Wrong Side of the Bed

The alarm clock had stopped at 3:13. Desmond Pike found this out at 7:40, on the left side of the bed, with his left foot already on the floor.

“No,” he told the foot.

Thirty-two years of right side, right foot first, and it had ended while he was mostly asleep. In the kitchen the refrigerator kicked back on. The power had blinked overnight, which happened in this building twice a year and never on a morning that mattered.

He lay back down, counted to ten, and got out again on the right side. It didn’t count. You don’t get to retake a test because you’ve seen the questions.

The rules went back to his cousin Tricia’s eleventh birthday, when he was nine. A basement bathroom, four kids, a candle off the cake, a dare. Say her name three times into the mirror. He said it three times. On the third, the shower curtain behind him pushed inward at about the height of a hand, slowly, in a room with no window and no draft, and Desmond took the basement stairs on all fours.

Tricia swore she was in the hallway. Nobody thought to ask her friend Glenn, who was the last one up. Desmond had spent the three decades since making sure that whatever was behind that curtain had no reason to come looking: a rabbit’s foot on his keys, salt in every coat pocket, an umbrella with him in all weather, because a man caught in the rain has already been careless once. His one mirror was the medicine cabinet door, hung crooked on purpose so that brushing his teeth showed him the towel rack, and the bathroom light had been on since the day he signed the lease. Nobody but the super had been through his front door in eleven years.

He had never said the name again. Not at Halloween, not at brunch.

“Tomato juice and vodka,” he would tell the waiter. “You know the one.”

This morning he reached for the toothpaste and the top hinge let go. The door swung down, met the corner of the sink, and came to rest with a crack running corner to corner through the middle of his face.

He didn’t own glue. He owned a box of bandages, and he spent six minutes he did not have dressing the crack. Eleven strips. When he finished, the mirror looked like something recovering from surgery, with a frightened eye on either side of the scar.

The cap came off the salt shaker over the eggs with everything in the shaker right behind it. Spilled salt has a known remedy, a pinch over the left shoulder, but his hands were not at their best and the pinch went over the right, into the coffee on the counter behind him.

He tried again. Left shoulder this time, his back squared to the open window. Four floors down, somebody on the sidewalk said a word.

#

Mrs. Okafor from 3B was on the second-floor landing. At her feet sat her cat, black from nose to tail, already looking at him.

“Could you hold him?” Desmond said. “Just until I’m past.”

“He’s a cat, Mr. Pike.”

“What’s his name?”

“Mr. Tiddlywinks.”

Nobody on earth was afraid of something called Mr. Tiddlywinks. Desmond held on to that thought while Mr. Tiddlywinks stood up, stretched, and walked from the left wall to the right, across the only way down. He sat again with the look of somebody who had been paid in advance.

A crossing could be uncrossed, surely. Desmond got down on one knee, unclipped the rabbit’s foot from his keys, and jiggled it along the floor.

“What are you doing to my cat?”

“Reversing him.”

Mr. Tiddlywinks came back across in three steps, took the rabbit’s foot in his teeth, and kept going up the stairs.

“He’ll return it,” Mrs. Okafor said. “He returns everything. Usually in pieces.”

The stairs let out into a service hallway. Halfway along it an A-frame stepladder stood open from wall to wall, a painter on top doing the ceiling, a tray of white hooked to the shelf beside his knee.

“Come on under,” the painter said.

Under was the entire problem. Desmond gave the ladder a claims adjuster’s reading, for the exclusion, and found one: nobody had ever said a word about going through. Between the second step and the third there was a gap that a determined man could mail himself into.

The briefcase went first, and his head. Then one arm and a shoulder, and that was where the ladder stopped accepting him.

“Buddy.” The painter was looking down now. “What are you doing?”

“Going through.”

“Through to where?”

Desmond was looking at the underside of the paint shelf and the soles of two boots.

“That’s under,” the painter said. “You went the long way to under. There’s three feet of clear hallway down there. I left it on purpose.”

Desmond tried to back out. The ladder rocked, the tray came off its hook, and a stripe of ceiling white landed down the length of his back, collar to belt.

He had never been more under anything in his life.

“You do this a lot?” The painter had climbed down. He lifted the ladder off Desmond with one hand.

“First time.”

At the curb a grackle lay dead on the windshield of his Corolla. He was not going to touch it. The umbrella had a crook handle, though, and he hooked the bird off the glass into the gutter. He got in behind the wheel with the umbrella across his lap, where his thumb found the button.

It opened. All of it, door to door, inside a Corolla. He had it closed in nine seconds, but open was open, and he sat at the curb with the question of whether a car counted as indoors. It had a roof. It had a dome light.

The umbrella had knocked the rearview mirror level. He turned it back to the roof by feel, and a spring in the back seat ticked once.

