Spring 2009

Pieces

by Trent Hudley

The only light in the room was from the television, a pale, blue-white haze suspended in the surrounding darkness like a patch of metallic mist. Elder DeVille, wrapped in the mist, sat naked, except for his plaid boxer shorts and a can of Pabst beer. Stiff and motionless in his recliner, he stared, unblinking, forward. The television cast gray, flickering shadows across his body, and the sound, turned down low, suffused in his head with the voices from the other room. The images from the television paraded in front of his vision in disconnected flashes of color. A collage of sight and sound swirled around his head, like a thin cloud of smoke.

He could hear his sister Mary's voice, thin, soft and airy as if it were carried on a breeze from some great distance away. He knew the voice was his sister's, and somewhere in his consciousness he knew she was in the next room, but as he stared into the television screen the words seemed to come from the mouth of a tiny animated chameleon—garbled, only a few words distinguishable, old words, repetitious words, words like "about time he… money… grown man… job." The words shot into his head like B.B.S., then ricocheted off the perimeter of consciousness and bounced away into the outlaying darkness. Elder stared. Peter Jennings' face seemed to hover ethereally in front of him, and his mouth moved to the voice of Elder's mother. "I've been trying so hard, but he doesn't respond to me. He walks around the house like a zombie all day. I think he might need… well… help… a doctor of some kind, maybe." Elder chuckled to himself under his breath, sighed loudly, then closed his eyes. The mingling of the television's sound and the voices slowly began to fade and recede into some far away region of his mind until there was only silence and the dissolving after-image of a reporter in the foreground with the desert landscape of some foreign country behind him.

The beer can hit the floor with a dull, muffled smack. Elder opened his eyes slowly. He looked to his empty hand then to the floor where the can wobbled back and forth in a small puddle of beer. On the television, a tornado was tearing through some small Midwestern town. Elder turned off the television and sat staring unblinking, forward into the dark.

He tried to get up but the familiar tugging sensation kept him in the chair. It felt like his entire body was having a muscle spasm from the tip of his toes to his stomach; even in his brain he felt the twitching. He knew he would have to wait until the thing separated itself before he could move. It only took a minute or so and he was becoming used to it. He stood up and stared down at the transparent apparition in the recliner. It was him—a thin, pale, shade of himself sitting there exactly like he had been seconds ago, flickering slightly as if it were a bad picture on the television—sitting there in boxer shorts staring, unblinking, forward. They were all over the place. Holographic, phantom selves, bits of himself spewed throughout the house and city, frozen in whatever activity he had been doing when it decided to dislodge it self. Always quiet, always thin and pale, always staring, unblinking forward as if they were hypnotized by some distant vision. There was one lying in his bed naked, staring, wide-eyed, almost frightened, up at the ceiling, there was one in the shower staring down at the drain, one at his desk—his elbows on the desk and his chin resting in the palm of his hands, staring out of the window. There was one at the kitchen table, one on the porch smoking a cigarette, one at the bus stop, one on a bench in front of the duck pond at the park, one on a bar stool at Chuck's, one on at least three different buses, and two at the public library in the K's of the fiction section. They seemed to be everywhere lately, and he was the only one who could see them. He asked his mother once if the parts of himself that he left around the house bothered her. She only stared at him with wide, pleading eyes on the verge of tears. He didn't seem to disturb them either. Several times he tried to get them back inside of himself by taking the exact same position that they were frozen in. He would stand or sit, they super-imposed around him like a dull aura, with his eyes closed and concentrating on trying to draw the image back into himself. It never worked. So he moved around them so as to disturb them. He slept on the floor in a sleeping bag, used the bathroom in the basement, and sat across from the one at the kitchen table. Now he would have to find a different chair to sit in to watch television. He sighed and walked into the kitchen where his sister and mother sat.

They quit talking when he entered. They looked up at him, silent, and he looked at them. His sister put out her cigarette, exhaled a cloud of smoke and eyed him with one eye closed through the cloud. She scooted her chair back from the table, crossed her legs and arms and looked at him. Elder saw that she worn the same white and beige tartan skirt that she had wore ten years ago to their father's funeral. He noticed that the seam was coming undone at her hip and that she had a run in her stocking. He wanted to embrace her. He smiled his crooked smile and his sister sighed. "I'm going out, " he said, and walked upstairs to dress.

The voice of his mother and sister drifted back into his head. As he walked up the stairs the sound vanished as if it were snatched away in the wake of some massive truck. It reminded him of waking up one morning feeling that something was missing. A vague, nagging suspicion that he had forgotten something important. He lay in bed staring at the red L.E.D. numerals on the clock face. It was 5:28 am. Something was different. Something definitely had changed. He didn't know what; it wasn't a conscious knowledge, just a feeling, a strong intuition. Gray, phantom images of the incessant inertia of his daily routine streched across his mind's eye like an old newsreel in slow motion. The thought of engaging in anything caused a knot in his stomach. He wrapped his arms tight around himself and curled up into a semi-fetal position. The electronic insect buzz of the alarm erupted—the knot in his stomach exploded and diffused into his body, thick, gray and slow like a liquid metal cooling in his veins. He felt unmade.

