The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (29 page)

“Help?”

He spoke easily to her in his own language now, having realized that his tone of voice, facial expressions, and hand gestures would get his meaning across. He was holding up the crude bracelet he himself had made, responding to her—sometimes impatient—prompts on how to do it and using coins, buttons, paper clips, and parts of food containers for this purpose. After his request for aid, she was politely encouraging, but then opened her hand and wiggled her fingers to indicate that he should hand it over. Given that he hadn’t had any of her materials—unknown to him and from the outside—he thought he’d done pretty well; however, after she in a few seconds rearranged and improved the sway of the objects on their string (a rubber band from a bag of Centre s’mores), he realized how much he had to learn.

When he had passed the jewellery to her, she had conscientiously as ever avoided touching him, which given their close proximity sitting on the floor had required almost balletic skill that she was willing to employ if it meant not burning him. His appreciation of this was unspoken, yet he secretly inhaled her natural perfume, equal parts skin, sweat and—was it smoke? He felt like the blindfolded chef on that Centre cooking show.

Other things remained unsaid as well. Both knew, for instance, that this “braceleting” art or craft, call it what you want, had long since superseded his doing his actual job (which involved receiving, processing, and then resending facts and figures, things which now seemed so boring he couldn’t begin to figure out the words and gestures to explain it). A red square blinked on the Centre’s adjustment for his job, signalling a next to final notice of his absences, something which had only happened once before when he came down with a flu he had gotten from a tiny hole in one window he later plugged with an epoxy. The eventual consequences: docked pay then withheld groceries, and then—well, either he would return to work or he was dead, and in that case, there would be a slow and complete shut-down of the Centre. Unspoken, too: there would not be food enough for two forever and she was strong enough to go now, whenever she wished.

That night, as she slept, he sat awake in his chair, the work warning the only light in the apartment. When his eyes adjusted, he could see again her torso, revealed by the box, her shirt hiked even higher than usual. The signal spotlighted her elegant spine—the bones that led to her brain,
her
Centre—as if it was a path on the floor of a darkened room in a museum, a way to get out. He swivelled and stared at the triple-thick window, at the slightly shaky, shimmering grey sky that was all he’d ever seen of the atmosphere outside. He knew the glass could only be broken open, unless there was some other odd other way to escape—the air duct or whatever—that he had never learned.

He was willing to make the leap, and leap was what it might be: she would know he didn’t know a thing. If he survived, his life outside would be a reversal of fortune, a shift in his status, a come-down; while that scared him, it intrigued him, too, or so he thought.

He rose. For a second, instinctively, he steered toward her then he took a turn. He stood before the Centre, frozen in its light, then shifting uneasily as if it could see him and judge him (like someone he saw in a story on the Centre who thought a painted portrait on a wall had accusing eyes), though he knew that it did not.

He did not know how to shut it down, for he had never wanted to. The front was smooth. He came close and strained to see a few knobs at the back, the whole area dusty from lack of use. He reached his good hand, could only get it in a little before his forearm, crushed against the wall by the Centre, forbade him going farther. His fingertips managed to turn the first knob, but that did nothing. He touched the second—he’d never get as far as the third—and with an effort spun it twice. To his surprise, this dimmed the light of the Centre’s screen. With a grunt, he plunged in again and twisted it a final time. The light went off entirely, but the Centre’s familiar hum was audible: no matter what he did, it was and always would be on.

He snapped on an overhead light, which startled her. She sat up, blinking, her young face looked weirdly wrinkled by her being so rudely awakened. She appeared beyond beautiful to him: a faun, a newborn, or an angel, whatever image there was for the most hopeful and least cloying creature, he did not care. In a second, he was beside her and beginning to explain.

He flicked one of his best made bracelets, which she had endearingly attached to her wrist. He indicated the idea of them working together. He pointed at the window, at her, at him, and said “We,” a word he knew now would make sense. Before he could finish his final and most foolish gesture—to cross his heart—before he could say the word that was so basic and yet so hard to express and understand, she was way ahead of him and had agreed—her shrug said so—to anything he wanted.

Her smell was more powerful now: impossible to describe, except that it was hers alone and could only ever from now on be imitated by others. Her lips parted—not in a smile; he had seen many of those—a way to say something new, to convey a want that was at once welcome and treacherous. He saw the fast rise and fall of her small breasts beneath his own washed shirt, the beauty, even the existence of which he had tried to avoid acknowledging.

