BRIEF: GROWING UP IN A SMALL TOWN IN RURAL PENNSYLVANIA WAS LARGELY WHAT MADE ME A WEIRDO. EVERYBODY SMILES AT EVERYBODY, EVEN IF THEY’RE ON THEIR WAY TO A FUNERAL. AND THE AIR ALWAYS SMELLS LIKE FIRE. MY WRITING CAREER BEGAN IN POETRY BECAUSE I FELT LIKE IT MADE ME GRAND AND DIFFERENT, BUT IN HINDSIGHT, I DIDN’T WANT TO FEEL GRAND. I WANTED TO FEEL IN CONTROL. I WRITE SHORT STORIES BECAUSE I LIKE CREATING THE FEELING OF IMMERSION, BUT NOT COMFORT, AND DEFINITELY NOT COMPLACENCY. I LIKE THE INTIMACY, THE MOMENTARY VOYEURISM OF SHORT FICTION. THE FEELING LIKE MAYBE YOU’RE READING SOMETHING THAT’S MEANT TO BE KEPT SECRET. WHAT I THINK PERVADES MY WRITING IS A CERTAIN KIND OF SENSUOUSNESS, A SENSITIVE EXPLORATION OF THE NON-OBVIOUS.
WRITING ABOUT LOVE AND ITS STAGES OF RECESSION AND PROGRESSION INSPIRES MY WORK. I DON’T MEAN LOVE IN THE OOEY-GOOEY SENSE, THAT’S UNFAMILIAR TERRITORY. I MEAN UNROMANTIC LOVE. FAMILIAL LOVE. DESPERATE LOVE. INFECTED LOVE. WHAT CAN LOVE BE IF IT’S RESTRICTED, EITHER SOCIETALLY OR BY THE PARTIES INVOLVED? WHAT MAKES A CERTAIN FEELING “LOVE”? MY INTEREST IN THE MYSTERIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SIDE OF LIFE NATURALLY DRAWS ME TO WRITE ABOUT WOMEN BECAUSE THEY THEMSELVES CONTAIN THE UNKNOWN, THE UNHEARD. I CHAMPION SEXUAL FLUIDITY AND REBELLION IN MY STORIES BECAUSE MY OWN EXPRESSION IS CONSTRICTED IN THE DAY-TO-DAY. I TRY NOT TO LOOK AT IT AS ESCAPISM, BUT RATHER AS AN INQUIRY. GETTING DEEPER. FANTASIZING A LITTLE BIT, ROMANTICIZING LESS.
MY CRAFT IS TO GATHER TOGETHER LIFE’S STRANGE. KEEPING A VISUAL DIARY, TAKING AND DEVELOPING PHOTOGRAPHS, TRAVELING WHENEVER I CAN, FREQUENTING ART MUSEUMS AND ANTIQUE SHOWS, AND LISTENING TO OTHER PEOPLES’ CONVERSATIONS ARE ALL PARTS OF MY STUDY THAT HELP ME TO BUILD THE ATMOSPHERES OF MY STORIES.
THANKS FOR READING. LET’S GET WEIRD.
Lavender, Lavender
By CARSON LaGreca
She was a miracle of the in-between, always long-faced and sinister, completely misunderstanding what a real woman was supposed to be, what everybody had always known a real woman was supposed to be. What I’m trying to say is that she was perfect. She wore these filmy pink stockings that she pulled up only to her knees where they would slip and fall, Sisyphean, nothing to cling to except that varicose skin of her calves that had gone thirty years without being touched. She refused undergarments as a whole, the flatness of her never needed support and she abhorred the idea of being strapped into something, into anything. Her whole body, her whole essence, she concealed in heavy wool dresses fitted with turtlenecks because she wanted everyone looking at the right parts of her. The burgundy dyed mouth completed her circle of consistency, for I never saw her without blood on her lips.
She smiled at nobody winsome. She was predatory. I saw inside her mouth and I cried. The teeth like dried-up late fall flint corn destroyed by American rodents, dark circles around her greasy eyelids indicative, creeping lengthwise to be astride with her thin slits of nostrils. She ultimately ended in a very delicate, grotesque flourish of greyish mauve. She slept plentifully but always complained of a sore back upon waking. She was chronic in many ways. Of course, she was unmarried. I proposed to her every half-hour and she told me I was symptomatic. She never painted her face, though it was paler than the rest of her body which was already lime-white, entirely devoid of blush. The singularity of her could be counted in each of those beastly fingers, all spread apart like the legs of a dead spider. She moved herself like a cadaver’s posthumous tremors.
One day in November of 1926 I dressed to meet her for something to eat. She had sent a telegram to my apartment which read: CURRENTLY DECOMPOSING—ARE YOU? CAFÉ ROMANISCHES THURSDAY AT 6.
I saw her sitting in the pink corner with a big mean scowl on her face and I loved her. She was drinking a Corpse Reviver. I told her she looked like she got hit by an autobus. She agreed and complained of a cluster headache and a lack of inspiring things in Berlin.
“Why do you always deflect?” I asked, reaching across the table towards the open box of her crimson-tipped cigarettes.
“I think I am a very real person in a very disgusting and false world,” she said.
“So, write about that,” I said, noticing the dirt caked into the gaps of her silver ring, the cleanliness of her hands.
Across the café, a man in a striped t-shirt smiled the smile at me. I smiled the smile back. She followed my gaze and collapsed inwards. She could go sullen so quickly, some rotten childhood impulse never outgrown. It was absolutely ruinous.
“Nobody wants to hear about my feelings,” she said.
“Some of the most profound writers only talk about their feelings,” I said.
“I’m tired of modern literature. Everybody thinks they’re interesting but nobody’s willing to prove it,” she said, leaning forward in her seat so she became huge, nightmarish.
“Why did you even invite me here?” I asked. “You don’t need to talk to me. You need me to hold up a mirror so you can talk to yourself.”
“You’re wrong and you bore me,” she said.
“Why are you so militant?”
I held up my finger, tied with a strip of white bandage. Pinhead dots of blood were coming through in two places.
“I’m unstable. I stapled my finger to a sheet of paper yesterday and I liked it. Do you really want my advice?”
“I’ve decided I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
She was geometric. The ornamental back of her chair was more effective at being a woman than she was. I adored it. As I went to leave, she stood up and grabbed my forearm from behind, pulling me in close so I could hear something secret.
“Will you come tonight?”
She owned my choices. She had baited me there, to the café. I didn’t mind. We could never have normal. My head had begun to feel like it was filled with sand and I wanted to be alone so I could think. Sometimes I liked her idea taking shape in my head better than her presence, which for the moment was all voracious and exquisitely consuming me.
“I can’t,” I said. “Bernhard has requested my company this evening.”
As I left, pulling up my collar against the freezing wind, I half-heard her mutter something about traitorous behavior and feminine fickleness.
…
When I arrived at the apartment, Bernhard was stepping out of his taxicab. Somebody else was seated next to him, but I couldn’t quite catch a glimpse of who they were, only seeing a shock of lavender purple as the car sped away from us. We stood on the curb and looked everywhere but at each other.
“Cold today,” said Bernhard.
I responded civilly and followed him up the stairs and inside. He sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. Unforgiving white light was streaming in through the windowpane, casting over everything a lifeless shadow that looked like a cage. The blue vase with its dying daisies, the congratulatory tin of candied cherries, the table set for tea with our third-best china. Bernhard was not a complex man, but he did have that imposing sort of expression that suggested he was. It was something that had excited me at first. Later I would come to find that mystery in men is nothing but destructive.
