The Burning House. Paul Lisicky
I’m going to pay off my Visa, and after that, I’m going to buy Laura a new car and dig a water feature!
I laughed aloud like a madman, startling a woman who was hauling out her trash. What supreme, nutty pleasure it was to laugh in the night like a madman!
Our house couldn’t have been quieter, though my ears roared. I walked from room to pretty room, fighting off the urge to cry, I’m here, I’m here, waving the flags of my good news. Lights burned as if in a stadium. I shut them off, one by one by one, and did twenty pushups on the kitchen floor. Not just everyday pushups, but the kind with a clap in them.
The washing machine churned sloppily, as if glad for its work.
I stood still outside Joan’s room, chest banging and large. Light leaked beneath her door. She was talking to somebody, but it wasn’t her phone voice. It was higher than usual, less from the chest, in cold clear tones. Maybe she was already talking to Ferris, scoping out the details of my employ. But there was nothing of that familiarity or ease about the conversation. Her voice sounded hard, the syllables slack, as if the roof of her mouth had been scorched.
I miss you terribly, Mama.
Saving a neighborhood ... what was I thinking?
Things aren’t so good here. This is not how I’d pictured my life. (A little laugh.)
Whatever made me think that this would be enough for me?
I stood absolutely still, stolid as a suitcase. I’d never heard anything so lonely and remote. Really, she had every reason to be mad at her mother, and was she mad?
I sat down on the floor, still breathing, head buried on my folded arms. I licked, just once, a patch of my skin.
Years ago I’d seen a fox in the bracken across Route Nine. She had mange; her hair had come off in circles, skin smelly, a deep outrageous pink. We faced each other from a distance of twenty feet, both of us ashamed, both knowing there was no way I could make things better, even as I wanted to. I only had myself here: poor, hulking with excitement and spent dreams. I saw a part of me then—a part of me that I didn’t know I possessed—rise up and off my body to put my arms around Joan from behind.
I held her like that, in my imagination, until she stopped talking.
Then the part of me that was my body just had to get out of that house.
I lifted the bar above my chest. I’d put on fifty more pounds than I could handle, but why not? I was wired tonight. Little impulses sparkled, crackled like ice chips inside my brain. Burning nurtured my biceps; my axis, throat to furry belly, tensed and vigilant. I couldn’t hurt my back again, not now, now that I had a job. Twelve reps, twelve deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. One, two, three, four, five....
The bar went back on the rack with a clatter.
I sat up quick, too quick. Panting, a little dizzy, winded. It occurred to me that my protein intake was low. Was I dehydrated? Luckily the gym was empty after nine, none of the usual types escaping their wives, slumping on benches, yelling into cell phones. No one in sight but the Russian, a pale guy with black hair, whose fanatic devotion rendered him practically fatless, everything hard about him. He bent over the water fountain, sipping a mouthful, swallowing it, sipping. If we’d exchanged more than five words within the last year, I would have asked him to spot me. But we hadn’t talked since the night he walked by Laura, Joan, and me at Chi-Chi’s, where he must have figured out the three of us were related. I suspected it had something to do with Joan; there were plenty here who wouldn’t talk to us anymore—maybe they were realtors, contractors, building inspectors, plumbers, whatever. Maybe they thought she was a troublemaker. So went life in our town. None of that crap made any sense to me.
I lay back on the bench, still shaking in some deep basement of the self. I thought of the starkness of Joan’s room, the lamp on top of the washing machine, extension cords snaking along the floor. It wasn’t right that she was living like that. I kept telling her she deserved better. She deserved the second bedroom, but she wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t even hear of it. She claimed she liked the room just as it was. She was with us temporarily, only until she could get herself back on her feet. It was time to kick her out, she’d insisted, once she started sanding the floor, rubbing herself into its surfaces.
I lay back again. This time the bar struck me as heavier, much heavier, though certainly within the bounds of another ten reps. If I opened my mind, if I thought of it as a glass stage absolutely open to everything around me, I knew I could harness the energy in the atmosphere, the elements. I knew there was enough energy in the pea on last night’s dinner plate to explode my limits. I lifted the bar. And there was Joan’s low, throaty voice: preposterous, embarrassing, and marvelous all at once. Just the thought of speaking to the dead, even if it was only speaking to the air, spit into everything that was my life. I pushed back against the roar, against doubt, stupidity, the stubbornness, you name it—anything that wanted to do me in. Ten more reps. And another for good measure. The muscles in my arms saturated and burned. The pain shredded away, as if it had left me for someone else.
The Russian stepped to the water fountain, back curled as if he were protecting it from a blow. He bent over the faucet, made clean, sipping sounds like a sparrow. Then a peculiar temptation seized me: the desire to speak. Certainly not anything profound or remotely intimate, just ... the sky tonight: isn’t it beautiful? To let him know that I hadn’t been undone by his silence, his steady work to shut me out. When I thought of the shock on his superior face!
And maybe we’d actually carry on a conversation like decent men.
I laughed louder than I’d expected, a soft bark that burred the base of my throat. I put on another forty-five for the hell of it. Oh, the weight this time: I was a column, fluted and bleached, holding up the great marbles of the Parthenon. Or better yet, the belly of heaven itself: all the souls born, died, and yet to come. But they weren’t flying around up there; I refused that. None of that ever made any sense to me. If they were anywhere, they were below us, dark and dry, stacked up side by side, like glowing rods. If there was anything like a Heaven, it was somewhere in the center of the earth, in a moist, vast envelope.
But an afterlife? Really. Every time I thought about such matters I felt insubstantial, dandelion fuzz knocked about by the wind. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about God. It just seemed self-defeating to put too much investment into something that seemed beyond, incomprehensible, infinitely larger than myself. Wouldn’t the world be in better shape if people ignored what was on the other side? As for me, every time I looked up at the sky, it brought me more trouble than not. I tried to think about hope, and my deep, deep desire to bless life, to love every living thing from apple branch to pigeon, but the harder I tried, I couldn’t push through the sludge in my head. All the while a piece of me shriveled like a freeze-burned plant, as if I sensed that my uglier thoughts were heard, if not by God, then by the soil underneath my shoes, and I was already paying in ways I couldn’t yet see.
The bar pressed deeper into my clavicle. It resisted all my efforts to push it skyward.
The Russian was gone. No one in that part of the gym, not even the guy with the handlebar mustache, who wiped down the machines, buzzing from bench to bench like some tanned, muscular bee. Even if I humbled myself to yell out for help, I wouldn’t have been heard.
If I was lucky, I’d only come away with a band of bruises on my chest. If I was less so, I’d spend the night in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder.
The sleek white blades of the fan turned on the ceiling above, a good six inches toward the windows. Its rotation calmed me, cooling the sweat on my brows. I stared at them with such fixation that I saw a face. The face of God? I almost laughed at the grandiosity of it, in spite of my pain. It was something less expected than that, though: a woman’s face. And before I named the eyes, nose, and mouth, I knew it was Joan seeing me through, Joan pulling me up the side of a building, away