Jodi and the Himalayan Salt Lamp

Ryan Emmert

Jodi and I arranged to have an evening at her house up in Tecumseh —
dinner and all. The last we’d spoke was six months prior, on my mother’s
birthday when I gave her a ring. While this wasn’t the first time we met
to catch up, it is now the last I’m assured.

I left my apartment in Akron half an hour early to beat the traffic. The
drive took four steady hours and somewhere along the way I started
losing touch. A wrong turn may have caused a subconscious rerouting
back to Akron, but there was nothing to send me astray. The radio lost
volume over miles. My head was singing something to itself. And I felt
in control of all things emotional up until the very moment I arrived.
Pulling into the driveway, still unpaved. Looking out at the yard, still
more weeds than grass — still greener than the house in its pale citronella.
Nothing of the property had lost its unwelcoming effect. Or maybe it
just wasn’t the right time of year.

I gathered myself with the time it took for the song on the radio to play
out. I tried to smooth the wrinkles out of my pant legs, but I was unsuc-
cessful in doing so. The Honda became a final sanctuary, and I felt as
good as I was going to when I turned the car off and stepped out. The
air was thick and cold. There weren’t any clouds, but the sky gloomed
regardless. I walked across the face of the house feeling watched. Dead
leaves in the bushes along the porch rattled like shekere music and the
sound carried across the yard. I climbed the stairs and come to the door.
There’s a doorbell but I choose to knock. Jodi’s quick to open it. She hugs
me and we share typical greetings. There isn’t much substance to our
conversation. It’s just like old times. I remove my jacket and she hangs
it by the door. She tells me she’s still working on dinner. I look at the
clock on my phone and see that I’m half an hour late. I wonder if she
notices or even cares. After the courtesy check-in, she says I can take a
seat in the living room and meet the cats while she finished up dinner
and made a quick phone call. The kitchen is just far enough away to
require shouting. We don’t say anything else.

The cats in the living room don’t care for me. I try to call them over,
whistling like a bird, scratching the carpet. Jodi goes out on the back
porch for the phone call. She holds her arms in the cold as she listens to
the person on the line. I get the sense that it’s a man telling her what to do.
She listens and nods and listens until she sees me watching her through
the glass door. Then she hangs up and comes inside to serve dinner.

It’s quiet until we’re at the table eyeing the plates. She cooked up some
variation of shrimp scampi. For a casual dinner, I suppose it was appropri-
ate. It was nothing fancy but it wanted to be. Just noodles and shrimp
cooked in butter. The plate looked like it belonged on a Nutrisystem ad.
I grabbed my fork and waited for her to start eating. When she looks
down I feel that I can say something. It starts casual.

“How’re things?” I ask. I poke around at the food.

“Things’re uh — they’ve been good.” she says. Her voice conceals some-
thing. “And you? How’ve things been?”

“Oh, the same old,” I say. “Working, keeping up.” She nods. Her lip
pouts slightly. I feel that urge to further explain that she’s always giving
me. “I mean, things are better — just, ya know — generally.”

“Yeah.”

“Yep, same old.”

We laugh it off and carry on something like that. She mirrors me across
the table. I couldn’t sit still gauging the light of the chandelier down upon
us. Outside, the color of evening cycles through. At one point I mention
that I liked the theme of her kitchen: roosters. She doesn’t hear me so
I have to repeat myself. Then she hears me and she laughs. I laughed
too and through my nose and down my sinuses I can taste the blood drip-
ping. I swallow, reacting quickly. I cover my nose with my hand. There
were napkins at the center of the table. I put my fork down and reach
for one. My hand shakes and she watches it shake, small eyes with patience
wary. The act gets hard to pull off when the napkin turns red. I excuse
myself to the bathroom.

“Is everything all right?” she asks.

“Of course.”

After some time I’m seated at the table again. I had no appetite, but still
managed to finish the plate of scampi in front of me. Jodi couldn’t finish
hers. She asks about my new job at the resort in my hometown. I exag-
gerate my pay and don’t share too many details. She’s stoic with me. I
can do nothing but feel small. She clears the table and we move back
into the living room.

We occupy separate sofas. I sit facing the fireplace with all the family
pictures on the mantle. I look to see who she features most. I recall there
used to be a photo of my mother resting there, alongside everyone else,
but I didn’t see it. I didn’t want to. I take the room in. Jodi praises her-
self through my gaze and scrolls her phone on the loveseat across. A
glass bowl of mints on the coffee table fractures the last of day coming
in through the window. I grab myself a mint.

“Well,” I say, “I figure I should thank you for making me feel welcome
here, still.”

“Mhm,” she smiles, watching her phone. She takes a long breath in
through her nose.

I look around for something to talk about. There isn’t much to take in:
cats, family portraits, white furniture, floorboards.

“Keeping the originality of the house, I see.”

