Floating Staircase

  And then it did, coming right to the top, right up through the staircase’s hollow frame, and floated near the surface of the black water, framed in that rectangular chasm.

  Floating.

  My grip on the axe failed, and I let it sink beneath the water. I could not take my eyes from the thing in the water. Numb, frozen, a ruined man lost finally in the doldrums of his own paranoia, I stared at it, and no one could take it away from me by denying what it was . . .

  A rib cage.

  PART FOUR:

  INTO THE DEEP/THE HUMAN ABSTRACT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  There are filaments of me that twinkle like sapphire. Calmly, I watch as my dozen-fingered hand smears trails through the ether. I am in a place somewhere far beyond conscious thought. Sitting at the kitchen table of my childhood home, I watch my mother prepare a chicken dish, dressing it with green peas and garlic, humming softly. She does not know I am there—I am a ghost, a shade, a shadow. I have gone willingly to the other side, have exchanged myself for another, have claimed a place at a table of the eternally absent, the eternally damned.

  A scatter of feet on the floorboards. Whispers fall like cobwebs. What’s the most horrible thing you’ve ever done?

  I am shuffling along a desert highway. Steam rises in visible waves off the roasting blacktop. With each step, tar pulls like taffy and sticks to the soles of my shoes. I wince as I gaze at the horizon. Tufts of unruly weeds sprout in patches down the center of the blacktop. As I approach, I see they are not weeds at all but clumps of hair. There are people below, submerged in the hot tar of the highway, with only their scalps rising like the bulges of humpback whales. It is possible to grip the hair, hot and brittle as it is from the sun, and pull. There is a sense of withdrawal, of surrender, as the sticky pavement yields and the buried corpses, amidst a gurgle of bubbling tar and an acrid methane stench, are liberated from their underground prison.

  But they are only ragged scalps, decapitated from just above the eyes, and as each one comes loose, I fall backward at the ease of their surrender and slam down hard on the pavement.

  I think, Somewhere there is a great and mysterious sea where people struggle to stay afloat while the magic of the water gradually makes them insane.

  I am wandering the desert highway, collecting scalps like gypsy treasure.

  My fever broke by the end of the week.

  Jodie was in the kitchen cleaning the stove. She seemed surprised to find me standing in the archway. “I was just going to make you soup.”

  I went to her and hugged her, kissed the side of her face. Soon my neck was damp from her silent tears.

  On a Tuesday, two men in navy-blue coveralls arrived in a truck that said Allegheny Pickup & Removal on its side in bright orange foot-tall letters.

  “What’s this?” said the fatter of the two men. “Some sort of secret passageway?”

  I watched as they cleared out all of Elijah Dentman’s things—his bookcase, his writing desk, his trunk of toys, his tiny bed. I helped them carry the boxes out and load them into the truck, my personal relief seeming to grow as the room in the basement cleared out.

  “Your kid lives down here?” asked the fat man’s partner. When I didn’t answer him, he must have suspected the worst, and both men worked the rest of the hour in deferential silence.

  After they’d gone, I spent some time gazing at the hollowed-out room. It felt like I was looking into my own coffin. Jodie briefly appeared beside me. I wondered if she felt like she was staring into her coffin as well. Or maybe she was looking into mine, just as I was. Rubbing my back with one hand, she handed me some hot tea, then felt my forehead to make sure my temperature wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t.

  She wanted the room sealed up, but I decided on a better solution: I tore down the walls, those blind panels of Sheetrock. Particularly the one with the sage-green handprint on it. It was backbreaking work, and when I finally finished I was covered in white powder. Jodie laughed and said I looked like a mime.

  We did not talk about what happened that day after the cops dropped me off at the house—a day now two weeks gone. While I’m sure the image of her husband straddling the floating staircase, smashing it to pieces with an axe, would be burned in my wife’s memory for a long, long time, she was good about putting it all aside and loving me again. It had been a frightening thing, but I suppose it was also a necessary one; the revelation that day had shaken reality back into me, which was just what I’d needed. I’d needed to know if I had been right or if I had been wrong.

