The Companion

Jeff Frawley

Her father was hospitalized for a problem of the heart.  Elsa visited, found him snoring, stomach rising beneath the sheets.  Within half a year he’d be dead, cardiac arrest, discovered in his efficiency above the Bent Nail.  Unsure what to do, she laid a hand across his forehead.  She hadn’t seen him since his eviction, imagined looking out a window and finding that pitted face and yellow mustache.

“Pops, it’s me,” she heard herself say.  He awoke, glanced about.  Then he saw her, cleared his throat to speak: “But where’s your sister?  Where’s my little Annalee?”

He’d been arrested for peeping through neighbors’ apartment windows. Evidence mounted against him during preceding weeks, photographs taken from behind, his broad silhouette shrouded by light.  How mortifying, those photos!  His name went onto a list, his mugshot made the Republican-Times, he was forced to pay a large fine; he moved into his efficiency and ate each night at the bar downstairs.

When, a few days later, she registered for the Companion Assistant certification sessions, Elsa thought of him heaped atop the hospital bed, moaning for help.  Her sister and mother said the Companionship process was a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.  “After what he’s done,” said Annalee, “he can look after himself.”  He can’t, Elsa replied; without help he wasn’t long for the world.  “He’s got so much anguish deep inside—it has to be extracted.”

Her mother snorted.  “Is that what they’re teaching you at those sessions?  I can’t stand it, the thought of you pampering him with those stuffed animals.”

“I can’t let him rot,” Elsa said, and simultaneously her mother and sister replied, “Why not?”

She attended all six sessions, paid the three-hundred-dollar fee.  Extraction Resolutions approved her employment application and her father, recent arrest notwithstanding, qualified for the program thanks to years of service as county treasurer.  “Well,” said Annalee, “at least you can quit that job at the department store.”

***

No one liked to mention the other thing, the drunken boy who entered her apartment one night at Cielo Azul.  That big, single-room unit with dark maroon carpet and lightless hallways: a converted hotel, elegant but ancient, shuddering pipes, water scuttling through the walls like rats.  He was a college boy, jiggered the door open while she watched television.  He wobbled back and forth, face swollen, fists clenched at his sides.  Elsa melted with fear, insides nearly emptying into the recliner, yet she didn’t make a sound.

Instead she slipped a hand into the recliner’s side pocket, fingered the hammer stowed there long ago.  The boy looked as though he might collapse.  Elsa rose, hammer clenched.  He began to gurgle, love handles quivering beneath his shirt.  The boy—she’d later learn—lived in the unit below hers, too drunk to get the right floor.  When she drew close, he slurred out words, asked how she got into his home.  Then he stumbled forward and clutched Elsa’s shoulders.  He smelled of deodorant and something chemical and smoky, a charcoal grill.  He’d missed plenty of hairs shaving, and Elsa imagined a mother sitting at the edge of a tub, razoring the face of a naked, shivering son.

She screamed.  In his drunkenness the boy possessed a clumsy strength: he shook her, slumped his weight upon her, trying to embrace her or steady himself.  She freed an arm and raised the hammer, held it limply cocked against her thumb.  Then—what the hell—she felt the arm swing forward.  In that instant she decided not to strike his temple—too violent—nor to bash his nose or eyes.  Teeth, too, seemed cruel.  So the hammer’s little head found its way against his forehead, skin purpling instantly.  The sound was of a hardboiled egg dropped against a table.  A bit of blood gathered as the boy looked stunned, went cross-eyed, a bruise blossoming, redness draining from his cheeks.  He laughed and tried to speak, then slumped to the floor.  Elsa had just vacuumed that velvety carpet: there’d been lots of crumbs, a few dead insects, a nickel that clanked inside the machine’s mouth.

For several nights she stayed with her sister.  Annalee and her husband lived in a big historic house with two massive, gassy sons.  “Just move in, for the summer,” Annalee said.  “Break the lease, get out of there.”  Elsa imagined those boys tromping about, fouling the house with gas.  Annalee asked, “Won’t Mom lend any money?” and Elsa replied that she was thirty-eight, wasn’t doing that again.  She wished her sister would ask more questions about the boy, about her hammer, about the boy’s mother whimpering at the hospital.

