A Horizontal Plane

He sat on the discolored linoleum, waiting, his back against an air duct, his rifle upright beside him. He’d been sitting like this for over an hour, and the crisp square of light that had cut sharp angles on the plastic tiles when he arrived was now slowly, steadily sublimating into dusk. Within half an hour, the house would be pitch-black, and he would have to find his way out by feel. There were no lights now. He’d stopped paying the electric bills months ago.

A battery-powered clock above the kitchen doorway ticked on with a modest, but resolute persistence. Its quiet effect, Charlie thought, was like water hewing a gorge. Like miniscule drops of liquid, tap-, tap-, tapping away another hour, another day, another year, another decade. He shifted, drawing one aching knee up to his torso. He tuned the intensity of his concentration to the sound of the clock itself, and gazed into an imaginary tunnel of its resonance. It was the perfect sound of isolation and emptiness, the echoing reminder of unlived time.

He felt now that he was long past despair, having sailed through its deepest parts in the last month or so. And, he found, that at the end of emotion, there rose a horizontal plane of desolation, a level numbness from which the tide of potent feeling had ebbed and evaporated. He found this sensation of emotionlessness liberating, but less desperately pleasurable than the misery.

Marian, he thought. Marian was pretty, but not beautiful. She was something worth having now, but perhaps not later. No refinement would come to her features with age. She would not grow appreciably wiser, would never be someone to offer rectifying solutions. Nor had she ever inspired a comfortable blossoming tenderness to which he could run, as a chick to the warm feathered abdomen of a mother hen. Besides her already recognizably short-lived beauty, which was noticeably less confectionary than it had been a year before, the attraction for Charlie was inexplicable but unremitting. It persisted only because her devotion could never be captured and tamed.

He saw lights flash in the front window. A car had turned into the driveway, and he lost some of his silent composure. He hurriedly pushed himself up the wall, using the rifle butt as balance, and moved to stand in the kitchen entryway, just opposite the front door.

He heard the jingle of keys and Marian’s muffled voice. She tried the door, shoving her weight against it, and realized then that it had not been locked. Again the keys, some words in sharper tones, the unexpected heaving of the door, and then the shock of Marian suddenly there, regarding him soundlessly, her mouth slightly agape. He could see the whites around her irises, even in this light.

“Get out, Ma,” Marian said over her shoulder. “Go back outside.”

“What?” came an older voice behind her. “What is it?”

“Just get outside. I mean it, Mom. Go!”

Marian’s mother, who was still on the top step outside and who suffered from cataracts, had not seen Charlie, had not seen his silhouette of tangled hair, his emaciated form, the gun he held to the floor like a territorial flag.

“Evening, Marian,” Charlie nodded.

“Is Charlie in there?” piped Marian’s mother. “What’s he doing in there? Marian?”

“Ma, I said get out!” Marian pushed her out, and not gently. “Go sit in the car.”

“S’alright, Delores,” Charlie said, “I just want to talk with Marian. We’re just gonna talk. You go on back to the car. She’ll be out in a little bit.”

Marian’s mother didn’t fight further. She had seen nothing, had found no reason to regard her daughter’s cutting dismissal as anything more than a willful resurgence of youthful exasperation (how much it reminded her of Marian’s behavior in high school). She heard only Charlie’s composed inflection. In the weak light that illuminated Delores’ thinking, Marian and Charlie would patch things up, they would live together in the house again. It would all be as before, but of course different now. She stepped, uncertain of her footing, off the front stairs and headed back to the car, her hands extended a foot or so in front of her to be sure she wouldn’t crash into anything on the way.

Inside, Marian wondered now whether she really needed any of the things she came for or if she even wanted them now. “Charlie,” she began. “I came to get my dishes and then I’m going to leave. You understand? I don’t know what you’re pulling with the gun, but you’re not scaring me, all right?”

Charlie had grown strange over the previous two years. He had become what Marian’s late father would have called a certified nut case. Marian felt that, at least half the time, Charlie acted strange just to knock her off balance or get her sympathy. But now, now she just didn’t know. His eyes were fixed on her with such peculiar concentration. The whites were bloodshot, the irises opaque. Don’t let him know he’s scared you. Grab your stuff and go.

She could have left the moment she saw Charlie, just turned around, slammed the door, and run. But her mother. Her mother would have slowed them both down. She brought her along for moral support, but really, really, she was a liability. Marian knew it, but some part of her could not come alone, and she had not thought to call anyone else. Now here she was.

In the car, Delores thought about what Marian would say when she returned. She anticipated animation in Marian’s gestures (for that’s all Delores could really make out now), how Marian would talk about the future, sing along with the radio and poke her mother in an effort to get her to join in. Whenever Marian had done this before, Delores would shake her head, laugh with more uncertainty than mirth. But if her daughter did this tonight, she thought, I will laugh and feel happy—genuinely happy for her.