Geoff Wyss

Border Districts

The rumor that our department chair was a hoarder had murky origins and therefore eternal life. One story, told in variations, featured a colleague, long retired, who had visited the chair’s residence and was awkwardly shielded from the mess glimpsed through the crack. Another came from our Spanish teacher, a person who would say anything for attention, whose aunt lived in the same building and related the hoarding as a known fact. We treated the rumor as true because it felt true, artistically true the way fiction is true. But then the 2016 election happened, and for a time fiction lost its fun, so when cancer took Jim away to the hospital in January, Travis and I decided to break into his apartment and see what was inside.

Depressing, I said when Travis’s phone landed us at the address. We were looking out on an asphalt lot poured inside a U of apartments, two gray levels with the symbolic feel of an hourly motel. Trapped hawthorne bushes garnished the black. A flagpole threw its shadow. Something in the vintage of the architecture—dirty stucco, a low roof sweeping forth from the 60s—whispered to me that this was where Jim had lived all the decades he had taught at Bevolo Jesuit. 

We found Jim’s first-floor door.

Can you see anything? I said.

I was crouching in front of one window full of white blinds, Travis the other. I could feel Jim’s dusty hoard pulling me from the other side of the slats, pulling more heavily because it was made of my imagination and knew the language of my cells.

Travis tried the door handle. The apartments held still around us. 

The apartments held still around us, I said.

Old lives, he said, waiting behind the walls.

Travis and I often wrote impromptu sentences of fiction aloud.

We cut through the dim breezeway, I said as we cut through the breezeway to a rear apron where garbage cans stood guard. Jim’s sliding back door was locked and obscured by curtains.

Me: Had they really expected to get in? The idea now seemed silly.

Travis: Then they thought, the neighbor will have a key.

This was why I had asked Travis along, to oppose my own tendency to yield when the universe put up resistance, to counter my aversion to plot. 

Travis slanged the neighbor’s knocker until a canny eye peeked through the chain.

Good afternoon, ma’am, he said. Mr. Gary here and I are colleagues of your neighbor, Jim Prieur, at Bevolo Jesuit High School. My name is Travis. As you may be aware, Mr. Prieur has fallen ill and is in hospital. He has asked us to retrieve personal items from his residence.

I nodded along and tried to keep the lie off my face.

However, Travis continued, Mr. Prieur seems to have given us the wrong key. Travis raised and rattled his own keys as a vague visual aid. Might he have entrusted you with a key we could use to gain access to the residence?

He is quite sick, I said when the eyes darted my way. 

She looked back and forth as if memorizing us—the schoolday tie I wore felt false as a costume—then threw the door shut.

So much for that, I said.

I hoped my conceding might fire Travis’s sense of competition, but I could feel that the mystery was inert for him. He had a two-year-old child waiting at home and all the direct life that went with that. Having never had children, I moved through experience as through a secondary medium of motifs, patterns, and themes. As we returned to the car, I called up the vignette my mind had composed to represent the wonder of child rearing, basically an admission of my awe and ignorance: Travis kneeling before his child in an explosion of sun, light emanating in a halo from the child’s orange hair.

I could not grade essays if I lived here, Travis said, looking over the dash.

I knew what he meant. But when I tried to imagine sitting at Travis’s school desk—neat, spare, ordered—I realized that I would be disarmed, robbed of force, inside anyone else’s life at all.

Jim had been dying before the cancer, dying bit by bit as if in demonstration of both the fragility and durability of the human machine. Earlier cancer had shortened an intestine. Heart problems had fluttered him into the care of a cardiologist and stolen the air from his speech, every phrase fighting for breath. A bum knee turned hallways into hejiras and glossed his face with extremity. I found each mark of Jim’s disintegration exhilarating, as I assume other people’s sickness is to all of us if we’re telling the truth. Watching Jim die, imagining him dead, was a pleasure so like victory that it could only mean my unconscious had calculated that Jim’s death meant I would live forever. Stating this insane belief consciously did not make the feeling go away. I was an atheist teaching in a Catholic school and had perhaps made a devilish substitution for the Masses that left me unmoved: Jim’s suffering would wash away the sins that time had begun to commit against my fifty-year-old body. 

