The Inelegant Universe Read online

The Inelegant Universe

  Stories

  Charles Hibbard

  Copyright 2014 Charles B. Hibbard

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  Chapter 1. Fare Evader

  He’s an English teacher. Five foot nine, dark hair, sunglasses, he leaves the apartment hurriedly with the cat, Reyjavik, slung over his shoulder, wrapped in his girlfriend’s best bathtowel, the one her ex-boyfriend gave her when he got back from Turkey. This is a fine how-de-do. He doesn’t even like cats. Reyjavik is an orange tabby whose one permanently drooping eyelid gives him an air of disapproving contempt even when he’s at his nominal cutest, “playing” with his catnip mouse. The name, Frances has told him, is an homage to her happy days with the Peace Corps. “They don’t have the Peace Corps in Iceland,” he pointed out. “It’s not an underdeveloped country.” “Well, it was then,” she replied. “And anyway, it’s all relative.” Personally, he thinks the name is onomatopoeic, a reference to Reyjavik’s little problem with hairballs.

  Only yesterday morning, Sunday, Frances stood in the bedroom doorway and reminded him that he was in charge of Reyjavik. He lay on his side in bed with the sheet draped over his hips, the contrast of his messy nakedness and the sagging of his gut with the fine trim of her business suit making him feel like a slutty odalisque. Her little black suitcase on wheels peeped between her gleaming pantyhosed legs like a well-disciplined child. Frances is gone a lot, sometimes traveling for two weeks at a time, calling in every other evening from Atlanta or Dallas. They started living together only a couple of months ago, moving into an overpriced three-room apartment with a fireplace and a nice western exposure. The bedroom wall (the landlord, riding the wild surf of the San Francisco real estate market, had felt no need to repaint) still bears the marks of the brackets where the previous tenant, a casual friend of David’s who clued them in to the vacancy, hung his shackles and whip-holder. These marks sometimes inspire certain visions while David lies in bed waiting for Frances to finish brushing her teeth; but her tastes are more mainstream, and David feels that he’d been able to satisfy her needs in that area even before they took the apartment. He suspects, in fact, that in Frances’s mind the new living arrangement is aimed at normalizing her relationship with Reyjavik, who suffers so deeply during her absences that he is scarcely able to drag himself out of his fluff-lined bed. Perhaps it’s only the relative newness of the arrangement, but David still has trouble shaking the feeling that he’s been retained primarily as a cat companion.

  And now, only a day after Frances has departed for DC, Reyjavik is draped over David’s shoulder, wretching on the Turkish towel and yowling heart-rendingly at 30-second intervals. David has returned from school in the early evening, his arm aching from the weight of a briefcase full of term papers, to find the cat lying helpless in a pool of his own fluids. Now he hurries along the sidewalk beneath dancing late sunshine-lit May leaves, heading for the subway. In his pocket, a single wrinkled dollar bill and his Clipper card. He has neglected to go to a teller machine, knowing there’s enough packaged food in the house for his dinner; and now this emergency, with no money for a cab.

  The underground blows its complex, musty perfume at him as he trots down the stairs into the cool station. From her glass case the station agent glances at him as he shifts Reyjavik to his other shoulder and slaps his Clipper card onto the stanchion of the toll gate. The red light of malfeasance begins blinking on the digital readout, and a loud beeper sounds. His monthly pass has expired. That’s right! Another thing he forgot to do.

  What now? David approaches the toll booth with his yowling companion. Inside, behind several inches of bulletproof glass, a small, neat black lady is crocheting an enormously complex lace garment. She examines him over the tops of her glasses. “Excuse me,” he says. “I just realized my monthly pass has expired, and I don’t have any money with me to reload my card. My cat is very sick, and I’m trying to get him to the vet. I don’t suppose you could let me through.” He waves Reyjavik gently at the woman.

  “I’m sorry sir,” she says, “I can’t do that.” She continues to stare at him over the tops of the glasses, as though her dispassionate gaze must convince him of the rightness of her cause.

