Vertical Odds

“If you count the number of bolts holding up the sides of a bathroom stall wall, you usually find an odd number – three, five, once I saw nine. But if you find some kind of object or hanging – you know, like curtains – they’re embedded with evens, usually two, four, six is good for longer windows. The vertical odds and the horizontal evens. They make the world. They harbor it. And, sometimes, they fuck it up a little.”

His name was Vernon Kraig and he lectured on the world and other things he didn’t really understand. Sometimes he blinked hard and then the room would spin a little – his mind a multidirectional amalgam of foci. But usually he landed back at home, back at the kitchen table, back in his brown hair and blue eyes and Kaufmann’s suit jacket. Linda stood mere feet away, but on a different plane.

Linda was his wife and had a nose that wobbled just a bit when she smiled, as if it was attached to her face by a staple. She had an intense stare and thickly heeled shoes. Her cheek bones were jagged and rose nearly to the breaking point of her tied-back hair bun.

“That’s what I told them today,” said Vernon. “I told them that and they loved it.”

Linda wiped her nose with the free hand that wasn’t washing dishes. She peeked at Vernon and saw him gesture outwards with his free hand that wasn’t reading the New Yorker. With a gentle shrug, she went back to a blue porcelain dish with some kind of cheese stain holding on like a hungry baby pig.

“Not convinced?”

She wiped her heel against the carpet twice. “I guess I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get?” asked Vernon, a defensive vein working its way around his free hand.

“Numbers, organization – life likes to fuck with them. That’s what I said.”

“Did you need to use that word?”

“They can handle it,” said Vernon, directing his attention back to his magazine. “Preschoolers don’t get MFAs. Often.”

Linda ignored the comment like his pretensions and scraped the cheese off with a knife.

Vernon stood outside the nursing home and tilted his head every number of degrees his neck could handle. Every time he watched the fountains, the wheelchairs, the nurses, his mind turned them into some kind of portrait. The colors ran together and dripped off the frame. Once or twice this happened with his class and he had to excuse himself momentarily. He told them he had to shit.

“I have to shit,” said Vernon’s dad, Gabe, humbly contained within his wheelchair. He was snuggled up, wrinkled out, a deflated soccer ball. His glasses were just for decoration.

Vernon glanced down at Gabe and added him to the pinks and yellows of the building facades in his nursing home portrait. Then, the temptation that had dictated his existence from the days he lectured to teddy bears reentered him.

“Linda…she’s been…I don’t know…” said Vernon, “Rough.”

“Did you hear me?” announced Gabe, before watching Vernon’s spinning glare and turning his disheveled body into a resigned one. “You know how she gets.”

The grass surrounding the home stretched infinitely with hues of green and brown mixed in with fallen leaves. Vernon’s hands rested firmly in his jacket pockets and his plaid scarf itched his neck just a little. An old couple on walkers passed by on the left and the woman coughed. The old man reached for her hand, but stopped halfway and returned it to his handle.

Gabe watched Vernon’s legs wiggle with dying spirit. “Interpret.”

Vernon’s vision blurred – a flashback was starting, but it quickly blended back into reality. He turned to watch the old couple walk away.

“I…I don’t know,” said Vernon, lowering his eyes to a crinkled leaf. “She doesn’t get the lectures…”

The bedroom was blue. The carpeting matched the bed sheets matched the curtains matched the adjacent half bath. Linda was curled up with Vogue and had her upper right lip placated into a downward drag. Vernon wore his furry brown robe and his reading glasses, because he thought that’s what he was supposed to.

He sat down next to Linda and slid his slippers under the king size. He stared at the digital clock at the end table, which was neither a real table nor at the end of anything. The almost-ottoman was more toward the door, adjacent to a deluxe tropical fish tank housing one fish.

A Pissarro knockoff hung crookedly above the desk in the other corner. Vernon stood up to fix it, but stopped halfway and scratched the back of his hand. “Seventy-three died this week. At the home. They said it was a new record.”

