Читать книгу The Unsettling - Peter Rock - Страница 10

BLOOMS

I TOOK A JOB no one else wanted, and I learned many things I would never have believed. Here’s an easy one, to start with: Fungus can bloom inside books. Different kinds of molds, mostly, in dark, damp libraries where the air isn’t too good. Fungi cannot make their own food; they take what they can from other organic matter. They start on the fabric and cardboard of the books’ covers, then feed on the wood pulp in the pages, the vegetable dyes in the ink—kind of like how moss grows on tree trunks, swings from branches.

Samples are taken, and sent to a laboratory, to check if the bloom is virulent. Usually, it’s not—it’s only penicillin or aspergillus—and then they send in a team to clean it up. This is no job for librarians. They hire other people, whoever they can get. It’s not exactly skilled labor.

An injury had forced me from my previous occupation. I’d been working down the shore, on the boardwalk. I wore a suit with three inches of padding, a hockey mask painted with a fanged smile. I leapt around behind fake trees, in front of a canvas backdrop, and people shot paintball guns at me. Ten shots for three dollars—I had targets on my suit, my helmet, a bull’s eye on my crotch that everyone found hilarious. I wore two cups, with padding between them. Tough-talking boys couldn’t touch me, cursing with their cracked voices, slapping their temporary tattoos; it was their girlfriends—bikini tops, slack expressions, baby fat under their arms—who had the deadly aim. At the end of the day, in the shower, I counted the round bruises on my skin.

One day I was recounting a story to a friend of mine, holding the mask in my hand. He had one of the guns, twirling it around his finger like Jesse James. When it went off, it caught me in the face—sideswiped me, actually, not even as hard as a punch. Dark red paint splattered across my temple, into my ear. I was left with this detached retina, where my vision’s crooked and everyone I talk to thinks I’m trying to say something else; it’s still shadowy on that side, but some days I believe it’s clearing. Some days I’m not so sure.

My boss said he couldn’t be held accountable for a time I wasn’t working. Playing grab-ass—those were his words. And, of course, with my vision wrecked, my depth perception completely gone, I did not make a very challenging target. I was sore all over. We gave away half the stuffed animals in one afternoon.

Fortunately, none of this impaired me for the new job—the blooms did not move so fast. I answered an ad and was hired over the phone, told where to be the next morning.

They said I’d work on a team; what that meant was one other guy, Marco. He was forty, at least, from South Philly, where he still lived. Older than me, and heavier, with gray flecks in his hair, which was thick on the sides but you could see through it on top, his scalp shining. He had a heavy way of walking, almost sliding his feet. His hands would hang down at his sides, opening and closing with each step. My first impression was that he would never surprise me. Nothing he would do, nothing he would say.

We didn’t shake hands when we first met, he just started to show me how things worked. Hair pushed out the collar of his T-shirt, both front and back. He’d done this kind of work before, and he told me there were worse jobs.

I’ve had them, I said.

He told me he was only working long enough to make enough money to get out of town, and I nodded and said that sounded wise.

I have to get out, he said. The reasons are personal.

We went through a side door, on a kind of loading dock, down a flight of stairs. The books we were dealing with were on two floors—a basement, and then another basement beneath that. There was not one window. Marco had already isolated the area with clear plastic sheeting, hung up the warning signs.

He helped me into my suit, that first day. They were white, made of Tyvek, with a long zipper up the front, and zippers on the sides of the legs. We wore latex gloves, and baggy paper booties we had to replace every time we went outside. The hoods on our heads had clear plastic face panels; we wore battery packs on our belts, a fan with a tube that blew filtered air in front of our faces. It took one morning of breathing my own breath in that hood before I quit smoking. That’s one positive thing that came of that job.

