A Door's Door

Beth shut her eyes, opened her mouth in a droll show of complaisance, and leaned forward into the spoonful of steaming chicken broth. Nicholas guided it gently to her tongue, tipped, and removed it with care. She coughed a little, letting some of the contents spittle onto the napkin she had tucked into the neck of her blouse. Nicholas wiped the creases of her mouth with a napkin, and let some seconds pass before handing her another spoonful.

“Ma, maybe we can try a walk today, huh?”

She looked at him blankly, and her lips formed into a smile.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “Yes, a walk.”

Beth was eighty five years old. Nicholas, her son, had been taking care of her for the past fifteen years, refusing to put her in a nursing home after her chemo treatments.

“Well then, we’ll go on a walk this afternoon. Get you movin’, huh?”

Sam Dietrig slowed his truck to a stop in front of his house. Fresh supplies from the market in hand- a fresh supply of liquor in Sam’s case- he walked up to his front door and let himself inside.

He placed the contents on the kitchen counter, poured himself a small glass mixed with water, drank it thirstily, and retreated into his bedroom to sleep. What a day for Chef Sam Dietrig. Out of work for the past week, and on a binge for the past four days. What a day, what a day.

Ben sits at his desk, his head in his hands, fingering whisps of his long hair while staring out the window. On his desk is a digital recorder and a dog-eared German copy of Martel’s Life of Pi, which the foreign publishers decidedly renamed Schiffbruch mit Tiger, Shipwreck with a Tiger. Beside the window is a mess. All over the room is a mess; tools lay strewn about, and the wooden floor panels are scratched and discolored, with bits of concrete and sandpaper edges littered about. Next to the window is a door, a door which seems magically out of place. The door’s framework seems to be older than the house itself.

He and his father had been working on the house for months: painting, refurbishing, sanding the interiors, plastering and landscaping the exterior. They had finished the majority of their projects just in time for his father to re-mortgage the house by February, as they had planned. The house was old, and the months of hard work they had put into it made it just barely acceptable.

It did not look new, rather, it looked old but nice and somewhat well-kept.

After the inspections had been passed and the house re-mortgaged, Ben found a fresh crack in the wall of his room, which was located on the side of the property facing the street. Upon further assessing its constituent parts, he found the hint of a portal, a slight relief in the hollowed section of the wall. He stepped back and looked at it: the shape of a door frame under the old, misshapen drywall.

Without reason, and without foresight, he tore down the wall, ruining the coats of fresh primer and paint in the room and the newly applied stucco and paint on the exterior, and unearthed the original front door of the house, which apparently had lead in -or out- through his bedroom.

This act summoned in him a fleeting cognizance, a subconscious sense of ease and freedom; a vision of his future, and the fulfillment of his dreams to live in Germany someday.

He knew his father would be furious.

At 2 PM Nicholas got up from his recliner with a grunt, and smiled at his mother. She sighed, smiled, and put down her reading glasses and her Bible. He helped her over to her walker, and escorted her soft body gently and devotedly down the steps, out the front door, and toward the sidewalk. It was their usual afternoon or evening exercise, to walk down a few hundred feet to the end of the street and back again. It kept her young. On this particular day, she felt great, excited to be getting outside. Her digestion had been stagnant the past few days, and the movement would do her good.

For the past week she had stayed home, due to the growing intensity of the virus precautions, but today Nicholas seemed to feel it was safe enough to go outside, just for a walk. Once on the sidewalk, she steadied herself to her normal pace, arm in arm with Nicholas and her walker.

As a young couple approached them, Nicholas angled her toward the street, keeping in mind the seven foot span which the reporter on the news had said was the minimum distance needed to stunt the spread of the virus.

Another pair, a father and son, came along, and though they were conscientious enough to walk single file as they passed, Nicholas still angled his mother street-ward to retain the seven foot span: for safety’s sake.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the street sweeper days along Valley Crest. On the East side of the street, all the cars were prohibited from parking on Tuesdays from 7 AM to 7 PM. On the West side of the street, it was Wednesdays. During all of the hubbub of the quarantine, all parking tickets and restrictions were put on hold, though the streets were still swept.

