Amelia Gray - Threats

Franny, pressing her lips together, let out a stifled laugh that startled them both. She set down her wineglass and covered her mouth with both hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, snorting. Her face reddened to the ears. “I’m sorry, that’s not funny. I’m sorry. I think you’re right.”

He watched her red ears and felt a lightness in his chest that he hadn’t felt since they were dating. From then on, he made a small special effort to compare his old profession to hers. It was so good to see her laugh that he didn’t mind. Sometimes she would lean over and hold his hand or even kiss him between peals of laughter. He saved the comparison for special occasions, such as their anniversary.

THERE WERE TWO UPSETTING THINGS about the new threat. One item of concern rested in the body of David’s father, the other in the body of his mother.

When David and Franny were in their fifth year of marriage, they moved in with his father. This meant moving into David’s childhood home, a dark-wooded, many-roomed house on the old side of town. David and Franny had spent the years prior renting their own apartment, but when his father needed help walking from kitchen to basement and eventually from bedroom to bathroom, David found himself spending nights on the sag-springed bed in his first bedroom, and then nights plus weekends, and finally all of the time. He returned to his wife and their apartment, where the landlord wouldn’t allow them to put nails in the walls. Their picture frames leaned against the walls from their permanent spots on the floor.

David had spent their savings first paying down the debt of his mother’s care, then fighting his malpractice case in court. Without his income, it seemed unlikely that they would be able to hire a home nurse. Franny and David began to consider the monthly expenses they could save by giving up the apartment. Franny mentioned wanting some repairs on the car to fix the heater before winter. The decision to move evolved quickly and came with other benefits. The question of having children was resolved by the presence of David’s father, a strange older child, with his stubbed toes and occasional tears and oversize diapers. David’s father called them “incontinence products” in the rare instances he mentioned them, saying, “If you are going to the store, I require one box of incontinence products.”

The years had worn on the details of the house. Photographs turned yellow and then brown. Upholstered fabric began to show its threads. Spoiled food grew a bacterial fuzz on the dishes piled in the sink. Before he took Franny over to see the place for the first time, David had tried cleaning. He ran three loads of dishes and swept the downstairs and vacuumed the upstairs and dusted picture frames and unscrewed burned-out lightbulbs, wrapping them in newspaper before throwing them away. Franny declared she liked the house and helped him haul bags of garbage out to the curb. David’s father watched her warily from his chair. “A busy woman has a plan,” he said. In the basement, David showed her the marks on the wall that signified his increasing height, and that of his sister, who was gone before they could make her third mark. Franny asked for the history of the home before David’s family had moved in, but he didn’t know it. The property was old enough to have a carriage house and a farmer’s fence, but it was all in extensive disrepair and offered more nuisance than charm.

It was hard for David to remember how old he was exactly when he and Franny rented a truck and moved in over the course of an afternoon, but he always had a problem with his memory. In fact, he had trouble remembering basic details about his parents, such as their birthdays. He had to go to the drawer by the kitchen door and dig out their old driver’s licenses to recall.

David’s father sat in his rose-colored recliner and held his journals on his lap long after his vision had regressed to the point of near blindness. To him, living at home meant remaining stubbornly comfortable long after the actual comforts had vanished. After his wife left, David’s father had spent many years sitting in his chair. The chair cultivated his scent. The man might read the paper or a book, but more and more often he sat with his hands circled underneath his stomach, looking out the window or more likely looking at the window itself, considering its construction, trying to remember the last time he had had it replaced, how much it had cost at the time, and the conversion of those funds into a modern-day equivalent. He suspected that the window was as few as fifteen and as many as twenty years old. Then he thought at length of the new technologies — those of which he was aware, such as three-paned glass, and those he could only speculate about, such as four-paned glass. He considered the cost of such advanced technology and the resultant energy savings. “A window is a life which presents a life,” he said. “A timeline itself, designed to witness an exterior and interior timeline.” Thinking in this way, David’s father could spend a week in his chair.

In the home for women, David’s mother grew happily old. Her room featured a small television mounted in the top corner. She had herself wheeled out to a brightly lit meeting area in the center every morning. Each day, her attendants heard her speaking numbers. At night they wheeled her back to her bedroom, where she slowly changed into her pajamas, climbed into bed, and covered herself with a thin blanket. It was as warm as an incubator in the home for women. She often dreamed of herself as a chicken hatching from an egg.

DAVID’S FATHER had been prone to axiom. “Weight is the most important force in your life,” he would say, upside down in his inversion machine. David’s mother was cooking dinner in the other room, dumping pasta into the strainer, broccoli onto the pasta. “Everything is affected. Everyone succumbs.”

His mother tended to make a remark after such statements, but David couldn’t remember what she said. Once she was gone, David and his father ate a lot more toast. David’s father would regularly make a meal of five pieces of toast. He ate his own toast dry and smeared grape jelly on a single slice for his son. During one such meal he set down the jelly knife, plucked an eyelash off David’s cheek, and held it before the boy’s face. “You have more intelligence in this eyelash,” he said.

“Than what?” David asked, but his father had already left the room, toast in hand.

The man stored pens all over the house. They were taped under desks and tucked over doorframes. He kept them around so he could write down particularly succinct pieces of wisdom or pay the bills while he was taking a bath. He had worked as an accountant and was often writing figures down both sides of a page. Despite never holding a job for more than a few months, he liked to stay informed and involved, to engage his mind.

He valued the knowledge that he gathered during his vast stretches of private time. He liked to make a daily report of the way he spent his hours. He might divide the day into time spent eating toast, sitting in the bathroom, hanging upside down in his inverter, or sitting in his chair, down to the half minute.

After his father died, David read the man’s notebooks. There were hundreds of them, lined up carefully on a shelf in the workroom. On the front page of each notebook was written LIVE WITH MEANING in the man’s careful block print. It was full of numbers and shorthand, symbols that did not correspond to anything David understood. Columns stretched down the page, unknown symbols on each side. There was a drawing of a window, including what looked like dimensions translated into concentric circles. Behind the line of notebooks David found a box of red pens.