Elephantine by Jack O'Brien

     The young boy’s frame materializes at the foot of the bed and dances like light in water. The man thinks to himself that the boy is a dream and that he cannot be real. She thinks to herself as well. She is not so sure.

     Outside of the bedroom the long fingers of palmish leaves wave in the remnants of the hurricane, up from the Gulf and the weatherman says it is losing steam. It does not feel to her as though it is losing steam, underneath their ceiling like buckling driftwood. To Abigail it feels as though the storm is trying to blow down their house with long angry breaths. Her husband moves in bed because he thinks that she will notice and he likes “letting things out to breathe” and she notices and pretends that she doesn’t. The storm was given the same name as the boy, Andrew.

     “Elephantine,” Abigail says and looks from her crossword puzzle to the window. Her husband is answering before she can tell him that there are only nine letters in the word and his answers always have too many letters and are sometimes in fact more than one word. She listens to the storm, outside like a child playing in pots and pans and his answer to elephantine is impossibly long.

     “Only nine letters,” she says and thinks about how often her husband is wrong, how he laughs when he is wrong, and how she had told her sister that she loved her husband for his “enormous humility”. The storm bellows and the windows chatter against their frames and in the remnants of the hurricane her husband’s laughing at himself seems clumsy and out of place to her, as far from endearing as laughter can be.

     “I asked if you wanted to talk about this.” He is repeating himself and this time she hears him and she does not want him to say anything about letting things out to breathe or about their son.

     “I feel fine. Elephantine. Only nine letters.”

     She holds her breath and looks out the window.

     Tree Climbing. Climbing in that tree that is waving at her with leaves that look like green banana peels and that feel thick and waxy when you are up in the branches and close enough to touch them. It had frightened her, having a boy that climbed trees like he did, and the way that he could watch the zoo giraffes for hours, stretching their necks up toward the tops of trees and chewing in dumb slow motion. It was more like a monkey the way he climbed with short jabbing thrusts, but it was always the giraffes at the zoo and his second grade teacher had said that he liked giraffes and climbing trees because he wanted to be taller.

     Her husband breath is shallow and she knows that he is waiting for her to start breathing again and thinking of whether to tell her to start breathing and she thinks of being up in the tree with the waxy leaves and the boy’s small sneaker close to her face. Looking out at the tree she knows that it was all more dangerous with her along in the branches out over their front yard, adding what little extra weight she did and him having to worry after his old mother, much older than the mothers of any of his friends. When he was alive and running around at birthday parties, she thought proudly about climbing with him, the young mothers with firm breasts like water-balloons and her own breasts, stretched as though they should be tied into animal shapes. She thinks about how her breasts had looked to her then and about Gertrude the second grade teacher whose sons had laced the tree in the window with toilet paper, about the smell of the eggs Gertrude’s sons had thrown baking on the roof and about how Gertrude had said the boy wanted to be taller than he was. And then Abigail is only thinking about green banana peel leaves and imagining their texture, like living candle wax.

     “I’m going for a walk,” she says it and knows that it is raining outside and that she will need to do better.

     “In this?” Her husband’s frame is so small in the bed next to hers while he pushes himself up on one elbow and indicates the storm outside. She thinks of how her sisters had all said the boy took after his father and how her son and her husband were both smaller than she and had always seemed poised to smile. Even when the boy cried about the smell of the eggs rotting in sunlight his face spread before her like oil over water and Abigail had thought that the boy might smile.

     “Or maybe I’ll watch TV,” and a floorboard creeks under her foot, stepping out of the room.

