The Furnace

A woman attempts to escape her isolating existence through the sensation of heat and a handyman has a profound experience at a dinner party. Magical realism inspired.

It wasn’t a car horn, or a dog bark, or the thumping bass of a stereo from a neighboring apartment that woke Ama that morning. It wasn’t the limitless sweep of car after car, the pop of the ceiling boards of the downstair’s apartment, or of the floorboards of the upstair’s apartment, or a disembodied voice calling a disembodied name, the siren, the static, the uninterrupted interruption that rode the moving air of the city. It was the jarring unfamiliarity of total and complete silence.

            She lay there vaguely recalling a pang of irritation from the sound of a door slam, the last human sound she'd heard, now that things were so silent, like a gunshot in an open field, what was it... two... three hours ago? An unintended irritation, sure. He’d pivoted the handle just as the door descended upon the frame, in such a way that the metal piece receded back at the moment when metal and wood would have made contact. And she, under-stimulated, in half-sleep, in the stillness of the room, was disturbed.

Of course, it was all unintended.

She lay there in the too big room, so large and bright and silent, her boxes huddled together in one small corner, like a spastic doodle on a pristine white page. In those boxes were contained the entire contents of their old apartment, and it was “too much stuff”, she’d said. “Ridiculous”, she’d said, to have someone drive all of their belongings eight miles to Maine from New York City while they flew above in first class. Now, seeing the pile of inconsequential items in this mountain of a home, she wondered why they’d bothered to bring the stuff at all. Did her little figurine of a whale, her bulletin board, her toothbrush really have a place in these vast rooms, in this hollow shell?

She shifted onto her side, the sound of the down collapsing in the comforter making her conscious of her own body. The door now stripped of the tweed wool coat that hung there the night before, the closet absent of the dry cleaned suit jacket, the floor and the table all naked. She gripped the down comforter with her toes, and pulled the end beneath her to trap in her own warmth against the little spears of cold that undercut the blanket, and gazed at the expanse of floor, paralyzed by the silence.

 

She was watching the long strands of spaghetti crisscross in the frothy water and spinning the little cyclone in the pot when Jacob returned to the house that night. The hollow bolt catching the lock, toes and heals clicking beneath Italian leather shoes, he entered the room. Saying hello, he opened the fridge and began preparing a salad. First, after removing his silver plated wristwatch and placing it, face-out, on the ledge above the sink, he scrubbed the romaine thoroughly with the vegetable brush and severed it lovingly into strips with the santoku knife. Second, the cucumber, skinned with the vegetable peeler, and sliced paper-thin. Third, he cleaned the cherry tomatoes in a small colander and placed three in each bowl. Then, he took the extra-virgin olive oil and the white wine vinegar from the cabinet to the upper right of the sink and mixed equal proportions of each into the small ceramic dressing bowl and mixed them with the small ceramic dressing spoon. He then added a pinch of iodized salt and hand-ground peppercorn. He added equal amounts to each bowl.

            Ama slopped the spaghetti heavily into the used colander, the hot steam rebounding from the cold sink encircling and caressing her head. She took a slice of butter, softening on the counter from neglect, and folded it into the tangled threads of pasta.

            “How was your day?” asked Jacob, placing both salads slightly up and to the right of the plates’ tall buttery mounds of spaghetti.

            “Okay.” Ama lifted the pasta to her mouth, but more than that, she bowed her head toward the pasta.

            “Did the man come and hook up the TV?”

            “No. I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t notice. Did he?”

            “He was supposed to come this morning.” Jacob’s glasses fogged as he bent over the pasta. He took them off and wiped them clean. “You didn’t hear anyone knock?”

            “I don’t know. I must have been sleeping. Or in the shower. I didn’t hear anyone.” She may as well have woken up on the moon, it was so silent.

“That tile next to the shower head needs to be refastened,” said Jacob.

Ama continued to eat.

“Really, the problem is that the bathroom has too much humidity. We need to install a fan in there,” he added, punctuating his statement with a jab of his fork at a cherry tomato. 

“I don't know if that’s necessary,” said Ama, mouth still full, losing some spaghetti to the plate.

            “Absolutely that’s necessary,” said Jacob. “Already you can see the paint peeling on the window frame. Speaking of which, let’s leave the window open slightly when we're showering to let some of the condensation escape.”