Thirty minutes later we stepped out into the night. I wore pink because I felt devastating. He offered me his hand as we walked down the front steps.
“Are you trying to impress someone?” he said, regarding me like one might fresh roadkill.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I said. “Your mother phoned. Your sister’s dead and she said it’s because you’re so repugnant.”
The sky was clear but I saw very few stars. The moon looked lonely. I felt like an excuse. The car was waiting in a plume of its own exhaust.
…
The lobby of Hotel Adlon was filled with other important-looking men with ugly faces and blonde hair in various states of retrogression, their wives the most exquisite of afterthoughts. We ascended the carpeted staircase. Above us floated frescoes of angels. I looked down upon the burning, gossip, beckoning, grabbing. I wanted to be everywhere. I wanted to hide between the giant fronds of the split-leaf palms in their enormous blue porcelain pots, I wanted to be on the lap of some duchess of something with two lit cigarettes in my mouth and thousands of marks to spend on something frivolous while the rest of Germany starved. I loathed myself.
We had a table set for twenty-eight distinguished persons in one of the hotel’s grand ballrooms. Everyone was milling about, directionless and gorging themselves on delicacy, almost violent in their decorum. The wait staff in their light yellow coats rang their little silver bells and we took our seats. I spoke to no one. There was pale melon carved into balls. Pressed duck and something green. The woman next to me told me they liquefied the carcasses to make the sauce.
I eyed him in the orangey light of the ballroom, laughing, his mouth full of something dead, and remembered when we met. I hated this memory. It was December. I was visiting my deranged brother at his little house by the sea in Honfleur, France. I had wanted a change of scenery, to smile. When I got there his cat had just died so he had painted all of the walls black and covered all of his in-progress paintings in shoe polish. I went out. The weather was miserable. I sat beneath the tired awning of some café that hugged the curve of the Vieux-Bassin with its impossibly skinny homes all crowded together for warmth. They made me anxious to look at but I found them beautiful. The air was wet. I tried in vain to light my cigarette. Bernhard was the only other person sitting outside. He looked horrible, his left eye was swollen shut and his lip busted. I wanted to know what happened. I explained to him the roughest night I’d ever had, wherein I threw up on a man’s tiger pelt rug and woke up shoeless and half-naked on the embankments of a small stream in the German countryside. He laughed. I sat next to him. He explained he had this problem where he could never remember what happened the night before. I told him that was called alcoholism. Then I went home with him. We were married in Berlin that May. Nobody came except for my deranged brother. He was happy to see me walk down the aisle towards a gentleman.
…
I was in a taxi that smelled of burnt toast. Dinner had ended, the women had politely disappeared. The men stayed afterwards to do whatever it was that they did. It was snowing. Those fat, unhurried flakes that don’t look real and disappear the second they hit the ground. I wanted to go somewhere so quiet that I could hear them as they landed. That faint, brushing whisper.
Her building had come up too soon. I wanted to stop feeling for just a few moments. I waited on the front steps and watched the tires of passing automobiles kick up the grey soup of winter. In an apartment building across the way, only one window had its shutters open.
In it stood a naked woman. She was scrubbing dishes. It was so calm on the street that I could hear the sounds her plates and cups made as they jockeyed for position in the washtub. I still could not hear the snow.
My miracle of viciousness answered the door in a man’s attitude, her hair sticking up and out at odd angles. She looked freshly moonstruck. I wanted to kiss her. I think she wanted to kiss me, but she didn’t. She grabbed my hand and led me through the twisting half-lit innards of her apartment. A crystal ball sat on her ice box, wrapped loosely in a piece of peach-colored velvet. In the beginning told me she was a collector of other people’s futures. I now knew for a fact that this could never be the case.
Before I came, she had been in her living room, mutilating a leather wingback chair with a hatchet. Just laying into it with her body. Over and over and over.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I think I love you,” she said. “It’s destroying me.”
“I just thought of something chaotic,” I said.
“What is it?” she asked.
“No one can ever know we were happy, never once in our lives. And no one will ask. Because we aren’t allowed that sort of freedom.”
She handed me the hatchet and pointed to a wooden side table that sat overturned in the corner, a lamp resting atop it.
“What about the lamp?” I asked.
“Smash it,” she said.
I smashed it and I felt okay. I hacked the table to bits and I felt better. As night bled into morning we butchered every last piece of her furniture. She had passed out on the floor. I went and arranged my body alongside hers. It felt like a victory. I never blamed her for not being vulnerable. I wished the world had made me hard at birth.
At four in the morning I went for a walk around the block but ended up walking all the way to my apartment. It was far. My feet were frozen. I looked up into the façade of the first three floors, which were occupied by the flat I shared with Bernhard. The lights were illuminated in his study. In the window I saw a flash of lavender purple. I kept watching, observing two tones of flesh excite and thirst and sigh until one of them closed the curtains.
I screamed his name. The curtains did not open. I screamed it louder. Someone shouted at me to shut up, another called me a whore. He flung open the window, clutching his balled-up undershirt to his chest with one hand, angrier than hell.
“Let me clear the air,” I yelled up at him. “This is something about you that I hate.”
Then I walked forty minutes in the snow back to her apartment.
The door was unlocked, so I walked straight through to where I had left her. She was different. She looked younger but still just as bitter. Less cold, more apologetic. She was reduced too. I wanted her to go down with me if that’s where I was headed. She stirred. I grabbed one of those great sinewy hands. I told her I was going to be with her forever she hated me for it. She went into the kitchen and began mixing a cocktail. It was 6:30 in the morning.
The Accursed One
By CARSON LaGreca
In the bag of peppermints on the table there is a straight razor. The air is damp, like a sweating pocket. Next to me, a man in a blue rain slicker unpacks fish from crates, their fat slimy bodies nearly lifeless. He thrusts them into a metal container overflowing with pellet ice. Soon they will be stripped of their silvers and greens and belong steaming on a plate next to a pile of hot glazed carrots.
My company is very quiet. Harman has brought along a tiny bearded dog. I can smell its heavy stench as it sits between us with its hands folded neatly, ready to kill, hungry for a fillet of whitefish, probably. It never moves. It’s so still.
“Harman, why is your dog like that?”
“Like what?” asks Harman.
“Like, careful. Too cautious.”
I shudder and make sure Harman sees. I look at the dog. It doesn’t look at me. It doesn’t even blink. In fact, it licks its eyes to keep them moist. Like a reptile.
“What’s its name?” I ask.
“The Accursed One,” replies Harman.
“That’s rather formal.”
“The Accursed One doesn’t like nicknames,” says The Accursed One, lizard-licking its bulgy milky eyeball.
“How much longer are we staying here? I have somewhere to be.”
Harman, with absolutely nowhere to be, coughs into the wooly sleeve of his sweater. He looks thin in odd spots, like someone sucked the fat from his cheeks with a big, pointy straw.
“Harman, you’ve looked better,” I say.
I remember that sweater. Offensively scratchy. His neck inside looks like stretched out putty, his tendons twanging against the splotchy skin of his throat when he gulps and when he speaks and when he smokes his Vogues with that foreign delicacy. He rises from the table like his limbs don’t know each other.
“I’ve gotta piss,” he mutters, already ambling on bowlegs into the alley behind the market.
