Homesick for Another World(43)

But life wasn’t strange at all. Marcia’s sudden death was the strangest thing that had ever happened to John. And even that wasn’t very strange. People died all the time, in fact. As he crushed the tiny wishbone in his fist, it cracked into pointy shards that poked into the skin of his palm like needles. “Since then ’tis centuries; but each feels shorter than the day,” Maureen continued. John shook his head at this nonsense. Listening to the stupid woman revel in the spotlight made him ill. He held his bleeding hand over his heart, feeling it pound like an ax through a thick wooden door. His throat clenched with what—sorrow? Was that all it was? He scoffed at how small that seemed. Then something seemed to break inside him. His breath caught. He choked and coughed. The wild thumping of his heart stopped. He belched loudly, from the depths of his gut, as though releasing some dark spirit that had been lodged down there his whole life. His secretary laid a hand on his shoulder. “Excuse me,” John said, wiping saliva from his mouth. When he looked up again, Maureen’s poem was over. He straightened in his seat and felt his heart start back up. Its beat was now soft and aimless, like a baby’s babbling. He was calm, he thought. He was fine.

Next, Marcia’s choir group took the stage and began to sing an old Negro spiritual. They sang lifelessly, as though the song didn’t mean anything to them. Perhaps it didn’t. John rose and walked up the aisle to the bathroom at the back of the chapel. He blew his nose for a while in the stall, urinated, defecated, then flushed the broken wishbone down the toilet.

? ? ?

A week later, John still had not returned to work. He spent his days in silence, eating duty-free Ferrero Rocher chocolates and bouncing the strings of Marcia’s squash racket against his skull. He paced the apartment, his mind empty but for the bits of music he heard from cars passing on the street outside. Or he sat on the leather sofa in front of the muted television, which was showing back-to-back episodes of true-crime docudramas. People liked to kill one another, it seemed, on speedboats. Aliases, disguises, offshore bank accounts—these notions began to pepper John’s mind. With Marcia gone, perhaps he could fill his remaining years with criminal pursuits, he thought. He was too clumsy to be a cat burglar. But couldn’t he stalk someone? Or vandalize something? Library books? The backseats of taxis? Easiest would be to send death threats to someone he despised—Maureen, perhaps. He could do that without even leaving the apartment. He winced at his cowardice. At every stage of his life he’d been reasonable, dutiful. He’d prescribed creams, lanced cysts, cut plantar warts out of the rubbery soles of smelly feet. Once, he’d pulled a seven-foot coil of ingrown hair from an abscess on the tip of a patient’s tailbone. That was as wild as it got for John. He’d never been in a fight. His body bore no scars. The hands now folded in his lap were bland, beige, wrinkled in all the predictable ways.

The spot he’d chosen for the urn of Marcia’s ashes was on a shelf in the kitchen, next to the coffee grinder and the mini food processor that she had used expressly for guacamole. “The secret is to freeze it first,” he recalled her saying. Or was that something else? John didn’t care. He’d had enough of what people said, tips and tales, theories, tidbits. If he could have it his way, nobody would ever say anything again. The entire world would go silent. Even the clocks wouldn’t tick. All that mattered would be the beating of hearts, the widening and narrowing of pupils, the whirling of ties and loose strands of hair in the wind—nothing voluntary, nothing false. He opened the fridge and peeled back the tinfoil from a dish one of the friends had brought over. Fat from the chicken had congealed into a dun-colored jelly. He stuck his finger in it, just to feel the cold gunk.

Then the phone rang.

“And?” is how John answered. The voice on the line was a recording from the local convenience store. Marcia’s photos had been printed and were ready to be picked up. She’d used a disposable camera on their trip to the island. John hung up the phone. Marcia’s purse was where she’d left it, on the table in the hallway. He rifled through and found the claim stub in her wallet. Without changing out of his pajamas, he put on a jacket and shoes and went down to the lobby.

“How are you, Mr. John?” Eduardo asked. He followed John to the door and opened it, his black rubber shoes squeaking on the polished marble floor.

John didn’t answer. He had nothing to say. He let his head hang and plodded slowly down the block. He didn’t care if people thought he looked forlorn or deranged. Let them judge. Let them entertain themselves with their stories, he thought.

At the convenience store, he went to the counter and pulled out the claim stub. When the shopgirl asked for his last name, he handed over his business card.

“Can you confirm the home address?” she asked.

John shook his head.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Are you deaf or something?” she asked.

“Maaa, haa,” John said. He ground his jaws and pointed to his ears.

“OK,” the girl said, softening. She held up a finger. “One minute.”

John nodded. Why would she need to confirm his address, anyway? What kind of impostor would want someone else’s photographs? Someone with a speedboat, perhaps. John laughed at himself. “Maaa, haa,” he said again.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t understand you,” the girl said. She slid the packet of photos across the counter and pointed to the glowing numbers on the cash register’s display screen. She held up her forefinger and thumb and rubbed them together. “Money,” she said. “Dinero.”