Cygnet

by Season Butler

  Spiky, mean thoughts try to pry their way in, but I shoo them away. I say it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t my fault.

  This is real and now is real, and I’m here and it’s so hot our bodies stick and graft and it hurts to touch and hurts to pull apart.

  Oh, God. I’m dying and I’m alone. I’m dying and no one cares because we’re all dying, we’re all flying through space at the same rate.

  “Faster . . .”

  and sometimes it’s too mundane, to die a little every single day and sometimes you can feel it, you can feel how fast we’re flying through space and

  “It’s amazing.”

  He kisses me to thank me for the compliment. When he takes his mouth away again I want to say I’m dying but maybe that’s not exactly what he wants to hear.

  It’s all mixed in my head, everything’s mixed up. It’s like, I didn’t want you anyway, just leave me the fuck alone but if you stop I’ll fucking kill you. Do you hear me? Fucking. Kill. You. But of course he doesn’t hear me because this is all just a blur of nonsense thoughts and sensations that’s sometimes like a kaleidoscope, all colors and brightness, and sometimes that muddled nothing color that happens when you’re a kid and you mix all the Play-Doh together and your mom shouts that you’ve ruined it now but how were you supposed to know—

  “Oh God, keep doing that.”

  “What?”

  “That.”

  “That?”

  “Oh God.”

  Oh shit, I can’t remember his name. I was just about to yell it out. It’s—sometimes it’s, it’s—sometimes it’s nice to be encouraging when they’re doing something good or even when, when, even when it’s not going so well, it’s nice to say something because you’ve got to make noise, I mean, when you’re making noise already and it’s nice—

  “Oh, Jason.”

  Aha! Jason, of course—it’s good, to encourage them, so they know how it’s going and saying their name makes it, makes it, makes it, like, oh, personal. It’s nice, it’s a nice thing to do. Women and children first, women and children first. We’re inside each other and he’s got me surrounded and suddenly I feel perfect and perfect and perfectly sure that I’m going to die very soon, maybe even now, maybe even in the moment that was now and just passed and I’m gushing my life out like a fat, bleeding bee.

  There’s a man in my bed. Not my man, really. And in a way it’s not even my bed. But they’re both mine now. The springs press into my right side and his hand rests on my left side.

  “Your hair’s all messed up.”

  “So what.”

  We stare into each other’s eyes until we can’t stand it anymore. The pressure builds until kissing more is the only way to release it. Pressing our lips together, biting his earlobe, kissing my collarbone, pressing his nose into my sternum, rolling him over, squeezing each other hard, resting my ear on his chest.

  “Your heart’s beating really fast.”

  “So’s yours. I can feel it in my stomach.”

  This is what we do, my imaginary boyfriend and his little castaway.

  The light at the window’s turning red.

  I trace my finger over the curve of his shoulder and lean up and bite it. He half squeals and laughs, rolls me over, pins my arms down, and starts kissing me. Harder and harder until he reaches down and I hear the foil of another condom ripping and we’re at it again.

  After our second go we sit up and share a joint. We must look like a married couple. I nestle my shoulder into his armpit and lean against him.

  “What time’s Ted taking you back over to Appledore?”

  I don’t know why I ask that. He’ll go when he always goes.

  “Eight. Need to get moving soon.”

  “You can stay here, if you want. I’ll cook. Are you hungry?” Boys are always hungry.

  “Um, yeah, but I gotta get back tonight. It’s busy on the weekend. All the Wrinklies counting on me to shift their gear, ya know?”

  Just stay. They can miss you in the Bad Place for one night. Stay here, make some phone calls if you need to, rearrange your plans while I make us dinner. And then we can go for a walk on the north side of the island, out along the rocks. We can watch the sun set and maybe watch a movie on TV. Just stay tonight.

  He pulls on his underwear, plain black boxers, not new, not worn out either. “I’m sorry. Maybe next time.”

  “Yeah, cool. No worries.”

  “Do you want any weed?”

  I nod and reach for my bag to take out some money but he refuses. Instead he drops an eighth on the bedside table and leans over, kissing me again, giving this whole it’s so hard to leave you routine, which he keeps going with until I push him away.