The blooms, they were a green fuzzy mold, streaked with black. Fibrous, like nothing you’d want in your lungs. They rested atop books, forced the covers open where they weren’t tight in the shelves and squeezing each other. We started out with the vacuums, fitted with HEPA filters that trapped spores. Marco would work one aisle and I’d do the next. The shelves were tall, but sometimes I’d pull out a book and see him there, on the other side, his face close but his expression hidden. We kept moving, slowly and methodically, as if we were underwater.

The days went fluid, each like the one before it, progress marked only by the bookshelves left behind. Sections of maps, then encyclopedias. Novels, even poetry. It was strange to spend so much time so close to a person without being able to talk with them. We went our separate ways at lunch, and the rest of the time we were inside the suits and ventilators. It was all white noise, down there—the fans, the rustle of Tyvek, the sound of pages being flipped under our gloved thumbs. At least a week passed before we first had lunch together. He asked me to join him. We walked half a block, bought sandwiches from a truck, then headed toward a little park. When the children in the play-ground saw us coming, they started screaming Astronauts! We always got a kick out of that.

The wooden bench we sat on had been chewed by pit bulls—the owners train them to do it, to strengthen their jaws. Next to the jungle gym, the plastic swings were so gnawed they looked melted. When we bit into our sandwiches, shredded lettuce fell onto the ground, tangled with cigarette butts.

Marco stood and tried to touch his toes. He stretched his arms and grunted. All that work in the damp library tightened his joints.

I wonder, he asked, if you wouldn’t mind rubbing my knee a little.

I’d give it a try, I told him.

Not everyone would, he said.

If it helps, I said.

I kind of kneeled down and tried to get a decent hold, through the slippery Tyvek, using both hands. Marco picked up his sandwich, closed his eyes. He obviously shaved, but there were always these long whiskers along his throat, ones he missed. I rubbed his knee. The sun stayed where it was, straight overhead, stuck there.

You’re probably wondering what I’m going to do for you, Marco said.

I told him not really. My knees felt fine.

I live in a rowhouse, Marco said. So I share walls with my neighbors. Thin walls.

A couple lived there, and he’d hear their arguments—threats, recriminations, then the usual coming to terms. Marco would turn up his radio, or go out walking around his neighborhood.

Italians, he said, almost spitting.

I thought you were Italian, I said.

I am, he said.

There was an Indian spice shop near that park, so it always smelled a little foreign. The air was thick. Marco picked his teeth with his fingernail as he spoke.

Pay attention, he said. This won’t turn out any way you expect.

I told him I had no expectations.

Sometimes on the mornings after the arguments, Marco would run into the man from next door. You’re lucky, the man would say, you were safe—a wall between you and her. Pray for me, these nights! He and Marco would laugh together.

What happened to him? I asked, guessing ahead.

I just stopped hearing him through the wall, Marco said. Stopped seeing him in the front yard. He was gone.

And that was your opening, I said. Don’t tell me—she’s incredibly beautiful.

Yes, Marco said. But that’s not the point.

We took our time in the basements of the library, though we weren’t being paid by the hour. It wasn’t that I got a lot of thinking done, exactly; it was almost a different plane of some sort, listening to my own breathing, a kind of meditation. Sometimes I even thought of the people who would follow, who would be able to read the books because I’d saved them.

Sometimes people came down the stairs, descended by mistake, and I’d catch glimpses, twice-distorted by my face shield and the clear plastic barriers. The people seemed to have no feet, to move fluidly, as if they were growing their way smoothly upward again, beyond my sight.

Sometimes, on my break, I’d climb those stairs; I’d hold the door slightly open, my ventilator around my neck and the cool air on my sweaty face. I spied into the library, and it was quiet up there, just like it was supposed to be. A green and yellow parakeet hung on to its perch, inside a bamboo cage. I heard the sound of pages turning. If I held the door open a little further, I could see the desk where the librarian sat. She was about my age, with dark black skin, gold eyeglasses; her hair was braided close to her head, in curving lines, the loose ends like ropes whipping her shoulders. Her fingers were thin, her smile wide as she answered someone’s question. Whenever I turned away from her and began to descend into the basement, it was as if my body grew heavier with every step. I wanted her to know there were real people underneath her, that I was beneath her every day. I wanted to tell her I’d wiped mold from musical scores and hummed the melody, that I’d read a Russian story about grown men swimming in the rain, another where people could see into the future and still couldn’t change it.