The Bevolo English Department inhabits a makeshift space created by knocking out a wall between a storage bay and the shunt beneath a flight of stairs. To draw the exterior wall of this room would require fifteen segments, and the shape on your notepad is not one you would want to step inside. Every desk is jammed into a provisional corner, Jim’s in a middle corner, commanding from its choke point a view to left and right—or, if you like, suffering the greatest concentration of anxieties by virtue of that view. I lowered myself into his vacated chair not because I wished to succeed him (the psychological reading was available, but I rejected it), nor because I wanted to snoop through his possessions to deepen him as a character (that would happen as a side effect), but because the long-term substitute we had hired in Jim’s absence had a desk nearby, and I wanted to look at her.

I made a commotion at Jim’s desk until Angela looked up from her screen.

How is everything going? I said, aiming for the disinterested tone of a veteran helping a newbie rather than the grossly interested tone of a man manufacturing an opportunity to look at a woman’s high forehead and blue-edged glasses.

Just wrestling with this grading program.

I commiserated over the awkwardness of the program, but Angela had returned to her screen, so I could not very well sit staring at her. I opened Jim’s file drawer.

The drawer hung fat with the folders of a teacher too old to trust the digital age. Few things are more melancholy to me than another teacher’s handwriting on manila folder tabs. I shut the drawer before its sadness could consume me. The desk’s shallow top drawer offered a mess of pens and rubber bands and post-it pads in a sedimental heap, a true junk drawer clearly the work of decades, disorder reached through incrementally relinquished order or through an idea of order so idiosyncratic that it stands, when fully realized, as a portrait of the person. I would have allowed myself a close reading of its contents, but I could not maintain the pretense that it contained anything I needed. Not that Angela was paying attention. I tried to remember whether Angela had once looked directly at me since taking the job at Bevolo. Women’s discipline over their eyes is the clearest mark of their difference from me is the sort of generalization I would not accept in a piece of contemporary writing. A male character trying to judge a female colleague’s attractiveness was a plot point made disgusting by contemporary politics.

I lifted a piece of paper from Jim’s desk—a printout from the web about a newly discovered Salinger story—and pretended to read as I peered over it at Angela. I was halfway through Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows and was aware that my observations of Angela were conditioned by the pages in which Murnane’s narrator, the autofictional Murnane, gazes across a train car at his own dark-haired female person. Imagining myself as Murnane’s character—imagining myself as both character and writer of the character of myself—now helped me recall that when I had entered the department office that morning and seen a photo of Angela’s daughter on her desk, I had on the instant composed a fantasy in which I was no longer married but seeing Angela and serving as father to the child. In the five steps from Angela’s desk to mine, I had given the daughter a personality and myself the charm to win her over, had seen the three of us eating supper together and then Angela turning off a bedside lamp at night’s end to join me under the covers. This vision had leapt to mind with the terrifying authority of a dream, a fever-story assembled in the mind’s shadows and exposed suddenly to light.

Angela was wearing a denim jacket in the cold of the office. The hands below its rolled cuffs were the knobby red hands of a potter or runner. She had pulled her hair into a clean part and ponytail that I tried not to let remind me of Emily Dickinson. This person I knew nothing about had strayed unsuspecting into the wilds of my imagination, and I had invested her with nothing less than the belief that she could renew everything: the building we worked in and the work we did in it, the texture of time and space, what I was to myself and others. She would make everything the same but different.

I was in the midst of assigning words to my insanity, the words above, when Angela startled me by standing and walking toward me.

Gary, why isn’t this working?

She knelt beside Jim’s chair with the laptop on a forearm. The act was so excellently nimble that my imagination leapt out to kneel alongside her and for one exquisite moment inhabited her, my left knee rounded onto the carpet below my black skirt.

This quiz has no value assigned to it, I said, my finger near the white of the screen. So the numbers you entered are assigning infinite points.

Ah, of course. Three spry steps took her back to her desk. Didn’t he leave like twenty novels in a safe? she said, typing again.

