deathlings.com: The Cuckoo in the Clock

The Cuckoo in the Clock
by Brett Alexander Savory and Paul Tremblay

I don't remember his dog's name, but she's a she, and her name is something that's silly for a German Shepherd, something like Fifi or Princess or Cupcake. I'm glad I forget.

We're in an alley. One with restaurant dumpsters and all those empty, droopy clotheslines hanging above, like some giant spider blew its web-wad and then split. The alley walls sweat garbage and are always slick with water and mold, even if it hasn't rained for weeks.

We stand facing each other, and close, closer than most dance partners. He's a whole head shorter than me, but I still see his yellow teeth and I know they want to smile even when he's being serious.

I turn to watch her, his dog that is, that nameless, skinny cur with patches of pink skin peeking through her mangy coat. She's running circles around us.

I say, "Then who is responsible?" She's whining and her circles are getting tighter and faster. I'm thinking about how I want to pet and care for and love the poor thing. But I'm also thinking about how I might just scream and scream and scream if it so much as brushes against my leg.

He sticks a foot out and tries to trip her. But she avoids it, jumping sideways.

She stops running, drops her ears and tail, cowering into a squat, and then she pisses.

He backs up toward a black skeleton staircase and says, "If you don't know, if you don't remember, then I can't help you." His face is a pitted fruit. Off-color and unrecognizable.

The dog moves slow, eyes and muzzle pointed at her master. She didn't piss all that much, but the squirt-puddle is dark. It's tinged with blood.

I say, "You have to help me." And yeah, I say it like I remember who this guy is, like I know what I'm doing here.

There's a breeze pushing through the alley like a blast from one of those bathroom hand-dryers, electric and unhealthy and with that dirty/funny I've-been-in-the-bathroom-too-long taste.

I look down. The dog's sniffing her bloody piss, then lapping it up. Three quick tongue strokes and it's gone.

Phone's ringing across town. And there's Gramps to pick it up. I picture the old guy shuffling across the floor, stepping around his shitty dog, what's-her-face. He's wheezing, heart hammering, like it's the most important phone call he'll ever get. And maybe it is.

"I don't have a grandson. And I don't appreciate that kind of language. Who is this?"

"I'm sorry, Gramps. But you know I miss you, don't you? You know that, right? I miss you like someone's tearing my ticker in two. You do know, right? Right?"

Gramps is quiet. This really is my grandfather's phone number. A lot of things I've forgotten, but his number isn't one of them.

"You still there, Gramps? I love you, okay? I mean, I love you so much. I wish things were different between us. I wish . . ."

And my voice falters, cracks. I'm all choked up and no place to go. But Gramps just stays quiet.

Finally: "Leave me alone, do you hear?" And his voice isn't cracking with tears. He isn't all choked up. He sounds like he hates me.

"But Gramps, come on, remember when I was young, real young, and you'd bounce me on your lap and tell me--"

"Bullshit!" He's wheezing like hell now. And it's true. It is bullshit. Gramps never bounced me on his lap, but these are the kinds of things grandfathers are supposed to do.

But there's no disconnection. I still hear him wheezing. The line is dead, but Gramps is still with me, right here, in my ear. Puffing. I hear him shuffling across the floor, back to his ratty old chair, flicking on the tube to catch the last half of Wheel of Fortune.

I close my eyes. Missing my grandfather. That ornery son of a bitch. I love him and I wish he were here with me so I could touch him, feel his withered, bony hands, nothing but two fat liver spots waving around at the ends of his arms.

We loved each other. We had fun together. But now he won't talk to me. Maybe because something happened with her. Or maybe not. I don't fucking know.

Gramps shuffles around in my head, wheezing, talking to himself all day, all night. Trying to catch his breath. Trying to get any breath at all, because he's been dead for three years.

I'm back in the alley with the pissy-blood-lickin' dog, with that guy--maybe someone's grandfather--talking riddles, grinding bullshit through his teeth, with that hot wind blowing around the clothes on the line, wafting, wavering, fluttering like my memory, like my sense of safety.

He--Mr. Yellow-teeth, Mr. Pitted-fruit-face--says, "I shouldn't do this," and he fishes inside his coat pocket.