Linda imagined herself picking up the phone to call Guinness. “It’s a big home.”

Vernon rotated away from Pissarro and watched Linda breathe slowly and turn a page. She licked her lips when she did, as if her fingers were so nimble at turning, her tongue didn’t know what to do.

“I’m a mess,” said Vernon.

“You’re a mess,” said Linda.

“I’m lost,” said Vernon.

“You’re lost,” said Linda.

And Vernon quickly fixed the Pissarro, but overshot the mark so it hung crookedly in a new way. With a nod, he turned and walked toward his wife, gathering the loose sheets and organizing himself along the bed. As he lay, his eyes stopped blinking.

“There’s an organization to everything, with defined sections – once I thought I saw a piece of it leaving a student, when I was helping him with an essay on Faulkner,” said Vernon, instantly continuing. “It’s like if you’re arranged in an order other than the one prescribed from the beginning, you disband, and run, frightened.”

“You’re fri…,” said Linda.

“And it made me tilt my head, diagonally, at him. He knew Faulkner, but he couldn’t view it in any way worth viewing. It was as if he was decimating the figure when he was explaining him, and he couldn’t handle it.”

Linda folded over the back cover of Vogue and watched the smoke from the perfume ad fall off the edges. She set down the magazine, turned off a light, and told a man whose eyes stopped blinking to fall asleep.

Gabe’s bedroom was far from blue. It was nothing but pastel and the air smelt thick. Gabe was attached to a drip, with a plug in his left nostril. He looked the same as always, but with a faint brightness in the upper portion of one of his eyes. A nurse watched on, eyeing the old man and the way his leathery skin rubbed against Vernon’s hand. Vernon sat at the side, touching Gabe, but staring out the window at the crisp spirit. The nurse smirked and exited.

Gabe tugged on the drip and pulled it out of his arm. He nudged Vernon, who left the outside for the remnants of the world.

Vernon reached for the drip and attempted to reattach it. Each failure added frustration. His futility left him dizzy, but he kept trying until Gabe finally smacked his hand away.

Vernon sat back a little and Gabe threw the cord from the IV behind his bedpost. Gabe and Vernon watched each other as minutes passed. For Gabe, there was no response. For Vernon, there was no vertigo.

Finally, Gabe closed his eyes and listened to the pastels. It was a noisy image, riddled with moments of gunshots and bells. His head scraped against the edge of the pillow and his eyes reopened. Vernon was no longer at his side, but wheeling the IV across the room, far from where it could cause any damage.

This time, as Vernon felt his father breathing, he remembered the classroom filled with students, all at attention, all engaged, all participating. There were four seats in each horizontal row and five in each vertical. A couple were void of students. Vernon took a pen and drew a circle on the blackboard. The class reacted and Vernon set the pen down while they took it all in. He scanned the rows of students and landed on an empty desk. And, somehow, it got emptier.

Gabe looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Vernon reached for a blanket at the end of Gabe’s bed and rolled it up until the old man’s legs were fully covered.

Vernon moved forward three steps, reached in, and hugged Gabe. Gabe watched the way the ceiling fell into pieces and rubbed the edges of the room.

“I’m an idiot,” said Vernon.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” said Gabe.

Vernon stood in the kitchen while Linda sat in the living room.

From the second step on the stoop leading between the two, Vernon examined the way Linda rubbed her ankle slightly when she noticed him staring at her. He wanted to tell her about soreness and Gabe and equilibrium.

Linda could tell he was dying to reach out. She stood up and took a step toward him, but crossed her arms. She looked up at her husband.

“I…I have to say something,” she said, adjusting her bun.

Immediately, and without thinking, Vernon took two steps down from the kitchen and stood right across from Linda, face to face.

“It’s over,” she said.

And she went on to elaborate. And for the first and last time, Vernon heard her.