Another man enters my frame with a feminine sort of grace, sporting a long blonde beard that’s done quite nicely into three braids. He’s unloading wire traps filled with crabs from the back of a drab box van with a rusted-out fender. A particularly aggravated specimen protests against him, instinctual. It doesn’t want to die. He pulls a pair of long scissors from a leather sheath strapped to his waist and severs its limbs easily, one by one. They clatter like plastic on the reddened asphalt. Out of the corner of my eye, I see The Accursed One lick its lips.
“Have you seen her come by yet?” says Harman, returning in perpetual shiver.
“If I had, I wouldn’t still be sitting here with this clawed nightmare of yours.”
“I thought Les said she’s walked by here on her way to Poissonnière for the last three Fridays,” says Harman, standing over me.
“Maybe she fell down a manhole.”
“We just spent two hours steeping in fish guts,” he says.
“I think that’s what happened. Are you in love with me?” I ask, unblinking at him.
Harman scoffs with his entire body.
“I’m leaving.”
His slinky of a figure fades around the mist and the noise, The Accursed One trotting behind him, probably hating it. I watch the aisle from my seat for another two hours to be safe. The man running the stall across from me has a gold canine tooth, and he is selling strawberries, slicing them open for people to try. Deep red right to the very heart.
“Essayez! ” he calls to anyone daring enough to make eye contact.
She never comes, and I eat three whole pints of strawberries for free, with their little hairy insides tickling my throat.
. . .
I find my socks are soaked through with blood when I return home. I place the brown bag of mints on the table next to the door and lay my socks over the radiator, which hisses at me. I hiss back, meaner. In my chair, I sit and think about Harman and his pretentious dog. He really did look terrible, Harman. Maybe The Accursed One is a succubus possessed by some sort of vengeful spirit, one who is acutely attracted to the incurably selfish. I wonder if Harman’s socks were wet when he got home.
On the secretary’s desk in the corner sits the scant file. The picture is ridiculous. Her, holding a baby. She’s got rings on every finger, who’s baby is that? Did she rent a baby from some shady backdoor baby-4-hire agency? Closed-mouth smile to hide her tiny squarish teeth and flame-red gums. Never trust someone with small teeth and big gums, they’re always vindictive. Susannah.
I throw open the window and sound floods my apartment: the woman mourning her lost lover, the half-starved alley cats holding trial, the sudden whip-crack of a car backfiring, the Putain de merde! yelled by the car’s tired owner, the thousands and thousands of engines, glasses breaking, shutters descending, matches being struck. My upstairs neighbors are fighting over the crust of a cheese. My next-door neighbor’s young daughter is hammering away at Gnossienne No. 1. My downstairs neighbor is crying.
The phone in the hall rings. The hall is very somber and strange. The light’s busted and there’s a nest of brown spiders in the socket so it rains spider whenever someone flicks the switch. The entire place is haunted and cursed and I’m so awfully lucky to be here. A man’s bathtub fell through the ceiling in my last apartment. It broke my television and killed my cat. This flat was owned by my aunt but she’s very dead now, and all of her horrid pockmarked children disliked her, so therefore they dislike me for appropriating her home and all of her belongings.
After seventeen seconds I pick up the phone.
“It’s me,” says the voice.
I watch a spider coming right for my eyeball.
“She didn’t walk our way,” I say.
The voice lets the phone drop. In the background I hear female pleasure sighs, some wet noises that sound metallic, secondhand. Les lives in sin.
“OI! DEVO! Tu m’as dit que she walks by the fish—DEVO! Turn that shit down, j’ai une demi molle! You told me she walks through Marché Saint-Quentin on FRIDAYS, mec! What? What did you just say to me? How about YOU come here and lick MY sweet—what am I? No, JUST WAIT A MINUTE! TA GUEULE, TOI!”
I’m silent. The other line is silent. I clear my throat.
“If you don’t find her, I’ll find you. And you don’t want that. Je te le promets,” says Les.
I flip the switch and it rains spiders and they all lay eggs at the roots of my hair and it is very, very creepy when they hatch.
…
At 21h57 I put on my new shirt and leave to meet Harman at Skunklord’s. Maybe I should become a deep-sea fisherman. I would love to wear those gelatinous galoshes and splash around and fear for my life and use wicked-looking hooks and chains to haul in wicked-looking beasts from the sea. I cross Rue d’Assas with a full head, distracted by thoughts of myself, and a taxi nearly ends my life, its aging tires skidding hot on the cobbles. I shake my fist at the taxi. A pair of youngish boys snicker at me from a nearby park bench. I wish for their hairlines to thin even faster than the average Frenchman.
Skunklord’s is a little corner establishment in the 14eme that Harman and I frequent due to its curious interior. It’s very, very dark, which is good for secret-telling and anxious people. It smells strongly of lemon cleaning fluid, which comforts me, and Harman claims the floors feel the same underfoot as his childhood bedroom. There’s a table in the way-back that we like with a thick brown curtain that warmly conceals us from the public menagerie. On the table there’s an old rotary telephone and a begonia in a vase with its pliant stem cut short.
We call the bar Skunklord’s because it’s run by a full-lipped man, and I don’t know his name, maybe it’s Didier, who once sold us a stink bomb that he made himself. Yellow oily liquid suspended in a little glass jam jar. This was just after Susannah had disappeared the first time. I was devastated, Harman was not. Our disparity had called for a drink.
Skunklord works shifts every now and then. I like to see him. He’s older, fatter, he’s got these tiny round glasses with bright pink frames, he shaved his head clean. He wears tight shirts, and around his neck he keeps the jawbone of a mink on a chain. It’s interesting to me how men slip into femininity with old age, how women do the opposite.
The door is guarded by a bony hip, Harman, who is lighting a slim with another half-spent between his lips. He’s is waving me in urgently, like there’s something bad outside about to catch me and he wants to seal shut the door of Skunklord’s as quickly as possible. The Accursed One hovers by his ankle, its eyes glowing with hatred for me.
“Come on! Come on! You’re late as hell!” says Harman, surprisingly animate.
“I do not believe a few minutes substantiates an as hell, Harman. Why is that thing here?” I ask, throwing my chin in the dog’s direction.
“It expressed it might want to come along to make fun of your ghastly shirt, which is truly the color of the vomit of someone who has just eaten a salmon fillet and washed it down with a large glass of milk.”
I scowl at both of them, who are grinning like perfect fools.
Inside, The Accursed One gracefully assumes its throne upon the table directly between our faces. It looks at Harman, licks once round its deflated right eyeball, then once its left, then it stares at me with what can none other be described as a very grave countenance.
“Tell it to stop looking at me,” I say.
“Okay,” replies Harman.
“Are you going to tell it?”
“I did. Telepathically.”
“If you’re going to be insufferable can you at least buy me a drink?” I ask.
Harman presses the 2 button on the phone. It lights up. There’s a grease stain on the cuff of his sleeve, which dangles from his limp wrist as he inhales three full centimeters of his cigarette.
“Have you been eating?” I ask.
“When’s the last time you got properly fucked?” he asks, and sits back in his chair, pleased with himself and annoyed at my probing, his arms crossed like a smug child.
“You’re not allowed to ask me questions like that. I’m interested in why you find all of this so futile. It’s distressing,” I say. “You have no foresight. We could die tomorrow.”
“Dit la chemise vomissure. We can always die tomorrow. I’m interested in today. What a colossal waste of time. Frankly, I’m pissed at you,” he says.
A silver platter carrying two Aviations divides the velvet that surrounds us. We each take a glass, and Harman places a few francs into the expectant cream-gloved hand, which promptly disappears.
