“Brandon. Omigawd, Brandon.
That man is choking.”
Brandon looked up from his salad, not hearing the words but alerted by
the frantic tone of his wife’s whisper. Her wide eyes looked at
him, expectant, from out of the violent blue of her eyeshadow. “Uh,”
he said. Sure enough, the man two tables over was going through
an extraordinary pantomime, arms flailing, great gasping sounds coming from
his throat, while the woman across from him half-stood, hands raised to
her face and pulling down on her lips, eyes staring. Brandon regarded
the scene dully, mouth hanging open a little. He noted with interest
how the water in the man’s glass shimmered in the light every time the man
bumped the table.
“Do something, Brandon. Omigawd, he’s choking. Dintchya take
that class.” Brandon had indeed taken that class, for just such
an occasion as this. His wife had made him.
“Help,” the woman was saying, beginning
to shout. “Somebody help! My husband is choking!” Heads turned;
chairs scraped; a fork clattered on a plate. Brandon noticed how
the woman’s satin dress, a deep cool blue, rumpled in light and shadow
and how one of her earrings shone and glittered with a rainbow of colors.
His wife was hitting the table, was hitting his arm. “Brandon.
Help that man.” Brandon seemed to wake up suddenly. “Uh,” he
said. A tide rose inside him, which would in a moment wash over his
limbs, and he would leap up from the table: to the rescue. Brandon
stayed still. The tide fell away and then rose again, this time tripping
the switch of his arm and making it jump a little where it lay on the table.
His head began to pound and he could see the pulsing blotchy redness of the
blood that pumped through his eyes.
Then a sandyhaired man wearing a red sweater yelled, “I took a class,”
and ran to the choking man. Brandon watched him take the man under
the arms and give him a thud under the ribcage. Another. Brandon’s
wife stared, cheeks quivering. Brandon was breathing hard and staring
at the man with the red sweater and thinking you bastard. You bastard
as the choking man received a final thud and something gristly sailed
out of his mouth and onto the table.
On
the drive home they were silent. Brandon’s wife stared straight ahead,
arms folded. The pale blue streetlights slid over Brandon’s face
while his thoughts growled and muttered. In his fury he cut off the
car behind him and his wife shrieked “Omigawd” and clutched at him.
They pulled into the driveway, gravel crunching under the tires; an orange
cat jumped off the porch steps and bounded silently away. He shut off
the engine and sat there, looking straight ahead at the moonlight on their
white door. His wife sat there too, waiting for him, then glanced annoyedly
at his blank face and with a grunt opened got out and went inside the house.
After a little while Brandon went inside too, went to his room, got undressed
in the dark, and got into bed beside his wife. He lay on his back,
staring at the ceiling, eyes uncomfortably dry. Soon his wife began
to snore and finally he fell into an uneasy sleep.
He dreamed that he was seated at a restaurant table with his wife and
the man with the red sweater. She was indistinct except for the
burning glare of her eyeshadow, which suffused her entire face.
The man smiled and said It’s okay and put his hand on Brandon’s
head. Brandon said Argh and jerked away and fell back in
his chair and hit the floor and woke up. The clock said 5:36 in
red numbers.
He rolled over and fell back asleep. When he woke up again it was
almost ten, and his wife was not in bed.
He padded across the hallway’s beige carpeting and into the kitchen,
where his wife sat with a glass of juice and a lurid-looking paperback.
He poured some coffee and sat down with a newspaper. “That cat
is back again,” she said flatly, not looking up. The orange cat
was peering in through the porch window. Brandon opened the door
and said “Shoo” and waved his arms. The cat looked him in the eyes
with something like pity, and twitched an ear back and forth. It
stood that way for a little while – just long enough to show its own autonomy
in the matter – then turned (eyes flashing red in a trick of the light) and
leaped noiselessly off the porch as it had done the previous night.
Irritated, Brandon sat back down with his newspaper and turned the crossword.
Across: 1. Red hue. Scarlet; too long. Sweater.
Sweater?…Dream. Argh. He pushed the paper away and drank
coffee with a slightly shaky hand. His wife looked up from her novel.
“We need eggs,” she said. “I’m making quiche.” Brandon said
“Sure,” and put on some street clothes and shoes and went out the door.
The drive to the supermarket; early morning sun. Wellcut lawn and
tidy houses passed by quietly; Brandon turned on the radio and something
cool and soft began to play. He breathed deep. Okay,
he thought. Wisps of cloud, lit up brightly by the sun, hung motionless
in the sky. He pulled into a parking spot and got out.
The electric doors slid open smoothly, letting out cool wafts of supermarket
air. An expanse of rows filled with stacked and sorted goods met
his eyes, and the order of them pleased him. Dairy and produce, all
the way down on the left. An entire wall of white milk jugs and squares
of cheese and soft cardboard eggboxes, all lit by the long straight fluorescent
bulbs. They buzzed sleepily. He selected his eggs: grade A,
white, medium.
Am I forgetting something?
The fluorescent light flickered.
Brandon turned. The man with the red sweater was pushing a shopping
cart and reaching over to squeeze a tomato, like some housewife out of
a fifties commercial. He looked over his shoulder and caught Brandon’s
eye, smiling pleasantly. Inside Brandon’s head something went snap.
“You!” he shouted, and lunged for the man, upsetting the case of tomatoes:
they spilled and bounced around the floor, an avalanche of round shiny
red. Brandon squashed them underfoot and went for the man’s throat.
“You stole it,” he yelled. “You stole it. You stole it.”
He was so absorbed and intent that he did not notice the blue-uniformed
security men who came up and took him from behind.