The Family Unit and Other Fantasies Read online

  Still, pondering the future didn’t change his present quandary: where to buy milk now that Steen’s was gone—the organic kind, without the cow hormones or whatever was bad. He turned, his feet feeling heavy, and walked at the pace of a man twice his age (forty-five—his age, not twice his age) to, well, he guessed Green Harbor was the nearest place now, though the milk was hormonal, the bananas were always brown, and he saw a mouse in there once.

  Barry’s head throbbed. The four blocks seemed to take forever—because, of course, he didn’t want to go, Steen’s had been just fine with him, and so his resistance increased time, and not in a good way. Other people might not mind as much, Barry thought, because they didn’t work at home, they only passed Steen’s on the way to and from their jobs, whereas he actually entered the place three or four times a day, since he never shopped in bulk—where did he live, the suburbs? What did he have, kids?—and went in for one item at a time: salt, a sponge, this morning, milk. Truth be told, he liked to leave his apartment, which sometimes seemed suffocating and was where he spent all day writing freelance brochures for U.S. stamps, and besides, going up and down the stairs was the only exercise he got, being somewhat plump and pasty, so why not spread it out?

  Then something cheered him up on the way to Green Harbor, distracting him from the endless length of the trip.

  He realized he would be passing Elegamento’s, his usual newspaper store, and that today was the second week of the month and thus the time for new magazines to come in. He rarely if ever bought magazines, preferred to just stand and read them right there in the store, but he always bought something—usually a single small pack of tissues—to pay Elegamento’s for its time. (With irony, he thought that tissue packets represented free-market capitalism at its best, since their price from one end of town to the other ranged from twenty-five cents to a dollar, and Elegamento’s, at sixty cents, was right in the comfortable middle—another reason he liked the store.) If the owners seemed to witness his behaviour with something less than pleasure, they always at least recognized him, and that was all that mattered.

  But when Barry reached Elegamento’s, he read the sign, dumbfounded: “Coming Soon: A New Drugall’s.”

  There was no prevarication, no pride; there was no brown wrapping paper, either; Elegamento’s was simply closed, shut, kaput, he thought. Inside, the place was dark, but he could see that all was in suspended animation, the magazines—last month’s, not new—candy and paperbacks just sitting there, like those recreations of parts of Pompeii he had seen on TV, only without any ash. A small pile of mail lay on the floor near the door, apparently the universal symbol for an absconded owner.

  Barry was more than dismayed; he was mad. Where would he be known for reading magazines for free now? The nearest place was News Buddy, six blocks over, and it was so narrow you couldn’t move your arms enough to open a magazine, let alone read one!

  At least Elegamento’s was honest about what had happened: its landlord had obviously jacked up the rent and a chain was taking over. No wonder they’d blown off that month’s bills, they were mad as hell—as mad as Barry. How many Drugall’s were there in the neighbourhood now anyway? Ten? (The stores had originated ninety miles north of New York and were spreading everywhere, like an illness or an awful catchphrase.) Each one was alike—how much eczema shampoo and imitation aspirin and scented toilet paper did one neighbourhood need? (And why were the interiors always heated to what seemed like a hundred degrees? And why was there always a long line, even when you were the only one there?!)

  He bet Steen’s would be one soon, too, or some other national outlet for clothes, coffee, or whatever else. In the twenty-odd years he had lived in the neighbourhood, he had seen individuality and small ownership dwindle—and who knew in what homogenized hell it would all end up? What had happened to his little microcosm of Manhattan, the two or three blocks around his apartment house? Who had stolen his little city?

  Barry’s vision briefly blurred and affected his balance. His fingers scrambled in his pocket for a pill but found none. These fits of anxiety, depression, and paranoia— other people’s words, not his—were eased but not erased by the prescription. He resented having to take the pills in the first place: he was only being honest, after all—chain stores were taking over everything, it was true! Still, not even having the option of ingesting one unnerved him, especially since he’d been chastened by losing his job at the Philatelic Society a year before and going on disability. He would have to go home and find the small bottle he had left—intentionally? Arrogantly?—in his other jeans; the prospect of returning to the tiny room increased the unhappiness that now left him leaning limply against the wall of the new, upcoming Drugall’s.