His phone said 8:52, Friday, November 13. He called in sick on those. He had not been awake to call.

#

Halvorsen Mutual had the fourteenth floor of a building with no thirteenth, and Desmond could count.

He carried the umbrella in closed, as on every working day. The elevator was mirrored on three sides, and it stopped between twelve and fourteen for eleven minutes. He spent them watching the feet of the blur in the brass doors, in case one moved before his did.

Priya Raman from Accounts looked up when he reached his desk. She took in the paint, the salt dried at the corner of his mouth, the black feather on his cuff. In March she had invited him to her birthday dinner. He had asked how many were coming, and the answer was thirteen.

“How many?” she asked.

He took a green notebook from his breast pocket.

“Left foot. Mirror. Salt. Cat. Ladder. Bird. Umbrella. The date. The floor.” He tapped each one. “Nine. It isn’t ten o’clock.”

“And what’s actually happened to you?”

“I drank salt.”

“Because you put salt in your coffee.”

“Because I broke a mirror.”

“I have covered your desk every Friday the thirteenth for six years,” Priya said. “Nothing has ever happened to it.”

Of course nothing had. He had never been at it.

On his monitor the Fenwick claim, three days of work on a collapsed carport, stayed open for four more seconds. The screen went black, and in the dead glass sat a face he had spent thirty-two years not looking at. Desmond studied his stapler until the lights came back.

“Did you save it?” Priya asked.

“I was going to save it after my coffee.”

He knocked on his desk. Laminate. So was every other flat surface Halvorsen Mutual had bought. The only real wood on the floor was the regional vice president’s door, walnut, at the end of the corridor.

Desmond knocked on it three times. It opened.

“Did you want something, Pike?” Gordon Halvorsen-Pruett was wearing one golf glove.

“Only the wood, sir.”

“Good. Where are we on Fenwick?”

“As of four minutes ago, sir, nowhere.”

“That’s the carport.”

“It was.”

“Excellent. On my desk by noon.” His eyes went to the stripe. “What is that on your back?”

“Ceiling, sir.”

“Well, don’t get paint on the Fenwick file.”

The walnut closed an inch from his nose. He was halfway back down the corridor before it came to him that he had knocked three times on a door, something had answered, and it wanted paperwork.

“There’s a Mrs. Fenwick out here,” the receptionist said at eleven. “She has called nine times, and she’d like to meet whoever has been not answering.”

Dolores Fenwick was five feet tall and had brought photographs of a carport lying flat on a Buick.

“The other man said it might be an act of God. Does God do carports, Mr. Pike?”

“Halvorsen’s position is that nothing is anyone’s fault, ma’am. God’s included.”

“So I’m covered.”

“You’re excluded. It sounds similar until the check doesn’t come.”

Mrs. Fenwick looked at him for some time, and at the umbrella hooked on his desk. She picked it up and hit him across the shin with the crook end, once, with good form.

“Was that an act of God?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then you can’t exclude it.” She hung the umbrella back and left.

He checked the notebook from the floor. There was no superstition about being hit with your own umbrella.

By noon the lot on Ninth had called to say a gray Corolla with his plate had been towed at 9:40.

At three the office toasted Carol’s retirement, and Carol’s chair gave way under her before the cake was cut.

“Twenty-six years,” Carol said from the carpet, “and it’s a chair that gets me.”

“It’s been broken since spring,” Priya said.

After four the mailroom kid arrived with a shoebox Desmond had purchased, and set it open on his desk. New shoes on a table.

“It’s a desk,” Priya said.

“It has four legs.”

What he kept picturing was the bathroom at home, the bulb burning, the door on its one hinge, the bandages holding or not holding.

#

The tow yard was nineteen blocks east. He walked it with his eyes on the pavement, until a delivery cyclist forced him sideways onto a slab split clean across by a root.

His phone rang before his heel had lifted.

“Desmond? It’s your mother. Don’t panic, but I’ve put my back out.”

“When?” He had not moved off the crack. “When did it go? Just now?”

“Tuesday. At Zumba. I told you Tuesday, you said ‘mm.’”

He put his full weight on the crack.

“How’s your back now, Mom?”

“Same as a second ago. Why?”

The clerk at Mercer Street Towing ran his plate twice behind scratched plexiglass.

“Wrong car.” She pushed a release form through the slot without looking up. “Driver wanted a gray Camry.”

“Is there an apology?”

“There’s a door.”

In the plexiglass something tall stood at his left shoulder. He turned around. It was a coat rack.

In the Corolla he opened the notebook across the steering wheel and wrote, next to each entry, what had actually happened. A power blip. A hinge screw with eleven years of shower steam on it. A grackle that had not seen a fourth-floor window coming, with a Corolla parked underneath. A tow driver who could not read.