I had forgotten the article in my hand. 

That’s the rumor, I said.

I bet they’re terrible.

I bet you’re right.

I laid the article back on its stack. Someone had tidied the top of Jim’s desk in his absence. Once distressingly drifted, it was now cleared down to naked laminate, the remaining matter tamed into two squared piles. I thought of the outbuilding full of file cabinets where Gerald Murnane wrote fiction amidst the gathered documents of his life: letters written and received, clipped newspaper articles, research for and drafts of his books, the daily results of imagined horse races between the dozen syndicates of an island nation he had invented. Perhaps the reclusive Murnane had admitted to his sanctum the reporter from whom I had learned of it as a hedge against some later person throwing it open after he was gone and culling it down to a few mute piles.

**

My confused feelings about Angela were typical of my confusion about everything now that I had reached fifty, even the simplest things, things long settled, reverting to mystery and phenomenon. My body had become again the kind of riddle it must be for infants. The idea that there was an I stored in this carrying case was so ridiculous that by turns my body and then the self it hosted seemed to disintegrate. I no longer knew what was funny and why. I couldn’t tell what music was good or bad. Whether being a human being implied responsibility was not a question I could speak to. Sex: an exaltation or a debasement? Me: was I smarter or much, much dumber than other people? I could no more judge whether a book was great or awful than someone who had never read one, and I often found myself saying to students things I had said in past years about, say, Frankenstein but without the certainty that had first occasioned those comments and hoping that the students could not tell that Shelley’s pages had gone flat and meaningless before me. What was art even? As a young person, I had pored over books on Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, and gone into raptures over their contents, but now it was only with the severest effort that I could muster any response to such images at all, to art of any sort. Everyday objects (pencils, TV remotes) had regained an animist significance.

The deepest mystery was other people. Did they care, or were they pretending to care? Were they as lost inside themselves as I was, or were they as assured as they looked when they passed me in the hall, on the street? People my age and older seemed unreachably self-contained and spinning away through private atmospheres—planets that could be seen but not reached—so that even if I had not lost my grasp on all the proprieties of conversation, I could not imagine asking Jack Culicchia whether he sometimes suddenly could not remember what season it was, August and the first days of school or May with graduation nearing.

Jack was poking filters into a row of coffee maker baskets, as he was every morning when I entered the faculty lounge, both of us creatures of perfect habit. Next would come the pouring of grounds, the clicking of red switches. I thought of Jack’s ministrations as priestly not only because he performed them with a set of prescribed gestures but also because Jack was one of the queerish bachelors Bevolo seemed to produce, married to the school in a way I found beautiful and terrible.

How is Jim? I asked.

He’s okay, Jack said.

I pulled my tie from my school bag and began tying it. I couldn’t make a follow-up question come out right—Jack knew I didn’t like Jim—so I waited.

They adjust his medication every day, Jack said, based on the numbers.

In other words, I thought but did not say, Jim is receiving the best cancer care in the history of the world and also serving as a vector field for medical data.

Is he in good spirits? I said, another bland wall of a question raised to catch whatever Jack might throw at it.

Everyone knew that Jack, as acting department chair, regularly consulted Jim, but I had further intuited from our earlier conversations that Jack visited Jim daily and was managing his personal affairs. I would have given much to know whether Jack performed these offices out of duty or devotion, the devotion of being Jim’s former student in these very halls or the duty, broadly defined, of his interim role, or the affinity of one unmarried man for his image in a prior generation. Perhaps the question was meaningless. Jack was the most regimented person I knew, his life a calendar of obligations fulfilled in a way that struck me as deeply Catholic, with the result that what he did was what he believed. Thus the answer to Did Jack like Jim? was Jack visited Jim. As attested by Jack’s senior-class photo, hanging in the hall I would momentarily walk down, Jack’s constancy was written on his very body: his fine blond hair and oversized glasses and smooth cheeks had been his since he was eighteen, though whether he had authored his body or his body him, who could say. In the twenty years I had known Jack, even his discourse had rounded off to a stock of worn phrases and formulae so that talking to him could feel like consulting an oracle, first the gnomic pronouncement and then the interpretation. It took a special effort to even catch hold of his turned language—whatever he said about Jim’s spirits slipped entirely from my grasp—or to make him lift from his shelves of language an object he hadn’t offered a thousand times before.