“Pissed, Harman?” I ask, smirking.
“Pissed!” says The Accursed One.
“What kind of pissed?” I inquire of the dog.
“The cut your eyelashes off and make you eat them kind of pissed,” responds Harman.
“Why that kind specifically?”
I peer into the light purple swill of my drink, into the sweating cherry resting in its half-moon home. Harman uses a toothpick to clean his nails and wipes the filth on the table.
“It’s no secret that she’s terrible. Fickle, self-serving. Probably the devil reincarnate, and impossible to find. I don’t want to see her and I don’t care if she’s dead,” he says.
“Frankly, you nauseate me. She’s your sister, Harman,” I say. “She must be alive. You know she’d never let herself be killed, and she’s too clever to die.”
The Accursed One is gnawing on something. It wasn’t before. Harman looks at me so deeply it makes me want to part the curtains and scream. Then he belches in my periphery and it is a gauzy pinkish color and smells of brimstone.
“There must be another way to get out of this. You’re sure you don’t have 9,000 francs lying around somewhere?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “We could do one more job.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t share your death wish.”
“What about after?” I ask.
“What about after? What after?”
There was once a time when Harman needed me in a desperate, grasping way. I realized the full extent of his vulnerability when he got punched in the face by a teenager who had called him a pillow-biter. Your mother eats my shit and says it’s delicious, Harman had retorted. We ascended the roping maze of stairs at Cité and he was bawling and clutching at his face in dramatic agony, like someone had ripped out his eyeball and replaced it with shards of glass. I grabbed his elbow and brought him to rest against the dripping wall under one of those enormous globular lights.
“Let me look at it,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Kiss me,” he said.
Today Harman sits before me and can’t be bothered to be even a half-decent human being. Whoever says that people don’t change are dirty liars. He creaks off the stool and snatches The Accursed One off the table.
“Her place. 11.”
…
It is really the most lovely day. I tie my hair into five parts with lengths of honey-colored ribbon and look out the tall window upon a bustling stretch of Boulevard Raspail. On the street there’s a shining white scooter with a loud hurrying engine, there’s a little shaking baby and a parent holding lopsided hands, there’s an old woman with too-large clothing who is frightfully successful at begging, there’s a severe young woman in a close skirt and a puffy black coat coming around the triangular corner of the key-maker’s building. She stops suddenly and thrusts out a hand. She falls to the ground and is writhing there, all clenched, her head all smacking the sidewalk. I watch and I call out in my apartment, all alone. I can’t use the phone. Anyway, it’s been destroyed. But I’m worried about her, so I watch, I really watch, and I eat cracked pistachio nuts with reckless abandon. People are gathering around her and an upcoming man says Je suis un médicin je suis un médicin and everyone backs away at his authority. A few minutes later she comes-to with her head in his beige lap. She looks embarrassed. Everyone collects her belongings. I see a cracked compact mirror glinting in the early sun, a red notebook with its angry ruffled pages, pills spread about like limey pinches of bird excrement on the gum-splotched concrete. I turn away from the window. I sometimes wish I had a partner that would care about these kinds of things with an undertaker’s curiosity. I feel very lonely, just now.
Yesterday’s Le Monde, delivered to my dead aunt, is filleted on her table:
“LE COUP DE FOUDRE: ÇA N’EXISTE PAS!”
I don’t want romance anymore. I sit down, and am pensive, and remind myself as hundreds of cherry pits settle into the hollows of my stomach that I am too deeply entrenched in myself to take a lover.
Of course I think about Susannah. When I met her she lived in a small village near Fontainebleau, had rented the attic apartment of a vast crumbling manor and filled it with taxidermies and dried flowers and mid-century furniture. One day a fire broke out in the servants’ kitchen, shattering ancient windows, blackening walls, destroying precious family heirlooms. There was no warning. She always chose to live in tinderboxes. She liked to move around a lot. It was better for business. The local paper published her obituary, so I figured it would be a while before I saw her again.
I did, the next spring. That night, I opened my window onto Rue de Rougemont. I had been painting a large nude of myself all day, and was quite tired but nonetheless very enamored with myself. I rolled a cigarette and lit it, tossing the glowing match out the window. The air coming in was cool and fresh, exceptionally clean, as nearly no cars were on the street. My chemical-choked apartment inhaled with me. The usual passerby moved in slow blurs below, snippets of conversation reached me about une grosse bite and du mauvais vin. I saw a scurrying creature the size of a man’s tennis shoe dart from the throbbing neon shadow of the Chinese restaurant with a yellowish chicken drumstick in its mouth. A too-young girl wearing star-shaped sunglasses was vomiting into a trashcan, a man pissing on a doorstep with a bottle of 1664 in his hand and his shoes on the wrong feet.
Eventually, the street grew still. The wind sighed. I heard a police car’s staccato siren echoing hollowly in the distance. The clock signaled 1h00 just as the Eiffel Tower’s rotating searchlight stopped its glaring rounds. Drawn to the window, I then watched a woman in an unbuttoned trench coat walk towards 14 Rue Bergère, unhurrying, her coattails flapping out behind her so she was august. This particular building was, at the time, a stronghold for collectors of some of France’s finest Romantic artwork. It had that porous molding that looked like brains, sun-crisped ivy with sinister roots crawled up its sides. The whole place had an air like unnamed things lived in its crawlspaces. The gold paint accenting the facade was immaculate but the windows were sullied, made nearly opaque by years of compacted dust. The trench coat woman pressed a button on the brass panel next to the door. A blue light flickered on in the first floor windows. The vestibule opened. There was no fight, she subdued her adversary with practiced ease, dragged the body inside, and silently shut the door.
Moments later, she emerged from No. 14 with a small square box pressed to her chest, wrapped neatly in brown oilcloth. She now hastened in the opposite direction from which she came. I rolled another cigarette on the mirrored tray, and lit it, waiting. Then my doorbell rang. My couch faced away from the entrance in that apartment, and I had just enough time to position it so I could look her in the eyes when the door opened.
“Hello, Narcissus,” she said, shaking her hair out of her eyes in a way that annoyed me.
“Most humorous,” I said.
“Can I come in?” she asked, taking off her shoes in the hallway. Two different sizes, one 37 and one 39. Both boots that made an authoritative click on wood or cement.
“I’m thinking about it,” I responded.
“How could I begin to convince you?” she asked, removing her trench coat and sliding it onto one of the hooks of my leaning coatrack.
“Come in but don’t touch me,” I said.
She glided into the room as if confident on a tightrope. Her shoulders never moved when she did.
“Feels a little bit cramped in here, no?” she said, running a spindly finger over my surfaces.
My north wall was tacked with an assortment of things I had collected for months: silver gelatin prints of schoolchildren, non-functional zippers, a clay sculpture of a T-bone steak, watercolors of cowboys, a model of the Canis Major constellation made out of matchbooks and royal blue leather, coroner’s reports with gruesome details and charred edges, dead daylilies inverted and dissected, tiny plastic cherubs with dented heads performing the ritual sacrifice of a wingless bumblebee.
“Don’t steal anything,” I said.
She replaced a jar full of baby rattlesnakes suspended in formaldehyde to its original home.
“Why did you come here?” I asked.
“Why are you naked?” she replied, turning to face me.
“I was painting,” I said.
She glanced at the canvas that was reclined against the south wall.
“It looks much better than you do in real life,” she said.
“I know,” I said, rising to climb the shaky oxidized staircase in the corner.
“Where are you going?”
