Simon and Celia are biking home from a dinner party on a smoky orange night in August.
A sloth falls out of a tree in front of Celia’s bike. The brakes of Celia’s bike have been worn down to nothing.
Plus, she is drunk. She crashes into the sloth and flips over the handlebars. She rolls in a frenzy of limbs for several yards on the plastic grass that replaced streets and sidewalks last February.
Simon leaps off his bike. He kicks the sloth in the back.
The animal screams. Its eyes are gone. It reaches a clawed hand toward Simon, mewling for help. Simon kicks the animal in the face, not because he wants to hurt it. It will die soon anyway.
The sloth’s head splits away from its body and rolls in front of a cyclist on the green artificial speedway. The cyclist gives Simon the middle finger. Simon raises his hands in apology, then turns back to the sloth. Nose-shaped beetles are digging into its neck.
“What the fuck,” Celia says. She stands beside him now. He meant to help her up, to kiss her wounds and make her feel better, but the sick animal prevented him from going to her.
“Are you okay?” he says. He puts a hand on her lower back.
“I’m fine.” She crouches over the sloth, evading Simon’s hand. Simon can tell by her tone that she is annoyed.
“Watch out for the beetles,” he says.
“I know,” she says.
“I’m sorry you crashed into a sloth.”
“I used to like sloths. Now that they live in the city, I think they’re pretty stupid. I wish they would send them back to the jungle. It’s like we’re living in a fucking zoo.”
“I kind of like having exotic animals around,” Simon says.
“Even the air we breathe is manufactured.”
“It’s better than living underwater. The oceans are dying and we couldn’t ride bikes down there.”
“I guess it’s good that automobiles were banished to the ocean, but what does it matter if they replaced all the trees with fake plastic ones? We’re living in a false city.”
“At least we can ride bikes and not get hit by cars.”
“No, you only crash into sloths now.”
“You think you’d get used to it after six months.”
“Get used to it? Get used to it? Fuck you, Simon. I will not buy into the apathy machine. Fuck you.”
“You’re drunk. You shouldn’t have drank tonight. If our baby has fetal alcohol syndrome, I will never forgive you.”
“I thought you wanted a freak.”
“Can we go home?”
“Admit that the world is a cold dead place.”
“The world is a cold dead place.”
“You didn’t say it with feeling.”
“Because I’m so cold and dead that I feel nothing. Can we go home now?”
Celia crosses her arms across her chest. “Fine. Will you read me a bedtime story?”
“Yes. What do you want me to read to you?”
“Anything. I don’t care.”
Simon picks up his bike and stares at the decapitated sloth. The beetles move around inside its belly, making the sloth look pregnant.
“I’m sorry you crashed into a sloth.”
“You said that already.”
“What do you want me to read to you?”
“Gah, you decide.”
“Penguin Island?”
“You decide,” Celia says, as they pedal into the fractured bloom of a late summer night.
Simon and Celia lock their bikes to a light post. They stand out side the door of their apartment, their fingers clasped loosely together. They hear the footfall and trumpeting of a miniature stampede within.
“Elephants again,” Simon says.
“Impossible. I sprayed elephanticide this morning.”
“The elephants are transcending our poisons. They are elementally evolving,” Simon says in a monotone voice, but meaning it as a joke.
“This is serious, Simon,” Celia says.
“It’s just an infestation.”
“They’ll destroy everything we own.”
Simon shrugs. “I don’t like anything I own anyway.”
“I think I’ll kill them this time. I really think I’ll kill them.”
“We are beyond peaceful negotiations. We are beyond poison. We must squash the elephants beneath our shoes.
We must boil their children in hot water spiced with cloves. We must be ruthless in the face of the intruder.”
Celia unlocks the door and pushes it open. They stand side by side, staring into the darkness. Simon flips on a light.
Tiny white elephants parade in a single-file line that spirals inward and outward like a vortex of pestilential cuteness.
Simon lets go of Celia’s hand. He steps toward the parade of tiny elephants.
“Please don’t kill them,” Celia says.
“I thought you wanted them dead.”
“I was just mad. I didn’t mean it for real. They’re only elephants. They don’t know any better. Look how tiny they are.”
“If we don’t make a stand now, they’ll never leave us alone. They’ll run us out of our own fucking home.”
Celia is crying now.
“There’s got to be another solution,” she says.
“We’ve tried everything. There’s no other solution.”
“Can’t we wait until morning?”
“And let the elephants shit all over the floor and keep us up all night with their trunk music, just to kill them in the morning?”
Celia nods.
Simon looks at the tiny elephants. The tiny elephants are very cute. A while ago, Simon would have liked to keep one as a pet, but he hates them now. Celia hates them too.
It makes them sad to hate tiny elephants because they used to love tiny elephants, before tiny elephants were imported to the city and infested their apartment. Simon hates the government for making him hate tiny elephants.
Simon looks away from the tiny elephants. He massages the right side of his face. He has a minor toothache.
“Let’s go to bed. The elephants have until morning to pack their bags.”
“Do you hear that?” Celia says to the elephants. “You have until morning. Then your death bell rings.”
Unlike rats, tiny elephants are not afraid of humans.
They do not scramble for the dark when lights come on.
They are festive creatures and might be pleasant to have around, if only they did not congregate by the hundreds or thousands and make noise all night, for tiny elephants are nocturnal.
“Still want a bedtime story?” Simon says.
Celia slips her arms around him, saying, “Yes please.”
They hold each other close, and in holding each other dis solve the sandpaper feelings that rubbed them raw earlier in the day, when they argued about money. They say that money is shit, but they are in debt, accumulating more debt, and learned two weeks ago that Celia is pregnant.
“I love you,” Simon says.
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t have drank tonight.”
Celia buries her face in his chest and sighs. “Are you sure you still want to start a family with me?”
“Of course I’m sure. Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
Simon kisses her forehead. She pulls away from him, kicks off her laceless red shoes, and tiptoes across the apartment, careful not to squash any elephants. She climbs into bed. Simon unties his shoes and throws them across the room. He shuffles into the bathroom, where the elephants have unwound the entire roll of toilet paper.
