The dog had vomited, warmly, onto the man, startling the man. In turning his head to examine what had startled him, the man turned the steering wheel hard. The car was traveling forty-nine miles per hour in the highway’s right lane, and he had just enough time, before it struck the pylon supporting the overpass, to brake to forty-one, which put the car into a spin, and to wonder if the gel had caused the dog to vomit, or if, as his wife would probably claim, the bacteria on the bacon was the culprit.
3
The coma seemed to last for about thirty seconds. The man had a vision of the crack oozing gel and thought of a cummy vagina, a “creampie.” That’s not what it was, though! He felt so dumb, just dumb and iniquitous to even think such a thing. It wasn’t a “creampie” at all, but a crack. A crack in the wall oozing gel is what it was, and now he noticed how the light was reversed, like a photograph’s negative: the gel a bright, pearlescent white, the crack even brighter, the wall black as onyx. He stared at the crack. It was a lovely crack, beautiful, perfect even—its width, its length, its distance from the ground. How could he have missed that? How could he ever have wished it away? What a fool he had been! The crack was a blessing! The crack was a gift! It was there for him—his crack. He knew it all at once, and in the most basic way. He knew it the way he knew he loved his dog. Now all he wanted was to tend to it lovingly, to give it a long, tender wiping—but he couldn’t. He couldn’t move his hands! He couldn’t feel his hands, much less find a tissue. He needed a tissue. All he needed was a tissue and one working hand on an arm that could reach. This poor, gorgeous crack, he thought, in need of a wipe! But wait a second, wait. He could feel his head. He could feel it inside—he could feel his mouth. His mouth was so dry. If he could feel his mouth, he could move his head!
The man sprang from his coma, sitting up straight, licking at the air. The side of his head hurt. Everything was white and beepy and glugging. He heard his wife’s voice. “Thank God,” she was saying. “Thank God, thank God.” His sight adjusted. The room he was in was small and overlit, a hospital room. His wife was huge.
“Thirsty,” he rasped.
She brought him a crinkled paper thimble of water, held it to his lips. He sipped and he swallowed. The side of his head hurt. He remembered the dog, the vomit upon him, the stab of panic just before impact.
“I missed you,” his wife said. “I missed you so bad.”
“I missed you, too. I’ve been such a fool. I was wrong about the crack.”
“Wrong?” she said.
“Yes. I was wrong. I…” He couldn’t explain. He couldn’t phrase it right, not with any dignity. His knowledge was a private kind—it wasn’t even, he now realized, knowledge. It went beyond knowledge, was better than knowledge. What it was was belief. The crack was good.
“How’s the baby?” he said.
“Still ticking,” she said, and patted her belly.
“And the dog?” he said.
“The dog?” she said. “The dog,” she said. “The dog,” she said, and she burst into tears. In came some nurses. She must have pressed that button.
They told him his coma had lasted three months, that the pain and the scars along his temple and cheek should fade with time. They told him he’d T-boned his car on the pylon. That all of the Swedish airbags had deployed. That the dog, whose mouth had been wide open—they’d found its vomit all over the car and deduced it had been in the midst of heaving when the car struck the pylon—was thrust, face-first, against the man’s head. That the thrust was so violent, its jaws snapped at impact and “opened like a book.” That nine of its teeth, sunk to the gums, were lodged inside the man’s head when they found him. That the dog, most likely, went instantly unconscious and asphyxiated on vomit. That they hoped that’s what it was; that that fate was superior to bleeding to death (a much slower way to go). And they told him the EMTs were blown away, had never, in all their careers, seen anything like it. They told him that he should be thrilled to be alive, and twice as thrilled yet, coma and head wounds notwithstanding, to be entirely intact. He was. He was thrilled. He was thrilled and he was grateful.
They wanted to keep him around for a week, but he left in three days. It wasn’t the insurance—he had the best insurance. He needed to get back home.
The crack on the wall was a mess of oozed gel that had hardened and crusted, ruptured, dripped, re-crusted, grayed. At its center, the mess protruded from the wall by as much as half an inch, and resembled, more than anything, a volcanic mountain range mapped topographically. The man knelt down on the floor before it, staring intensely, committing the features of the mess to memory; he wanted a stick to brandish at himself on the off-chance he ever grew tempted to abandon his crack-wiping duties (for a carrot, his vision from the coma would suffice).
