Face a Week

Rob Washington makes terrible cakes. They are spongy, but never moist. They are slightly more flavorful than wet cardboard. The frosting is so sweet it makes teeth burn. By all rights, Washington’s Bakery should have closed years ago. But although Rob’s baking is miserable, his hugs are legendary.

The counter behind which Rob stands has a section that can be folded down to allow Rob into the eating area, or fixed in place to prevent customers from passing through. It is never fixed in place. Rob’s great deficiency as a baker (or anyway, one of his deficiencies) is that he has no sense of smell. Yet he can smell despair before it even walks through the door. He’ll have a cup of coffee ready by the time the little silver entry-bells are done ringing, and by the time you’re at the counter, he’ll have crossed around to meet you. He rarely says anything. If he does, it’s something simple like, “Oh, honey.” Something that carries no meaning, just the soothing bass of his voice. Then he enfolds you in his hamhock arms and doesn’t let go until he’s wrung the sadness out. After that, you’ve got to buy something. He won’t force you, but you know you have to.

And so Washington’s Bakery is full at all hours, every table packed with people gamely struggling through their cakes as a show of gratitude. The tables are small and scarce, which means the bakery has been responsible for a lot of chance meetings. Some of those have become marriages. There’s a general camaraderie amongst the patrons, even if they never speak. Something about having the sadness bled out of you by big arms, then suffering through baked goods in solidarity.

Rob must know the real reason for his success. What other Bakery have you ever heard of that’s open 24 hours? He sleeps on a cot behind the counter when it’s slow, always ready to leap up at the sound of the bell. The customers are so wrapped up in their own problems, they hardly ever question why a grown man would choose to spend himself on such an endeavor. If anyone ever asked, Rob would tell them it’s for more than just the love of the world.

“I know my cakes are terrible,” he’d tell them. “If anything, they’ve gotten worse over the years. What I’m waiting for – and maybe you’ll think this is silly – but what I’m waiting for is a handsome man about my age, with clean fragile hands and redeemable eyes, who comes into my shop crying. And when I hug him, and he finally smiles, he’ll tell me:

‘God, this cake is terrible. Let me show you how to make a better one.’”

Nobody wants to play chess against Casey Kresh. It’s not that she’s good. She’s phenomenal, but that’s not the reason. For a true connoisseur of the game it would be an honor to play against such a talent. That is, if it resided in anyone but Casey Kresh. She plays the game as if staving off a nightmare – eyeing the board with fierce desperation from across the ridge of her chin, knotting the muscles of her neck, snatching up pieces with fingers like talons.

In the rigid grip of her tibbly fingers, every piece is equally expendable. She spends lives extravagantly with no apparent aim, forcing the game into arcane configurations no chessmaster in his right mind would ever familiarize himself with. She digs herself out of these holes as a ghoul scrabbles free from a grave. She twitches, wheezes, hyperventilates. Trying to concentrate on a board game with a hundred and thirteen pounds of desperate muscle on the other side of the table is impossibly foolish. All but four of her matches have ended in forfeit. She won the other four, but her opponents from those matches are still revered as heroes. Two even survived.

Casey has always been playing war games, of one kind or another. She was born of an anonymous womb, left to live or die in a word that only granted passage if you carved the way yourself. By the time she was twelve she’d slashed so many grown-up hamstrings that she had to relearn knifeplay again from scratch when the growth spurt hit. From then to now, her life has been one screaming, white-knuckled brawl. Somewhere along the line, she taught herself to play.

This is why the patrons of the Blue Tip tolerate her night after night, as she sits shaking by the chessboard: Because this is the retirement she’s earned, and no one dares question the absurd constraints she’s seen fit to impose on it. Though no one is stupid enough to sit across from her these days, Miles the barback cautiously keeps her bowl of peanuts full, and she always has something to drink. But fear isn’t the only thing that keeps the chair across from Casey empty. Every patron knows the old quip about the only winning move. With Casey, though, the saying’s different. For Casey, after years of winning fights by force and absorbing the violence in her victims’ blood, the only winning move is not to win.

Arthur Molina is an unusually serious child. He insists that his mother cut his hair to precisely the same length every two weeks, and when people ask him why he’s always frowning he tells them that’s just the way his face looks. There is a reason for this.

Arthur (“Arturo” by birth, but he won’t let himself be called that) is an empath. He is uncannily good at reading emotions. He would be alarmingly good at it, except that he has yet to reveal his talent to anyone who might be alarmed by it. He doesn’t need to. He needs no outside corroboration to confirm his gift.

He is old enough to speak, but young enough to remember when he was born. The nurse placed him gently in the incubator. Too gently. Arthur’s newborn nerves detected the tension in the nurse’s fingers as she lowered his tiny body. She was trying not to cry. He cried for her.

He cried a lot, for a long time. He was devastated by the way the mailman gingerly dropped letters through the slot. Moved to tears of joy by the healthy gleam of the garbage men. He knew which of his classmates’ parents were going to get divorced before he knew what divorce was. His parents took him to a therapist, because of all the crying, and he sensed such an utter, terrifying coldness in the therapist that he resolved to appear sane from that day on.