She laughs.

“Yeah, I uh — I suppose,” she says, pulling the phone away from her face,
“but it’s not like I really have much time to work on it anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s tough.” I say, looking out the window behind her, out at
the yard.

“Mhm,” she sat there in thought. I watched two birds chase one another
through the window. I was counting the motions of their wings.

“I would do so much with this place, though,” she came back.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I mean, why not?” she says and looks up, away, “I remember
buying it,” she got quieter, “I remember we thought it could be so nice.”

She went off about the driveway, the back porch, her bathroom, all the
things she’d do if she knew anything of what makes a house a home. It
was almost charming, the carelessness of our conversation in that mo-
ment. I smiled easy. I sat up straight and laced my fingers together. She
spread herself across the loveseat, resting her arms behind her head.

The window behind Jodi is just wide enough to frame her. I bounce one
of my legs up and down rhythmically, watching the leaves and the wind
in the trees through the window. Jodi raises her arm and draws a half-
circle to her side. I watch her open as she starts to speak.

“How often do you think about her, still?” she asks out of nowhere. I
don’t understand why she didn’t just use her name. I knew it was about
my mother.

“Uhhm,” I clear my throat and say, “everyday.”

I look at her slightly cross. I was about to laugh when I saw she was dig-
ging her thumbnails into the index fingers of both hands. I watch her
closely. It seemed like a forced reaction. She didn’t have anything to
think about it.

“Me too,” she answers. It humored me, her feeling obligated to try and
comfort me. I let it carry on.

“You know it wasn’t easy for us. I mean, the debts we owed Tommy. Then
having to visit her, all the proced — ”

“I — I know. I get it.”

“It was — I don’t know,” she moves her hand to her forehead, “We did
what we could when your mothe — ”

“We did what we could?”

“Yeah, we did what we cou — “

“Is that what you say to be happy with yourself ?”

“Scott, please. You — don’t act like you know me at all anymore.”

“Ha, glad to hear you’ve changed,” my tongue rots.

“This was wrong,” she says under her breath. I watch her and she watches
the air.

“I just know — and I mean this honestly,” I spoke louder than before,
“that I’m at the point where this shit is not eating away at me. I’m out
of it, I’m — ”

I lost track of my words. I’m watching Jodi. She’s holding her arms close
to her body.

“I don’t know, I’m trying to live something else. I’m not gonna force myself
to be happy about it, I’m just — not feeling anything of it,” I say.

She says nothing. She’s back to clawing her skin and my hands are growing
warm on my thighs. My body wanted to convulse, implode, but I remain
still. Everything so unnatural — the couch, the pictures on the mantle,
her eyes and her nose and the hills of her lower lip — everything so fix-
ated. I excuse myself to the bathroom again and she doesn’t question
it. I wonder why I’m even there, why she finds the time. She seemed only
to request these evenings together to prove I was still the more childish,
the more miserable. But I had always questioned her motives.

After college, I moved north with Jodi to pursue a management job at a
small casino that her uncle owned and operated out of Detroit. It prom-
ised big things, but following a three month spell of reckless mutiny, I was
jobless and twenty grand in the hole with nothing to fall back on. As I
believed — and as Jodi later confirmed — I had no one to blame but myself.

Meanwhile, my mother down in Akron prayed for me with an aching
in her heart she didn’t know was permanent. I seldom called. I wanted
to be there, but I felt trapped between debts and the shame of owing
them. It didn’t matter how many times my mother promised to help pay
them off; Jodi shut those options down. She was the most hardheaded
of us all. She wouldn’t let us take the money. And it had everything to
do with her being my mother, the only person I could otherwise turn
to. I could just never say it to her.

“…Good! I’m fucking glad! You act like one more day is gonna make a
fucking difference!”

“I don’t see why you have to raise your voice, Scotty.”

“Ma, I just get tired of you telling me these things.”

“I’m only trying to help.”

“Well, I don’t need it.”

“…Scotty.”

“I don’t need it.”

“Scotty, stop that.”

“I’m hanging up, Ma.”

“No, no, you — you’re just like your father, that damned — ”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“It’s damned well true! You never hear anything I’m saying, even when
you listen!”

“Ah, that’s bullshit, Ma. You just say that to get to me. I’m hanging up.”

“Scotty, please. I’m sorr — ”

“I’m hanging up.”

Jodi was there for that call, smiling when I hung up the phone.

When I returned, we stopped talking about my mother. She figured there
was nothing else new with me and we moved on to talking about her.
In my head felt like boiling water. I was thinking too heavy and talking
too quick. I wanted to leave. But things began to simmer when I real-
ized how little it mattered. I’m even grinning when her voice returned
with another question.

“Did you hear about Jericho?”

Jericho was Jodi’s younger brother. He and I used to hang out when we
were younger, before Jodi and I began seeing one another.