  I had been wrong.

  After I cleaned the basement, I took my writing notebooks—the ones in which the initial stirrings of Elijah Dentman’s make-believe story still lingered, unfinished—and tucked them away in one of my trunks. I tried, kid, I thought. I was trying so hard that I was searching for something that wasn’t even there. And at that moment I wasn’t sure if, in my soul, I was talking to Elijah Dentman or to my dead brother, Kyle.

  Yes, it had been a rib cage. And I had stared at it, fascinated and dumbstruck by my own premonition, because I was right; I was right; I was right, and my work was done, and the writing was done, and the boy was saved. I had saved him. I had championed him, vindicated him.

  Adam had clambered out of the lake and up the staircase, nearly losing his balance twice. When he reached me, he threw his arms around me and held me tight against him. I could feel his heavy breathing as he held me, could feel his hot breath against my freezing neck.

  “Look,” I’d said, not even bothering to point.

  Adam had peered down and did not say a word. He did not say a word for a very, very long time. Finally, he said, “It . . . it looks like . . . is that . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Quieter—in my ear: “How did you know?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just occurred to me. Just now.”

  “But how?”

  I turned my head in his direction. Our faces were close. “A ghost. I think a ghost told me.”

  Adam appeared confused and scared . . . but somewhat relieved, too.

  “I’m not crazy,” I’d told him then.

  Adam glanced down the shaft of the hollow staircase. “Look.”

  Confused, I saw a second object float to the surface—more bone. But not just bone—another rib cage.

  “Adam . . .” My voice was thick, my throat too tight to articulate properly.

  We both stood there and watched as countless bones drifted to the surface of the water and bobbed there, carnival prizes in a barrel, eventually crowding the hollow shaft. Among them were skulls. Tiny skulls.

  Thinking about all this, I closed the trunk and climbed the stairs where a nice lunch was waiting for me.

  Animals. Animal bones. There were even the remnants of a dog collar affixed to one of the larger skeletons, the band black with slime, the little brass nameplate dull in the overcast light. Still, I thought I could make out one word on it—Chamberlain.

  “Wait,” Adam said. “What are we looking at?”

  “The mass grave for Elijah Dentman’s pets,” I said. Then I collapsed onto the stairs, extremely weak and unable to maintain equilibrium.

  With one hand, Adam gripped my shoulder and kept me from toppling into the cold, black waters.

  That night Jodie came home. I promised her I was done and was putting it all behind me. Something broke inside her, and she cried in my arms. At first I was terrified, but then, in holding her and in feeling her hitch and sob against my chest, I knew she was okay. She needed to cry and I let her. In that moment, it occurred to me that I hadn’t held my wife in some time.

  (Two nights after the incident, a violent thunderstorm accosted the town and thoroughly demolished the weakened structure of the floating staircase. In the morning, all that remained were the bone-colored planks of wood that had washed up along the frost-stiffened reeds in the night.)

  I took off several days from writing altogether—partially because I
was still out of sorts from the hideous flu I’d caught slashing around in the lake in near-freezing weather, but mostly because I owed that time to Jodie. We made love several nights in a row. We went to the movies together like a couple of high school sweethearts, and I helped her edit a rough draft of her dissertation. Valentine’s Day arrived, and I bought her flowers and chocolate, and she made my favorite meal—baked macaroni—and we watched old Woody Allen movies until the early hours of the morning. In the weeks after my nervous breakdown on the floating staircase, everything was as perfect as pie.

  Then Earl telephoned me one rainy afternoon and said, “Boy, you’re a goddamn genius,” and it started all over again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  By the time I arrived at Tooey’s bar, the drizzle had increased to a steady rain, driving craters in the hummocks of graying snow along the shoulders of Main Street.