  The search for the pills soon gave Barry hope, however. In the pocket, his fingers felt a small piece of paper, stuck deeper down. It was a ticket from his dry cleaners, where he had left his one good shirt. It would be ready today, that’s what the man said (he was pretty sure), and retrieving the shirt would give him a positive new chore to perform and take his mind off the appalling industrial encroachment he seemed to encounter at every turn today in, as he thought of it, his little city.

  The dry cleaners were, what, up two blocks or over one? Were they on Second and not Third? The pills, regardless of their effect in other areas, had always focused his attention, snapped him to, so now—in addition to the extremes of emotion he was pinballing back and forth between—he groped for simple surety as to the way he should walk, at last reaching the dry cleaners by instinct only, like a dog whose owner has uprooted him and finds his old home from many, many miles away.

  The balloons outside the store were the first indication that something was awry, their merry aspect a kind of awful harbinger. The name was still the generic “Dry Cleaners,” but that gave Barry small comfort when he took out his ticket inside.

  “That was from the old owner,” said the man behind the counter—Asian, like the last proprietor, but male, tall, and young, not female, squat, and old. “Sorry.”

  “What do you mean?” Barry said, surprised by the sudden sound of his own voice, since he had been silent for days at home. “What about my shirt?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he shrugged, regretful but only a little.

  Barry had no answer; he just kept crumpling the ticket until it was a small ball in his hand. It had always been a guarantee, a laundry ticket, a way to get things back that had been so close to his skin they were almost a part of it, a way to get them back better. He was the one who had to worry about losing it; if he had the ticket, he was home free. What happened to his things when it didn’t work that way, when no one cared if he kept his part of the bargain? Had he left the shirt there too long? Or had someone rewritten the rules here, too, as they were doing in the rest of the neighbourhood?

  This was the worst yet, for it upended Barry’s assumption that big business was all to blame; this was a small shop owner. And it wasn’t enough that his places of convenience and ritual were being withdrawn, now his stuff was being abandoned, lost and forgotten, along with everything else! How had a piece of him disappeared with the old dry cleaners, like water down a dirty drain?

  “Where is my shirt?” he kept asking. “Where is my good shirt?”

  He was in danger, he had to escape—and that meant travel, the only way he knew how. He had to reach the garage in which he kept his mother’s car, a 1991 Volvo, which had been his inheritance after her death two years ago, along with enough money in carefully stipulated installments to keep it housed, cleaned, and filled. Sometimes Barry felt that the car was his mother’s real survivor, not he, so lovingly did she allot the money and spell out the method for its upkeep. “At least the car works,” she once told him.

  Though he rarely drove it, Barry made to do so now, nearly sprinting the ten blocks to the garage, which bordered the highway and so allowed easy access for getting out of town.

  He ha
d actually been standing in the garage for several minutes before he realized where he was—and how could he have known when it had been so utterly transformed, as totally shifted in shape as a balloon animal, one minute a dachshund, the next a giraffe?

  It was a city park now, covered in fake grass and featuring cheery green benches, swings, and slides, a distinct improvement over the old grey garage, but a change so drastic that it almost made him lose consciousness and have to sit on one of those swings, the leather slingshot kind that sinks along with you.

  He knew it was possible that he had not heeded the warnings, that he had discarded the letters that told him to remove his mother’s car or else—he often tossed out envelopes unopened that seemed official and might mean he owed money. But now, along with his locations, routines, and clothes, his past was being dumped in the junkyard in the form of a car that, though a hated rival for her love, was all he had left that was tangible and touched by his mother.

