The Attic

The Attic

Thaddeus Lenk

You and I spent all night in the attic working on the rope machine. I didn’t notice the hours pass me by; I didn’t notice how late it had gotten as we worked, sweating, in that airless, wooden attic.

I guided you, like I always did. You tried to hide the anxiety in your eyes, or the way your hands shook at first as I showed you around the boxlike machinery and the twisting, corrugated metal arms that hooked and interwove within each other at frightening speeds as they jammed back and forth in violent succession to bind the rope’s natural fibers together.

Sweat covered our bodies as we worked. We barely spoke a word.

Was it love that we felt on those hot nights in the attic? Were we capable of love?

From the attic, a door led out to a small balcony embedded in the building’s sloped rooftop. The cool night air sent shivers crawling up and over my sweat drenched body as the breeze washed over me. In the distance sirens sounded. I stood there under a smog-tinged sky and let the city’s energy wash over me while you remained in the attic.

How many nights had we spent like this? I looked around at the skyscrapers and ominous brick buildings which towered over me. I looked below at the distant streets, crawling with traffic, but from this distance I couldn’t make out the details of the cars, only their headlights and the rough shape of their boxlike bodies.

Standing on that balcony I sometimes felt like I was falling. Or more accurately, that the sky above me was crashing downward while I fell in reverse, covered in sweat and oil, my arms and hands covered in bruises.

It felt like every night we spent in that attic working on the rope machine brought me closer to God.

Murray looked at me funny from across the bar. His green eyes and off-center smile tried to disarm me as he spoke in a thick accent.

“I ‘aven’t seen you in a couple days Carrie. Where ‘ave you been hiding?”

I gave Murray a noncommittal answer, like I always did. He’d been coming into Callaghan’s for the past three years on a regular basis: every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He never crossed a line; never got too drunk. Everyone loved Murray.

He kept asking me where I’d been lately. His green eyes kept looking at my scarred and bruised hands, with my pinky twisted and partially broken. I kept dodging his questions.

“I’m jus’ concerned about my friends,” he slurred toward the end of my shift.

“I’m sure.”

The cycle kept repeating in time with the moon’s phases. Or so I thought, as I would take breaks on the balcony to breathe in the city’s hot, humid, vibrant summer air. Sickly sweet, I loved hiding in the city with her cardboard skylines and her empty-eyed automatons.

Just like you, my love

Skin made of rope with beautiful quartz eyes but nothing of intelligence behind them, with skin so rough to the touch but so gentle too. I treasured all of our time together, even though our love was still young and fragile, like a hatchling reaching out with blind eyes and an open beak begging for food.

Are you my hatchling, or am I yours?

No one else seemed to notice the patterns. I didn’t mean the patterns in the sky, tied to the moon and her beauty and to my violent, angry rope machine. I meant the other patterns: the ones tied to the city; to the humans; to the wave after wave of roiling flesh and eyes and teeth. The consciousness of humanity worked in patterns: the same people hiding behind different bodies that looked the same but still appeared slightly different; the same timing of hellos and goodbyes into my life according to the calendar year and the time of day; the same wants, desires, and compulsions, manifesting, just like their bodies, as always the same but different

Even Murray.

Sometimes I confused him with an old friend named Michael.

They looked similar. They even spoke the same, but with a slightly different emphasis of their connotation. Was their passing affection toward me genuine? I could never be certain.

“I’m thinking of leaving the city,” Murray said to me after his first drink.

I raised my eyebrow and asked him why. I found my mind preoccupied with thoughts of my rope machine. It had been several days since I’d been up there. I’d run into a roadblock with one of the mechanical arms, and you had been of no help to me recently.

That was okay. Your head was empty and stuffed only with cotton.

“I was born out in the pastures. My family raises sheep,” Murray said, his words hesitant at first, as if he were somehow embarrassed by his upbringing.

Or maybe it was that I made him nervous to speak genuinely.

“I got a letter from mum asking me to come home, an’ I’ve been thinking about it … what’s the point of being in the city if you’re all alone?”

His words washed over me. I heard them and I processed them, but I didn’t care about them. All I could think about was my rope machine, and about you. I worried you didn’t have a heart; I worried you didn’t have a soul.

What did that say about me?

“D’yaknow what I mean?” Murray asked me.

The attic: hot, stuffy, and violent, drenched in my sweat and my fears, rattled with violence. You were on the other side of the machine’s main, boxlike compartment. One of the arms had gotten stuck again. At first I thought one of the hinges had seized up, but as I disassembled the arm and inspected the mechanisms inside, as I applied thick, viscous oil that looked like blood in the attic’s dim light, I noticed something strange growing within the machine. An organic matter, like a nerve, like flesh, had wound itself from the machine’s box and into the joints and hollow places of the mechanical arms used for weaving and assembly.

