Knock on Wood
Alex Dabertin
The homunculus sat in the deck chair, looking out over Brooklyn’s patchwork roofs, whose rough, black-tar squares mockingly reflected the sky’s fluffy white clouds.
Its pupils couldn’t move so, to take in the urban landscape, it moved its head side-to-side in stuttering arcs. Its wooden chin drooped in awe, mouth gaping wide enough to make a nutcracker to blush. Its arms and legs were articulated like a person’s, but unlike the smoothed elm of the rest of its body, its joints were aluminum, cut from beer cans. A fragment of Pabst’s over-hyped blue ribbon was visible in the right hand’s ring-finger joint. It was naked, and she’d fit it with an anatomical appendage. She did not remember doing this, but she was not angry she had.
The sun snuck from behind a cloud and glared off Manhattan’s towers. The light made the mannequin’s companion squint, but the mannequin didn’t seem to notice.
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would.” The puppet had a human voice, a warm baritone, colored even more richly by the wood. But it seemed to be coming from, maybe, four inches behind its head, fainter, echoier than it should be.
“That’s a bad pun,” she said, kneeling by the puppet’s side.
The head spun to look at her. “Then you shouldn’t have pined for me so terribly.”
Her squint deepened to both block out the sun and refocus her anger at the varnished figure beside her, perhaps attempting to set it alight.
“You know,” said her companion, “There’s no way for me to smile in this thing. How can I tell you when I’m kidding?”
“You’ll have to trust me.”
After a short pause, in which the wooden man extended a leg and wiggled its wooden toes, seemingly discovering its full complement of appendages for the first time. “Then I guess you’d better put me back in the ground.”
She laid her hand on his carved arm. “Is there nothing but the ground?”
“No. There’s more,” said the puppet, shaking its head as if to shake off memory like a dog does water, “but its damn near impossible to put into words.”
“Heaven or Hell?”
“More than both.”
“That’s a relief.”
“No, but being here with you is.”
The wooden man moved his arm under her hand. She says, “Can you feel that?”
“I can—it’s nice, but smoker than with flesh.” He bends his head crudely at the neck. “Wait, is that what I think it is?”
“The neighbor kid lost his interest in baseball, so his Louisville Sluggers were put out to trash.”
“And,” he begins to inspect himself more fully, particularly his joints. “Are these beer cans?”
Her skin tone made it hard to blush, but she does her best. “Work with what’s at hand.”
He lifted his eyes to hers, and, somehow, in their bare black glass was concern and worry. “How long have I been away?”
“Three years.”
“I thought—how long did it take to build this?”
“When I’d gotten through enough despair to really start on it?” She rubbed her hand again over the Louisville arm with tender, fearful disbelief, as a child will over the back of a new-born fawn curled underneath the maple tree in its yard. “About six months.”
He was getting better at moving the body. He managed to take her hand. “I’m sorry it was so hard. But I, wood, have come back.”
“How are you so calm about this?” Her anxiety had been fluttering behind her back for hours. She had convinced herself this would not work and had brought a fresh bottle of Maker’s Mark to crack open in preparation of, possibly, throwing herself off the roof. Her eyes flicked to the bottle to make sure it was still there, still sealed. The tremors had made carrying his puppet to the roof hard.
“I knew you would do it. You’d talked about it too many times to just let it die away.” He spun his head side to side. “Where am I in this? Is there a way to upgrade it? I can’t exist with no eyebrows or lips. I’m too expressive.”
“You’re in the head. Everything else can—will—oh God, Mark, is that really you? Am I just drunk? Is this a dream?”
Mark lifted his crude, tripartite foot and tipped over her chair. She cried out in surprise. “I think it’s me, Ida.”
That had been Mark’s way of grounding Ida on their honeymoon. When she was waxing quixotic about the beauty of the moon over the water and the soft sand, Mark had pushed over her chair, sending her crashing into the sand.
Now, as a wooden man, Mark knelt beside her, offering to help her up. On the Mediterranean beach, he’d joined her in the sand. Death had enforced at least a little distance.
Mark had died of leukemia three years before, but he had been sick when they got married. He’d always known he would die, and he had never lied to her about that. He loved her deeply, truly. He held her, cajoled her, helped her finish her schooling, believed her crazy theses about the permanence of the soul through vibrations. He didn’t let her despair, even when he was in full blast attack and every cell in his body was in rebellion against him and against life.
However, once the earth had been given its new occupant and the door down to him had been sodded over, Ida did despair.
