The mother turned toward the man—the man right there behind her, breathing.
She’s sick, the man said again. His voice was clear among the noise. Sick, he said, distinctly. He did not seem concerned.
He splayed his hand on the wallpaper, singling fingers.
This is words, he said.
The beeping felt, under the man’s voice, somehow very far away.
The man ran his thumb along some lines. He read aloud in a strange language, what the bumps said. His skin glistened on his head.
Under the speaking, by the beeping, the mother heard the broken glass inside the locked bathroom getting crunched, as if under some other bigger object, like the woman, another wanting mother, one day to be. More jostling around, cabinets slamming, spraying water. There was the sound of sawing or other friction on the wall between the tiny bathroom and the son’s. The mother spoke into the door’s face. She tried the handle with her hand. The door, for sure, would not open. A door in her own home.
The man behind her, rubbing the household, its wallpaper, read aloud another line. These words came through him as more beeping, forming chorus, though now the mother, inside her, could understand. She could hear the voice as if it were her speaking. She fought within her to form breath. Doors inside the house. Doors in other buildings. Windows, vents.
The mother turned inside the sound to shake the bathroom door’s knob with all her fingers. She tried to think of the woman’s name so she could call it out, then realized she did not know the name at all. This woman could have any name.
She could be Janice or Doris or Euphrasie or Kathleen. The mother had this list of names inside her again, female: other mothers. She could be Mary Anne, Sally, Barbara, Arlyn, Mary, Jan; she could be Grace, M., Linda, Regina, Anna, Annie Ruth, Phyllis, Polly, Addie, Afeni, Cherry, Salomea, Joan, Komalatammal, Doreen . . . the names came on and on, in spinning, as for combinations on a lock. The mother tried to say the same name as her name, or her mother’s, or the father’s or the son’s, but she found she could not recall any of those names. Her breath sizzled inside her. She leaned into the door. She squeezed.
These walls aren’t even here, the man said behind her.
The man took her by her hand.
The mother started to rip herself away but the man’s hands’ grip was strong and now the fingers were all warm—blistering, even. She felt wet all up in her buttocks and her navel.
The man stretched the mother’s arm and placed her hand against the wallpaper. The ridges slightly writhed. The man’s gone eyes.
Feel, he said.
She felt.
the house there all around her, laughing
all through the roof and walls, the sound
in light, the child’s name rerepeating
names in names in names on names