     Her old body is curled on the plaid couch and there is warm red-brown rock under her hand. The sky’s blue on the skin of her back makes the sweat jump with cool, startling rapidity into dry heat. She takes the next handhold and the desert spreads behind her like a cape. She is light as an insect, and racing up the face of the rock. Racing invisible moisture, rising off of her skin into air like outer space and she does not dare turn around to look where the moisture goes. Something is moving below her, but the boys on the TV never look and so she keeps moving upwards. Another handhold and it is gaining on her below and she is moving like a spry cat, bounding up the side of the rock and then there is a hand on her ankle. She looks down and it is the small angular rock climbing man from cable TV. Her legs are old and brown under his hand and she moves her left leg so that she is straddling the warm rock, pushing away from him, and she feels a warm pop like electricity in her abdomen and then she is home in her den on the vaguely itching plaid couch.

     She forgets the dream immediately and outside through the window the rain has stopped and now it is only the wind. The first thing she thinks when she is awake is that she will have to light her cigarette inside of the house away from the wind and then she looks at the TV. It flickers greens and blues and is the only light in the den. Before sleep it had been the hunting shows, and then a show about perfectly muscled young men climbing rocks in the middle of the dessert and she had gone to sleep to the young men climbing rocks and the electric echo of voices in the room. She had often watched the young men climb and thought about her son, and thought that he would have graduated to large rocks that rise straight upward in the dessert. Before, the show had made her think of sex with the young men’s perfectly muscled bodies and it had been the first time she had thought of sex with any seriousness since years before her son or any of these boys were born. She had stopped watching the shows as sleep came earlier in the past years and then there it was in greens and blues in her den and she had closed her eyes to the boys climbing and talking about climbing and she had slept a dreamless sleep.

     She moves across the den through shifting TV light and opens two windows. On the second, air rushes through and lifts the hem of her nightgown to her knees. Her knee skin is wrinkled and dark and her pearl nightgown is phosphorescent blue and green in the TV light. It clings to her torso and reveals her long breasts and her thin joints and she thinks of a hermit crab that she has not thought of for half of a century.

     For two days the crab did not come out of its shell and then it began to smell a salty rotting smell. Her brother had said it was her hermit crab stinking up the bedroom and that it was dead and rotting and she did not believe him, could not fathom until her mother dug the crab from its shell with a Q-tip and waggled it in her face. The body was slender and curly and looked to her like the worms that came up from the ground in dirty street puddles and nothing like the animal dragging along in its regal swirling shell.

     On the porch, tiny drops of water fleck her skin and she thinks that it is raining again before she knows that the beads have shaken free from the large tree, dancing a shushing dance above her in the wind. She taps her cigarette to beat out a rhythm and follows its smoke into the upper registers, climbing over her through the light of the bedroom window where it becomes yellow creeping cursive, and then disappears to mingle with clouds and tree limbs.

     And then she is thinking of the tree again. Of climbing with her son, and the second time that they had been up there, cleaning wet toilet paper from in between its limbs. It had been the boys from down the street, the sons of his second grade teacher Gertrude and Abigail and her son had climbed into the limbs of the tree together to clean away the wet toilet paper. They had made a joke of it, about the boys that he was sure had done it and about how they would end up living in this neighborhood with Gertrude and going to the same country club as Gertrude and she had been glad to be up in the tree with her son before the eggs began to smell in the noon time sun and before she tried again and could not make a joke about that smell.

     She steps off of the front porch, out into the yard and her feet give inches into the wet earth. She smokes her cigarette deeply and walks out into the street where large outwardly fading halos surround street lamps in the quiet. She thinks that this must be the eye of the storm. The weatherman had said that the difference would not be so marked, that the trouble and the eye would have meshed this far up from the Gulf. Watching the weatherman she had expected the storm to pass unannounced, a day of rain like any other, and then a day of sun that would whitewash her memory like bone in the desert, but the storm was everywhere when she awoke and she had tried to go back to sleep.

     She walks down the middle of the road under the cloud-softened moon like a thumbprint in the sky and she feels defiant and powerful in the night and thinks of her son returning from sneaking out of the house into the summer night. It was three in the morning and he had been coming up the stairs while she had been coming down to watch TV and he was covered in grass stains and sweating profusely and had said it had just been a bad dream that found him like this. His eyes went dead when he said this and it was a ridiculous lie and he was certainly one of the worst at lying that she had ever met. She wonders whether she knows about every lie he had ever told her and thunder rumbles at her back.