Simon decides to leave the toilet paper alone. Celia usually wakes up before him. He wants her to see the toilet paper and get mad at the elephants for being messy and wasteful. Then they can kill the elephants together. Maybe they will eat one. He wonders what tiny elephants taste like. He thinks that maybe he should be more concerned about the baby and less concerned about the taste of tiny elephants.
He opens the medicine cabinet and picks up his toothbrush. He squeezes a cashew-sized glob of glittering blue paste onto the frayed bristles, closes the medicine cabinet, and sticks the brush into his mouth without wetting the bristles. He stands in the bathroom doorway. While brushing he says, “Will I make a good father?”
Celia lies facedown in the pillows. The sunflower-patterned sheet is pulled up to her waist. She has taken off her shirt. Her back is a pale honeydew rind, bereft of distinguishing marks, like a desert without cacti or rocks. Her breathing is slow and heavy. She has fallen asleep.
Simon spits toothpaste foam into the sink and rinses his mouth. He swallows two aspirin for the minor toothache. He crawls into bed after turning off all the lights except the bedside lamp. He gets under the sheet and picks up the book on the nightstand. It is a copy of The Little Prince in the original French. Although he understands almost none of it, Simon begins reading aloud from the book.
After a while, he closes the book and turns off the lamp. He curls around Celia’s sleeping form, wondering if fetuses get lonely, or if loneliness only comes on after the body grows larger than a crumb.
Simon dreams that he and Celia are stapling bacon to the card board walls of a cathedral without doors or windows.
They have coated the entire exterior of the cathedral in bacon when a yellow crow falls of out the sky and begs them, as its dying wish, to go inside the cathedral and sit very quietly. “But how can we go inside if there are no windows or doors?” Celia asks the yellow crow, who weeps profusely for it has been shot through the heart.
“Ask forgiveness,” the crow says, then Simon wakes up. It is an unsettling dream, not the least because he and Celia do not eat bacon, nor any other meat.
She has turned away from him in her sleep. They each take up one side of the bed, leaving the middle cold.
They used to joke that they became one person as they slept. They used to sleep closer together. Now they sleep far apart, while tiny elephants cuddle on the floor around their bed.
He slides across the void of bed to spoon her. She stirs a little, pushing into him, murmuring, “Good morning.”
“Did you have good dreams?”
“A sad one. We were in a funeral home, trying to swallow green pills because we had died and one of us was being forced to go away. The green pills were supposed to make us inseparable, but the pills were as large as ostrich eggs. We couldn’t choke them down. It made me sad. Did you have a good dream?”
“We were outside a cathedral, doing something with bacon. I forget what.”
He never remembers his dreams for long.
He moves his left hand over her hip, up the side of her body, across her chest, and down her belly.
Her belly, where the baby is.
“What the fuck,” he says. “The blanket is squeezing my hand.”
He throws the blankets off. Three powder blue strings protrude from Celia’s bellybutton. They are as thin and transparent as fishing line.
The strings go taut.
He waves his hands back and forth. His hand passes through the strings without getting tangled or affecting them in any way, as if they possess no physical substance, like holograms. But when he makes to grab them, closing his hand into a fist, the strings feel solid in his grip. They feel cold and rubbery, like mozzarella cheese.
“What’s wrong?” Celia says.
He looks at her face. The strings jutting from her belly are not the only strings.
Strings come out of her hands, shoulders, feet, face.
“What’s happened to you?” he says.
“Nothing,” she says, wearing a panicked facial expression. “What’s wrong with you?”
As she speaks, her strings move in sync with her words and gestures. Celia and the strings act in such accordance that Simon cannot tell whether she is controlling them or they are controlling her.
“There are strings coming out of you,” he says. “Strings in your hands, feet, face… even strings coming from your belly. You must see them.”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Is this a joke?”
Simon puts his hands on her shoulders and looks her straight in the eye so she knows he is serious. He speaks in a level voice. “This is not a joke. There are strings coming out of you. I don’t know why you can’t see them, but they’re there.”
She shakes her head and laughs. “I always knew you were a little crazy, but strings? Really, Simon?”
As she speaks, her body shifts like a marionette controlled by a trembling puppeteer. He imagines the strings weaving through her guts and muscles. He cannot touch her after thinking this. The strings repulse him. It is as if she is infected with a dangerous parasite. Despite his revulsion, he feels compelled to save her from these strings that are invisible to her.
“Let me cut your strings,” he says, averting his eyes.
“I’m going back to bed.” Celia turns her back to him and lays down. She pulls the blankets over her head. Her blue strings cut right through the blanket.
Simon tries to stay calm. He doesn’t want to freak out.
He feels irritated with Celia. He knows that it’s irrational and that he had better stop before things escalate into a fight, but he cannot help thinking that it is her fault for not seeing the strings.
“Hold me,” she says, in a half-asleep stupor.
Simon gets under the covers, but he cannot touch her.“Let me cut your strings,” he says.
“Go for it,” she says.
“Do you want me to cut them with scissors, or just use my hands?”
“I don’t care. Do what you feel like.”
“Which do you prefer?”
“Dammit, Simon.”
“Well which?”
“Hands. I don’t know.”
“OK, let me know if it hurts.”
He reaches for the belly strings first because they are the smallest, but Celia is lying at an angle where Simon cannot reach them.
“Can you move?” he says.
She rolls over, grumbling about what an asshole he is.
Simon grabs the three belly strings in his hand and jerks on all three at once. They go slack and slide out of her belly, unbloodied, damaging her in no discernible way.
“Did you pull out my strings?” Celia says.
“Be quiet. I’m waiting to see what happens.”
Nothing happens for another minute, then the strings blacken and wither. They slip out of his hand and retract into the ceiling like vines.
“Do you feel any different?” he says.
“I feel exactly the same, which is annoyed and tired.”
“Sorry. I’ll be done soon.”
“Can’t you be done now?”
