Into the Distance
by Anderson Holderness
I was left holding the baby. As the guests exited the living room, squeezing through the tight doorway, they threw back their martinis, wrapped and unwrapped their arms around each other, nodded and laughed and pushed and laughed and nodded and pushed. Their animated banter spilled into the long hallway, softened, and died away. One particularly drunk gentleman, lagging behind the others, stumbled into the doorway, turned toward me, and bowed so low and swayed for so long that it appeared he had just discovered his feet. In this position he cocked his head to the side and smiled at the baby and me.
I bounced at the knees to comfort the baby lying flat across my arms.
The man, still doubled over at the waist, raised his pointer finger and said, “Half of all—Half of all children…” and burst into a hushed fit of giggling. I continued to bounce with the baby and smile, so that I wouldn’t offend the gentleman, and nodded, encouraging him to continue. But he waddled backward, clutching his ankles and chuckling to himself until he was out the door and in the hallway. The hallway was significantly brighter than the living room, almost blindingly so, with the walls and floor having a white, lacquered finish, and once there he stood tall in his black suit, immediately in contrast to his bleached surroundings. Composing himself, he wiped the tears from his beet-red face, and, giving a long sigh, he slid closed the living room’s heavy wooden doors with a pop.
He chuckled down the hall and clopped with irregular steps into the distance. Once the noise died out, I felt utterly abandoned and forlorn. So forlorn that I remembered the word “forlorn” and it resonated so intensely as the most perfect and accurate word for that particular moment that I grimaced and kind of smiled because I knew that words were nothing and even the idea of an accurate word could not help me.
I continued to bounce.
The baby and I looked at each other. The baby must have seen my grimace because it looked at me with wide, unsure eyes and nervously sucked its pacifier.
The baby and I bounced around the living room, which was quite spacious and belonged to another time. The walls, the floor, and the ceilings were hardwood, like we were enclosed in an old cedar chest. There were tan leather couches and chairs that formed a sitting square in the middle of the room, and an antler chandelier with actual burning candles suspended over the center. Over the empty fireplace hung a large antique mirror peppered with black flecks where the silver had been chipped. I saw the baby and me bouncing in the cloudy reflection.
I took its little hand and pointed it to the baby in the mirror. It burbled and cooed and squirmed. A greenish snot bubble rhythmically inflated and deflated under its nose. How heavy the baby was for such a little thing, and warm. Its rosy cheeks were as soft as a down pillow. Overall, I would say that it was sturdy. A very sturdy baby. Like a tree stump. Its fragility did not immediately enter the mind and was more of a parenthetical, something stamped in fine print on the ball of its foot.
The baby, stretching its legs straight and stiff, abruptly turned to me with a sober look on its face and said, “BAP BAP BAP. Ayoo uh? Bap bappa?”
What a weird thing a baby is.
We bounced around the room for longer than I cared to, but in my brain something loud and panicky was telling me to shield the baby from any and all discomfort. Bouncing, though a rudimentary form of amusement, was remarkably effective at maintaining the baby’s attention. Even though my thighs trembled and my arms and back ached from carrying “Stumpy,” as I had named it, I was determined to keep the baby in top condition. But I could only bounce for so long before I sank into one of the leather chairs. I jingled my keys over Stumpy’s head and watched the candles flicker on the antler chandelier. Every minute or so the candles dripped wax onto the floor, creating drip formations that steadily rose from the hardwood. The wax fell faster. I jingled my keys. Jingle jingle jingle. And the wax fell like rain.
***
When I woke up, the baby was gone. I looked all over the room, under the leather chairs, behind the mirror, in the antler chandelier, but there was absolutely no place it could have gone. The doors were shut and too heavy for a baby to open. The only other possible exit was a tiny air vent in the corner of the room, but the vent was screwed in tight with flathead screws. A closer look revealed a lion’s head etched into each face of the flathead screws, which struck me as ridiculous and repulsively gaudy and provoked further stress and exasperation.
A few hours after losing the baby I thought I heard it in the ceiling dragging its feet. I heard a distant “Bappa bap bappa.” I was sure of it. So I stood there, rigid and walleyed, straining my ears to pinpoint any slight movement. Minutes passed by. I hugged my ear against a wall and knocked. I knocked on all the walls. I called out for it. I called out again and again. I called out in farm animal noises. And as I did so, I paced around the room and sobbed. Crazy incoherent sobbing. A sturdy baby? What was I thinking? No baby has ever been sturdy, ever. It’s a baby!
