Rolling and Other Forms of Crabwalking

Ted’s toilet was off center. His hand-soap was always a bit out of reach, his favorite recliner had developed a pleather tumor that made it uncomfortable to sit cross-legged, and Ted never really quite knew what the fullest extent of the law was. Yet, despite all the discomfort Ted felt he endured in comparison to his neighbors, Ted soldiered on, or did what he thought was soldiering, which more aptly could be called trudging. And the days marched. Foot over foot, week over week, time neatly tightroped, and so Ted was carried along more by nature than any other force.

Ted trudged because every day he found new ways to drag his feet. See, Ted woke up every morning but it was more like sleeping himself awake. He flossed everything but his teeth and fried an egg-sans-yolk and made his way down to the train station. Above the subway entrance was a mural of the Virgin Mary with an accusatory look. On this day, April 12th, the air was heavy, like it could drop suddenly, like surface tension. It was four o’clock. This was normal; the agreed-upon afternoon was Ted’s morning: he worked the night shift.

Every day, Ted swam his thirty-two and a half laps under the watchful eye of Melia Baumberger, a former East-German prostitute turned lifeguard. Ted could not afford the price of admission to the swim club, but through a fortunate turn of events he discovered Melia adored his miniature train set and so they struck up a deal. Regular admission swimming for one hour of train time a week. She came right after her Saturday shifts. She always re-setup Ted’s train loops, but Ted didn’t mind. She had names for them too-something Ted hadn’t bothered with. But soon, he began calling his trains by Melia’s names. Georg thin whittled and ivory--Ted felt bad, imagined perhaps its mother elephant could feel Georg’s restlessness on the tracks--slim like skeletal piano fingers. Janik, a diesel beast of burden. Sabine the blueberry boxcar. And Alma, the delicate one. Ted’s favorite. Made from china, rosacea-stricken like a Santa Claus, Ted stole Alma from a museum in Connecticut during a blizzard where flakes piled faster than Ted could shovel out his car. Ted was stranded in the building with a janitor he remembered as Juanelo, a Cuban who puffed through three Cubans per hour and islanded himself near the marble runs to half-read, half-sleep through a book of T.S. Elliot. Juanelo nodded off softly, as if Elliot would have been proud. Ted, on the other hand, slept in the museum on the train track, a large open loop like a pool or a screaming mouth. Ted’s teeth chattered like dice. The next morning when Juanelo and Ted woke, the doors were drenched and the thatch roof sogged with the bog of feet of snow. Ted swiped Alma in the snowy chaos, but Juanelo wouldn’t have noticed anyways. Juanelo had been looking at his hands for hours, turning them over as though he had forgotten their shape. Que edad tengo, Juanelo muttered. And Ted, he could do nothing but agree and spend the next week pruning off his fever by swimming around his hotel hot tub basin.

Ted liked his trains, but loved swimming. Ted loved the ocean too, but in a different way. Ted loved the ocean like he loved his mother: he couldn’t explain why and he thought himself fine with that being the end of it. For Ted was convinced in the unparalleled power of coincidence. Perhaps, self-delusion in self-dilution. This was only reinforced by his selective listening. He had heard about how the head speech writer for the US once jumped into the final stretch of a women’s track meet, apparently intent on proving his athletic superiority over the opposite sex, and found his natural talent for the 400-meter, and Ted thought it the most amazing thing. In his mind, Ted did not know much. But this sentiment was incorrect. Deep down, Ted simply felt that what he knew was insufficient to explain the world around him. He could never remember where he placed his keys, he was the last one to memorize the primary colors in elementary school (He asked himself: Aren't all colors primary?), and he could never understand the intricate relationship between consumer and supplier. When Ted was nineteen, he and a few buddies jaunted down to South Jersey where their Saturn got stuck in mud. Ted watched as the car’s wheels struggled. They spun and spun until the engine blew itself out. A tow truck came and lifted the Saturn out of the mud, like how a mother lifts their baby out of a bath.  

After swimming it was 6 o’clock. Ted walked outside the pool building and turned back, wishing Melia Baumberger would flag him down for something, anything. He had left fifteen pairs of goggles in the past year at the swim club just so Melia would ring him up, flute in in that lilt of hers, “Ted, zhese water glasses. You have forgotten again.”

“Oh have I?” Ted asked.

“Yes, Ted. You must check around zhe lockers and zhe benches.” Ted liked how she used his name.

“You’re still coming Saturday aren’t you?” said Ted.

“Yes and I will bring zhem zhen,” said Melia. Her line clicked off.

