Know Your Beholder: A Novel Read online

  At around four thirty p.m. my prospective tenant, Baylor Phebe, came by the house. To say that he possesses the largest stomach I’ve ever seen might be an understatement. It is exceptional, perfectly oval-shaped, and protrudes perhaps a full two feet from his waistline. It’s strange because the rest of his body isn’t in any way obese. He’s certainly husky, but his midsection is completely and ludicrously incongruous with his legs, arms, head, and neck. It’s a stomach out of a comic book. It looks almost like a prosthetic, as if it’s been screwed on somehow, a Halloween gimmick.

  His voice was deeper than it had been on the phone. “I shoulda worn snowshoes,” he bellowed, stomping his boots on the porch, shaking my hand.

  His paw is enormous. I noticed that he still wears his wedding band. After Sheila Anne divorced me, I continued to wear mine for almost a year. Now it lives in a matchbox on my writing desk. I like to think it’s sleeping. Baylor Phebe has a vigorous, warm handshake and huge mountain-peak knuckles. This man could clear a bar, I thought. A bar and a smorgasbord. He stands a hulking six-three. His head is the size of a cinder block.

  His broad Nordic face is marked with little broken blood vessels; purple and blue and pink spider legs drift across his nose and are faintly embedded in the yellow oysters under his eyes. Speaking of his eyes, there is an unmistakable kindness living there. Grief softens some people, distorts others.

  After my mother died Lyman got weird and mechanical and emotionally distant. Cornelia’s death turned him into the used-car-salesman version of himself. He got his teeth whitened and told more jokes and hung out at restaurant bars and started wearing Paco Rabanne. He brilliantined his hair and compulsively fiddled with the change in his pocket. And he bought a bunch of shit. Like a Rolex watch. And a nine-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen.

  But back to Baylor Phebe’s stomach, which has the same effect as a great Frenchman’s nose—it somehow makes him more epic. I wondered what his students called him behind his back, whether the protuberance was the stuff of preteen mockery or legend. Songs could be written about Baylor Phebe’s stomach. It could be the subject of a Roald Dahl story. And it also makes you think about diabetes.

  He wore an augmented one-piece snowmobile suit. Augmented meaning an entirely different winter garment had been fashioned for the area covering his belly. A kind of torso shell of down-filled tufted nylon. It was sophisticated, festooned with snaps and a little marsupial-looking pouch, which had its own snap. There had even been an attempt, though unsuccessful, to match the color to the original one-piece. The patched stomach panel was a sort of hickory brown, whereas the one-piece was more straight-up chocolate. I wondered whether his dead wife had made the piece for him. Under a red-and-black-plaid wool hunting hat complete with earflaps, his hair was a thick yellowy silver, sprouting in all directions. His eyes were bright blue, the whites a bit dull but still white nevertheless.

  I showed him the available basement unit—the small kitchen with its marble-top eatery nook, the bedroom, the living room/dining area, the bathroom where I had imperfectly set the base of the toilet, so that it’s a hair cockeyed—and he immediately said he’d take it. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t even give me a chance to talk up the heating system or the amazing lack of substory mold or the necessity for the dropped gypsum ceiling or the pleasures of the house’s lone true eco-friendly refrigerator.

  “Is the size okay?” I asked. “I realize it’s a little small.”

  “I don’t need much space. Only enough for the couch to pull out.”

  I told him he could easily have a bed in the bedroom. “You can fit a king in there.”

  “The pullout’s for when my daughter comes to visit,” he explained.

  I nodded. He seemed larger in the apartment than he did upstairs, as if he were slowly expanding.

  “You don’t mind the lack of sunlight?” I said.

  “That won’t make a difference. I’m mostly an outside guy.”

  Outside.

  The word itself caused me to briefly relive my anxiety at the Dumpsters. The mad dash to the back porch, slogging through the depths of snow, everything speeding up on the inside but eerily slowing down on the outside, my limbs turning to lead. I could feel the cottonmouth coming on. I swallowed hard.

  “I get plenty of sunlight,” Baylor said.