I poked at the apparent flesh with my finger. In response it quivered. I thought I heard the machine sigh in a soft, longing ache.

At my touch you turned your head to look at me with your quartz eyes. You tried to speak but your voice remained stifled with cotton. Embarrassed, blushing, I avoided your gaze as I reassembled the broken arm, encasing that unusual looking flesh with steel.

Tony, tall and sardonic and not caring much for the world, stared down at me as we sat opposite of each other at a chess table in the park.

“You missed last week,” he complained with a voice filled with granite as we set out our pieces and re-started our weekly ritual.

“I’ve been busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Working.”

“That’s a lie. You’ve never missed our games for work before.”

I glared at Tony, angry at him for not simply accepting my lie.

“How long have we known each other?” I asked.

“I'm not sure … you tell me.”

“Why are you dodging my question?”

“Why are you dodging mine?”

I continued to glare at Tony as he scowled at me. We were too similar.

“There’s this project I started recently,” I finally said, not wanting to tell anyone about the rope machine I’d been working on, “I’m making good progress, but it’s all I can think about. I lost track of time last week.”

“I sat here waiting for you for two hours,” Tony complained, “I held the table and everything. A couple guys were trying to cause trouble about it and I told them off … they didn’t like that very much.”

“That’s very valiant of you.”

“If you need more time, we can call off next week.”

“No, I should be good. Things are wrapping up. And I really like our weekly meetup.”

“Do you want any help?”

“I don’t think you can help me in the way I need it.”

Tony looked down at me with sad eyes. He wanted to help me; he wanted to be let into my world.

“Do you hate me?” he asked.

His deep voice, filled with granite and gravel, wavered with insecurity.

“I don’t hate you like that,” I said, knowing instinctively what I meant, “We’ve played so many games together. You should know me better by now.”

He stuttered. He looked ashamed, and embarrassed.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said.

In reply he laid his hands out against the table, indicating he was ready to start. We played in silence.

After our game we shook hands without speaking to each other. We would see each other next week.

My work in the attic left me wanting more. Unsatisfied. Hungry. Confused, because this was all I had ever dreamed of, but now that I’d gotten here, now that I’d come so close to achieving my dreams, I found myself unable to enjoy the moment. Covered in sweat and oil, I escaped the attic’s heat to stand outside on that hauntingly lonesome balcony. Not even the thought of you could lift my spirits. I felt robotic, and unfulfilled.

After all the progress I’d made, after all the sacrifice and the hurt and the insecurity and the uncertainty, and now I felt hollow inside? More machine than woman; I felt empty and used.

Inside, the rope machine had neared completion, its body of metal and hinged joints now partially consumed by a pulsating flesh that exuded a sickly sweet aroma of forest fauna and wild game.

Intoxicating.

I hadn’t expected the flesh to smell so good, or to have grown so quickly. Covered in oil and steam, stretching out past the limits of what most creatures could endure, I was starting to think the rope machine had developed a mind of its own.

Not a mind like ours.

Not one meant to think of things like empathy or guilt.

A grinding, crushing, consuming mind that operated under the same rhythm of the rope machine’s violent arms as they twisted, spun, and pulled you apart before reassembling you.

Beautiful, in a way. Like how the city surrounded me in a labyrinthian humming of machinery and humanity.

Intoxicating.

Murray had started slurring his words. It was only the afternoon but already he sat hunched over the bar with his chin resting loosely on his hand.

“I don’ like the city anymore,” he complained, “It’s too lonely.”

It was Friday afternoon. A pounding headache consumed my head. All last night I’d been up in the attic working on the rope machine. The machine’s thrumming and the clanking of its flesh arms echoed inside of my head. That was all I could hear; all I could think about, as I poured Murray another drink and listened to him whine.

“I barely make any money,” he sighed into his drink, “I came out here to find a wife. There’s no women back home. All men herding sheep, or working in the pubs, or the factories, or the fields. It’s all just men working. I came here to find a wife and bring her back home to pasture, but now look at me.”

His red-rimmed eyes looked up to me as if I were some sort of deity or half-god who could fix his dilemma.

I was neither.

“Do you know what I mean?” he asked.

You kept opening and closing your mouth, trying to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. I’d yet to give you a heart; a soul. Without one you would never be able to speak. Not truly, with words of your own. All you would be able to do would be to parrot whatever you were told.

Obedient. Like a dog. You were an automaton, preprogrammed and without thought.

And I loved you for that. My sweet little toy, crafted by hand, spun up from the many violent, twisting and flesh-like arms of our rope machine.

I loved you, darling. I treasured you.

