Except that nothing is getting sucked up in here. Instead it’s getting forced out.
And it’s not air at all, but music. Gladys Knight & the Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”
How can this be?
I press my whole body against the grille to listen to the song. Mom’s favorite. One she used to play over and over again until I got sick of it. Until I pouted and told her to turn it off because it was old people music. Those were the words I used.Old people music.
I’m stricken with the most impossible of thoughts, one that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.
Mom is there. Inside the home’s ductwork.
I set the urn down on the floor and, at first, try to jerk the whole thing off the wall with both of my hands. It won’t budge. I grip the edges of the grille and pull, but I don’t have a good grip on it and it slips easily from my grasp. I tumble backward, falling to the floor. The air return grille is wedged on too tight, held to the wall with four screws, one in each corner. I make an attempt to unscrew each with a bare hand, pinching and twisting the jagged screws until the skin splits, catching a sharp edge of it, one that’s been whet over time. My finger starts to drip with blood.
But the screws don’t move. Not even a little bit.
I grit my teeth and pinch and twist harder, but still nothing. They don’t budge the slightest bit.
And so I wedge a fingernail into the slotted screw and turn. But all that happens is my nail breaks, getting ripped in two, leaving my nails in tatters. I curse out loud from the pain of it before hoisting myself from the floor and hurrying to the kitchen for a knife. I shuffle through a cutlery drawer—tossing forks and spoons out of the way, spilling them one by one to the floor—and find a butter knife.
I run back to the air return. I fall again to my knees.
I stick the knife into the screw head, turning counterclockwise as hard as I can. Bearing down on that knife with my whole body weight.
This time, it turns.
I spin and I spin that knife, desperate, gasping, as if I might just find Mom inside the air return. Because for this moment that’s exactly what I’m thinking. That that’s where she is. Inside the air return. I don’t know how or why, but she is. She’sthere. I’m just sure of it.
I pluck one screw from the wall and move on to the next one. And the next one. And the next. All four screws tumble to the ground.
The grille loses its grip on the wall and falls. The sound is clamorous. I shove it out of the way and look inside. It’s some sort of stainless steel box set there behind the air return grille, one that changes course about a foot of the way in. I can’t see far enough inside to see where it goes and so I reach in a hand, grasping, sweating, but come up empty, thinking that behind that curve there are miles and miles of pipes and tubes which somehow or other lead to Mom. Mom is at the end of those tubes, listening to her music, speaking to me.
I try going in headfirst and then feetfirst. But I don’t fit and in time give up, because I don’t know what else to do.
I spend the rest of the night lying on the floor beside the air return in the fetal position, listening to Gladys Knight sing to me.
eden
September 26, 2010
Chicago
We bought our first computer today, at Jessie’s insistence. I’d been saving for some time for it, hoping to surprise her because, as Jessie says, we’re the last two people in the world without a computer, which may or may not be true.
We had to take a cab to the store for it, so that we could tote the boxes home in the trunk of the cab, while the driver waited impatiently for us to load and unload, meter running the whole time, never once offering to help. And then, at home, after Jessie and I lugged the boxes to the office, we sat on the floor, methodically reading instructions and trying our best to decipher which cords went where. The directions might as well have been written in Japanese, the illustrations done up for a four-year-old.
When all was said and done, I was shocked to find that, when we turned it on, the thing came to life, some sort of revolving image—a screen saver, Jessie told me—moving about on the screen.
Jessie went straight for the internet. “Look yourself up,” she encouraged me, and I asked what she meant by that, thinking she’d just use this computer to type up papers for school. I hadn’t thought much of her fiddling around on the internet, but I saw quickly that it was the one thing on her mind, the reason she wanted this computer. To look stuff up on the internet.
“Go ahead,” she said again with an enthusiastic nod of the head, dishwater hair falling into her eyes. “Type in your name,” she told me, “and see what you find.”
But I laughed only, telling her we wouldn’t find anything, because certainly I’m not on the internet. That’s the kind of thing reserved for celebrities and politicians. Not everyday, ordinary people like me. But Jessie was certain.
“The internet knows everything,” she told me, emphasizing that wordeverything, and I filled instantly with dread, trying to assure myself that it was only the ramblings of an eager preteen, that certainly the internet couldn’t knoweverything, like some sort of omniscient god.
But Jessie’s hands breezed past mine, and with nimble fingers, she typedEden Sloaneonto the keyboard and pressed the return key.
It didn’t happen right away.