On that day, Arthur closed his face. He suffocated the telltale twitching of his hands. His hair, which he’d been growing out for years, he let be cut. The world is an exhausting cataclysm of emotions for him, and he is determined not to make it worse with his own. He knows every avenue through which his feelings might escape, and he has bricked them all up until such a time as he is ready to explore them again. In the meantime he’ll become a doctor, or a police officer, or perhaps an advertising executive. Perhaps an artist, if he gets desperate. Anything, really, to pass the time until the walls come down.

Scott stopped wearing his button-down to work a while ago, but his bosses don’t mention it. For one thing, his job is to talk on the phone all day. For another, he’s a volunteer. Anyway, if they were going to quibble about anything, it would probably be his hair.
Scott started work at the suicide hotline with a full head of hair. He’s been shaving off half an inch every week since then, from back to front. He volunteers seven nights a week, from 11PM to 7AM. He goes home to his two-bedroom apartment, and sleeps all day, and no one else comes home. He pays rent with the savings from his last job, bartending on the North Side. He quit that job just before he started work at the hotline. That was months ago, and at this point he’s got about enough money left to last him through the week. Most of the money goes to rent, frozen pizzas, and cigarillos.

Before he was a bartender, Scott was a carpenter’s apprentice. He’d spend the summer building decks, and only turn to bartending when it got cold out. Then he started slipping. Changed phones and lost the number of the carpenter he was working for. Started staying behind the bar year round, year after year, until half a decade had disappeared into the middle-distance between his customers’ anonymously smiling heads.

Five years since he’s worked as a carpenter doesn’t mean he doesn’t practice, though. In his living room – the one nobody goes in anymore – he’s built a scaffold. He plans to hang himself from that scaffold, when the money runs out and the last of his hair is gone. In the meantime, he spends his nights on the suicide hotline, saving lives. Racking up a reverse bodycount to counterbalance the acknowledged selfishness of his decision. Practicing, for an audience of a thousand anonymously weeping voices, an arrangement of words that might make even him reconsider.

Riley is really more of a girl’s name, if you think about it, and so Miss Washtenaw prefers to go by “Riles.” She got the nickname back in her twenties, on account of what she’d do to men. She stopped doing it at thirty-three when she got married, but the name stuck. Now she’s fifty-two years older than that, and she’s the closest thing this town has to a witch.

Which is not to say she’s ugly. She wouldn’t have the nickname if she was. She wears her hair short now, and age has had the effect of sanding off the unnecessary parts of her. She weighs eighty pounds soaking wet, and on the backs of her hands there’s not a vein you can’t see. It’s not that she’s mean, either. She’s got more smiles than frowns etched into that streamlined hatchet-face of hers. It’s just how she is with the plants.

Courting was most of what Riles did, and when she got married she found she had nothing to do. She had kids, sure, but she took care of them with the same absent-minded ease she took care of her tables in the diner where she used to work before getting hitched. She had to fill the time somehow, so she took up gardening. Or really, she spent a lot of time trying to kill herself.

That’s what she’d do. She’d go out in the backyard – at that time a slimy mud-pit twenty feet on a side – and just put things in her mouth, hoping to die. She must have developed some sort of truce with the swamp in those days, or else the plants got the impression she was too crazy to fuck with, or else the knowledge she gained from her … experiments gave her a hard-earned green thumb.

Nothing grows in this town, except in that 20 by 20 square behind Miss Washtenaw’s place. She doesn’t plant seeds. She searches the muck for the beginning of something she might like, and she helps it live. She makes deals with the creepers and the pitcher plants and the poison ivy. Only good bugs cross her fence. And she knows what every plant in that garden will do to a body …

All this to say, nobody ever asks her what happened to Mister Washtenaw all those years ago.

Tony makes his money on the bass guitar, but his passion is astronomy. He slumps through his sessions, his swoop of black hair hiding his whole head as he searches the carpet with unseeing eyes. He does not need to look up. Barely needs to listen. Tony has perfect pitch and an unerring internal metronome, and if you’ve listened to a jazz, funk, rock or blues track produced in the last decade, chances are you’ve heard him.

Here’s the thing, though: Tony’s blind. Or, near enough. When he was ten he got it into his head to try and see the shape of the sun, and now it’s like he goes through life with shades. He’s got to peer real hard at his sheet music to understand. The skin around his eyes is creased from the strain. Makes him look older than he is. He’s only thirty-two.

The plus side is that the damage is already done. Tony can stare at the sun all he likes now. The dimness of his vision protects him. And he likes to stare. He’ll be walking down the street when suddenly he’ll stop. Turn to watch the sun fall below the horizon. Not move until it’s dark out and he has to feel the walls to find his way home.

When he gets home, he climbs to the roof. He knows the number of rungs on the ladder by heart, and as he climbs them the taps on his boots make them ring in perfect rhythm. Then he opens a thermos of coffee and fires up the radio telescope. He builds images in his head out of coordinates, hears music in the cosmic background radiation. When he gets back inside, he cranks the brightness of his captured images up all the way, and stares.

Among music producers, Tony’s widely known as the best session bassist in the world. It pays his bills. That’s not why he does it, though. That’s not why he put in the ten thousand hours. He did it because he knows that one day some re-purposed airline is gonna send up a luxury space shuttle, and that shuttle’s gonna need a band.