for cal's contest
Song: Losing Touch (The Killers)
022. exodus
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I.Characters and some events transpiring on August 1st
1.) (1975) The daughter. Rouged up cheeks, slender, throated wrists, and plunging neckline, revealing topography of secret and whim. Ugly eyes. Always been told that, suspected that. Black, nonsense things. Rummaging, thorough, unbearable. They sit in her sockets, big and shiny as black widow bodies. Red hourglass. She turns it, turns it. Her fingertips are busted. She can't feel a face. She can't touch lips. She stops to press them to the glass of the storefronts along jackson ave., along with her nose. Tiptoed. Almost rising out of her heels to see past the display – fingerprints and fogged up breath. Her fingers can feel the glass, but only the glass. Cold, smooth, bodiless. Like the surface of a lie. Inside the store, the salespeople shrug, quote, measure. They rush, red-faced, white-skinned, like nurses around a laboring woman. She eyes the mannequins with their dainty ankles and their knowing eyes, sophisticated scarecrows, and she moves on. She wants to go and hide somewhere. She wants to cry. She wants to hide and cry and let all her tears collect, drain, fall around her feet, dappled, tarnished. But you musn't, musn't. Big girls. Big girls musn't cry. Big girls hold it in, store the tears like grain in a silo. Keep it, let it grow, ferment, poison. You're a big girl, Margaret. Scaffolded lips, holding up her face. She doesn't carry a handkerchief. She walks slow, the big iron grilles in front of the closed up stores with their obscene, humorless grins, and folds the hopelessness up inside of herself. The faces of the people on the street, sinking into their coats. They pass like planets. There are suns somewhere in the city tonight. Their pull, gravity swinging them along, but not her. She moves out of orbit, out of sync. Spinning, spinning. Dr. Hubert lives on 124th street, suite 43, with the welcome mat outside the door and the broken doorbell. The corners and the avenues leading there are jointed, angled like elbows. She hums a song. Something new, hip. Her heels click, click, click.
2.) (1960) The Father. Lived in Boston his whole life. Can't stand the sight of it. The tight, sequenced streets. Hurried, scrubbed people. Slatted moonlight, drunk sun. The thin wasp-waisted women. The prominent flab-armed men. Neat houses. The harbors clinging and lonely, the bell-lipped mercantiles, ships coming in and out like bees weighed down with pollen. The cops in their blue. The preachers and the teachers, holy hands and the measured chalk strokes. The church steeples inspecting the sky, like tongue depressors. He holds his breath. He draws aside the shades. He looks out the window. There is a park across the street and the playground equipment rusts and sags, swing sets let down, clinking against the metal support poles that are bent, segmented like daddy-long-legs. There are people down at the door. Two men, impeccable. Suited and bland faced. Respectable mustaches and brown-skinned, lapped suitcases. Knocking, all fists. They have rimless spectacles. They stand there like undertakers. Representatives, smooth cheeked and calm. The death on their lips and tongues. Measuring fingers. Imagining what kind of handles, silks, chemicals for his burial. Rosewood for a man of such respectable standing. Inlaid silver handles. Empty him of his blood and guts, fill him full of formaldehyde and sulfur. He wrings his hands. He is a nervous man [psychoanalysis and session transcripts for Robert Schumacher: pg 15]. The walls sag with their tacky paper. They reveal thin cracks in the plaster, twining, spidering. The walls contract on him like a diseased lung. The smutty cancer in the window panes and the naked light bulbs and the dusty travel cases. The men will go away eventually. They will leave and come back with the blue cops and neat warrants. He sits up against the wall and thinks. Calm his mind, smooth it out. He licks his lips.