***

The first session, he answered the door in boxer shorts and an undershirt that revealed white hair between his breasts.  Ruddy-faced, breathing heavily, he seemed unsure whether to let her in.  Her sympathy for him—his big gut, stale takeout stinking up his efficiency, broken bottles and cigarette butts littering the parking lot below—was quashed by the urge to shout: What are you thinking answering in your boxer shorts, after everything that’s happened?

Inside his apartment he cleared the sofa, swept aside blankets, clothes, magazines with pictures of colorful meals.  He noticed her staring.  “If only I can save a little,” he said, “I can take that trip to Italy before I kick the bucket.”  Elsa said he shouldn’t talk like that, he wasn’t kicking any bucket anytime soon.  Her father, stacking magazines, said, “They’ve got these food tours …”  When he looked up, tears sparkled in his eyes.  “Don’t even need to be married, singles are welcome.”  She might have replied he ought to stop eating at the Bent Nail if it was cuisine he worried about, but she remembered the guidebook: “Your duty as caretaker is not to provide advice regarding a Charge’s physical, mental or medical wellbeing.  Your duty is to provide access to the Companion, and to facilitate exchange between Charge and device.”

Unzipping her pack, she told him to lie on the sofa so she could administer treatment.  The wooden legs croaked.  “Pops,” she said, “I need you to close your eyes.”  That gigantic man, veiny eyelids, tongue-thickened breath. His socks were generic, twelve-to-a-pack whites stained black on the bottom.  She imagined him raising onto tiptoes, peering in on college girls drinking wine.  Those little tiptoes would’ve crunched, would’ve smushed under his weight.  She knew, in reality, he’d observed them from a distance, could picture the same impassive, scientific look upon his face as when he paused to watch airplanes trace across the sky.  When one of the girls looked out the window—they’re wearing sweatshirts and cotton shorts—she’d first mistake him for a custodian or pest control.  Then split-second terror: his mustache pulsing as he breathes, apartment light glinting off his glasses …  No pest man would be out at nine-thirty at night.

His toes wriggled and she wanted to leave.  Instead she reached inside her bag and withdrew the Companion.  She’d chosen a sort of puffy amphibian he might like, round and pancaked and green, two cute eyes bubbling out its back.  “Dad, I’m going to lay it on your tummy.  Tell me if it hurts.”  Her father, eyes closed, said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”  When she flipped the switch, the amphibian quivered and her father’s gut rippled beneath his shirt.  Once or twice the Companion cooed inquisitively, waddling towards his chest.  Her father giggled and opened his eyes.  “Hello there,” he said.  Elsa said, “You can tell it whatever you’d like.”  She expected him to say, “This is stupid,” but instead he cooed in return, wobbling his head back and forth, smiling.  This, this trancelike effect, the guidebook coined “going in the pocket.”

Soon, as if she wasn’t there, he giggled and stroked the Companion, telling it about a time he’d shown his girls an enormous bullfrog in the pond along Rural Route Forty-Two.  He’d nabbed the frog and held it up: long as a cat, four or five pounds.  “Those legs!” he told the Companion.  His daughters had squealed, slightly afraid.  Finally Annalee—“The younger one, the braver one”—stroked its belly.  “I told the other girl to touch it too, but she never obeyed.  All for the best—the frog pissed everywhere.  That older one, if she’d gotten piss on her clothes, she’d’ve never gone outside again.”

While he spoke, Elsa glanced around his gloomy room, told herself, Now he’s the one who’s infantile.  She imagined going to the fridge and finding bottles of breastmilk, pictured him peering through a window, watching a mother breastfeed a baby.

“They used to love that pond, those girls.  Then, when they turned into little women, they couldn’t be bothered.  They had this smell, some sort of deodorant or hairspray …”

Elsa remembered cattails growing at one end, aswarm with little birds.  And, oddly, a rusted grate they found in the mud, drain squelching with water.  Little Annalee laughed, poked Elsa in the gut, said the drain was like a man’s asshole.  Elsa told her sister she didn’t know what a man’s asshole was like.  Annalee, laughing, said, “I do, a boy at school showed me his.”  She remembered the bench planted opposite the cattails: their father made them carve their initials and date on its back.  Too scared, Elsa scanned the horizon as he etched hers for her.