The first year after his death was largely an amber-colored blur of tears and their couch. Ida found herself wishing she’d had a child, a piece of Mark to keep her company. Still, it wasn’t until after she’d sold their shared apartment and taken the life insurance payout to buy this place that she was anguished enough to consider reembodying him.
It had been her wildest theory—that the soul was not only eternal and reasonably unitary enough to be wholly recalled but that it could be plucked out of the other side. She’d come to this conclusion out of a mix of psychology, physics, and raw, embarrassing faith.
Needless to say, she did not explain to her colleagues at the materials lab why she was taking home samples of various small crystals and metals.
The soul, like a photon, has inherent energy, and to fit it into a space, the vessel must have the correct energy gap. She’d made a big enough network of molecules to capture the soul of an animal relatively early on. The small armatures those souls could move were promising signs. But capturing something and recalling one particular person from the billions and billions of the dead were very different prospects.
She went through periods of total self-disgust. A rational voice in her head said, “Let him go. He’s done enough. Move on. This grief is too much.” And for a little while, she would try. She would look at the experiments and feel silly. How could she know she’d captured a soul? She’d had too much to drink.
After a couple of sober days and forced trips to the park for half-hearted runs, she always ended up reviewing the tapes of the experiments. In the brutal light of cold sobriety, she knew she was calling forth the dead.
If he had lived a long, satisfied life, she might have learned to let him go. She might have continued the experiments in his honor but not for him. But Mark hadn’t been satisfied. He’d been sick his whole life. He’d been worn out and battered every second and was, in his heart, enraged at his fate, the unfairness of it.
She couldn’t let him just float away like a poorly rooted tree ripped away by a freak flood.
She’d thought she made the right size crystal a month before. She’d also begun to realize that her emotions could help serve as a beacon. Not that dissimilar to being a medium, really, which she would never admit to the world.
She could focus on someone, and they would seem to float into the crystal.
The final test had been her father. She’d had to get completely and totally smashed to try it, in the brownstone’s basement, at 3 A.M., so she was glad she had the phone to record her father’s bewildered voice—in a blend of all the ages it had worn in life—echoing through the puppet mouth—a different puppet than Mark’s.
“Where am I?”
“Steven Washington?” she’d slurred out.
“Yes. Yes, Ida?”
“It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”
Then she’d smashed the crystal with an expression that was, per the video, utterly, completely unhinged with fear. It had been proven. She must complete his puppet.
She’d had to be pretty drunk to build up her nerves for that, too.
All the while, her office work had not suffered. No one else—apart from the recycling guys—knew how much booze she was consuming out of terror, but being God requires much courage.
Then, that morning, Ida’d woken up to find the puppet all but complete. Only the crystal needed to be loaded into the head. With hangover-congested fingers, she’d done so, and with steps trembling with hope and preemptive, protective misery she’d climbed the stairs to the roof.
She’d figured he’d want to see the sky. If being dead is better than being alive, maybe the sky was just about as good.
Besides, it wouldn’t work.
She had focused and run the necessary current through the crystal.
And then it had worked. He was here.
“Mark,” she asked, before she took his hand to stand, “are you angry with me? Do you want me to let you go back?”
The wooden head cocked. “Why would you ask that?”
She shrugged, “Every ghost story ever? The laws of nature and God?”
The head nodded. “Hmm—Hollywood’s good at lots of shit, but it doesn’t understand death. That’s how I would answer. Oh,” The eyes gleamed, “and in those stories, none of them had you waiting for them.” He pulled her up and wrapped her in his temporary arms.
It wasn’t the same as holding him—but it was so much better than nothing.
“I love you,” he said, the funny polyphonic effect of the voices of the dead making the words more believable than they had ever been. “Thank you for this second chance.”
“Then it’s okay?”
“Better than okay. It’s oaky.”
“Still,” he continued, after the little shower of laughter had passed by, “can we upgrade this body? I’ve heard of morning wood, but this is ridiculous.”
“I’m not changing that,” she said. “I worked hard on that.”
“I meant my face.”
How the world would react to proof of an afterlife, to an ability to call people back, how they would prove Mark’s resurrection, what she would do to continue to advance her understanding of souls? That would all be tomorrow’s work. Now, right then, it felt good to laugh in the sun for the first time in three long years.
The clouds over Brooklyn were white and fluffy while the roofs were black and gritty, that was true. But people cannot live in clouds, and clouds do not keep out the rain.