If I could tell the librarian one story, it would be this one. And I would tell her only a little at a time, the way Marco told me, until she had to know what would happen next, until she couldn’t stand it.

He never used the woman’s real name, since he said I was his friend and he was afraid I’d try to track her down, once I’d heard it all, that I’d only get myself in trouble. Louisa—that’s the name he chose for her.

Their houses shared a porch, so all Louisa had to do was reach over the railing to ring Marco’s doorbell. She wanted to ask him a favor. Groceries. She had the list in her hand, and he took it when she held it out.

It’s my eyes, Louisa said. I can’t see a thing. She told him that the doctors had found nothing wrong, physically, but that didn’t help her.

Marco looked at her eyes, and she didn’t seem to see him. Her eyebrows had always been tweezed into a narrow arch; now they were returning, thickening. She stood there, barefoot on the concrete porch, the toenails of her left foot painted red. All the words on the list in Marco’s hand tilted, and some stretched off the edge of the paper, cut short. Others were written right on top of each other; he struggled to untangle them.

When he returned from the store, he offered to put the things away for her, and she said she could do it. Stay, she told him. You can talk to me while I do.

She held the door open and then led him, moving deftly around the furniture, hitting the light switch exactly and just for him. Later, he tried it in his own house, his eyes closed. He bruised his shins and tore his fingernails; he cursed and stumbled and wondered if she heard him, if she guessed what he was doing.

In the kitchen, she reached and found the knobs on the cupboards; inside, they were carefully organized, all the cans lined up.

I’ve got it all figured out, she said. I miss being able to read, but that’s about it. I was halfway through a book when it happened.

Marco asked if it happened all at once, and she told him she had one day where everything went dim—that gave her a chance to prepare—and then the next day that was it.

Is it just pitch-black? he said. Or is it like nothing at all? Marco wasn’t sure what he meant, exactly. He couldn’t stop watching her hands.

Somewhere in-between, she said.

He stayed until all the groceries were put away, and then said he’d be happy to help her again.

I remember what you look like, Louisa said, but do you mind? She reached out, and slowly her soft fingertips moved down his face.

Yes, I said, when he told me that. I knew this was going somewhere.

You know nothing, Marco said.

I learned not to say things like that, eventually; it only made him stop talking—it was as if I’d sullied the way it had been. If I asked, he’d say to wait, to be patient. He could only tell it a little at a time; otherwise, it made him too sad.

The conversation at lunch would turn to other things. We’d walk to the park, stripping off our latex gloves, the sweat between our fingers going cool, the zippers of our suits pulled down and their white arms dragging behind us. The weather turned hot and dark, overcast. Trains came and went, slowly, sat on the tracks behind the playground. We watched the dogs, betting on which owners would pick up after theirs and which would pretend oblivion. Down there they had dogs of all shapes, with their tails lopped off, their ears pinned up. Marco knew the names of all the breeds and what they were for. He’d have his arm across the back of the bench, fingers drumming next to my shoulder. I didn’t mind. Once we saw a guy crash his bicycle into a parked car as he tried to look behind him, to check the ass on a girl he’d passed. Marco got a good laugh out of that—a little shift like that would bring him around again.

All right, he’d say, turning toward me. Where did I leave off?

The next time Louisa rang his doorbell, she was holding a book in her hand. She asked what he was doing; when he said nothing, she asked if he wouldn’t mind reading to her.

She had already read the first three chapters. It was a novel where all the characters were rabbits, but it was for adults. Thick. Later, he borrowed it, to catch up on the beginning.

