The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (6 page)

“What do you mean?” Alan asked.

“Everything bad.”

Alan looked at him: trim, almost handsome, the hair on his head growing back in patches after being shaved during his stay upstate. “Like the—”

“The hurricane. And that thing down in the city. And this.” He rolled up a sleeve, long for a summer day, to reveal slash marks that started on his wrists and ran up to his elbow. “They made me do this. They came here from hell.”

Alan couldn’t help but be repelled by the display of his injuries and was immediately dismissive of his “information.” Yet it was so different from the beliefs he and Annabelle held that he found himself compelled and even a little frightened by it.

And he continued to be so when the man, shifting forward on the couch far enough to get close to Alan’s face, ended with, “Good to see you, Phil.”

“That’s his own name,” the woman said, outside again with Alan. “Sorry.”

“I see.”

“Don’t take him too serious. He harps on your friends for what happened to him. He thinks the end times are near, and they’re the cause. I think he’d have a pretty good case against his
parents
if he could remember something real.”

She looked off, seeming to consider her options. Alan nodded, seriously, and thanked her. Then he hurried from the park. He felt as if he’d been to an old-style carny sideshow, complete with fortune teller (the country fair the town hosted didn’t have them anymore and had become benign and cautious with healthy food booths and hand sanitizer soap stands near the petting zoo). Yet he didn’t entirely scoff. Did this lunatic know something he and Anna didn’t? Preoccupied, he had to dodge cars coming in both directions to get home, the rain already starting to fall.

Alan was pretty well soaked by the time he reached the driveway of his house, thunder sounding. On his way in, he saw the Lynches sitting dry beneath the roof of his—his and Anna’s!—porch, Sam rocking and smoking that foul smelling piece-of-crap pipe, Dorothy staring off with a peacefulness he had not seen in her before and which he could not help but deeply resent. Yet mixed with his contempt was a little bit of fear of them now, as he again heard the claims and saw the rolled up sleeve of the crazy guy in the trailer.

Once inside, he slowed at the entrance to the spare room. After checking through the front hall window and seeing the relaxed backs of the Lynches, he walked into where they slept. Something immediately caught his eye through the now half-shut closet door. It was a burst of sharp colour, sharper than the faded denim and dusty browns of the Lynches’ wardrobe. He walked toward it, his fingers twitching with anticipation. Then he yanked the door completely open.

He saw his own purple button-down shirt. It was the one he’d bought down in the city one night, admittedly when he was a little drunk, after dinner. Still, he wore it, usually on special occasions and mostly to prove to himself that it had not been a terrible mistake. What did it matter? It was his—his alone!

Alan turned on his heel and coldly approached the chest of drawers. As if he were a policeman frisking a suspect, he pulled open the top drawer—and before he could even get to the more likely offenders near the floor, he saw Annabelle’s amethyst necklace. It was the one that she—well, he couldn’t remember where she got it, if he had even given it to her. He only knew that it was hers, just as the—what colour was it? A funny name for green—ring beside it and the pair of pearl earrings beside
it
were hers.

Alan slammed the drawers, forgetting that he meant not to attract any attention. He glanced at the doorway, nervously, and on the way, saw something else: a large leather bag sitting in a corner. It contained his golf clubs—the expensive set he had used only once and not well about a year ago, when he had decided to get more exercise. He cursed out loud but the sound was obscured by a shout of thunder that rattled the entire house.

Alan burst from the room and went into the main sitting area, past the dining room, convinced that everywhere he went he saw items missing—a glass ashtray owned by Annabelle’s aunt from the coffee table, a pair of his nylon sneakers from under a chair, a broken umbrella from a stand—things that were now obviously rolled up in the Lynches’ lousy bales of belongings. The rain fell so heavily on the roof it seemed like more anger and confusion trying to enter his mind, which was already stuffed to overflowing with them.

Out the window, through the obscuring sheets of water, he thought he saw Sam Lynch. He was standing and looking in with an expression of angry entitlement. Or was it something else, something worse? Like pride of ownership—of the rain itself? Alan felt faint.

“Alan?”

He stopped suddenly, responding to the familiar voice. He had not even noticed Annabelle standing at the window and watching the storm. Her arms were not folded this time: one elbow was in one palm and the other palm was at her cheek, Jack Benny-style. It was her most benign and least anguished stance so far.

