Читать книгу The Paper Man - Gallagher Lawson - Страница 9

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ON THE DRY PAVEMENT LAY THE BODY: A NUDE GIRL WITH WHAT looked like seaweed for hair, with fishing line and beaded floats tangled in it. At first, Michael thought it was a body risen from the dead, southern custom dictating that all bodies be buried at sea in the great Bay of Bones. Perhaps there had been a mistake, and she had been buried alive and tried to swim back to land? But the triple set of gills—crusted with sea foam and bursting from each side of her neck, told him this creature had not originated on land. Her skull—crushed, the bones piercing the skin of her face. One of her webbed hands held a rusty knife; the large fin that extended in place of legs had been severed down the middle and was filled with a canyon of dried blood. Her bluish lips had a taut smile, exposing two sets of small, serrated teeth. The stench of her body overpowered the lingering gasoline from the bus. Around her an elastic cloud of flies stirred as people approached, and then returned to cluster onto the soft spots of her iridescent skin.

The bus finally gave in to gravity and disappeared over the low cement wall. The passengers paused as it slid below the canal’s trembling surface. Several fragile passengers whimpered; a few ran away. Michael stood back. Two clean-cut young men had pulled him out after spotting his detached arm waving like a flag outside the window of the bus. They had nearly tossed him across the highway, misjudging his weight so badly. He thought they were heading toward him for a better look, but the corpse of the fish girl was far more intriguing.

The man with the missing eye was nowhere to be seen, Michael’s valise gone with him. It was as if another part of his body had broken off. There was too much going on around him, though, to think about this. He neared the crowd, wobbling past a few sweating passengers who lay on the ground, pressing cloths to cuts on their foreheads and forearms. Michael saw flashes of bright red. Blood always thrilled him, not because he was sensitive to it but because he no longer bled like that.

Leaning for a look, Michael wondered aloud: “It’s a dead mermaid?”

“Should’ve run her over,” someone complained.

“And we were almost home.” The woman who had smuggled lemons and laurel leaves was crying. “Typical city trash! Get me out of here.”

“She was dead before we got here,” said a woman with red hair, frizzy as if she had been electrocuted. She put her hand out to touch the body but pulled back when a pair of mating flies landed on her palm.

The bus driver became defensive: “I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. I had to swerve out of the way.”

“Of course she was dead. Who lays in the middle of an off-ramp?” the woman with red hair said.

“Has anyone seen a man with an eye patch?” Michael asked.

They ignored him. All of his concerns of being noticed in the city faded. He had always wanted to blend in, and the time he needed to stand out to get somebody’s attention and assistance, he was no match for a dead mermaid. He looked around, and for a moment he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t simply dreaming. With his one functioning hand, he touched his face and stroked his ears, and for a while he waited in vain to wake up.

Soon, several ambulances arrived. The men inside were volunteer paramedics who set up zebra-striped barriers around the body and covered it with a black tarp. Littered around everyone were their blue entry forms, flopping on the pavement like gasping fish. Then a fire truck arrived and passengers began arguing over who would get a ride to the hospital.

The sky was turning past evening—a brilliant expanse of pinks and blues, like nothing he had ever seen inland. In a way, the accident had served a purpose: he was now free from his past by losing all of his belongings. As the paramedics struggled to write with dull pencils what passengers were saying, he longed for his own ledger book. They never glanced over at him, and so he decided they didn’t need him—there was no one here to ask for his entry form—and he walked away.

The exit off-ramp led to a road that connected to a main street that stretched as far across the peninsula as he could see. Buses and taxis sped beside cars and bicyclists. The street was lined with tall buildings, many starting to turn on their lights as the sky darkened. Michael stuffed his detached arm in his jacket sleeve and used his good hand to hold it in place by clasping the elbow. At a stoplight, he stood beside a flyer that said:

SAVE THE CITY: SAY NO TO ANNEXATION!

He joined a loose crowd of restless pedestrians and strolled as if he had always lived here. He had told no one at home he was leaving. At this time, his brothers, Leo and Ralph, had probably returned to the house after all of their deliveries of their coffee beans in town, and their father was leaving the high school where he taught. They probably thought he was still in his room. His younger brothers had turned their backyard into a coffee farm and sold their coffee to local coffee shops and grocery stores. Michael was their bookkeeper, and the day before, after counting the bags they had taken away, he updated their accounting books, went into his bedroom, and then packed his cardboard valise with a few belongings, including two socks stuffed with money and some clothing. He wore his one suit and walked their long driveway, past the apiaries and sycamore trees, to the town’s single bus stop.

The big secret was this: his brothers knew nothing about bookkeeping, and for the past several months, Michael had used an account he had created, called Offsets, where he had placed small amounts for himself. Life inland had become intolerable. Ever since the accident, his life had become stagnant, never leaving the house, watching the same trees lose their leaves and then burst into green again, never knowing any other smells than those carried by the wind; before he knew it, ten years had passed. His younger brothers grew bigger, hairier, and fatter, and although Michael technically was an adult, he was treated like a cloistered child because he was the same size he had been at fifteen. He listened like a child by placing a glass on the wall to hear the sounds from their rooms, and he hid whenever his brothers’ girlfriends stayed overnight and ate breakfast in the living room. His family was constantly worrying he would be swept away by the strong inland winds. They never let him go outside unless he had a heavy metallic belt with him, like a paperweight, to hold him in place. The few outsiders who saw him were always so startled and overly sympathetic, as if he was in constant pain. They never understood. No one understood. But after ten years as a kind of pet, he was on his own, and there was no way to stop him. They would never know he had come to the city. Did the wind take him away? they’d ask, searching the fields and inspecting the scarecrows for evidence of Michael’s body. But they would find nothing. He didn’t even leave a note. He didn’t want to waste the paper.

He could be anyone now. The one thing that acknowledged him was a crow that yelled at him from a tree. He wandered the streets of the city and thought about the new life he would start. He imagined living in an apartment that overlooked the ocean, painting the images on large canvases, much larger than any work by his father. And in the corner would be paintings of his memories back home, with a dark streak beside the collapsing barn to represent his father’s shadow. From this apartment, he would study the ships entering the harbor and how the pedestrians moved like ants on the sidewalk.

Here he was, one of the ants, someone unknown in the buildings above studying him. He looked up, searching for that window with a light, the hope that he could one day be up there.

Instead, he was hit in the eye.

It began to rain.