            Jacob's phone rang and he rose from the table to answer, leaving Ama's mouth agape with undigested spaghetti and unspoken words. She swallowed both.

 

“See this?” he said. “This is water damage. The steam goes under the cracks and loosens up the caulk. That’s why your husband is right to want a fan in here. If you have a fan on when you take a shower, you shouldn’t have a problem.

            I used to work in this house that was so bad �" you wouldn’t believe it! �" this was back when I was a Super and I lived in a big condo development down in Long Island �" I went into this married couple’s bathroom and the paint was so bubbled and cracked, I had to scrape the whole room down to nothing �" the entire room! �" and underneath was this thick black mold. So I scrub the whole thing down to the bone �" and I kid you not! �" two weeks later they call me ‘the paint’s peeling again!’ �" as if I hadn’t told them to use the f****n fan! �" so I go back, scrub the whole thing down �" but it’s just completley f*****g hopeless �" only job I ever gave up on. At least they sold the place while they had the chance �" I hear the walls just went to nothing.

Nicest couple in the world though �" this gay couple, two guys �" really really nice people. They had this fluffy white cat named Snowball �" the thing was like this big!”

            He held out his hands. The tile was in his right hand. The caulk gun was in his left.

            “Now, this was back before I was married and had kids, and I lived alone in a small apartment in the development. And I’m heading out to answer a call one morning and one of the tenants stops me, so I say ‘Hi. How’s everything?’. He’d been there a while �" ya know married, no kids, worked for some kind of real estate business or something �" and he says to me ‘what are you doing working for these two gay guys?’ and mind you �" I’m toning down the language a little �" what he actually said was a lot nastier. I mean �" can you believe that? I said ‘so what if I work for a gay couple? They pay to live here just like you do!’ And he just didn’t say anything to that but he acted really surprised. As if I wouldn’t work for someone just because they were gay!  I don’t care who you have sex with �" you could be sleeping with your washing machine and I’d still come over and fix your toilet if you paid the rent on time �" excuse me, ma’am �" but you know what I mean.

            And that’s not to say this couple �" well �" see I hired out this guy to help me �" Dan Macallroy �" he was Irish. Had this really heavy brogue. Actually, I hired him out illegally since he wasn’t allowed to work in the US. Didn’t have a visa or anything. I actually met him when he was working for a bagel store downtown and I’d see him every morning, and he’d always complain about his boss and I knew he was illegal, but it was New Years Day and I go in to get a bagel and Dan’s there working and I thought ‘if this man is Irish and he’s able to come into work at seven AM on New Years morning, then that’s the guy I want to be working for me.’ So I said ‘Dan, come work for me. I’ll pay you better than what his guy pays you, and I’ll treat you much better too.’ And he quit on the spot.”

 

It was the cold that woke Ama this time. Slowly, reluctantly, deliberately, she got out of bed, put on her robe, and headed for the bathroom. At first, she ran the hot water in the sink. The faucet coughed and sputtered as it rose in temperature. Under the warm water, her fists began to release their resistant clench. She left the water running in the sink, the steam filling the room with a warm dreamy haze. She looked at her own face in the mirror. It was cluttered with a galaxy of freckles, disappearing slowly as the mirror filled with fog, like puffy cloud cover on a starry night, lifting and tugging at her wild hair.

She got undressed, bumps already forming on her thighs and on her forearms, and took her shower. The unevenness of the ancient showerhead cast some streams on her left eye and not on her right. Some on her neck and none on her shoulder. Some on her right rib and some on her left breast. She didn’t like when the shower curtain tickled her calf when it puffed out towards her. When she got out of the shower, she liked ringing out her hair. Not how it clung to her back. And so on.

            The window too. She looked. The paint was peeling on the window frame. Within, a pane of glass projected the muddy outline of something, sky, branch, earth, outside, but no thing perceptible, like a veil.

 

Again, the cold woke Ama. Only this time, it was night. Ceaselessly shaking beneath the thick covers, every muscle in her body tired from clenching, she vaguely recalled the vision she’d been struggling with in her shallow sleep, of a cruel giant spreading a great blanket of ice over the house, tucking in the corners beneath to keep in the cold, for a moment confirmed by his cold eye watching her shiver through the open window, before she realized that it was only the gaze of the moon.

The open window. Why is the window open?

