G.H.
It is possible that the noise the raccoon made entered Sarah’s dreams. It is quite certain That Matthew slept only briefly before the clawing woke him. This time, this second night, he rose from bed and grabbed a shoe and threw it at the crawl space door—a satisfying action, making a satisfyingly loud noise. But an action whose only discernible consequences were a black scuff mark on the crawl space door, and Sarah’s waking.
“Matt, my God, what is it?”
“It’s okay, Max, just me.” He stumbled back to the bed and sat on the edge, listening.
“Sweetheart?”
“Damn thing. Don’t worry about it. Sorry I woke you up, babe. Go back to sleep.”
“Are you kidding? What’d we do, board it in?
“Seems so. Shhh.”
He made himself count to fifty, one hundred, before moving. Quietly across the room to the night table, the flashlight in the drawer. Quietly walking back, unlocking the crawl space door. Sliding his thumb on the cool plastic flashlight button, waiting as his pupils contracted with the access of light. Turning the lock, the cold knob, urging the door ajar. And in the light the animal crouched for the thinnest of moments, for the thinnest of moments staring with eyes stained red by Matthew’s light.
And then gone.
Matthew took two steps but could see nothing. Nothing. Not wanting somehow to go further in, not wanting to turn around to retreat, he took a few steps backward. A rustling. He thrust his arm into a darkness that suddenly seemed enormous, swung the flashlight’s beam in wild arcs. Something moved again, thumped—in a whirl of rage he kicked at cartons, banged the flashlight against the sharply angled rafters, Eddie’s crutches clattered to the floor as Matthew slashed his light again and again through the small darkness, screaming, “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch!”
Silence.
Chest heaving, he slammed the crawl space door, locked it, sat heavily on the bed. Only then did he become aware of Sarah, kneeling on the bed, watching him. Her hand came down gently on his shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get it out.”
He fell back onto the bed, clicked the flashlight off. “Brilliant, just brilliant. I boarded the damn thing in. Must have been hiding behind some boxes or something. Trapped myself an animal.” He yanked up the covers. “Have to figure something out tomorrow.” He draped an arm around her. “C’mon,Max, let’s get some sleep.”
“Exactly how are we supposed to sleep with this going on?”
He listened. Behind the wood of the low door, behind the plaster and lath of the wall, the animal, too, was still, listening perhaps for danger. So close, no more than a few feet away, maybe. Strange it would stay, but maybe not, it’s used to living close to other kinds of life, other animals in the woods. Maybe it doesn’t seem strange to him, having us lying here on the other side of the door. I mean, people come along, we build huts and factories, pyramids and skyscrapers and suburbs and slums—maybe to him that’s strange, he’s just trying to get on with his life, with all these bizarre barriers in the way.
The models of projects displayed in his offices were miniature wonders complete with delicately leafed trees and shrubs perfectly shaped and placed, as minute and artificial as the buildings they surrounded—the ones he’d designed. He shivered with revulsion and pulled the covers closer. Maybe his work was only artifice, too, only hubris transformed into mass and volume.
But people have to live somewhere; not many of them, in this country, anyway, if you gave them the choice, would want to live in tents and caves, and the people living in fridge boxes and under bridges, don’t they deserve better than that, don’t they? And what about the great buildings, the cathedrals palaces mosques museums temples—they’re structures of aspiration a longing for beauty prayers to the sublime—they should’ve been built, they should’ve, they express something of worth. Some of them, anyway.
After a long silence he answered her. “It’ll be quiet now, Max. C’mon, turn over—I’ll rub.”
His fingers searched out the knots of anxiety in her back, began rubbing them in slow circles until they began to come undone, until she fell asleep. Even then he continued, concentrating on the circles, on the orderly, shapely alignments of bone and muscle in her back, the circles slowing down as he falls into sleep. When the animal begins to rake its claws against the woods beside their heads.
This time when Matthew rose from bed he did not go for the flashlight or the crawl space door; he stalked down the hall to Eddie’s room. Heaps of their unfolded laundry and several of Sarah’s coats obscured his brother’s narrow bed, whose unmade refuge he sought. He pushed the coats aside, dumped the laundry to the floor. Closed the door to close out sound.
The mattress was cold, lumpy with age and too many bad nights, but he persevered, layering the coats over himself, molding himself to the form of sleep. Certainly this process was a familiar one, if rarely blessed with success. Try: to slip the rope from its mooring, to let the sails rise and fly like desperate, pent-up birds released, to shove away from the troublesome shore of wakefulness. Abandon knowing for not, sail resolutely away from islands of memory beckoning with their treacherous scents—his brother’s sweat on the uncased pillow, the scent of his wife on her coats: abjure resentment at having to leave her and their bed, ignore an ache now surfacing in the back of his thighs, as if from muscles seized between the desire to run and the grip of waiting.
Go away from it all. Go. Into a dimly lit room where there is only a chair and a table and on the table a ball of string, large and lumpy with many different lengths and colors and types of string from packages. And you sit at the table and slowly undo the ball, carefully untie each knot. Over and over, knowing that if you persist you’ll get to the center of the ball, where there won’t be string but something else—possibly wondrous, certainly different. Pick apart each and every knot, green cord from the department store from yellow twine from the hardware store from fuzzy red string the man at the bookstore uses. You know this string is very old because it’s all faded, and because no one uses it for packages anymore and that is part of the point, the uselessness of these ravelly remainders of forgotten purchases, they should be pulled apart. Knot by knot by knot, not him, not here. No decencies of house and job and prudent car and terrific wife asleep in a bed you can’t share because a rabid animal has invaded your careful hoard of decencies. Knot by knot by knot. A pair of hands patiently working the old strings’ knots to be undone one by one, unraveling to the secret center where there will not be nothing. Not. See only this, only this, no sound, no cars moving on wet pavement to who knows where, see nothing, hear nothing only hands knots lights string.
