Amelia Gray: Threats

David’s mother hated the device and refused to dust it. Before she went away, she made a daily case for its move to the basement, where it would be out of sight and less of a general hazard. David’s father tried to sell the table in order to help pay the bills after she left. Finally he moved it, and it remained, almost hidden under a carload of old road atlases, in the basement.

David went down and surveyed the scene a week after his father’s funeral. He saw the lizard tails and the evidence of sagging rot and then closed the door behind him on the way out. He couldn’t bear to gather what he had been looking for, the old organized dental files and contacts that had once been a proof of his value and were becoming the hallmark of his personal depreciation. He liked to look at them in the way that similarly sentimental people liked to look at their own baby pictures and the baby pictures of their parents. When he closed the door to the basement behind him, an old, dry fountain pen fell from over the door frame and rolled into the hallway.

IT WAS EASY to stand in line at the post office. The action required walking for thirty minutes beside the road, but David walked. Three buses passed him. It was a comfort to know that every footstep was possible. Earlier, he had let workers into his house. They arrived with proof of license and an order to clean the stairs. He wasn’t sure who had sent them, but his own presence in the house while they were there made him feel uneasy.

The post office was a low brick building. The handrails that flanked it looked as if they’d been painted blue a thousand years before. Standing beside them meant becoming intimately linked to a moment in history.

Inside, individuals entered their personal information onto slips of paper. A woman smiled at David and pointed at a change-of-address form in front of him. He passed it to her and she accepted it with a slight, half-bowing nod. Everything seemed possible at the post office. The customers brought canisters and tubes and small cubes to the counter, and the men and women behind the counter accepted these objects and affixed them with stamps and stickers indicating their destination and contents, and at that moment they were in America, everyone in that room was in a city in Ohio in a country called America and the packages were in America and they were all a part of that.

David looked for the postal clerk who had wept but could not find him. He thought about how each of the postal clerks had likely wept at some point in time, though he had not witnessed it. When it was his turn at the counter, he produced a piece of paper that he had found in his mailbox.

The clerk accepted and examined the page. “You’ve got to be checking your mail every day,” he said.

David didn’t very much like the idea of speaking, but the man seemed kind in an unsmiling way. “I’m sorry,” David said. “Things got out of hand.”

The man tapped the card once on the counter and began to enter David’s information into his computer. “I’ll need some identification,” he said. David saw flashes of lateral incisor. He handed over his driver’s license.

“You can always come down here and stop your mail,” the man said. “We’ll hang on to it for you.”

“Thank you.”

“No thanks necessary, sir. It’s the duty of the United States Postal Service.” He tapped David’s license on the counter again and slid it across the table. “I’ll fetch your mail.”

He went into the back room and returned with a bundle of junk and bills. A card banded to it bore David’s name. David accepted the gift and felt that it would be possible to survive. It was good to be out of the house.

WHEN HE RETURNED HOME, the workers were still there. They were pulling up carpet on the stairs. They had seemed kind enough when he let them in before, but after he left, they put on hazmat suits and masks and stood on the stairwell, where he had recently spent a concentrated span of time. It had been enough trouble to get around them on the way up the stairs, and David didn’t want to do it again. He sat in the bedroom and smelled its occupied smell. He imagined that the comforter was packed with particles of skin, and stretching out on it made him feel cradled in a hand. He rolled to his side, opened the compartment on the back of the digital clock, and ticked out the battery with his fingernail.

The workers were listening to classic rock from a portable radio. David heard one of them singing along. The music sounded filtered or reversed. Still, it felt good to have some activity in the house. He remembered the sound of his mother announcing breakfast.

He didn’t remember calling the workers, but he did remember letting them into the house. He was glad they were there.

It was hard to leave the bedroom. He heard them calling out to one another over their machines in the stairwell. Their voices came to his ears as a comforting hum. David moved to the floor and sat with his back to the bed.

Eventually they came to speak to him. One of them helped him up and brought him to the stairwell, where he saw that their work was done. The human waste was gone, as was the carpeting. They had cut a clean line in the carpet at the top of the stairs and ripped it all out, removing nails, sanding down what remained. The walls and wood had been cleaned with a solvent. The men had taken the hoods off their hazmat suits, and their faces were ruddy and flushed, suggesting a fine day of accomplishment. He couldn’t understand what they were saying behind all the buzzing, but they seemed pleasant and kind to him, and he nodded. It did register to him that they were speaking in English, but they were saying things he couldn’t follow. One of the men reached out with a gloved hand. David felt confused. He heard a ukulele. The men looked at one another. They seemed very kind.

When they didn’t leave, it occurred to him that they might require some form of payment. He found a set of silverware in a velvet box and gave it to them, smiling. He bowed slightly, the way the woman in the post office had bowed, a gesture of respect.

The men left through the front door. David had been holding the digital clock battery between his cheek and his right maxillary second molar. Once they were gone, he ejected it into his hand. He observed it, whole and unconcealed, with no small amount of satisfaction.

FRANNY had been an aesthetician, specializing in pore extraction and deep chemical peels. She talked infrequently about her job, becoming vague about the details like she was afraid to give away too much. “It’s more complicated than that,” she would say, and change the subject without elaborating.

About a week after the workers took out the carpet on the stairs, five women from the salon came by and offered to cut David’s hair. They wore matching tank tops and salon aprons and arrived unannounced. One of them laid a plastic sheet on the kitchen floor and put a chair from the dining room in the center of it. They had brought clippers and products.

“We can do something about this salt and pepper,” said one, yanking on a fistful of hair. “Update the look a little?”

David felt the paper band stretched around his neck like a cleric’s collar. He thought of ways to politely refuse.

“Let’s keep foils out of it,” said another girl, and David realized that the first girl hadn’t been talking to him before, despite looking at him and speaking to him, and that this was a thing that would continue to happen.

“It’s nice of you all to do this,” David said. “Franny always said you were so generous.” She had never said such a thing about anyone, but he felt it was important to get her involved. A young woman sat on the floor and painted his toenails with clear polish.