Louisa wanted him to read to her in the bedroom, so she could lie down and imagine it all. She set a chair next to the bed, then took off her shoes and stretched out.

This isn’t right, she said, after a few pages.

The way I’m reading? Marco said.

She said it was strange, because she couldn’t see him. She said that his voice was kind of disembodied, and that distracted her from following what was going on in the story.

Is it all right if I reach out and touch you? she said. While you read?

They tried it for another few pages, but she still couldn’t get a sense of him.

What is it? he said.

Your clothes, Louisa said. It might be better if I didn’t have to feel you through them. Is this turning too weird? You don’t know what it’s like, like this; I start to need different things to feel anything, to understand.

At first it seemed it would be enough to take off his shirt, to strip down to his underwear. Part of it was to test her, maybe, to see if she was having him on somehow, and part of it was that it excited him.

Did she know you were all the way naked? I said, afraid to interrupt.

I believe so, he said.

He had never been involved in anything like that, he told me, never felt that way. He’d been married before, even, and this was different—he felt it in his heart, he said, knowing how ridiculous that sounded. And he never even touched Louisa, not once, yet sometimes, as the weeks passed, he’d wake up in the middle of the night because he’d been laughing in his sleep. He’d just lie there, smiling in the darkness.

Are you happy? Louisa asked him, a little later, that first night.

I guess so, he said.

She told him it seemed like an uneven trade.

Well, he said. I can see. I can read. I can see you.

Are the lights on? she said. Can you see well enough?

Yes, he said, except you’re wearing clothes. As soon as he said that, he was sorry, and he wanted to take it back. He wanted to say it was a joke, but it was too late for that. Louisa had already begun to answer.

One piece at a time, she took off her clothing, folded it, and stacked it at the foot of the bed. She lay back, her hand on his leg again. He knew he was not allowed to touch her, just as she could not see him.

Now, read, she said.

And that’s how it always was, after that. There was nothing showy about it, as if she was alone, unlacing her shoes, unbuttoning her shirt as he began to read. He turned the lamp up high and moved it closer to her; her shadow twisted low across the opposite wall, attached to his by her hand, checking that he was there. He flexed his bare toes on the cool floorboards.

Louisa’s skin was dark and smooth, solid, hiding her bones. She wasn’t skinny. Her thighs were heavy, a scar above one knee. Stretching and turning over, she’d laugh and hold a smile, showing her teeth, listening. She had a faded tattoo of a rose on her right hip, and a smaller, clearer one over her right nipple. Perfume rose from her skin as Marco read; sometimes he’d look up into the full-length mirror on the wall, and see her thin waist angling out to her rounded hips, and himself, the book in one hand and a glass of water in the other.

He drank between chapters, rested his voice. He counted the few hairs that circled her nipples, watched how her breasts slid across each other when she turned, enough space between them to hide a flattened hand. The hair under her arms matched that between her legs, where the edges, unshaven, were growing back. Her eyes stared and stared, shining.

Are you happy? she asked him.

He told me that she wore no jewelry at all, that there was nothing on her. Nothing. She and Marco hardly spoke, except for his reading, or deciding on the time they’d next meet. He never asked about her husband, and Louisa never brought it up. He felt there were many silent understandings between them.

Of course it took him weeks to tell me all this, and even in pieces the information was not easy for me to process. It was difficult to shake. Sometimes, even now, I set a glass of water beside me and I hold a book in one hand. I read aloud, my voice echoing off the tight walls of the room I rent, not letting my eyes wander from the page, and I imagine my other hand belongs to Louisa, and that she is listening to me, and that she can’t see a thing.

Marco’s story was farfetched, but I had never known him to lie. Still, I’d sometimes watch him at work, pausing with a book open in front of him, and I’d wonder if he was coming up with stories to tell me, or searching for something for her, or if he was just staring into the words without reading them, trying to think.