Its pupils couldn’t move so, to take in the urban landscape, it moved its head side-to-side in stuttering arcs. Its wooden chin drooped in awe, mouth gaping wide enough to make a nutcracker to blush. Its arms and legs were articulated like a person’s, but unlike the smoothed elm of the rest of its body, its joints were aluminum, cut from beer cans. A fragment of Pabst’s over-hyped blue ribbon was visible in the right hand’s ring-finger joint. It was naked, and she’d fit it with an anatomical appendage. She did not remember doing this, but she was not angry she had.
The sun snuck from behind a cloud and glared off Manhattan’s towers. The light made the mannequin’s companion squint, but the mannequin didn’t seem to notice.
“It doesn’t feel like I thought it would.” The puppet had a human voice, a warm baritone, colored even more richly by the wood. But it seemed to be coming from, maybe, four inches behind its head, fainter, echoier than it should be.
“That’s a bad pun,” she said, kneeling by the puppet’s side.
The head spun to look at her. “Then you shouldn’t have pined for me so terribly.”
Her squint deepened to both block out the sun and refocus her anger at the varnished figure beside her, perhaps attempting to set it alight.
“You know,” said her companion, “There’s no way for me to smile in this thing. How can I tell you when I’m kidding?”
“You’ll have to trust me.”
After a short pause, in which the wooden man extended a leg and wiggled its wooden toes, seemingly discovering its full complement of appendages for the first time. “Then I guess you’d better put me back in the ground.”
She laid her hand on his carved arm. “Is there nothing but the ground?”
“No. There’s more,” said the puppet, shaking its head as if to shake off memory like a dog does water, “but its damn near impossible to put into words.”
“Heaven or Hell?”
“More than both.”
“That’s a relief.”
“No, but being here with you is.”
The wooden man moved his arm under her hand. She says, “Can you feel that?”
“I can—it’s nice, but smoker than with flesh.” He bends his head crudely at the neck. “Wait, is that what I think it is?”
“The neighbor kid lost his interest in baseball, so his Louisville Sluggers were put out to trash.”
“And,” he begins to inspect himself more fully, particularly his joints. “Are these beer cans?”
Her skin tone made it hard to blush, but she does her best. “Work with what’s at hand.”
He lifted his eyes to hers, and, somehow, in their bare black glass was concern and worry. “How long have I been away?”
“Three years.”
“I thought—how long did it take to build this?”
“When I’d gotten through enough despair to really start on it?” She rubbed her hand again over the Louisville arm with tender, fearful disbelief, as a child will over the back of a new-born fawn curled underneath the maple tree in its yard. “About six months.”
He was getting better at moving the body. He managed to take her hand. “I’m sorry it was so hard. But I, wood, have come back.”
“How are you so calm about this?” Her anxiety had been fluttering behind her back for hours. She had convinced herself this would not work and had brought a fresh bottle of Maker’s Mark to crack open in preparation of, possibly, throwing herself off the roof. Her eyes flicked to the bottle to make sure it was still there, still sealed. The tremors had made carrying his puppet to the roof hard.
“I knew you would do it. You’d talked about it too many times to just let it die away.” He spun his head side to side. “Where am I in this? Is there a way to upgrade it? I can’t exist with no eyebrows or lips. I’m too expressive.”
“You’re in the head. Everything else can—will—oh God, Mark, is that really you? Am I just drunk? Is this a dream?”
Mark lifted his crude, tripartite foot and tipped over her chair. She cried out in surprise. “I think it’s me, Ida.”
That had been Mark’s way of grounding Ida on their honeymoon. When she was waxing quixotic about the beauty of the moon over the water and the soft sand, Mark had pushed over her chair, sending her crashing into the sand.
Now, as a wooden man, Mark knelt beside her, offering to help her up. On the Mediterranean beach, he’d joined her in the sand. Death had enforced at least a little distance.
Mark had died of leukemia three years before, but he had been sick when they got married. He’d always known he would die, and he had never lied to her about that. He loved her deeply, truly. He held her, cajoled her, helped her finish her schooling, believed her crazy theses about the permanence of the soul through vibrations. He didn’t let her despair, even when he was in full blast attack and every cell in his body was in rebellion against him and against life.
However, once the earth had been given its new occupant and the door down to him had been sodded over, Ida did despair.
The first year after his death was largely an amber-colored blur of tears and their couch. Ida found herself wishing she’d had a child, a piece of Mark to keep her company. Still, it wasn’t until after she’d sold their shared apartment and taken the life insurance payout to buy this place that she was anguished enough to consider reembodying him.