“Celia, there are strings coming out of your body. I don’t give a fuck if you can’t see them. I want them gone.
Maybe they’re a new breed of insect, or probes.”
Simon collects all of Celia’s remaining strings in one fist, thinking again of cheese. He will pull them out all at once.
“I’m going to pull all of your strings on three, OK?”
He knows telling her this will annoy her, but since it is her body they are dealing with, he thinks he should at least keep her in formed. “One… two… three.”
He pulls the strings.
He slides a hand under the covers as the strings go slack and dark. He strokes her lower back. “All done,” he says. “Thank you for being patient with me.”
Celia offers no response. Simon feels sick. “Celia? I’m sorry. Please say something,” he says.
Her deteriorating strings leave a sulfuric odor in the air. She must be really pissed to ignore him like this. He knows it is better to leave her alone. After sleeping for a few more hours she will not be mad, but Simon cannot stand letting bad feelings simmer between them, even though Celia says bad feelings are sometimes necessary.
He tries tickling her. She remains still. “Celia.” Frustrated by her unresponsiveness, but also growing concerned, Simon shakes her shoulder. “Celia.” She does not move. “Celia!”
There is no question now. Celia is not breathing.
Pulling out her strings has rendered her unconscious.
And the baby, the baby. What about the baby?
Not knowing CPR, Simon leaps out of bed. He slips in elephant shit twice, banging his knees and elbows, before he reaches the phone on the wall.
Simon and Celia thought it would be charming to have an old-fashioned telephone. Now, as Simon struggles to pick up a dial tone on the antiquated machine, the receiver feels like a stone wheel in his hands.
Finally, the dial tone buzzes through and he punches in the emergency number. He wonders what he will say.
That he has killed his wife and unborn child by ripping out the strings that tethered them to life?
“What is your emergency?”
“My pregnant wife is unconscious.”
“How long has she been unconscious?”
“A few minutes I think.”
“What is your location?”
“Seven-One-Seven Golden Oak Drive.”
“An emergency dispatch will—”
“An emergency dispatch will what? Will be here shortly? Answer me!”
He looks at the phone, hesitant to hang up, but there is a blue string running out of his right hand, and he drops the phone.
Fifteen minutes later, an ambulance pulls to the curb outside the apartment. Simon opens the door. Two ambulance men dressed in gray uniforms and carrying a stretcher between them hop out of the ambulance and hurry into the apartment. One of the men has curly red hair and looks to be about Simon’s age. The other man has a white handlebar mustache. The ambulance men have strings identical to Celia’s strings, minus the belly strings. Simon decides to ignore the strings so the ambulance men can focus on Celia. He doesn’t want to cause a scene.
The men place the stretcher next to Celia on the bed and set to work checking her vital signs.
“No pulse,” the mustached one says.
“No temperature,” says the one with red hair.
“Even if she’s dead, she should still have a temperature.”
“Well it’s obviously the temperature of a dead person, so it may as well be none at all.”
“Standard procedure, Dan,” says the mustached one.
“Temperature is protocol.” He turns to Simon. “Really sorry about the attitude. He’s new to the ambulance squad.”
The men roll Celia onto the stretcher.
“Is she OK?” Simon asks.
“For a dead woman,” Dan says.
“Oh shut up,” says the mustached one. “I’m sorry to report, sir, this woman here is
beyond retrieval.”
“Beyond retrieval?”
“It means there’s nothing we can do to bring her back.”
“She’s gone, chap,” Dan says. “Left you for a Mister Rigor Mortis.”
“What did I just tell you?” the mustached one says.
“You said she’s beyond retrieval.”
“Of course she is, but no! I told you to shut up. Now shut up and lift.” And to Simon: “Again, I’m terribly sorry for his behavior.”
The men lift the stretcher and move toward the door.
“Hold on a minute.” Simon hurries in front of them, blocking their exit. “Where are you taking her?”
“Trying to keep her around for some after-hours fun, eh?” Dan says.
“Idiot!” says the mustached one. “I’ll be back in a moment to discuss the paperwork.”
“Paperwork?” Simon says.
“Death papers, funeral forms, a load of bollocks if you ask me,” Dan says.
“Nobody asked you,” says the mustached one.
The ambulance men push past Simon, balancing the stretcher between them. They load Celia into the back of the ambulance and hop in after her.
The emergency siren howls.
Simon thinks they are about to drive off, having practically abducted Celia from the apartment, when the mustached one hops out of the ambulance, holding a thick stack of papers in his hands. The mustached one yells something to Simon, but his words are drowned by the siren.
They go inside and the mustached one says, “Take a seat.”
Simon sits at the table. The mustached one lays the stack of papers in front of him. He puts a pen in Simon’s hand and says, “Sign here, please.”
“Sign where?” Simon says.
“Anywhere. I just meant sign the forms. It doesn’t matter where you sign, or what order you sign them in, but all these forms do have to be signed.”
“What are they for?”
“Records and Information. Tax men. Telemarketers. Local, state, and federal governments. The green forms contain information about the funeral. They certify that you trust the hospital to make all funeral arrangements. One of those forms is an Agreement of Notification. The hospital agrees to notify all immediate family members of the deceased. Were you her spouse?”
“Yes.”
“The hospital will not contact your side of the family. They leave that up to you.”
“OK.”
“And friends. Should friends be attending the funeral, you will need to notify them in advance. Johnston Funeral Services handles all of our funeral affairs. Anyone who is not a member of the immediate family of the deceased must contact JFS and RSVP if they are to attend the funeral.”
“Do I need to… RSVP?”
“No. Spouses are considered immediate family.”
“Is there anything I can do? Anything I should be doing?”
“Sign these papers. Beyond that, you’re off the hook.
Call people, if you’d like. We have a grieving hotline, if you need. The hospital, or JFS on our behalf, will contact you soon with the date and time at which the funeral is to be held. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Can I—”
“Can you hurry up signing the paperwork? Your wife is not the only person dead or dying today. We’ve got at least a dozen emergency stops after this one.”