3.) (1959) The mother. Small woman, with grace and prudence shaping the gullies and hollows of her face. Graying hair, fuzzy ear lobes. Her eyes are sour as pills. Her fingers are syringes, her words like brown-bottled medicine. A creaky, respectable old language that frequents her tongue. She loves the bible more than her husband and child. She cocoons herself in verses and the feeble, antennaed voices of Old Testament prophets. Weak chinned, big hipped. She has a scar on her forehead [refer to medical records for Lane Pfenning (pt. #3287) at Providence Community Hospital, Ferndale, WA]. Wide maternity, surfaced femininity. She reads the newspaper every morning, looking for signs of The Second Coming. She circles reports of plagues, wars, and protests and ugly, perverse sin throughout the paper with a red marker. Trims out the clippings. Keeps them in a book. Her fingers flicker, startle, unsettled as horseflies. Her touch distills down Margaret's back – slippery, wormy. She likes to feel Margaret. She likes to feel the notches in her spine, the clamminess of her underarms, the valleys and canyons of her feet. She says that Margaret reminds her so much of herself when she was young. She touches, touches. The touch clings, attaches, remains, like sluggish insects stuck to flypaper. On hot days, like this one, she works outside on her garden. The bald, limbless seeds plugged into holes. Her papery hands, smoothing the dirt. She wears a straw hat. Her knees moist, dirty. Margaret plays tentatively. The mother smiles at her and waves and Margaret waves back and picks lap-tongued dandelions. Hazy, tincan sky. Tattling insects, pulling, chirping. With the sharp end of the trowel, the mother cuts the long, pink earthworms she digs up in the garden soil. They writhe. She smiles and watches. But the smile goes away.
II.) Dialogue between Dr. Phillip Hubert and Margaret Harris (August 1st, 1975/ 08:24 PM)
[Hubert]: Something urgent, Margaret?
[Harris]: Yes.
[Hubert]:Take a seat. There we go. So, what's the trouble? Would you like to talk about it?”
[Harris]:Yes. I...I think I'm losing feeling in my fingers. I can't feel anything but glass anymore. I can't feel the texture of this chair, a tree, a wall. It's gone.
[Hubert]: Nothing but glass, huh? When did this begin?
[Harris]: Last week, I guess. I was at the grocery store. They're letting me out like that, you know. I feel better helping out anyway. I feel like I'm a real person, you know? I'm not like those sorry, brainless vegetables in the halls with their loose jaws and their nightgowns. It's a nice feeling. They let me go pick up groceries for the Friday night supper. I was in the produce aisle, see? I was looking at a head of lettuce. The little sprinklers turned on, the one's that keep the leaves fresh and wet, and then I couldn't feel the lettuce anymore. It...It was like I knew I was holding something – I could see it – but my fingers weren't attached to my brain or something. Like some circuits were fried or something. Strangest thing. I put my hand under the sprinklers. I could feel the water on my arms, my wrists and hands, but not my fingers. I went around the store touching things, people. Thought I was having a stroke. You know, my mother had a stroke. She said that when she had the stroke it felt like her arms weren't attached to her body nomore, like they were floating away. I was terrified that maybe I was having a stroke or something, maybe they're genetic, and I ran around all worked up until some clerk took me to a back room and I was asking for a doctor and he said, sure ma'am, sure, just calm down and I'll call a doctor and he went into another room and called for a doctor and I put my fingers to the glass window and I could feel that. But only the glass. Smooth and cool. The doctor examined me and poked me and prodded around and said he couldn't find jack squat. He said I was healthy as a horse and I told him no, doc I can't feel my fingers and he asked me if I'd been bit or something by like a bug or if I had heart problems. I said no and he kept telling me I should go home and rest a little bit and call him if I still can't feel my fingers in a couple days.
[Hubert]: And you have no idea why you're fingers have gone numb?
[Harris]: Not a clue.
[Hubert]: Something to do with your mother?
[Harris]: I don't think so.
[Hubert]: She had a stroke. They are genetic. Maybe you think that you'll have a stroke, too.
[Harris]: I don't think so.
[Hubert]: They're dead, Margaret. Your parents are dead.
[Harris]: Yeah, I know.
[Hubert]: They don't control you anymore. She's gone. He's gone. There's nothing of them left. You can burn it all. The pictures, the feelings, the clothing. You can move out of their house. You can let go of them. Throw them away. Tear every godawful page out of her godawful bible and spit on their graves. Start over. And then you'll get your fingers back.
[Harris]: Sure, doc.
[Hubert]: You don't sound convinced.
[Harris]: Doc, I can't get rid of her. There's no way. She's always there, in the dark places, in the shadows, in the hymns and the Christmas songs. I can't burn those memories. I can't burn off the feeling of her touch. Godssakes, you know I would if I could. I'd burn down this whole city.
