Saturday, April 7, 2012

Zalman's Slipper


Sometime before dawn on the morning in question, Zalman was crudely awakened by a strange noise in the closet.  Very unusual.  Every day being the same, Zalman took great comfort in relying on the familiar pattern of sounds from morning until night.  So although this new intrusion was only a slight thud, nothing more than a gentle shove against the still air, it was loud enough to send Zalman into a fit of concern.  Rather than investigate, and true to his blunt nature, he covered his ears with the blanket and defied it.
            But he was only vaguely successful.
            What could it be? he wondered.  There was no one else in the apartment and had not been for years.  He did not own and had never wanted a cat.  The closet was on the outer wall of the building and so there were no neighbors on the other side to make such a noise.  And since he never moved anything, except the slippers that he carefully lined up together on the closet floor at the end of the day, there was no reason for anything to fall down.
            Above all the Home for Retired Extras in which he lived was a hush place.  That was the appeal of it for seniors who had had their fill of voyages and expeditions and adventures.  You could be still there, look at old videos of yourself floating in zero gravity, go through your mementos in peace and quiet, recall the past.  The unexpected was uninvited there and hardly ever paid a visit.  So what could it have been?
     Just my mind, Zalman concluded.  Nothing at all really, a quirk of the ear.  Like the tinnitus that hits you as you re-enter the atmosphere which is nothing more than a drop in air pressure making your body swell and ring.  Yes, that was it.  Nothing important.  Thus soothed, he tried to remember what it was he had been dreaming before the noise, and he slowly drifted back into sleep.  But he only got as far as dreams of dreaming and it was not restful in the least.
            At precisely seven o’clock, just like every other morning because Zalman was a man of precision, he woke up for good and began his routines.  He put on his boxer shorts, shaved, slipped into his black pants and pulled on a fresh undershirt.  He made a cup of coffee and stood at the window trying to see through the clouds to the impending rain which, just like every other morning, never came once the microclimatists had decided that bad weather was depressing for old folks.
            Eventually, he went to the closet to get his slippers, those old house slippers that he knew would be lined up perfectly on the closet floor.  But an odd feeling of dislocation seized him at the door.  About what, he had no clue.  He barely recalled waking up three hours earlier after hearing the sound.  But an inner sense of order -- or perhaps the lust for it -- told him that something was wrong.  Or was about to be.  Not knowing what to expect, or why he expected anything at all, Zalman opened the closet door slowly, like the engineer he had been, and peered inside.
            In the closet, the solution to the mystery was lying on the floor.  An old box of videos from a shelf above had fallen down.  Very odd, he thought.  For sixteen years, he had opened the closet twice every day.  Once in the morning to take his slippers out and put them on, and once in the evening to put them neatly back.  The rest of the closet – the folded flannel shirts, the old computer console, the spacesuit in its hermetic case, the box of videos itself – he never touched. 
            What would have made the box fall down?
            In space capsules everything was in its place or all hell could break loose.  The merest loose screw floating around in zero gravity could be inhaled, after all, and a flying tool could really throw a wrench into the works.  Zalman, during his flying days, had been known for keeping his ship shipshape.  Neat as pin.  One of the things he loved about space was the lack of it, in his capsule at least, where everything was trim and right, well within reach, never out of place.
            Of course, back on earth in his own apartment, there was no need for such care but Zalman was the kind of man who learned his lessons well and in any case the whole compulsion fit him like a twitch.
            But things were changing in spite of all that.
            As he lifted the box up to put it back, he stepped forward and slightly skid on his right slipper.  That might have concluded the whole episode and made that day as forgettable as all the rest, had he not also bumped his elbow on the door jamb, twisted around in reaction, and dropped the box onto the floor.  A single video with the words “Hesperus Orbit” written on it in black marker fell out of the box and landed on his foot.  Hesperus, the Greek name for Venus when it dazzled as the evening star.  But this time the words merely reminded him that time was passing and he promised, one more time, to throw the box away or donate it to the space agency.  Then he slipped on a slipper, left everything on the floor, and went about his day.
            But it was a different day from that point on as a hazy sense of discomfort began to pervade his chores.  As he cleaned his nails meticulously at the rear window, he thought about the videos and all those stupid poses, the dim smiles, the moronic tricks of weightlessness.  All that nonsensical mugging for the camera.   What did that have to do with planetary interferometry?  And later, while making himself a cheese sandwich, he thought of those mushy meals he had sucked through a straw while looking at an image of the food he was supposed to be eating and decided that he was not hungry, maybe never would be again.  Later in the morning, he found himself drawn to the obituaries on the board and became annoyed about every little detail…all those survived by, first woman to, donations can be made to, loving husband of, and on and on.  Such rubbish!  You did what you did that was all, and when the flight was over you unlinked and that was that.  Nothing more to say about it.  He even considered showing up at one of the services and contradicting the eulogy, whatever it was, but knew he would not do it because he couldn’t muster the gall.
