Rubble

A short story by Joe DeBritz

I dreamt last night that I was at a horse race. The tremendous four legged creatures pounded their hooves around the dry, cracked track. The minuscule jockeys beat their rear ends savagely as they pushed through the final straightaway to the finish. There were rows and rows of spectators in huge bleachers all around, some of the bleachers were metal and some of them were made of stone. Against the imposing sky, at the top of the giant stadium, stood a colossal cathedral. Its hulking limestone walls were yellowing in the bright sun. While I wasn’t looking, far across the track, the stadium began to crumble and the spectators were covered in an avalanche of rubble and giant plumes of dust that smoke-clouded the vibrant and all-too-cobalt sky.

In my dream I was courageous and jumped immediately to action. I began, as quickly as I seemed to notice that it was happening, pulling huge chunks of rubble off the bodies of those crushed. Teleporting in that dream-like way from where I was seated, all the way to where the action was happening, suddenly on the steps of this angry cathedral, it watched me as I hurried, frantic and sweating. The first person I freed was a small blonde woman, completely naked except for the dust that covered her pale skin. She gasped for air as I freed her and she clung to my forearm. I peeled her off and kept trying to pull back the rocks. I pulled rubble off of a middle aged man. His body was crumpled and bloodied and horribly disfigured. I couldn’t tell if he was alive.

I turned around and the naked woman, her hair clumped with dust, was sitting dejected on the steps. She stared at me with her empty sullen eyes.

At that point, I heard my cell phone ringing and I was back inside somewhere, it was a small room, like a den, with old furniture and shelves lined with books. There were books in piles on the floor. The doors were split double doors made of glass, the wooden trim painted white, they were almost like shudders.

I answered my phone, and it was my old boss. My boss who was fired from the last company that I worked for. He was urgently telling me something.

“Anthony,” he kept saying.

“Yes, it’s me. How are you Lawrence?” Never Larry, always Lawrence.

“Anthony, these motherfuckers, these animals at Pine Valley,” Pine Valley was the private equity fund that purchased the company where Lawrence I worked together, “they started a brand new fund. I hear the first one is tanking. They are supposed to exit these companies on a five year horizon, but they are all duds, they can’t sell them, because if they ever did, everyone would know that they aren’t worth shit! So they are just starting a new fund. We have to do something.”

I sighed, Pine Valley was the reason that Lawrence got fired.

I realized all at once that I was in the midst of responding to tragedy. I told Lawrence.

“Listen, I want to talk to you about this, man, but I can’t talk now. I’m busy, I’m at this horse race and the fucking bleachers collapsed and I need to try to help these people trapped under the rubble.”

“What the fuck? Why did you pick up? Go!” Lawrence screamed into the phone. He was easily excited.

As I opened the split glass doors, I felt someone move beside me. I tried to walk back outside to help the people trapped under the rubble, but I couldn’t. I thought I heard someone walking around me. I felt cold soft lips land a kiss on my cheek, and then my lips. I opened my eyes. My wife’s face was right above mine. She was wearing a green wool hat.

“Bye,” she said softly, “see you later, I love you.”

“Love you too,” I said as she disappeared from my vision.

I laid in bed for a few moments longer and stared at the dull white ceiling, the morning light creeping into our bedroom. Where was she going again? The dentist, I think. She is the only person I know who would book a dentist appointment at seven AM on a Saturday morning.

After I showered and had a coffee at home, I walked to the grocery store on main street. I grabbed a few things and walked around aimlessly. They had a little coffee bar in the back with a barista working. She was maybe twenty one, she was tall and thin, her nose angular, her eyebrows thin. She had dark hair, pale skin, and light brown eyes. She wore a bandana over her hair like the girls used to do when I was in high school. She had a discerning intelligent look in her eyes. I decided to get another coffee. I needed to wake up more.

“Hello there,” I said to the barista.

“Hi, what can I get you?”

“Just a cold brew, please, black,” I said, thinking about the hot sun rising outside.

She rang me up and poured the dark syrupy liquid into a plastic cup and snapped the lid on. I looked to my right and then to my left. When I looked forward again there was a small man directly in front of me wearing a balaclava. His face was round and dark but his cheeks were rosy and he was smiling. I took a step back, surprised at how close he was. I tripped over some packages of water bottles on the floor and fell into the display of drinks behind me. The barista smiled and laughed a little, still there with my coffee. The man looked concerned. He reached out and said something to me in Spanish. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me back up. He smiled again, brilliant and white and beaming with happiness.

I stirred as I felt it getting lighter. I opened one eye to see Claire’s closet door open. The light shining out of it. She stepped back out, slipping a long sleeve t-shirt over her naked torso. She smiled at me. I laid on my back with the covers up to my chin.

“You slept in,” she almost whispered.

“How are your chompers?” I asked.

She sat on the edge of the bed, she placed her hand on the comforter over my chest.

“I went to yoga,” she said, “I canceled the dentist, remember?”

“I guess I didn’t.”

“I turned down the AC a little, it was freezing in here, you’re all bundled up.”

“What are we doing today?” I asked her.

“We don’t really have plans.”

“Do you want to go to Best Buy and look at the TVs?”

Claire smiled at me.

“Okay,” she said.

I loved going to Best Buy to look at the TVs. It reminded me of when I was in high school, I would smoke weed with my friends and go to the mall. We’d be shocked and lambasted by the bright lights as soon as we entered. We’d practically skip down the halls. We’d eat at the food court, try on sneakers, go to Dick’s Sporting Goods and play on the putting greens, we’d try out baseball gloves, and pick up the heaviest weights we could. We’d go to Best Buy and stare at the wall of giant colorful flat screen TVs in awe.

