Subtraction by Sean Madden

Here on the coast, the mornings bring outsiders. Crows from the Valley, like slashed black scarves, descend on the hillside houses and telephone poles. They squabble with the native gulls over the trash in the liquor store parking lot—the cake crumbs, the pad thai, the God knows what’s edible inside a discarded ballet flat. Nothing is too rotten for their liking. Nothing is spoiled enough to waste. Their wings beat in protest when a mole-brown apple core is compromised, when it slips through the grate into the sewer. But a gull just knocked a platter of sausages off the dumpster lid, and now the mob flaps away to the feast.

This is Hermosa Beach in January. This is Paradise.

Dennis LeBlanc stood in front of the liquor store in question, waiting for the commuter bus. It was a quarter past seven, misty out, and since dawn, a clever old senora had been browsing the alleyways for treasure. Today and every day, she takes what the garbage man refuses and makes a killing at the local flea markets. From Burbank to Arcadia, she hawks her hard-won finds—cloudy mirrors, flimsy brass headboards, bookcases with bowed shelves—all advertised as “shabby chic” to the previous owners’ yoga instructors, or to their grown children’s Silver Lake friends.

Dennis appreciated the senora. Like the birds, she beautifies Paradise by subtraction, by hauling away the old to make room for the new. This December morning, he gave her a nod as she puttered by in a beat-up van. As she doubled back to Boyle Heights with her catch.

The senora leads a frugal life, Dennis suspected, and a passerby might have thought Dennis, in his patronage of public transportation, was frugal, too. But it would’ve been a mistake, in this instance, to confuse convenience with penny pinching. Dennis made six figures and knew how to spend it. His riding the bus had nothing to do with economy. It only spared him the headache of having to contend with L.A. traffic. It kept the miles off his Mercedes. Off his antique Corvette. It kept the miles off him.

At the intersection of Manhattan and Longfellow stood an endless queue of northbound cars, but no bus in sight. Dennis had a few more minutes left to wait.

Plodding up the hill from the beach, past the houses under construction indefinitely, was another man. Secondhand-clad, sun-ravaged. A smoker. A stranger to Dennis. The new Korean restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway had fitted him with a deep-pocketed canvas vest. A hired hand, his burden was takeout menus; one to be deposited on every doorstep in the zip code.

Pockets’ oafish grin and crusty cap reminded Dennis of the carpenter who’d fixed his gate last spring. Stuart might have been his name. Now the latch caught the bar just right, but Dennis would never hire Stuart again. Stuart lost Dennis’s trust when his dopey gray eyes lit upon Mrs. LeBlanc’s wetsuited figure; when he inquired after her maiden name. Dennis cut Stuart a check for what he’d quoted and sent him on his way.

Back to his dusty black Suburban. Back to the Valley, where the crows roost.

On the other side of the avenue, at the kickboxing joint, a comely brunette crunched her abs to perfection. Up and back, up and back, with a medicine ball held tightly to her chest, the way God once held the world. She was the LeBlancs’ neighbor, and her Siamese cat mewled all night, but Dennis didn’t care. He lost sleep anyway just thinking of her. If he’d been a lesser man, he’d have drained his bank account and taken her to Cancun and made strawberry love to her again and again in a giant margarita. (Did such a thing exist outside of his fantasies? A glass so tall they’d need a ladder to climb inside)? But Dennis wasn’t this man. He wasn’t that weak. And neither, apparently, was Pockets. As he ambled by the studio, dragging on a cigarette, he didn’t ogle the brunette. He hardly seemed to notice anyone at all. He looked once, a nothing glance, then away.

But Dennis was a poor judge of character. Farther down the block, outside the darkened dance studio, Pockets lingered before the glass. Photographs taped there on the outside of the pane. The instructor with her trophies. The instructor with her novice class. Headshots of awardees. Dennis knew these photos because he’d taken them—his daughter was a ballerina there. Pockets slipped his fat-knuckled thumb under the photo with the trophies and lifted it up off the glass. Then he let it fall, as though bored by all the gold, and lifted up another. These were the novices, here, in his grasp now, the grade school kids—Dennis’s daughter among them. Pockets paused, studied it. He stuck his beak of a nose at it, as if there were fine print to read. Then he straightened up, delicately detached the photo from its place, and slipped it down his shirt.