            Yet by the afternoon, Zalman was in a profound state of imbalance.  Over what specifically, he had no idea.  But every sound in the hallway, no matter how feeble, seemed like a toll of some kind and the noises from outside became unbearable.  The light seemed dark, the air seemed thick, and motion itself seemed to stop and wheeze.   Something was wrong all right, something out of whack.   Like the time the gyro clutched and everything when skittering all akimbo.  He didn’t panic then but instead went down his checklist and, point by point, set it all right.
            Zalman, like all spacefarers, was nothing if not precise and he spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what was wrong.  As the sun went down through the slats of the blinds, he came up with an explanation.  It was the only one left on his list.  Clearly, he thought, someone had died.  That had to be it.  What else could account for this gloamy gloom?  Someone had died and he had forgotten to send a consolation.  But no matter how hard he tried, he could not recall who that someone might be.  He rubbed the sides of his jawbone and thought and thought and went through candidates.  Was it old Syms who had gone as far as Jupiter?  No, he had died a few months ago.  Patrice from the third floor who chased down the comet that proved to be just ice and dust?  No, that was last year.  Or the year before.  Making a poached egg for dinner, glancing at the board for new news, Zalman  felt like a stranger in his own world.  By the end of the day, the darkness churned his thoughts even muddier.
            Tess will know, he concluded.  She knew everything that went on and since she never answered the phone, he launched himself out the door and down to her apartment passing in front of an immense mural of the Orion nebula along the way.
            The extras at the Home for Retired Extras were not from Hollywood.  The word referred to extra-terrestrials.  Everyone there had left the surface of the earth while working for one of the space agencies either in the government or the private sector.   It was a home for former astronauts and that is why star charts filled the halls instead of bad paintings, why telescopes were scattered around in lieu of plants, and why old rocket launches were shown on Monday nights and not old movies.
            Zalman bypassed the two men arguing about the perihelion of Mars and arrived at Tess’s door.  It was unlocked as usual and so he went in.  She was in the bedroom, propped like her own portrait in the bed.  She was watching the board and eating chocolate covered raisins.  Her red hair, the texture of straw, looked like a dry thatch mounted on her head.  A startling floral cape was loosely wrapped around her shoulders, revealing the thick strap of her bra.  She had makeup on but it seemed to have been applied in the dark.  The scene shocked Zalman just like it always did.  It was hard to imagine that this woman, who now looked like an aging diva in her own private opera, had been packed into a can when she was young and sent flying into the asteroid belt to search for exominerals.  Yet there she was.  Besides, the question in his mind was bigger than both of them and he put it forth with a grim lip.
            “Tess, who has died?”
            “Oh, it’s you,” she said barely looking.
            “Me??”
            “You startled me,” she said, holding her cape close around her bosom, “Sit down, you look like a zombie.”
            He sat down gently in the chair at the foot of the bed.
            “Now, what is this?  What did you say?”
            “Who has died?” he repeated.
            “Ha!  Who hasn’t?”
            “No,” he said with conviction, “someone has died.”
            “What, when, where, who?  What are you talking?”
            “I have this feeling.”
            “Which century, my dahling?  Most people have died.  The vast majority.  It’s not exactly a new thing.”
            “Someone we know,” he said slowly, “has died.  I’m sure of it.  But I can’t remember who.”
            “Who, Syms?  You’re talking about Syms?”
            “No, not Syms.  I remember Syms.”
            “Of course you do,” she comforted.  “His idiot cousin threw up.  Who could forgot?  It was hotter than hell.  That’s one thing I do not want is a hot funeral.  Everybody hates you for years.”
            She took a sip from a cup on the night table, looked at her watch, changed the frame on the board with a flick of her hand, and noticed that Zalman was frowning.
            “Do you want coffee or something, you really look like…I don’t know what?”
            “It’s this feeling.”
            “In the prostate?  Harry had that for years.”
            “No, in the…” and he signaled the area somewhere between the brain and the belly.
            “You’re too fussy.  Everything has to be perfect.  That might have worked in space, dahling, here on earth it helps to be messy.  Trust me.”
            “Maybe I dreamed it.”
            “I dream about that all the time.  Every night I’m visiting someone or other’s grave.  It’s a natural part of the aging process, I read.  Sure you don’t want anything?  You look like hell.”

