Susan Steinberg - Spectacle - Stories

There was me waiting, counting seconds, staring at the wall.

My mother said good-bye and disconnected first. Then the doctor said good-bye and disconnected. After the doctor disconnected, there was silence, but I said, Hello. I was hoping my brother was still on the line. I wanted to laugh or something. I said hello again, but my brother had disconnected too.

And before I ran downstairs to the massive kitchen that was my kitchen, I sat on the edge of my bed, still holding the phone.

I imagined the doctor arriving home that morning.

I imagined the doctor taking off his scrubs, washing his hands, and climbing into bed with his beautiful wife.

I imagined him easing into his wife’s heat, the way I once eased into my ex’s heat.

Before we had a sense of what came next.

Before we had a sense that something came next.

Firefighting.

Warrensburg, Missouri.

Me in my bed eating cold lo mein.

Me eating egg rolls, watching TV.

You have to trust me.

There was no grand scheme.

I would quit my job. I would leave that place. I would cross the state line. I would cross another. I would cross another.

And here I am now in a different state.

There is the man digging through the trash.

There is the gem buried in the mess.

Listen. It was not a shit hole.

It was not that.

Call it what you will, but there were cowboys there, for God’s sake, standing on corners in the biggest hats you have ever seen.

There were tornadoes that would send you into space.

There were spiders that would necrotize your ass.

There was a sky turning light. The same sky as everywhere turning light.

Call it what you will, but there I was, same as you were, under that sky.

There I was, just some poor soul. Same as you.

When the plane crashed, I was all messed up. I was all kinds of all messed up. Because first we’d had drinks. Next we’d smoked. There were pills we’d taken from a bowl on the floor. The pills all did their different things. We liked not knowing what they would do. It didn’t matter which way we went.

When the plane crashed, I was on a couch. I was in this place, Club Midnight. It was where we went when it got too late. Or there was nowhere else to go. A guy was sitting next to me. He was a guy I knew from school. He was a guy I hardly knew. It didn’t matter that he was there. It was always a lot of us sitting there drinking. A lot of us always were sitting around.

There’s nothing to say about the guy. This is not the place for adjectives. I wasn’t even looking at him. The pills from the bowl had spilled to the floor. And no one was rushing to pick them up. I made no move to pick them up. I just sat there thinking they’d get crushed. I was waiting for the boot that would come to crush them. I was thinking of the sound the boot would make. I was thinking of the person attached to the boot. The beautiful person we all could blame.

At first the guy wasn’t looking at me. But when the plane was falling from the sky, I felt him writing on my arm. And before he could finish what he was writing, I said, Stop.

I don’t know how to tell the next part. It was like I knew a plane had crashed. Even though I was all messed up. Even though I was thousands of miles from the plane. It was like I had a premonition. Or I felt a reverberation. I mean I felt a crash push through my skin. Not from his pen. Not what you think. It was more like air pushing through. Or a song pushing through. It was more just like a ghost.

Winter was creeping in again. The holidays, again. I would not be doing much that year. The same thing I did every year. Going to my father’s house. Not eating what my father made. Staring at my father across the table staring at me. Glaring across the table because he never let me do a thing. My father, who thought he’d saved my life.

The other kids all studied abroad. They came back home all better than me. They knew things I didn’t know. There were lamp-lit roads they talked about. There were churches made of stone. There were whores in windows lit by red lights. I could see myself walking the lamp-lit roads. I could see myself small in a hollow church. I would be too far for my father to find. But my father said no to study abroad. You’re not ready, he said. You don’t study, he said.

It wasn’t technically a crash. It was technically an explosion. It was technically a fireball. Technically, it was a lot of things. What I mean is, it was meant.

It then took just the sound of a plane. Or a trail of smoke. Or a shadow moving fast and wide across grass. And the terrible way my brain worked. The way my brain said duck. And fast. And now. And I would lie in the snow. I would lie under trees. I would wait for the plane to pass overhead. Or for the smoke to disappear. Or for my brain to tell me, Get up. Or for the plane to crash.

I knew the chance of a crash was small. A plane would not likely drop from the sky. I would not likely be crushed on the ground. It was all of it unlikely. And I knew that it wasn’t just planes. That cars could swerve. That trains could derail. I’d once seen a bus that had gone off the road. It was upside down in a field. But this didn’t make me afraid of buses. Because there was something different about crashing on land. I mean it was different from crashing to land.

As a kid I wanted to walk a tightrope. I’d seen a circus on TV. I’d watched it with my father. I liked the tightrope walker most. I liked the thin stick he held on to. And how he stared ahead to the other side. And how he would make it clear to that other side. Or how, perhaps, he would not.

There were photos all over of the crash. It’s not enough to say raining metal. It’s not enough to say twisted metal. Or that the people on the ground were stuck in the storm. Or that I wasn’t there, of course, in the storm. Because I was thousands of miles away, of course. I was sitting around Club Midnight. And pills were spilled out onto the floor. And a guy was writing on my arm. He wrote the first four letters of my name. I imagine he planned to write the fifth. But I said, Stop.

There was a service in a church. I went because it was right to go. I went because everyone went. Before the service, we stood outside. Someone had something to smoke. Someone else had pills. We went to the service all messed up. I was too messed up to feel a thing. It wasn’t a big deal, being messed up. The whole world was a mess.

Then were the times lying flat in the snow. It didn’t make sense, my lying flat. I know this now. It would not have saved me, lying flat, from a storm of metal crashing.

To my friends I said, I’m fine. I said, I am. But they looked at me like, You’re not fine. But I am, I said. Because I was, I thought. Because I didn’t know her well enough to be anything other than fine.

The guy was laughing at me. I was too messed up to laugh. My tongue felt covered in fur. Clouds had formed, and I fell into them, one by one. I said, My tongue. I said, My God. I didn’t mean to say this. I didn’t mean to say anything. I didn’t want a conversation. It had started to snow, and I wanted to go outside. Because the snow just seemed like more than snow. It was something about the light. I didn’t know what it was. But the guy said, Your tongue, and laughed again. And then I was falling into him. And if I must use an adjective, right now, right here, I would use beautiful.

I know I shouldn’t have been driving. The roads were a mess. Murder, my father would have said. Murder, every time it snowed. But there I was, rising from the couch. There I was, surrounded by clouds. Next I was in the driver’s seat. And there he was beside me. And there were the holiday lights in windows. And the lit-up trees in windows. And the reflection of my car. And the reflection of us inside the car. And there was my building. There were the stairs leading to my door.