Fantastic Metropolis

It was all so real until my own eye happened to catch sight of the girl with the red hair. I perused her ham from my passing car and speculated as to where she was always so purposefully off to. The next thing I knew, I was in front of my class, carrying on with little conviction about the sublime and the beautiful and the intersection of future present and perfect past. My gracious students understood the absurdity of it, but they held their tongues. Eventually my words petered out and I sat at my desk, putting my head down on my folded arms.

Then, I wasn’t sure if I daydreamed it or I actually heard it, but my name came slithering through the room on a whisper. I looked up but could not see him back there in the last row, his face blocked by the plastic heads in the front of the room, but I did see his foot in the aisle, tapping slowly. “Forte,” he said, “do you remember?”

I nodded and that was enough of an answer for him. “Do you know why you are here?” he asked like a shower of chalk dust.

“I work here,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Because of some sin, I suppose.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he said, his voice melting into a bronchial laughter that mimicked the breathing of my sons. “What does the universe care about sin?”

“Then why?” I asked.

His foot stopped tapping in the aisle.

“Forte,” he said after a long silence.

“I’m still here,” I said.

“Would you like to go back? Would you like not to feel that certain, shall I say, undertow?”

“I don’t know which is worse,” I said, “the forgetting or the remembering.”

“I can make you forget the forgetting,” he said.

“I can take you back to where you had been. This will all be just a moment’s lapse of clarity in a bright day.”

“Who are you?” I asked and got up and walked down the aisle. The manikin was back in place where he had been sitting. Then I heard the classroom door close.

This afternoon my older son brought home from school a photograph of himself holding his student of the month certificate. His round face was rounder with a closed mouth smile that held back pride. He had the certificate across his chest and his legs were spread in a perfect V. “Do you love this?” he asked.

I told him three times how much I did.

“Then, it’s yours,” he said and handed it to me.

“We’ll have to get a frame,” I said.

“We’ve been in school a hundred and sixty-five days,” he told me, “and my snowflake hasn’t fallen once.”

I gave Wood a bath out in the backyard with the hose while the kids messed around in their plastic wading pool. Bill came to the back fence and asked me if I would hold the extension ladder for him so he could pull some bird’s nests down from the eaves of his house. I held it and he hobbled up thirty feet and started dislodging handfuls of hay and twigs, shredded spittle stick filters and bits of string. It rained down dreamlike. But right in the middle of the slow falling—plop, plop, plop, three sightless baby birds hit the ground like ripe fruit.

I took the kids inside before Bill dug a hole with the shovel. I watched from the fence as he scooted them, writhing and chirping, into their grave.

“This is really fucked,” he said, shaking his head, and then he put the dirt in. We heard them from underground and so did their mother, who now had landed in the lilac and was frantically calling for them. “I oughta kill her too,” he said, stepping down on the spot, “but then where would it end?”

My wife came home from work as I was serving dinner. She had just heard on the car radio that Rasuka had vanished. We ate quickly, and then got the kids ready. We went down to the river like everyone else and just stood there staring at the spot where the head of the Colonel had sat forever. I didn’t see anyone in shock. We all just started talking about the Colonel, telling Colonel stories. Right in the middle of it, I had a fleeting ancient memory of cooking marshmallows at a barbecue. It was late when we left and the kids chased fireflies on the way home.

After the boys were asleep, my wife and I sat outside in the lawn chairs, staring at the sky. She had a glass of wine and I had a beer. I was smoking a spittle stick, blowing rings.

“Colonel Rasuka,” I said.