And suddenly he had placed his hands under the shirt and onto her sides, her waist, the area he had seen so often at night. He didn’t stop; she could not, either, even though the fire burned him, even though he shrieked so loudly it startled neighbours in the building he didn’t know he had. Dusky smoke filled the place like fire on a grill from which the grease was never cleaned.

In the morning, he sensed something different in his home, the opposite of the first inkling he had had it seemed so long ago. He had an acute perception of solitude, different from the one he’d always known—worse, for absence had been added to it, and loss. Was it more awful than the physical pain he was in now? He didn’t know: as someone wise once said on a Centre talk show, when you’ve got abysmal alternatives, why choose?

To be honest, he couldn’t see whether she had gone or not. He could hardly turn in his chair, and his eyes were nearly covered by bandages (which the night before, diligently, weeping, she had followed directions dispensed by the Centre and helped him to put on). He had to depend upon a feeling for the once again altered “aura” of the place—and of his knowledge of her, of her sense of right and wrong, of how and how much she loved. And, sure enough, the sun eventually set without a sound or sight of her.

He was startled to think of never seeing her again. The idea of mourning was a mystery to him—everything on the Centre had always stayed the same, or only ever been added to (more meat for meals, new shoes, even another job if he wanted one, though he had always stayed with what he had). He didn’t cry, though he wanted to, fearing initiation into a kind of grief from which he would not return the same.

He turned his attention to the Centre, the warning work light of which had reached the final level: orange. To his surprise, just as he’d been acknowledging the thing’s consistency, he saw that a new adjustment had been added. Maybe it had been there the whole time; he’d been paying it so little mind. He didn’t rise to reach it, though his feet were his only parts that were unscathed. Out of curiosity, he simply switched to it with the clicker.

And there on the screen he saw her. She looked at him with an excited expression, as if she’d been waiting for him to turn to her. Was it his imagination? He didn’t think so. He believed that she had found her way inside it as she had his home, gone through whatever were the Centre’s equivalents of pipes and air ducts, a process he could not begin to imagine. It was her way to love him without risk, to protect him from herself, to never leave.

He smiled back. Then he couldn’t help himself, he cried—not just because he was so relieved to see her, or so moved by the enormity of her gesture. He cried because he had already begun to—and knew he would forever—miss the irresistible agony of a human touch.

Not long after 9/11, my beloved wife Susan Kim and I rented an apartment north of New York City as a kind of bomb shelter. Soon I was sitting around there, totally and loudly bored out of my skull. Sick of my complaining, Susan said, “Why don’t you just . . . I don’t know . . . write a
story
or something?” So I’d like to acknowledge her exasperation and impatience as the reasons this book exists. Plus her love, support, and notes.

I’d also like to thank Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi of ChiZine for their innovative sensibilities and excellent taste, Andrew Wilmot for his immensely helpful edits, Erik Mohr for his superb cover, and Andrea Somberg of the Harvey Klinger Agency for her dogged efforts on my behalf. Finally, I’d like to thank my therapist, Catherine Silver. It’s great to get this book published, but I’ll be keeping my appointment next week, as usual.

“The Family Unit” was originally published in
Natural Bridge
, No. 22, Fall 2009

“Hole in the Ground” was originally published in
Café Irreal
,
Issue 22, May 2007

“What the Wind Blew In” was originally published in
SNReview
, Summer 2007

“Stray” was originally published in
The Literary Review
, August 2008

“The Unexpected Guest” was originally published in
Gargoyle
, No. 53, 2008

“Long Story Short” was originally published in
Foliate Oak
,
Volume 4, March 2008

“Versatility” was originally published in
Hamilton Stone Review
, Issue 19, Fall 2009

“Modern Sign” was originally published in
The Literateur
, Oct 29, 2009

“The Happy Hour” was originally published in
Skive Magazine
, Issue 13, December 2009

“Alert” was originally published in
Sliptongue
, March 2008

“Bomb Shelter” was originally published in
Brink
, May 2008

“Old Tricks” was originally published in
Straylight
, Volume 2.2, Fall 2008

“The Dead End Job” was originally published in
Sliptongue
, March 2010

“The Son He Never Had” is original to this collection.

“Home Invasion” was originally published in
[Pank]
, No. 4, September 2009

The Family Unit and Other Fantasies
© 2014 by Laurence Klavan
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover design © 2014 by Samantha Beiko
Interior layout © 2014 by Vince Haig

All rights reserved.

Published by ChiZine Publications

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

EPub Edition AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-204-2

All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
[email protected]

Edited by Andrew Wilmot
Proofread by Sam Zucchi

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.