We both slowed as the weeks went on; he slacked off worse than I did, but I didn’t mind. Mostly, we spent our time reading. We were using the rubber sponges, then, so there was no longer the vacuums’ roar. The reflection of the face shields made it difficult to read; sometimes we let the hoods slump over our backs and wore only the ventilator masks with the HEPA filters, our eyes clear and uncovered. In the books where the fungus had really taken hold, it bled down into the pages in red and purple stains, blurring letters, eating words that we could not recover.

Louisa and Marco did not always meet at the same time. Once she’d called him at three in the morning, saying she couldn’t sleep, saying she could hear his footsteps and wouldn’t he like to come read? They finished the first novel, then went through another, and another. She liked books about animals, others where women took charge.

One of their understandings was that she had to come for him, and not the other way around; after all, he was doing her a favor. It was on a night when he waited—listening for the doorbell, the phone, her knock on the wall—that he heard the man’s voice. Next door, and it was not the voice of Louisa’s husband.

Marco was jealous, partly, but he also feared something was wrong. He took a can of corn from his own cupboard, so he could use it as an excuse, say he forgot to give it to her.

He tried the doorknob before the bell, and the door swung open. He stepped inside, the can of corn in his fist, ready to hit someone with it. In the dim living room he moved around the furniture as easily as she had that first day. He’d come to know her house that well.

In the hallway, closer to the bedroom, he listened; something about the man’s voice seemed strange, the rhythm too regular and Louisa never interrupting. He stepped to the doorway and looked inside.

She was stretched out on the bed, wearing a long flannel nightgown, her face turned to the ceiling. On the bedside table, a tape recorder was playing, and the man’s voice looped out from it, a hiss behind his words.

Marco took another step, into the room, and waited there, silently. He could tell she sensed him, that she knew he was in the room, and the fact that she said nothing made it all worse. As the taped voice looped around, Marco turned and walked back down the hall. He locked the front door and gently pulled it closed.

The next day, she told him the news. Her vision was returning; it was clearer each day. And the reading couldn’t be the same if she could see the shape of him, his slumped shadow and the words coming out. Closing her eyes wouldn’t work, when she knew she could open them. Awkward—that’s the word she used. Soon she’d be able to read, once again, on her own.

When he told me that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. He’d been right—something in me wanted to find her, to hold her down until she saw some sense.

Marco never read to her again. He did find a place, though, where they made those tapes; he went there and volunteered, read a whole book into a microphone. He hoped Louisa might hear his voice, and remember, and have second thoughts. The sadness I felt, hearing this, was like I’d breathed in the spores and they’d thickened in my throat, blooming darkly through my organs, cold, one at a time like the way a blackout spills over sections of a city.

There was a time I believed and hoped that job could continue indefinitely, that I might persuade Marco to stay on, but those blooms are seasonal, mostly. Nothing stands still.

We were finishing up, just wiping down the shelves with the Clorox solution, when he told me the end of the story. In fact, Marco left before the job was finished, without any warning, and I handled the last few days—tearing down the plastic barriers, taking down the signs—by myself. He left that way, I believe, so he wouldn’t have to say goodbye.

It wasn’t as if he thought things between him and Louisa could have continued—he knew the balance had changed, that they couldn’t return—but he expected it all had to go somewhere, that it couldn’t just trail off into nothing.

She refused to speak about it. She was cool, not quite unfriendly. She turned down the simplest favors. She said that had been a different time, that they had been different people who needed different things.

He felt that they were the same, inside the changes. He needed her, and he couldn’t stand the way she looked at him, every day, watching him with those same eyes as he came home from work with his hood and ventilator bouncing along his back, the arms of the Tyvek suit tied off around his waist. Her gaze rested cold on him, settling so he felt it even after he was inside his house. He sat alone, shivering; it was very, very quiet on the other side of the wall.

If I ever see Marco again, I’ll tell him that I know what happened, even if she was ungrateful, even if she never understood.

He healed her.