Manx- Gingerbread AC

  Sig tried a third time—Hold still, you little bastard, he thought—and missed entirely, wasn’t even close, painted a crimson slash across the metal lampshade instead.

  And it wasn’t just that one soldier moving anymore. It was all of them. They lurched toward one another, wavering like candle flames.

  Sigmund rubbed his hand across his forehead, felt a hot and slimy sweat there. He inhaled deeply and smelled gingerbread cookies.

  A stroke, he thought. I am having a stroke. Only he thought it in Dutch, because for the moment English eluded him, and never mind he had spoken English as his first language since he was five.

He reached for the edge of the table, to push himself to his feet—and missed and fell. Sig hit the walnut floor on his right side and felt something snap in his hip. It broke like a dry stick under a German jackboot. The whole house shook with the force of his fall, and he thought—still in Dutch—That will bring Giselle.

  “Hulp,” he called. “Ik heb een slag. Nr. Nr.” That didn’t sound right, but he needed a moment to figure out why. Dutch. She wouldn’t understand Dutch. “Giselle! I have fallen down!”

  She didn’t come, didn’t respond in any way. He tried to think what she could be doing that she wouldn’t hear him, then wondered if she was outside with the air-conditioning repairman. The repairman, a dumpy little man named Bing something, had turned up in grease-stained overalls to replace a condenser coil as part of a factory recall.

  Sig’s head seemed a bit clearer, down here on the floor. When he had been up on the stool, the air had started to seem soupy and slow, overheated, and faintly cloying, what with that sudden smell of gingerbread. Down here, though, it was cooler, and the world seemed inclined to behave.
...

  He leaned over the stool, both hands on its edge, and took a long, trembling breath—and smelled the Christmassy odor of gingerbread again. He almost flinched, the fragrance was so strong and clear.

  A stroke, he thought again. This was what happened when you were stroking out. The brain misfired, and you smelled things that weren’t there, while the world drooped around you, melting like dirty snow in a warm spring rain.
...

  “Little men, little men!” the Gasmask Man said. “I love little men! ‘Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren’t go a-hunting, for fear of little men.’” He looked at Sig and said, “Mr. Manx says I’m a rhyming demon. I say I’m just a poet and didn’t know it. How old is your wife, mister?”

  Sig had no intention of answering. He wanted to ask what the repairman had done with Giselle. But instead he said, “I married her in 1976. My wife is fifty-nine. Fifteen years younger than myself.”

  “You dog, you! Robbing the cradle. No kids?”

  “Nr. No. I have ants in my brain.”

  “That’s the sevoflurane,” the Gasmask Man said. “I pumped it in through your air conditioner.[”]
...

  “That is her place across the street, isn’t it?” the Gasmask Man said.

  Sig intended not to tell him. Not to collaborate. “Collaborate” was the word that came to his mind, not “cooperate.”

  “Yes,” he heard himself say. Then he said, “Why did I tell you that? Why am I answering your questions? I am not a collaborator.”

  “That’s the sevoflurane, too,” the Gasmask Man said. “You wouldn’t believe some of the things people used to tell me after I gave ’em some of the sweet old gingerbread smoke. This one old grandma, like sixty-four years old at least, told me the only time she ever came was when she took it up the pooper. Sixty-four! Ugh, right? ‘Will you still need me, will you still ream me, when I’m sixty-four?’” He giggled, the innocent, bubbling laughter of a child.

  “It is a truth serum?” Sig said. It took a profound effort to verbalize this question; each word was a bucket of water that had to be laboriously drawn up from a deep well, by hand.

  “Not exactly, but it sure relaxes your intuitions. Opens you up to suggestion. You wait till your wife starts to come around.[”]

- Bad Mother: Haverhill