Another time, she and Annalee found a crude illustration in black marker on the bench: a set of woolly genitals, a man’s and a woman’s.  Elsa remembered the fear upon seeing the two side by side: she’d seen both before, in a magazine or dirty comic, but never next to each other.  Now they were nasty, sticky things like the creatures groaning in the pond.  She remembered the knock-knock-knock of the men building the structure along the road, a couple hundred yards from the pond.  It was to be the apartment complex where, twenty-five years later, her father would be arrested and evicted for spying on neighbors.

***

Between sessions she kept his amphibious Companion at the edge of her bed.  “I won’t talk to it,” she said aloud, “I’m not that bad.”  At the sound of her voice the thing chirped and wriggled its rump.  Each night she heard her neighbors come in, latch their louvered door, trundle over and plop onto a sofa; then the unzipping of the woman’s purse, the first exchange of insults, something snapping shut, a compact mirror perhaps, the next round of insults, volume rising until they shouted.  Their words, despite the shoddy walls, were unintelligible, like a language from the moon. Some nights, too, a group of ruffians stumbled in from the bar across the street.  Lying in bed Elsa heard them laugh—soft, rat-like squeaking—as they scraped something along the hallway walls.  When they reached a door, they thunked it and erupted with laughter.  Two, three nights a week: slowly, slowly scraping their way towards her unit.  They’d pause.  She’d hear breathing, tittering.  The gap beneath her door seemed suddenly, excessively tall.  They’d give it three swift kicks before moving on.  Giggling.  One of them liked to shout as though being murdered.  I’ve taken intruders in the past, she’d whisper, stroking the Companion.  Taken and beaten them back.  Her hammer sat on the bedside lampstand, like a talisman.

***

Had she not interrupted, he would’ve chattered to the device for hours on end.  (“Do not,” read the guidebook, “allow the Charge to overindulge; overindulgence minimizes effectiveness.”)  On and on he rambled, cycling through memories of his girls: Annalee the ebullient firecracker, good with his friends, Elsa somehow off.  “That one,” he told the furry amphibian, “is a bit like gas, like a low, quiet fart.”  She’d learned to listen emotionlessly, surveying his efficiency, gnawing back her nails.

One day Elsa found him lying on the floor.  “Where were you!” he cried.  “My back, my back, I can’t bend my back!”

That day he complained to the Companion about the tempestuousness of the women in his life: his ex-wife, his eldest daughter, his baby girl who never came to see him.  He mentioned two others too, names unfamiliar to Elsa.  She felt something inside her gush open.  Though her father protested, she snatched the Companion from where it wriggled on the floor.  His fists pummeled the carpet as he shouted.  Elsa knelt beside him, told him about the intruder.  “Be quiet,” she demanded, “I want you to hear what I did.”  He produced little sounds like he was trying to speak.  But Elsa pressed on: “They took him to the hospital.  His mother sat there all night, watching the bruise go down.”  Her father tried to sit up but cried out in pain.  He looked at her as though she were robbing him.  “My daughter,” he moaned, “my oldest daughter …”

 

Nowadays, when she can’t sleep, she thinks of the boy toppled onto the floor, staring blankly at the ceiling.  Those several eternal seconds when she thought he was dead.  Then he blinked, his drunken tongue swabbed his lips, and he asked, “Are we there?”  Best was the feeling of the plush carpet between her toes at that moment.  The place seemed so comfortable just then—the carpet, the handsome cabinetry built into the walls, the chandelier-style lamp.  The boy rolled back and forth, eyes closed, groaning.  Something about those groans, as though he craved sympathy, caused her to heat with anger.  She considered going to the kitchen, returning with a knife, slipping the tip into his belly just above the hairy navel, sawing upwards towards his heart.  He sounded like a child waking from a nightmare; she imagined a mother hurrying to a bedroom to press hand against forehead.  She considered removing his wallet, binding his hands with an extension cord.  She’d never dialed 911 before.  No matter: a neighbor who’d heard her scream was suddenly there.  The woman stared at the boy on the ground, then at Elsa, before grabbing and leading her out.

