I took my husband one fine Sunday morning, when the crows croaked in pairs from the telephone wires and it seemed the whole world was in love.
We entered the tracks through a gap in the fence behind Target, stepping in uneven gait from cross tie to cross tie while I pointed out things he might like. “Check out that pile of rusty railroad spikes. Bet you could get some real serious tetanus from those!”
He responded, as he had for the past eight months, in grunts. When we first started dating, we’d stay up past sunrise doing nothing but blah blah blah, but then the Sad Thing crept in, and my husband refused to speak. The silence in our house is making my ears shrink, I swear. I stick a cue tip in and each day it swirls a little smaller. One day it won’t fit at all.
Of course I tried to help.
I bought a set of wigs from the dollar store and tied them with fishing wire to the fig tree in our backyard. “Oh my god!” I yelled, jabbing a finger. My husband padded over from a shower, towel around his waist. “That fig is growing hair instead of fruit! Or else maybe the squirrels have been stealing wigs! Either way, it’s weird, right? What do you think?”
He grunted and walked away, dripping.
I moved all our furniture just an inch or two out of place. I switched our sugar for salt. I paid a neighborhood kid to crawl around in our crawl space and say “Wooo.”
“I think we have a ghost,” I said. “I think this house is haunted. We have to hold a séance. We have to burn sage. I’m so scared I can’t even think straight. What should we do?”
My husband flipped the channel to one about baby animals and sank deeper into the couch. The neighborhood kid scraped his knee on splintered wood and I had to pay him extra.
I decided to be bolder. I decided desperate times called for desperate measures, and so I staged a real doozy of a scene. Dinner time. I chopped carrots for salad; my husband stirred a pot of soup.
“Aiieeee!” I screamed. “My knife slipped!” My husband turned his head and oh, what a sight: my left thumb was tucked back, pressing a small pouch against my palm, and each time I pumped it, out spurted a gush of fake blood. Blood on the carrots! Blood on the counter! Even two perfect strangers would have plenty to say. “Quick, the keys! A towel! No time to waste, we can talk all about it in the car!”
My husband let his wooden spoon settle against the pot and came to me, but not with a towel or keys. He reached behind my hand and unfurled my thumb. The bloody pouch dropped. His fingers were warm, and his skin smelled like sour, earthy things: onions and garlic and leeks. “There’s a guy named Gus who sells body parts down by the railroad tracks,” he said. “New ones, not used. I’d like to see that, I think.”
Oh, how I treasured those words. “Rrrrrrailrrrroad,” how beautiful! “Sellsssss,” what music! I would find this Gus, I would take my husband to him. We would examine all his wares and in the end, we would buy the part we lacked. A hand, maybe? A heart? I didn’t know, but Gus would! It was his job!
We met him where the web of train tracks narrowed to cross a deep culvert. Oily water rushed out the black mouth of a tunnel, shimmered for fifty feet or so in daylight, and then continued underground beneath our feet and out to sea. A concrete ledge ran along one side of the tunnel, and it was there Gus had set up shop, his patchwork of quilts spread out beside him.
He waved up at us.
“Are you Gus?” I called.
“Of course he’s Gus,” said my husband.
“I’m Gus!” yelled Gus. “Come on down, don’t be shy.”
We climbed down a metal ladder. A stench tickled the back of my throat – the water, maybe, or duck poop that decorated the tunnel ledges.
“Welcome to the Emporium of Innards and Outtards! Welcome to the Open Air Market of Human Pre-mains! I’ve got all textures and tones, all ages and sexes. If there’s a part you’re missing, why – look no further, because I’ve got it.”
Gus sat on one of those miniature lawn chairs and waved a cigar at his wares, then stuck it back between his lips and puffed out smoke. He seemed old, or at least parts of him did: reddened cheeks and grey hair, a tattered woolen sweater and grody baseball cap. But his right hand was ivory-colored and smooth, veined in blue. The fingers that curled around his cigar ended in delicate, tapered tips. His tongue seemed too small and pink for the mouth that held it. I’m pretty sure one leg was longer than the other.