I sat at our usual chess table waiting for Tony. The summertime humidity, trapped by the city’s asphalt streets and concrete buildings, smothered me like a thick, wool blanket. I kind of liked the feeling. The humidity made me feel warm, and safe. I sat there at the stone table sweating, stewing, enjoying my time out in the open in the middle of the day. Rarely did I feel safe. Rarely did I feel calm, and satisfied. But the humidity was doing wonders for my mind.

Only fifteen minutes late, Tony approached from the far side of the park. He strode up to me in his long, loping gait before settling his lanky body down awkwardly across from me.

“Sorry for being late,” he muttered.

“Why are you sorry?”

He shrugged, looking embarrassed again. “I dunno … I just feel guilty. Like I disappointed you.”

He paused. I waited for him to continue speaking, knowing the slow cadence at which he liked to speak.

“I always feel guilty,” he said, not looking me in the eyes, “When I've done something I perceive as rude.”

“You’re a coward.”

“I know.”

“You play chess like a coward too.”

His stare crumbled from mine and his eyes looked down at his hands which he shuffled about, preoccupying themselves with each other.

I reached over and took one of his hands to hold in mine. He looked back up at me, startled. His mouth opened and closed, as if stuffed with cotton.

“I like how you play chess,” I said, “It’s frustrating, and cowardly, but you play well. There’s a hidden grace to it.”

He smiled at me. Genuine, afraid, but hopeful, and kind: Tony was a sweet man.

“Are you free this Friday?” I asked, “I started renting a small studio near the westside. It had a balcony, it's perfect for an evening dinner.”

The flesh had grown from the arms and cascaded over the rope machine’s boxlike body to anchor their long, pulsating tendrils into the floor below. I’d spent all night cutting at the flesh, peeling back the tendons and ligaments and fusing those severed ends into the rope machine’s steel body. The work proved gruesome, and left me stained in blood and oil.

I reveled in the work; in the satisfaction of building something with my own two hands.

For a moment I stood in front of my rope machine, my hands on my hips, pride swallowing my heart.

I tried to ignore the acrid smell of burnt hair and putrid diesel that filled the attic: the unsettling scent of half-cooked meat wafted up from the boxlike body. You looked at me with your quartz eyes and your empty voice and your limp, wet-noodle body, and I could feel your shame.

In frustration I retreated to the balcony where I let the night air wash over me, cooling me. I wiped at the sweat along my brow. I closed my eyes for a moment, centering myself before tilting my head up and opening my eyes to stare at the towering skyscrapers which surrounded me and the hazy city night sky which hung overhead.

I wanted to feel free. I wanted to fall into that endless sky overhead and free myself from all my scummy wants, desires, and mistakes.

Instead I remained there on the balcony, wishing I had the guts to jump to my death to the busy street below.

“Murray, I’m cutting you off,” I said with a stern but even tone.

“No ya don’,” he muttered with a hiccup.

“You can barely even sit upright. It’s irresponsible if I keep serving you.”

Every week we went through this same ritual. I did my best to be neutral with him, and to explain why he was suffering the consequences of his own overindulgent actions, but it never seemed to click for him. He always whined and complained, saying we were the only bar in the city to cut him off so fast. But still he kept coming back, week after week, and day after day.

“Carrie,” Murray said to me with unfocused eyes and a quivering lip, “Will you marry me? We can move back to the old country. It’s beautiful. Green hills … green hills everywhere.”

His voice trailed off as he proposed to me, his body half-stretched and leaning on the wooden bar which separated us.

“Murray, I'm cutting you off. You can come back tomorrow and we’ll serve you.”

A lingering smell of rot had seeped into the attic. Nauseating, dizzying, I’d started burning incense to try to clean the air, but that did little to mask the smell.

The rope machine had started leaking blood. Its boxlike body sat in a circle of a dark red pool tinged with oil, and saturated with sin. You hung above the pool, your rope body suspended by the machine’s flesh arms while your quartz eyes looked down at me with obvious disdain.

You’d stopped trying to speak to me.

Had you finally accepted your place?

Did you hate me?

If you did, I didn’t blame you.

“I’ve already tried giving you a heart twice now,” I said, stepping around the pool of blood to get closer to you, “Both times your body rejected it.”

You tried to pull away.

I didn’t let you.

In that sweltering heat; in that sickly sweet aroma of machinery and death; I grabbed your arms and wrapped you around me. We danced in slow, gentle circles. The pool of blood stained my shoes. I didn’t care. I held you so gently in my arms; you held me so gently in yours.

We danced in soft, gyrating circles all night. I imagined that was what lovers did with each other when they were finally, thankfully, alone with each other.

“Do you remember when we used to play chess in the park, all those years ago?”