I just stand and wait. He roots around his jacket like he's digging for gold. He knows something I don't. He's a small, small man, but he's keeping a big, big secret from me.

Gramps knew. Gramps knew all about men like him. Gramps is wheezing in my head again, whispering something to me, maybe trying to tell me the little man's secret, but I can't make it out. Can never make it out.

For the first time since I started coming to this alley, I notice that Gramps and this old fucker, whoever he is, look a little alike. Could be brothers, if you saw them both standing side-by-side in an old black-and-white photo. A grainy, washed out, black-and-white photo, sure, but the resemblance is definitely there.

"Ah, here it is," he says. He pulls something out of the dumpster; it's real small and palmed in his hand, like he's some cheap magician. That fuck. He knows who did this to me. He knows who took away my wife and everything else.

"Take a look. A good look. A long look. Whatever kind of look you need, son." He extends his arm up and out, holding his prize up to my face like some toy police badge.

He's holding a picture of my wife. She's standing in the alley. This alley. It's a close-up of her face but the alley background is clearly visible. There's the alley wall and there's the short wrought-iron staircase with its five steps hanging right below a grimy exit-door, and it's all behind her. There are some of these droopy clotheslines above her head, too.

I look down for a second. One goddamn second. I need that one-one-thousand count to keep it together. And I notice the dog's stopped moving. She's curled up around the old guy's feet. Eyes closed. Not sure if she's still breathing.

The guy hasn't moved his arm. The picture is still stuck in my mug, so close that I taste my Rubin-laced breath bouncing off the plastic and chemicals. So I dive back into the picture. And yeah, my wife's still there. And she's all teeth. Mouth wide and teeth bared like some fucking jungle snake ready to strike. But the thing of it is, when I take the long hard look that the old guy wants me to, I can't tell what she's doing in the picture.

"Jesus, man!" the guy says. "You do know when this picture was taken, don't you? Don't you?"

And no, I don't know. So I don't say anything and push the photo away, as much as I want to rip it out of his hands and stuff it down his throat.

He says, "I can't just give it all to you." And I know he's teasing. Like always.

He says, "You have to earn it." And I know he's trying to get me to do something I'll regret.

When I look down at the hand holding the photo--trying to look at anything but that fucking picture--I see that his liver spots are the same as Gramps'. Brothers, my ass. This is Gramps right here. Dead-and-gone Gramps. Shuffling-around-in-my-head, answering-the-phone-when-I-call-his-old-house Gramps.

He says, "You won't learn that way. So I'm done leading you by the scruff like you're my dirty little bitch." And he kicks his dog. She goes from laying down to up on all fours, then sitting at attention.

I look away from his dog, decide I should go home, wait another hour, day, week, month, then call him on the phone. He doesn't remember who I am on the phone, true, but these alley visits sure aren't doing the trick, and I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to remember to keep coming here.

Everything else is slipping away from me. And sometimes I wish I could just forget the rest, instead of hanging on to tiny moments that seem randomly jammed into the cracks in my mind--brief insights into what used to be my life. Before the alleyway, before Gramps and his fucking dog. Before the late-night phone calls to dead fathers of fathers who don't recognize me anymore.

I'm not talking about insomnia, either. I mean, I never seem to close my eyes. I just float between home and this alley, the phone and this alley, and those hours, days, weeks, months, and try to figure out what happened. Where everyone went.

But there are very brief flashes of time when I feel the weight of sleep bearing down on me, folding me up, blotting me out; I fight it for as long as I can, and then the next thing I know, I'm fully awake again, either dialing the phone or heading to the alley. I'm not refreshed, I'm never refreshed, but I am ready to keep recycling, ready to jump back into my shrinking loop.

Maybe I'm like the cuckoo in a clock: existing only at appointed times, emerging from the darkness at some pre-determined hour. Which would be alright--I can think of worse fates.

Now I'm leaving the alley, floating home again. Three, maybe four blocks, drift into my house, slip into the chair and table by the phone. Wait for sleep to swoop in, flicker through me, restart my loop, reset the cuckoo.