“No?”

“He moved out to Washington with his girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

I run my hand under my nose to ensure it isn’t bleeding again.

“Yeah, can you believe it?”

“The same girl? What’s her name again?”

“No, not Anna, actually, he’s with someone named Edith now.”

I thought about that name. I swore I knew who she was talking about.

“Yeah, been together sssev — no, eight months now? I met her last June at
the cookout,” she says. I think about being invited to the cookout, being
unable to attend.

“She a nice girl?” I ask.

“From what I can gather.”

I try to figure out what she’s implying but the more I think about it the
more the room is closing in on me. It starts to rain and thunder outside.
Jodi says she wasn’t expecting a storm and hops I’ll be able to get home
safely. The window behind the couch framed her in blue and gray. Light-
ning struck and thunder would follow seconds after. I must have looked
tense or something and she asked what was up with me. I told her I hadn’t
been feeling well lately, that I’d been trying to collect myself, deal with
a lot of stress, etc. She gives it some thought.

“I get that,” she says. It seemed like she always said that. She gets that.
She gets that. She goes on, it goes on.

“And I don’t like thunderstorms,” she says. “They make me feel like my
anxiety is outside of my body, and surrounding me.”

It pours and flashes behind her head for longer than I find it amusing.
I don’t say anything. My body shallows, my heart slows. I look at the
clock and she looks at her phone.

“I guess it can’t help but be this way,” she says and I feel bad for her.

“Yeah,” I say. And I take a breath and say, “we do what we can.” She’s
unaffected.

I mention something about leaving soon and she tells me I can leave
whenever I like. Suddenly I felt in no rush to go. I looked at Jodi. She
was on her phone. I found it unusually difficult to swallow. I excused
myself to the bathroom again.

When I returned, Jodi was trying to reach somebody over the phone again.
The other line didn’t pick up and she took a moment to herself. She rose
and led me down the hall to the front door.

She takes my jacket off the hook and helps me guide my arms through
the sleeves. I say it was nice to catch up and she says so too. It’s trying
to sound sincere, but we keep it brief. She says she forgot to show me
something, but that it didn’t matter since I had to get going. I tell her I
don’t have to leave right away and that she still has time, if she wants. She
says it’s something upstairs that she’s been meaning to fix. She wasn’t spe-
cific about what it was, saying she would explain when I saw it. I agreed
with more haste than I had wanted. I was just curious of what it was.

Jodi moved quickly and I followed, up the stairs, down the hall, toward
her bedroom where it was. It felt strange to be invited in. Being in that
room where she slept, where she brought her other friends wasn’t of
interest to me.

And then I was standing there eyeing the Gustav Klimt painting that I
hung above her bed three or so years ago. A tall portrait of an ugly sun-
flower, shrouded by fat green leaves, other plants and flowers around
and behind. Jodi adjusts the pillows and sheets on her bed. Meanwhile,
I’m thinking about Gustav, how his mother probably liked that painting.
Paintings of flowers were easy gifts to my mother.

“So,” I say.

Jodi looks over.

“What am I doing up here?” I ask.

“Oh, the lamp on the stand over there,” she says.

“You need me to fix it?”

“Well, it doesn’t work.”

I scan the room for a lamp. The light fixture on the ceiling fan lights
the room, shadows on the wall from slight indentations in the paneling.
The bed is unmoved. The window has its curtain raised. Two dark wooden
dressers face one another, one covered in old mail, magazines, books,
paper, pens, scissors, and a pocketknife. The other covered in empty wine-glasses, various mementos and jewelry, a yellow hairbrush, and photos
of family and friends. A keepsake chest takes one corner topped with
blankets and stuffed animals. A nightstand takes the other corner by the
bed, with an empty wineglass and a decorative rock on top. I see no lamp.

“Uhm,”

“Over there,” she points at the rock.

“That’s a lamp?”

“It’s a Himalayan salt lamp.”

“A what?”

“A Himalayan salt lamp.”

“It’s made of salt?”

“Yes,” she says and goes back to tugging the sheets to get the wrinkles out
of the bedspread.

“I don’t get it.”

She walks over to the nightstand, moving the wineglass aside and sliding
the lamp toward us. She places her hands around it like a source of heat.

“Well, ya see,” she begins, “the lamp inside heats up, and the salt like,
disperses ions throughout the room to like, release negative energies…”
she fans her hands like jellyfish to demonstrate the process, “…and it’s
supposed to cleanse your skin, and like, be cleaner to inhale. It’s very
beneficial.” I lost my attention when I noticed the ceiling fan had been
turned on. I didn’t recall it being on when we entered the room.

“Uhuh,” I say in response, examining the lamp. I pick it up and flip it over
to see the bottom. It was heavier than it looked. You could kill someone
upside the head with it, if nothing else. Clicking the switch on the dimmer
produced no light.