The smell of bacon wafted up to his room with the flat monotonous, squeal of a violin from some muzak his mother had playing on the radio. He dreaded having to look his mother in the face. She was the last person in existence that he wanted to see at that moment. He pictured her shuffling around the kitchen, as she had done every morning for what seemed like eons, still in her quilted, powder blue housecoat with the dirty, laced collar unfurling itself around her neck. It was the same scene he had witnessed since he was a kid. Everything the exact same except the skin around his mother's neck, which had become looser and the spots on her hands darker. But there was the same ceramic blue plate, the same wheat toast, two strips of bacon, scrambled eggs and orange juice, and the same happy smile that too honestly revealed the damages of her life. The image caused his neck and shoulders to ache. He thought about climbing out of the window instead of going downstairs but decided it was more trouble than it was worth. She would be calling him all day at work. Then she'd have his sister call, and his sister would have his brother-in-law call. Then they'd have to have a family dinner at his sister's and discuss why he had "performed such and outrageously selfish stunt… and how worried mother had been all day," and inevitably the conversation would turn to him getting a job at his brother-in-law, Craig's, bank, working real hard and one day getting married to Lee, having their own house and children and… He laughed out loud, a high squeaky laugh that startled him. He felt his heart pounding against his chest; he got light-headed, dizzy and afraid. He thought he might be a having heart attack. He had read an article about a 35 year old man who's heart had exploded in his chest for no apparent reason just two weeks prior, and he was 36. He sat on the edge of the bed and dropped his head into his hands and rubbed the palms hard against his eyes. Geometric figures swirled, appeared and disappeared against a field of black. It was soothing. He felt as if he were floating, just drifting through some other distant, removed space. "Elder, breakfast is almost done." He opened his eyes. His vision blurred, he stared forward, unblinking. He turned to the window, sighed and fell back onto the bed.

He didn't iron his clothes, shave or shower. He brushed his teeth, dressed and went downstairs. He noticed the startled expression on his mother's face but it seemed to be a strangers face, a doll's face, unreal and not directed at him. He muttered something about not having time to eat, going to work early. His mother's voice and the gritty sound of her house shoes on the linoleum floor droned in his head like traffic in the distance. He walked through a tunnel across the kitchen, the back door the only clear object in his field of vision. "Elder you can't…" was all he heard before he closed the door. He staggered down the driveway to the sidewalk rubbing his temples and sighing a deep heavy sigh.

It was after he returned that night smelling of smoke and alcohol, confronted by his wild-eyed mother, still in her housecoat, his sister and brother-in-law, and a barrage of questions inquiring why he had called his job and fiancée and quit them both, that he smiled his crooked smile at them, stumbled up the stairs and into his room and discovered the piece of himself lying in his bed.

Elder looked at himself in the mirror. His skin was pasty and thin. The bristly growth of a three-day beard clung to his face like sand on a wet beach ball; dark semi-circles sagged beneath his eyes. He rubbed his hand across his face; he could see the white glow of the fluorescent bulb above the sink through his hand. He chuckled to himself. He stepped back from the mirror to get a better look at the rest of his body. His stomach was sunken in and his ribs poked slightly through his skin. He looked at his face in the mirror again. He smiled at himself and wiped away a tear as it slid down his cheek.

On the way out Elder stopped at the kitchen door. He turned back around and walked to the kitchen table where his mother and sister sat with his flickering image. He kissed them both on the cheek and said goodbye. The two women continued to stared after him as he walked out the door and watched through window on the door as he faded into the haze of the cold night.

In the pond at the park a lone duck floated in lazy circles upon the dark water. Elder sat next to himself, lit a cigarette, offered one to the wavering shadow who stared silent, motionless out into the trees beyond the pond. Elder shrugged and watched the duck. A strong breeze began to blow and it got colder. Elder heard the breeze blowing but didn't feel it. He laughed out loud. "You see buddy;" he said, turning to the image on the bench. "Intangibility is the best defense against your environment." He stood up, took a final drag from his cigarette, tossed it on the ground and crushed it under his foot. He stared at the phantom on the bench and smiled. "Better than a novel or a painting any day," he said, nodding.

He left the bench and walked to a small clearing and laid on the ground with his head resting in the crook of his elbow. The wind blew from behind him and he watched with a disinterested calmness as the particles of his coat, pants and shoes blew away from him in small clumps and danced in a sub atomic ballet in the wind. The wind was steady and cold, its currents purposeful in their southeasterly course—blowing constant in its path across the North American continent. Elder, like a sand dune in a storm, was dispersed and floated with the wind on its course.