“To my bedroom,” I called back.
I heard her undress beneath me. All whispery, she slipped into my room on ice skates and sat wide-legged on my wooden desk chair. She blurred at her edges.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
“Friends in odd places,” she said.
“You have no friends,” I said.
I watched a fly crawl up her shoulder. The heat lamp suspended over my collection of sprawling and venomous tropical plants began to flicker.
“Do you want me to get into your bed?” she asked.
“You can get in my bed but don’t touch me,” I said.
“Then I don’t want to get into your bed,” she said.
“Did you kill that guard?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Does Les know you’re in Paris?” I asked. “Does Harman?
“No, no,” she said. “He still thinks I’m dead. And Harman gave me your address.”
“You should never have stolen that painting from Les in the first place, and worse, you sold it and re-stole it within Paris city limits. He will find you once whoever you murdered makes the papers,” I said. “I don’t want to be implicated.”
“I do love it when you reprimand me, but relax. I’m going to return his Isabey miniature tomorrow at mid-day,” she said. “Then you and I are moving to Lyon.”
“I don’t want to move to Lyon,” I replied.
“I love you,” Susannah said.
“I can’t respond to that,” I said, loving her back.
We slept with our backs towards each other. In the morning, I found her downstairs painting over what I had done. She scraped the palette knife against her heel to clean it between colors.
“You have a Renaissance body,” she said. “Soft and remembering and gorgeous.”
“I don’t think you should’ve told Harman you were back in Paris,” I said.
“Maybe you’re right. He never did learn to share,” she said.
She ground a line of evergreen into the curve of my painted thigh.
“I should go,” she said.
“Will you come back?”
She smiled. We both thought we knew the answer.
…
I meet Harman on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis out front of No. 137.
“Seems rather pointless to go through all this trouble to enter an apartment she probably hasn’t been to in three years,” says Harman.
“Can’t you have a positive attitude just once?” I ask. “Maybe she’s sitting on her bed, gazing at the Isabey, and this will be the last time you and I ever have to see each other again.”
Harman crosses himself and advances toward the building with a black steel file in his left hand. He crouches at the lock on the outer door, and I pretend to scan the apartment’s directory behind him until the click sounds and Harman pushes open the heavy door into the courtyard. It’s very lush and beautiful, almost fake, with scores of marigolds, rosebushes, sweet violets and round-trimmed trees. In the far corner, the gardienne is pulling weeds with red gardener’s gloves. She looks up to say: Puis-je vous aidez?
Just then, I stumble and fall, lying face down on the stone floor of the apartment building’s green heart. I hear the woman scramble towards me. Harman begins his Mon Dieu! Mon amour! soliloquy. I stay completely still and listen to Harman render the woman unconscious. We lay her body down next to her box of tools. He pulls a small brown bottle from his pocket, uncorks it, and waves it under the woman’s nose.
“How long have we got?” I ask.
“About thirty minutes,” he says. “Or until someone finds her body.”
“No one will,” I say. “The French do nothing on Sundays.”
We climb the stairs two at a time until we reach the fourth floor. Harman deftly picks the lock to apartment 9. The door swings open.
…
Honest, I’m One Too
By CARSON LaGreca
When I woke up, she was gone. She’d emptied the drawers, pulled her books from the shelves, all except for one called “I Love You But I Don’t Trust You”. The spine was unbroken. She hadn’t left me a letter. She had taken the carpet, pushed all the furniture into the corners in order to roll it up more easily. She could have it. It smelled like cat piss and I hated the color. I never expected a thing from her but to love me unconditionally. She couldn’t even do that.
I walked outside and onto the porch. A bottle of beer sat on the ground, half-drunk and dew-covered. The label was picked at, torn off. I could see the path she took through the wet grass, could see the carpet’s path as she dragged it to the car. I picked up the beer and drank the rest of it. Something floated into my mouth. I pulled it from my lips. It was the last seconds of her cigarette, an outdated shade of coral lipstick around the filter.
Inside I made an inventory of the bedroom. It was a void. Clinical. Like nobody had ever lived there, breathed there, wept there. Like we had never existed, like I was a madman locked up in the madman’s house and she was but a whisper of a memory of someone I’d seen on the television as a child, and I myself never born. It wasn’t my house. That wasn’t the glass of water I’d drink from at 2 a.m., that wasn’t the photo of us at the hospital when that deer had jumped straight through the windshield. I stripped the bed, her nosebleed pillowcase. Everything smelling of sweet almond and motor oil. She had taken the yellow suitcase. I damned her. That was my favorite one.
I called my daughter.
“Hello?”
“Is she there?” I asked.
“Yes,” said my daughter.
“Tell her she can go to hell and never come back and I will dance at her funeral,” I said. “And then maybe I will kiss her sister.”
In my robe I marched to the shed and pulled a shovel from the rusted rack. I walked twenty paces north from the door, and seventeen paces west, and five more paces north. Then I started digging. I began to search with my hands when I heard my shovel scrape metal. I was frenzied, violent. I didn’t trust her, no, not as far as I could’ve thrown her. She probably read my mind with that sinister sort of feminine ease. Burrowed in there like the cold plague. I hated to think about having to look at her. I pulled the lockbox from the ground and opened it. Its contents were intact.
I washed my hands at the kitchen sink, vomited into it, then washed my hands again. I didn’t look too closely at anything. I didn’t look too closely at the imprint her body had left last night against the chair near the fireplace. I remembered the existence of our hope chest for the first time in fifty years. I jerked it from the hall closet and through the house, scraping the floorboards, catching area rugs. I threw it down the front steps and I felt liberated. I stood back to look at the house. I spat on her unyielding tomato plant. And then I took the bicycle into town.
…
That day I noticed my bones felt no longer young. I walked up the front steps of the address listed on the advertisement. I’d ripped it from the local paper last week. There was another man waiting before the door when I arrived. I didn’t know if I should say hello, if I should turn around and just leave and go back home, if I should smile. Standing in the hot sun before the house as the serendipity soured.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
The man looked at me in a slow way that said incomprehension. He inhaled sharply.
“I—uh,” he said.
“Are you here to buy the Airstream?”
“Why, yes,” he said, and put his hands in his pockets.
We were both quiet for a minute. It was very simple. I couldn’t tell if he was challenging me.
“I was thinking of buying it for my wife,” he said. “It’ll be our 27th wedding anniversary on Thursday.”
“Congratulations,” I said. I wanted to pull out my front tooth and jam it in his eye.
“Why are you looking to buy it?”
I told him I had terminal cancer and that I planned to take it to the sea to live out my final moments. It worked. He left me on the doorstep, said he’d find another way to please his wife.
I knocked on the door and the man of the house emerged with a redheaded baby on each hip and nothing in his eyes. He showed me the trailer. It was attached to a car. A real piece of garbage. Fuzzy tan interior. Replete with cigarette burns, white dog hair, questionable stains in questionable places. Centuries of bug corpses glued to the windshield. I stuck my head inside the open window and looked around. A crystal rosary hung from the rearview. He told me he’d take 500 for the unit and we two gentlemen had an agreement. He had a weak handshake and counted the money in front of me.
I drove back home, the steering wheel shaking between my hands. I dumped the moth-eaten linens from the chest onto the front lawn and packed it with my blue AM/FM, a rabbit’s foot on a string, a package of deli ham, my grandfather’s Korean war binoculars, and the ancient coffee press, repaired with duct tape. On the way out the door for the last time, I uprooted her entire garden. Split squashes between my hands, threw peppers at the siding, kicked my feet into seedless watermelons so their guts spewed everywhere. I hoped she’d felt it. Then I got going where I was going.