Simon signs the papers faster. His hand is beginning to cramp. Outside, the ambulance siren continues to wail.
“I’m sorry. It’s just—”
“I know. Hard. I’m sorry, again, for your loss.”
After the final form is signed, the mustached one collects the stack of paperwork under his left arm. “The hospital will be in touch,” he says. He salutes Simon and marches out of the apartment.
After the ambulance goes, Simon finds a pair of scissors.
They are left-handed scissors because Celia was left-handed. The scissors feel awkward in his right hand, but he is right-handed and prefers the awkward feeling of using left-handed scissors with his right hand to the awkward feeling of using any scissors with his left hand.
He cuts the string attached to his left hand. It hurts very badly. He screams. His left arm falls limp at his side. He drops the scissors. He can no longer move his left arm.
Simon curls up in a little ball on the floor. He screams into the Persian rug. The rug is stained and smeared with elephant shit. He does not care. He is in severe pain. His left arm is immobile. He has killed Celia. He has killed their unborn child. He feels destroyed. Worse, he feels guilty.
Simon picks up the scissors in his right hand. He will kill himself.
He realizes that he cannot cut the string attached to his right hand if he is holding the scissors in his right hand.
He can cut all the other strings if he wants, but he fears that if he cuts all the strings except the string attached to his right hand, his spirit or whatever will be absorbed by his right arm and he will live the rest of his days as a right arm. Simon does not want to live the rest of his days as a right arm.
Out of frustration and a sense that he has reached his grieving limit, he throws the scissors against the wall.
Unlike Celia’s strings, his severed string does not disintegrate or retract into the ceiling. It floats about a foot above his head.
He gets up off the floor. He has resolved to make something work. He finds some thread and needle in a drawer.
He will sew his broken string back to his left hand. No he won’t. He cannot thread the needle with only one hand.
He does not possess that skill.
In the same drawer where he found the thread and needle, he finds a roll of electrical tape. He peels the tape back and clenches it between his teeth. He holds the tape roll in his right hand, unwinding it in a slow and cautious manner. When his arm can reach no further, he drops the tape roll and unsticks the tape from his teeth and lips.
He sticks one tape end against the back of a chair, retrieves the scissors from where they landed, and cuts off the other end. Simon repeats this six more times. It is a tedious process but eventually he has seven pieces of electrical tape that are as long as his arm.
He grabs the severed end of his string and encounters an other dilemma. He cannot hold the string in place and also tape the string with only his right hand, and no matter how he strains his neck, his mouth is too far away from his left hand to perform either task.
Simon feels doomed. Today’s events have distorted his mind. In his sadness and confusion, he feels bad about wasting electrical tape. He does not want the seven pieces of electrical tape to go to waste, so he tapes his left arm to his side. At least then he can pretend that he is not using his left arm by choice. It is much better to choose what you do, even if you hate doing it.
Simon sits down on the rug, still indifferent to the elephant shit. Celia will never live here again. Her organs will be passed on to other people. Her body will be donated to science. Should I move out of the apartment or keep on by myself, he wonders. The news of her death will destroy everyone.
On the morning of the funeral, Simon wakes up and puts on a pot of coffee. He lays two slices of whole wheat bread in the toaster oven.
He dresses in his grandfather’s grey suit. He would wear something black, but he doesn’t own anything black, nor any other suits. The left arm of the suit jacket hangs limp and hollow at his side.
In the bathroom, he brushes his teeth and combs his hair. He stares into the mirror above the sink while he does these things. He does not really see himself in the mirror. He only sees his strings.
The toast is burning. He can smell it. Celia’s funeral is in three hours, but at the moment, burnt toast is his reality. I am expected to cry, he thinks.
In the kitchen, he turns off the toaster oven. He slides the charred toast onto a green plate, careful not to scorch his fingers. He pours a cup of coffee and sits down at the table with his black toast.
The toast crumbles like ashen logs in his mouth.
The coffee burns his tongue.
Company might be nice. He’d even welcome the tiny elephants, but the tiny elephants are gone. They sleep in the walls in the day.
He shuffles around the apartment, terrified that he will fail to occupy the hours remaining before the funeral. He wipes crumbs from the corners of his mouth and stares at the books on the shelves, anything to avoid looking at his strings.
He takes down Keats’ Complete Poems.
Keats was Celia’s favorite poet.
He sits down again and opens the book to a page marked by a coupon for dog food. The coupon must have been there since before Ferdinand and Fernando died.
That was what? Three, four years ago?
The dogs were born of the same litter, and they died by the same rifle, fired by the same neighbor on the same day. Said the dogs threatened his goats. Simon and Celia loved their tent cabin, tucked away in the forest on the coast north of the city, but they decided to move after the death of Ferdinand and Fernando. Maybe they would have stayed on if only one of the dogs had died, or even both, if a mountain lion or bear killed them instead. Maybe, if they stayed, Simon would have never seen the strings. He folds the dog food coupon into his breast pocket and tells himself to forget the maybes.
The pages are blank because this is a talking book. In order to be read, the book must be wound like a music box. After he winds the book, the pages melt, then rise and fold together in the shape of a human head. The visage is that of the dead poet. The paper Keats opens his mouth and begins reading from Part Two of Hyperion. Simon is not surprised that Celia kept this page marked for so long.
Hyperion was her favorite poem. Face to face with the talking paper head, Simon has to turn away. Keats’ breath smells of mildew and rust, probably due to water damage.
The poet’s croaking voice emanates from trembling, yellowed lips:
The book spits up blood. A major problem with talking books is that as they get older, they assume the infirmities their human creators possessed in life. Celia’s copy of Keats’ Complete Poems has grown tubercular. Simon wipes the blood off the lips. It feels like blood, but when he looks at his fingers, he sees liquid words. He rubs his fingers together, smearing the words together into a blob.
He shakes the book. It sputters and fast-forwards through a few lines before continuing in its normal mechanical voice:
The book spits up blood again.
Simon rips Keats’ paper head out of the book. He tears the head apart in his right hand. He wanted nothing more than to hear these words that filled Celia’s heart and mind and spirit like balloon animals, but the book is a malfunctioning piece of shit.
