breathing. They kept piling up.
Call it the covered wagon.
I sat on the bed with the light on. There was nowhere left to look but the closet door, the protruding bolt like a tongue stuck out at me. Nothing to do but stand up and walk over and press my thumb against it. Cool and tarnished and it wouldn’t give. I put my thumb to my mouth and it was bitter.
I kept looking. The bolt and the latch poked through a narrow metal plate in the edge of the door. I got my imitation Swiss Army knife and pulled the screwdriver. One at the top and one at the bottom. They cracked when I started them. I got the screws out but the plate stayed where it was. Pried at it with the driver, then the knife blade. The blade broke and I figured I must have got my two dollars’ worth. I went at it with the butter knife then and it still wouldn’t come out. Still connected to something inside you couldn’t see.
The truth is I’d never been very good with my hands.
But I didn’t want to stop. Another screw in the neck of the doorknob and I took it out because there was nothing else to do. I pulled on the knob, turned it, and it kept turning and I saw something bright. Kept turning and now you could see a square threaded shaft, clean and silvery, getting longer.
The knob came off. It was glass. I held it, tossed it, held it in different ways till it was something else, like repeating a word till it is pure sound. I put it on the dresser. Gripped the shiny spindle it had been threaded onto when the Avenue had another name. Tugged. Soft crunch of metal churning in wood. The faceplate in the edge of the door moved, the latch and the bolt moved. All one thing.
I grabbed the knob on the other side and pulled the spindle out of the lock.
I still heard the screaming but in a different way now, not under my skin. I heard wood and metal coming apart. I took the lock out of the door.
I sat at the round table in my underwear. The window was behind me and so was the voice, the traffic, the after-hours sound a city always makes. The soft roar of its engine. I’d taken the lamp off the nightstand and put it on the table. It was all the light I wanted.
It sat on the table in front of me, a flat black metal box. Rectangular, heavy, cast iron maybe. A single screw held the cover in place. I took it out and opened the lock.
Something in the bottom corner. White and puffy, a wad of cotton, or mold, but then no, some kind of cocoon. An egg sac. I poked it with the tip of the driver, tore it apart. A cluster of tiny objects inside, bodies or eggs, now ruptured and lifeless—just husks now. I scraped them out along with the white skin that had held them.
From somewhere a train was coming. I was sweating.
Most of the bolt was inside the case and a tiny post rose from the side of it. I poked at it and nothing moved. A flat lever covering the bolt, a notch that the post fit into. A narrow strip of metal. I touched it. It shot up out of the lock case with a spring sound and hit me in the eye.
Bunk beds three tiers high. Pushed together to form a square. Draped with linen so no one can see what’s going on inside. What they don’t see, they don’t know, but they know enough to call it the covered wagon.
I put down the screwdriver and let it hurt. I tried not to move. My eye was streaming and wouldn’t open. I kept wiping at it and looking at my fingers to see if there was anything but water. The pain was like something big squeezed into a tiny point. Even as it dulled it seemed to move deeper, behind, burying itself in my head.
I hadn’t expected anything alive, but you couldn’t take it personally.
The train passed through, sounding its horn at every crossing.
When I didn’t feel like throwing the lock out the window anymore, I leaned back into it with one eye. The lever with the notch had jumped out of place and the bolt moved freely now. I slid it in and out of the case. Then back in for good. The latch above the bolt and lever, the coiled spring behind the latch. Something I decided to call the plunger, and I was sure that was the word. A sort of cam, and in its center, in the middle of the table, the corner of the room, the square hole through which the spindle passed.
I put the lever back the way it was. Beneath its curving edge a metal spur poked out from inside the case. Put the cover back on and close one eye just long enough to see a key, what you think is called a skeleton key, see what it raises and pushes when you put it in the lock and turn it. See the notch the blade will need in just the right place so it can clear the spur and do what it does.
Things were getting simpler. I remembered the piece of spring steel that had struck me, found it on the carpet under the table. I held it with a certain respect, loaded it back into place and felt the energy fill the lock again. The tension I’d restored would push the lever down each time the bolt went home.
I couldn’t hear the train at all. I’d heard its gradual approach, its passing, but not its departure, the fading into distance. It wasn’t there.
But it took the screaming with it.
After I had the cover back on for good I tried something. Took the large paper clip that fastened my rental agreement together, straightened it and bent the tip into an L. Holding the lock in the palm of my hand, I slipped the end into the keyhole, into what was back in the dark again, what was only there and in my head. I scraped around, feeling for an edge until I felt it. I pushed up and it gave, and then it gave back and I felt the warm itch in my eye and behind it. What was no longer a paper clip kept slipping off the edge. I’d hear the lever clicking back into place then, and again, and I did this till it couldn’t teach me anything else.
I had to look for what I’d removed. I put the lock back in and reattached the faceplate and the knobs. I screwed everything back on tight and then shut the closet door, feeling it latch, flat and flush in the wall. There was a full-length mirror in it. My eye looked like it felt, pink and half-closed, but dry. I opened the door again, closed it. Only I could let them in.
Then I filled the bathtub full of hot water and fell asleep in it.
IBRAHIM said, “I’m looking for someone to trust.” He had long deep scratches on his arm and on his neck, just under the jaw. They looked recent.
“I need someone for up front,” he said. His English wasn’t broken, but sometimes rearranged.
“Spell your last name,” Wanda said. She was Wanda and she wrote it down on a yellow legal pad. She assured me that this was only a temporary measure, that I would be filling out a real application as soon as—it had just been so crazy lately you wouldn’t—they just needed something on paper for now. I nodded. I could see that this was a place where certain things didn’t always get done. I relaxed a little in my madras shirt.
“Someone to make keys,” Ibrahim said. “To cover the drawer, sell locks, track inventory. Someone to clean up.” He sat on one of the stools in front of the counter, his hands moving. I sat on the other one. The man with the newspaper wasn’t there.
“Social security number?” Wanda asked. Address. Date of birth. “You look younger,” she said. I thanked her but I wasn’t sure I was flattered. Maybe she hadn’t looked closely.
“You see what a mess we are here,” Ibrahim said. He gestured at the display over and around the counter, “We need this organize.” Many different kinds of the same few items—key chains, holders, fobs, those colored rubber rings you put on the heads of similar keys to tell them apart. One of the key chains had a rubber pig at the end of it. It farted when you squeezed it.
“Just throw it in the garbage,” Wanda said.
“Reorganize. Fix up.”
“It doesn’t make any money.”
“The phone please, Wadiya.” The phone sounded like a weapon in a video game and once it started it didn’t stop. Wanda wore a headset. She asked someone for a job number. She wrote it down on a slip and gave it to Ibrahim, gave him something to do with his hands.
“Could I see your driver’s