Once he had the mess memorized, he drove the new car (same model as the old car; their coverage was excellent) to the hardware outlet, and purchased organic natural sponges and a non-abrasive solvent made with berries, milk, and mink-fat that required refrigeration. (“The Lamborghini of cleansers,” the salesperson told him. “A little blob’ll do you.”)
As per the instructions printed on the tube, he applied a dime-size gobbet of solvent to his wetted (with filtered water) sponge, and waited for the solvent to turn from green to silver. Once the color had changed, he held the sponge to the wall an inch above the crack, pressing just enough to allow a few drips, and then he made the magic happen. The entire mess of crusted, hardened gel came off with one gentle, downward stroke of the sponge, and the crack, shimmering and wet, was freed. He blotted up the moisture with a second special sponge and threw both sponges away in the garage. On his way back upstairs, he stopped in the kitchen to pick up a jelly jar. The mess had slid down the wall intact, but had broken in two—mountains and foothills—when it struck the floor. He put the two pieces inside of the jelly jar, screwed the cap tight, brought the jar to the yard, and began, with a spade, to dig a hole in which to bury it.
Through the sliding-glass door, his wife saw him digging and went outside.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I’m burying this mess.”
“Why?” she said.
“It seems like the right thing to do,” he said.
“I think it’s strange.”
“I know,” he said. “But I don’t mind.”
“Can we talk about the crack?” she said.
“I’d rather not,” he said.
“Can I just say that I think, with the baby coming soon, I think that we should really consider trying again to replace that wall. I don’t know what that gel that comes out of it is, and I’m worried it’s doing something to you that I don’t like. And I’m worried about what it might do to me or, God forbid, the baby.”
The man stopped digging to stand and hug his wife. “The gel,” he said, “won’t do anything at all to you or to the baby. I would never let that happen. I won’t let it happen. I will tend to the crack every morning. The wall stays.”
“You’re insisting.”
“I’ll put my foot down if I have to. Do I have to put my foot down?”
“No,” his wife said. “You don’t have to put your foot down.”
He raised a leg high and slammed his foot down on the patio. Then he did it again. His wife laughed, kissed his cheek, and went back inside to watch TV. He joined her once the burial of the jar was complete.
But for one brief moment, the man spent the rest of his life feeling ebullient. The crack oozed gel, he wiped the crack, threw the kleenex away, his teeth were clean, his home was lovely, he backed his car in, he thrived at his job, his coverage was solid. His child was born, the child was cute, the child was healthy, his wife was healthy, they had another child, who was also cute and healthy, his investments matured well, and, after the second child started grade school, his wife sold real estate and thrived at her job, and by the time that he and his wife retired, his children were wealthy, and they had their own children, and the man di
ed smiling in the middle of a dream, and his wife collected millions of dollars in insurance, wiped the crack in his stead, bought higher education and condos for the grandkids, lived mostly in her memories, nearly all of which were good, and then she died, too, in her sleep. In the months before her death, she’d had the house remodeled, but she’d let be the wall with the crack in the bedroom, and in her will’s only codicil, she made it clear to all her progeny that if her youngest grandchild, to whom she’d left the house, were to alter the wall in any way or fail to wipe the crack with a kleenex as needed (as the years marched on, the gel emerged less frequently), the house would go to her eldest grandchild, whom the youngest despised, and the youngest did nothing to alter the wall, and he tended to the gel on the crack as needed, and he continues to do so till this very day.
The brief moment the man’s ebullience faltered occurred on the steps of the church, following the baptism of the couple’s first child (named after the dog). The man saw the painter going to his German sedan and realized that although he’d greeted him earlier, they hadn’t had the chance to have a conversation. The man felt terrible, not just for having missed a perfect opportunity to be fraternally warmed, but also because the receding painter’s posture was slumpy and defeated, which suggested to the man that fraternal warmth was something the painter direly needed, and the man had failed to provide him with it. What a crummy feeling the man had on those church steps! But he made a decision to call out to the painter, and he followed through, and the moment passed, the crummy feeling died, and his ebullience resumed.