…
The Hypnotist on 5th
By Carson LaGreca
I work in the shade. I cannot see the sky most of the time. If I put my ear to the wall that faces the street I can hear conversations taking place outside in full clarity. I have a large globe, and thick maroon curtains, and a stained-glass window with panes of yellow, and blue, and bright pink. When the sun hits it correctly, it reflects onto my fish tank. There is a painted turtle inside of it. His name is Herschel. I bought him a heat lamp. He is always reddish. I have a large couch. It has a dimpled velvet cushion. It is quite long. I have a desk made of glass. I like to have my curtains open when I am alone. I do not very much like to be alone.
I have quite the schedule. It changes sometimes. Each day for breakfast I have a cup of cream of wheat with salt and butter. I have a black coffee. I have half a grapefruit. I save the other halves in saran wrap. I gather my lunch into a brown paper bag. Each day for lunch I have a tin of sardines and lemonade from a can. I put Herschel in his cardboard box. I walk to work. It is only 3 blocks. My street is lined with sycamores.
I see the Queen of England on Thursday mornings at 10:30, and the woman with no name on Tuesday afternoons, just after lunch. On Mondays, I listen to jazz and see Jonnie, and Philip, and Claire. On Fridays I take notes with green pen on a yellow notepad and see Mr. Cherry who always brings me a flower from the window boxes on the building next door.
On Wednesdays in the summer I make different varieties of jellies and jams. I don't like the taste of them myself, but I sell them on the internet for ten dollars a jar. People buy them. They seem to like cranberry orange. On the summer solstice, if it falls on a Wednesday, I cut my hair, and throw the clippings out the window for the birds to use in their nests. My hair grows quickly.
On Wednesdays in the winter I rearrange my furniture. I move my bed into the living room. I hang my art from the ceiling with fishing twine. I have another heat lamp for humans, not turtles. I sit under it. I am reddish like Herschel. I think he is jealous. My lamp is bigger than his. I buy a new carpet every first Wednesday in November, and December, and January. They are usually made overseas, for quality. I also find them delightfully scratchy between my toes.
On Wednesdays in the fall I drink tea instead of coffee. I have a large brass teapot. I wish that it whistled, but it was a gift from my mother so I can't get rid of it. She isn’t around anymore but I should think she would be greatly disappointed if I did. I grow lettuce hydroponically. I bought a kit a few years back. When I first opened it, it looked like the components of a tiny alien spaceship. Now I grow iceberg and arugula under the window in my kitchen that’s always sunlit. Maybe I will try my hand at chard.
On Wednesdays in the spring I organize my collection of antique toasters and telephones. I use a genuine ostrich plume feather duster to clean them. My apartment is quite old, and therefore quite dusty. Sometimes I will organize them by age, and sometimes by function, and sometimes by color. My favorite toaster imprints the image of a spider web onto the bread. It’s from 1932. It still works. Sometimes the wire shocks me when I plug it in. My favorite telephone is made of mother-of-pearl. It has a secret compartment under the number dial. When I bought it, there was a yellowed note inside that had a phone number written on it in pencil. I called it. It was disconnected.
…
Today is Monday. I am walking to work. Herschel eats hydroponic Bibb lettuce in his box. There is an odd quality to the air, almost liquid. I am tired. I sleep from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. most nights. Last night I did not. Last night I painted my bedroom walls the lightest of purples and laid down with my ear to the floor so I could hear the pipes whimper. I wonder if they are still copper.
When I get to my office, it begins to rain. Fat drops. I put Herschel in his tank and turn on the heat lamp. He stares at me from his mossy rock. Soon the rain increases. It is almost 9 a.m., so I look through the crate of 33s I have under my desk and choose two. At 9:03 a.m. Jonnie comes scrambling into my office, water dripping from every one of her angles.
“I’m late.”
“That’s quite all right, Jonnie.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, what makes you say that? It’s just three minutes.”
“Three minutes wasted. We could have been talking for those three minutes. We could have put on some hot water in those three minutes. There are things that only take three minutes to complete, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I say.
Jonnie hangs her blue rain slicker on the coat rack to the right of my door. A small puddle forms underneath it. She sits cross-legged in the center of my long velvet couch.
“Is it okay that I sit like this?”
“Yes, Jonnie. You may sit how you like.”
I gather the records I have chosen and place them next to the player beneath the window. It is an antique phonograph with a gilded triumphant horn. It is something I cherish.
“Jonnie, how was last week for you?”
“Oh, it was just fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Just fine,” she says.
“How is your son?”
Her face changes, contorts. She is incredibly emotive. So much so that sometimes I cannot recognize her. I think her body must be like putty to the touch.
“He is with his father for the time being.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, um…he, well, his father came and took him away from me.”
“Have you any idea why? I was under the impression that you two have been getting along quite well lately.”
“Yes, I, uh…I thought so too. But something happened.”
“Something?”
“Something,” she says. “I’m not entirely sure. I don’t really remember it.”
“Have you been dissociating?”
“Not at all lately. Not until this happened. Suddenly he, my son, became furious. We were in the kitchen. It was dinnertime. I had made potato soup. I didn’t even realize I had floated away from him until I was opening the door to the downstairs bathroom. He was inside, and it was dark in there. Pitch black. His fists were clenched very tightly. His cheeks were red. It looked like he had been crying for hours. He said things that were hurtful.”
She hasn’t taken a single deep breath since she came through the door.
“Would you like to listen to some music, Jonnie?”
“Oh, yeah, of course. What have you got?”
“I was thinking we could listen to Mingus.”
“Oh, you’ve just read my mind,” she says.
I walk over to the window near my desk. I place the needle carefully on track five. When I turn around, Philip is there, with his feet on the head cushion and his left hand running erratically through his hair.
“Have you ever thought about why some people are better liars than others?”
“What was that, Philip?”
“I thought I said it loud enough the first time.”
“Well, I didn’t hear you.”
“I said, have you ever thought about why some people are better liars than others?”
“Sometimes. Do you know why?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“I read somewhere that it’s a matter of intelligence, you know, being able to read people quickly and judge them just so you know exactly how to manipulate them, and just what to say to keep them on the line,” he says.
“Ah. Would you say you’re a good liar?”
“I’ll get to that. Let me finish. I disagree that it’s a matter of intelligence at all. I think dumb people can lie well too. I think how well you lie is a product of your upbringing. Good liars raise good liars and bad ones raise bad.”
“How do you figure?” I ask.
“Well, my mother was a good liar. She also wasn’t very bright, but she fooled people all the time. I, though, I could always tell when she was lying. It takes a good liar to spot a good liar. And the best liars can tell when good liars are lying.”
“So, you think you’re a good liar, Philip?”
“No, I think I’m the best liar. Wasn’t that clear from my logic? Sometimes I wonder if you even listen to me at all,” he says.
Philip pauses, hearing a girl speaking beyond the window in hushed, reactive tones. Then, another voice. A man’s. Philip listens intently. So do I. We both hear the girl begin to cry loudly, presumably in an ugly, kidney-bean-shaped-mouth sort of way. The man is a sidewalk heartbreaker. Philip loses interest at the sound of a second screeching cry. He scoffs and shoos an imaginary bug away from his face. His skin is tight, stretched over his bones in an angry, persistent way.