He smiled. “The lungs are new too. I’m breaking them in.” He thumped his chest and coughed to illustrate his point, then leaned forward in his chair. “What are you looking for today? A young couple like you, maybe you’d like a pair of feet for dancing? Or a set of lips for when yours get worn down?” He winked. His right eye was green; his left brown. “Go on, take a look.”
We stepped past the man and studied his goods. My husband ignored a bloom of lips, a tangle of feet, and squatted to run his fingers along a cluster of ears. “These are great.”
“I’ve always loved ears,” said Gus. “If you ask me, they’re the most well-designed part of the human body. Compare them to, say, an elbow, or a nose. Ugh.” He stuck out his too-pink tongue. “Disgusting. But an ear – why, that’s a real piece of art. You want one? You want two? Or ten? A good marriage needs a good supply of ears.”
“We don’t need any more ears, actually.” I wondered if he could see how mine had been shrinking. “What about a pinky finger? They’re cute.”
“No.”
“What about an appendix? Do you sell appendixes?”
“Oh yeah, and I can give you a real good deal on them, too, since they are not strictly necessary, per se. More of a vanity type thing. Organs on that end.” Gus waved the cigar towards the end of his quilt where neat lines of forearms and shins gave way to reddened lumps and wormy entrails.
“Ooo, what do you think? Should we get an extra appendix or two?”
My husband grunted. He moved from the ears to a silver tray of toes, all curled together like fetal puppies. “She thinks I’m missing something,” he said to Gus. “She thinks that if she figures out what it is, I’ll be fixed. But that’s not how people work.”
Gus lowered his cigar and shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “No, it is not. What’s wrong with you, if I may ask?”
And then my husband told Gus about his Sad Thing. My husband, who returned from work each evening with nothing but “I’m tired;” who cried in the bathroom, shower running full blast, rather than let me witness his wails. We’d pledged to take care of each other in sickness and in health, and here I was, doing my best to take him in sadness, which was a kind of mental sickness, not as messy as leprosy or Ebola, say, but just as deadly to a marriage, and he wouldn’t have me, but he would have Gus? He would use up his words on this Frankenstein mess of a man who blew smoke with a child’s tongue?
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” I couldn’t help myself. “What do I need to do? You want me to get a new face? I’ll do it. I’ll get a brand new face.”
“If I may,” said Gus. “This doesn’t seem to be about you, in this case. In other cases, maybe yes, a new face would help, but in this specific case, it seems more likely that your husband here is dealing with something on his own, having nothing to do with you. If I may.”
“If I may, Gus, you may not,” I said, but my husband was standing.
“Tell me: what could you possibly do?”
“I don’t know, because I don’t know what’s wrong with you. If you told me about it – me! Not Gus! – I could figure something out.” I reached out to touch the cool back of his hand. “We could figure it out together.”
My husband sighed. The wispy note lingered, hung in the air like a curl of appendix. What a stupid, hopeless exhale. What a sad, vestigial sound. He looked down at the quilts, and I could tell then he wanted to buy the whole spread, every wrinkled elbow, every angled lower jaw; every heel and heart and rib. We would sift through them all in infinite combinations until we discovered the pieces that made him whole again. We would fix him together.
I reached for his other hand.
He jumped off the ledge into the water.
“No!” I yelled.
“Watch it!” shouted Gus.
“Oh, shit,” said my husband. “I thought it was deeper for some reason.” He stood waist-deep in the filthy creek; his stupid, beautiful ears were even with my shoelaces.
“Are you crazy? What were you trying to do? What if it had been deeper? What if there were rusty spikes at the bottom?”
My husband stared at the ripples he’d made and shrugged. Like, Whatever. Like, Oh well, the only reason this particular suicide attempt didn’t work out is because I’ve always been bad at judging depths, not because of any intrinsic desire to live.
I squatted. His eyes seemed to me the same color as the water: oil-black, struck with poison. “You were trying to scare me, right?”
“Ladder over there,” said Gus. My husband waded to the slick wall and hauled himself up. He returned to us in a cloud of duck poop and dead fish, a trail of black lagoon footsteps in his path.