  “But my card just expired today. You know I’m going to renew it tomorrow, so it all comes to the same thing. I just want to get on Muni and take my sick cat to the vet.”

  “I’m sorry sir. I can’t do that.”

  David feels his face getting red. Her refusal to defend her heartlessness in any way infuriates him. “Can’t you cut me a break? I don’t have any more money and the cat is really sick. I’ll be renewing tomorrow. What’s the big deal if you let me through?” In front of him the turnstile gate gleams implacably. He’s feeling a little desperate. The interval between Reyjavik’s yowls is now only 15 seconds. What’s Frances going to say? “You tried to take him to the vet on Muni? Are you crazy? Why weren’t you carrying any money? What is the MATTER with you?” He looks at the tollbooth lady, who’s still examining him coolly over the tops of her glasses, unblinking, willing him not to interrupt her crocheting any further. Her complacency, in there behind her bulletproof glass, maddens him; her complete failure of empathy for the urgency of his situation, her lack of concern for the welfare of animals.

  “Well, I’m going in,” he tells her, dropping suddenly to the floor and sliding under the gate, then proceeding across the polished stone floor toward the stairs. That was easy, he thinks. An enormous electronic click resounds through the cavernous station followed by a godlike voice echoing from hidden speakers: “FARE EVADER IN THE STATIONATION. FIVE FEET NINENINE, STOCKYOCKY, DARK HAIRAIR, SUNGLASSESASSES, APPEARS TO BE AN ENGLISH TEACHEREACHEREACHER.”

  “Jesus Christ!” David has the presence of mind to slow his pace, to appear as casual as possible, the last person who would ever perform any act of rebellion against the state. He also removes the sunglasses quickly and tucks them into his shirt pocket. Reyjavik squirms and yowls.

  It being rush hour, at the foot of the stairs is a crowd suitable for melting into. A few of them are looking his way, having apparently succeeded in translating the announcement. That asshole, he fumes, but cuddles Reyjavik tenderly, noting out of the corner of his eye a transit cop, galvanized at the far end of the platform, and a train gliding in. As the cop proceeds in his direction with exaggerated calm, David shuffles into the crowded car along with the rest of the commuters. Fenced in by weary bodies, newspapers, glazed expressions, David senses, rather than sees, the cop at the far end of the car, methodically examining the passengers and checking an occasional transfer.

  “I hope you’re taking him to the vet. Because he’s really not well. Your cat is not well.” The car, with its load of exhausted nine-to-fivers, provides a nearly silent backdrop for Reyjavik, who hoists one particularly long, loud lament, the cry of a doomed soul. Necks are craned. By now nearly to the center of the car, the cop puts her hand reflexively on her gun. At David’s shoulder a minuscule platinum blonde woman is gazing reproachfully at him, her sun-ravaged face projecting a predictable mix of emotions: sorrow for Reyjavik’s plight, angry disbelief at the callousness of his owner, weary acceptance of the limitless brutality of the human species, determination to do the right thing, no matter how futile or even dangerous to herself. “Your cat is really not well. You know that, don’t you,” she says.

  “He’s not really my cat. I’m just doing a favor for his owner.” If she gets to me, David is thinking about the cop, I�
��ll just have to tell her the truth. I’m totally innocent, for god’s sake. But the cop has planted herself in front of a young man in black leather, headphones, and a lot of not very convincing chains, the sort used to connect broken-down bikes to rusty newspaper boxes. He’s maybe five foot three, lean as a weasel, and his purple spiked hair puts him near the outside of the English teacher envelope. He is, however, wearing sunglasses. The cop, smelling blood, is asking him for his transfer. As the train slows for Castro Street the kid fumbles around with the many zippers and interstices of his uniform, chains rattling, but fails to produce the transfer.

  “Looks like I lost it,” he sneers.