***

The last time she visited, he was in the kitchenette in a t-shirt and sweatpants, mixing pasta with tuna, peas, cream-of-mushroom soup.  The spoon produced a nauseating suck.  He ate at the little table, chair creaking underneath his weight, stabbing his spoon into the pot and scooping up mouthfuls.  The room stank of tuna.  He glugged a can of beer, pausing to hiccup, press his chest, belch, begin shoveling again.  Elsa said, “Today’s the day we start Distress Extraction.  Do you remember?”

The goal of all Companionships was to work towards, to extricate the seed of a Charge’s irrational behavior.  Later Elsa would assist the recovery of Mrs. Li’s distress kernel with remarkable precision: there’d been an accident in the country; her husband driving, Mrs. Li in the passenger seat, the other car crushed; her husband, even on his deathbed thirty years later, muttering about that other family.  Once the Companion took her deep in the pocket, Mrs. Li tumbled from her bed, screaming and thrashing.  Yet just three weeks of Companionship nurtured her to a now-blissful Abatement.

During the certification session Elsa found herself obsessing: what was her father’s kernel?  When had he become such a strange and compulsive, such a dour man?  Why leave their mother, why move out while she was at church, taking only his suitcase and the aquarium?  He’d telephoned Elsa from his new apartment, sobbing: “I killed them all, every fish, less than two weeks …”

That afternoon, after eating, he groaned and clutched his gut, asked, “Can’t we do this on the bed?”  But Elsa refused to enter that backroom.  Instead she unpacked the Companion, switched its mode.  “Remember,” she told him, “the goal today is to tell it about the Change, just as we discussed.”  The Companion sputtered a strange, chirruping purr, rolled back and forth, grunted.  At one point her father’s arm shot up and pounded the wall.  The Companion, sitting atop his gut, wiggled towards his face, shook his chest, grunted and squealed.

Her father talked, described a night a couple years back, after he moved out.  He’d parked down the street so that his wife and daughters wouldn’t recognize his car.  Snuck around back through the holly bushes, hid beyond the light spilling through the window.  “On the sofa, watching a game show, was my wife, and in the chair my oldest daughter—a Friday or Saturday night.”  For weeks, he told the Companion, he visited their residences, lingering until they went to bed.  Soon he turned to his own apartment complex. “So much easier watching strangers.  It wasn’t just those young ladies who got the cops involved.  There were ladies young and old—men too, lots to be learned from watching men.  The police, the city council made such a fuss about those girls, such a big stinking deal, when all they did was watch TV.”

When her boss asked if her father’s extraction had been successful, Elsa said, “There was none.”  She used that funny term learned during certification: “The device determined he’s a Pusher.”  The boss stared a moment.  “Want to give it one more go?  Try a different unit?  There’s a lot of paperwork for a Pusher, Els.”  No point, she replied.  When she told her mother, her mother said, “I could’ve told you that.  Is this how they’re spending my tax dollars?”

Before long her father’s heart had given out.  The bartender at the Bent Nail helped police jimmy the door, found him on the kitchenette floor, bulging and black.  They were summoned to clear his stuff, her mother emerging from the bedroom pinching her nose.  “That man,” was all she said.

***

Mornings she visits the café where, two years back, she met Fred.  Fred was a supermarket manager, took her to movies, bakeries, Templeton High basketball games.  He was quiet, polite, loved root beer; once he took her to a place, some sort of cellar, with a dozen types on tap.  “Who,” Annalee had asked, “needs that much root beer?”

Then one night he telephoned late, left a slurry, vulgar message on her machine.  Underneath the blankets Elsa listened to him ramble, couldn’t believe the words he used, the things he said he wanted to do.  “I have a daughter,” he cried, “somewhere with her mother.  Priggy bitch!  She moos and oinks and wears shitty old clothes—I ought to spank her ass!”  In the morning she called back, hoping Fred, in his embarrassment, would invite her for root beer.  Instead he didn’t answer, abandoned the café, seemed to vanish from town.  Elsa’s frequented the place ever since, in case he comes back.  Though now she’ll rush forward with wonderful, angry disinterest.  You’re looking fat, she’s planned to say, even if he’s lost weight.

