Keys - (a short story) by Joseph Holmes

Trudy is standing in her front hall at the bottom of the stairs, almost ready to leave for work, when she has a sudden vision, an image of a black park bench resting on a broad expanse of grass.

~•~

Trudy is checking her reflection in the mirror that hangs by the front door as the bells of the Lutheran church down the street begin to ring the hour. Her head is tilted to the side, and Trudy presses her hair neatly under her hat using the hand that holds her house keys. This is the moment that Trudy hears another sound, a familiar metallic crunch, that she can’t immediately place.

And this is the precise moment that she sees the bench, a small black rectangle on a field of green, a scene so clear and vivid she can hear faint voices and smell the autumn grass. Trudy shivers in the phantom autumn chill.

The familiar sound is the crunch of a set of keys landing on a hard surface. It’s the sound of Trudy’s keys hitting the hardwood floor at her feet, as she stands in her front hall at the bottom of the stairs, tucking her hair under her hat with an abruptly empty hand.

~•~

Trudy has been meaning to see a doctor. She intended to call for an appointment weeks ago when she first noticed she was dropping things. Coming home after work last winter, walking up the steps in the low evening sun, she had just reached her front door when she turned to a sound. There behind her on the steps were her house keys, unfamiliar for a moment, and then the sound suddenly making sense, Trudy turning over her hand to find it empty.

The time after that, she’d been standing at the kitchen window before work one morning, a butterfly tumbling through the garden, a newspaper headline reporting a tornado in a far-off land, and she heard a crash, felt the heat on her leg, and looked down to discover the broken remains of her coffee cup.

And then there was the compact disc case that tumbled and shattered and the bottle of shampoo that bounced and finally she tried to put a name to her new affliction, searching her memory, worrying that, not only did she have some unnamable disease, but it was taking away her ability to remember the names of things. And what was that called, the inability to name things? Trudy made a mental note to make an appointment. And then out of fear or recklessness, or maybe just because she forgot, she put it out of her mind, and there was no one to remind her.

~•~

Trudy stands in the front hall with her coat buttoned up, a black bag over her shoulder, one empty hand raised to her hair, and the hum and tick of the clothes dryer reaching her from the basement stairs. When the image of that black bench comes to her all at once, she immediately knows that she once sat on this bench with an open letter in her hand. It must have been her second year in college. Something like thirty years ago.

But there’s no Trudy in the image that she sees, and no letter. There is only the empty bench, a hyphen on a blank green page, just as it appeared one morning thirty years ago when she stopped and turned to look back across the autumn grass. She knows all this immediately, simultaneously, perfectly. She knows everything all at once.

~•~

Trudy had walked up the steps of the campus post office, a dim and noisy place in the basement of an old stone building that squatted at the end of the quad. It was late Fall, and she was re-reading a letter in her hand as she pushed open the post office door with her hip and started up the granite steps, her wooden sandals slapping the stone. She crossed from shadow into sun, stopped for a moment, and when she finished reading, she looked out across the grass and spotted the black bench.

Above the post office, her friends were eating breakfast in the dining hall. Trudy walked out into the shadow of the enormous cathedral that ran along one edge of the quad. The bench's glossy black surface was cold against the palm of her hand.

Trudy sat waiting for her friends to pass on their way to class or to breakfast, to spot her from the tall, mirrored windows of the dining hall, to come out and cross the quad and sit down on the black bench, taking in the letter and the expression on her face, and asking. Trudy, what is it? Is something wrong? She waited a long time, the wind snapping the letter in her hand and drawing tears from her eyes, until the sudden shadows of birds swam across the quad, watery uncertain particles swarming in her peripheral vision.

~•~

Standing in her front hall now at the bottom of the stairs, Trudy doesn't remember what was in that letter. She doesn't have the slightest idea, no memory of the words or who wrote them or why the writer felt the need to put those thoughts down on paper and mail them off to Trudy’s brass post office box under the dining hall. She is certain she will never remember, but at the same time, she knows that the letter was a part of that moment, and a part of this one.

~•~

The Lutheran church bells are telling Trudy that she's late for work as the shadows of birds swarm across a square of light on the wall by the stairs, fractal trails of starlings.