As the words leak out of the destroyed paper head, tiny blue strings, so nearly
invisible that he failed to notice them before, blacken and fall away from the book.
Simon prepares to leave the apartment for the funeral. He does not care that he will arrive early. He cannot remain where he is. He simply cannot stand his own company in this space of so many memories. He cannot stand knowing that the book was alive. It was Celia’s favorite and he killed it. He loosens his tie. Maybe he’s just anxious about the funeral.
On his way out, he slams the door on a hideous noise.
He spins around.
A tiny elephant’s trunk has been crushed in the door.
He was not prepared for that.
Hands shaking, he fumbles with the door key. He finally manages to turn the key in the bottom lock. He opens the door.
The tiny elephant’s trunk has been severed completely.
The tiny elephant lies on its side, bleeding to death, choking. Simon takes off his suit jacket and wraps the tiny elephant in it. He failed to notice the creature on his way out.
It must have tried to follow or squeeze out behind him.
He sits on the floor in the doorway, cradling the elephant in his right arm.
The elephant dies. Its strings dissolve, floating off in wispy flakes. Simon holds his breath so as not to breathe them in.
He shakes the elephant out of the jacket, onto the floor. Blood has seeped through the jacket. Blood stains his pants and shirt.
He moves the elephant’s severed trunk with his foot until the elephant and the severed trunk lie side by side.
They look like two sleeping creatures. If not for all the blood, they would look peaceful.
Feeling disgraceful, Simon puts on his jacket and leaves the apartment, careful not to smash any elephants on his way out.
He is concerned about riding a bicycle with only one arm. Even if he removes the electrical tape, his left arm will not function, so he leaves the arm taped, the left sleeve of the grey and bloody jacket unfilled.
When the hospital called with the date and time of the funeral, they also gave him directions and an address. He takes the piece of paper he’d written these things on out of his pocket. He looks it over. Although the hospital is only three miles away, Simon has never visited the city sector where it is located.
He gets on his bike. He pedals down the street, right hand on the handlebars and then no hands. This is the first time he has left the apartment since Celia’s death. He realizes how hard this is going to be.
He failed to consider how seeing strings might affect his getting around. Biking one-armed isn’t even the hard part. There are so many things alive in the world, so many strings crossing other strings. He feels as if he is riding into a citywide spider web. The blue strings of people, birds, sloths, elephants, badgers, and other city dwellers thread the streets and sky, connecting the invisible dots of the psychogeographic landscape that maps every impulse, routine, pressure, and pleasure of the city’s circuitry.
An eagle swoops down. It is tiger-eyed, its talons outstretched. A tiny elephant stumbles into Simon’s path. The eagle’s strings coil around the elephant’s strings as the eagle swoops down. Unable to swerve out of the way, Simon crashes his bike out of fear that his strings will crisscross those of the predator and its prey.
He sits up, strawberry patches for elbows and knees, as the eagle lifts the elephant toward the sun.
He must hurry to the funeral. He is no longer due to arrive early. He picks up his bicycle and wheels it along beside him.
He steps in a gutter full of water and says, “Fucking hell.”He contemplates running into the street and pulling all his strings. Why wait to die. He figures he’d better wait until after the funeral. Touching Celia’s coffin is the closest he’ll ever get to holding her again, unless there’s a Heaven and they both get to go there. Maybe they’ll reincarnate as slugs. They will rejoice, reliving the love and happiness of their human days, only slimier.
A caterpillar bus turns onto the street. Simon has always been afraid of caterpillar buses. He has never been good at riding with other people, let alone a few dozen strangers all at once.
The conductor of the caterpillar bus yells at the passengers to slow down. “Where you heading?” he calls to Simon.
“I’m going to the funeral home,” Simon says.
A few people shout for him to go away. The conductor tells them to knock it off. He turns to Simon. “That’s a steep climb. What are you willing to pay?”
Simon reaches into his pocket for his wallet. He removes a wad of bills from his wallet and hands the bills to the conductor, feeling glad that he always carries his money around despite the many times he has been called old-fashioned for doing so. Unfortunately, he is now totally broke. The conductor counts the money and nods.
“Climb aboard,” he says.
Climbing is not actually necessary to board the caterpillar bus. It is a huge metal caterpillar with bicycles instead of legs. The passengers pedal to operate a hydrogen engine located in the head. When the caterpillar bus moves fast enough, the hydrogen engine forms bubbles.
The bubbles float out of a brass smoking pipe welded between the caterpillar’s lips.
Simon secures his bike just behind the caterpillar’s head, upon which the conductor sits behind an enormous steering wheel. The conductor shouts for everyone to pedal. Simon and the rest of the passengers begin to pedal.
Since there are not many passengers, the caterpillar bus is very wobbly, like it is missing most of its legs.
As they pick up speed, bubbles float out of the caterpillar’s brass pipe, but the momentum quickly dies. There are not enough passengers to propel the caterpillar bus to go any faster. At this slow pace, Simon would almost be better off walking. Fortunately, the conductor does all the steering.
“We were moving along quite well before you came along,” a person behind him shouts.
“That funeral better be for someone important,” shouts another.
“It’s for my wife,” Simon shouts.
“He says it’s for his wife!”
“His wife? He’s riding a bicycle to his wife’s funeral?”
“What a disgrace!”
“An imbecile.”
“He’s a slow rider too.”
“Making us ride all the way up the damned mountain.”
“And filthy. Take a look at his clothes.”
“I’d looked forward to this ride.”
“The funeral boy has ruined it for us all.”
“A disgrace.”
The passengers of the caterpillar bus continue to berate him as they teeter out of the city and through a forest of plastic trees. They ascend a narrow mountain road so steep that Simon must hook his chin over his handlebars to prevent from falling backwards.
When the caterpillar bus halts to let him off, Simon realizes that all the other passengers have tumbled off their bikes. The caterpillar bus must contain reserves of hydrogen or some other fuel source. Simon thinks this is illegal but says nothing. He could never have propelled the bus up the mountain by himself.