            That night, too distracted to take care of himself, Zalman went to bed just the way he was dressed and therefore did not go to the closet to place his slippers.  More disjunction.  Gone from his sleepscape were the lovely dreams of weightlessness, of drifting over Venus as he watched the atmosphere swirl below.  The planet reflected more than half the light that fell on it and so Zalman had worn venusglasses to stop the glare.  Venus was the closest object to the earth other than the moon and his trajectory had shadowed its 225-day orbit around the sun, yet still we knew little about its inner secrets.
            In his dreams these visions were replaced by fantasies of long roads through manicured hills filled with headstones.  As he approached them the names carved on them seemed to vanish like an aria in a hurricane.  Dreams foretell, he told himself, although he had never believed it before.  And from that moment he deduced that the name on the gravestone was his own.
            In the morning, wearing the same clothes as the day before, he sat in the kitchen waiting.  The antique clock on the wall jumped from minute to minute, the cracks in the ceiling took on sinister bends, the faucet mocked him with its incessant drip like a countdown.   He thought about the pale thin mists of ionized air outside the capsule window, and about the woman in Toronto with the cleavage, and then the retirement party.  Using the tiny deliberate movements of a prisoner, Zalman pushed his coffee cup to the edge of the table and then right over it.  The shattering cup splashed shadows over the floor as rivulets of dark brown fluid followed the cracks in the tile.
            Then, for the second time, a sound interrupted him.  It was a familiar sound, he thought, but distant and frail.  It went on for a long time.  An alluring ring, he thought, and then realized that it was his own doorbell.  He thought to ignore it but the visitor refused to give up and he eventually dragged himself to the door.  Not knowing, or perhaps knowing too well, what to expect on the other side, he stood there frozen as the ringing continued.  Long moments passed in which universes are created, and the bell went on. 
            He finally opened the door.
            There before him, a sight unseen before, stood a ruffled, frazzled little thing smoking a cigarette through a long holder.  Zalman looked at her as though she had just walked in on him in the toilet.
            “Tess?” he said, the way you would test a mike.
            “What’s with the foot, dahling?”
            “The what?”
            “I thought something was off with you yesterday but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.  I kept going over and over it in my mind’s eye.  Good visual memory, you know.   Studying crystal structures and all that.”
            “What are you talking about?”
            “Something funny.  Then this morning it hit me.  Like a ton of bricks.”
            “Hit you?”
            “And there it is…proof positive.”
            She was pointing down at the floor.
            “Proof about what?”
            “That,” she said and pointed right at his right foot.  “You’re only wearing one slipper, dahling.  See?”
            He looked.
            “I hate to say this,” she continued, “but it makes you look like one of those nuts in a nuthatch.”
            Sure enough.  Zalman followed her bony finger down to his feet and saw what she saw.  A pair of familiar old feet.  But one had a slipper and the other was bare.  And it did, even to him, look just like a crazyman’s feet. 
            “Oh that,” he said, trying and failing to cover.
            “Throws you off balance.  Bad for the back.  No wonder you’re all lopsy-dopsy.”
            She turned and went back down the hall while Zalman, more perturbed than ever, went back to his closet.  He moved the box of videos and discovered the missing slipper that had been hidden underneath it.
            So that was it, he thought, with a certain degree of buoyancy.  No one had died, nothing was amiss, the universe was just as before.  A box fell down, a slipper had slipped out of place, he had been walking around all uneven.   Quickly, to most efficiently undo the error, he slid his foot into the other one.  Then, balanced and righted, he suddenly felt better.  Perky, even.  He picked up the box of old space videos and carried it with pomp out to the trash cans in the yard. 
            And all the while and all above, Venus was just completing its eight-hour transit across the face of the sun, nudging ever so gently on the earth’s gravitational field, as it turned purple and then violet and then plum and slid silently back into invisibility.

No comments:

Post a Comment