She jumped out of bed, throwing the covers aside, and ran to the window, quickly pulling the pane down until it sealed and tugging both heavy curtains together, shielding herself from the eye of the moon. The last cold breath from the window left a tense impression all over her body as she stood there in disbelief. Her husband slept soundly in the bed, covers strewn about, his right arm, fully bared, revealed downy hair lying flat and soft. Ama suddenly realized that the other window, too, had been left open. Without hesitation, she ran to it and dragged it shut, absorbing another icy breath, and closing the heavy curtains.

She was losing control of her body now, trembling not just from the cold. She ran out of the room to the windows in the bathroom, the dining room, the den, the guest room, the kitchen, all open, shutting each, drawing the curtains closed tightly on each, spastically shaking like a candle flame shakes when it’s agitated by the slightest breeze, poised to disappear. Heart racing, she surveyed the layout of the house in her mind and realized she’d forgotten the living room. Quickly, knees buckling, she went to the living room and drew the panes, and pulled tight the curtains. The house, concealed completely from the moon and from the movements of the outside, ever more dark and cold and silent.

The living room was an empty place, and beyond that the stone walls, and beyond that more cold.

Empty, except…

There in the darkness, but dark itself, Ama took notice of an old cast iron furnace. She wrapped the curtain of her robe tighter around her hips, and turned back into the hallway to return to the bedroom. She stopped with her fingers on the door knob, the frozen metal burning her hand like ice. She turned it slightly, the metal piece slipping out the door frame, retracting behind the knob. She stopped. Then, without opening the door, she replaced the metal piece back in the frame.

 

 

So this is much later, a year or so later �" and this gay couple invited us over for some holiday �" I think it was Thanksgiving. We just came over to repair a leak in the pipe under their sink and they asked if we’d join them for Thanksgiving dinner �" and I was single and my family was kind of spread out and Dan’s family was back in Ireland so we said okay. So we get there around six o’clock. I was too embarrassed about my cooking and Dan only had a little hole-in-the-wall place with a hot plate, so we brought a couple bottles of wine and I grabbed up an Entmens cake form the Stop n Shop, we could have for desert. There were a few other people at their party �" José, that was one of the guy’s, sister, Sofia and her husband, I forget his name, and another guy from Chris, that was the other guy’s, work, and then two women who also lived in the complex, and whose fridge me and Dan repaired, which broke because the back fan had sucked up too much cat hair.

Dan and I are sitting at the dining room table while the meal is getting brought out and Sofia is telling a story of how she once choked on a fish bone and was given the Heimlich by an elderly Asian gentleman, and Chris begins to tell us all about the man who invtended the Heimlich, Henry Heimlich, and how he tried to cure AIDs by giving people Malaria. Believe me �" my memory is not anything special, but I remember that night like it was yesterday. Actually, I know this is going to sound crazy, but when I remember it, it’s kind of like it’s happening right now. Like I can see it right in front of me, right now. This one candle in particular. The whole time I keep looking at this candle that’s on the table. And I know it sounds crazy, but it just seemed brighter than usual. I mean �" the whole room did, in a way �" seem brighter, only dimmer too �" like the whole room seemed just to be lit by this one candle, but still like a candle.

 

For a moment Ama forgot where she was, when she awoke to the piercing scream of a large electric saw. Keeping her eyes shut tight against the omnipresent drone, she groaned and rolled over, taking the pillow with her and pressing it down on her head to muffle the sound. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to be woken up by something. For the last week, in the stillness of the house, and the darkness (the window facing east and masked by a sheer white curtain subdued the stark morning light) there had been nothing, no interruption, no trigger, to tell her body to find its way back to consciousness. Something insider her, within her, would push her up to the surface of reality. Upon waking, she would often try to retrace the last few moments of her dream, trying to recall what it was that triggered her, and should the trigger ever fail her, if she’d just go on sleeping forever.

Finally bothered enough to be curious, she removed the pillow from her ear, wrapped herself in her robe, and went to the window, pushing aside a cluster of boxes that had been placed there. Outside, a stocky man beside a massive machine hollered orders upwards, as a looming maple tree was carefully dissected and fed into a wood-chipper. Ama watched as the stocky man made a joke in Spanish to the man operating the machine, and they shook and grinned. Then she saw another car pull up the driveway, which was significantly long and away from the road, and another man, much younger, almost a boy, get out with a cardboard tray of coffees. The man operating the machine, seeing the younger man, pulled a lever toward him, clearing the air of the relentless drone, and hopped down from his post. Ama heard through the window his feet land on the cushion of dead dry grass. She watched as the man lit up a cigarette, claimed his coffee, and began aimlessly strolling around on the dry grass, steam forming on his lips and above his cup to mix with the smoke rising from his hand.