  The day before, Earl had met me at the front door of his trailer where, with near childish jubilance, he handed over a cheese-yellow envelope sealed with packaging tape. Inside the double-wide, I could hear dogs barking.

  “I can’t believe it worked,” I said, hefting the weight of the envelope. It had been a long shot; I hadn’t expected it to actually amount to anything.

  “I told them I was with the union, that we needed the paperwork for an impending audit. Just like you said to.” The old man grinned like someone who’d just figured out a secret. Had he been just a bit younger, I had no doubt he would have been bouncing on the balls of his feet. “They bought it.”

  “Hook, line, and sinker,” I said. “Listen, I know you’re a reporter. Without insulting you, is there any possible way I can—”

  He cut me off. “I won’t print a word of this before I hear back from you.”

  “Thank you.” I was looking very hard at the envelope he’d given me.

  “You know what this means,” Earl said evenly.

  “Of course,” I said. We both knew what it meant. “Of course.”

  Now I crossed the sawdust floor of Tequila Mockingbird and sat at an empty table toward the rear of the room. My chair faced the door. The jukebox was rolling through a sad country number, visibly making the shoulders of the few assorted patrons at the bar slump. Rain hammered the tin roof and sluiced down the windowpanes. The whole place felt hollowed and bleak, like a grave site that had been violated by vandals. I checked my watch.

  Wiping a glass with a dishrag, Tooey Jones approached the table. “One of the few lost souls who dare to brave the rain,” he commented. “What’ll it be?”

  I ordered a glass of water, which I gulped down the moment it arrived, as well as a gin and tonic (so that I wouldn’t arouse suspicion), which remained untouched on the table beside the envelope I’d gotten from Earl. On the juke, the sad country song segued into some old but upbeat Charlie Rich tune. Across the room, the framed panels from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience were like startling and irrational anomalies that somehow made their way into an otherwise mundane dream. My gaze lingered on the reproductions of “The Little Boy Lost” and “The Little Boy Found.”

  When Adam arrived, his hair was matted to his head with rainwater, and he was blowing into his hands for warmth. He ordered a beer at the bar, then came over and sat opposite me at the table. He was in plain-clothes—khaki slacks, an outdated American Eagle sweater, canvas peacoat with corduroy cuffs and collar—and he looked exhausted from a long day.

  Smiling at him, I tried my best to look casual.

  Under the pretense of brotherly companionship, I’d phoned Adam this morning and asked him to meet me for a few beers down at the ‘Bird when he got off work. I had said nothing about Earl’s envelope (which was now tucked beneath the table in my lap) or the contents therein. I would sit here and engage my brother in idle small talk and wait to see if the rest of my plan fell into place.

  Just as Jodie and I had overcome my little episode—the “incident,” as I thought of it—following my breakdown on the floating staircase, my brother and I had seemingly bridged our differences as well. Whether it was genuine or only the illusion of authenticity, we became brothers again. (Suffice it to say, I knew my intentions on this evening—as well as the envelope in my lap—risked destroying all that we had rebuilt, although I hoped it wouldn’t. Had I possessed any doubt about the contents of the envelope, I would have set it afire in the hearth back at the house and never brought up the Dentmans to my brother again.)

  “You’re looking better,” Adam said over the rim of his pint glass. “How’re you feeling?”

  The flu had passed for both of us—following me out onto the floating staircase that afternoon, Adam had gotten sick, too—and I’d shaved and had my hair cut.

  “Better,” I told him. “Stronger.” For a second, I wondered if he could sense the nervousness just below the surface of my voice.

  Five minutes later—right on time—the pub’s door banged open. David Dentman’s broad-shouldered outline was framed against the stormy, gunmetal sky. Dripping rainwater on the floor, Dentman pushed through the doorway, his considerable bulk exaggerated by the heavy corduroy coat he wore. Behind him, the pub’s door slammed shut on its frame. Aside from my brother and me, no one looked at him.

  Adam did not say anything at first. He didn’t even glance at me. Not that I was prepared to look at him; my stare was locked on Dentman.