Even before she starts to bend down to pick up the keys, she thinks neurologist. She thinks M.R.I. and CAT scan, a shaved scalp and a surgery scar in a lonely hospital room, slurred speech and physical therapy and learning to walk again between those parallel wooden bars whose name she doesn't know, a nurse holding her elbow and guiding her. And who will drive her home?

What else? Lately she has begun to shake her right hand like an excited child when she runs down the stairs, as if shaking off a cramp. Not a completely voluntary thing. And now here's this flashback, or what would you call it? This vision.

Trudy takes a single deep breath and begins to bend down for her keys.

~•~

She had walked up the steps from the post office and across the quad to sit on the bench with the letter open in her hand, the bell tower and dome of the cathedral looming and the stucco Physics building squatting before her beyond a leafless sycamore tree. She was not about to cry.

She sat waiting for someone to discover her on the bench, for a friend to appear along one of the synaptic sidewalks that crossed the quad, though really, Trudy had drifted away from so many friends since freshman year, the pinball trajectories of relationships overwhelming and exhausting her.

Trudy tried to picture the friend who might arrive, to imagine the concerned face, and the conversation that would open her up, that would bridge the distance between them, change everything. But her imagination failed. She watched a butterfly trace a random path across the quad toward the physics building, setting the world in motion with each flap of its wing, rising and spiraling until it looked like a tiny piece of paper lost in the vast, white sky.

And then at a certain point, for whatever reason, she stood and started back to her room.

~•~

She bends to pick up the keys from the hardwood floor, the asymptotic line traced by fingers uncurling and reaching, and she's thinking: You start dropping things, this is just how it happens. Neurons burst like water balloons and the next thing, you're dropping things, your hand shakes autistically, memories rush in all of a sudden for no reason.

~•~

She had walked up the steps and across the quad to sit in the chilly shadow of the cathedral.

Nine o'clock, late for class, the quad empty but for the shadows of bell-startled birds scattering over the green quad.

No one was going to discover Trudy on the bench. And so she stood up, turning away from class, away from the Physics building, away from the post office and the inscrutable, mirrored windows of the dining hall. She turned away and started back to her room, the letter at her side, whipped by the wind.

~•~

Buttons click in the dryer, the church bell rings. Trudy bends to pick up her keys, neurons popping and withering, dendrites failing.

~•~

The image is like a photograph, so sharp and so clear she can trace the sycamore's branches, so vivid she can count the holes in the button on her black pea coat.

And yet.

Was there a cathedral by the quad? She isn't sure. Could there really have been a cathedral? She has sudden doubts. Were there sycamore trees? Was there a green quad and a white building and a black bench? Was there ever really a letter?

Now she’s thinking. Did she have flashbacks the other times she dropped things? Was this dropping symptom always accompanied by visions?

Maybe the dropping causes the flashback, not the other way around. Or maybe some rare confluence of sound and light, some perfect alignment of disparate events, creates the vision and the dropping, the way a seizure is triggered by a certain quality of light. It's only electricity in the brain, the rise and fall of microvoltages creating the smell of autumn grass, the shiver as Trudy moves from sun into shadow, the feel of glossy black paint. The bells and the shadows and the sound of the keys have conjured a place and time that never existed.

What's the word for that? What's the word for not knowing the word?

~•~

Sitting on the bench, Trudy had stared down at the letter snapping in the wind. And then she had looked up.

She looked up in time to see her roommate, Letha, passing in front of the Physics building. Lost in thought, textbook in one hand and keys in the other, Letha moved along the asphalt path, her shadow creased and rippling. Trudy watched Letha follow the edge of the parking lot and disappear down the steps into the basement post office without looking up, without raising her face and turning to look out across the quad to the black bench where Trudy sat waiting to be found.

Trudy folded the letter. The cathedral bells chimed, and a dozen glossy black birds took wing and wheeled chaotically overhead. She stood up into the sunlight and pulled her keys from her pocket and began to walk back to her room.

~•~

Trudy is looking down on a middle aged woman, herself in fact, standing at the bottom of the stairs near the front door, facing the mirror, head tilted to one side as one empty hand is poised to tuck her hair neatly under her hat. A set of house keys lies splayed on the floor at her feet. Watching this, Trudy is surprised by how frail and lonely the woman seems in her black coat, black hat, and shoulder bag. Trudy is both disappointed and relieved that she can't see the woman's face as she begins to bend, fingers uncurling.