     The cigarette burns her lips and while she throws it into the yard of the large house where Gertrude lives she wonders whether or not he had ever lied to his teachers and whether they had seen his eyes go dead. She pictures him in his second grade school desk surrounded by construction paper collages with his face reddening from revealed lies and he is where she sat during her second parent teacher conference.

     They had always been nervous affairs, like high school all over and this time being judged for something that mattered and she was always ashamed of the sweating and the stomach acid she felt about her son. But the conferences are a blur to her now and even the one where his teacher had warned about his “mental well being” is vague, but she can remember the one with Gertrude and how they had laughed at Napoleon complexes and about the way that he climbed trees. The two had talked the way that people from the same street that should be old friends talk, and she had laughed with the teacher when she had mentioned the Napoleon complex because she had wanted to seem easy about her child and without hang-ups, the way she imagined the mothers that belonged to Gertrude’s country club were made. Until her boy died she had never thought much about the parent teacher conference with Gertrude and now she thinks of it whenever it is quiet like here in the middle of the street under the closing eye of the hurricane.

     Back up the street in front of Abigail’s house the tree is dancing again and she thinks that the eye has passed and soon enough the rain will return. Their house behind the tree is smaller than the rest on their street, and they had held out against the builders who came offering ridiculous money to “collapse and rebuild” because they had been happy where they were and had not needed money. The larger houses appeared around theirs and the house became the smallest on the street and she knows that this is the decision her husband regrets when he thinks about their son.

     She looks at her front door, black in blunted moonlight, and begins to feel the inertia that takes over at this point. One step toward the bedroom and then the next and the rest will follow toward the line of light under the bedroom door because to not follow the first step would be to waste energy and it is too late in the night for wasted energy. She can feel herself, into her bedroom getting slower and sleepier until she is in her bed and twisting her torso to juice the tension and turn off the bedside lamp. And by the time the light switches off she will have convinced herself that she is tired enough to collapse into dreamless sleep and even now she feels the sleep coming. The next morning she will wake and the day will be sunny and her husband will smile at her over cold cereal and things will be ok because there will be the crossword puzzle from the purple section of the USA Today and maybe even something good on the TV and she is cleaning breakfast dishes in her mind when her sneaker squeaks on the front porch and she touches the bronze door handle.

     Abigail takes her hand from the handle and lights a cigarette.

     She is thinking about cleaning toilet paper from the large tree, and about how the tree is the only familiar thing in the night and how the boy had cried when her husband asked about the smell. They had not seen the toilet paper for what it was and the sun was hot that day and the eggs splashed on the roof began to smell and when her husband came home he had said something like “Goddamn, what is that aw-ful smell?” before she could get to him and he had sat with the boy while he cried and asked him to let things out to breath. She doesn’t know whether the boy let anything out into the egg smelling air and she takes a second drag from her cigarette and opens the door.

     She moves through smoke toward the kitchen with certainty and understands. They are there in front of her in harsh refrigerator glare and she has three of them, as many as she is able to fit in her small leathery hands and then she forms a kangaroo pouch with her pajama top and drops two of the eggs and then another into the translucent fold. She thinks about Gertrude at the wake and how she had wanted to tell her that Napoleon had verged on world domination and that she would be damned if any of the second graders in the foursquare line would come very close to something so grand and fabulous in their lives and especially not Gertrude’s sons with their identical crew cuts and there dumb animal eyes and then Gertrude’s sons were there next to their mother and Abigail knew that her son was dead and felt silly and crushed as though her son had died again there in front of her in the glossy casket.

     She is outside in the middle of the road and the rain has started to come again. Her pajamas stick like wet paper to her legs, and for a moment she can see herself, old and her brown skin darkening like a deflating balloon in the middle of a rainstorm named after her dead son. She imagines she looks less than human walking down the middle of her street, like a hermit crab out of its shell and thin and pink and curly and dying.