  “Are you taking your cat to the vet?” says the blonde woman. “Because I really think you have to do something. He’s not at all well.” The train stops, and the cop retreats with the crowd surging to the door, braces it open by standing with her back against it. “Sir, I’m going to ask you to get off the train now.”

  “Yes, I’m going to the vet,” says David, looking over the woman’s head to the platform, where the cop is lecturing the now hangdog but still defiant kid with emphatic hand gestures. After a moment the door closes and the train pulls out. He feels slightly limp, but also empowered. He reaches into his pocket and takes out his sunglasses, puts them back on. “I don’t even really like cats,” he tells the blonde woman. “If he belonged to me, I’d probably just let him die peacefully at home, surrounded by his friends and favorite toys. As it is, the last thing he sees will probably be a stainless steel examining table or a pair of latex gloves.” Reyjavik’s yowls have ceased for the time being. He’s either much better or much worse, David thinks. “Or maybe just the inside of this train. You.” he adds. The sunglasses have strengthened his position. The blonde woman is now on his side, nodding sympathetically, won over by his spirited advocacy of dignified pet death.

  The train emerges from the tunnel at West Portal, and David feels normalized by the circulation of the passengers and the reconnection of the car to the outside air as its door opens. The concerned blonde woman, wishing him luck, departs with most of the rest of the riders, and he is able to find a seat. Reyjavik has been silent for several minutes by now, and David is avoiding looking at him. I’ll just wait until we get to the vet, he thinks.

  But at the vet, whose doors are closed and locked in any case, the news is not good. Reyjavik is no longer breathing. His good eye, or the eye that has recently been good, is now closed, but the droopy eye is still open, halfway through a wink. David pulls the towel over the face of the deceased and loiters for a while on the street outside the vet, listening to the muffled howls of canine boarders. Now what? Frances will have a shit fit, of course, but really, what could he have done? His thoughts stray to the pile of term papers tossed on his desk when he found the cat in extremis. He’s way behind on his grading, as usual. The little teenage faces will be cranky. Grades are due, he has to write a final exam, and he doesn’t really know what he’s going to talk about tomorrow morning in class. Alas, poor Reyjavik. He can wing it, talk about death. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee; my girlfriend’s in Charlotte or is it Trenton. And meanwhile there is the problem of corpse disposal.

  An L car is approaching from the other direction, crawling up the long staircase of Taraval from the Pacific. A broken layer of clouds filters the sunlight, leaving the ocean’s surface, sleek and still at this distance, mottled black and blinding silver. David wraps the towel carefully around Reyjavik’s head and, leaving him slung over his shoulder, boards the L at the rear door, taking advantage of the Proof of Payment honor system and for no reason feeling certain that this time no transit police will appear to disturb his reveries. He sits by the window, a young father perhaps, with a sleeping baby on his shoulder, thinking about consigning Reyjavik’s mortal remains to the freezer so as to give Frances a final viewing. Will she really want to see that? More to the point, how will it affect her evaluation of his own performance during the cat’s final hour on this earth? His own philosophy is that whatever Reyjavik was, his catness, has been simply sharpened down to the disappearing point, or maybe narrowed and extruded into a parallel universe; in either case, the earthly remains are basically an empty old coat, for which any rag pile or dumpster will do. But he doesn’t think Frances will see it that way. She’ll want closure.

  By the time he reaches home, it’s getting dark. Frances calls, perhaps sensing catastrophe, before he’s even had a chance to turn on the lights or put his bundle down on the bed. He stands in the dark with a dead cat on his shoulder, listening. “Yep, everything’s fine. Just got home. No, a little tired, that’s all. How about you? Yes, he seems fine. What do you think? He’s right here on my shoulder. He’s resting. Actually he seems to be handling it a little better than usual. He’s very calm. Just eatin’ and sleepin’. Yep. I will. No. I don’t kiss cats. Yes, me too. I’m thinking about you a lot. OK. Be good.”