The Christmas lights hanging from the liquor store’s eaves were the first to sound off. “Thief! Thief!” they shouted, strobing frenetically in chorus. “Get him, Dennis! Go!”

Then the hydrant on the corner, stoic and solid, shushed them. “His daughter’s safe at school,” he said. “And you know he’s no angel. No less guilty.”

“Yes, but there’re shades to sin,” said the lights, calming down some. “You know that.”

The hydrant turned a deaf ear and said, “Here’s what he ought to do.” Pockets turned the corner, back towards the ocean, as the hydrant tried to convince his trembling friends overhead that Dennis should steal a menu off a doorstep, and then call the cops with the name of the Korean place and report the crime.

“But was it truly a crime Pockets just committed?” the liquor store window interjected. “Will he go on to do what you expect him to? Or have your fears polluted your perception of what was really just the pettiest of theft for the cheapest of thrills?”

Just then the bus appeared, and Dennis, hearing none of this discussion, felt his eyes begin to burn for lack of blinking. By force of habit, he’d readied his fare; and in handling his wallet he’d considered another option entirely.

But he knew it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t just shell out a few bucks and get the photo back. That’d do him no good. Unlike with Stuart, it wouldn’t bring him any peace of mind. No transaction would. Not with Pockets. Not when it came to his child.

“Bastard,” he muttered, and waved the bus on.

By the time Dennis rounded the corner, Pockets was already on the beach, traipsing through the sand like it was his property. Like no hellhound was snarling at his heels. Like he was an innocent man who’d never done anything wrong in his life.

“Hey!” yelled Dennis, but Pockets kept moving.

When Dennis got to the bottom of the hill, a truck towing the chainsawed remains of a palm tree blazed past, nearly clipping him. He stumbled back, cursing, into a wall of bamboo shoots, then got up and crossed Hermosa Avenue. He dodged a flock of cyclists on the Strand and raced past the rusty yellow swing set creaking in the breeze. Under a lone umbrella lay the canvas vest.

Seaweed sprawled along the water’s edge. Rocks tumbled in the surf. Sand crabs buried, then resurrected themselves. And there amidst it all was a bulgy-eyed, pale blue pelican, and Pockets, diving headfirst into its throat pouch.

It struck Dennis in the moment that he wasn’t dreaming, that the thief was, in fact, bending the immutable laws of physics. But there wasn’t time for calculation. For gaping in awe. He managed to grab Pockets by the boot, but it popped off in his hands without struggle; the bird’s beak shut on Pockets’ bare feet. The pelican tried to escape then, but Dennis was too strong, too quick. Too determined.

He fell facedown onto what felt like a freshly-used wrestling mat. Moist, rubbery. The springiness of the bird’s tongue had softened his landing. Nothing was broken or sprained. If anything, he was sore—and hot. It was so humid inside the pelican that, mere seconds after entering, sweat began to collect at Dennis’s temples. Infiltrating his nostrils was the rankness of brine and masticated crustacean, and in his ears, the guttural growl of the bird’s bowels played counterpoint to the thrum of its heartbeat. When his eyes adjusted to the dim, he saw the wet interior folds of the bird’s throat rising up on either side of him like cathedral walls, gleaming as they were in the blood-orange glow of the uvula: an antique lantern swinging from a thick, knotted rope. The lantern shed light, too, on Pockets’ clothes, which sloshed around Dennis in an abrupt surge of saliva. He crawled around on his hands and knees, in a daze, trying to find the photograph. Then someone from behind snuck up and shoved his face into a puddle of slime.

Pockets, naked from head to toe, skipped away, and Dennis scrambled forward, only to feel the floor drop out from beneath him.

It was a long, tortuous descent through utter blackness. The weather changed. Icy spears of salt water spewed at him from all directions, as if he were in an automated car wash, and he held his breath, for fear of drowning.

Suddenly it was over. He settled. There was no impact, no collision. Just stillness. Just rest.

Something was different, but he didn’t know what. It was too hard to articulate, to even begin to think about. He could feel that the ground on which he stood was hard, but the breeze floating through him was neither cool nor warm. It was just air, just movement—and that, he perceived, even in his mushy state of consciousness, was strange.

