My good friend, Man Martin, here with an excerpt from his novel that shows how alternately hilarious and sad his story is. If you’ve read either of Man’s first two novels ( Days of the Endless Corvette and Paradise Dogs ), then you’re familiar with the Martin-esque story. Still, Man always finds a way to filter literary intrigue into his characters, such as here, with Bone, an etymologist concerned with, well, too many things.
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(To make sense of the following, you will need to understand that etymologist Bone King has recently been abandoned by his wife Mary, and that he suffers a mysterious neurological condition that intermittently prevents him from going through doors. His neurologist Dr. Limongello has advised him whenever the condition strikes, to overcome it by square dancing.)
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Bone made up his mind with an I’ll-Show-Them intensity to throw himself into Words; fanning up fresh hatred for E. Knolton’s lies would banish the drabness and flabbiness of life without Mary. Even if Grisamore didn’t want the manuscript, so what? Someone was bound to want it, and meantime he needed to complete it anyway for his dissertation. Bone worked into the afternoon, amending the introduction for a book that might never be published, until he became uncomfortably aware he needed to use the bathroom. Predictably, the office door blocked him. His condition always struck when getting through was especially urgent. Impatiently—his bowels were insistent—he began square dancing, skipping the formality of bowing to his partner and his side, and the preliminary do-si-do, starting with a brusque promenade, and unwisely, in spite of Limongello’s advice against thinking too much, permitting himself a moment of self-consciousness: “This is the way I get through doors.”
The door wasn’t having it; Bone could not get through.
Damn.
No time for another try: he had to go now. For a makeshift toilet he dumped out a box of paper and dropped his trousers, turning and squatting just in time. Disgust, shame, and relief—plus a little gratification at his quick thinking—mingled in him, but now that the crisis of his bowels had been dealt with, he shouldn’t have any trouble getting through; it was only needing to go so badly that’d stymied him in the first place. He put a lid on the box. (What a stink! Water must prevent a lot of the odor in a regular toilet.) Not wanting to dance with a box of shit in his hands, he gently pushed it into the hallway with his toe. Once he got through, he could dispose of it.
He square danced again, this time going through all the careful preambles of bowing to his partner, bowing to his side. It was a square dance without brio, however, a pensive and a meditative square dance, the square dance of a man concerned with getting things right. Dancing and stamping contemplatively, he thought of Mary’s words. “They never liked you.” Why did he think of that now? It turned into the caller’s sing-song, chanted to fiddles and clapping. “They never liked you. They never liked you.”
He came to the door and again still couldn’t get through. Damn.
He stood nonplussed, and then a solution hit him, so simple it surprised him wonderful Double-Doc Limongello hadn’t thought of himself. Bone couldn’t walk through, but surely he’d be able to crawl. He’d attend to the box of feces once on the other side, then he could get back to work. He shook his head. The things he went through, coping with his absurd condition. He got on hands and knees to crawl out. But when he got to the door, he froze.
Well, what do you know about that?
He stood. Now this was definitely inconvenient. Okay, but no big deal. He’d write a little longer and try again. The condition was sure to abate on its own if he ignored it.
He sat, fingers poised, but didn’t touch the keys. At his wrist was a letter he’d written and addressed, but not yet stamped: care of the Cook County Library, Laurence Hobbs, the librarian who’d once taken an interest in a hay-seed bookworm. Was the condition striking because Bone had been remiss in fulfilling the three tasks? But he’d intended to mail it, and look at all the trouble he’d already gone to google the address, taking his laptop into the bedroom to hook up the cable. (Bone deliberately denied himself an internet connection in the office, to prevent cyberspace-lollygagging.)
What was the point of working on his manuscript? Bone looked up through the window. A bird angled down through the oaks and disappeared into the Rose of Sharon. Words wasn’t going to be published, at least not with Bone’s name on it. How could Grisamore have turned to Knolton, that quack? Because Bone hadn’t met the deadline, that’s how. Bone had but himself to blame.