“It’s not much further,” the conductor says.
Simon detaches his bike from the caterpillar bus and thanks the man. He continues on foot, thankful that the road has leveled off, as the caterpillar bus turns around and begins its slow crawl down the mountain.
A sign on the side of the road proclaims WELCOME TO JOHNSTON FUNERAL SERVICES. An empty parking lot overtaken by plastic blackberry bushes comes into view. Be yond the field of bushes, a glass dome sparkles in the hot afternoon sun. Skinny blue strings protrude from the glass walls. The strings sway in a light breeze. Simon follows them with his eyes, but the sunlight obscures their endpoints. For all he knows, they continue into outer space, and perhaps even further.
Simon locks his bike to a FUNERAL PARKING ONLY sign and approaches the glass dome.
A path cut in the blackberry bushes leads up to the dome. The path is overgrown. He is cut by plastic thorns.
Simon remembers when he and Celia went to New-port Beach and the same jellyfish stung them both. At the memory, his mouth creases into a smile, sadness filling him like sand. That was their first vacation together. The weather was miser able, the motel had cockroaches and moldy sheets, and they got stung by a jellyfish, yet they had the most beautiful time together.
He approaches the doorway cut into the glass dome.
The dome seems fancy for a funeral home. The strings rising through it belong to trees. Real trees.
Amidst the tree strings, there are smaller strings attached to the fruit that hang from branches. Simon has not seen a fruit tree in almost a full year. He doesn’t recognize the purplish fruit growing on the trees. He thinks they are plums.
He follows a cluster of larger strings down to the person they are attached to. She is a skeletal old woman swathed in vibrant greens, yellows, and reds. She is not frightening to look at, nor is she pretty.
“Excuse me,” he says, rapping lightly on the glass.
The old woman looks up. Her lips have been eaten away by something black. Simon casts his eyes to his shoes.
“I’m here for the funeral.”
The pressure behind his face swells. He closes his eyes, afraid his eyeballs will pop out. His knees buckle. He steps in side the glass dome and leans against the wall for support.
The old woman limps toward him. She stops to pick some fruit off of a tree. When she gets close enough, she hands him a piece of fruit.
“What is it?” says Simon.
“Pluot.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s good.”
Simon looks at the smooth-fleshed, purple fruit. It fits perfectly in his right palm. As he holds the fruit, the blue string coiled around the stem disintegrates.
“Eat it,” the old woman says. “It’s good.”
Simon takes a bite. He chews slowly. He doesn’t know why he received this gift. He only accepted it to be kind.
He has never tasted a sweeter, juicier pluot.
“The ceremony is about to begin,” the old woman says.
“You can follow me over there.”
“Are you the groundskeeper?”
“I’m the accountant.”
“The accountant?”
“I settle the books of the dead. These days I bury the bodies and keep JFS running, what with budget cuts and layoffs they’ve even released the gardener, but officially, I’m just the accountant.”
“Is anyone else here… for Celia?” Simon asks.
“No one yet.”
“Maybe they’re running late,” Simon says.
“Did you expect anyone?”
“No one in particular.”
The accountant shakes her head sadly. “No one ever shows up late to these.”
The mustached one said the hospital would send a notice of death to everyone in Celia’s immediate family. However, Celia had been estranged from her family since before Simon met her. He has never even met her parents.
He intended to call his and Celia’s friends, and also his family.
He failed to call anyone.
The accountant walks past him out of the glass dome and says, “Follow me.”
“Where are we going?” Simon says.
He cannot feels his limbs. He thinks he must be going into shock. He’s out of breath. He cannot breathe.
He stares up at the glass dome pixilated by tears. A plane screams high above.
“We don’t do funerals in the garden. Come around to the parlor.”
“OK,” Simon says.
The accountant bustles away. Although she is barefoot, she walks at a fast clip. The patchwork fabric of her dress billows around her like a carnival tilt-a-whirl. Simon has to jog to stay by her side.
The accountant’s presence calms him a little bit, but uncertainty and shame gnaw at him. Uncertainty about the nature and regiment of funeral affairs. Shame over the absence of mourners, the absence of flowers. He failed to bring flowers.
“Do people still bring flowers to funerals?” he asks. “I know from reading articles that it used to be traditional, but what’s the tradition now? I’ve never been to a funeral.
I don’t know what’s expected. Are flowers normal? Am I doing some thing wrong?”
The accountant tilts her head and stares at him. Her eyes are cold and mean. Her blackened maw cracks into a smile.
They walk along a trail of stones that curves around the glass dome and zigzags through the fields beyond up to a trailer overtaken by flowering vines. The vines are blue and Simon initially mistakes them for strings.
“These vines are fake,” he says. He knows this because the vines do not possess strings. He has learned that living things have strings attached.
“No, they’re not,” the accountant says.
The accountant pulls a set of keys from beneath her dress and unlocks the door of the trailer. They go inside.
The trailer is the standard classroom type. Cheap variegated carpet on the floors, burlap curtains over the windows, pastel butcher paper stapled to the walls to hide the structural cheerlessness, and a sputtering heating/cooling unit in the corner. Simon has not set foot in one of these since his school days. Rows of black foldout chairs fill most of the room. In front, a podium and a coffin rest on a plywood riser.
“Take a seat,” the accountant says, approaching the podium.
“Is Celia in the coffin,” Simon says.
“It’s her funeral, isn’t it?” The accountant does not pause or turn around to respond.
“Can I look?”
“Look later.”
Simon chooses a seat in the first row, center. He pictures every chair in the trailer occupied, except for those in the front row because the other funeral attendees, in awe of the depth of his grief, have left the front row empty.
People stand in the back, but nobody dares sit in the front row with Simon. He can almost hear the people whisper,
“That man loved her,” and “She loved that man,” and
“True love found them,” and “Even now, I long for what they had,” and “It’s always like this.”
Simon turns in his seat, first caught in his daydream and then by the empty chairs. Family and friends are not here.