“Yes?” he said, thrown by seeing her.

“I want you to know,” she said, smiling in a certain way that was, well, adorable to him and always had been, and what it was like was not even worth trying to explain to anyone else, they would never understand. “I felt they needed some more of our things.”

He was about to scream at Anna. Maybe it was worse than that the Lynches couldn’t be trusted; maybe they were to be feared. Maybe she had invited into their home the very pain they had been trying in their own opposing ways to scare off, that their guests were who or what had been spreading it around the world for centuries, ever since the start of time, ever since the day they invented death. But before he could open his mouth, a javelin of lightning was thrown across the sky, and it exposed and electrified the living room like an old-fashioned flash bulb from the world’s biggest camera.

Then they heard the sound. It was more than a boom or a crack or a funny sound effect from a cartoon. It was a tragic clash between giants equal in nature, the murder of something in the earth by something from the sky. Alan and Anna felt the house shake brutally—they were two tiny figures in a snow globe, that’s how little power they had and had always had—as the top half of the old oak tree in their backyard, which had just then been killed by electricity, broke off and crashed into the roof, landing in their attic.

The lights flickered for a few seconds but stayed on. Soon, the house settled and was still, though Alan felt in his feet what he was sure were aftershocks. They heard the rain again, which was letting up, as if having made its big statement it had nothing else to say.

Both the faiths they had invented had been removed from within them; all that was left was the physical reality that existed outside. Both Alan and Anna said nothing, only wept, overwhelmed by fear of her disappearing from the world in pain, of his following after, of their showing up again nowhere, of their being lost forever and never even knowing. The setting sun was suddenly and again revealed. They looked outside and saw no one.

But they heard something, and it wasn’t organic. A car was being started. They both ran to the window and saw their Subaru pulling out of the garage. At the wheel was Sam Lynch, Dorothy beside him. They didn’t wear seat belts, as if they were new inventions they didn’t understand. Their things and many of Alan’s and Annabelle’s were stuffed in the back seat and overflowing from the trunk. Given? Taken? And what about the new storm clouds that Alan could swear he saw forming before them?

Alan reached over as the Lynches drove away. His hand found and tightly held Annabelle’s. Now these were mysteries for other people never to solve.

She couldn’t remember when she first heard the sound, but once she had that was all it took. Faye lived on the first floor of the Gleeful Terrace apartment complex, a—even she acknowledged—somewhat shabby development in a town ninety miles north of New York. It had been inserted into fields that also played host to several houses similarly stuck into the countryside a few years before (like those long houses—hotels!—you stuck on a Monopoly square; that’s how ill-fitting and arbitrary they looked, though just as in the game whomever had stuck them there did so as a symbol of success). Wild life still roamed the area—mostly deer, raccoons, and skunks—perplexed by the change in their surroundings and adapting to it only in the sense of now feeding on what their new human neighbours threw or left out instead of on the living prey that had been scared away. Less exotic creatures also ran around, some in fact not wild at all, some belonging to the people who’d moved in and were merely let out to play and hunt frivolously, not to forage for food to survive—and by creatures she meant cats, because that’s definitely what she’d heard crying. (Faye had had cats as a kid but not since then, so it had been a long time since she’d heard the sound and still hadn’t forgotten it—probably close to thirty years, for she was thirty-four.)

It wasn’t the usual cat crying, which had a repetitive, automatic pilot or broken car alarm quality. This one made a plaintive sound, broken up into what seemed like words, with spaces in between them to suggest sentences being stopped and started. This was what she imagined, anyway, as if the cat were beseeching people, and not just saying say “feed me!” or “house me!” or “please let me have sex with someone!” but pleading for something more complicated and unintelligible, like that homeless woman she’d seen once on the street down in the city, talking at the top of her lungs in a language all her own. (They had a few homeless in town, too, but they were quieter, more discreet even in despair, it was just the way it was.) This confused Faye, for if the cat had been left out by a neighbour, as so many others had, and for the same reason—fun—why was it crying like a crazy person, that is to say someone homeless, or some
thing
, a stray?

“Well, that’s because it is,” explained her neighbour, Ed Koch (just like the old city mayor). “But it never used to be, it only became this way recently.”

She’d never met Ed before, but had seen him leave his car carrying a big bag of dry cat food, and so she assumed he’d know something and had stopped him in the parking lot.