Without warning Bone’s pulse beat with longing for Mary. It wasn’t making love he thought of, or her beauty, or even her companionship; it was the way she drank water. That long, uninterrupted swallow, plonking down the empty glass with a gasp, devoting herself to the experience of an ordinary glass of water, even to the exclusion of breathing. That fact seemed wonderful to Bone, but maybe part of the reason it seemed so was that he was starting to feel pretty thirsty himself.
When you got down to it, all Bone’s separate problems—his condition, losing his
publishing contract, losing Mary—his flubs, failures, and false starts—the Yin and Yang of his life, mostly Yin—were all aspects of one big problem: not following through. The cardboard box of feces, sitting and reeking and possibly seeping, on the other side of the door was a metaphor; he let things be and hence they got worse. But no more, Bone resolved. This was it. He’d make changes starting here and now. It wasn’t the end of the world. Mary didn’t love him. She never had. Sure it hurt like blisters, but he was better off. He’d show her—if he’d looked in the mirror just then, he might’ve seen his chin thrust forward in determination. Meanwhile he had his manuscript. He’d finish it and find another publisher. Hell, resubmit it to Grisamore. Why not? Grisamore would be sure to want it once he saw how well it’d turned out. Bone was taking charge of his life again. He pressed the save button, went back to the top of the page, and re-read his introduction.
He had a bit more water tinged with brown cola in the plastic cup at his elbow, and he drank it. Now another way out occurred to him. If he sat on the floor in front of the threshold, facing into the room, and allowed himself to fall backward, his upper torso would land in the hallway, and surely once his top half crossed the boundary, the rest of him wouldn’t offer any trouble. He imagined witnessing the plan in action as if he were a video camera mounted on the ceiling, pleased at the prospect of elegant success, the satisfaction the Coyote must’ve felt studying the dotted-line on blueprint, charting a dislodged boulder’s trajectory to the x-marked intersection with the Roadrunner.
Bone sat on the floor, hands on his knees, scooting his butt across the hardwood until his back was to the threshold. Man, that box really stank. He’d gotten used to it, but this close it was something awful. How had it come to this? A car filling with fast food receipts and containers, a house filling with plastic cups, dishes sitting a week without washing, and feces in a cardboard box. Well, he’d take care of it now, and he almost smiled as a pun came to him involving the words duty and doody. He released his knees and let himself fall back.
Only he didn’t fall.
Now this was too much. He pushed on his knees to make himself fall, but it did no good. Was something wrong with his plan? He turned the other way, facing the door now, to see if he could fall in the other direction. He let go of his knees and fell with marvelous success, banging his head on the open drawer of a filing cabinet he’d forgotten to allow for.
Leaving the office began to assume the dimensions of Job One. Not that it was a crisis, he’d definitely be out before matters progressed as far as that, but everything else—the blinking cursor on the first line of his manuscript, for example—could wait until he reached the other side of that door.
His faux-leather rolling office chair presented itself as the next obvious solution. It wouldn’t fit through the door, but when it jolted to a standstill at the frame, the momentum ought to eject him into the hallway. Starting at the desk to build up speed, he launched toward the door. Unfortunately, the designers of rolling office chairs, not considering them transportation devices, do not take their ability to accelerate as a potential selling point, and do not design them for building up speed. The instant Bone pushed off, the chair lost momentum. It stopped a little past the starting line.
Trying to maintain velocity by additional pushes with his feet did as much to retard his progress as improve it; moreover, as he discovered, rolling chairs are designed with as little thought to maneuverability as to speed, at least with distances greater than scooting up to or away from a reasonably nearby workspace. Whereas a conventional grocery cart comes equipped with a single rogue wheel with its own notion of where the cart should go, a rolling office chair has five such wheels, each as independent as a hog on ice, and even then a hog of an infuriatingly distractible and inconsistent disposition, a hog greatly in need of a good dose of Ritalin.
After three attempts, he came no closer to success as smashing a hand between the wall and the arm of the chair. The hand he’d pierced on Cash’s chain link. If he had a broomstick, he could use it as a pole to propel himself, but then, as he considered it, the rolling-chair concept was doomed to failure. Even at maximum rolling-chair speed, he’d never attain enough velocity to overcome the friction of the faux leather cushion and slide into the hallway. No, he’d have to come up with another method or wait for the condition to abate on its own. He leaned back, put his feet on his desk, and folded his hands across his abdomen to give the matter careful thought with his eyes closed.
