Fantastic Metropolis

Sometimes when Matt looked at his son, particularly during those strange days after Ellie’s funeral, he wondered where the young boy had disappeared, the young boy he and Ellie had chased around the rooms of Matt’s now empty and echoing apartment. Where was that single day, that briefest of pauses between what has been for so very long and what will now be forever more, that solitary heartbeat when Richard stopped being a boy and stretched out for manhood and all the things it carried with it?

If he were he able to go back to live through his life again but this time pay far more attention to even the most seemingly insignificant things, would Matt spot that moment? Would he be able to discern some change in the lines on his son’s face, see some dawning of higher intellect in the boy’s eyes, like the gradual dissipation of milky cataracts washed away by a magical healing fluid?

Matt wondered if everyone had a moment like Christopher Milne when, as Milne—then Christopher Robin—did in the final story of his father’s two Pooh books, he or she became disenchanted with childhood things (not least a one-time favorite teddy bear), and discarded them in favor of a future beckoning on a distant horizon shot through with the burnished reds and golds of a New Dawn and all its myriad opportunities.

When Matt had first read that story, ‘The Enchanted Place’, to the then seven- or eight-year-old Richard, while Ellie bustled in the kitchen preparing supper, his son’s eyes had misted over in tune with his own suddenly cracked and quavering voice, picking up the aching sadness of Christopher Robin’s fumbling attempt at explaining to Pooh that he was not able—or even inclined—to spend as much time with the bear in the future.

Now the book was filed on one of the shelves in the apartment, dusty from years of being left alone, and the boy that had listened and wept silently was also filed away, deep in the recesses of the adult he had become. Now, all Richard could think about was making sure the guy who ran into his mother’s Mustang II paid… and paid dearly.

As far as Matt was concerned, what the hell did it matter what the guy got? Ellie was dead. She’d be no less dead if they chopped off the guy’s nuts and fed them to him on Cable television. And she would be no more dead if they gave him the keys to the city and this week’s winning lottery ticket.

Matt was glad when Richard and Sandra went home, 3 November, early in the morning, with the day shining bright and oblivious of the dramas unfolding everywhere in the city, everywhere in every city in the world. Matt made an apologetic refusal to Sandra’s invitation to go with them and spend a few weeks in Farmington, saying he needed to come to terms with Ellie’s death and staying in the apartment was the only way to do that, Richard not repeating the offer, the shrew-faced dental receptionist air-kissing the side of Matt’s face, a self-confident off-Broadway starlet, saying ‘You give us a call now if you want anything, okay Dad?’, her name for him sounding silly and affected, speaking to Matt like he was the child she’d never had and never would have.

The apartment seemed to settle once again when they’d left, seemed to rest and grow easy, breathe out in relief. If an apartment could unbuckle its belt and flop down on a couch, Matt’s would have done it then, lifting its skirting boards and letting rip a mighty one with the sound of the Toyota Four Wheel revving up out on the street, Matt waving from the window once, seeing his son return the wave as the car pulled away from the curb, Sandra saying something, Matt seeing her mouth move… like she was chewing peanuts, Richard saying something back to her, things about him, Matt… things Matt would never know about, and banging his fist into his chest while he called names at some driver who didn’t do exactly as he wanted.

The resulting silence in the apartment was absolute and reflective.

It was as though Ellie was still there, sitting in her favorite chair, shaking her head at the TV guide, sitting behind him, pretending she was reading but secretly watching him wave out of the window at their son, too tired… too exhausted to come and stand alongside him. He could feel her regret like an oppressive summer heat, a sentient thing.

There had been times during that first week on his own when Matt could smell Ellie’s perfume wafting along the warm breezes that moved from room to room. There were times, too, in that part-horrible and strangely part-magical time between worlds—between lives—when he had unashamedly spoken to her, told her what he was doing… tried to explain to her memory how much he missed her and all her little ways. And always in his head he could hear her voice, telling him that she knew. Calling him Matty—Ellie’s name for him—and saying it was swell where she was. Swell. One of Ellie’s words… but Matt knew that it wasn’t Ellie saying it. He knew that it was only himself, putting words into his dead wife’s mouth.