But I can't wait like this anymore. Not another month. Not another fucking day. Tears sting my eyes, spill over, patter onto the table. I look down at the tears, blink twice. They disappear. More tears fall to replace them.

I tell myself to remember that he's dead, that he's not supposedto answer his phone. But that sort of logic doesn't fly here. Memories are all that are real in this place, all that matter.

A short conversation. I don't see it or hear it, so I don't know who's speaking. It could be me and her, or her and me, or me and Gramps, or even something I just heard while walking down the street once.

This conversation is just a jumble of words, like a smudged letter in my head. And the words float, like this:

I put them together and they make sense. Sometimes I imagine whole scenes built around the words. Sometimes I'm there, and she's there, and sometimes it's complete strangers. Other times I build incongruous, ridiculous scenes, action that doesn't fit the words. Sometimes I put the scene in the alley. Mostly, I build a quiet scene: My wife and I in a coffee shop, at a small glass-topped table for two, but we're not drinking coffee. We're touching hands, madly in love. Her face is sharp, white, beautiful, but as unreadable as that photo Gramps keeps showing me, because that's the only face of hers I have left.

This time I'm the first to speak. Next time, we'll switch, and the next and the next and the next . . .

Yeah, I've thought of the possibility that it's something I made up. But somehow I know it isn't.

Between the phone calls and the alley meetings and Gramps and his dog and my wife's photo, there's a big part of me that wants to give up, let my wife go. But she's not dead. I know it. Not like Gramps. She's alive, and I just have to find her.

This part of me that wants to give up also does not want things to turn out happily. It wants me to give up, forget everything I've held onto, everything that has kept me stuck in this loop, everything that matters to me.

The alley seems slightly colder than usual--that hot wind's not blowing through today. Gramps' expression isn't all assured cockiness, like usual. He frowns, shakes his head a little.

"I go…home," he says. Looks down at his dog. The little bitch, nuzzling at his ankles. Whimpering.

"Do you answer your phone sometimes? Does some kid keep telling you he's your grandson? That he loves you? But you just slam the phone down in his ear? Does that happen sometimes? Did you even understand what he was saying, what any of us were saying, Gramps?"

He flinches at the last word. His dog whines, but now it doesn't sound like a dog at all. It runs in small circles behind him until it clips the metal staircase. It limps away toward the dumpster and then pisses some more blood.

I don't really want to--I know this isn't how the game is played--but I'm getting impatient, so I say, "Tell me what happened, old man. Tell me everything, so I can go home. So I can stop calling you, stop coming here to this alley, stop looking at you and that dog, that picture of my wife. Tell me where she is."

But I see the mistake of it the moment the words drop out of my mouth: My confusion gives him strength. That insufferable look is back on his gnarled old face. He's regained some control. That dryer-hot wind blows, bullying through the clothes on the clothesline. He reaches into his pocket, brings out the picture of my wife again. Holds it up to my face, grins.

This time I knock the picture from his hand, refusing to look at it. It flutters to the ground, blown about by the wind like a little boat. A boat with no sail--nor any desire for one. Gramps looks behind him, up the stairs, like he's afraid of me. Backs up, feeling behind him blindly, groping with one of his hands. He finds the railing, pulls himself up the metal staircase one step at a time. I follow after him, a couple of steps below, feeling his terror come off him in waves, his power dwindling with each step.

On the top step, he twists his ankle, loses his balance, lurches forward, falls-- and then we're back in the house, my arms outstretched, ready to catch him but I don't, because I don't want to and I let him fall.

He crashes hard onto the gritty alleyway below, his brittle old wrists snapping as they try to bear his weight. His head bounces and skids. There's a crunching sound. He comes to rest near his dog. He's face down in her blood.

The part of me that wants to give up is watching this all play out. The coward that is me judging my own actions. The comfortable cuckoo, wanting to stay in this weird little graft of time, enjoying its repetition, its comfortable predictability.

Standing over Gramps, I watch his dog lap up more blood. I step forward and crush the thing's skull with my boot. But it continues lapping, its tongue flicking out, its hind legs twitching. Its owner has one arm draped across its belly. Its tail is wagging.

