Stranger Things Happen Read Free Page B

here with me now. I'm not sure if I'm in
their place— if this place is theirs, or if I brought them here,
like luggage. Maybe it's some of one, some of the other. They're
people, or maybe I should say a person I used to know when I was
little. I think they've been watching me for a while, but they're
shy. They don't talk much.
    Hard to introduce yourself, when you have forgotten your name.
When I saw them, I was astounded. I sat down on the floor of the
lobby. My legs were like water. A wave of emotion came over me, so
strong I didn't recognize it. It might have been grief. It might
have been relief. I think it was recognition. They came and stood
around me, looking down. "I know you," I said. "You're
loolies."
    They nodded. Some of them smiled. They are so pale, so fat! When
they smile, their eyes disappear in folds of flesh. But they have
tiny soft bare feet, like children's feet. "You're the dead man,"
one said. It had a tiny soft voice. Then we talked. Half of what
they said made no sense at all. They don't know how I got here.
They don't remember Looly Bellows. They don't remember dying. They
were afraid of me at first, but also curious.
    They wanted to know my name. Since I didn't have one, they tried
to find a name that fit me. Walter was put forward, then rejected.
I was un-Walter-like. Samuel, also Milo, also Rupert. Quite a few
of them liked Alphonse, but I felt no particular leaning towards
Alphonse. "Tree," one of the loolies said.
    Tree never liked me very much. I remember your mother standing
under the green leaves that leaned down on bowed branches, dragging
the ground like skirts. Oh, it was such a tree! the most beautiful
tree I'd ever seen. Halfway up the tree, glaring up at me, was a
fat black cat with long white whiskers, and an elegant sheeny bib.
You pulled me away. You'd put a T-shirt on. You stood in the
window. "I'll get him," you said to the woman beneath the tree.
"You go back to bed, mom. Come here, Tree."
    Tree walked the branch to the window, the same broad branch that
had lifted me up to you. You, Ariadne? Thomasina? plucked him off
the sill and then closed the window. When you put him down on the
bed, he curled up at the foot, purring. But when I woke up, later,
dreaming that I was drowning, he was crouched on my face, his belly
heavy as silk against my mouth.
    I always thought Tree was a silly name for a cat. When he got
old and slept out in the garden, he still didn't look like a tree.
He looked like a cat. He ran out in front of my car, I saw him, you
saw me see him, I realized that it would be the last straw—a
miscarriage, your husband sleeps with a graduate student, then he
runs over your cat—I was trying to swerve, to not hit him.
Something tells me I hit him. I didn't mean to, sweetheart, love,
Pearl? Patsy? Portia?
    You know who.
    #
    The dead man watches television with the loolies. Soap
operas. The loolies know how to get the antenna crooked so that the
reception is decent, although the sound does not come in. One of
them stands beside the TV to hold it just so. The soap opera is
strangely dated, the clothes old-fashioned, the sort the dead man
imagines his grandparents wore. The women wear cloche hats, their
eyes are heavily made up.
    There is a wedding. There is a funeral, also, although it is
not clear to the dead man watching, who the dead man is. Then the
characters are walking along a beach. The woman wears a
black-and-white striped bathing costume that covers her modestly,
from neck to mid-thigh. The man's fly is undone. They do not hold
hands. There is a buzz of comment from the loolies. "Too dark," one
says, about the woman. "Still alive," another says.
    "Too thin," one says, indicating the man. "Should eat more.
Might blow away in a wind."
    "Out to sea."
     
    "Out to Tree." The loolies look at the dead man. The dead
man goes to his room. He locks the door. His penis sticks up, hard
as a tree. It is pulling him across the room, towards the bed. The
man is dead, but his