Is someone picking up his mail? I said. Does he need anything from his apartment?

That’s all covered.

The closed door of the passive voice told me Jack was the one covering these matters, just as I knew, in that moment, that Jack was the one who had straightened Jim’s desk. 

Bills?

Taken care of.

I was asking these questions in a tonelessly pragmatic way as if to suggest that if things needed doing, I could, for their own sake, do such things. Even muted, my concern sounded fake to my ear. So it was in the nature of doubling down, I suppose, when I said, When are visiting hours? Jack was refilling the stacks of styrofoam cups, not looking at me, but I made a show of writing down his answer and double-underlining it for the sake of the third-person narrator. I was still wearing an earnest look when I exited the faculty lounge at the end of the scene.

I took part in several other episodes that week, some of which did not happen. Because these scenes arose to awareness unbidden, as if welling from the sump of my fears and desires, they possessed a truth that reality seemed designed to hide. In one I sped through every traffic camera on my drive to school, aware each time of incurring a ticket but unable to hold firmly enough onto the resolve not to speed to keep from speeding through the next camera and the next. In another, I climbed the stairs to the Bevolo priests’ residence, fell to my knees, and expressed a desire to become Catholic. Another, one I returned to many times to work its variations, went like this:

I am sitting at the picnic table in Audubon Park where Angela’s Sunday-morning run ends. (How I know when and where Angela runs is unexplained and leaves no mark on the scene.) I am turning a page of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows when Angela emerges from the shadow of the last live oak.

Hello, Mr. Wilkens, she says, walking a winded circle with hands on hips.

Hello, Ms. B—. I knew you were a runner. You’re in astonishing shape. 

I resist looking down at her legs, but I can see them by virtue of my being both first and third-person, character and narrator.

And I, she says, nodding at my book, would picture you doing exactly this on a Sunday morning.

Do you picture me?

I have. She pushes sweat across her forehead, eyes holding mine beneath the gesture.

I also picture you, I say. I shut the book and describe for her, in this imagined scene, the imagined scene in which she emerges from her apartment’s fragrant bathroom, dressed in a nightgown and smelling of lotion, and turns off the bedside lamp to join me under the covers. I describe for her with a simplicity possible only in imagined speech the way the shapes of her imagined body fit into mine. I tell her about the imagined supper with her daughter. (I do not reveal to jogging-Angela that my imagination has placed nightgown-Angela in a humble basement apartment to straiten her circumstances and give my presence the air of conferring a benefit. Nor is jogging-Angela—or of course nightgown-Angela—allowed awareness of all the things my imagination has erased beyond these circumscribed vignettes to make their clean sweetness possible: that is, my entire actual life.)

She sits down across the greened picnic table from me. Light through the oaks picks out the browns of her hair.

You’re very attractive, I say. You must find me repulsive.       

I find conventionally handsome men repulsive.

I pause in doubt of the verisimilitude of this remark, but Angela holds my gaze until I believe her.

I want to touch your hands, I say. But then I will want to touch your arms and those beautiful sunburned shoulders.

There were versions of this scene that turned carnal. But they were for a specific use, and I could sustain them only so long as the camera, so to speak, did not pull back to include my own actually repulsive self. 

She offers her hand. But I say, No. Let’s keep this metaphysical.

What do you suggest?

We could write to each other. Like Gerald Murnane does to his dark-haired girlfriend of the mind.

It seems Angela might never blink again as she says, I have reservoirs of unexpressed feeling.

Almost everything I feel, I say, is unexpressed.

Our letters will serve as our bodies.

In them, I say, we can have the nightgown and lamp. 

The moonlight streaming silver through the blinds.

Sunlight on those beautiful burnt shoulders.

My eye betrays me by falling to the indent of her collarbone.

Is this where things turn carnal? she asks.