“He was part of a litter that used to belong to someone here.”

Ed seemed about fifty but could have been any age, for he had a timeless, dishevelled look: straggly greying beard, comb over, and wrinkled checked shirt untucked over chinos above sneakers. He wore glasses that made him look like a retired academic, though he seemed too young to be retired (but if he wasn’t, why was he at home in the afternoon mid-week?). Anyway, this was how he spoke, too, in a precise, learned sort of way, not snooty but smart and with a slight lisp. Though Faye knew it all was silly: wearing glasses didn’t mean people were smart; she wore them, was supposed to, anyway, and she wasn’t smart, well, not book smart anyway.

“What do you mean, used to belong?” she asked, a little guilty that he stood there holding the cat food bag the whole time, but he could have put it down, she wasn’t stopping him.

“Well, the recent young super—Ronnie, not the old super, Tim—”

“I moved in three months ago, right after Tim left, like he had one day to go, that’s when.”

“Well—and it wasn’t a family reason by the way, they just made Tim take the fall for the string of robberies here, and then for the boiler explosion in the winter, though God knows they weren’t Tim’s fault.”

Faye was quiet. She hadn’t known about either thing—the real estate broker hadn’t mentioned them—and she felt a little annoyed and even a little scared hearing about them. Still, if nothing else, the information proved that Ed knew a lot about the complex and so could be trusted to tell her about the cat. Frankly, she wished he’d get to it already.

“Then Ronnie, his replacement, only lasted six weeks, because they caught him selling ecstasy out of the back of his truck.”

“
Really?
” The unpleasant facts about her home kept coming, made better or worse by Ed’s matter-of-fact delivery, she wasn’t sure.

“Yes, and when they fired Ronnie—and I’m not sure if he’s going to be prosecuted or was just told to skedaddle, you know—he left his
cats behind.”

Faye was quiet again, this last imparted fact the most disturbing of all. Since it was obviously just the beginning of a longer, even more upsetting story, she braced herself for it, knowing she had to hear it even though she dreaded hearing—and besides, with his detached and intellectual air, Ed didn’t seem the type to avoid upsetting details to spare anyone’s emotions. He almost seemed to enjoy giving the awful specifics, rubbing his audience’s nose in them—or was he rubbing his own? After all, he had hoisted the heavy cat food bag up on his shoulder instead of putting it down. Why, so he could feel pain as he expressed someone else’s?

“Ronnie had adopted a cat in his office. The cat had kittens. They were royalty for a while. They had the run of the place. And when he got fired, he just abandoned them. Someone said they saw the mother cat dead by the highway; they said they could recognize her by her red-and-white stripe. Most of the offspring disappeared. A few were taken in—the friendly ones, savvy to the ways of humans, able to be fed and petted. But there’s one that’s stayed. It’s red and male, skittish, frightened, hard to feed and, as a result, to keep alive. A shame.”

Ed gave a little half-smile, a wince really, either in reaction to the sad events or to his—they must have been by now—aching arms, shoulder, and hands, or both. Then, because Faye wasn’t responding, he turned toward the path to his own building.

Faye was silent because she was shocked, to put it mildly. She couldn’t imagine anyone being so cavalier about other living things, especially those that had trusted Ronnie and didn’t have the mental capacity to understand the shift in their circumstances.

“Well,” she finally blurted out, stopping Ed at the last second, “couldn’t someone take him in? Couldn’t
you
—”

“I already have three cats,” he said softly, but with the first small hint of an edge to his voice. “So I don’t think that would be feasible. Besides, some have attempted it, and it’s impossible.”

“Well, what about just feeding him, what’s—”

“I and others have tried that, too. But, as I’ve said, he’s too frightened to even come close. But you’re, you know, perfectly free to try.”

He said it as if it were a project doomed to failure but one he found touching, endearing even, for her to attempt. Then, since this prompted no reply from Faye, who was still chewing over and trying to digest the nauseating account Ed had offered her, he disappeared inside with his bag of Dry Friskies.

“Funny,” he said, or at least she could have sworn he said for he was halfway through the door. “You’re the only one who’s ever heard him cry.”