The accountant clears her throat.
He faces her.
“Celia Conk is survived by her husband, Simon Conk.”
He clenches his right hand in his lap.
“The records of her birth and early life are contradictory and incomplete, and are therefore unworthy of repeating. In recent years, she graduated from Gramercy College with a Bachelors of Science in Ornithology. She was employed by the St. George Free Zoo from the month of her graduation until April of this year. At the time of her death, Celia Conk was $1,916 in debt. She had not made a payment toward nullifying her debt since her termination from St. George. Her life was presumably a happy one, albeit short.”
The accountant sighs. She looks bored.
“Is that all?” Simon asks.
“Unless you have something to add.”
Simon rises and approaches the coffin. He kneels beside it, presses his right hand against the lacquered lid about where he estimates Celia’s face to be, and bows his head. He has never been to a funeral so maybe this is how all of them go, but it feels wrong to him. There must be something he can say.
Nothing rises. Maybe silence is best. No reason to fill her coffin with words. Words don’t help the dead.
“Do you have anything more to add?” the accountant says. Simon opens his eyes and looks at the accountant. He realizes that his face is wet. “That is all,” he says.
“Since it’s only the two of us, do you mind if we discuss payment here,” the accountant says.
“Payment?”
“Funerals aren’t free, you know.”
“Is there somewhere else we can go to discuss payment? I mean—” he gestures to the coffin.
“I’m afraid I shouldn’t have suggested that we have another option. My office is all the way across the property and I’ve got to bury yours and prepare the next body before my three o’clock appointment arrives. There’s really no time.”
The next body. Three o’clock appointment. These are the terms of death. Simon hates this old woman who calls herself the accountant.
She takes a black binder from the podium and steps off the plywood riser, comes and sits next to him. She opens the binder across her lap and clicks her tongue against her teeth, like a teacher attempting to show a failing student what they’re doing wrong.
“Total cost is $1,916.”
“How can it be that much? You hardly did anything.”
“The cost of a basic funeral is the debt owed by the deceased at the time of death. Had your wife owed nothing, her funeral would be free.”
“Nobody said anything about payment.”
“It’s in the agreement that you signed. Ignorance does not absolve responsibility.”
“Will Celia’s debt be cleared, or is this additional?”
“It’s additional.”
“Can I pay in installments?”
“There’s a monthly plan, but I warn you, the interest is steep.”
“Fine.”
“How much would you like to pay now?”
“Can you mail the bill? I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do today.”
The accountant studies his suit. She has a look on her face that says she’s registering the blood and sweat and mud for the first time. She seems to spend a long time studying the flop ping sleeve of his suit jacket.
“You’ve had a bad time of this,” she says. She shuts the binder and looks at her wristwatch. “If we hurry, I suppose there’s time to run over to my office.”
“Is there more to discuss?”
“The monthly installment form is in my office. If you take it with you, it’ll save me a stamp.”
“If it means that much.”
“It does.”
The accountant springs up from the foldout chair, knocking it to the ground as she charges for the door.
Simon picks up the fallen chair and hurries after her.
He has to sprint to keep up. He feels awkward and unbalanced, hustling down the stone path with one arm taped to his side.
About a hundred yards behind the trailer, they come upon another trailer. The accountant goes inside and Simon follows. Except for a white desk, three foldout chairs, and several rusting file cabinets, the trailer is bare.
“Sit down,” the accountant says.
Simon collapses in a chair and rests his forehead on the edge of the desk. He is breathless. His side aches.
The accountant opens a file cabinet and removes a green document. She sits across the desk from him, studying the document. “You have twelve months from today to pay for all funeral expenses, including interest,” she says, sliding the form across the desk.
Simon sits up. He creases the form down the middle and stuffs it into his inner breast pocket.
“Anything else?”
“Give me your hand,” the accountant says.
Simon places his right hand palm-up on the desk.
“The other hand.”
“I can’t. I taped my left arm to my side.”
“Why would you do such a thing?”
“It was acting up.”
“Let me look at it. Maybe I can help.”
“It won’t move.”
The accountant comes around the desk and stops behind Simon. She puts her hands on his shoulders. “Let me look.”
Simon shrugs. He is too confused to resist. Plus, maybe if he lets the accountant look at his arm, she’ll take pity and reduce the amount owed for the funeral.
She removes his jacket and rolls up the left sleeve of his shirt. She tears off a piece of electrical tape. Simon flinches. Hair and skin come away with the tape, but the pain does not alert his left arm into action.
The accountant lifts his left arm and lays Simon’s hand palm-up on the desk. She reaches above him, grabs the withered string that used to be attached to his left hand, and returns to her side of the desk. She opens a drawer, comes up with a little sewing kit, and removes a needle and blue thread. Simon is too shocked to get up and run out of the trailer.
“Be still and don’t speak,” the accountant says.
“But how can you—”
“I said shut up.”
Simon obeys.
The accountant grips his left hand string between her teeth while she threads the needle. After the needle is threaded, she loops it in and out of the severed end of his left hand string.
She lowers the string to the center of his left palm.
“This might hurt, but it won’t take long,” she says.
She weaves the needle in and out of his palm. Every time the needle enters his hand, it feels like a tattoo gun being pushed too deep. But she’s right, it doesn’t take long. As soon as his string is sewn back to his hand, she bites and ties the thread, and returns the thread and needle to the sewing kit.
Simon digs his fingers into his palm.
He can move his left arm again.
Although the funeral just ended, he suddenly feels very excited.
He leaps out of his chair and says, “You see them too.”
He has so many questions for her.
“Get out,” she says. “I have much work left to do. Your business here is done. If you have any questions about the monthly payment plan, Johnston Funeral Services has an auto mated telephone system.”
“What about the strings? I have questions about the strings.”
The accountant points at the door and shouts, “Get out.”
“But—”
“I’ll call the police.”
