Kathleen Alcott: Infinite Home

That she had missed Paulie’s wallet, its slim worn shape mostly concealed by some jeans of hers on the cheap wood bureau, seemed like a gift, like his hand on the back of her neck.

Their father had given it to Paulie when he turned thirty, the last age Seymour would watch him become, and had spent too much on it, as though he had known. It was a fine brushed leather, the color of a roasted hazelnut just rubbed of its skin, and over the years Paulie had relished the responsibility it conferred: patted it in his back pocket and lingered while he paid for things at the corner store — cartons of orange juice, travel magazines, holographic key chains. As she stood to reach for it, she realized she had never seen the contents, that this had been one of few private corners of his life.

For reasons she couldn’t name, she looked first at the money, twenty-seven dollars, the bills arranged by denomination, a fact that hit her like the sprain of a muscle, knowing what slow, hard work it must have been for him. In his ID card picture he had tried to appear solemn, pained by bureaucratic process, and the image looked little like her brother. In the other pockets, she found a photo of their parents waving on a dock; a scientific drawing of a Japanese flying squid torn, perhaps illicitly, from a library book; a note from Edward, which read, Dear Mr. Mayor, swing by when you can. I have an adventure planned ; a glossy magazine clipping of a baby’s bottom; a snapshot of him and Claudia at a wedding, each pointing at the other with a mouth in an O; and one of them as children, asleep under the kitchen table, their tiny features dwarfed by adult feet.

The sounds were few, the highway and the faucet in the next room and the heavy steps of someone going to fetch ice or a candy bar, but she found comfort in them, that they were similar to what he had heard as he left. She would not vocalize the thought, but Edward had known, when she’d paid for a week in advance, that she needed to stay where Paulie knew to find them. She owed him that, had spent her life on that promise.

In the dark hours of early morning she was awakened by nothing, her body distrustful of the stillness itself. Her hand shot to the lamp like a reptilian tongue. Edward’s eyes opened as though they’d only just closed, and he turned to see her.

“It would have happened no matter what,” he said.

She looked like a beggar, no aspect of her life uncharted on her face.

—

THEY SPENT A STRING OF HOURS that felt interminable there, moving from the bed to the toilet, the toilet to the bed, the bed to the doors of the balcony, but they didn’t step outside. The chair remained where it had fallen when they had wrested him from it. They used the bulky telephone to order food, ate little of what arrived, let the plastic and cardboard pile up in the heat with the turning smell of leftovers. Housekeeping knocked twice, three times a day, and each time they bellowed, “No, no — not now,” their conviction about this their only real expenditure of power. As they fell asleep, Edward knocked his knuckles on the nightstand between them, where Paulie sat in his jar, quiet, unrecognizable.

—

ON THE FOURTH DAY he asked her. She was sitting up in bed, the top sheet around her hips, the remote lying across her slack hand. The television was dark, the only noise a fly caught in the bathroom.

“I thought it might be too much,” he said.

“Not too much. Never enough.”

“Okay.”

And he crawled into bed with her, the laptop under his arm, and opened the screen.

As he scrolled through the list of files, struggling to remember the contents of each, Claudia beheld the electronic glow as though it were an archaeological wonder.

“What’s ‘Alphabet’?”

“Oh, that one, no, I don’t think it’s—”

“What? You don’t think it’s what?”

“Okay, Claudia, Jesus. Okay.”

At first there’s just the keyboard, set up in a corner of Edward’s apartment. A red silk curtain blows into the frame, then Paulie, in a tuxedo shirt and a pair of swim trunks, on the right leg of which is a neon gecko.

“Okay, Paul, what is it? You said this was very important.”

“It is. Important and educational.”

“Educational in which regard, Paul?”

“Well, Eddy, you know, when two people spend a lot of time together they sort of build a language together. Each person picks up a bit of the other. And in our case, I’ve picked up a lot of you.”

“How so?”

Paulie slips behind the keyboard and hammers out the beginning of the alphabet song, teasing a little, then starts again, singing this time.

Cock smith, tool belt, fucknut tree,

These are the words you’ve given to me.

Jizz doctor, fecal cream,

You are just an enema fiend.

Now you know your dick has fleas,

Rectum’s got a bad disease.

The frame shakes until it loses Paulie entirely and settles on the open window. Edward’s laughter rises and wheezes.

Edward searched her face in his periphery without turning towards it. “I swear, he just comes up with this. Came up with it.”

Propped up by the roughly starched pillows, Claudia gaped.

“How much of this do you have ,” she asked.

“I think there’s maybe thirty-seven, thirty-eight hours. But most of it is like, Paulie discusses soup. Paulie inspects a dead bug. Paul ruins several commuters’ subway rides, armed with only a mood ring.”

Claudia nodded, the joy gone from her face as she calculated how few days she could fill with what was left. In the breezeway outside their room, two men bickered with low energy about routes, bleating the numbers of interstates, calling out the names of towns like they were items for sale at auction. Her skin itched from not having showered, her muscles felt fatigued from not having used them.

For the first moment in her life, time multiplied in front of her, unimagined, unimaginable.

THE RESTING PLACE YELLOW. Just wide and long enough. Near it another where the quiet woman slept. At the beginning chickens. The nothing of forest. Men with blue eyes came with things to put in her mouth. Soft and warm as what she had given her baby. They all walked to where the land stopped and they moved into the cold green and they kept her hand while everything watered around them. Back in the room the woman shaking down her silver head nest. She brought in the arms of some trees and lit them. Through the glass hole birds. Cheep cheep cheep then dark. Staying near the heat until the wet was gone. The men again with things to swallow. Fingers on her neck. They changed her hair and the woman’s hair until they were ropes. Different shapes for wearing. Big forms of white for sleeping in. One more time outside. All their faces up to see the big sky fruit. Then the woman’s eyes on her and a long look. A hand low to guide her. Was there a missing. Something gone. A man with her in the mornings. Black circles that played music. Boxes full of bodies that zipped under the earth. A building at night golding onto the street. Had this always been her life. Had she always known the woman. No. Yes. Always.

THE NEIGHBORS HAD WATCHED with some curiosity as he rehabilitated the house, floor by floor, room by room, over the course of the year, and sometimes waved when they saw him, through an exposed frame, working in his uneven way. He hadn’t hired any help, and often continued after midnight with his work, lit by bare bulbs clamped to paint-splattered ladders and fed by dried apricots and cashews he kept in his corduroy pocket. A careful preservationist, he matched the original colors of the doors precisely, fingering each swatch on a great fan of color samples, and restored the gilded leaves of the stairway wallpaper himself.