He made several large circles in the grass and then looked up at the tree, perhaps admiring it, perhaps strategizing its removal, and then as if she’d called his name, he turned and looked at Ama in the window. She only saw momentarily his hand raise with the cigarette between his two fingers before she stepped back and the man disappeared under the window sill. Standing for a moment, she saw only her own reflection in the window glass.

 

That night Ama had a strange dream. She dreamt that the house was a beast. The pipes were his veins, and the appliances were his organs. (The garbage disposal, his stomach. The washing machine and dishwasher, his liver and kidneys. The oven, his heart). The wide open rooms were his thoughts.

Every morning the beast awoke to find his windows and doors wide open, the outside air freely flowing through them, into his wide open rooms. So he took all of the things inside of him (the lamps, the dishes, the blankets, and chairs) and he piled them up against the inside of the doors and windows, and went to sleep that night in peace. But in the morning the things had been swept aside and a cool breeze blew through his entire body.

So he took all of the bushes and trees from the outside and pressed them against the outside of the door. But the next morning, when he awoke, the trees and bushes had blown away, and the windows and doors were open wide once more.

So he took all of the clouds and the stars and the moon from the sky, and he swallowed them all, and they filled the wide open rooms and pressed and sealed the windows and doors. But alas, still he found the windows and doors open in the morning. The clouds had evaporated back into the sky and the stars and moon had frozen overnight to form ice crystals throughout the wide open rooms.

The beast looked around hopelessly. He cried, and his tears ran through his gutters. He could think of nothing else to do. Then he saw the sun, shining brightly and warmly in the sky. He took the sun in his hands and he swallowed it whole. The beast was filled with joy, sealing his windows and doors with a beautiful red light, as he burned to the ground.

 

“Well everyone sits down. There was music playing �" or, there seemed to be. The two women are asking Dan now about his brogue and why he chose to be an assistant to a Super in Long Island. All of a sudden I realize that I haven’t spoken in a while �" I mean a long time �" I begin to wonder if I’ve said a single word since I came into the house.

            But I am speaking! I’m telling a story to Sofia about the lawyer’s wife, across the way. ‘And I come over her house and she is hiding in a corner with a mountain of stuff piled against the door,’ I’m saying. The candle gets brighter and dimmer too. The voices are like strokes of red and gold, the women red and the men gold, and Dan like eggshell white, the laughs striking the air like pipes bursting. And the skin like nylon and the eyes like vinyl. And I said, ‘Lady, that mouse wants nothing to do with you.’

            Sofia’s telling the story of how she and her sister once bought each other cheese for Christmas, one of the women is telling the Native American creation story, Dan tells the story of the unlikely friendship between a housewife and an electrician, and somehow this all leads to one of the women offering to cut the long steal-wool hair of Chris’ coworker. “

 

The following night was like every night had been. Ama matched the click of her footsteps with the measured descent of the cutting knife, frequencies of metal and rubber and wood and ceramic all in seismic unison. She grabbed her robe from the bedroom and, as usual, brought it into the bathroom with her and, closing the door behind her, undressed.

            When she touched the bathroom light switch, her body froze. The buzzing of the saws penetrating through her sleep all morning, like a dentist filling a cavity, the minute tap of screws resting on the tub rim, the nauseating drone that accompanied the workers’ deep sighs of accomplishment, the way it finally stopped just before the men shook her hand goodbye, hearing them yell behind them “there’s a year warranty if the fan gives you any trouble, miss.” She remembered.

            She looked at the white sink, the fan and the added switch that accompanied its installation lingering in her periphery, still pointing at a downward angle in the off position. Pivoting, she started the shower, the sweet perfume of warm moisture grazing her nostrils, she removed her robe and stepped beneath the shroud broadcasting from the brand new showerhead. She watched as the white knuckles of her toes formed little red blood clots. Blood coursed through her body, returning to the heart, where perfectly even streams of hot water beat against her chest.