He thought about Glenn coming up out of that basement a full minute behind everyone else, grinning, his socks leaving wet prints across the kitchen linoleum.

The laugh started somewhere low. It fogged the windshield.

#

That night he put his new shoes up on the kitchen table. Next to them stood vodka and a can of tomato juice, and he made himself the drink he had been describing to waiters for twenty years. It was a little salty. He laughed at that until he had to put the glass down.

After the second glass he opened the umbrella in the living room and sat under it on the rug.

Mr. Tiddlywinks turned up on the fire escape. The dark window had made a mirror of the whole room at Desmond’s back, and he walked straight up to it. When he slid the sash up, a damp gray object that had once been a rabbit’s foot dropped onto the rug between them.

“Keep it,” Desmond said. He stepped across the cat’s path four times. “You’re Mr. Tiddlywinks.”

For the first time since he was nine, Desmond Pike sat in a room without checking what was behind him. He texted Priya before the vodka could think better of it. “Save me the thirteenth chair.”

She answered inside a minute. “Done. Leave the umbrella home.”

There was one entry left. In thirty-two years it had never needed writing down.

The bandages came off the mirror one at a time, all eleven.

The dare had to be done as it was done the first time, in the dark, by one candle, and he did not keep candles in the house. A candle that goes out by itself means a death under that roof. The junk drawer held the one exception, a pink birthday candle off the cupcake Priya had left on his desk the morning after her dinner. He had been meaning to throw it out since March. He stood it in a shot glass and lit it.

He pushed the shower curtain back to the wall. He reached for a switch that had not been touched since the lease. The hum of the bulb stopped, and behind the wall the pipes held nothing, only the small wet crackle of the candle.

He straightened the door on its one hinge until both halves of his face looked back at him.

“Bloody Mary,” he said.

“Bloody Mary.”

Mr. Tiddlywinks had come as far as the bathroom doorway, tail wrapped tight around his feet.

“Bloody Mary.”

Nothing. The flame stood straight. The shower curtain stayed where he had put it, and after a slow count of ten Desmond laughed loudly enough to flatten the cat’s ears.

“See?” he said to the glass. “Thirty-two years. See?”

He blew out the candle himself, which didn’t count. He brushed his teeth with the mirror pulled square in front of him and watched every stroke. On the way out he left the light off, because a person could. He reset the alarm clock from his phone, got into bed with whichever foot got there first, and was asleep in minutes.

#

He woke without knowing why. The clock said 3:13.

He watched it for what felt like a minute, and the 3 on the end stayed a 3. The refrigerator was running. It wasn’t the power.

A line of yellow showed under the bathroom door, the wrong yellow for a bulb. From behind the door came the small wet crackle of a candle, and under that, slower, water dripping onto porcelain.

Both feet were on the floor before he thought to choose.

He pushed the door with one finger. The pink candle was burning in its shot glass. He had personally blown it out. The mirror hung on its one hinge, and the shower curtain was closed.

He had left it open. He had made a point of it.

It pushed outward at about the height of a hand.

The room was cold, a basement cold, and it smelled of standing water and a blown-out match. He had last met that smell at nine years old, on his way up Tricia’s stairs.

The curtain went back one ring at a time. A woman was standing in his bathtub. She was taller than he was, in a gray nightdress wet to the knees, and there were pieces of broken mirror in her hair, each one with a candle flame in it. A cut ran across her face from corner to corner. The two halves did not quite line up.

“I was nine,” Desmond said.

She held up three fingers. She closed the hand, opened it, held up three more.

Six. It had never occurred to him that they carried over.

“There has to be a time limit,” he said. “Thirty-two years.”

She stepped over the edge of the tub, carefully, a person minding a wet floor. Her hand closed around his wrist.

She went into the mirror backward, the way you would go down a ladder, and she took his arm in with her.

The frame was thirteen inches wide and Desmond was not. It took him anyway, arm to the shoulder, shoulder to the ribs, while his free hand tore the towel rack out of the drywall and his heels drummed the side of the tub hard enough to split the caulk. He screamed the whole way.

The last of him through was a left foot, bare, toes spread. The candle went out by itself.

#

On Monday Priya Raman covered his desk. It was the sixteenth. By two she had called his building twice, and the super let himself in. He found the living room window open, an umbrella open on the rug, and new shoes on the kitchen table. The phone on the nightstand lit up while he stood there. Somebody named Priya was still holding a chair. A towel rack lay in the bathtub, and eleven used bandages in the sink. At chest height on the mirror there was a handprint, and it would not wipe off from his side of the glass.

“Come on, cat,” he said from the bathroom doorway. “Out.”

Mr. Tiddlywinks stayed in the hallway, paws together, at the exact line where the bathroom tile began.