  He hangs up and stands for awhile vaguely gazing out the darkening window, trying to imagine the scene when Frances returns: removing the stiff, neatly wrapped package from the freezer where it will have waited for the week with the porkchops, ice cubes, blue gel paks, and miscellaneous food-encrusted frost buildup. The eye, clouded and fishy, the orange fur pathetically tipped with hoarfrost. Not good; and yet if he’s simply gone, vanished, deceased, flown when she returns? There’s something wrong with that, too, isn’t there? She might not even believe his story, might imagine that he’s been planning this hit since he moved in, watching Reyjavik’s yawnings, stretchings, and barfings with murder in his heart, or at least kidnapping. Alive, the lazy beast has been an annoyance and a handy spark for arguments; vanished without a trace, he could become a furry splinter working its way to the very heart of their relationship, a source of recrimination at best, at worst of dark suspicion. But the wooden freezer-cat scenario won’t play well, he’s sure of that.

  He feels a surge of annoyance at the thought of this complication, when he should be sitting down to grade at least some of those term papers: hundreds of pages, the equivalent of a whole bad book that he has to read in the next few days – and not only read, but critique, edit, try to understand, even make marginal comments, wade around in the sucking morass of teenage reason and elocution.

  It’s the weight of the term papers that tips him over the edge into decisiveness. A plan enters his head and with it a furtive joy, the prospect of his second illegal act of the evening, this one to be conducted in the city’s shadows, in the light of the sinister moon, which he notes out the window, low on the horizon and shredded by the big white pine in the back yard.

  He changes clothes – black sweater, black pants, white sneakers, the only ones he has. A purple ski cap. All black would be nice, but this will have to do. Leaving Reyjavik wrapped in the ex-boyfriend’s Turkish towel (I knew you’d want him to be buried in something nice, sweetheart) he stuffs the whole bundle with some difficulty into his briefcase and snaps the lid closed. He checks himself in the mirror, trying to twist his too full lips into a world-weary smile. A cat-burgling English teacher, rendered innocent by the bulging briefcase. For tools, only a cake knife, which glints once in the moonlight as he shoves it into his pocket.

  Thinking of the tollbooth Defarge, he rummages around his dresser top to come up with a buck-fifty in change. And she’s still there, watching him approach the turnstile. She stares at him over the tops of her glasses, unfooled and unimpressed by his disguise. He hoists the briefcase up and over the turnstile, ostentatiously depositing his change, seizing the salmon-colored tongue of the transfer as it pops out of its slot, striding deliberately toward the stairs, waiting for the mighty click of the PA system, which doesn’t come. Leading him to wonder, as he sits, briefcase on his knees on the marble bench, why she didn’t include in her original fare-evader description the yowling, expiring cat on his shoulder, surely a more salient feature than dark hair or
even English teacherness. It’s an enigma. He imagines her interminable hours behind the bulletproof glass, her countless sighs, her fingers roughened by the years and the miles of yarn pulled through them, but none of these provides an answer. What seems clear is that for some reason she was willing to give him a fighting chance. He’s heartened by this conclusion, as if it were a message of potential redemption from the world of endless term papers, disapproving girlfriends, and dead cats. He’s very aware of the weight of the briefcase on his knees, the insistent tug of the earth, now at last unresisted by dear old Reyjavik.

