by Addison Zeller
Dog with no owner charges, runs from wave breaking on seawall. The dog barks joyfully, the wave bursts on the berm, recedes. The scene repeats. I don’t remember how old I was. She wanted to show me the hospital she was born in, but it was demolished. Condominiums. Then the apartment she lived in. A steady rain, high waves. No islands in the bay.
At her apartment there was nothing to see. A woman lived there who insisted she hadn’t known our family. She wasn’t mistaken, she said, couldn’t be, because she’d lived there forty years. But it is the same address, my mother said, same door, windows, even gingko. “I feel I’m pissing in your holy water,” the woman said, “but it’s impossible,” and when my mother tried to look over her shoulder at the room, a man with a head like a pent-up animal stood and asked if she’d like to see downstairs. “You probably lived downstairs,” he said, but my mother insisted, “No, I lived in that room over your shoulder, I went downstairs sometimes, when the neighbors were out. I was a little girl. Maybe you mixed it up. Maybe you lived downstairs. Because if you had a soap dish with a goldfish on it you had a walnut wardrobe, two mirrors faced each other in the vestibule and two bay windows with window seats, are you sure they weren’t yours?” But he was leading us down and pulling the door closed, so my mother refused to see anything else and we walked into the rain again.
“They were lying,” she said. “And in that building I was born a second time. It was a pediatrician’s office then and I had no conception of myself, I only was. I didn’t know how I related to my parents, time, space, but a light came on and when it ended I knew who my parents were, who I was, who the pediatrician was, everything was new and familiar, I was self-aware, and the pediatrician looked me over, he always smoked, smoked in the examination room, I don’t know what he looked like, just mouth smoke and hands, and when I left his office I held hands with the woman I knew was my mother, and the world was happening at last. My father was a smoker too, he was a hard man, like your father. Whatever happens we’ll be drawn to each other. When we reach the bus-stop you’ll see the bay. Lines queued up and the bay was right between two buildings. Maybe it was farther. It must have been farther than this.
“It’s like squinting in a keyhole to see yourself. Do I look all right?” Yes, I said. “Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s time anyway. My belly’s in such knots.” She smelled the flaps of her camel coat to tell if it had picked up the rain.
In the museum she instructed me to wait by the door to the bathrooms. She came out differently arranged. Her face was dry with makeup, her salty hair tied back. She’d spent an hour that morning arranging. Scissors, tweezers. Comb on a folded Kleenex by the blue-veined sink. The luxurious mist of her bath opened and closed the distances between the sky and the city on the window I stared through.
“Why did you take your shoes off?” They’re all wet, I said. “We can dry them out back at the hotel. Please don’t do this to me. We’re in a public place, we’re at a museum.” She told me we would stay in the decorative arts gallery. “Ebonized oak, leaded glass, brass,” she read aloud. “Wall clock, case by, movement by Tiffany & Co., walnut, pine, glass, brass, silver-plated brass.” She checked her phone. We drifted into the prints gallery. “Chromogenic print…” “Gelatin silver print…” “Silver dye bleach print…” “Linocut…” “Pink rice paper…” In a linocut, in blue ink, which we examined with a magnifying glass that hung from the wall, a barking dog wagged its tail at a suicide in a wide, dense elm. Only the boots were visible, swaying in the limbs. A summer afternoon storm was blowing in, to judge from how the upper boughs dipped at the dog and shook what clung to them with a watery, joyful sound of leaves and heels. “Might as well go,” she said.
“He works here,” she said of her friend when we reached a small picture gallery two blocks down. Nor was he there. We examined a photo of an iceberg. A tooth. She wanted to go straight to the water. The clouds at the marina were so low and gray she said they were like gauze she was stuck under, a medical mask she had to wear that wouldn’t peel off. She looked straight ahead when she walked along the seawall. Sometimes she wrote in the air with her finger, one or two words. “I’m trying to find this walking bridge I used to pass under,” she said, “and the gulls on the other side would clap their wings.” Can we at least eat? “There’s food at the hotel. Or we can go back to the gallery and try that area. I’m sure it isn’t cheap. Say if you see somewhere.” We settled in a coffee shop with a view of the seawall. Two gulls hung on the water as if pinned to a blank canvas. “And now we have two more days of this,” she said. “Why don’t we go to the hotel. You take a bath, I’ll shower, we’ll go to the restaurant on the top floor, which I’m sure costs, but it’s a reward for all the walking we did. It’s the view we’re paying for, which won’t be there, but we’ll pretend.”
