The mother was not in the kitchen raising dinner. The lights were on and the fridge was open, full of light and frigid breathing. The oven had been preheated, though there was nothing in it and nothing sitting wanting to get in. A set of knives was spread out on the table. One of the four long bulbs in the overhead fluorescent lamp was dead.
The mother was not in the hallway that connected the kitchen to the garage, though from the garage the father could see his car up near the glass, its headlamps stunted by the near door and treating the tiny windows with more light. The father moved into the garage cracking his fingers and opened the freezer door and shut it. No mother, but the father found a hammer on the ice. The hammer’s head was cold and solid, a thing that would always be. He touched the hammer to his face.
The father carried the hammer with him back into the family hallway with a set of school-made photos of the son ordered in ascending age on either side, a progression that ended with the most recent photos, which somehow still did not look the same as the son did now.
At a certain spot in the hallway on the carpet the father set the hammer down.
The mother was not in the laundry room where the floor had babbled sick with suds. Underneath the suds, the machine shook. The bubbles blew larger than most soap bubbles. The father stamped the sudding with his boot and heard it crackle like glass pellets.
The mother was not in the TV room, as far as the father could rightly see. There was a smell that curled the air. Some color not a color. The TV lay turned over on its face. The father called the mother’s name several times into several cracks the room had and left his voice wedged there behind him.
The door to the son’s room was closed and locked and inside he could not hear the son up or moving. Asleep, the father assumed, as the son would not answer, not for anything. He tried the knob again, again.
The mother was not in their bedroom. The bed was made and covered all with crumbling crap that’d come down off the ceiling, plaster popcorn. Something had been making the ceiling shudder in the evenings. The father’s feet felt triple-sized. The father sat down to take his shoes off, glowing. The father said the mother’s name some more. He was so tired. He knew that he should find her. He knew he couldn’t just go to sleep, though he felt the feeling flooding through him, weighing his limbs down, thickening his blood.
The father leaned back on his elbows on the mattress, nodding. His head felt wide as nowhere. His head had so much in it.
The father heard someone rummage in the bathroom.
Ah, there she is, the father said, relaxing.
OTHER FATHERS
Outside the house inside the night beyond the father, the mother stood in porch light, in a gown. The mother knocked and rang the neighbors’ bells. She banged and clapped and tried the windows. People, she thought. People who can sleep. The mother moved from one house to another. None of the houses looked like hers, nor the house she had grown up in, nor the house grown up in by the son. From house to house to house to house to house the mother knocked and crossed off numbers on her arm. She’d woken up and found the numbers there delivered, formed in the patterns of the clogged pores where her hair would no longer grow.
The mother had some idea of what she’d say when asked, if ever. Some homes had bells that shook her sternum, or would play a song she knew she knew. Some homes seemed to quiver right along, as would their home, leaning. The mother imagined herself inside each home’s walls as she touched them — inside not sleeping, hearing herself at the door. At certain doors she tried the keys she’d crammed fat in her pockets, but in the locks they’d spin and spin.
She guessed men’s names into the crack, a string of fathers’ names hidden inside her, names of those who too had lost. She tried Antoine, Paul, Stanley, James; she tried Tom, Kim, Ken, John, Jim, Ray, Edward, Robert; she tried a name she could not quite name. The names stuck to her mouth. These names came from somewhere in her, she could hear them, coming on and on, and trailing off. .
The mother tried her name, then her mother’s, then the father’s, then the son’s. No one would come. The homes went on hearing. The homes would stand there. Overhead the sky cracked up with old light — light that sometimes seemed to form a map. The neighborhood went on regardless, even when the mother hid her eyes.
THE SON’S PHONE
The son lay with his cell phone between his pillow and his head, the way the mother had made him swear he would. She’d bought the phone in case of relapse—but relapse into what? The son could not remember. He had to wear the phone on him at all times. What if he could not find her? The mother could not stop thinking. Sometimes in her thoughts the mother would explode as balls of heat and crud and light.
The son’s phone was purple by most opinions, though sometimes it might appear blood red or translucent.
The son had set up a mirror at the foot of the bed that he could look in and see himself, as well as what might be in the room around him. So much of most rooms were never watched. Many people had used this room before the son, the son knew. Sometimes he felt they were still there. Some mornings he would wake up and the mirror would have turned slightly, rotated to one side, which the son attributed to his sleep-kicking, learned from his mother, held inside her. Some mornings the mirror would be turned around entirely, so that the son woke to the mirror’s flat brown back. Sometimes he’d find the mirror in other rooms inside the house.
There were sometimes other copies of the mirror.
The son also tended to talk in his sleep quite a bit, though neither he nor any other had heard anything he’d said while sleeping, ever. The sleeping son knew when to shut up. Most nights the son could not sleep at all.
The son concentrated on one body part and then another, approaching nowhere. The phone rang against the son’s face. The son rummaged, found the ringing, and took it open. Inside the phone there someone spoke — someone not the mother. The son said something back. His voice felt chalky, caught inside him. Inside the house the house stood still. The someone took what the son had said and said it back just slightly different, sounding almost like the son himself.
The room was dripping. A string of stinking lights. The phone against his head, a squeeze of wires, warm as fire among day.
The someone went on saying the same thing over and over, warbled and rushing, in a loop. Within the loop, by slips in repetition, the voice took the tone of something else: a buzzing, beeping. It raised abrasions on the son’s chest, the patchy pale skin puffing up with shapes like words. In the room downstairs, just below the son, the pucker in the wall grew slightly bigger. In the mirror the son saw nothing. The silver surface had a little curdle.
The son could not get the phone off of his face.
The windows sweating. The skin along the son’s wrists and forearms firming, fitted as with gloves. His cells, in sound, becoming ordered, torn up — the house inside the son so calm.