  And who could object to how it happened? Who didn’t like a park? This was a pro-public civic gesture, not some crass commercial grab by a corporation or an individual. This was a good thing, even he knew that; the fact that he couldn’t blame anybody caused him to cry tears of bitter and lonely helplessness.

  Barry cried until he could cry no more. The discombobulating process seemed complete. There was only one place to go now: home, which while small enough to entomb him was also familiar enough to embrace him. He would bring back to it no milk or shirt but it might not matter; his dusty, cluttered, and overheated studio would at least allow him—or force on him, with the entrancing fumes from its radiator, the moderating knob of which had long since ceased to turn—the protective sleep he felt was his last, best, and at this point only possible action.

  Drying his tears on a coffee-stained napkin—from the old Steen’s?—he found in his back pocket, and averting his eyes from a child who now stood staring at him, horrified, at the base of the slide, Barry stood and started for the sidewalk. His Metro Card had fifty cents too little on it for the bus.

  He stopped a few blocks from his home, panting from the effort, though he had walked at a reasonable rate. Unable not to, he pulled a little cell phone from his pocket, one which needed repair, one which for some reason was stuck on speakerphone and so blared his business to the world at large—which was most often the ringing of his home phone, as he checked for messages that were never there. Then he pressed in his personal PIN.

  This time, there was a message. Barry turned to muffle the booming voice from any nosey passerby.

  “This is Dr. Hagel’s office. Please call at your earliest convenience. Thank you.”

  That was all the woman, clearly a receptionist, said in a tone neither comforting nor alarming, with a neutrality she had been trained—or with which she was naturally gifted and hired in the first place—to perform.

  It was, he knew, the results of the tests he had taken since complaining of horrible headaches and dropping things during dinner—the kinds of symptoms ignored by others when you’re the nervous type, and that even you yourself hope bizarrely are just more mental problems, more maladjustments, and not something worse, something in your brain that little pills can’t cure.

  It was the call, Barry admitted to himself, that he had left the apartment to avoid; his milk would have lasted until tomorrow.

  Now he felt the cold touch of fear. Wouldn’t the doctor have left a message himself if it were nothing? Wouldn’t he feel that leaving bad news on a machine was too blunt, too callous, and, most of all, too cowardly? Of course, Barry thought—and his fingers trembled so much he had to struggle to put the phone away.

  Then, suddenly, uncharacteristically, he caught himself. Why was he jumping to conclusions? Calm down, he thought, see it clearly. There were other opinions to get, other tests to take. Hadn’t his cousin contracted something bad and survived? Mightn’t he improve his diet, eat more greens, add more exercise? All was not lost; there were things he still could do.

  Bolstered by this unique bucking up of himself, he started to take the few steps left toward home to return the call. He turned the final corner, his heart beating more from weird—to him impressive—hope than panic.

  His building was gone.

  All that was left was a giant hole in the ground, as wide and deep as the building itself had been. The residences to the right and left remained; it was as if the one between had simply been pulled out, as cleanly and completely as a tooth from a person’s mouth.

  Barry went to the edge and looked in, looked hundreds of feet down to a floor of solid earth, looked into the emptiness. Then he looked back up and stared without fear straight into the raging sun.

  He had no doubt what was about to happen to him.

  WHAT THE WIND BLEW IN

  “But why would they be here?” Alan asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

  “I don’t know,” Annabelle, his wife, replied. “The government put them here.”

  “But it happened a long way from here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I didn’t say that it did.”

  There would be no settling the issue, Alan knew, partly because Annabelle didn’t know the answer and partly because she didn’t care. If two survivors of a hurricane half a country away—almost the whole country, really—had been resettled in their town ninety miles north of New York, then that’s what had happened, and that’s all there was to it.

  “The government doesn’t know what it’s doing,” she said. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? So why would this make any more sense than anything else they do?”