No. Now you stand and walk away through that patch of sun.

Her eyes communicate a smile. She stands and walks toward the dapple. Here? she points.

A little to the left.

She is assumed into the glow. 

Perfect, I say.

Perfect.

It was difficult to feel virtuous about visiting Jim when I did so only to prove myself to some doubting Observer, but I got that settled in my mind and held to it to distract me from the anxiety of navigating Tulane University Medical Center’s claustrophobic garage and esophageal pedestrian bridge and disorienting maze of corridors, the message of which seemed to be that one might get deeply enough in to never get back out. It felt directed at me personally, like all impersonal threats.

Jim was in the Bone Marrow Unit, a phrase that hollowed my own bones as I looked in through its sliding security door and waited for admittance. The glass slid open, slid shut. Except for the mint of the nurses’ uniforms, it was a white world, white on hushed white. I signed a form attesting that I was not communicably ill and sighted Jim’s name on the closest door. The line of frosted institutional panes featuring the names of their occupants put me in mind of a professorial hallway or writers’ retreat, rooms consecrated to the special projects of their possessors.

I entered the room with an overloud greeting and walked through its echoes to Jim’s bedside. He struggled up from the deeps of sleep or medication, eyes growing slowly definite and finally finding me. A high table near his bed was heaped with propitiatory offerings, mostly books, from other visitors to this representative of our species exalted by his nearness to death or promoted to the post-human by virtue of the wires running into and out of him, by his assumption into hardware and software. I had brought my own gift, Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts. The Bone Marrow Unit’s hand-washing policy was revealed as superstition by their having allowed me to enter with the book, which had passed through who knew how many browsing hands at Barnes & Noble, paid host to uncounted coughs and sneezes.

I clutched the book in its paper bag as Jim described his treatments. Every detail sounded terrifying, but what interested me was Jim’s serenity, even contentment, as he related them. The contentment was genuine, and I thought I recognized in it the delight in passivity which I also share, the ecstasy of being left without choices in circumstances you cannot change. A person who, with agency, was a sniveler and coward could, when agency was removed, become an example of courage. Nurses entered to check this, adjust that. I relayed department news in a hard-bitten manner meant to signal that I would not patronize Jim because of his condition and perhaps also with the idea of offering him something bracing to clear the remaining glaze from his eyes. Jim received these news with the requisite canny expression, but the expression was put on, and from behind it he was watching my act with interest. I might have played the part convincingly had I ever once before discussed department matters with Jim, had I not in fact actively hidden all such back-room information from him as a way of making his job harder. What I hoped my manner communicated was that our work relationship took place inside a game whose rules were suspended now that he had been thrown from the field. I am unable to record any specific thing I said because I was conscious only of my tone of voice, its watery murmur behind my ears as it searched its way upstream. When I could stand the sound no longer, I gave Jim the Murnane with its freight of germs.

Border Districts features an elderly narrator, obviously Murnane himself though the book is subtitled “A Fiction,” combing through his image store to understand why his mind has retained the things it has, to investigate, as he phrases it, the life and death of mental entities. Murnane (I told Jim) writes in a shed-like outbuilding crowded with ranks of file cabinets in which he houses the documentary record of his existence. He also keeps there, I continued, what he calls his real work: not the fiction and autofiction of a dozen books but the daily results of imaginary horse races between invented syndicates, each with a name and livery and location in a country which Murnane has also invented and mapped. Every day, with his other work completed, Murnane divines the results of these races-in-the-mind by opening randomly a paperback novel kept for this purpose and obeying alphanumeric dictates of his own devising. 

Really, Jim exclaimed.

Think about that, I remarked in a tone meant to express that we, he and I, were in a position to denote such behavior a curiosity and enjoy it as such. A nurse and doctor entered, representing some unpleasant mission clearly implied by their pleasant, unhurried air. The nurse, while performing her part in the chitchat, situated a wheeled platform bedside and set atop it a transparent envelope containing a complex of other sealed items. When the doctor finally uttered the word biopsy, I rose with a sick feeling and, escaping the Bone Marrow Unit, realized that Jim had known why they were there—replaying those moments, I saw his left forearm readying itself for the stab—and that he had been conspiring in their light manner for my benefit.