  I told him the apartment was his and he asked when he could move in.

  “As soon as you’d like,” I said. I added that we could even prorate the days for January.

  “Great!” Baylor beamed.

  I told him that per standard procedure, I’d need a final month’s rent as a deposit, to which he replied, “No problemo.”

  His sudden Spanish made me smile.

  It’s worth noting that upon exiting the basement, while ascending the stairs, I observed Baylor Phebe to be much lighter on his feet than one might expect for a man of his size.

  There was a young woman sitting on the floor in front of Bradley’s apartment. She was very pretty, of mixed race, skin like caramel. Her corduroy jacket was too thin for the weather. Beside her lay a book bag and a large blond canvas sack, the size of a laundry bag, snapped shut at the top, and somehow bloated. The sack dwarfed the girl, who was text messaging on her cell phone.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”

  She was tough, a little feral, maybe from East St. Louis.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” she retorted.

  I told her I owned the house.

  “Good for you,” she replied. She completed her text and sent it off.

  I asked her if she was waiting for Bradley.

  “Maybe,” she said, not looking up from her cell phone.

  She smelled of patchouli oil and clove cigarettes. I thought maybe she was his pot dealer, that her book bag was full of those little tetrahedral terrariums containing helices of high-quality crystal-budded hydroponic. But it was the larger sack that was really getting the better of my curiosity.

  I asked her if she was Bradley’s girlfriend.

  “Naw,” she answered. “We just friends.”

  “Video game buddies?”

  “He don’t play video games no more,” she said.

  I was shocked.

  She said that he didn’t even have a TV. “Gave all his shit away,” she added.

  I asked her whom he gave the TV to and she said she didn’t know, but that he’d given his PlayStation away as well. “He’s been simplifying,” she said.

  I asked her what was in the sack.

  She told me to mind my business and she said it like a man.

  She was prettier when she didn’t speak, with sharp hazel eyes. They were almost silver, these eyes.

  “You mind me asking your name?” I said.

  She asked me if I was conducting a census.

  I told her that Bradley was sort of like my brother. “I used to be married to his sister,” I explained.

  “Oh,” she said. “You that dude.”

  “Francis,” I said.

  “Yeah, Francis the Fuckup.”

  “The report’s that bleak, huh?”

  “Pretty bleak,” she replied, “yep.”

  The central heating system kicked on. A deep whirring sound, almost subliminal, soothing.

  “Why you so worried about Bradley?” the girl said. “He’s just doin’ his thing.”

  “Which is what exactly?” I asked.

  Her phone chirped again. She read something off its screen, then wrote and sent a text. Her thumbs moved with exceptional velocity.

  “So you’re just gonna wait for him?” I said.

  “That okay with you?”

  Her phone chirped yet again and she checked it and shook her head.

  I asked her her name.

  “La-Trez,” she said, the emphasis on the second syllable.

  “Pretty name,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “It�
��s got a hyphen.”

  She stood and we shook hands. She was taller than I expected. Her legs were much longer than her torso. She hoisted her backpack. I didn’t hear anything clinking around. For all I know there could have been actual books in there.

  Again, her phone made a noise. Checking it, she said, “Fiendin-ass nigga.” She asked me if it was cool to leave the large canvas sack in front of Bradley’s door.

  I told her I’d make sure he got it.

  “Thanks,” she said. “Tell him I said keep makin’ your way.”

  “Keep makin’ your way,” I echoed.

  She thanked me and descended the front staircase. She moved quickly, like an athlete, her feet a fast patter down the steps.

  After I heard the front porch screen door open and close I unsnapped the huge sack. Inside was an enormous blob of string, the kind you might use to bundle packages. I dug my hands into its depths to see if there was anything else hidden—drugs, chemicals, bomb-making materials, what have you—but there was nothing but string.

  I miss my wife.

  It’s late and I’m drunk as I write this. It’s four in the morning—4:07 to be exact—and I can’t sleep and there is a kind of postoperative ache deep in my side that feels like a rib has been removed, and for no good reason.