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Bone awoke, cotton-mouthed and headachy; it had been late afternoon, and now it was night. He needed to leave the room now, and no more fooling around. He arose and square danced, once, twice, three times for good measure. Each attempt as useless as the one before. He tried crawling on all fours and on his belly. He tried sitting on the floor and falling backward. No luck. He did not resort to rolling the chair again.
Naturally, the one thing he needed, an office phone so he could call somebody, he didn’t have. His cell phone was in another room. He cussed his perverse obstinacy in not permitting internet in the office. What he’d have given just to tap out a quick, “Help, Get Me Out of the Office” email. To whom would he have sent it, and what would they have made of it? Would the recipient of a message like—“This is very embarrassing, but I’m trapped in my office. Please come at once to release me.”—have thought it a new identity-theft scheme, like the email saying a friend is marooned in Zimbabwe and needs a money-gram? No matter. These questions were moot anyway because Bone had neither cell phone nor internet.
His head hurt too much to go back to sleep. He was very thirsty now. Remembering a trick from his Tennessee childhood of sucking something to work up spit, he put a pen cap in his mouth, and sure enough, got some relief.
Might as well work on his manuscript and try again later. He couldn’t manage to write anything new, so he made do with revising, adding a phrase, taking out the same phrase, polishing and un-polishing the same few lines and getting nowhere until sunrise.
The neighbors would be up now. He made another futile attempt to square-dance through, then cranked open the window and shouted, “Help!” And again, louder, “Help!”
They never liked you.
They would never be able to hear him, he decided.
“Well, I’ll just have to go through the window,” he said, rolling up the shirtsleeves of his imagination.
“If you use something as a means of exit, that makes it a door,” he imagined E. Knolton’s mellow accent objecting, “and, as we know, you can’t go through doors.”
“Shut up,” Bone retorted. “A thing doesn’t change identity just because we use it for a different purpose. If you wear a frying pan on your head, it doesn’t make it a hat. And anyway, you’re just imaginary.”
“Touché,” he imagined Miranda Richter chiming in supportively, “Illegitimi non carborundum.”
“Thank you,” Bone said. “You’re who I should have married.” Bone’s knee was on his desk, and with a final push up, he was standing. The office windows were high jalousies, and even cranked out to their fullest extent offered little room for a full-grown man to squeeze through. “I can’t go straight out,” Bone pondered aloud. “The best way to do it, I reckon, is lie on my back and go feet first, so I can bend my knees. Once I’m to my waist, I can wriggle around onto my stomach, lower myself as far as I can, then drop into the holly bushes.” Bone studied the sill, the distance to the ground, and the holly bushes below, estimating the cost of his escapade in cuts, scrapes, abrasions, and bruises.
Outside, the air darkened, and the Rose of Sharon leaves shivered and turned in the wind of an approaching storm. He moved his penholder to the edge of the desk, as well as his computer, several spiral-bound notebooks, and an unabridged Devil’s Dictionary which Mary had given him during their courtship. He opened it and looked on the inside cover.
To the man in love with words, Love Mary.
“Here’s an interesting word,” he said, like a man abruptly changing the subject of conversation. “Defenestrate.” He put the dictionary beside the un-mailed letter. ‘Throwing something out of a window, from the Latin, fenestria, ‘window.’ I will now defenestrate myself.” He lay on his back and pushed his feet toward the open window.
His feet would not move.
For the first time, something like genuine panic flared in Bone’s stomach. Goddamn it, why did it have to occur to him that windows are just another type of door? Goddamn E. Knolton anyway; the man was a menace even in the imaginary state.