It had been her wildest theory—that the soul was not only eternal and reasonably unitary enough to be wholly recalled but that it could be plucked out of the other side. She’d come to this conclusion out of a mix of psychology, physics, and raw, embarrassing faith.
Needless to say, she did not explain to her colleagues at the materials lab why she was taking home samples of various small crystals and metals.
The soul, like a photon, has inherent energy, and to fit it into a space, the vessel must have the correct energy gap. She’d made a big enough network of molecules to capture the soul of an animal relatively early on. The small armatures those souls could move were promising signs. But capturing something and recalling one particular person from the billions and billions of the dead were very different prospects.
She went through periods of total self-disgust. A rational voice in her head said, “Let him go. He’s done enough. Move on. This grief is too much.” And for a little while, she would try. She would look at the experiments and feel silly. How could she know she’d captured a soul? She’d had too much to drink.
After a couple of sober days and forced trips to the park for half-hearted runs, she always ended up reviewing the tapes of the experiments. In the brutal light of cold sobriety, she knew she was calling forth the dead.
If he had lived a long, satisfied life, she might have learned to let him go. She might have continued the experiments in his honor but not for him. But Mark hadn’t been satisfied. He’d been sick his whole life. He’d been worn out and battered every second and was, in his heart, enraged at his fate, the unfairness of it.
She couldn’t let him just float away like a poorly rooted tree ripped away by a freak flood.
She’d thought she made the right size crystal a month before. She’d also begun to realize that her emotions could help serve as a beacon. Not that dissimilar to being a medium, really, which she would never admit to the world.
She could focus on someone, and they would seem to float into the crystal.
The final test had been her father. She’d had to get completely and totally smashed to try it, in the brownstone’s basement, at 3 A.M., so she was glad she had the phone to record her father’s bewildered voice—in a blend of all the ages it had worn in life—echoing through the puppet mouth—a different puppet than Mark’s.
“Where am I?”
“Steven Washington?” she’d slurred out.
“Yes. Yes, Ida?”
“It’s alive! IT’S ALIVE!”
Then she’d smashed the crystal with an expression that was, per the video, utterly, completely unhinged with fear. It had been proven. She must complete his puppet.
She’d had to be pretty drunk to build up her nerves for that, too.
All the while, her office work had not suffered. No one else—apart from the recycling guys—knew how much booze she was consuming out of terror, but being God requires much courage.
Then, that morning, Ida’d woken up to find the puppet all but complete. Only the crystal needed to be loaded into the head. With hangover-congested fingers, she’d done so, and with steps trembling with hope and preemptive, protective misery she’d climbed the stairs to the roof.
She’d figured he’d want to see the sky. If being dead is better than being alive, maybe the sky was just about as good.
Besides, it wouldn’t work.
She had focused and run the necessary current through the crystal.
And then it had worked. He was here.
“Mark,” she asked, before she took his hand to stand, “are you angry with me? Do you want me to let you go back?”
The wooden head cocked. “Why would you ask that?”
She shrugged, “Every ghost story ever? The laws of nature and God?”
The head nodded. “Hmm—Hollywood’s good at lots of shit, but it doesn’t understand death. That’s how I would answer. Oh,” The eyes gleamed, “and in those stories, none of them had you waiting for them.” He pulled her up and wrapped her in his temporary arms.
It wasn’t the same as holding him—but it was so much better than nothing.
“I love you,” he said, the funny polyphonic effect of the voices of the dead making the words more believable than they had ever been. “Thank you for this second chance.”
“Then it’s okay?”
“Better than okay. It’s oaky.”
“Still,” he continued, after the little shower of laughter had passed by, “can we upgrade this body? I’ve heard of morning wood, but this is ridiculous.”
“I’m not changing that,” she said. “I worked hard on that.”
“I meant my face.”
How the world would react to proof of an afterlife, to an ability to call people back, how they would prove Mark’s resurrection, what she would do to continue to advance her understanding of souls? That would all be tomorrow’s work. Now, right then, it felt good to laugh in the sun for the first time in three long years.
The clouds over Brooklyn were white and fluffy while the roofs were black and gritty, that was true. But people cannot live in clouds, and clouds do not keep out the rain.
Alex Dabertin is a NY- based writer who grew up in Wisconsin. He received his MFA in Fiction from Columbia, and his writing has appeared in The Smart Set, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and weekly in his newsletter, Under the Stereoscope. He is also the guitarist of the band Your Dad, whose first album, Your Dad Gets What He Deserves, is available on Spotify.