We are both quiet for a moment. Philip looks pensive, relaxed and backwards on my long velvet couch. Philip loves lying. Philip sees it as a sport, or a game, and he does not want to be bested. Philip always says he is lonely. Philip also says that everyone is boring. He likes to talk about potential suitors he meets at various places around the city. No one ever meets his standards. He has very particular tastes.
“Have you met anyone new recently?” I ask.
“No one of interest.”
“So, you have met someone new?”
“Yes, but like I said, they weren’t worth pursuing.”
“How did the interaction go?”
“Well, you know, I materialized like I always seem to do, and I found myself in a bar wearing women’s clothing. I’m always wearing women’s clothing. Do you know why this is?” he asks, picking his teeth with his pinky nail.
“I’ve got an idea. Let’s continue with your story first.”
“Okay, fine. So anyway, yeah, I was in some bar. Dim lighting. Lots of people. Smelled like desperate people. 28 year-olds who haven’t found somebody yet, or maybe have and strongly dislike them but will marry them out of fear. I personally can’t imagine something worse than living with someone for the rest of my life. Anyway, I’m ordering a whiskey neat at the bar when a woman with a half-bald head walks up to me. One of those trying cut-jobs. Supposedly trendy, something I find curious. Oddly enough, I can’t say I hated it. I found her ever-so slightly attractive, in an alien sort of way. Attractive enough to pique my interest. So I gave her the once-over. She was wearing a vest. Who the fuck wears vests anymore?”
“No one I know.”
“Exactly,” he says, snapping his fingers but not looking at me.
“Did she speak to you?”
“Yes, she did. She complimented me.”
“What did she say?”
“She said, Your aura is interesting,” he says, and smiles in this funny little way that men do which says innocence but means full comprehension.
“What did you say?”
“I said, That’s an odd thing to say to someone you just met. And she laughed. She laughed!”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t meant to be funny, what you said?”
“No, clearly it wasn’t. So immediately, of course, I deemed her to be unintelligent, as evidently, she was unable to understand humor and its proper usage in a witty, bantering conversation—this was clearly not one of those times. She should have known that. Everybody knows that. And the vest!” he says, exasperated.
“Okay, so you wrote her off. What happened next?”
“Well, she still seemed interested in pursuing me for some reason. Her breath smelled like gasoline so I surmised she’d been drinking Sambuca. Another point against her. Sambuca is reserved for old Italian men having celebratory aperitifs and nobody else.”
“So, what happened next?”
“Well, I wanted to practice lying. I wanted to see how far I could take it. You know, put my skills to the test. So, I started off by telling her that I was a composer.”
“Did she buy it?” I ask.
“Oh, sure she bought it. She fawned all over me. She touched my forearm with her fat fingers. Her half-bald head rubbed up against my arm when she laughed again at something I said that wasn’t supposed to be funny. It felt like AstroTurf. It was awful. I couldn’t stop staring at the buttons on her vest. They were so completely wrong for the style.”
“What happened next? Did you continue?” I ask.
“Oh, I’ll spare you the tiny details but let me just say, it was perfect. I told her a very moving tale about how I grew up in Germany to some very poor parents, and I barely had money to eat, but I never smoked a cigarette to keep away the hunger pangs, because, you see, I said, I am a master French horn player, and I didn’t want to sacrifice my breathing ability in the slightest, because I knew that playing the horn was the only way to get my family out of poverty.”
“What was she doing through all of this?”
“Oh, she ate it up. She cried silent tears. It took every bone in my body not to burst out laughing. That is comedy. That is a reason to laugh. Irony, you know?”
“Sure, irony, sure,” I say, writing.
Philip rises into a seated position with his legs tucked under him. He grins widely. I begin to move towards the window. Sometimes it is difficult to humor him. I look at Hershel. He is glaring. He does not care for Philip.
“Anyway, I continue on and tell her that I, through hard work and diligence, make my way up the ‘symphonic ladder’, so to speak, and am eventually composing pieces that sell out opera houses all over eastern Europe. By that time, I thought she was ready to jump my bones.”
He chuckles. I am over by the phonograph now with my back to Philip, who sighs contentedly, and claps his hands together lightly, just once.
“Ah, but it was all just fun. Just fun, just fun. And she’ll never know I was lying! It’s humor!”
I pick up the needle from its position on the Mingus record. I place it back in its home. Philip has no insight to offer into what happened between Jonnie and her son. I should ask Claire. Now Herschel is sleeping. It still rains. I turn around. Jonnie is sitting once again in the center of the couch.
“Would you like to listen to some music, Jonnie?”
“Oh, yes, of course. What have you got?”
“I was thinking we could listen to the Guaraldi Trio.”
“Oh, you’ve just read my mind,” she says.
Guaraldi plays, and it is Claire who is sitting on my long couch. Claire sits slightly off-center, with her legs hanging so that her toes barely rest on the carpet beneath. She takes her shoes off and places them directly under her, in the shadow of the couch. She bites her nails, and the skin around them. She is fidgety, nervous. She takes hold of the water bottle I set out on the table for her and begins to rip its label to shreds. There exists a certain kind of person whom one cannot persecute for their wrongdoings. Claire is one of those people. Today she is crying. I pass her a box of tissues.
“What is the matter, Claire?”
“Something happened. I scared someone. A small person. A young one, I mean.”
“What do you mean, Claire?”
“I was in a kitchen, it was really lovely, actually. There were a lot of fresh flowers, and it smelled great, like onions cooking in butter.”
“Were you alone?”
“No, I was with the small person. The young one.”
“What were they doing?”
“Uh, they were writing something on a piece of notebook paper. Drawing, maybe? Yes, they were drawing,” she says.
Claire has trailed off and has a dreamy look in her eyes. She cannot quite process the emotions of others, but they do have a profound affect upon her. They usually frighten her. It would be a mistake to interrupt these dream-like states of hers. I imagine she is picturing the scene in question, making fervent connections and tying crackling synapses together.
“Did you speak to them?”
“Yeah, I did. It was a boy, I remember. I asked him what he was working on. He said, A picture. For you, Mama. I’m using primary and secondary colors. That confused me.”
“That is odd indeed, Claire. What did you say to him?”
“Well, I said, I’m not your Mama. And he said, Mama, you’re being silly. And he sort of awkwardly removed his chubby little limbs from the chair he was sitting in and swayed over to me across the room. He was wearing a striped shirt.”
“Did you embrace him when he came to you?”
“No. I, uh, well, I moved away from him as quickly as I could. But he kept following me. He began to think it was a game, like he had to catch me. It scared me.”
“Why did it scare you?” I ask.
“Well, because, I had never seen this small person before in my life. He was somebody’s small person. You’re not supposed to touch other people’s children. Right? That’s right, right?”
Claire has entered her waking dream once again. I wait. The rain has stopped sounding its repetitive din against my windows. I wonder what I will eat for dinner. I look at Herschel. He looks lonely. I wonder if two painted turtles can peacefully coexist in the same tank. I wonder if Herschel has many personalities. He could not tell me even if he did. I wait to answer Claire until her eyes meet mine once again.
“Yes, that’s right, Claire.”
“Yeah, I thought so. I didn’t know what I was thinking, but I knew I just couldn’t have him touch me. I thought if he touched me I would die,” she says.
“Was there anyone else in the house?”
“Not that I knew of. He was still following me. I was faster than him, and I knew I had to do something to separate us before somebody did come and find us together, or worse, he’d touch me and I’d die.”
“So, what did you do?”