No sooner had the man yelled the painter’s name than the painter turned from his car and waved. “Don’t leave!” the man shouted. “Wait!” he shouted. He walked down the steps and went to the painter. “I wasn’t leaving,” said the painter. “Just getting one of these.” The painter opened the door of his car and, from a cooler on the floor, removed a narrow orange can containing an energy beverage called ZOINKS!!!. “For bravery,” said the painter. The man told the painter, “I know just what you mean! I could’ve used a can of bravery the last time I went to a baptism, also. It was my wife’s brother’s kid’s baptism, and a funny thing—well, not really funny, not funny at all really, but maybe just kind of interesting or strange, or, I guess, coincidental, which I’ll get to why in a second—the thing was my wife had just miscarried a few weeks earlier, and we were really upset, especially she was, and then we’re at this baptism, her nephew’s getting baptized, and holy moly was I not feeling brave. I mean, I was just kind of waiting for her to completely break down, and I was so scared because I had no idea what I’d say. We’d been over it so many times, you know? There’s no way to—there’s nothing you can say when something like that happens. All you can do is kind of throw your hands up and hug her and tell here it’ll be alright, that you’ll try again, that as hard as it is—as impossible as it is—to make sense of what’s happened, you just have to accept it, the way you accept, I don’t know, math. Death. The weather. Your metabolism. See? It’s not comforting at all, but your role, as the husband, is to hug her every time, and not try to explain it, but I’m saying this in retrospect—at the time, at that baptism, I still thought I could somehow explain it to her, show her the bright side, but I couldn’t even explain it to myself and I wasn’t able to admit that. Anyway, I could’ve used some of that energy drink, I think. To keep the spirits up. To be brave for my wife. Though I heard it rots your kidneys or your liver or something. But oh! So the weird coincidence, I was saying—what I’ve wanted to tell you, ever since you came over to paint the crack and we had that amazing conversation on the driveway, was how I almost bought the exact same car you drive, but last minute decided to buy the Swedish one I drive because the Swedish one’s the safest there is—not that yours isn’t safe, but the Swedish is the safest—and the reason I bought the Swedish one instead of yours is that we had a baby on the way, the baby you just saw baptized thirty minutes ago, and because of the miscarriage during her first pregnancy, my wife—and, look, I’ll admit to it too—my wife and myself the both, we were superstitious about telling people she was pregnant because we thought it would jinx us somehow. Counting our chicken before it hatched, as it were, huh-ha! I mean, you like to think of yourself as a sane, scientifically minded person, but the truth is you’re not. And by you, I mean me, you know what I mean? But so how’s the car? Is it still an exciting car to own?” The car, the painter told the man, was fine. More than fine, actually. Maintenance was easy and, unless his calculations were off, he got even better mileage than promised, especially on the highway. “What I want to talk to you about, though,” he said, “is something I feel really bad about—it’s why I needed to get all this bravery in me.” The painter turned the narrow orange can upside down, and a single, hot pink drop of ZOINKS!!! splashed onto the concrete surrounding the sewer grate. The painter went on: “That crack in your wall that you called me about? You know how it came back even after I painted it? The paint was bad. Now, I didn’t know that when I painted the wall, or even when I repainted the wall. I mean, I knew it wasn’t great paint like in the rest of the house, and I felt a little guilty, but I didn’t know just how bad it was. But that’s not even an excuse, because by the time you had that second wall put up, I did know how bad it was, and I didn’t say anything about it to you, not even when you called me, and you’re such a nice guy, with such a nice family, so I just want to come clean with you, and that’s what I’m gonna do if you’ll let me. Your builder, who pays me—and I’m implicated, too, don’t get me wrong—but the builder is a shyster, and a serious cheapskate, and there’s this guy who works for him, a foreign guy, Polyp, you might have met him—he wears his pants funny, makes weird faces—this Polyp’s a jerk, even worse than the builder, and just a couple days before I finished painting your house, Polyp says to the builder, who’s building like twenty other houses in your development alone, he says to the builder he wants a raise, an unheard-of-type raise, like fifty percent. And not just for him. Polyp tells the builder his whole crew wants a raise, and if the builder, Polyp says, refuses to give them this