I stood and repeated, “You were just trying to scare me, right?”
“I’m sorry, Gus,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry, happens all the time.” Gus leaned back into his tiny lawn chair, his lady hand tracing smoke patterns in the sky. “I’ve seen plenty of people jump from plenty of places. It’s old hat by now. You’re not even the first person I’ve seen jump today.”
One million things to say, and I swallowed them all. I did the only thing I could think to do. “How much for a toe, Gus?”
He answered, and my husband squatted to pick one out, not a big toe or a pinky toe, just a middle toe, lovingly formed and the color of honey.
“That’s a real good one,” said Gus. “No, damn it all, that’s the best toe I’ve ever seen. Your husband has a real eye, ma’am. He doesn’t need any more of them, that’s for damn sure. You know what I think?”
“No, Gus, I do not.”
“I think this toe is just the thing you and your husband need. And you can trust me. I’m an expert in human hearts” – he tapped on his chest – “and minds.” He tapped on his temple. “You want a bag for that?”
We answered yes, but before he could hand it to us, something hard popped into the graffitied wall to our right and skittered across the concrete.
“Goddammit.” Gus pointed his finger up at the tracks where we’d come from. “I see you up there, O’Connells! You don’t scare me!” He crouched and started flipping the edges of the quilts over the smaller body parts. I turned, catching a glimpse of children up on the tracks we’d climbed down from – red t-shirts, matted yellow hair, straws clutched in dirty fists – before the gang ducked back out of sight.
Gus rummaged in a bag. “The O’Connell brothers sell teeth and bones and nails by the harbor. Hard stuff. They think I’m encroaching on their business, but who was here first? Tell me, who?” Another bullet slammed into the platform, bouncing into the quilt Gus had pillowed over the ear, and I saw it wasn’t a bullet, but a back molar.
“You two lovebirds run,” said Gus. He pulled a motorcycle helmet out of his bag and squished it down over his gray hair and baseball hat. “Keep following this ledge into the tunnel, all the way through. You’ll pop out near the Amtrak station. I’ll hold ‘em off.”
Teeth whizzed through the air and Gus beat them back with loose arms, with feet, with thighs and shins and elbows – you name it, he swung it – but me and my husband, we had just the one toe, and it couldn’t do much of anything against teeth, so we ran. Light and shouts and the hard pop of teeth faded behind us, and soon the darkness consumed even my palm held in front of my face.
“It stinks in here,” I said, single file behind my husband.
No response.
“How long until the station, you think?”
The only reply was his shuffling feet.
So this is how it would be. I should’ve lopped off my ears for Gus, he could’ve sold them half price. I wouldn’t need them. And my husband – what was to stop him from jumping again?
The ledge swerved left. My husband stopped suddenly so that I bumped into his back, his clothes still damp. He cleared his throat. “Can you see me?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
His breath quickened. He began to sob. I’d only heard him cry from outside the bathroom door, before hurrying away to loop a wig around a fig branch, to fill a small plastic pouch with fake blood.
“Why are you crying?” I asked. “Is it me? Is it the Sad Thing? Is it the duck shit? Is it because we’re lost in this tunnel?”
“Just listen. You never listen.”
I didn’t point out that he never talked. Instead, I shut my mouth, and oh – I listened! His sobs echoed in the warm, sewage-rich tunnel, and I wished we’d purchased an extra heart instead of just the toe. We’d funnel his tears through the superior vena cava, into the right atrium, then pipe them into the ventricles. Our two hearts alone couldn’t handle the volume of his sadness.
But that was the problem. Maybe three hearts wouldn’t be enough; maybe we’d buy five, or ten, or twenty, and my husband would drown them all, and then what?
“Let me hold something of you,” I begged, “let me hold anything,” and so my husband gave me the toe. He held the top bit and I held the bottom and we inched forward like that, together in the dark.
Marya Brennan writes, works, and walks her dog in Oakland, California. She is the Director of Programs at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and a proud alum of the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Tin House Summer Workshop, and The Writers Grotto Fellowship Program. She has work in The Florida Review and Literary Hub. Twitter: @moxyb Instagram: @marya_brennan
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