Faye knew that she identified with the cat, the scared one who couldn’t come close. She assumed this was who—what—had been crying, or
was
it crying? Begging. And the fact that she alone heard it—and she convinced herself that Ed had said so—confirmed their bond. She didn’t go any further with this idea; her interest in psychology, especially her own, was small and tended to be self-aggrandizing, engaged in only to make her feel better. Faye had been hurt by men, all of whom had been unfaithful to her, or just as good as, often eyeing other women or renting certain movies with certain female stars in them—they didn’t have to do that more than once or twice, and she was out of there!—and she didn’t much feel like being hurt anymore. She waited tables at Coco’s, the local bar, and her interaction with the male customers tended to be flirtatious—and was certainly more profitable in tips when it was—and this for the time being satisfied her in that regard (the way someone tells himself he’s worked out for the day by walking two or three blocks to the store instead of, say, actually going to the gym). There was a younger female bartender who was obviously and aggressively interested in her, and Faye wasn’t entirely against the idea, but Rita, the woman, seemed just about as bad as any man, hitting on lots of women. So why would it be any better with
her
? Maybe it would be more tender, she didn’t know. (Rita had posed sucking a straw for a sexy highway billboard ad for Coco’s, and the owners thought it was funny that male drivers ogled the picture when Rita would never have given them a second glance. Faye just thought the whole thing was stupid, maybe because she was mad and hurt
she
hadn’t been asked to pose. Faye looked almost child-like—shorter, flatter, and slighter than the curvy and half-Spanish Rita—and still had acne scars.) Still, she never even thought of the word “lonely” and certainly would never have said it to anyone else.

Maybe that was why the cat sound plagued her—and the next time she heard it, it was even worse: a kind of loud, bitter cat shouting, if that were possible. It seemed someone else’s utterance of what
she
was feeling, like a lyric in a song that puts into words what you can’t express. Except these weren’t even words, just cries that sort of sounded like words.

That night, Faye stood at the open glass back door of her apartment, looking out into the darkness of fields that were abbreviated by backyards but still retained to her a wildness, a sadness, and a sense of secrecy and threat. She had decided to follow Ed Koch’s example and put food out, to see if she alone could lure the cat to nourishment, as she alone could hear him speak. She had bought the same brand as Ed, though a smaller bag for she was a smaller person.

When she got back from her shift after midnight, which was why
she
had been home during the day—
she
wasn’t retired, no sir, and the way things were going she might never be—she poured the dry pellet-like food out onto the small asphalt square that the landlord pretended was her “patio” but which really looked more like a short stone continuation of her living room floor. Tonight, she felt that the floor passed through a dimension or a membrane—the glass door—and became somewhere else, some other world. When she opened the door,
she
entered it; by pouring the food, she was asking to be accepted, as if her actions were an offering. Faye was usually exhausted when she came home and yet so keyed up that she sometimes—often—always!—smoked pot, and even then remained so restless that she’d stay up until two or three watching TV. Tonight, though, she watched the show outside, finding the darkness more fascinating than any old movie or infomercial, because they, after all, were other people’s worlds, worlds others had made up, and this one was both real and invented by her. It was hard to explain, the pot made her fuzzy. At any rate, she sat up and waited for the cat to be beckoned by her and be saved.

No one—nothing—came. This hurt and disappointed Faye, especially because when she finally dozed off, she could swear she heard the cat crying again, louder than ever (or was it a dream?) and now felt he might be wilfully and self-destructively avoiding the very thing that could save him. (Anorexics did this too; it was infuriating to others when they refused food placed—pushed!—in front of them. Faye had done it as a teenager and had moved away from home, which made it harder to get back to a normal weight.) But these feelings reminded her of hopelessness, so she pretended to simply feel frustrated by Ed Koch, not only because she disliked negative people but also because she didn’t want him to be right.

“Sorry,” he shrugged when he heard—why did she tell him? It was stupid—as their paths crossed again, she driving out of the parking lot, he carrying a bag of trash to the communal dumpster. “You did your best.”

Since he owned cats, Faye figured he was probably a warm person, but he sounded so brusque and fatalistic that he appeared kind of cold. And didn’t he ever
go
anywhere? Still, she always ran into him, so what did that say about her and her travels? (Besides going to work, she meant, and even now she was just going to get some paper towels, a carton of OJ, and some ant traps at the Buy ‘n’ Fly and come right back.) So she put up her car window and, without another word, drove away.