He climbed off the desk. Now he was really in a fix. Soberly, but knees trembling, he did one last square dance, bowing, do-si-doeing, and attempting to promenade through the door. It didn’t work. He knew it wouldn’t work. He couldn’t go through the door, and he couldn’t get through the window. What other way out was there, unless…
He climbed back on the desk, and with his good pair of red-handled scissors jabbed the ceiling, gratified and horrified by how easily they punched through. “This is silly,” he told himself. “I’m really overreacting. I’m sure I could have gone through the door on my own if I’d just waited a little longer.” Nevertheless he kept jabbing, hot attic air brushing his face as a black wedge took shape in the white ceiling. Presently he was reaching through the smooth white ceiling to pull down a hunk of sheetrock, at which a confetti of shredded-paper insulation, dust, and no doubt rat turds fell into his eyes. Outside, wind whirled and whipped the Rose of Sharon in the approaching thunderstorm, and a serrated leaf ripped from its branch, pressed briefly to the window pane and passed on, while on this side of the window, Bone’s heel, unaware, stepped on the letter he meant to mail, and knocked the dictionary Mary had given him to the floor.
He looked down, wiping his face against his arm, batting his eyes. He reached up to pull down more sheetrock, keeping his eyes closed this time against the rain of debris.
After blowing grit and grime from his nose and picking it from his eyelids, he studied his handiwork: an irregular starburst-hole of jags and obtuse angles, and a corresponding heap of sheetrock on the desk. Someone’s going to have a time cleaning this up, he thought, and vaguely guesstimated the cost of repair, but the headache blossoming behind his eyebrows slowed its growth just a little bit. Above the sheetrock, a yellow joist rose in the attic darkness, illuminated like a moon crater’s inner wall.
Now for the acid test: “A ceiling hole is really just another kind of d—” E. Knolton’s imaginary voice began, but Bone silenced it by grabbing the joist—standing on his desk he didn’t need to jump to get his hands over it—and in spite of his sore palm, chinned into the dark attic heat, choked on his pen cap, and lowered to spit it out before lifting himself again.
He saw little but his head’s shadow floating on swirling dust, but he hung a few moments, savoring his first success after a long drought of failure before lowering himself to the desk. So much for E. Knolton. A ceiling hole was clearly a different matter than a door. Still, it needed to be a good bit bigger if he intended to pull himself through, so he set to work with gusto, until a hole, Tennessee-shaped, and manhole-wide, exposed two joists. It would still take some doing to wriggle through; the joists were only about a foot and a half apart, but Bone figured he could do it.
He did another chin-up and realized he couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t that the joists were too close together; they were fine, nor was it another bout with his condition—that had elected to exclude ceiling holes from its jurisdiction—it was that he’d knocked out the hole too close to the side of the house. The roofline here was so low, he could lift his head no more above than nose-level to the joist. If he’d chinned-up higher on his first reconnoiter, he’d have bumped his head and spotted his mistake before going any further. As it was, he’d made an unnecessary mess, not to mention wasting time and energy and working up an even greater thirst—he was terrifically thirsty, he realized—for nothing.
And nothing now remained to do, but begin the game anew.
He dragged the desk to the center of the room—God, but it was heavy—stood on it, and gave the ceiling three jabs before giving himself a nice little gash with the scissors. Of course, it would be the same hand he’d gored on Cash’s chain link and slammed against the wall. Was there a risk of tetanus? When was his last shot? God knows, with all the crap falling from the ceiling, he was liable to catch beriberi, measles, mumps, rabies, and rickets, with scurvy, shingles, and schistosomiasis tossed in for good measure. He tenderly wiped his hand on his pants and studied the wound running along his life-line from his pinky to his ring finger, wondering how deep it was and wishing he had some water to wash it. It would probably need stitches, he decided. Damn, yet another thing to deal with if he ever got out of this room.
When he got out of this room, he amended.
Using typing paper for a bandage failed on account of 1. Not being absorbent enough; and 2. Being too small to wrap around his hand.
It seemed melodramatic removing his shirt to bind his wound, but this is precisely what he did, figuring better melodramatic than sorry, and feeling absurdly macho, covered with ceiling crap, bare-chested, his shirt tightly wrapped around his hand.