The distant chatter of gulls, crows. The click of a gate locking. It was still morning. The alleyway behind his house was exactly as he’d left it earlier, but it wasn’t any place he recognized. He knew he was somewhere familiar, but for reasons he couldn’t ascertain.

He didn’t see or hear the woman approaching, so when he felt her stroke his arm, he flinched. Instantly she withdrew her hand, and hummed a curious hum, and Dennis said, “Sorry,” but she seemed not to hear him. She touched him again, turned around and sat down, right in his lap. He hadn’t known he was sitting—and he didn’t object to her forwardness; but when all he felt in the flattening of her soft curves against him was dumb pressure, he became troubled by the inexplicable memory of having had skin, of having felt texture, temperature. There was the sense that a reduction had taken place, that only the framework of a once-complete self remained. That the trellis no longer wore vines.

The woman shifted her weight to one side, and Dennis wobbled beneath her; he’d have blamed his trick knee if he were standing. She hummed again, only this hum wasn’t the same. There was nothing curious in it.

She got up and took one last look at him before leaving. Dennis said sorry again, and he followed her with his eyes until he found that his head wouldn’t turn, that he couldn’t rotate himself at all.

“Shame,” said a voice, and Dennis jumped. He felt his feet, all four of them, skid across the pavement.

“Maybe next time you’ll come back as the salt on her margarita glass. Bet you’d like that, huh, spaceman.” The voice was deep and scratchy, a man’s voice, and seemed to come from somewhere nearby, though Dennis couldn’t locate the speaker.

“She’s moving, you know. If you weren’t in such crap shape, she might’ve brought you with.”

“Who’s there?” said Dennis, finally.

“Just a friend,” the voice replied. “This ever happen to you before?”

Dennis’s mind set to thinking about it, but found no answer, yea or nay. So he guessed: “Maybe.”

The voice chuckled flatly. “You’d know if it had. Good news is you could’ve gotten a lot worse. That much I know.”

“Worse?”

“Oh, yeah. Could’ve ended up as anything.” A pockmarked kid on a skateboard rolled by, and the voice carried on, but the kid showed no signs of hearing him. “Guy I know was a hammer once.”

“A hammer,” Dennis repeated.

“On a construction site, no less. Can you imagine? Just one long never-ending headache.”

“What happened to him?”

Another chuckle. “He was himself again for a while. That is, till today.”

Dennis looked around a second time, but the only person in sight was the skateboarder, ducking into an open garage.

Then a black toaster oven, sitting unevenly on cracked cement pavers across the alleyway, popped open its door with a beep. “That’s fun,” the voice said, and Dennis realized who he was talking to.

“That’s you,” Dennis said, and the toaster oven spun its dials for show.

Then a van pulled up, and the driver got out.

“This is it, spaceman,” said the toaster oven. The clever old senora smiled at Dennis, as if someone had whispered into her ear an amusing observation, and Dennis, in a state of wonder, said, “I know you.” But as with the brunette and the skateboarder, his words elicited no reaction, no response. She picked him up by the arms after very little inspection, and then hoisted him over her head.

In the van’s side window, Dennis caught an upside-down glimpse of what he’d become—lathed mahogany, with scratches all over—and the toaster oven commiserated with him. “I know how you’re feeling.” The senora waddled over to the trunk, and from this vantage point, Dennis could see inside his new acquaintance. The photo lying on the steel rack. The young girls in leotards. Their faces.

“But you got to think of it,” the oven added. “You might not be fit for Paradise, but you sure are fit for someplace else, and that’s not nothing.”

Names swirled around Dennis’s brain like clouds of nebulous shape. Those faces had names, he knew that, and that one face, that bright face with the missing front tooth—why did the thought of her name make him feel so sad, so desperate?

Dennis, wedged now in between a box full of books and a torn snare drum, asked the toaster oven where he was going. If he’d return. But the start of the van’s engine drowned out the answer. The last thing he saw was the oven’s door snap shut, and the coils below the photo burn blood-orange, before the senora pressed on.

Sean Madden holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Kentucky. Recently he was named a co-recipient of the 4th Annual John Updike Review Emerging Writers Prize. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Dappled Things, Blue River, and Alternating Current’s The Coil. Visit him at seanmadden.org.