raise, they’re gonna walk away, just like that, leave the builder in the lurch, and not only that, but there’s this veiled threat that’s in there, because if you want to know how a fresh-off-the-boatsky chucklehead like Polyp, who, by the way, is also a degenerate gambler and a part-time pimp—if you want to know how a guy like Polyp gets such a plum job building houses for nice couples in the suburbs, I’ll tell you this much: it’s not because he doesn’t have crooked uncles in the unions who know how to set structure fires that look like acts of God. So what can the builder do? Take a personal loss to pay Polyp’s crew? Well, yes, he could do that, he could make less money, but like I said he’s a shyster, so instead of cutting into his profits, what he cuts is corners. All kinds of corners. Luckily, like I said, this all happened just a couple days before we finished your house, so the only corner left to cut there was the paint, and not even all the paint, just the paint in the master bedroom. The paint we used for the rest of your house was good, but the brand that we used in your bedroom was this recently banned Indonesian brand of paint. The builder got hold of hundreds and hundreds of cans of it for cheap from I don’t know where—probably Polyp’s uncles. The thing about this paint, though, was some of it was tainted with mold or bacteria or something—I never got it straight—but some of it was tainted with something weird and Indonesian that, first of all, cracks sometimes, to varying degrees, and second of all, sometimes, especially in the dark, it attracts some other kind of mold or bacteria that causes that paste stuff to form. Thus: banned. Now, I’d never seen this paint before I painted your bedroom, but the builder, who supplies me with my materials, he brought me two cans of it with the labels stripped off, which should have told me something, but I refused to imagine what that something could be. The first can must not have been tainted, though, right? Because the rest of your bedroom walls didn’t crack, right? But the second one, which I barely used??
?the one I left in your basement closet—that was the one that your cracked wall got painted with. Anyway, after I painted over the crack in your wall, I saw the builder the next day, and I told him about your pasty crack because I figured he owed me money for going over to your house like that on a Sunday, especially considering how that jerk Polyp was getting such a big raise and I was getting nothing. And that’s when he came clean about how it wasn’t just cheap stuff in those label-stripped cans, but tainted Indonesian stuff. And he told me that if you ever called me again, I had to call him, and he’d go out there himself to smooth things over with you and replace the wall, because some of those other houses we used the tainted paint on? The newer houses that we used only the tainted paint on? Some of them had wall-cracks oozing pastes and gels like your one wall did, but then a couple of them—the walls were actually, like, crumbling. And so the builder, he was scared that if he didn’t replace the tainted-painted walls, something terrible would happen—some kid would eat the pasty stuff and die, or a wall behind a crib would crumble violently and a pointy chunk would fall and spear a fontanel or something, and then the jig would be up. Not just for him, but for me, too—I’d painted a lot of those walls myself. Lucky for us, the one thing you can always count on the owner of a newly built home to do is complain. So every time there’s been a complaint about a crack, the wall gets replaced and I paint it using good stuff. If it’s any comfort, you probably got hit by the taint less badly than anyone else. I want you to know, though, that I’m sorry for using cheap paint in your bedroom to begin with, but what I’m even much sorrier for than that is that I didn’t say anything to you about the paint being tainted that night you called me, after you’d painted the wall yourself, especially because I assumed, at the time, that you’d used the tainted paint I’d left in your basement, which obviously you didn’t because the crack didn’t come back, right? But please accept my apology, man. I am humble before you, and I’m telling you the truth now. I was just really afraid that I’d ruin my reputation or even go to jail is why I kept quiet, and I consider you a friend, even though we don’t know each other that well—that conversation we had on your driveway about cars, and that killer Rwandan coffee we drank together… I feel like we bonded, and, above all, I just hope you appreciate the risk I’m putting myself at here, in telling you all this stuff that could really, if the wrong person found out—it could really ruin my entire life—and I hope you can forgive me… Why are you looking at me like that? What’s that look mean, man? What is that? You laughing? Are we okay? Are you laughing because we’re okay or because…?”