It was harder and less effective jabbing the ceiling with his left hand, but he succeeded in starting a decent hole as well as gashing that hand, but not as seriously as the first time. His shoulders ached from reaching overhead, and he stopped and rested often, dropping his arms by his sides to shake the soreness out and get the blood circulating. His right hand throbbed no matter what position he held it, distracting him so badly that not only did he forget to close his eyes against the rain of debris when he tore free the sheetrock, he allowed his jaw to hang slack, getting a good mouthful of dust and insulation into the bargain. He picked pieces and tatters from his teeth and dug a plug of dust from between his cheek and gum, but without water to rinse, the chalky sheetrock taste stayed in his mouth.
Outside, the swaying trees brightened in a flash of lightning. Maybe he should give another try at shouting at the neighbors from the window. No, the die was cast; he’d already made a hole in the ceiling and a wreck of his office. Besides, he’d sufficiently demonstrated that the neighbors weren’t close enough to hear him. They’d never liked him, Mary said. But she’d also written, “To the man in love with words, Love Mary.”
At last the new hole was big enough, and he grabbed the joist, jacking himself up with a chin-up. It was a lot harder than before. He’d used up a lot of energy in the meantime, and couldn’t bear to put too much weight on his right hand which was wrapped in a tee-shirt with a mauve chevron of a bloodstain.
There was more overhead clearance in this section of the attic, but not much, and the roof-beam scraped Bone’s bare back as he tugged himself into the heat and darkness. With a sudden move that shot pain from right his hand all the way up his spine, he released the joist and grabbed for the next one over. He lay, the joist pressing his ribcage, the migratory pain from his hand tingling in his forearm, for a time unable to summon the will to move. Then, more slowly, he grabbed the joist with his other hand, and hauled himself the rest of the way in.
He rose tottering on his fours. The narrow joists gouged his knees and made the wound on his hand sing. He rested on his forearms to take the weight off his injured hand. He had made it. It was going to be okay. Two glowing holes in the ceiling below lit the interstitial triangles of support beams, and the narrow seams of light outlined the rectangle of the attic door; silhouettes of Christmas-ornament boxes, old photographs, letters, old clothes—his past with Mary—ranged themselves around him, and not only that, leave-behinds of the family before them: shoeboxes and baby toys, fossilized under decades of attic dust. He crawled to the attic door, squeezing between support beams, ignoring the clamoring pain in his hand and head. Then he was on the rough floor planking in the center of the attic, and though he still couldn’t stand straight, he could walk in a crouch, and what a relief it was to get off his poor hands and knees!
The air was heavy with dust, and the attic insufferably hot, but he did not perspire. Almost there. He pushed down on the attic door, but powerful springs held it closed. It would need his full weight to open.
“How do you expect to get through?” E. Knolton’s voice asked. “The attic door is still a door after all.”
“It’s really more of a ladder,” Miranda Richter’s voice amended. “In any case, all he has to do is put his weight on it and gravity will take care of the rest. It’ll open by itself and he can just drop to the ground.”
Bone could imagine E. Knolton wondering, but not mentioning, what would happen when the attic door opened. If the metal ladder unfolded, as it seemed certain to do, where would Bone end up? What angle would he hit? Could he control his fall? The prospect of ricocheting against a wall or getting painfully tangled in a collapsible stair was not a pleasant one, but in for a penny, in for a pound was Bone’s motto by this point. He took hold of the ladder as tightly as he could bear, grimacing at the pain from his hand—the bloody stain on the tee-shirt had stopped growing, at least—but he hesitated before bringing his knees onto the attic door.
“Toodle-oo,” Miranda Richter suggested helpfully.
Bone brought both knees up and instantly the door swung down out of the darkness into the lit hallway below. “Wait!” he shouted. The ladder extended, unfolding, knocking Bone’s skull against the sill, and stopped. “Wait!”
Iron bands clamped his head. He strained the nape of his neck against the sill, holding himself in place, trembling at the effort. What a hideous blunder he’d nearly made: wasting all this work escaping the trap of his office, only to drop himself into the trap of the hallway where his exit would be barred by not one, but five taunting doors. His head slipped from the sill, and he went down. The ladder did not unfold, thank God, and Bone perched, and panted.
“You need to get back up that ladder,” E. Knolton pointed out unnecessarily.
Bone scrabbled up, holding his body low to keep the ladder from unfolding.
