Know Your Beholder: A Novel by Adam Rapp

“Salt them down afterward. Just a few times a week. Someone sort of dependable.”
    “I could do that,” Haggis offered, his voice suddenly hopeful, childlike even. “Shoveling’s my thing.”
    I was surprised. He was obviously making good money dealing drugs—enough to finance homemade valance curtains at least—and I presumed he had very little if any overhead since he was living in his dinged-up car.
    “I’d pay you twenty bucks a go,” I offered.
    “Oh, keep your money, bro. God knows my flat ass could use the exercise.”
    “I’d do it,” I said, “but I tweaked my back the other day.”
    “Say no more,” he said.
    I asked him if he could get it done by tomorrow, explaining how one of my tenants had been complaining.
    “I’ll do it tonight,” he said. “I just have to run a few more errands. I’ll be back later.”
    I told him he was the best.
    After he left, I placed his mug in the sink and turned Rumours over to side B.
    The whistling again. The blizzard passing diagonally across the attic window. That snowplow was back, scraping by on the street below.
    When “You Make Loving Fun” started, I lay on the floor, pressed my ear to the central air duct, and listened, hoping to somehow bypass the second floor and hear into the Bunches’ apartment. I imagined Todd and Mary Bunch not talking, but passing notes to each other across their kitchen table, their daughter’s small half-rotted body interred in some frozen field on the outskirts of Pollard, her ice-blue cyanotic face arrested in an attitude of calm certainty, as if she glimpsed something beautiful just before Mommy and Daddy forced her to drink from her sippy cup of strychnine-laced cranberry juice.
    After the Viagra finally kicked in, I powered down the turntable, manned my desk, opened this manuscript to here, where I had sketched a fairly decent likeness of my wife’s naked body, her eyes staring back at me, irises larger than her real ones, the pupils dreamy and crepuscular, her rabbitlike mouth filled with yearning. Her breasts small yet full, nipples erect. Her perfect hips, shaded with faint cross-hatching.
    I masturbated with the intensity of a thief pillaging a dark room. Crazy images bloomed in my mind: Sheila Anne on all fours; Sheila Anne morphing into Mary Bunch with stelliform eyes, fellating me on my bearskin while clutching her TiVo remote. Even Kent’s ex, Caitlin, made an appearance, her feminist thatch absurdly large and dark, simian-like. She rode me while I clutched her bush. But it was Sheila Anne who returned and brought me to the promised land, in a classic missionary formation. Though I aimed for the nest of paper towels I had fashioned in my lap, I accidentally orgasmed copiously onto the reverb and volume knobs of my Marshall kick amp.
      
    Later I was awakened by strange, guttural huffing noises coming from the front of the house. From my attic window I could see Haggis, down on his hands and knees, using the back of a hammer to chip away at one of the four ice-encased steps leading to the porch. He had already cleared the walkway from the street, and there was a big bag of melting salt on the lowest step, against which leaned a snow shovel.
    Haggis’s grunts were impressive, and he seemed to be making great progress, clawing away with his hammer as his breath smoked up through the now thinning snowfall. Behind him, as the dawn just started to silver the Grooms’ rooftop, a lone cross-country skier clad in goggles and head-to-toe sky-blue Thinsulate passed down the middle of the poorly plowed street.

 

 
    Bob Blubaugh moved in four days ago.
    Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh…
    Stating his name over and over sounds like a septic tank going bad.
    His possessions include a steamer trunk, an aluminum-surfaced kitchen table, two matching dinette chairs, a small wooden desk, five milk crates filled with books, and a full-size mattress and box spring.
    On Friday morning, just as the blizzard finally