Joanna Ruocco: Dan

The hatch had not opened into the middle of the room. It had opened into the middle of the bottom right square of the room, if the room could be thought of as a four-square court, with the men studying the wall occupying the top left square. Melba suspected that the kitchen was beneath the bottom left square of the room. She sniffed and smelled no vinegar. The air was dry and tangy. Everywhere she looked there were men: men pacing, men standing, men sitting, men crouching, men lying on their backs, men lying on their stomachs, men lying on their sides. Melba swallowed, hesitant to seem as though she studied these men. She cast about for objects upon which to drop her gaze. Everyone knew that men in private men’s clubs preferred to protect their identities.

And here was Melba Zuzzo, thought Melba Zuzzo, self-accusation and self-pity warring within her, here she was, standing uninvited in the middle of one quarter of a private men’s club, identifying men left and right! She tried to blot out the names before they registered in her mind, but she realized she was moving her lips, shaping the names with her mouth. Bert Bus. Hal Drake. Grady Help. Seton Holmes. She clapped a hand over her mouth. She would never have put herself in this position intentionally.

Damn Don Pond, she thought.

“This must be a faux-pas!” she burst out. “And it’s your fault Don Pond!”

The men nearest by, those standing in a line that described the top of Melba’s square, brushing the shoulders of each other’s sports jackets with tiny brushes, all turned their heads to look in her direction. Don Pond, charging over from the top right square, pushed through the line of men and marched right up to Melba, who sagged at his approach.

“Oh, now I’ve done it,” she said miserably. “I’ve identified you. I shouted ‘Don Pond!’ for all to hear, and you probably use a different name in this context, like Shorty or Fats Fish. I’m no good up here. I’ll wreck everything. I don’t know why you brought me.”

Melba’s nose burned and she dug her nails into her palms. She realized that, in her sagging, she had allowed her neck to wilt and her head hung lower than she’d thought possible. It hung heavily and her neck offered no resistance. Her head swung slightly as it sank and sank. The carpet filled her field of vision. It was a dull carpet, institutional beige, designed for moderate to heavy traffic, new or recently cleaned, nylon, no off-gas, utterly inert. Melba felt as though she were executing the slowest swan dive in the world. She was diving into the carpet. She had penetrated deep inside the carpet. The fibers twisted around her this way and that. She had come too close; she could no longer see the pattern of the weave. Its curves formed the dimensional space in which she bobbed, weightless.

Matter has but one pattern, thought Melba, rotating, seeing the fibers branch and branch again, those branches branching off, the shapes they composed creating a whole that was the same shape as every part.

The subdivisions are infinite, thought Melba. Infinite and identical. The distributions of fibers in the carpet, of cells in her body, of bodies in the room, of rooms in the house, and of houses in Dan — they were indistinguishable, each from the others. At a certain range, Dan wasn’t any different from the mountains that surrounded it or from the craters on the moon. Maybe, without difference to separate one thing from the other, distances vanished. She could be anywhere, with anyone. She could walk around inside herself and there would be sacks of dark apples, culverts, sudden rises and muddy declivities, swamps and meres and woods and rotted leaves to nestle into, mosses that would sing her to sleep. She could continue sinking, headfirst, diving slowly down onto the carpet. She could roll onto her back on the carpet. She could lie quietly.

“Maybe I’m over-tired,” she murmured, stiffening her neck, striving to right herself. Turgor pressure? Was that what she needed?

“I wonder if all these men drink tea or if there’s coffee …”

“Coffee’s in the kitchen, Melba,” said Don Pond. He had reached her side. No longer charging, he no longer seemed bullish. He didn’t look in the least likely to stamp and snort and toss her broken body high in the air. He displayed the chumminess of a man enjoying himself in the midst of men and seemed untroubled by Melba’s rash, nominating shout. His chumminess only deepened as he addressed her. “Poor Melba! You missed your chance. Europeans make small coffee so I’m not surprised you didn’t see it!” He laughed. “The coffee was right there. You walked right past it.”

Melba tried to smile.

“I know I was accusing just now,” she said. “I felt gawky and out of place, but not anymore. This is a wonderful club, Don.”

“Wonderful? I don’t know about that,” said Don Pond. “But men have to congregate somewhere. We wouldn’t be men if we were dispersed, if we were each of us all by himself. Do you recognize those potted plants? Or those magazines?”

“It’s been a long time,” said Melba. “But the whole place, the men, plants, magazines, chairs, carpet, overhead lights, it does seem familiar. It reminds me of Dr. Buck’s waiting room.”

“A long time you say? Doesn’t it always feel like a long time in waiting rooms!” Don Pond’s enjoyment was only increasing. He rubbed his pale hands together and they squeaked.

“Is Randal Hans here?” Melba allowed herself to scan the men in the bottom left square of the room, the men who sat in broad low chairs, leafing through magazines, or using shoe horns to remove their boots, settling in to wait with stocking feet. She doubted Randal Hans would be among the more vigorous men, the men clustered at the wall with their pins and spools and packets, using tiny rulers to measure angles, consulting pocket notebooks then pointing at some pin from which several dozen strings radiated, crying out in protest, but neither did she see him among the men seated in chairs. She looked over the heads of these seated men, looked intently at those men sticking and wrapping and crying out at the wall. Suddenly Ned Hat spun away from the wall and glared at her, his mouth bristling with pins.

“A bald cap,” supplied Don Pond, guessing the source of Melba’s confusion. “This morning. He was wearing a rubber bald cap.”

Melba nodded. Ned Hat’s hair did not brush his shoulders, but it curved away from his scalp in a globe the bottom curves of which turned inward to brush, on either side, against his jaw. She would have been hard-pressed to believe he could have managed to grow such hair since she’d seen him last, although it seemed ages since she’d stared up at the bald, frothing man in the window.

Of course, time moves differently when considered from the point of view of hair. Time is slower for hair and yields to a progress narrative — the hair extruding in lengthening shafts — until each hair reaches its maximum length and progress stops. But what about curly hair? Hair that coils around and around? Melba strained, thinking. If she could consider time from the perspective of her hair, which was dead, a waste material, but which would continue to lengthen after she herself was dead …

Think, she whispered, think, think.

“He’s wearing a rubber mask too,” said Don Pond. Melba let her fingers drop from her temples where she had pressed them, turning them rapidly back and forth, like drill bits skipping in stripped screws.

No good, the thinking. She observed Ned Hat.

“A rubber mask? I wouldn’t have been able to tell,” she said.

“No?” said Don Pond. “It’s a rubber mask of Ned Hat’s face. Can’t you tell that’s Ned Hat?”

Melba paused. Ned Hat spat the pins in her direction. His tongue emerged to prod his lips then retracted. He whipped a pocket notebook from inside his sports coat and spun back to face the wall, pointing, crying out in protest.