Back in the attic’s safety, he crouched and panted until his trembling subsided. No harm done. He’d just keep going toward the back of the attic until he was safely over the living room, break through the ceiling there, and go down. No need to turn on the attic light; it was bright enough to see where he was going without it. The rough plank floor of the attic gave out after a little distance, and he crawled on knees and wrists—it hurt less than resting his hands on the joists. Above him the roof tapped and pattered in the falling rain. Then, contrary to expectations, he discovered the light could penetrate only a little way through the opaque attic air after all, and he passed into darkness as if going through a curtain. His hand had stopped throbbing so badly, though, or at least he no longer noticed it as much. His head, on the other hand, felt like something was crushing it. And his throat…
To the man in love with words, Love Mary.
Perhaps the “Love” was neither object of a preposition—“(with) Love Mary”—nor a present indicative verb “(I) Love (you), Mary” but a command, or at least a recommendation, offered to a man who’d unwisely given his heart to words: “(You should) Love Mary.”
Far enough. He must be clear of the hallway by now. Probably over the living room. He balanced himself on the joists. With his less-injured hand, he pressed against the sheetrock through the fluff of dust and insulation. It was going to be harder breaking through than he’d anticipated. He wished he thought to bring his scissors. He definitely wasn’t going back to the office for them. In hot darkness he pawed back the insulation, until his palm pressed smooth sheetrock. He pushed down. No good.
“You’re going to have to put your weight on it,” Miranda said.
Sitting on one joist and bent forward to brace his hands against the joist in front of him, Bone put his feet on the sheetrock, powdery insulation almost up to his ankles. He tentatively lifted his butt and at once there was a hollow tearing sound and the sheetrock gave way, his knees scraping the joist in front of him.
His butt hit the joist again before he went through. Powder floated in the air, and he gave a dry, useless sneeze. Leg hairs cast shadows up his white calves. The hole wasn’t big, but Bone recognized a corner of the rug that lay in front of the sofa, and there, unless he mistook, was a bit of the dining room table. He was above the living room.
The jagged sheetrock reminded him of broken ice over a pond, and for a moment Bone imagined it actually was ice, that the builders had prudently constructed the ceiling out of a special ice that didn’t melt at room temperature, but would dissolve in the mouth. He instantly brought himself back from the brink of this dangerous fantasy. He wasn’t that far gone. Soon he’d be drinking a glassful of actual water from the sink. He’d drink the first two glasses, he promised himself, with no ice at all, and then the third and fourth glasses he’d put ice in. Then he’d reward himself each day for the rest of his life by driving to the Quik Trip and buying himself a giant-sized cherry slushy.
Maybe he’d have the first three glasses without ice.
He lowered himself through the ceiling, holding onto the joist, the sheetrock cracking and falling as he pushed through, slowing his descent. While his elbows were still bent at ninety-degrees, his feet touched something solid. He was standing on the edge of the dining room table.
Bone let go, and in that speeded-up thinking you get in a crisis, realized a nanosecond too late the table’s edge was not the sturdiest possible place to place his weight. The commotion that followed came in a flurry of sensations; first his feet were touching the heavy oak table, then the table was under his arm, then he was on the floor, the table on top of him. All of this accompanied with the loudest possible of knocks and bangs.
Then it was over.
There wasn’t even an echo in the stillness. Supplementing the crushing feeling in his skull and the all-but-forgotten throb in his hand was a magnificent shooting pain in his ankle. Blue and red spots flashed in his vision.
“I will have broken my ankle,” he said to Miranda and E. Knolton, employing the little-used future perfect tense to indicate that in the fullness of time it would be discovered he had done so.
Bone rolled the table off his legs, and turned sideways so his broken ankle rested on top of his good one. He allowed himself—and instantly regretted—one look back to check if it could possibly have swollen as elephantine as it felt, like it was trying to rip open the shoe from the inside. A white cotton sock bloated over the canvas rim of the tennis shoe like a muffin top, but the thought of gripping the heel and pulling off the shoe made everything go swimmy.
Bone shut his eyes against the sight and began crawling to the—and this is when he wasted a perfectly good bellow on his own misery—door.
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