  I spent the evening doing dishes, organizing bills, shelving paperbacks, anything to keep my mind off of Sheila Anne. I even went down to the basement and cleaned Baylor Phebe’s bathroom again, though it was unnecessary.

  I keep going over the bad nights, the irreconcilable moments, and when I really examine the peptic marital viscera in a hard forensic way there really isn’t any one thing that I can point to. The end of our marriage lacks an event. Sure, we fought about little things. She hated that I often didn’t get out of bed before noon. She thought I was wasting half the day sleeping and dreaming and drooling on my pillow. She never bought the argument that the artist needs to be afforded the time to let his unconscious flower. She liked to rise early and go running and eat organic granola and update our streamable Netflix cue and knock out at least two-thirds of the New York Times crossword puzzle. She got more things done before eight a.m. than most people accomplish in an entire day.

  After the band split up, my attack on pursuing a career in rock ’n’ roll waned. Contending with the inchoate narrative of the Third Policeman—really taking a long, mature look at it—would have been like being forced to eat potting soil. The very idea of touching my guitar made my stomach churn poisonously. I got a few offers to tour with another band, to replace a rhythm guitarist who had fractured the ulnar styloid process in his wrist. It would have paid pretty well and most certainly would have led to other opportunities, but I wasn’t crazy about their music and I was just too damn sad about the Third Policeman’s demise. That band, Natural Appliances, sounded like four other alt-country outfits from Southern Illinois shamelessly trying to ape Son Volt and early Wilco. I turned down two overtures from them and instead stayed in bed, a king-sized Swedish affair made with brass springs and authentic horsehair (a wedding gift from Sheila Anne’s wealthy parents).

  Then my mother died, and Morris left for North Carolina and my column in the Pigeon was no more, so I stopped going down to the at-home studio and a film of post-nuclear-holocaust-looking dust settled on all the recording equipment and I started getting flabby in the middle and some random hairs sprouted simian-like around my shoulder blades and I developed a sty on the lower lid of my left eye that looked unfortunately cystic and maybe even a little venereal and that same eye started twitching uncontrollably and then I tried to pop the sty with the tip of a safety pin that I’d sterilized with a Bic lighter but it made it worse and it took months to go away and even when the twitching stopped I developed a paranoia that the sty would return from a sneeze or from a brisk wind or from telling a little white lie about whether or not I’d called the cable guy to upgrade our package and Sheila Anne NEVER SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THE STY IN THE FIRST PLACE, the omission of which was a point of contention constantly dangling between us, and there were more than a handful of occasions when I couldn’t get fully erect despite being thrillingly turned on by Sheila Anne’s face and mind and body and something really intense was happening to my stomach, meaning I could often feel it digesting itself, and in the bathroom mirror I could see psoriatic wens forming on my scalp and sometimes I could smell a faint metallic rot escaping from my own mouth, which meant other people could smell it too, especially Sheila Anne, and when I would drop my towel post-shower to leg into boxer shorts or briefs or what have you, Sheila Anne started looking away, as in literally doing a disgusted one-eighty, and then I turned down another offer, this time to go to Madison and help the guy who ran Slowneck Records start a new label, because I didn’t want to live in Madison because it reminded me too much of the band failing and then I noticed Sheila Anne coming home later and later into the evening, like sometimes as late as tenish despite Decatur being ninety minutes away and she never got off work later than seven, and I’m sure she was doing some emotional screwing around with Dennis Church like Skyping with him from her office and maybe even engaging in cybersex, which still makes me brux because I start imagining Sheila Anne baring her breasts to him and him making obovoid shapes of awe with his mouth and then getting the right laptop camera angle trained on his cock so it looks larger than it actually is and the simultaneous mewling and sounds of mutual suspiration and actual utterances like YOU’RE SO HUGE, DENNIS CHURCH, and I CAN FEEL YOU INSIDE ME, DENNIS CHURCH, and YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE ME COME SO HARD, SHEILA ANNE, and I’M COMING INSIDE YOU, SHEILA ANNE, and their embarrassed but honest laughter during post-jism jism-policing, with Dennis Church’s conveniently placed box of scented Kleenex within arm’s reach, and Sheila Anne Purelling her hands so it almost looks as if she’s wringing his cyber sperm into her very being, and the convivial silly guffaws at their desperation and elation and the scintillatingly unbearable fucking vernal attraction for each other practically setting fire to the Internet waves they shared and then the plans they made and the conspiratorial low-voiced conversations Sheila Anne had, or maybe as a rule she spoke to him only when she was alone in her car or maybe they texted each other in code or maybe there was a whole narrative of digital subterfuge, like when he came up on her smartphone it said PHYLLIS or KAREN or fucking BLYTHE or some shit, and when did all the trickery begin and when did that (the trickery) start to get old or even unbearable and when did they finally declare to each other the promise that they couldn’t stand to be apart for another hotfooted minute and did he use his last available frequent-flier miles to tear-ass it through the heavens to Chicago and Amtrak it to Decatur and fuck her in his rental car because they just couldn’t wait to get to the Marriott and did she wax her pussy for him because I DID NOTICE THAT TOWARD THE END and when I asked her about it she said she just wanted to try it and the last time I went down on her I thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted in my life and I still do, even better than birthday cake and vanilla ice cream when you’re stoned, and I was in a kind of erotic schoolboy utopia complete with a fully engaged erection, maybe the largest it’s ever been, but Sheila Anne kept making a face like I was trying to put chilled serrated salad tongs inside her and when I consider the moment she decided to wax her pussy for him I want to die, I want to take an entire bottle of painkillers, preferably Percocet because of its warm, steady undertow and downright goofy slow-motion feeling, and enter the perfectly configured Francis Falbo–sized death canoe that will float rapturously down the loving River of Neveragain and evaporate into sun splash and low satiny cumuli and the gentle infinitesimal breath of fluttering hummingbirds…

