nor incensed.
—I should pay for your electricity? he said. —Not fair. He reminded me in some ways of my father.
Fair would have been my being hired as a secretary to one of the administrators over at the University—I applied often enough—but I’m not young and cute, which is the flavor of the month in secretaries these days.
I didn’t tell Mr. Lee that. He’s the type to take umbrage, and it was likely he would raise my rent again, just to satisfy his cantankerous soul.
—You’re yaya, the heater said.
—Whatever that means, I said in reply.
Mercy, I thought, I’m talking back to voices I hear in the night. The other sales ladies would say I’ve taken leave of my senses.
I tried to ignore the voice after that. I tried not to think of myself as an old lady going crazy from loneliness or Alzheimer’s. I was somebody, it’s just that there was no one around to remind me of it.
Which might be the basis for the voice. Maybe I was fabricating a voice as an remedy for loneliness.
That could be crazy or healthy, depending on how you look at it.
I could have spent all night, every night, listening for the voice, but I resisted vigorously. I was like an alcoholic telling himself, —I’ll only have one, I’ll only have one. I couldn’t both read and concentrate on the voice, so I would turn off the heater and read for an hour, then turn it on, drinking herbal tea and playing solitaire while I gave my attention to that infernal machine.
When I played solitaire I remembered a story my cousin told me, about a neighbor going crazy with Alzheimer’s, who played solitaire incessantly. He believed that God was watching him play and judging whether he did it properly. If he followed the rules, he won. If he violated the rules, he lost. When he lost a game he would know God had changed one of the rules and he’d try to figure out the new one.
My cousin, a bright young man going to the University, said it was like the Nazis, who would beat concentration camp prisoners for doing something one day that had been required on pain of death the day before.
I knew in my heart it wasn’t God in the cards. If it was anyone, it was the Devil.
Besides, the rules he was talking about weren’t the rules of the game, they were rules like, you must always start playing from the right end of the layout. Anyone knows you could as easily start by laying off any aces that might show up, then playing from the highest combination in the layout to the lowest. That’s how I do it, and God hasn’t punished me yet.
I put the heater out in the parlor one night and set the recorder in front of it. I went to bed. It had been a night of warm rain, so it wasn’t too cold to do without the heater. I could hear the faint hum of the fan but not any words. I counted from one hundred and got into the teens before I drifted off.
Next morning—I’d set my alarm fifteen minutes early—I got up and brought the recorder into my room. I looked at the counter on the recorder and it said ninety-eight. Had I set it back to zero when I went to bed? Gad! So many things to think of. I wound it back to zero and pushed the play button and listened, a pad and pencil in hand, to see what it might have captured.
—And with his own diary wonderful most current.
I stopped the machine and wrote that down. This was exciting.
—The puppy's interest is considered to be drafting.
I wrote that and hit the play button again.
—You actually number one among the man's aspire.
I listened until the counter said ninety-eight, but before I could turn it off, the speaker said, — Auntie, did you entail?
Entail?
The voice at the end, after the ninety-eight count, sounded a lot like Mr. Lee. I’m sure Mr. Lee doesn’t use words like entail, although I’ve had little experience of Mr. Lee. If Mr. Lee had mustaches he would be twirling them, if you know what I mean. Venality, thy name is Lee.
I went into the parlor and took down the dictionary from the bookshelf. Before I could open it, the clock on the mantel chimed and I saw that I’d gone well past my fifteen minutes.
—Drat.
As I poured my cereal I realized I’d said that aloud.
—Stop it! I said, knowing as I did that I’d said that aloud, too, but it needed to be said aloud, this voice business was getting out of hand. How do you make sense of a puppy that’s interested in drafting? And how explain words recorded after the last number on the counter? In Mr. Lee’s voice.
It was April first. Maybe Mr. Lee had a telescope and had been watching me. Maybe he’d figured out I was recording the heater. He had entered my house, listened to the tape, decided to play an April Fool’s joke on me by recording more gibberish and carefully winding back the tape.
Of course. That had to be it. After work I would give Mr. Lee a king-size piece of my mind.
Except I didn’t get home at the usual time. After the store closed at seven, Mr. Hobby had the deli across the street bring in sandwiches and cookies—they use excellent corned beef—and after a half-hour’s break, we did the annual inventory. Gloves are part of leather goods, even though many gloves these days aren’t even partly leather. But since I’m part of that department, I inventory gloves and then I help Marrissa Cressy with wallets and handbags. While we were working side-by-side, I wanted to ask Marrissa if she’d ever had such an experience as mine with the voice—or voices, now—but I was afraid she’d think I really was crazy.
Marrissa is a bitter woman. Her husband had the temerity to die before he renegotiated with his partner to get rid of the survivor clause in their contract, and now Marrissa, with only his life insurance to fall back on, has had to work again, after years of being a stay-at-home housewife.
Marrissa is also very modern. She asked me one time if I was a virgin. When I recovered from the shock I said, —Well! I wouldn’t tell you if I wasn’t.
—Which means you are, she said.
—Just supposing I am, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
She chuckled and said, —Sorry, I guess it’s on my mind. I’m not getting laid these days.
I nearly fainted. I actually saw spots in front of my eyes, like tiny sparklers.
To pursue or not to pursue?
I dawned on me that I had ‘heard,’ if you can call it that, a steady stream of words when I ignored the heater, it’s just they were spoken so softly I couldn’t understand them. If I went back to ignoring the heater (no small task, given how it had eaten into my consciousness) maybe it would start talking in paragraphs. After all, it had progressed from ‘yaya’ to ‘small, medium, large,’ to ‘the puppy’s interest is considered to be drafting.’
What rubbish! Progressing.
It dawned on me, maybe I was misunderstanding the heater. Maybe instead of yaya it was saying llama, or Yana, which is a tribe of Indians that lived in California, in the Sacramento River valley. I once dreamed of raising llamas, when other teenage girls were wishing for horses. Later I read about the Yana in an anthropology course my sophomore year at the University.
What would I have mistaken ‘drafting’ for?
—Stop it, Muriel. You just stop it.
But I couldn’t. I’d started to read Desire Turns Deadly, concentrating as hard as I could on the words on the page, even though the purple passages were setting off alarums in my core, the heroine, Winona Crowley, having no luck whatsoever, half-way through the book, resisting the advances of her major professor, who’d just come back from a six month dig in the Rift Valley, all sunburned and (her word, not mine) ‘horny.’
Okay, my hormones are changing, I know that. The Curse is coming on only intermittently now, my body’s last gasp of fertility dying out, estrogen diminishing. Maybe I was fighting a battle within myself, my mind against my womb, my heart against my ovaries, one last chance, while I was remotely ‘zaftig’ (Marrissa’s word, not mine), to have a man whom I loved with my whole self. Giving everything.
I set
the book down and imagined a handsome man, almost brutish but saved from that by the sensitivity of his large, green eyes. He was writing about me in his diary, his most current, wonderful diary. He was imagining my breasts, my thighs . . .
The heater laughed. I mean, the heater laughed. The heater laughed.
The next day being Saturday, I took the heater to Goodwill and donated it. While I was there I went inside, despite hating the smell of unwashed clothes—really, people are such slovens—and found one of those oil heaters, which are totally silent. It was only twelve-ninety-five.
END
(If you enjoyed “Kafka’s Heater,” you may also enjoy another short story of mine, "The Spare Husband" .)
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