Interior Design (6 page)

Bradley listened to his uncle's voice, so similar to his father's, and he eased into his aunt's anxious grip.
They
wanted to comfort him, even if his angel didn't. What Father Gregory had said was true: his angel wanted only to observe him and his thoughts. Suddenly he wanted to protect his aunt and uncle from this same fearsome angel that had kept him from his parents. Remembering the intense calm he had felt when detailing the potato chip, Bradley hoped that more such careful communications might appease his angel. Slowly pushing his aunt away, he began to silently describe the crinkled look of hurt on her face.

*

Bradley's aunt and uncle grew accustomed to the sight of him fingering the ridges of a lampshade, the interior of a mailbox, and since he rarely spoke they were puzzled by his almost constant paging through the dictionary. Aunt Lena ached for the sound of his voice, and whenever she touched Bradley his hesitant, endearing hug turned into a sudden breaking away, and she was left alone in a hall, the kitchen.

One afternoon as Bradley tried to sneak outside, his aunt called from the living room, “Where are you off to, Bradley?” He pretended not to hear, but when he pushed open the creaking screen door she said, “Would you like a little snack first?”

“No thanks,” he managed, though he was hungry.

Standing outside, he knew from the directions of the subtle, shifting winds that a storm was approaching. All those grasping branches above him shook and his hair swept across his forehead like the softest of touches. He bent down and thrust his hand into one of the last small piles of late snow. Its crystals were larger and harder than he expected. Then he squeezed some in his fist and felt the cold throb against his warmer skin. After the bit of snow dissolved, Bradley slowly swept his tongue over the lines of his palm, silently describing each ticklish ripple. The rain began to fall. Bradley stood there as it soaked his hair and drained down his face, its taste vaguely metallic against his parted lips, and he recorded scrupulously how his increasingly wet clothes matted against him, how an oddly pleasurable chill spread over his body.

Aunt Lena dropped the cauliflower she was washing in the sink when she glanced out the window and saw Bradley standing drenched in the middle of the backyard, his face turned up into the rain. She ran outside, wailing his name.

That night Lena and her husband sat beside Bradley's bed, alarmed at their feverish nephew's smile while he touched his forehead carefully with his fingers, as if for the first time. When Bradley recovered three days later, Uncle George bought him a bicycle. They sat together in the driveway and attached baseball cards to the spokes for an intricate, ratchety sound, and Uncle George patiently ignored those unnerving moments when his nephew sat still, his eyes distant, his hands working at nothing.

But Bradley was rarely at home. Instead he ranged through the neighborhood, discovering the patterned silences between birdcalls, the new green shoots and their clusters of buds within buds. Dizzy and oppressed by the seemingly endless supply of the world, he doubted he could ever chronicle it all for his angel, and one evening, while listening to his uncle's faraway voice calling him, Bradley stood transfixed beneath an evergreen tree lit by a street lamp. In the odd light its needles were an unearthly green. Detailing the ascending, branched pattern of the thin needles, which resembled an odd spiral staircase, he realized that the convoluted spaces between the branches were passages for the wind. But he could only see these spaces by looking at the branches, which in turn held no pattern without the surrounding emptiness, and Bradley was reminded of his own invisible, complementary presence.

*

After years of plumbing the hidden corners of dictionaries, words had become for Bradley exquisite bearers of comfort, yet by high school the frequent sight of boys and girls necking furtively in the school hallways filled him with a strange longing for which there were no words. He found brief solace in gym class, deftly kicking a soccer ball that seemed to float endlessly in the air before suddenly eluding the goalie, or exulting in a basketball's intricate, rhythmic music as he sped down the court.

Despite his sometimes unnerving solitude a few girls thought he was cute; Debby Wickers, who seemed to always appear by his hall locker, adjusting the pile of books under her arm, thought he was handsome. But after so often standing nearby with nothing to say or do, Debby was almost ready to give up on Bradley ever acknowledging her.