The morning after her father died, she visited the café, taking an extra moment to glance around for Fred.  A voice beside her startled her: it was a well-dressed man who, over the hissing machines, told the barista he’d pay for Elsa’s drink.  When she refused, he shushed her, held up a gift card, said, “Expires today.  Plus I’m leaving the country.”  Elsa thanked him, reached inside her bag, touched the hammer’s handle.  The man didn’t move, kept smiling at Elsa.  Finally he left.  The barista sighed, said, “My friend says he’s a real good kisser.”  She shot Elsa a contemptuous look.   “He was on the prowl,” she said, “but then you went and blew it.”

***

She decided to bring his Companion to her mother.  Elsa said she forgot to return it and her mother clucked her tongue.  “Those things are expensive—they’ll come looking for you.”  Elsa imagined men in company jumpsuits breaking down her door, disappointed at the lack of items to overturn.  “Darling,” her mother rasped, “I keep thinking of you alone in that dump.  Tell me about this lease.  Your sister says the air is unbreathable, the carpet toxic.  Says there are men with tattoos loitering near the entrance.”

The Companion, hearing her voice, began cooing.

“Get this thing off my bed.”

“Don’t resist, Mom.  Lie back if you’d like.  This one likes to crawl.”

“Your father needed one of these things.  Not me.  I’ll gut it out on my own.”

“Everyone can benefit from a Companion.”

“You’d do well to take your own advice.”

But already her mother was leaning back, legs crossed at the ankles, looking like a high schooler in her spring dress.  The Companion cooed and wriggled around the bedspread.  Her mother said, “It’s warm.”  Elsa thought of the day, a few years ago, when she visited the woman’s house, found her slumped onto the kitchen floor.  At first Elsa thought she was looking for an earring.  In her right hand was a glass of milk.  Elsa said her name, stepped forward, stooped.  Only when Elsa’s knees popped did her mother look up, eyes searching.  Elsa asked what happened.  Her mother gave a sigh—Elsa smelled milk on her breath—and said, “Sometimes, darling, the things done by men are simply overwhelming.”

***

Then one night she woke to soft rapping, someone knuckling the slats of her louvered door.  Elsa sat up and squeezed the stolen Companion, causing it to squeal.  More tapping.  “Psst,” she heard, “anybody home?”  Muted giggling as well.  Heart pounding, she visualized her own death in the corner of the room: blood-black carpet, blood-slashed walls.

When the ruffian rapped a third time, giggling louder now, she was overcome with an urge.  She opened the drawer on the lampstand, withdrew the hammer.  Clutching its handle, feeling its mottled wood against her fingertips, she went to the door.  Hammer raised, she undid the lock, slid back the bolt, opened.  The hallway floorboards creaked as shadows shifted behind the wooden slats.  She saw sportcoats, pale skin, sunglasses.

“I have a weapon,” she announced.  “Here in my hand.”

“We only want to tell you—”

“A hammer.  I’ve used it before.”

“Please, it won’t hurt to listen—”

“On a boy, a drunken college boy.  I’m not afraid to hurt someone who fucks with people.”

“If you’d only listen—”

She smacked her louvered door with the hammer.  Two slats cracked and dropped from the frame.  She saw the man jump backwards.

“This building, it’s no place for ladies like yourself—”

Elsa shoved into the hallway.  The louvered door bashed the wall and more slats fell.  She growled, stepped forward, hammer raised.  “All you boys who like to fuck with people!” she shouted.  Already the three men were bolting towards the emergency exit, sportcoats fluttering.  They slammed through the door; she heard footsteps clatter down the stairs.

Elsa gathered the broken slats, returned inside.  She locked the louvered door, leaving the inner door open to see if they returned.  She wasn’t afraid.  The Companion offered coos of encouragement from bed, programmed to lure her into talking, into confessing something.  “I have nothing to say,” she told the device.  Squealing inquisitively, it wiggled its rump.  She thumbed the hammer’s cool, heavy head before sitting down to wait.  Eventually she slid under the covers.  She said something.  A moment later she said something else.  The sound of her own voice surprised her.  Soon the Companion was purring.  Birds began chirping.  The creature was moving, and the blankets felt warm.

 

© 2019 Jeff Frawley

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Jeff Frawley‘s fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Portland Review, South Dakota Review, Crab Creek Review, Bridge Eight, Storyscape, Storm Cellar and elsewhere. After receiving an M.F.A. from New Mexico State University, he served as a Fulbright scholar in Budapest, Hungary. He now lives in southern New Mexico.