indistinct and assenting. They entered a small kitchen. A man was standing at the kitchen stove stirring a large pot. He turned when they entered. The man’s coloring was not particularly dark but he gave the impression of darkness, most likely due to his crowded features, and the long, dark, well-tailored coat he wore even though kitchen work is not cooling. Melba felt that the heat stifled, but the man breathed lightly and his skin bore no sheen. The kitchen smelled powerfully of vinegar and damp grains.

“Dinner is a surprise,” said the man, holding out his wooden spoon to prevent their approach.

Don Pond nodded his small head vigorously.

“We’re passing through, Helmut,” he said. “We absolutely will not peer.” To Melba he said in a loud whisper: “It’s always entertaining to pass by a European. They take offense at the least thing and want to duel you with swords or pistols or else they burst into storming sobs or give you ominous counsel and if they’re feeling expansive they present you with oddments from a storied cigar box of oddments which they claim to have taken with them on many journeys by boat.”

“What kind of oddments?” whispered Melba dutifully.

“Sheep vertebra, digestive biscuits, potsherds, triangular coins,” said Don Pond, waving his hand vaguely to indicate “and so on” or “things of that nature.”

“Ah,” said Melba. The man had returned his attention to the pot on the stove.

“He’s really from another country?” asked Melba.

“That’s what we assume,” said Don Pond. “Dan has its homegrown Europeans to be sure, but Helmut Pirm doesn’t mix with them. He says they speak gibberish and if you allow them to take your coat they fill the pockets with mothballs.”

“I’ve seen his mansard,” said Melba. “Does he make good dinners?”

“He makes surprising dinners,” said Don Pond. “Watch me sidle to that door then do the same.” Don Pond sidled to the door. Helmut Pirm stirred his pot. Melba tried not to investigate Helmut Pirm or his vicinity as she sidled after Don Pond but she noticed that he had lined up a row of spices and a bird on the counter.

She stopped behind Don Pond who had stopped before the door. The door opened inward and Don Pond stepped back and sideways, as though he too were a door, a door that opened outward. He gestured Melba through the door and she went through it, feeling uncomfortably aware that she had passed through the Don Pond door to reach the kitchen door — the second door, Melba said to herself.

The room she had entered was narrow, no windows, walls of recessed shelves bearing boxes, bottles, sacks, and jars of foodstuffs rising to the low ceiling. Across from the door, at the other end of the room, there was a wooden ladder. Don Pond was crowding her forward so that he could shut the kitchen door, the second door, behind them. The room was so small that Melba was soon pressed against the ladder. She put her foot on the first rung. From the second rung, she could press up on the hatch in the ceiling. She pressed up and began to climb through the hatch. Her head and shoulders emerged into the amber air of the upper story, and she saw the pant legs of many men. Tilting her head, she saw entire men, ranged all about.

“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. A few of the men glanced over but most took no notice. A fair number of them were grouped together with their backs to the hatch, studying a wall. Melba squinted. There was an image on the wall, dots and lines either drawn across its dull surface or drawn upon a large sheet of wheat-pasted paper, but as Melba peered, ascending a rung on the ladder and craning her neck to get a better vantage from her position, halfway out of the hatch, she realized the dots and lines were not drawn at all. They were dimensional. She saw that there were pins in the wall, dozens of pins, some long, protruding far from the wall’s surface, shanks stacked with beads, others short, more like tacks, their wider, flattened tops covered in plaid cloth. Colored strings stretched from pin to pin, although some of the strings might well have been wire, Melba thought, heated piano wire, or perhaps fishing line, so often purposed for other things, Zeno Zuzzo had once explained, coiling the line from wrist to wrist, such as the looping of a garrote, and the pins and strings created a vast web, with, it seemed, infinite hubs, radii, spirals, and frames, and Melba fixed her gaze, straining to look through the wall, wondering if a picture might resolve in the foreground, rising out of the hopelessly irregular design. Her eyes watered and she blinked. Her eyes felt spent, limp, and the water continued to drip from the incontinent ducts.

Suddenly, a man broke from the group. He stepped closer to the wall, pressed the point of a black pin against it, and sank the shank deeply with three practiced blows of a lozenge-shaped eraser. He stepped back and another man sprang to take his place, wrapping the end of the pin again and again with gold embroidery floss. Melba watched, curious as to what the man would do with the other end of the floss: attach it to another pin presumably, but which?

She felt a knocking on her calves. Don Pond wanted to ascend the ladder and Melba remained half in and half out, stalled between rooms. She tried to whisper down the hatch, “I believe it’s some kind of club, Don. A private men’s club. I’m not a member. I don’t think I should …” but the knocking on her calves sped up and began to sting, even through her skirts. Sighing, Melba struggled through the hatch, bracing herself with her arms then dragging up her knees.

A moment later Don Pond shot up through the hatch. Melba hung back as Don Pond circulated. She stood, fidgeting, a few paces from the open hatch and its lid, a hinged square of raw wood. She stepped forward once to toe the lid over, intending to close the hatch and reseal the space, feeling guiltily as though, by leaving the hatch open, she was allowing a kind of leak to persist, a leak which might eventually deflate the private men’s club altogether, so that the room and everything in it shriveled. She lifted the lid an inch with her toe then reconsidered. Was it better not to meddle? She stepped back, trying to detect in the room and in the men any sign that in fact the club was leaking, looking about for increasing flaccidity, listening for a high whine.