  Alan shrugged; she had him there. That wasn’t the point, anyway, not to Anna: it was the fact of the couple’s suffering, and the fact that it could be eased and that they might help ease it. Alan didn’t believe these were facts, but he didn’t say. He just let Anna go on, establishing the basis for what she was suggesting they do.

  “We have empty rooms. I can move my sewing stuff out of the den. Or you can move your toy theatres. It just seems criminal that two people who’ve been through so much should have to stay in a trailer park, and for God knows how long.”

  Now there was more that Alan didn’t say. Like, for instance, that he’d never liked having the trailer park across the two-lane highway from their house, had wondered why it was there, if this was what their notoriously high property taxes were going toward. (And no one was fooled by its smiling daisy logo and its title: “The New Day Flexible Life Center.” It was a trailer park!) He distrusted the people who lived in it, that was really it—he didn’t believe that most of them were actually in the dire straits they professed to be. He wasn’t a blamer, he considered himself compassionate; there was just something about other people’s pain that immediately made him doubt its existence, and the more pain, the more doubt. This man and woman had been suddenly upended, their home destroyed, their lives in a place ended perhaps forever, and so inevitably he felt the whole thing must be a fraud—especially since it had happened so far away and they were now here. And because Annabelle wanted the people to temporarily move in with them. But he said none of this.

  A year before, he would not have been so discreet. In those days—that is to say, in the twenty years of their marriage leading up to a year ago—he would have railed, scoffed, put his foot down, and Anna would have politely endured it and then backed down or compromised in a way that pleased him more than her, for he was always more negatively “invested” in his argument than she was positively in hers. But that was before Anna got cancer and things changed.

  The suspicion and petulance that characterized much of Alan’s conversations had been all along, it turned out, a kind of voodoo, a way to ward off the pain he saw in others and dreaded experiencing himself, even the pain involved in considering their pain. It was a form of subservience to pain, abject weakness before it. So when pain visited him, as it was always going to anyway, no matter what he did, visit
ed Annabelle and so him, he had to switch tactics; now he did and did not question anything Annabelle wanted, as an equally ineffective way to keep the cancer, and thus the pain from returning. This was what closed his mouth or changed what he said—though it could not change what he thought, the pattern of suspicion being too well established within him not to manifest someplace.

  “You’re being awfully quiet,” Anna said, surprised.

  Anna, on the other hand, had responded to circumstances differently. Before her diagnosis and treatment (it was breast cancer, she was forty-eight, the radiation was over now, she’d been clean for six months, no hair loss), she had been more open to and less frightened of life than her husband. In the time since, she had shown signs of passivity and depression. The hurricane couple’s appearance in town had brought back—even increased—her old intrepidness. She felt a new and invigorating alliance with them because they also suffered, felt they deserved all the help they could get. And since she was still here on Earth, she was here to help. Others in town had merely had them to dinner; Anna was willing to complete the permits to move the couple. This was its own mystical trade-off—help for health—but whatever its motive it tested Alan’s own superstitions and his new vow of silence. So far, he had passed.

  “I wasn’t being quiet. I was just thinking,” he said, and this at least was true.

  “And?” she said, apparently eager to get going with her plan.

  “I—” And here he swallowed a hundred objections, questions, and jokes, effectively ending his sentence as it began. He placed a hand on Anna’s hand, which was still as elegant and pale as the day they met, though he hadn’t noticed until a year ago. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

  When he met the couple, he was no more convinced of their veracity—less so, if that were possible. The Lynches were white, and hadn’t most of the hurricane survivors been black? That was the first thing. Secondly, they both dressed as if they had stepped out of a photograph from the 1930s or something—the dust bowl, the Oakies, the WPA, or whatever: denim shirt and jeans with rolled-up cuffs for the man, a simple sleeveless gingham dress for the woman. And even though they were probably in Alan and Annabelle’s mid to late forties age range, they looked twenty years older, with leathery skin tanned to a perilous crisp and rings beneath their eyes so deep they seemed to have been whittled out of wood.