Kathleen Alcott - Infinite Home

“Claude. Have you forgotten the last five hours? I had to pry his hands from the bathtub. He said his heart felt like a drum march. The doctors had to sedate him.”

“I’ve been his sister for about three decades longer than you’ve been his weird misanthropic neighbor,” she said. “Travel freaks him out, but he’s been talking about these fucking bugs longer than you or I have talked about anything.” She indicated the conversation’s conclusion by sliding into the driver’s seat and slamming the door.

Edward leaned on the hood and looked out at the lot. Three silver-red hounds left behind in the cab of a peeling green truck barked up a chorus, trying to crowd their mouths through the just-cracked window. He closed his eyes and felt the car start, all the parts beneath stirring towards purpose.

—

THE STRETCH OF THE DRIVE that followed, free of sound save the occasional zoom of a speeding car, seemed to reject any passing of time, presenting the same fast-food billboards and roadside crosses in triplicate again and again. Paulie kept his hands in his lap and sometimes pressed his mouth against the window, forming bubbles of spit that broke almost as quickly as they formed. Claudia, her posture improved but fossilized, as though her shoulder blades were sewn to the seat, sent hard looks to Edward via the rearview mirror. Made restless by the silence, Edward dug into the backpack at his feet and removed his camera, trained it on Paulie, and called to him gently.

“Oh hi Eddy,” said Paulie, with a deflated inflection.

Claudia sensed the presence of the device immediately and asked Edward to place it far within a body cavity of his choosing.

“Ass could be good, but why not try—”

“It’s okay, sweet pea,” said her brother, looking straight ahead. “Let Eddy do what he wants.”

“Hey, pal,” Edward said. “How you doing? Last night must have been rough on you.”

“To be Mr. Frank, I feel like an octopus in a… math class.”

“Yeah? Feeling weird? Like, foreign? Alien?”

“I guess so, Ed. I guess you could say alien. I guess I would say I was worried I was accidentally living on the wrong planet.”

“You know what, though. An octopus in math class could work on a number of equations at once with all those arms.”

Paulie’s face, as represented through the viewfinder to Edward, began to twitch upward in small ways. “Wow, Eddy. Wow. I bet you’re right.”

“Just a different way of working.”

Edward repositioned himself. Up on his haunches, twisted behind the driver’s seat, he filmed from a slight height. Paulie retrieved a pen and paper from the glove box and began to sketch the tentacled creature in question. “Oc-to-pi,” he said, exhaling air from his open mouth rapidly. “Oc-to-pi.”

Claudia slipped on her neon-green gas-station sunglasses and began looking for a radio station, turning the knob at the first hint of static.

I CAN WAIT for a long time,” he said, but Owen, Adeleine could tell, was made uncomfortable by silence. He jerked his thumb across the screen of his phone until the battery died, ran his index finger along the spines on the bookshelf and pulled down a 1930s Boy Scout manual. He grew briefly engrossed in a series of yellowed diagrams titled “How to Build a Snow Tent,” delicately lined images replete with pastel-cheeked boys in uniform. After he closed the brittle pages, Owen gravitated towards the records, delicately set the needle down on a Robert Johnson recording and settled on the floor. Adeleine watched as he drew his knees upward and tucked his face, like a hiding child trying to make his space in the world diminutive. He started to speak, and the spite in his voice, refracted through cloth and limbs, seemed softer, washed of grit.

“This isn’t how I imagined it happening, you know. I didn’t intend for this all to play out like a crime movie. I only came to get what’s owed me. Right, Mom?”

Owen turned his face, his coloring now blotched like a much-used eraser block, towards Edith, but she didn’t move. His speech was absent of its regular pattern of hard consonants, syllables doled out with restraint. It had adopted a reedy lilt, and Adeleine could imagine him very young, begging: for another hour outside, for dessert, for uncompromised attention.

“You have any idea what it was like growing up here, Edith? Mom? Dad throwing parties all the time while I tried to sleep? You painting all your attention on Jenny, praising her every weird ritual and sudden mood while I brought home perfect grades and made my bed? I spent all those summers helping Dad with the house, I worked to pay for school myself, I never asked for a cent — meanwhile you two blow your money on gin and private detectives: Where’s Jenny? Where could Jenny be? And I could have told you for free — getting fucked in the back of some car in California, getting high, losing what was left of her mind. I was never mistaken about what I meant to this family. I wasn’t a part of all your embarrassing excesses and I never wanted to be. I’m just here for what’s owed me.” The repetition of the phrase— what’s owed me —seemed to comfort him, break happily from his body.

As he droned on, Edith closed her eyes and began to whisper, her dehydrated lips moving against her teeth rabidly, as though physically locating the words she needed. Adeleine recognized the words as a prayer, and held her breath to listen.

Count not my transgressions,

but rather my tears of repentance.

Remember not my iniquities,

but my sorrow for the offenses I have committed against you.

I long to be true to your word

and pray that you will love me.

By the second recitation, Owen had quieted, and by the fourth, he was breathing in large heaves that moved up his back, broadening it. The needle had reached its center point and the record went on spinning, sounding out once a second with a modest, crackled thump, a reminder of how quiet it had become.

BY THE TIME Song finally opened her mouth to speak, Thomas had long since stopped expecting it. The unfamiliar travel of human speech confused him, and he looked around the small house, at the peak of the ceiling and the slanted gap beneath the door, as though to find where the word had landed. It was afternoon. He sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through rocks the color of long-circulated money, and she watched him from the wicker chair by the room’s one window.

“Hello,” she said. They had grown so comfortable with each other’s silence that the greeting seemed unnecessary, even foolish. Not quite ready yet for whatever it was that language might reveal, Thomas kept his fingers on the stones, thumbing the smoothest stretches, admiring dramatic variations in shade, and nodded. “I’m prepared to speak about the issue of your friend Edith,” Song said. “I trust you now. We grew that.”

“Oh,” he said, searching himself for a feeling of concern for their conversation. “Well?”

Hunting for the pivotal speech he’d filed away, he played back images and sounds: the locked door to Edith’s apartment and Owen’s impatient words behind it; the rigid form of her body in her son’s presence. Adeleine on the top floor, every object placed to amuse and comfort her, the safety that finally played across her face as she slept. Paulie at the keyboard, the clamor refining into pristine patterns and flying up the stale stairway. Edward, whispering something to Paulie as they made their way down the street, towards the park and the last of the sun. Claudia waiting for them on the stoop with overflowing grocery bags, heads of watermelon, ears of corn, smiling at Thomas with a muted, infectious contentment.