One day Bradley pressed his hands against the side of his locker door and mutely described the touch of metal and how its edges are almost sharp enough to cut—anything to avoid facing the girl who always stood so close to him, to suppress his curiosity about her constancy. But when he heard the sound of her patient sigh, there was something final in it that made Bradley turn and look at her steady dark eyes, her thick brown hair. “What's your name?” he asked, so quietly, and Debby felt he was staring at her face as if he were trying to memorize it.

The next evening he was at Debby's house, helping her with algebra. They sat on the carpet in her room, books open and paper scattered, while her parents called up regularly to ask how their homework was coming along. Bradley stammered out the solutions to the problems, and Debby was pleased—his nervousness was so flattering. When she had enough of answers she already knew, she stretched out on the floor, yawned, and then glanced up at Bradley. The night before she had made a long distance call to her sister in college. “Let him take off just one thing,” her sister had said. “He'll be chained to you after that, he'll want to know what's under the rest of your clothes.” Debby put her hand on his knee and smiled before she turned away.

Bradley wanted to touch the back of her neck where her dark hair seemed to burst out of nowhere, but he was at the center of an invisible stage, his curious angel the audience. Debby looked over her shoulder and reached for Bradley. Though he knew he shouldn't touch her, he tried to convince himself that her beckoning hand had just waved his angel away. He tentatively stroked her wrist and she snuggled against him. Instead of pushing her away, he gently touched Debby's neck and she arched her back. After a long moment he finally cupped his hand and slowly placed it over a breast, the cloth of her blouse softly tickling his palm.

Bradley let Debby lead his hands to one button after another until the thought of his angel, capable of anything, returned. Debby saw his face blank over. Shocked that he was resisting what she offered, she coaxed him into unfastening her belt, and before long she forgot everything her sister had advised.

When Debby was finally, stunningly exposed beside him, Bradley felt the habitual urge to describe what he saw.
Never
any privacy,
never
alone? he thought. He closed his eyes, refusing to explicate Debby, but already he could sense the presence of an angry, invisible hand. “No!” Bradley shouted, “No!” Debby sat up, frightened by Bradley's cries, by the sound of steps up the stairs. The door to her room opened. Debby held her skirt against her, but she could tell from her father's brief, horrified glance that he could see right through it. And then he was after Bradley, who was still shouting, his eyes still closed.

*

In college Bradley majored in Accounting and immersed himself in long spreadsheets, half hoping that his angel would eventually grow bored by the regularity of numbers. But that intimate presence had become a habit he couldn't cast out; Bradley sometimes wondered if Father Gregory had felt this way. He tried to remember the Father's long-ago words but could only see his lips moving: a silent, distant performance.

He always sat by himself in the dormitory dining hall, tired from programming long columns of audits and inventories, and though he was proud of his secret eloquence, Bradley listened with envy to the chaotic accumulation of speech and laughter that rose and fell in the large hall. He understood grimly that he had forgotten how to talk to other people, and he tried to imagine how his voice might sound as part of those alien give-and-take rhythms. But he spoke directly to no one, for he was afraid
not
to believe in his angel's possessive will, and when he felt words brimming up he panicked: he released them as sudden laughter, great huffing gulps of sound that held no happiness.

Soon Bradley couldn't stop these cheerless bursts, and he began to haunt the local comedy club whenever he felt the need to speak. Sitting alone at the bar, he held back a welter of words and hoped his awkward laughter blended in with the hearty convulsions of the strangers around him. He stared at the rows of bottles lined up beneath the mirror, those almost transparent bodies filled with clear or strangely colored liquids: how he envied the way they could be so easily emptied.

One night he arrived for the Open Mike Spotlight, the least entertaining show of the week, and he had to endure long stretches before he could join in with any appreciative guffaws and snorts. Yet he couldn't stop watching the painfully amateur failures who grasped at even the most modest reward from the audience. That night's barmaid, frightened by his desolate laughter, considered refusing him another beer—whatever tormented the poor guy, no drink would drown it.