It didn’t exactly work. Distantly, he heard, thought he heard, the scratching of the raccoon. Faintly, true, very faintly, but irritating still, like the sound of chalk squealing against a blackboard in the room he’s about to enter.
He enters late and sees Mr. Dubretsky, dubbed Fingers by his students, Fingers Dubretsky already turning from the blackboard, dusting chalk off his monstrous hands as he turns to face the Hebrew School class, as the sun falls in pathetic grandeur over the easeless roofs and telephone poles of the green suburban horizon. Fingers explaining the lessons to be learned from the story of Jonah and the whale. Sand pale, great-bellied Dubretsky hawking phlegm from his throat and telling the class God knew Jonah was on that ship, God made the storm so that Jonah would be thrown off that ship, and swallowed by that whale.
Oh, Matthew had dreamt about the whale’s insides, that night and others, those insides filled with hot bloody vomity things, things that smelled worse than the day the sewer backed up, that squeezed and tossed Jonah til he was so sick and scared he wanted to die and was afraid he would.
God arranged the whole thing, children, and God saw the whole thing, too, because God sees everything—sees Mr. Dubretsky gently adjust his kipa with his enormous spatulate fingers, sees Matthew lean across his desk to insert the icy tip of his ball-point pen through the orangey sunset cloud of Hillary’s hair so she will clutch at it and scream. God, children, knew that Jonah was a good man, He knew that as frightened as Jonah was, Jonah wouldn’t let the ship go down and the others die, just because of him. God sent the storm and the whale so Jonah could learn to face what he feared to do. To learn that we must answer to Him for what we choose to do.
The grey pouches beneath Fingers’ eyes are filled with a tender melancholy and deeply, anciently lined with the burden of expounding on Jonah’s fears and cowardice, his accountability and his rebellion.
So on the fourth day God made the whale vomit up Jonah, and he stood on the shore and was grateful even for the sand between his toes. His head was reeking of whale stomach but Jonah bent it anyway before God because Jonah knew at last, children, it was useless to try to run, he must do what and as God asks. So Jonah stood on the shore, and even though he wasn’t so happy about what God was saying, still he listened.
And Mr. Dubretsky, puffed and patient, sets before them in the dying light the harshly gleaming point. The meaning, children, is so: Jonah is a man, like all, responsible to Almighty God. And God can make the storm and the whale, but only Jonah can make up his own mind, to do what is right.
Heavy now with despair and exhaustion, Matthew came slowly to his feet, letting fall the warm protection of Sarah’s coats, blinking his eyes to clear from them the vision of sad-eyed Fingers Dubretsky, even now lurking in the deeper shadows of lamps and doorway and brushing his swollen fingers across the hairless bluff of his head and catching at his kipa—Matthew shook his head as if to elude the steady wheeze of Fingers’ voice, the persistent scratching of the animal in the unoffered shelter of the house.
Matthew shook his head to rid from it the worst of Jonah’s punishments, the most terrible pain of all: tossed, swallowed, vomited, and frightened as Jonah was, he still could not escape.
What the hell does it matter, what the hell does any of this have to do with anything, the damn noise, damn animal, what am I going to do?
Because even here the scratching reached him, even here it was ineluctable, and impossible to ignore. And it would reach him, he knew, anywhere in the house. He could sleep in the car, walk the abandoned street, check into some motel, but these choices seemed to him not only absurd, but more of an effort than he could will himself to make. Rubbing at his scalp as if to loosen it, he concluded at last that he was just going to be awake all night. Might as well be warm, then, and in his own bed with Sarah. And thus returned to the louder noise, the more easeful bed.
Sarah moaned and tossed in her sleep but did not waken. He lay beside her, trying to concentrate on the sound of her breathing, instead heard only the rasp of the animal’s claws. Okay. Okay. Why?
The reason the animal scratched, perhaps, was simply that it was trapped, was searching for a way out, in which case he’d have to wait until morning to go in there and pry off the board he’d nailed up. Other possibilities: it was sick or injured, trying to make a nest or some place to rest. Or hungry: searching for food.
Could be. Could do it. He’d give it food and if the thing was sick the food might give it the strength to go away, and if it was just hungry then food might keep it quiet. So Matthew could get some sleep.
With this sanguine reasoning as impetus, he descended to the kitchen.
Water, need that first. He filled a plastic yogurt container with tap water, then found himself stymied: he had no idea what a raccoon might eat. After hunting through the cabinets and refrigerator for some minutes, he dared a selection: an apple cut in chunks, a small can of tuna. He put the containers on a small tray and, going carefully so as not to spill or drop, he returned upstairs.
He heard a scurry, a thump as he opened the crawl space door. Come and get it, you little bastard. He set the bowls well inside. No sound at all.
In the continuing silence he returned to bed, stretched himself on the strength of modest hope. It would be all right now. He waited. A distant splashing of water, small circling of waves. Circling, circling silence. hands
He and Sarah were holding hands, a light Roman wind was blowing as they gazed at the facade of S. Maria della Pace when the animal clawed him back to wakefulness.
Considering the complexity of this experiment, I believe it is proceeding well. I now begin to contemplate the next steps.
previous, Sarah Asleep
The Nature of Things 