Claire and I made eggs and toast for breakfast, had coffee, and headed out the door. Best Buy was a short drive away to the outdoor mall in the main part of town. It wasn’t quite like the beautifully lit indoor malls of my youth, filled with strange independent stores that sold colorful polished rocks, and semi-legal varieties of “incense,” but it would do. I played some music from my phone and Claire asked me what it was. I told her.

“Do you like it?” I asked.

“I’m deciding that,” she said, which meant no.

We walked into Best Buy and I was washed over with the feeling of unlimited possibility. The gadgets, all interconnected, made of perfectly moldable plastic and metal filled me with an acute joy so potent that I could hardly focus on the specific and physical, I was overwhelmed by the ethereal and generic. The lego block transformer robotic toys and objects, speakers, TVs, cameras, vacuum cleaners, fans with no spinning blades, speakers with no wires, lithium ion batteries powering useless ambient blue light. I have been programmed since my youth to crave these gadgets, and crave them I do. I shuddered at the possibility—the opportunity! I walked over to the camcorders, something I have always wanted but have never bought. Something I’m sure I wouldn’t use. I picked up a bluetooth speaker. I saw the tiny round woofers behind that beautiful fine black mesh. I wondered about things like stereo separation, audio file compression, and the acoustics of my living room, but I pushed those thoughts out of my pesky little brain.

I walked over to the home theater receivers. That was too big-time for me, I just wasn’t ready for thirty-two channel surround sound. My experience was only slightly deterred by the general sad feeling that filled the Best Buy that Saturday morning. The limited staff looked dejected, their worn faces did not spell technological wonderland, they spelled anger pitted against powerlessness. There were some broken displays, some boxes blocking critical aisles that led to the cable section, the silver snakes that sent the wonderful signals, the coded messages that blared out from the speakers and filled my own organic receptors. I was reminded of my age, that Best Buy would never be the same as it was fifteen years before, or twenty years before then, in the golden ages of big box stores, a bygone era that I hardly had a chance to experience myself.

Despite this, nothing could have stopped me from enjoying the television display. Just listen to the sound of that word. Telegram, telephone, tele-VISION. The word spoke its power. The magnificent wall of criss-crossed rectangles, shining beautifully. Huge in scale. Fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, one hundred inches! One hundred inches of pixels and light. How many feet is that, even? I walked over to Claire. She was transfixed by a small TV with a strange white border. I looked at it, the color was dull, it was in a single, solitary display in front of the wall of TVs.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s the frame TV,” she said.

“What does that mean?”

“They are so popular right now. It means you can put a frame around it so it doesn’t look like a TV.”

“Like, what kind of frame?”

“A picture frame.”

“It will still look like a TV, what about the screen in the middle?”

“Well, you leave a picture of art on the TV and then it looks like a painting. See, look,” she pointed as a still life with flowers appeared momentarily on the screen.

“Still looks like a TV to me,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s dumb,” said Claire.

“Why can’t you just have a TV that looks like a TV? Why do you have to pretend it’s art, which is not particularly convincing, by the way.”

“I don’t know. If you don’t want a TV, don’t get one, that’s what I say.”

“True,” I pointed at the price.

“Yeah they cost way more too,” Claire said.

“What the hell is this?” I pointed to a small picture frame that had the image of a record on a turntable shot from above. It said, Frame Speaker.

Claire read the description and started to laugh.

“It’s a speaker,” she said.

I started to laugh too.

“That one really looks like a frame,” I said. I imagined everything in our house being disguised to look like something else. The TV and speakers would be art hanging on the walls. Maybe we could put a frame around our sinks and toilets too so no one could tell what they were. Our dishwasher could be behind a false bookshelf. Our entire house could be a series of trick items, sure to leave no sign of us living there.

Claire and I walked over to the fans and spent the whole time fantasizing about our home full of hidden household items. Claire loved the idea of a framed toilet.

We ended up buying a fan because the air had been a little warm and stale in our bedroom the last few nights but it wasn’t hot enough for the AC yet. I told Claire we should get a window AC unit that actually looked like a window, complete with a screen that played a live feed of what was happening outside the window.

There were two fans for sale, one was $69.99 and the other was $699.99. We decided to get the $69.99 fan, Claire pointed out that no matter how good the second fan was, there was no way that it was ten times better than the first. It didn’t even look like a frame or a statue or a bookshelf or anything, it just looked like a fan.

On the drive home I told Claire that I wanted to call Lawrence. She looked skeptical.

“He told me that Pine Valley started a new fund because all of their companies aren’t worth anything.”

“Not this again. Are you sure you want to indulge in Lawrence’s conspiracy theories?”

“It seems legit, from what he said.”

“You didn’t even like working for him, you were so happy when he got fired.”

“I know, but he’s not so bad. He was stressed.”

“When did you talk to him?”

I thought about it.

“I don’t know, last night, I think.”

“On your way home from work? I didn’t hear you talking to him last night.”

“Or maybe this morning.”

“This morning? No you didn’t. You were still asleep when I got home.”

“Well, I talked to him at some point, I’m fairly sure.”

“Alright well, you can call him back later.”

“I will.”

We walked back inside and set up our fan. There was a ton of plastic packaging and strange instructions on how to assemble the little stand that propped up the spinning tower. I finally got it moving, and I watched the brilliant blue light spin back and forth like a search light, as the cool air slid by my face and past me into our open bedroom. Claire was quietly napping, fully clothed, on top of our made bed.