Indeed, Ted even jaywalked in the off-chance she would notice his flagrant behavior. On this day, walking back to the subway, Ted admired the jagged-tooth buildings around him, the cavities of space between; Ted sometimes thought the island city of Manhattan was a mouth absent of a jaw around it.

Ted hurdled under Manhattan in the subway. When the train slackened on it’s rails, the briny clap of the Hudson didn’t reach his nose anymore. Ted worked in the Guggenheim as a night guard. He thought of it as equidistant from both the East River and the Hudson, in some sort of basin. He was far from water, and on an island, far from ‘real land.’

Ted arrived at the Guggenheim while crowds were exiting, while the sun was bolting itself down, while taxis retched millions across the spectroscopic city, chewing and spitting them out corner-wise.

Ted went to his locker to change. He affixed a flashlight to his belt, a pair of handcuffs so unused they were rusted, a small, non-military-grade taser, and a police baton donated from the NYPD. After another 20 minutes the art historians clacked their way out and the concierges dropped their brochures to drift out as well. Ted had his last interaction while a concierge locked the doors from the outside. He gave him a small salute.

On this April 12th, Ted was alone. But this was unusual. Ted regularly worked with three other men, but Serkins (so old he patrolled by riding the elevators and peering out the doors) had the flu, Eric, a middle-aged Chinese man (who once was in a street fight in China where he cleaved a man’s arm with a butcher’s knife. Not cleaved off, just cleaved) was at his daughter’s wedding, and Marcello couldn’t come because the April rain compromised his car’s engine. Ted missed Serkins and Eric, but not Marcello. Marcello weirded Ted out. Marcello was the kind of guy, in Ted’s mind, to hate his mother for the procedure of his own baptism.

“You ever wanna do it?” Marcello once asked Ted.

“What,” said Ted, “Do what?”

“Just go at the thing. Just. Just.” Marcello had a master plan to one day shoot up the mural at Grand Central with a 12 gage, just shoot and shoot until he blew the roof and people were shown the sun or the moon, or the weather that day. Marcello had a lot of misguided anger, Ted thought. Marcello hated the mural because he was disillusioned that it was the eighth wonder of the world. Marcello thought no mural could ever be as great as the Taj.

Ted patrolled. And he was thorough. He combed until his feet were tired. He ate his lunch in front of a painting of Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees vandalizing a coastline with bananas and sticks and general trash. The clock hit 10. Ted had read in a magazine recently that all the ham in New York had gone bad, so today he was eating turkey, and maybe it was because of this new taste that Ted turned to think of a small piece of discourse he and Melia had had the other day while she was fiddling with his trains.

“Ted, Do you like the artwork in ze Guggenheim?” she had asked him.

“Not particularly.” Ted knew himself not to respond with tact in these situations. “I think it’s all a bit contrived.” This was a new word for Ted. He hoped he used it right.

“Isn’t that funny. A real joke.”

“What’s funny.” Ted didn’t like being laughed at.

“Well people travel from all around ze world to see zis artwork,” said Melia. “It’s supposed to be zhe best. Zhe Best. And you, Ted, don’t like zhe best art in zhe world?”

This struck a chord with Ted while he was eating. At first he was unsure of whether this was a bad kind of chord. For in the fattest twist of irony, Ted, who was more average than the average man, became tired of the Guggenheim’s abnormalities.

Ted began to choke on his sandwich and he laid down and maybe it was because of the painting of chimps by the ocean, but while Ted was choking he could only think of two things.

1. How, when Ted was five, he saw his mother get bitten by a shark in the Atlantic Ocean. All How the shark swam up to their surf and chomped around his mother’s leg. Clamped, unmoving. Handcuffs. And all the blood. Ted remembers that even though the shark took off with her leg, somehow he left a tooth behind. Ted found it stuck into his mother’s thigh as she screamed. A man down the surf ran to call for an ambulance. Ted stuck by his mother’s side and looked at all he could look at, which was a lighthouse. He had to turn away after a while. All he could see was a bleeding leg clawing at the sky, like a monument of pain.

2. The crabapple tree he planted for his mother, thinking it was an apple tree. How at one point in its maturity when Ted shook it the fruit would no longer roll on the ground, but saunter over its divot, like crab walking. How his mother crabwalked without her leg. How she rolled along in her wheelchair. How she spent more time in her room staring at the ceiling. Ted remembered the agonizing 6 hour train ride from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to become more landlocked. On that train ride his mother confessed she could no longer look at the sea. How now Ted can’t convince his mother to come visit him in New York because she is afraid that a shark will take her other leg or a swordfish will splice off her good arms.