“Well, I tried a door in the kitchen and it opened into a small bathroom. So I sort of ushered him inside. I didn’t touch him. I never touched him.”
“Inside the bathroom?”
“Yes.”
“Did you shut the door?”
“Well, yeah, I had to contain him somehow,” she says.
“What happened next?”
“I sat in front of the door.”
“For how long?” I ask.
“I’m not sure. A few hours, at least. I kind of fell asleep once he stopped laying into the door with his tiny body weight, trying to open it. He cried a lot, and he was kicking the wood. I could feel the vibrations in my lower back. I think maybe he was afraid of the dark.”
“How did things end?”
“Someone else came.”
“Did you know this person?”
“No, I, well, he looked familiar, like someone you see in the coffee shop, but I didn’t know him. He came in looking very upset. He asked me lots of questions, like Where is he? and What the fuck is wrong with you? and I didn’t know the answer to anything and I got overwhelmed so I stood up and screamed at him I never touched him! Not even once! He wanted to touch me and I didn’t let him! and I pushed past the man and ran out what I presumed to be the front door. I’m glad it was. I’m not sure how I got so lucky. It was a very close call.”
When Claire gets upset she says entire half-minutes of speech in single breaths, only taking breaks to chew the skin around her left middle finger. It is bleeding now, so I hand her a tissue from the box in front of her. She seems to have forgotten its existence.
“How are you feeling now, Claire?” I ask.
“Well, I’m feeling okay now. The whole thing just shook me up. And I still can’t figure out if I’ve seen that man before. I hate that feeling.”
“That’s quite understandable, it was all very strange.”
I make my way once again over to the phonograph beneath the window. I move the needle to the right. Jonnie should be back. I decide quickly how to relay to her the information I have just gathered. This is careful, I must be careful. All is volatile, a wrong word could be disastrous.
When I turn around, Jonnie is on the couch. Resilient, broken into three. She looks tired, like Herschel.
“I’m tired. My head feels big, and empty, and square,” she says.
“That makes sense, Jonnie. The rain will do that to us sometimes.”
“Did you talk to the other people inside my head today?”
“Yes, Jonnie. I thought one of them might be able to provide some insight into what happened between you and your son.”
“Did any of them help you? I hope they weren’t mean to you, or unkind in any way.”
“No, of course not Jonnie. In time, I will bring you closer to them. I hope one day you will be able to know them as you know yourself, and then maybe they won’t cause you so much trouble.”
“You know, when they come into my consciousness, I go somewhere else.”
“Where do you go?”
“I don’t know. There are no walls, just miles of space. Sometimes I hear snippets of voices that sound like mine, but they are more gravelly, or more nasal. Always just unfamiliar enough to disorient me.”
“How long do you spend in this space, Jonnie?”
“It always feels very short, the time I spend there. Like no time at all, but I don’t have any control over anything. I just sit on whatever I suppose to be the ground, and close my eyes,” she says.
Jonnie has her eyes closed now.
“Jonnie, keep your eyes closed. Does the name Claire mean anything to you?”
I watch her eyes move under their paper-thin lids, the veins bluish.
“Claire? I, yes. I…knew a Claire once. She was my babysitter. She…was a few years older than me.”
“Can you remember anything else about this Claire? Try to recall as much as you can. It might be uncomfortable. I’m right here, Jonnie.”
“Yes…Claire, she was anxious, nervous. She jiggled her legs when she sat. It bothered me that she shook the card table when we played Go Fish. She hated germs. She never wanted to touch me. I wanted her to braid my hair, to hug me. She never wanted to hug me. My mother was never around. It was always Claire,” she says.
“Okay, Jonnie, breathe for a second.”
Jonnie breathes. Her eyes keep moving under the skin.
“Did Claire ever scare you?”
“Claire? She…I, I can’t recall,” she says, her face wrinkling.
“Yes, you can Jonnie. You can. Do you remember being stuck in a dark place somewhere?”
“Dark? Yes…it was dark.”
“Can you make out any shapes? Can you feel anything with your fingers?”
Jonnie reaches out a tired hand atop a limp wrist. Her pointer finger shakes. Her middle finger bleeds and the curve around her nail fills with red.
“Yes, I feel plastic, a sheet of plastic. And smooth, round shapes. They’re cold. The floor is cold. I’m not wearing shoes. I’m alone.”
“What do you hear, Jonnie?”
“I hear myself. I’m screaming. I’m crying. My legs hurt. I’m tired,” she says.
“What else do you hear?”
“Another voice. When I stop screaming. It’s another voice. It’s familiar. It sounds like a voice from the place in my head. The empty one.”
“Can you make out what they’re saying?” I ask.
“Something. The same thing. Over and over and over again. They’re saying…”
Jonnie scrunches her features into a small button in the center of her face. She holds both of her arms laterally above the couch, her fingers wide, her fingers tensed and curling.
“They’re saying Don’t touch me. They’re saying it. I can hear it now. It’s clear, I hear it, like there’s a wall between us, or something, but I hear it. I hear it.”
Jonnie has gathered her limbs into a knot. She rocks on my couch as if adrift in a roiling sea. Her face says pain. I can bring her back now. I stand, and begin to walk over to the window.
“It’s something I did. It’s because I did something. It wasn’t wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong, but it’s something I did, something the voice didn’t like. The voice is upset with me. I scared the voice. The voice scares me.”
I place the needle onto Ellington and Coltrane.
Jonnie is on the couch. She is present. She shakes. I hand her the tissues from the box in front of her once again.
“Jonnie, it was not you who scared your son.”
She sniffs. The tissue disintegrates in her hands.
“It wasn’t?”
“No, Jonnie. It was Claire. Claire is one of those voices from the empty space. Claire did something very unkind to you as a child, and has done something quite similar to your son. She did not mean any harm in it, Jonnie. She was not trying to be malicious in any way. I think Claire has trouble displaying her emotions correctly.”
“It wasn’t me?” she asks, brightening.
“Well, it was and it wasn’t, Jonnie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you are very tired.”
“I am very tired,” she says, quickly fading from me.
“You have done so well today.”
“I have?”
“You have. You’re going to be just fine, Jonnie. These people, they don’t want to hurt you, or make your life bad. They just want to coexist. I’m hoping to bring you back into your own body, Jonnie. I’m hoping we can quiet their voices a bit and make you familiar to yourself once again. For now, you need sleep. And try to avoid seeing Philip or your son for a while. I think he will just agitate you.”
Jonnie nods. I write her a script for a mild sedative, with instructions to take it once just before bed. She deserves a sound sleep. There is not a quick fix for her in these wakeful hours. Herschel looks at her. I look at her. I sigh quietly. I think Herschel would sigh too, if he could.
“Don’t forget your shoes, and your jacket, Jonnie. It’s stopped raining so you might not even need the jacket at all.”
“When did I take off my shoes?” she asks.
…
I open the curtains to sunshine. I hope Jonnie did not wear her jacket. I hope Jonnie felt the sun on her shoulders. I peel open my tin of sardines. I give one to Herschel. They are quite high in sodium, but he has developed an affinity for them so I’ll give him one every so often. I drink my lemonade quickly. I am always thirsty after my sessions with Jonnie. As I take notes from today’s session, I watch Herschel, who watches me.
“Herschel, tell me—do you think it would be easy to be a human?”
Herschel climbs onto the rock that sits under the reddish heat lamp and closes his outer lids. I think it is in his best interest to remain the sole turtle in his mossy tank. I have seen what can happen to those without voices.