The Caretaker by Doon Arbus

Author:Doon Arbus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229500
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2020-08-26T14:38:30+00:00

Peace at last. Solitude.

No one to answer to, no one to impress, charm, chastise, care for, enlighten or entertain, no one, that is, at least until tomorrow. The caretaker presses his damp forehead against the cool of the impartial plaster wall. He stays there motionless and listens. In the wake of the recent invasion, there is only silence. The building holds its breath. He holds his, too, and waits. And still no sound.

He has begun again to monitor the passage of time — an old familiar habit to help fend off panic — invoking the reassuring certainty of numbers as they follow each other with inexorable, if meaningless, precision (eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .). He pictures the shapes of the numerals, their lines and arcs superimposed in thickening succession one upon the next, blotting out everything that came before. The sequence of syllables composes a rhythmic nonsense nursery rhyme in his head while he counts out the seconds to himself like a junkie compulsively postponing the relief of his next fix: sixty makes one minute, and then sixty more makes two, and after two will soon come three. Is he hastening time by means of this ritual, or retarding it? Or is he just fiddling helplessly, irrelevantly, on the sidelines until the inevitable arrives and overtakes him?

At last, just when he thinks he can bear it no longer, something shudders briefly somewhere down below, a tremulous stuttering gulp — the protest of a faulty pipe, perhaps — but as spontaneously as it erupts, it dies away, leaving him to wonder if he really heard it after all, or if it were instead some random auditory hallucination conjured out of nothingness by hope. More silence. The noisy irreverent departure of the nine unwelcome visitors — the latest trespassers to violate the place with his permission and defile the sanctity of its private places with their strange voices and their strange indifferent eyes — is not even an echo anymore. How much longer must this cruel, protracted game go on before his most recent transgression will have earned forgiveness? And still he waits, head bowed, still motionless, still scarcely breathing now, while his sweaty, burning forehead pressed into the wall congeals itself there, obliterating any palpable distinction between flesh and plaster.

And then, at last, it happens. His forbearance is rewarded. The thing he has been longing for occurs. With a sudden tremor, the whole building, all three stories of it, exhales, heaves a long, low sigh, and settling a little deeper into its foundations like a luxuriating drowsy cat, surrenders. Everything it has been withholding from him, it now releases.

Close by, within what might have been a hollow space inside the wall, something shifts, dislodges itself, scuttles its way downward a short distance and comes to rest again, clunk. At the same moment, a windowpane rattles in its frame — precipitated by a wayward breeze, the voice of reason would insist, pedantically, by way of explanation (thereby explaining, in fact, nothing.) Another rattles in reply.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.