Simon throws on his jacket and walks out the door. As he walks down the stone path, he hears some keys jangle behind him. He looks back without losing stride. The accountant is locking the door to her office. She must be scared or worried that he’ll return. He shrugs and sticks his hands in his pockets. At least he has his left arm back, and also confirmation that he’s not the only one who sees the strings. Maybe someday he’ll meet others. Maybe they’ll talk about it. Maybe he will tell the truth about Celia.
Maybe he will not.
It is his, this secret of the strings, of how he killed Celia and their unborn child. It is his secret.
Simon unlocks his bike from the FUNERAL PARKING ONLY sign. A parade of mourners crosses the parking lot.
Some of the people are wheezing and keeling over. As Simon walks past the mourners, an old man who looks like a walrus points at Simon’s bicycle and says, “How vulgar.
How dread fully vulgar.” None of the mourners have bikes with them. Biking to a funeral must be an improper thing to do. Simon lowers his head and continues on, ashamed.
He arrives at the main road and stops, allowing the last stragglers of the funeral march to pass before mounting his bike. The mountain is far steeper than it seemed on the way up. He feels nervous about riding down, so he takes a few minutes to admire the view, which he failed to notice during his ascent.
From the entrance of Johnston Funeral Services, he has a view of the entire city far below. It appears small and trapped, a pit of civilization surrounded by a plastic forest that swallows the horizon. The tinfoil bristling of the trees around him is ugly. He wishes the breeze would stop.
He has never biked down a mountain this steep. He might hurt himself. Maybe physical pain will distract him from the other pain. Considering the last few days, he’d welcome a broken bone. A smashed skull would be sublime. He’d lick gray matter from his lips and taste Celia.
He will not crash, although he likes to fantasize what would happen if he did. He just wants to go home. When he gets home, he will clean the apartment, take a hot shower and sleeping pills, and sleep for twelve hours. Then he can start making plans for the rest of his life.
He repositions his hands on the handlebars and kicks off. There’s no reason to pedal. He gains speed in no time at all. Every bump in the road vibrates through his entire body, his skinny bike absorbing none of the shock. The wind is deafening, like swallowing an ocean in each ear.
He’s moving faster than he feels comfortable moving. The wind stings his eyes and pries his mouth into a flapping smile. He’s crying, from the wind and from grief, but also from exhilaration.
A dark shape rolls into the road, directly into Simon’s path.Simon cannot use his brakes. He’s going too fast.
The dark shape stands and raises its hands above its head, urging Simon to stop. He can see it clearly now. The dark shape is a sloth.
He swerves to the right to dodge around the sloth while the sloth also moves to the right in a miscalculated attempt to avoid his bicycle. He tries to correct his move, but too late and too sharply. This could be fatal, he thinks.
He collides with the sloth.
The sloth acts more like a ramp than a road block, launching Simon off the side of the road.
The bike falls away from him. He is weightless and almost floating, then he’s falling after the bike, toward the bottom of a gulch so far fucking down it may as well be bottomless. Oh fuck stop falling, he thinks. Oh fuck stop falling, is all he can think.
He claws at the air out of desperation.
And he grabs onto something.
And he stops falling.
He’s hanging over the gulch by two of his own strings, suspended in midair. He grabbed the strings because they were the only thing he could touch. He should be dead right now. Instead, he swings in midair, hundreds of feet over fake trees and sharp rocks. The road is thirty feet away and maybe a hundred feet up.
How fast was he going and how high was he launched to soar thirty feet? He tries doing the math, but the numbers ooze like broken yolks across his mind. How possible or impossible his arrival to this point in time and space is irrelevant because he is here now, and he’ll die if he doesn’t get elsewhere.
No matter how hard he tries to hold on, he’s going to fall. His arms will lose the strength to hold him up. His death has only been delayed. He is still going to die in the gulch. He is still going to die today.
He starts to climb. His strings are taut, betraying no sign that they’re about to fall out of the sky.
He climbs fast. His muscles ache and his breathing is ragged, but he keeps moving. He fears that if he pauses to rest, he might never get going again. A short break might kill him.
After climbing for a while, he comes level to the road.
Now he has two options. He can climb a bit higher, swing from his strings, and hopefully land on the road, or he can forget about the road and survival, just say fuck everything and climb as high as the strings and his body will allow.
Neither option guarantees survival.
His body decides for him. It moves upward faster and faster, eating up strings at an incredible pace. He has no idea what to expect, so he expects nothing. He should be lying dead in the gulch. Or he and Celia should have had a child, grown old together, died together. They had talked about that, how when they got to be a certain age they would meet in a dream and leave their bodies behind.
They said that’s how they’d live forever, by running away.
Now Simon is running away. It is not a dream; he’s doing it alone.
He climbs faster. His limbs feel like burning match-sticks, but he does not dare stop. The air grows thin, hard to breathe.
The blue sky assumes a feathery texture. A chartreuse trembling gnaws at the edges. The sky is molting.
Strings crisscross everywhere.
Simon shudders with anticipation and exhaustion as he reaches an altitude where he can no longer breathe. He cannot go on, but he must. He must be close to breaking into outer space. He goes on. After a while, a square of darkness forms above. The strings are now so thick around him that he cannot see the sky. There are only the strings and the darkness above. The square of darkness must be the source of the strings.
Simon’s strings begin to merge with all the rest, forming one massive blue stalk.
I’m never coming down again, he thinks.
Closer, the darkness reveals its substance.
The darkness is made of wood.
The blue stalk hangs from the dark square like the cord of a household appliance.
Finally, Simon pulls himself up onto the dark wooden square that floats in the sky. He can see the charred remains of walls around three sides. This was once a room.
His hands are bloody leaves. The dark square has scalded his hands, but when he screams, he does not scream out of pain.
A dead, half-eaten shark lies on the wooden platform.
The tail of the shark is missing. Its blackened ribs jut out from rot ting folds of skin like broken cast-iron fence posts. The stalk of tangled strings vanishes into the festering, cave-like hollow of the shark’s head. The strings are sprouting from the shark’s brain.
The shark’s mouth is clamped shut, as if it died while grinding its teeth or smiling.
He is alive, alone with the shark head in the sky.