The room got so hot I tore the legs off my pants. Then I tore off my pants. All those antler candles were like a billowing fire, and the air had no place to go except for the tiny air vent in the corner. The wax piled high in the center of the room now, enough to resemble a herd of stalagmites. I kicked them over in frustration and stripped off my shirt, wrung the sweat out, and wore it as a hat. In a last-ditch effort I stacked the leather chairs on top of each other. The chandelier was high above, and the top chair I balanced on swayed a foot to either side, but I had tied the pieces of my pants into a kind of lumpy lasso. I swung it around and around. As I swung and teetered on this mountain of leather chairs, with the antler candles shining bright and hot on my face, my plan ran through my head: climb into the chandelier, pry off an antler, punch it through the ceiling, scoop up the baby, celebrate by bouncing as much as its munchkin heart desires.
***
That was the last thing I remember, swinging those pants. I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but when I woke up the candles were out and it was cold. I wandered about in the dark for a long time, blindly groping for some material surface that would help me find my bearings. The baby was long gone, the guests were long gone, everyone was long gone. After I came to terms with that, all I really wanted was to see one of those red, LED exit signs, but despite my blundering in the dark, I couldn’t even find a wall.
I couldn’t wrap my mind around the thought that there was no exit. That there would never be an exit. I repeated to myself that there were walls somewhere around here. Walls that I could edge along, run my fingertips over. That there was a party somewhere and soon somebody will discover my absence, or at least the baby’s. Help would soon be on the way. No need to panic. No need to think about the word “panic.”
Sometimes I got the feeling that the baby was in the room with me, watching me. As I stumbled through space, every so often I heard something dragging behind me, close to the floor. Quick, quiet little drags which belonged to none other than a crawling baby. I stopped walking, it stopped dragging. I started walking, it started dragging. I picked up the pace, it picked up the pace too. I ran like a blind pig in an orchestra pit, and it chased me, scuffling and clopping every step of the way.
After a while, the baby wore me down until I could no longer run. I turned around to face it, and it approached slowly and steadily.
What most alarmed me about the baby was not that I couldn’t see it, or that it didn’t respond to my calls, or that it dragged itself like some old and sickly rabid creature, but the way the dragging sound lifted from the floor and glided through the air and swam around my head, not unlike a jellyfish.
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I reached out to touch it. The dragging sound was somewhere to my left, above my shoulder. I found its leg fairly quickly. It was chubby and strong. I pulled it and the baby lit up like a paper lantern. Surprised, I yanked my hand to my body and watched the thing somersault in the air.
“BAPPA BAPPA BAPPA,” it said and giggled, sticking its foot in its mouth.
So there we were. Me, standing tall and pensive and naked save for my knee-high socks and tighty-whiteys, and the baby, a glowing ball of optimism.
Thanks to Stumpy’s bright, floating self we could see again, but the living room was a much more cavernous place than it once was. The walls and ceiling had fallen away, and there was only the hardwood floor sprawling as far as Stumpy’s light could go.
I suspected that I might be dreaming, but it was impossible to know. While dreaming, sometimes I have asked myself, “Am I awake?” I asked this question now, quietly to myself, as I bent down and picked up a screw from the floor. I inspected the flat face, the fine detail of the lion’s mane and its open mouth stretching from end to end, the wide slot that receives the screwdriver that spins the lion’s face around and around and around.
I dropped the screw and it clattered away into the darkness. The baby went after it, but I grabbed it by the head and pulled it back. Its body flickered. For a few brief seconds I saw its baby skeleton as if it were electrical filament. Worried I had damaged the baby, I lightly touched its small back until it floated, safe and sound and a little dazed, back to its place by my shoulder. It started hiccupping like crazy.
We walked on. Or I walked on, and Stumpy floated alongside. As long as the hardwood kept moving beneath us, I was reassured that we must be getting somewhere. And although I didn’t really understand the baby, why it was glowing or how, I was glad it was there, drooling and hiccupping and keeping me company.
“Someone is trying to find us,” I said absently, reassuring myself more than the baby. Perhaps a search party with beaming florescent lights and echoing calls. Perhaps they could take turns trying to turn down the baby, passing around in a circle the burning bundle of joy.
Perhaps the baby just needed to be burped.
For the time being, the baby and I were stuck there, stranded on this small hardwood planet, perpetually walking around and around, searching for anything, anyone to tell us where we were and where we were going.
“Am I awake?” I asked myself again.
Yes. This is what it feels like to be awake.
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About the Author
Anderson Holderness tinkers with computer programming and is an avid powerlifter. Read more at salttooth.co.
“Into the Distance” © 2014 Anderson Holderness
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