“See?” she points at it. I shake my head and give her an off look.

“Can you fix it?”

I squint at the lamp. “I can try.”

I wrap my fingers around the dome of the rock to pry it off. It’s difficult
to budge. I adjust my hands to get more leverage and it begins to loosen.
I think one rip will free it up nicely, and it does until the rock spins around
in my grasp and crashes down on the hardwood like a spitball from Mars.
Jodi stills with her hand on her lips. I freeze staring at the shattered
Himalayan salt all over the floor.

“Ah, fuck — I”

“No it’s nothing, it’s — ” the sloth of her tone echoes, “it doesn’t, fucking
matter.”

I look at her and clench my jaw.

“I can get you another one,” I say

She shakes her head at me.

“I can get you another one,” I say again.

“No, really,” she speaks in airs of laughter now, “it’s not something to
worry about.” She looks at me like I did it on purpose, or maybe like
some final expectation had been met.

“You know that was a complete accident, right?”

“I know that,” she says. Her complacence wore on me. I did not move,
trying to form some convoluted apology in my head. Her smile dropped
into a line that kept back the tears and I lost what to say.

Her voice swells, “Can we just like, clean this shit up?”

I drop to my knees. I start sweeping pieces together and picking them
up with shaky hands. She stands above me having some sort of episode
over the shattered salt, or maybe over the person who gifted it to her.
Either way, the chore of cleaning it up seems to bring our mutual frustra-
tion to the surface. Something submerged for so long and never drowning;
all was preserved to a point in our lives where we found ourselves able
to breathe.

Jodi comes down to my level, picking up rocks of salt at a much quicker
rate. I watch her as if to learn a thing or two about efficiency. A rush
of blood runs through the front of my skull. She looks up and something
of the moment telling me I have been here before. Her arm reaches
across for a piece of salt smaller than all the rest. She looks so long, so
longing. Her gentleness consumes me. I do not move, letting shut my
eyes like the grand drape falling.

I felt her hand grace my elbow, under my arm, and across my chest. My
limbs move like ivy around her body and across the floor. She is on top
of me when I open my eyes. I am kissing her neck, she is steaming relief
into my ear. My chest containing a heart in its rage and I do all that I
can to breathe slowly. She takes her dress off and I turn my head.

She hovered over my neck for entry. The supple way she’d express this
in breath, in through her nose and out her lips. When she eased, I turned
back to her. She looked at me and I knew she thought I would go on.
She wanted that, maybe needed that. But it was only the illusion of it
being a choice, her and I together, evermore. She moved to kiss me sever-
al times and I made them last. I couldn’t bear the confusion of following
through with anything else. I just wanted to feel that she was there, that
she wasn’t some phantom of Jo that I had consumed, internalized for
years unknowing.

We rested there comfortably together with salt all around us. I ran my
fingers up and down her back. The fan turned rapid above sweeping
strands of her hair across my face. She apologized and fixed it behind
her ear. I tell her I don’t care. I roll over slightly and she shifts to the floor.

I sit up. “I’ll be right back,” I say, standing, fading in and out of myself.

“Okay,” She says

As I near the door, “Scott,” she calls.

“Yeah?”

“Are you driving home tonight?”

The question stops me in the doorway. I wait to answer.

“What do you suggest?”

She smiles toothless. I turn for the hall.

I leave to find the bathroom on the second floor. It’s small, but clean and
spacious like no one ever uses it. I empty my pockets onto the sink — everything I carried: my phone, my wallet, car keys, a quarter, two nickels
and four pennies, mint wrappers from before, cigarettes, a lighter, a
piece cut from a straw, a folded up business card, and a small orange
bottle of pills with eleven to spare. I pop the lid off the pill bottle and look
inside. I lift the seat on the toilet and let them fall into the bowl, flushing
them down. I toss the straw and card in the trash and examine myself
in the mirror. My complexion pales.

Jodi sneezes in the other room multiple times back to back. It probably
warranted a bless you but I acted like I couldn’t hear. I turn on the faucet
to wash my hands and splash water on my face. Grabbing a towel off
the ring, I feel a slight buzz and sting in my hand and up my arm. The
rush of blood circulates. Beads of sweat pool across my hairline. I bow
to splash more water on my face.

My ears tuned out. I couldn’t hear the faucet running. My knees felt elastic
and my feet filled with a coldness. I dropped the towel on the floor and
struggled to gather my things when, turning to leave, gravity assumes
control. The taste of copper taking my tongue, the room spinning vio-
lently — all goes to black. And I do not know where I’ve gone or where
I am going. I feel I have been here and asleep for years and years and
years and years and years.

Jo is laying on the floor in the other room, under the ceiling fan spinning.
Mother didn’t allow them to be on in our house. It was a rule I never
understood, but always followed.