The wind blows the picture of my wife closer to the dog's restless tongue, which touches the edge of the photograph. The emulsion of blood, saliva, fur, bone--this alleyway, this dream within a dream, it acts as a red room.

The photograph grows in this puddle, stretches at its edges, pushes up and out. The picture of my wife taking on its missing third dimension.

Gramps rolls onto his back. His forehead is raw. He's holding his broken wrists in front of him in disbelief. When he looks at me, he remembers. I see it in his eyes. And I see his sickness there, too. The sickness that brought him to live with us. My wife and I. My coffeehouse love.

"You murderer." The first words out of my wife's bloody mouth. She stands in the undead-dog puddle. Yeah, Gramps' dog, the only creature he ever loved.

Gramps just shakes his head, still concerned about his broken wrists. He leans forward as best he can, tries to pet his dog, but cries out when his bent wrist touch her fur.

"You murderer," Gramps says, an echo of my wife, now fully fleshed out, clean of blood. The way I see her, from this exact point of view, is the way she was in the photograph, my mind a camera, snapping the shot.

The clothes on the clothesline ripple, waver above my wife's head, flapping above the coffeehouse's back exit and staircase. I descend the rest of the stairs below me, my arms still held out. Empty, having caught nothing, no one.

The alley breeze colder than ever now. It starts to snow. Fat white flakes drifting down, sticking in my wife's hair, in the dog's blood-matted fur, onto Gramps' twisted, liver-spotted hands.

The dog finally stops wagging its tail. A full body shiver courses through it, and its tongue no longer laps at the white-flecked puddle in which my wife stands.

I drift home, memories clicking into place with each block, each alleyway I pass. Inside my apartment, I slip into my chair beside the phone, dial Gramps' number, wait for him to pick up. Give him plenty of time to get from the alleyway back to his house. His old house, where he lived before the stroke, before he moved in with us. Before all the stress and the bullshit and the demands and the nagging and the rift that tore my marriage apart, the sickness that not only infected my grandfather, but also, in time, this house, this love. Our love.

I wait and I wait, with a heavy hand crushing my chest, despairing at another day of it, another day of being in the middle, expected to take both sides, able to take neither.

This time he lies in an alleyway behind the coffeehouse, several blocks away, broken and frozen on the cold ground.

Or is it this time: he lies downstairs, in the basement, broken and bleeding at the bottom of the stairs.

Until I look down at the photograph in my hand--the photograph that has always been in my hand, even though I do not own a camera--and another memory snaps into place: The sky leaking all that snow into the alley behind the coffeehouse, after I told her, after I came clean, and my wife leaking all those tears and those words. All those words that I can take apart and put together in any way I want, except for the last two:

I pick up the phone, feeling everything I've remembered slide out of my head, no matter how hard I try to keep it in.

I wonder what sort of mood he'll be in today. It changes every hour. Will he remember who I am? He's always forgetting things now, the tough old son of a bitch.

My wife says we should take him in and that he's getting worse, that he barely remembers to feed and clothe himself these days. And I suppose we should. It's the right thing to do.

Even though we'll have to take in his goddamned dog, too. I don't remember her name, but she's a she, and her name is something that's silly for her German Shepherd breed, something like Fifi or Princess or Cupcake. I'm glad I forget.

Brett Alexander Savory is a Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Chiaroscuro/ChiZine (http://chizine.com), has had nearly 40 stories published in various print and online publications, and has written two novels, In and Down and The Distance Travelled--the latter will be released through Necro Publications later this year. In the works are a third novel, Running Beneath the Skin and a dark comic book series with artist Homeros Gilani. A benefit anthology he co-edited with M. W. Anderson called The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three was recently released through Arsenal Pulp Press. His latest release is a novella called My Eyes Are Nailed, But Still I See co-written with David Niall Wilson.

Paul Tremblay has sold over fifty short stories to various publications including Razor Magazine and Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three. In 2004 PRIME books published a trade paperback collection of his short fiction titled Compositions for the Young and Old. In the coming months, PRIME is re-releasing the book as a hardcover with an introduction from Stewart O'Nan.