A martini glass stood under a cloche on a shelf behind the hotel bar. “Only glass in this room that survived the last earthquake,” she read from the menu. “This hotel was designed by an earthquake architect. It shakes with tremors and slips into place again. Picture an accordion.” The other shelves were lined with green and blue liquor bottles. Amber necklaces glittered low in the windows, drivers silhouetted in the beads, while higher in the sky, in a pendant of light, hands sorted laundry.
She checked her phone often in the night and showered when her friend texted. “He’s sorry, which is fine, he’s kind of a flake, he wants to meet for breakfast. I might not see you till late, there’s money by the TV. Don’t go anywhere not in the hotel or forget the room number. I think that’s all.” Her face was hot when she leaned down. The back of her camel coat was visible for some time under the scaffolds and awnings. Pigeons made circuits on the roofs. Workmen opened hatches and disappeared with tools.
I went down first to the mezzanine and lay on my back to look up at the eight banks of suites above me, despite everyone, the staff and buzz of guests charging their devices, and the dog belonging to someone, that barked until she hushed it. I could see people in some of the rooms, unnoticed by anyone else, maybe not as aware of themselves as I was of them, until they shut their long blinds or drew away from the windows. Clouds were thick as bedding on the skylight. The furniture was monumental and warm. I played a game of hiding, although I had no one to play with, just people I had chosen seated on the mezzanine, who didn’t know I looked out at them from behind a pillar or the tiled plant bed where palms swayed in the air conditioning. They scrolled their computers and drank their coffee. I pretended to shoot them with an assassin’s rifle, or pinch their tiny heads, because I was so big and everything yielded to my fingers. Rain changed the light on the walls and the windows of the suites.
I took the elevator to the restaurant when I got hungry, but the view was intimidating in daylight. The sky hovered between the radiating support beams like dewy cobwebs in the spokes of a wheel. Only one party was seated, three elderly guests who didn’t look up. “What’s the matter?” a young woman called from the bar. I’m not old enough. “Who says? There’s no one here.” She sat me at the bar. Pennants of light from the little sun that came in fluttered behind the bottles and the cloche.
I’d forgotten to count the money. Nothing was inexpensive. The tempeh burger, the fried chicken sandwich with exotic slaw. “No, no, it’s all right,” she said. She had black curls and green nails. “It’s on the house, it’s on me.” She let me taste the cocktail she was making, I think to give us something to laugh over. “You’re old enough.” She dipped a tiny spoon and slipped it in my mouth. My face delighted her. I said, That’s like furniture. “It’s a Rob Roy. An old man drink.” She glanced at the party in the corner, then cleaned the spoon in my water glass and slid it into the next drink. “Martini.” Seagull, I said. “Seagull! And this one? Old Fashioned.” Someone’s beard. “Someone’s beard!” She shook her head. “Why don’t I bring you a chip dip and a, what do you drink? Not one of these.” Coke. “Chip dip and a Coke. If you want to sit at a window, it’s supposed to clear.”
I couldn’t sit still. The view changed every few feet. What was one skyscraper from one angle divided in two from another. Some of the buildings were furred with moldy clouds. “You’d blow away like a piece of paper,” she said when I asked what would happen if the windows weren’t there. She put my Coke down and walked away as a slate blue chevron dove past the window. A raptor hunting between the beam over my head and the roof of a building below, spiraling, then diving, silhouetted against the steam of exhaust vents.
A peregrine falcon, as I realize without having seen one before, but with perfect certainty, as though I’m already familiar with every detail of the moment I’m in. As if remembering through layers of gauze by settling my eyes on things in motion. An eddy of birds, or the circling of what resolves, I can barely believe it, in a skating rink on the roof of another hotel, distant as a mountain but reachable, I know elatedly, by flight.
Trolleys, buses. Convex surfaces of umbrellas. Umbrellas blooming open. The window, streaked horizontally with new rain, beads traveling their own way until I place my finger on the glass, and they begin to follow. Cold droplets pursue my finger in the warm path it makes. A train slips between buildings at the edge of the bay, as I take it to be, until I see it’s only a silver brook of traffic. I’m following the lines of movement. The ways of travelers for a season. A peregrine falcon, unseen but for me, on the sky’s blank face, and the dun of a camel coat as the windows rattle. My mother is walking back, she’s already in the distance, her finger is writing in the air. The skyscrapers fall like icicles and the rain on the window slides upward on cracks in the glass. Bottles burst and the dream of the architect has ended, the building has shattered in the earthquake. The sky is entering the window. The floor sighs with holes, the cloche slips. Goodbye, Humanity, I have the presence of mind to say. The spoon circles in the water glass. Goodbye, Time and Space! Goodbye.
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Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in many journals, especially Burial Magazine.
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