**

Jim did not die, not yet. Nor did Angela take my hand in a stairwell and, looking into my eyes, whisper etc. I wrote my scenes-in-the-mind until I learned that Jim was being discharged and saw how I might supply a frame for this story even if what the frame enclosed was shapeless, gray, garbled.

At Jim’s complex, I parked in the same space as before. It was the first week of February in a world where winter was obsolete, making it not unpleasant to sit in a car on a lake of asphalt. The placelessness of the parking lot made it feel outside time and space, suspended. I opened my Harper’s to the faraway grumble of a jet plane.

Jack’s They’re releasing Jim tomorrow had, in the projection room of my mind, taken the form of Jim shuffling from the rear of an ambulance in hospital gown and white socks. This few seconds of bad imagination did not include any attendants or provide the means by which Jim had gotten from ambulance deck to ground. My mind had spat Jim out of a flashing machine alone and basically naked, without even a set of keys in hand to suggest that his pained limp had a destination. In actual fact—as I saw after Jack knocked on my window to wake me—Jim was wearing dress trousers and a tucked-in white oxford. I climbed out through my drowze, too disoriented to make an excuse for my presence, just as Jack was too in need of my help to ask why I was there.

So kind of you to come, Gary, Jim said from the passenger seat of Jack’s car, door open and one foot thrown out onto the pavement. His tone suggested that we needn’t be unduly bothered by the problem before us: how to get a man well above two hundred pounds and so weakened that he could not stand without assistance up onto his feet and into his home. There followed some twisting and tugging it would not be helpful to describe, our language turning formal to lend a compensatory dignity, and with a final Give us your hands, sir, we rise on three, we yanked Jim out of the vehicle. He watched the ground in front of him, waiting to believe in his legs. His body looked the same as before—the worst of the chemo came later—but his head seemed eerily smaller and not only because it was surrounded by all that bright air: its circumference had been reduced, his features smoothed and simplified, and I struggled to push the word corpselike from my mind.

The asphalt was very far below and very black as we set out. We had to convey Jim across the twenty feet or so to his door and then inside to whatever couch was waiting, but I could not imagine how after that he would get back and forth to the kitchen, the toilet, not to mention over and around the particolored heaps of his hoarded house. His footfalls between us were so unsure that I knew Jack could never have gotten Jim inside alone, which allowed me for a moment to enjoy the feeling of what it must be like to be Jack, a person with a unitary relationship to the necessary. At the threshold, Jack jiggered a key into the tumbler. The neighbor’s curtain twitched in fact or in imagination. I got my language ready for what I would see on the other side.

The door swung in. Light spilled out. The curtain at the rear of the apartment had been thrown open, and the glass doors blushed with sun. The apartment was small and unremarkable, as blandly neat as a unit staged by a realtor. There was an armchair we helped Jim into, a taupe couch where Jack and I sat, a glass table with a month of New Yorkers squared at its center. The adjoining kitchen was clean and empty. I tried to read Jim’s face for evidence that this was the home he knew or that its immaculate impersonality stunned him as much as it did me, that he was witnessing his own erasure in the disappearance of the clutter he had invested with his meaning, but he had lowered his face into the handkerchief he was using to wipe his brow.

Or perhaps the wet on his face was crying. I suppose I could write it either way. Just as I could believe either that Jack had cleared away Jim’s hoard and wiped the last stain off the walls and exposed the room to scouring light or that Jim’s apartment had always been a faceless, ascetic way station he inhabited as provisionally as a monk his cell. Either way is beautiful, and—now that he is gone—I can see that I have given him both and have treated both as true in my mind and heart.

Meanwhile, who can tell my clutter? Who will help me clean it out? 

Geoff Wyss’s book of stories, How, won the Ohio State University Prize in Short Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Image, Ecotone, Tin House, and others and has been reprinted in New Stories from the South and the Bedford Introduction to Literature. He teaches and lives in New Orleans.