     She takes an egg from her pouch and speckles its white with rainwater. The rain is coming down hard and she is almost at the house where Gertrude and her young boys sleep and then she knows that the boys have moved off five years ago after college and she pushes the thought from her mind and imagines those dumb sad eyes. She is at the house and below a large oak in Gertrude’s front yard. Blue light flickers in a downstairs window and she can hear the electric whisper of TV words on the cusp of earshot. She looks at the house in its entirety, large and red and she thinks that it would look like a barn if it weren’t for the windows and the electric candles in every one. The egg in her hand feels impossibly light, like it will stay still in the air and drift to the ground if she tries to throw it and she wants to climb the walls and mash the egg into the red wood with her open palms, turn her hand and press it in like finger paint so that it is an orange and brown that testifies to chickens unborn and that looks the way it will smell.

     Lightning flashes and it is three seconds before thunder grumbles and five more before she realizes that her husband is next to her. He is wearing his yellow rain slicker and looks as though he is going on an expedition to the arctic and she smiles at him because it is the only thing that she can think to do. He takes her in slowly with his eyes on the verge of a smile and she wishes he would look at her like a dead hermit crab. Instead he smiles the way that he smiles when he knows that he is wrong. He reaches out his hand, and curls his fingers in small flicks and he wants her to come with him, where he will dry her off and kiss her ears until they are warm again.

     She places a rain-specked egg in his hand. He does not twist his face or turn away and instead he continues to look at her and smile. She looks up at the sky and rain drops long and slow into her eyes. She is looking at the top of Gertrude’s oak tree and it dances back and forth without rhythm, and she takes an egg from her pouch and taps staccato lightly on its side. The egg is covered in a smooth mold of rain when she whips it behind her head and aims it at a window on the second floor. Her arm is weak and she has not thrown anything since her childhood and the egg lands on the sloping tiled roof and spills upward towards the window like a breaking wave. Abigail immediately knows that the rain will wash her egg from the roof, carry it through the storm drain and then down through the earth. She looks to her husband and he has taken his hood down. His thin gray hair is rapidly matting to the top of his head and he has stopped smiling. She wants him so badly to throw his egg and she knows he will not and that he will wait there patiently until she is through throwing hers and then walk home with her and kiss her ears warmly and she grabs another egg from her kangaroo pouch.

     The rain and the air break the egg apart on its way to the window and then it covers the glass pane and the eggs liquid is loud on the glass. A light turns on in an upstairs window and then more lights, electric light like spreading fire on the inside of the house and she grabs another egg and sends it whistling. This one does not break in the air and hits the window with a crunch like bones and she is giddy and picks up another egg when the front door opens.

     All of the light in the house is buzzing white and yellow and the big red barn glows wide eyed like a jack o’lantern. She wishes that she hadn’t started to cry and she sobs loudly as she lifts her last egg and her husband places his hand over hers and he is not looking at her, and looking at the house lights and the open door where Gertrude’s husband stands in blue pajamas and Abigail’s hand feels so heavy and wet. Her husband walks to the front porch of Gertrude’s house and Gertrude is behind her husband, peering around like a child at the zoo and Abigail’s husband is gesturing to the storm and Gertrude’s husband is nodding. The door closes, and the lights begin to go off in the house, one by one, and her husband stands on the porch and looks at his feet with the darkness from the house closing in around him.

     She does not see him make his way to her side because she is watching the top of Gertrude’s oak wag like a finger over her. The lightning is now a far off flashbulb and all she can think of is the zoo, and how much Gertrude had looked like her son, peering in at the giraffes from behind her body, scared that the giraffes would catch him looking. She looks up at Gertrude’s tall oak and wonders if there are giraffes that could reach the top of that tree, and how they would look standing out in the front yard, their jaws chewing in dumb slow motion.