And in this moment, while Ted was choking, the pressure dropped in the air--like ears popping on a flight. Miles away a power chord married another power chord in the wrong way. And right then New York experienced the biggest power outage in its history. The stop lights all went out. A gentle kiss. The Guggenheim was dark for a moment. Then the emergency blue lights came on. And then the surface tension became too thick: the air turned to thick molasses. For a second, laying down, choking and not breathing, Ted really thought he was swimming through the air. He looked to his right and saw a Rothko. Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea it was called. Ted saw two creatures swirling around each other, a dog’s perpetual chase for its tale. Ted knew Rothko. His mother used to have books that slew across the coffee table, as if hurled open out of anger. Ted’s mother she painted after she lost her leg. And that was the best art Ted had ever seen. It was right then Ted reached it. The ominous threshold. When it seemed all Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees, came and busted the inside of Ted’s cranium with a fence-end, when Ted couldn’t handle it anymore, and when he looked down and around and could only see the corkscrewing Guggenheim as a large incisor. Ted lost it.

The world concave-convexed for a moment and Ted’s ears popped along with the surface tension, snapping like a taught cord, and Ted ripped all of his clothes off and his shirt landed on a glass display case and his pants on a marble bust of Caesar and Ted began running around like a madman, on the day he was alone in the Guggenheim, supervised only by himself, he ripped up the painting of the chimpanzees, ran around the circuitous stairwells tearing down canvases and breaking glass with his shoe, fashioned a harpoon out of the arm of a granite mobile and threw it at a painting of the ocean hoping to spear the shark, but then Ted imagined Eric with his cleaver--cleaving but not cleaving off-- as a shark, a kinder, more efficient shark, and he realized that he was wrong for hating the shark because it was only doing what he knew and with what Ted knew with ripped pieces of canvas he wrote out an apology letter to the shark that said simply, I am sorry and then he imagined Serkins riding the elevator like his mother in the wheelchair and he realized that his mother was tired of looking at ceilings and he had a brief moment of empathy for Marcello and his wish blow the roof off Grand Central and expose the sky: stars like peanuts thrown into rivers and Ted thought of Juanelo admiring his body like a temple and why Ted’s mother would not stop asking why her house felt less like a home and so Ted rolled around the floor and sauntered and skipped up the stairwells and saw the most beautiful statue he had ever seen because it was marble and it had these spindly, pale legs and so Ted handcuffed them together so the statue wouldn’t ever leave and in all this Ted came to believe he loved Melia Baumberger with that powerful kick of hers, although all he had ever seen her in was that swimsuit, her legs, those white legs, and Ted began thinking that maybe they will get married one day and maybe they will get married and she will wear that swimsuit and maybe they will get married at the ocean and maybe the shark will show up and give him his mother’s leg back in exchange for his tooth and Ted will use it as a cake centerpiece and Georg and Janik and Sabine and Alma will show up and crash into the Guggenheim, unstuck from their circular tracks, and carry Ted and Melia off into the soft folds of night, picking up Serkins on his sick bed, Eric and his daughter’s bridal march, and Marcello somewhere frowning at stucco-teeth cielings, and last stop his mothers house where she will be whole and he will be whole and Ted will be tied up to Melia and knotted to the city, clamped down like handcuffs.

Ted, in his stupor, filled a glass display case with water from a hose stowed for only the utmost emergencies and, naked, he lowered himself into the pool. He felt safe. Ted soaked until his legs didn’t hurt anymore.

For what Ted really wanted was for the Guggenheim not to corkscrew, to forget the image of the Saturn struggling in the Jersey mud, for the waves of the Hudson to swallow the city, but not really swallow it, just pool at the citizens’ feet until they realized what they were standing on. They were standing on water. They were standing on their feet. They were moving; they were moving. Until he could swim, but not really swim, more like drag and trudge and jaywalk and soldier and crab walk and roll through the streets. Ted wanted to see all the different types of movement because he was stuck. Stuck like the Saturn, stuck like his mother in the wheelchair, like a baby in a bath. He was stuck like his trains looping over themselves, Janik, Sabine, Alma, and Georg in a perpetual unclaimed marriage. Ted wanted to understand direction. He wanted his mother to cup his head gently like how a potter holds a half-baked bowl, and tell him he will get where he wants to go if he only continues. He wanted his mother to palm his cheeks and poke a divot into his head like apple that she could fill with knowledge, teach him how to roll along, how to move.

And in the morning, in their mass-like gathering,  the crowds at the Guggenheim will find, as the sun spits itself into the sky, many ripped paintings and clothes and water everywhere, but they will also find Ted, naked in a glass display case. Maybe he was drifting. Maybe he was swimming. And they will gasp. Maybe it will be a good gasp, maybe a horrified gasp. But for now, maybe Ted fell asleep like this.