That Tuesday, most people along Valley Crest Street had kept up with their usual weekly designs. They awoke early, whether by habit or by work schedule, and moved their cars to the correct side of the street for the day. All but one. This said dark green Ford Fusion was owned by Mr. Sam Dietrig. At the time of Beth’s maiden walk that day, he was still in bed, snoring and drunk, with a peaceful conscience.

A tired father and his four-year-old son walked the neighborhood street, passing by other worn-out fathers and young sons, astonished at the close vicinity of others like themselves. Are we allowed? they seemed to be asking each other. Most who were used to such daily perusals through the locale were pleasantly surprised at the heightened numbers of pedestrians on the sidewalks, especially during such publicly unqualified circumstances.

Up along Valley Crest Street there sits a line of houses, all differing in their shrubbery, lawns, color, size, and style. Some are rather worn down; the paint is chipped, the house itself is crumbling at the corners. Others, built within the last few years, stand resplendent and complete; wide-windowed and veranda-encountered, white-fenced and fresh-flowered. Still others are regular, unsurprising and comfortable; settled in age, color-scheme, and window size and shape.

One such house, about half-way down the softly curved quarter-mile length of Valley Crest, has one minor foundational cavity beleaguering its pale face which might give way to its facade’s being considered for a demotion, per say. The yard seems up to par, the window finishes clear-cornered, but there, to the left of the fore-window, and to the right of the antique-tiled porch, there is a gigantic hole in the wall ranging from the ground up to the awning.

Upon a closer look, there can be seen the rudiments of a door, through the brittle layers of concrete and stucco. It is not a hole in the wall at all, but a door un-buried; a door where the wall used to be, where once was a wall where a door used to be. The door is open.

The order on all major news broadcasts was to stay indoors, but Ben was feeling antsy. He had, after all, just destroyed a newly refurbished section of his father’s house. He grabbed his cap and skipped out through the artifice of a doorway for a nice stroll in the sunshine.

A few minutes into his walk, he looked up, to see a middle-aged man and an elderly woman approaching. Ben moved aside deferentially to stand within the widened breadth of a driveway, but the man had already escorted her out into the street and away from the sidewalk. The man had scooted her street-ward, off the curb and behind the shadow of a singular, parked Ford Fusion.

Just as he was shooting a glaring, impatient eye toward Ben, who stood in the adjacent driveway dumbfounded, a car, going much too fast, came around the long curve of Valley Crest Street, and, not seeing Beth’s brittle body emerge slightly from behind the Ford Fusion, hit her at a speed approaching 45 mph.

She was swept out of the arms of Nicholas, who, having thrown up his hands in a show of horror and exasperated disbelief, remained miraculously unscathed.

Ben stared, gape-mouthed. All his senses heightened and at the same time numbed themselves into a petrified stutter.

Four hours later Sam Dietrig awoke with a headache. He had slept through the cries and the subsequent sirens. He poured himself a glass of Scotch, while amusing himself with the thought that though he didn’t move his car, he still wasn’t given a ticket. Not this week. Not this week, you bastards, he thought to himself wryly. No, he stayed indoors, as he was told, and poured himself a stiffy.

Click. White noise, silence. A muted knocking starts, followed by what sounds like footsteps.

“Sorry, I’ve been on hold. Let me know if you need any help.”

The voice sounds far off, as if implanted from within some adjacent room, many yards out of clear audibility. It is a nasal voice and somewhat feminine in its inflection, though with yielding, hardened undertones.

“Just wonder- ah, hey it sure is a good time of the year to be on hold, huh?”

This voice is near, sharp and tense in reverberation; low and deep. It’s nasality comes from the quality of the audio recording rather than it’s fleshy source. It is followed by breathing and more footstep-like noises.

