Lorrie Moore - A Gate at the Stairs

“Is this where you go on about desiccated America? Don’t you understand? I agree with you!”

He said nothing.

“You’re not taking flying lessons, I hope!”

He shook his head. “No.”

A roll of toilet paper and two white pills shone from the windowsill near me as I backed away. “What are those?” I said, pointing at the pills. In my chest my heart had gone from the rapid flicking of a playing card on bike spokes to the loud erratic knock of a sneaker in a dryer.

“They are for emergencies. And for cleanliness, obviously. The pills? They’re from Brazilian potatoes — two interests of yours.”

“Really.”

“Potatoes and Brazil.”

“I understood what you meant.” Fear and sorrow flared up simultaneously like fires that put each other out. Feelings of any constructive sort deserted me. “As much as you want this world to end, it can’t. The seeds to everything are being stored, as we speak, in boxes in the permafrost of Norway.”

“Who will find them?”

“People will.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right.”

“You are?” On the other windowsill was a small package of tampons. “Why do you have those?”

“In case of emergencies. Worst-case scenarios: they stanch wounds.”

“Really.”

“When they ask you to name my friends, you will have to say you don’t know, because you don’t know.”

“I don’t know.” Why didn’t I know? “This kind of political and spiritual despair,” I said desperately, recalling something once heard on a Wednesday. “It’s mistaking a small world for a large one and a large one for a small.”

He smiled but he kindly didn’t laugh. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Maybe. But maybe not.” These were the words of a child. But it didn’t mean they were untrue. “Perhaps you are being recruited by a plant. What if you are a victim of a scheme?”

“What if I am the plant,” he said, feigning playfulness. “What if I am the scheme?”

“Listen! The jihadist leaders — they don’t respect outsiders. They think these fervent recruits are all crazy, coming from another country as they do, and they use them and laugh at them.”

“Who told you that?”

“The Donegal don. On a day when you were absent.”

“What?”

“He knows Arabic and collects chatter. That’s what someone told me.”

“He ‘collects chatter’! Listen to you!”

I just stared at him, feeling this was it: that I would never see him again.

“It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing,” he repeated. “It is not a war that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”

It was like Gertrude Stein speaking from inside a burka. I continued to step backwards, and my bare toe hit something sharp, perhaps a tiny carpenter’s nail poking up from the floorboards. In a kind of yoga stance I lifted up my foot, which was bleeding. I squeezed and I could see blood drop darkly to the floor, though nothing was stuck inside. Lifting my foot, however, just seemed to cause it to drip more. There was that roll of toilet paper on the windowsill, and I hobbled over and ripped some off, winding it around my toe.

“Are you OK?” he asked, sounding almost like the sweet boy I knew him to be, deep down, although that part no longer mattered.

“Yeah. It doesn’t hurt,” I said.

“They think I’m part of a cell, but I’m not, I swear. I hope you will always believe that.”

“In the name of Allah — oh, yes, I believe.”

I put my shoes back on.

It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jog and then sprint and then gives up altogether as the train speeds irrevocably off. Except in this case I was all the parts: I was the lover on the platform, I was the lover on the train. And I was also the train.

“In the name of Allah.”

In the name of la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. I took off, out into the street, crying. I ran and ran and never turned around and no one came running after me. I ran past the Muslim Students’ League, a small house not far from Reynaldo’s, painted turquoise and white; a makeshift mosque of some sort, I knew, had been constructed in the back. Reynaldo himself had been part of a team that had helped paint it. At this time of night no one was in or near it at all; at times during the day I had seen it ominously busy. Nothing, I thought, should be busy. All should be slow and sparse. I ran past a block I usually took but that was being ripped up for sewage pipe replacement, and in the middle of the street was a municipal barricade with a sign that said ROAD CLOSED. Beneath it but still on the sign a graffiti artist had sprayed, in black, I love you. In the sky were starry poisons, like the hundred spiders that, throughout a human life span, are said to drop into one’s mouth, while sleeping with a dropped jaw. I ran north and north and north and could perhaps have run all the way to Canada, where, paralyzed with sadness and exhaustion, my arms and fingers would stiffen upward and I would, in one of grief’s mythic transformations, become a maple tree, my sappy tears cooked down to syrup for someone’s flapjacks.

The interesting thing about a wound in the foot was that the pressure of just standing on it, not babying it, stanched the bleeding and healed the thing: Was that a robustly New Age truth or what? ROAD CLOSED I love you. When I got home I stripped naked and climbed into a filling tub, sat waist-deep in water and let loose with deeper weeping. The toilet paper I had wrapped around my toe was shredded and came off in milky wisps and fronds, floating all around in the water, and when I went under completely — to disappear, to clean, to alter my conscious state, whatever that was — the shreds swam toward my head and clung to my hair. When I could hold my breath no longer, I burst back up and saw that the warmth of the bath had caused my toe to start bleeding again, so that bright crimson swirled riotously through the water like life sprung free — though it was really a hello from death. I got out of the bath, wrapped myself in a towel, and then spun and spun, the towel falling away, my wet hair whipping droplets through the room, and I kept whirling until I felt neither death nor life but a kind of dizzying transport, which I was pretty sure wasn’t Sufism, or the radiant depths of my soul lifting from bottomland to lovely storm: it was more like low blood pressure combined with PE — something I’d experienced a lot as a child — a slight separation from the body, to serve as a reminder of what you were.

The clocks were wound forward an hour, and light flew down early and persisted into evening. My sleep was shallow, and the nights were long and full of chiding conversation from people who seemed actually to be in the room. But when I awoke there was no one. The apartment was muggy. The prairie, increasingly, I had noticed, could not hang on to spring. It was as if there were not enough branches to grip it, hills to hold it — it could get little traction, really, and the humid heat of summer slid right in. Soon the chiding conversation of hovering people was replaced with a feeling that I was being bitten by bugs I couldn’t see. Everything I ate seemed to collect in a clayey ball in my bowel, and my pulse would stop in my sleep then start up again in a hurry, discombobulated, waking me from dreams of blind alleys, naked running, and wrath. I would get out of bed with the scary meat-step of a foot that had gone to sleep and toenails that had loosened oddly, lost a firm grip on the actual toe — all this from a broken heart.