  When Dentman noticed me from across the room, it was like being spotted in the beam of a prison yard’s searchlight. His expression was the same one he’d had that day when he came home and found me in his house with his sister—like a pot graduating to a slow boil on the stove.

  “Travis,” Adam said, his voice small. He was still looking over his shoulder.

  “He’s going to want to hit me,” I said quickly as Dentman approached our table.

  The big man stood before the last empty chair at the table. If he recognized my brother, and I was pretty sure that he did, he didn’t acknowledge him. Glaring at me, Dentman squeezed a folded slip of paper in one fist.

  I didn’t need to examine it to know it was the letter I’d printed on my word processor and stuffed into a plain white business envelope. I’d driven to the Dentmans’ house in West Cumberland yesterday evening and fed the letter through the mail slot in the door. Then I’d knocked and quickly climbed back into my car and pulled backward down the drive. Until now, I’d had strong doubts that Dentman would even show up. Despite what I’d written on that letter . . .

  “What is this?” Dentman’s voice seemed to come from deep down in his chest. I could tell his sentiment echoed my brother’s, who remained silent.

  “Sit down,” I told Dentman.

  “Travis.” Adam had found his voice, weak as it was.

  Dentman pulled out the empty chair and slowly lowered himself into it. Both his hands were in his lap and beneath the table, and a swimmy, unsettling thought crossed my mind—maybe he’d brought a gun. I was pretty certain Adam had his gun on him—even off duty, he typically carried it—but would he be able to pull it in time if Dentman decided to plant a bullet in my brain?

  “What’s going on here, Travis?” Adam continued.

  Dentman took Adam in. He must have assumed my brother was in on this, that we’d both come together to gang up on him.

  “This is it,” I told them both, setting the cheese-yellow envelope on the tabletop. “This is what I found.” I turned to Adam. “You can do with it what you want, but I’m done after tonight.” Thinking of my marriage, I added, “I have to be.”

  “I can see I made a mistake not filing those charges against you,” Dentman said. He was red faced and fuming.

  Pushing the envelope in front of Adam, I tried to sound calm. “It was something you told me last month. You said murderers have motives, innocent people have alibis, and you can’t lock people up just because the pieces don’t fit.”

  “Travis . . .” There was a stomach-weakening distress evident in Adam’s tone. With the sober perception of a cl
airvoyant, I knew I was breaking his heart.

  “Open it,” I told him.

  He picked up the envelope but didn’t open it right away.

  Dentman adjusted himself in his seat, and I thought he was going to stand up and march right out of the bar. But he remained seated, and I could almost see the anger radiating off his scalp like steam from hot coals.

  “Do it,” I urged Adam. “Go on.”

  Adam slipped his thumb beneath the tape and ripped open the envelope. What slid out onto the tabletop was a stack of papers bound together by a metal clip. He fingered the first page, lifted it to see the printout underneath. “What am I looking at?”

  “It’s the time and attendance records of the construction company where you work,” I said, speaking directly to Dentman. “You’ll notice the date on the top sheet is the same day Elijah supposedly drowned.” I leaned over and absently tapped the column I’d highlighted. “Those are Dentman’s hours.”

  “Where’d you get this?” Adam said.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s all there.”

  “I don’t have to sit here listening to this,” Dentman said, but he didn’t get up.

  “You couldn’t have been at the house the day Elijah disappeared,” I went on, “because you were at work. You clocked out at a quarter after six. The job site was just over thirty miles away, so the earliest you could have gotten home was six thirty, and that’s if you were speeding. More like quarter to seven is my guess. Which would account for the delay in calling the police.”

  “This is bullshit,” Dentman muttered, his teeth clenched.

  “What’s bullshit is your statement to the police.” From my pocket I took the articles I’d torn from the library newspapers and unfolded them and set them on the table. “According to Nancy Stein’s statement, that scream she believed she heard happened around five thirty.”