“Yeah ha ha, I guess you could say that. Well, yeah it is, isn’t it?” responds the distant one.

“I came back looking for the copy of Goethe, I saw it last time I was here… I… you don’t have any bilingual editions, do you? Like, ah, I always enjoy those. Oh, where’s the poetry section?”

A short burst of laughter is heard from the distant one, muffled and diluted. The sharp, deeper voice begins again.

“I know, I was thinkin’ I might try-” He is interrupted by the other, who is now heard to be much, much closer than he was previously.

“Ahh, yes. Yes, here we go, oh me too, me too. I love the dual translations. German, too. Difficult, horrible language. Love it. Ah German. Uhmm… here we have some- oh, sorry, just the single language. Ah… English only. I have a foreign language section-”

“By the door, yeah, I’ve been lookin’ at them. You know German?”

The conversation now flows on a smooth, bearably static clarity, both voices in the vicinity of a clean reception. There are some nuanced pauses, interspersed between the shuffling sounds of books being placed back on the shelves.

“Oh, ha ha, I was over there once years ago. Oh a few times actually. On tour.”

“On tour? What with?”

“I was a drummer. Played the drums for a while, we toured some in Europe.”

“Hey, wow. And you picked up some German there?”

“Oh, no, oh well some yeah. I… (shuffling) I, ah, was into it for a while. I love languages, beautiful. Terrible. Language. Different languages. Always wanted to learn Dutch.”

“German’s been freakin’ difficult, yeah. I started studying it a year ago and still don’t understand it in the least. Put myself to sleep watchin’ Deutsche Welle every night.”

“Ha ha, oh yeah. Yeah it’s a tough one all right. Well that’s all for Goethe. Whatchya got? Ah, you ever read Murakami? I went through some short stories last night before bed. Really liked him.”

“No. Heard of him though. My buddy teaches Rhetoric up at Humboldt, he’s always trying to get me to read A Confederancy of Dunces. He recommended Murakami once, highly.”

“Yeah it’s just his… his way of… oh I don’t know.”

“Said he’s a real writer’s writer. Poet’s poet, Writer’s writer, my buddy said, ya know. Uh-”

“Yeah… A lot about running. Like it’s addictive quality, addicted to running, and…. And oh! I just started Lolita.”

“Oh, man, doesn't he write beautifully, though? Not really one I resonated with, but damn what freakin' elegance! It's amazing.”

A third voice, sounding submerged and distinctly female, muddled not by distance but by a dissonant value-tone, chimes in, “Ah, hello sir? Sir? Hello? Are you there?”

“Oh- gotta take this.”

“Yeah, yeah man, thanks.” The footsteps are heard softly departing. The clicking, motor movements, noises of the recorder being handled closely sound out. And it beeps.

End of recording three, folder number seven.

Click. Movement, the chortled merging of discordant voices; more haranguing; more movement. One voice is heard over the others.

“Get her over, get her over! Ma! Ma! Oh no, Ma! Oh... Oh, God! Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, no, no, no… Oh my-”

The clicking, motor movements, noises of the recorder being handled closely sound out. And it beeps.

End of recording four, folder number seven.

In his room, the newly unsheathed door still open inward, making the fraught room susceptible to the soothing, evening coolness, Ben sat benumbed, fiddling with his digital recorder and staring out the door. His father would be home soon.

The small recorder in his hands was giving itself up to hapless repetitions at his beck, as Ben listened and re-listened to a recording he had taken a few weeks back of his conversation with the owner of a small, local book-store.

For some time now he had kept up the habit of recording some of the off-hand conversations which he had had from time to time, with people whom he thought were interesting and notable.

One such a person was the owner of the local bookstore.

Another, though this time not the spontaneous participant in a jocular, philosophic-literary conversation, was the horror-stricken man who had just watched his mother die.

Ben was reminded of his own mother. She had passed away while Ben was at Summer camp one year. He was eleven years old at the time.

She had been hit by a drunk driver.