            From deep in the earth, water rose from a molten well, riding boiling channels, navigating vertical cylinders, to drop from a pocked sphere and find her undiscovered. Her mind went blank with the illusion.

            Then suddenly a change. She heard the door open, a hand flip the switch, and the shrill buzz of the fan began. She stood there a moment frozen, the precious steam escaping through the overhead vent. Not just escaping, being sucked out, rapidly.

            She jumped out of the shower and slapped the switch off. The shrill voice of the fan died out. A moment later, beside her, the door cracked open, and without hesitation, she slammed it shut and hit the lock.

            “Ama. Ama!” said Jacob. “We need to use the fan. The steam is causing the tiles to fall. It’s causing the paint to peal.”

            Ama stood there, motionless, as the room refilled with the intoxicating steam.

            “Ama! Do you hear what I’m saying?”

            She flinched.

            “Ama! It’s important that you use the fan…“

            Ama shoved her fingers in her ears and lowered herself to the floor, slowly. To her knees. Naked and deaf on the floor, she noticed the window. The fan had cleared the steam from the glass. Outside bare branches shook in an endless current of wind. The outside layer of glass housed crystals. The steam returned slowly to the glass, as she watched, patiently, soundlessly, for it to disappear.

 

“So we clear the middle of the room of furniture and José brings a stool from another room and places it in the middle of the floor. Leftovers of mashed yams and stuffing exposed to the air, hardening in their ceramic bowls. Chris appears from the hallway with a couple pairs of kitchen scissors and other scissors. She, the woman, I remember her name now, Ronda, begins cutting. But she isn’t cutting Chris’ coworker’s hair. It’s my hair. And Chris is cutting Dan’s hair. If I shut my eyes, there’s the sound of four scissors, like sheers on bushes, steel wool and lace and plaster falling to the ground. And even more, there are fingers sliding against my scalp, the metallic chop of the blades near my ear, the human smells, the sudden weightlessness, the scissors in my hand now, the course follicles on my fingers, my determining chop of the blade, my wanting to please, my eyes like pipes now, bursting. It was like nothing. I mean �" it was something. It was really really something.

 

Ama awoke in a cold sweat, her body trembling, her heart racing. She was lying on the floor of the bathroom. The room was unbearably cold. Her gums ached from persistent clenching. She lay in the silence, staring at the side of the tub.

            But it wasn’t silent.

How could that be?

            She stood up slowly and opened the door to the bathroom. A chilling breeze swept throught he long hallway, grazing her still naked body. She stepped out of the bathroom and onto a dense carpet of crisp grass, rigid with frost, crushing beneath her bare feet. She made her way back to the bedroom, the icy wind pushing her onward.

            The bedroom door was ajar. The metal piece gently rested against the doorframe. She grasped the knob and pulled it open. There was no bed, no windows, no walls. Just a field of frozen grass, and the night sky, and the discarded pile of lumber from the dissected tree arranged in neat piles. And the furnace, where the bed used to stand.

            She stood a long time in the doorway, looking across the field to where the furnace stood, a timid but ever present cracking and popping clearly coming from its depths. The door of the furnace was closed, but she could see from the seams of the door frame, a red stripe of dancing light. She began to move towards it, slowly, slowly, across the field, white with the white eye of the moon. Her bare feet crept towards the hypnotic ray of fiery light. Outside the door, she came to a stop. She closed her eyes, so that all there was the sound of the burning wood, and the sensation of it warming the front of her body, with the cold behind.

            Then, grasping the door of the stove in her fingers, she swung it open. It hissed as it was exposed to the night air. Finding a knobby piece of wood beside her, she prodded the nest of fire gently and sent encouraging currents of wind beneath it with hollowed lips. It fell back, then drew closer in response.

The fire was breathing on its own, its own quiet animal. She forgot her name, and let it give her new names. She closed her eyes again, feeling a constant warmth, surrounding her now. The heat beat against her stomach like an iron, scorching her. She took both sides of the mouth of the furnace in her hands, flesh searing, body and metal becoming one, and pulled herself inside.

Author's Note

how do the two stories relate to you?

Reviews

[A. Amos]

Very interesting my friend and enjoyable read...

[Tori Galatro]

Thank you so much for reading!

[A. Amos]

You're most welcome