“I thought something horrible happened to you, I’ve been calling and calling the room, why haven’t you answered? I thought you’d killed yourself.”
The maid excuses herself. She goes into the bathroom and gets me a cool washcloth.
“What are you doing?” my wife asks.
There is nothing I can say.
“Knock off the mummy routine. What exactly are you doing? Were you trying to run away and then you chickened out? Say something.”
To talk would be to continue; for the moment I am silenced. I am a potted plant, and still that is not good enough for her.
“He is paralyzed,” the maid says.
“He is not paralyzed. I am his wife, I am a doctor. I would know if there was something really wrong.”
THE WEATHER OUTSIDE IS SUNNY AND BRIGHT
In the morning there are marks where the pillow touched his face, where his T-shirt wrinkled against his back, from the waistband of his underwear, elastic indentations, ghostly traces. He peels off the socks he wore to sleep, the pattern is like a picket fence. With her fingernail she writes on his chest, Milk, Butter, Eggs, Sugar. The invisible ink of her finger rises up like a welt. In the shower it becomes perfectly clear—dermatographism. For the moment he is a walking grocery list—it will fade within the hour.
“I dreamed I was in the eighteenth century, having tea in a very elaborate cup.” He is a clockmaker lost in time, keeping track of the seconds, fascinated by the beats, hours passing, future becoming past. “And you? How did you sleep?”
“I dreamed the building was sealed, there were no doors, no windows, no way in or out, nothing to knock, nothing to ring, nothing to bang against,” she says. “The house of glass was suddenly all solid walls.”
“You are what you dream,” he says.
“It’s true.” She puts on her shoes, slipping a small piece of lead into both left and right, to keep her mind from wandering, to keep herself steady. “I’m late,” she says.
“You have a feather,” he reaches out to pluck something poking out of her skin. She sometimes gets feathers; they erupt as pimples and then a hard quill like a splinter presses through the same way a feather sticks through the ticking of a pillow or the seat of a sofa.
“Is that the only one?” she asks.
He searches her arms and legs and pulls out a couple more.
“All plucked and ready to go,” he says.
“Thanks,” she says. “Don’t forget the groceries.”
He nods. “Yesterday there was a fox in the woods; for a minute I thought it was you. I went to say hello and it gave me an angry eye—you’re not angry with me, are you?”
“It wasn’t me. I was at the office all day.”
On her way out the door she puts a clump of dirt in her mouth, presses a pumpkin seed in, and swallows for good luck.
“Drive carefully,” he says. He sprinkles fish food into the pond of koi, flips a penny in, and waves good-bye.
Outside, the lawns are being watered, the garden men are going around with their weed whackers, trimming, pruning. Everything is shape and order. There is the tsk, tsk, tsk hissing sound as the sprinklers spit water over the grass.
The landscape winding down the hill reminds her of Japan, of Scotland, of another country in another time. There are big rocks, boulders, and sand; a desert, dense vegetation clinging to the sides of craggy hills. There are palm trees, and date trees, and orange and lemon groves.
There is fog in the canyons, a hint of blue sky at the top of the hill. The weather changes from block to block—it is impossible to know what kind of day it will be.
She sits at her desk, pouring over drawings, reading between the lines. Her workspace is industrial, minimal: a skylight, an exposed wooden ceiling, furniture from an old factory.
Four pens on her desk, ten paper clips, a plastic spoon. Twenty steps from her desk to the door. She is always counting. There is something reassuring about numbers, she does math in her head, math to keep herself entertained, to keep everything in order.
Magnetized, she attracts things—right now she has a paper clip on the tip of every finger, like press-on nails. When she’s bored, she decorates herself in loose change, quarters all up and down her arms. Her watch clings to her wrist, synched with her heartbeat. Her pulse an even sixty beats per minute. When she exercises, she takes the watch off, afraid of breaking time.
“You are a magnetic, highly influential person,” a psychic once told her. “People and things are drawn to you.”
Making herself a cup of tea, she puts in a pinch of catnip—it makes her pleasant and playful. When she smiles, a thin line of soil at her gumline is easily mistaken for a tobacco stain.