Sunlight pools on the hardwood floor. Trudy watches the woman's shadow cross the light, creasing and rippling and suddenly torn by the blurry and uncertain shadows of birds. Watching this frail, lonely woman in black, Trudy is suddenly filled with heartache, something she has not felt for more than thirty years.

~•~

She stood up from the bench into the sunlight and pulled her keys from her pocket and began to walk to her room, her back to the cathedral and the bench and the post office under the dining hall windows.

When the wind suddenly tore the letter from her hand, Trudy turned, but the letter was already just a flicker against the cathedral, rising and spiraling until it looked like a butterfly lost in the vast, white sky. Trudy lowered her gaze and lifted a hand to shade her eyes.

She saw a black park bench, a distant black rectangle against a broad expanse of green.

And at that precise moment, as the cathedral bells rang one last time and the blackbirds spiraled, Trudy felt her dorm keys slip from her raised hand, felt the steel and worn brass slide through her fingers, felt the weight of the keys leave her curled hand, and then she heard a familiar sound. The familiar sound was the crunch of a set of keys landing on a hard surface. It was the sound of Trudy’s keys on the asphalt sidewalk, as she stood in the quad looking back at the glossy black park bench on a field of green.

~•~

It is called an event, this thing happening in Trudy's brain, a cerebrovascular event. There are cardiovascular events, there are probably other vascular events, but this one, she is sure, is called a cerebrovascular event and all the words come easily to her now. Cerebrovascular, confabulation, aphasia, dysnomia, eidetic, synesthesia. She knows all this immediately, simultaneously, and perfectly. Suddenly articulate, she understands what is happening, but it's merely an event, after all, and the euphemism is successful. She is reassured by the medical certainty of the term, a word no more threatening than a newspaper headline reporting a catastrophe on the other side of the world. The event is sealed away inside her brain, inaccessible, a blinding flash in a room without windows or doors, as irretrievable as the words on a letter lifted into an uncreased sky.

~•~

Standing in her front hall in that brief moment between the sound of the keys and the reaching, Trudy imagines tiny black clusters of grapes bursting like water balloons. She feels no pain or fear. She knows what happened next in the quad and what is about to happen now.

Yes, there was a cathedral, the blue-tiled dome and bell tower and shadow. The Physics building was white, the sycamore and the birds were black. The button on her pea coat had two holes. And the little brass doors in the post office were lined up in perfect rows.

The light and bells and the ripple of peripheral shadows, the burning fuse in Trudy's head, these events conflate and trigger. The Fall and the tumble become indistinguishable and fuse into the perfect key.

This is about the bells, Trudy knows. This is about the buttons and the bench and the swimming of birds. This is about the sound made by a set of keys hitting a hard surface and about the question: Did she turn and walk back to her room? Or did she start toward the post office, toward Letha who was at that moment slipping a little steel key into a brass door? This is about Trudy's decision, and whether a single moment can reverberate through a life.

~•~

Trudy imagined Letha in the basement post office, raising her own key toward a lock, opening her own mailbox. Trudy imagined the asymptotic line traced by fingers uncurling into the dark, and then Letha turning at the sound of footsteps, her face showing surprise and concern as Trudy approached, and then reaching out to her. Trudy imagined the reaching. There was a reaching that happened in Trudy's imagination, and Trudy shivered in the autumn breeze.

And then, at that point, at a certain time that can be mapped directly onto specific neurons thirty years later, at that certain location now represented by flickering and failing dendrites, at that certain intersection of time and place and memory and neurotransmitter, Trudy moved her eyes away from the bench, first to the door leading to the basement post office, and then down to the keys splayed on the asphalt path at her feet. And Trudy made up her mind.-

Her decision is sealed away, a brilliant flash in a room without windows or doors, as inaccessible as the words on a letter tossed into a windy fall day, as inconsequential as the beat of a butterfly's wing on the other side of the world.

~•~

The keys slip free. They tumble, spinning in momentary freefall, then land with the signature splat of metal on a hard surface, asphalt or hardwood. The world stops for a moment. Trudy makes up her mind. She bends to retrieve her keys, an asymptotic line traced by fingers uncurling, and the world starts up again.