a sports franchise, steel. Wings, concourses, annexes, each a different color, another familiar name. A hotel, a McDonald’s. A map. You are here.
But I knew any way I went would lead to her.
The skilled-care facility was housed in a tall round building, a silo with windows. You had to take a sky bridge so high and long it was supported by pylons and looked like a tourist attraction. I walked above a ravine I hadn’t even known existed in this part of town, a creek at the bottom. People stopped at the sides and looked down to their shiny trickling death. Signs encouraged them not to. I didn’t stop but I went slowly, because I needed to know what I was going to say if someone asked if they could help me, and because I wanted it to last. You could feel the air you were walking on.
I came to an elevator and took it down and stepped out into a circle. A round ward with a round desk in the middle. No one was there, and that was some kind of luck. I moved along the outer rim of the circle, looking into rooms I was not entitled to, heard machine-breathing and beeping. No bustle called for here, the calm of a museum, of a place made for the display of objects. I had to go around twice. The first time was to find out she was there, the second to find out if I was going back to the elevator or into the room.
Her eyes were taped shut. Her arms were at her sides, bent at the elbows. Hands clenched into tight fists resting on the sides of her chest. From the shape beneath the blanket it seemed her legs were crossed at the ankles. She had no color. Her hair looked lank and unreal, like doll’s hair, but somebody had brushed it and put a white bow in it. There were tubes. One was screwed into a hole in her head, another went into her throat. It was connected to something that looked like a kitchen appliance, and in a dark window you saw waveforms rising and falling, glowing, fading. Numbers that changed accordingly. Her body, the blanket, even the gown, looked so tense and rigid it seemed everything would feel like wood if you touched it, but I wasn’t going to find out. I was afraid of her.
She wasn’t alone. There was another bed in the room, the curtain drawn around it. I heard a voice murmuring. No one answered and I didn’t know if it was the patient or a visitor.
They’d fixed her face but it looked like a hasty job, like whoever had done it decided this was the least of her problems. A slant to her features now, one side of her mouth trying to be happy, the other confused. Another tube disappeared under the blanket. I saw what it came from and realized she was feeding.
I looked up. A mobile suspended above her bed, dangling five-pointed stars and a crescent moon like something you would hang over a crib. Either somebody thought it made a difference to her, or it was there to comfort everyone else. A birthday card, plastic flowers, the bend of her wrists. I touched one of the stars and the whole thing started moving.
The TV was on, a talk show. The voice with the curtain around it rose and fell.
I heard the elevator. I looked out the door but I couldn’t see anything. I looked at the birthday card. She was younger than me but she was on a different clock. She looked smaller—not just like she’d lost weight but like she was diminishing in some other way. Dwindling to a kind of essence.
The voice behind the curtain sang.
IT has a shoulder. It has a root. It has a bow and a blade. A throat.
There are three dimensions: the depths, the spacing, the profile. Hold one and aim it at yourself so you are looking dead at the tip. This is its profile.
I learned this on the first day. Yusuf taught me this.
The machine is a motor with a blade. The blade is a small wheel. The carriage moves up and down, side to side. Two clamps are attached to the carriage, so that to move one is to move the other the same way. Do you see it?
The shop was open half a day on Saturdays. Ibrahim asked if I would come in. I didn’t have to, so I said I would.
Put the blank in one clamp, the original in the other. To move the carriage is to start the cutter. To push the original against the point of the guide, drag it across the bittings, is to move the blank against the blade exactly the same way. You’ve stood there on the other side of the counter, but you haven’t seen it.
You know how it sounds.
Yusuf would do it in two quick motions, left to right, right to left, barely looking, or just looking at me. As nearly as I could tell they were perfect copies.
“One hundred procent,” he said.
Put each one on a ring of its own.
“How you want to be pay?” Ibrahim asked me. “Every one week or every two?”
I would need my first check by the end of the week to cover the rent. It would be just enough.
People brought in keys and they brought in locks and bought new ones and came for the ones they’d left to be serviced. Sometimes what they came for had been there for weeks and still wasn’t ready. Or wasn’t there. This is how you knew they needed somebody.
A white-haired woman brought in a suitcase as old as she was. She didn’t have the key. She didn’t say if it was hers or if she’d found it, but she wanted to see if it was going to change her life. How much to open it while she waited?
“Half of what’s inside,” Ibrahim told her.
“Ain’t no days like that,” she said.
One ninety-nine for a car key. Two ninety-nine if it was double-sided. Two forty-nine for a color key or one with a rubber bow. Always ask if they want their name on the receipt. Sometimes I heard two different prices for the same thing and this is how you knew.
The board had numbers on top, letters on the side, but you could still get lost. Ibrahim wanted it all fed into the computer so the computer could tell you where to look. He sat behind the counter with the suitcase on his lap, using two slender tools. Held the tip of one steady in the lock. The other he maneuvered delicately, relaxed and patient so you couldn’t see the hurry he was always in.
The man with the newspaper came and sat on his stool and read his paper. He favored articles about new discoveries in science and nature. First he read the metro section.
Someone asked me if I was hungry. The carriage grip hummed in the palm of your hand. Burnish the key after you cut it. Hold it against the brush wheel and clean off the burrs, smooth the cuts. Hold it up in the light next to the original.
On Fords the door key would also turn the ignition, but not on GMs. After that I was in over my head.
Wanda made coffee. Ibrahim gave her money and she went out after noon and brought back things to eat. Lunchtime was working with food in your mouth.
“Enjoy,” she said. “Put some meat on your bones.”
“Wadiya,” they said, and sometimes they spoke in their own language, hard dry sounds and soft dry sounds, deep in the throat, rapid. There was a word you heard over and over. Yusuf apologized. He said it was nothing personal, it was just easier that way sometimes. I didn’t mind, but hearing them made me thirsty.
“Shufi,” it sounded like.
A key has a shank and a post, it has lands and grooves. A lock has a bible. The air conditioner made a lot of noise but didn’t do much else. And there was the phone.
A