  I called Haggis.

  “Francis,” he said.

  He’d been sleeping, as one is expected to in the predawn.

  “Can you get me some Percocet?” I said.

  “Of course.” He asked if I needed it right away.

  “Later’s fine,” I answered, dreading the long h
ours ahead. Feeling sickened by it, actually.

  “Your back’s that bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s bad,” I lied. “It’s turning into full-blown sciatica.” I explained that the sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the body and once inflamed takes a long time to tame.

  “I’ll be by later,” Haggis assured me. “And I’ll shovel again.”

  I thanked him.

  Below, despite the hour, an occasional car passed, muffled by the snow-impacted street. Otherwise, the neighborhood was hushed. The only sounds were of the house settling, the cycle of the central heating system whirring on and off every twenty minutes or so. I wondered how many other Pollardians were awake at this hour, limping around inside themselves, doubled over in the marshlands of the dispossessed, their hearts like a cold damp toad in their hands.

  This morning I woke around eleven thirty. I was hungover and dehydrated, with bloated bowels and a kidney ache. I had pissed the bed, which raises all sorts of concerns when one is thirty-six years old. Fortunately, the mattress was mostly spared because of the wicking action of my double-layer waffle-patterned thermals and the terry-cloth thickness of my bathrobe. My urine smelled sweetly of bourbon. I peeled off the soiled long johns and took a shower and made some instant Folgers.

  I looked up the word agoraphobia. Agoraphobia: an abnormal fear of being in crowds, public places, or open areas, sometimes accompanied by anxiety attacks. Well, a standard definition just about sums it up.

  I turned on the radio, which reported various school closings and highway maintenance in the southern area of the state. Somehow, between dawn and now it has snowed another eight inches.

  According to the radio, things in Afghanistan are bad. An American soldier lost his mind and barbecued an entire Afghani family. Another head coach for the New York Knicks has resigned. And in local news, Bethany Bunch is still missing.

  After I stripped and sprinkled baking soda on my mattress, I took my coffee to the window and peered out. Indeed there was a fresh hide of snow, with a bluish, lunar crust. An old four-door Buick was moving slowly down the street, spinning its tires. The two bald sycamores in front of the house were so heaped with virgin snow they looked put-upon, humiliated.