  The train slithers out of its tunnel into the city night festooned with yellow-orange globes and peopled with shadows, walking, standing enigmatically, anonymous backs curved over trash bins, joggers keeping pace with the train for a block, then falling behind, catching up again at the next stop, finally running backward into oblivion. The blank faces of the houses too, edge-on and narrow ahead, growing and fattening out of the train’s unhurried rumble, turning briefly real, then sliding away into the darkness. He shares the rocking little lighted room with a few bored companions, arms folded, sleeping or staring into their own interior action. Looking back out the window he imagines Frances in her hotel room in Cincinnati or is it St. Louis. She prefers the old historic hotels in the city centers, even if the beds are bumpy and the plumbing drips rust stains onto the curving porcelain sinks. She’ll be brushing her short, thick blond hair, gazing abstractedly out the window at the neon of a gas station or a bar, then climbing into bed and flicking off the slightly tilted lamp on the bedside table. He wonders if someone is climbing in there with her, some amiable stud from the Ft. Worth office. She certainly has plenty of opportunity for dalliances, with all the time she spends on the road. But then, so does he, alone in the new apartment, and all he ever does is grade papers and worry about who’s going to take the role of Stanley Kowalski in class tomorrow. Having called home, she’s secure in the knowledge that her darling is all tucked into his own bed for another night. Little does she know that he’s actually stuffed into a briefcase on the L car, wrapped in a Turkish towel and headed for a lonely grave. It seems there’s no good way to handle this. If he tells her the truth during one of her nightly calls, she’ll be upset and furious at him, and her trip will be spoiled, although, he reminds himself, it’s only a business trip. If he waits until she gets home, there’s not only the shock of the missing cat but also the problem of all the lies he’s had to tell her on the phone. Maybe he should just be “out” a lot, or on line, conduct the whole correspondence by e-mail, adroitly evading her queries about Reyjavik in his best forgetful style. It won’t lessen her dismay when she gets home, but at least he won’t have actually lied. He’ll only have to defend himself against her suspicions of foul play or rank incompetence in feline management. The problem for some reason seems less pressing than it did earlier. Shouldn’t our relationship, he thinks, be able to withstand the sudden death of a cat? And, more boldly: Hasn’t Reyjavik been a sort of buffer between us? Now maybe we’ll have time to fight about better things than his hairball production.

  He disembarks from the train at one of those anonymous avenues halfway to the ocean. Here the houses all look the same for block after block, silent streets, every parking spot with its motionless vehicle, as if no one has ever arrived or departed. He lugs his briefcase over toward the dark mass of the park and enters it, as befits his extralegal mission, in a trackless area through a grove of pungent eucalyptus, his path down the grassy and uneven slope lit only by the percolation of moonlight through the thick branches. Their dry, stiff leaves clatter softly in a light breeze off the distant rumor of the ocean.

  At the foot of the slope is a pond, silent but for occasional mysterious plops. The grass and the bushes surrounding it are rustling, too, with anonymous sprites, the sighs of the homeless under their tarps, and perhaps a few of his own students trading skilled, ignorant caresses. The cake knife does not make an ideal gravedigger’s mattock, but he has plenty of time and works slowly, squaring the hole carefully as he digs, pausing frequently to listen to the wind. He wants to do this right; he actually feels something other than irritation for old Reyjavik, a sadness that even such a wasted, nonproductive life, a pointless round of eating, sleeping, and defecating, has had to end. He wants to be able to tell Frances that Reyjavik has at least received a proper burial.

  With the hole finally a foot and a half deep and the cake knife twisted beyond any possible appropriate use (something else to answer for, he thinks, but then flings it without a glance over his shoulder into the welcoming pond), he carefully lowers the Turkish bundle into the grave and continues to kneel, gazing at it. It’s too exposed, the ancient earth will lie too heavily on Reyjavik’s ribcage, people will step uncaringly on the grave, doing who knows what damage to the moldering corpse. He removes the bundle, replaces it in the briefcase, and snaps the lid shut, then positions it in the hole and begins sweeping loose soil onto it with his bare hands. He flattens the top (a mound will attract animals, park employees, vandals) and covers it with dead leaves. A small boulder, half-embedded, for monument – Frances may want to visit.

  The moon lolls just above the consoling complexity of the treetops as he exits the park and walks the dark streets, invisible in his black except for the swinging arcs of the white sneakers, like the grins of two traveling cheshire cats: a few long blocks to the Muni stop, where he waits tranquilly for the night train, transfer clutched in a muddy hand.