Finally, after a middle-aged man's ten-minute repertoire of personal noises, the MC announced “Last call.” Bradley finished his beer, edged off his stool, and was alarmed to discover he was walking toward the stage. He wanted to stop, but he felt the same as when that roller coaster had started its slow climb and there was no turning back. He stepped into the spotlight, absolutely uncertain of himself. As he adjusted the mike he listened to the loud, amplified crunks, the murmur of distant and unfamiliar voices. They were waiting, listening, and Bradley remembered his parents' funeral, when he had been the mute center of everyone's attention. His throat constricted—if he didn't speak right now he might never speak again. A few people in the audience began to applaud ironically.

“Better be careful,” Bradley heard himself say, “God doesn't like irony.” Where is
this
coming from? he thought, but more words rose up and he released them. “Irony introduces ambiguity, which undermines the power of God's Word, and His punishment is the Angel of Irony.”

There were a few hoots, and the MC began to edge toward the stage. They think I'm a fanatic, a crank, Bradley realized with alarm. “No, wait,” he said, “I'm only trying to be helpful. You see, the Angel of Irony is drawn to irony but, ironically enough, can't understand it. Maybe one day that angel will float nearby when you say something like, ‘It sure would be great to live in this little dump for the rest of my life.' Then it'll grant you your wish and you'll be stuck in that dump no matter what you try to do.”

Bradley paused, struck by the fluidity of his strange thoughts and the booming sound of his amplified voice. He looked out at the audience, their faces pale disks in the dark. Were they waiting for a punch line? He had none, so he plunged on.

“And what about your personal angel? There's one sitting right beside you now and yet somehow taking up no space at all. Since an angel has no substantial presence it can compress itself to the size of a synapse, can follow the extraordinarily swift and winding ways of a thought. But it must have
some
weight: imagine that this extra bit of almost nothing attaches to a memory or the beginning of a thought and subtly alters its forward motion, veering it, however slightly, to another neuron. Could our daily indecisions,” he continued, exhilarated, “be the contrast between what we truly want and where our concentrated knot of angel has taken us? Maybe we're compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they're attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.”

The audience was terribly quiet, but Bradley felt more words forming and he could hold nothing back. “It's late. Maybe you'd like to leave, right now, and get away from all my idiotic words, but your angel swerves you away from such a thought. Your angel is vain. Trained by a life of eavesdropping, it can't resist listening to such delicious talk. And maybe it's anticipating the pleasure, when everyone applauds, of its transparent body fluttering in the small explosions of the surrounding air.”

Finally emptied, Bradley felt almost weightless, actually released from that burrowing presence, and this purging was pleasurable, a loss that was simultaneously gain. But then the oppressive need to describe returned, and he couldn't help listening carefully to the applause, that indecisive clapping of hands that was both restrained and enthusiastic, conveying at the same time curiosity, appreciation, and resistance.

*

Although no one could really call his monologues comedy, Bradley became a regular at the club, and soon he was known informally as the Angel Man. Ignoring the clink of glasses, the whoosh of the tap at the bar, he held on to the microphone stand as if it tethered him to the stage, and the intensity of his concentration quieted the occasional heckler. He was immediately filled with words that metamorphosed into phrases and sentences, hungry for that exhausted moment after a performance when, briefly emptied of his angel, he had to clutch the plush curtain backstage and ease into its swaying.

But often his eloquence didn't seem his own, and Bradley suspected that his angel was confessing its inexplicable qualities. “Consider this,” Bradley found himself saying one evening, “since an angel has no voice, it assumes the vocal inflections of its human companion, and what we sometimes believe to be private thoughts are actually communications from our angels.” Yet as he listened to himself—or was it to his angel?—Bradley wondered if he might be able to pour out all those words inside until they couldn't be replenished, if one night he might finally be deserted.

He returned to the club as often as possible, pushing his impromptu inventions and never repeating himself. “Imagine how different angels are from us,” he said one evening, “because what we can't do without, angels don't need: food, clothes, houses, doorways, or cars….” For one dizzy moment Bradley had nothing to say, and he was filled with a wild thought: Could this really be the last emptying?