  “Come on, you don’t want to miss Ted. He’s waiting.”

  He looks over at my alarm clock—“Shit”—and picks up the pace with getting dressed. “I’m sorry, I really wish I could stay.”

  It’s weird being naked while he’s dressed. I don’t like it at all and I wish he’d just leave already if he has to.

  “I’ll call you,” he says as he leaves without looking back at me.

  My bed is comfortable. This bed, the guest bed. I listen to his footsteps down the stairs, across the living room, through the kitchen; the door closes really gently behind him. I move into the middle of the bed, splay my arms and legs out, relieved to be alone again, no talking, no repeating myself. No one to see the silly faces I make. I look up at the shapes made by bumps and depressions in the ceiling. An owl. An eel. A sea monster . . .

  Chapter Five

  Sometimes my parents were amazing. Like when Mom was still singing and she auditioned for a band that had just gotten signed and we went to California. We had a cool car that never broke down, an electric-blue Mustang convertible my parents loved. We drove fast with the top down. At least, I always remember us going fast.

  California was strange as well, though. I was little (five? six?), and California felt like a magic word. So I didn’t understand why California wasn’t clean, why I didn’t turn blond and golden there, why I still felt small for my height, and lonely. Why there was always this patina of dirt clinging to the hair on the palm trees, why the scars from mosquito bites still lingered big and black and ashy on my legs. Soon I developed a knack for looking at things without thinking about them. It helped. I just noticed the strangeness, the distance between me and everything else. The cars as they stopped at the traffic light outside my window, the letters on signs sitting bulky against their backgrounds, all these people who didn’t seem to see me.

  It did feel magical when we drove to their friends’ houses in Laurel Canyon. Out of the strip-mall lanes of the city, beyond the concrete and beige of the freeway, the drive turned dense green with lots of different leaves, occasional bald spots of desert with tufts of bushes threatening to become tumbleweeds. I could lose myself in the landscape going by, so the scars on my legs didn’t matter so much. Once I was bored at one of their parties. There were two kids I could have played with, but they were lying on their stomachs at the edge of the pool, picking up fallen leaves from the patio and placing them on the surface of the water while they told each other secrets that seemed very important. I didn’t like that game. I kept my distance and watched for a while, then walked into the house and found my parents in the kitchen with a handful of grown-ups, all talking at once, their jewelry rattling with their laughter. There was a pile of white rainbow glitter on the counter. I went to stick my finger in it, but as soon as I touched it the tall blonde who lived there pulled me away and slapped the dust off my fingers. She hauled me over to the sink, knocking my ribs against the edge, and rubbed her hands against mine under icy-cold water. “No! That is not for you!” Drying my hands on a limp little towel, she was only wearing a bikini and didn’t seem to notice that one of her breasts had come out. I couldn’t keep from staring at it. She knelt down to look me in the face. “There now—I wonder what the other kids are up to
. Why don’t you all get into your suits and play Marco Polo in the pool? How’s that sound?” I nodded and went back outside, but instead I found a corner at the side of the pool house where I could be alone to cry.

  And another night in Laurel Canyon—or maybe it was that same night, or maybe it wasn’t in Laurel Canyon at all—my mother was up on an outdoor stage with the band behind her, wearing this incredible green dress with green and gold beads that looked like it had belonged to some kind of princess at the beginning of the twentieth century but got blown apart and stepped on and fucked with until its ripped-up remnants flattered my mother’s licorice arms and serious thighs perfectly. Her sphere of hair was tinged with gold; her legs and arms and dress were a monster as the music started. Watching it was like picking up something you didn’t realize was hot. The drums and bass started rolling, the guitar whined into time with the rhythm section; then she screamed and everything went electric. Her voice could slide from a siren to a growl like her body was an instrument from hell or the future. I thought the microphone would break in half and let out sparks every time she slammed her rings and claws into it. The noise made my eardrums and back teeth sting, and I knew I was seeing something important. I thought, this is us. This is what our lives are now.

  But the best thing about it was my dad’s face watching her. I wanted in on it, somehow. Part of me wanted to ask to be picked up; I just wanted a bit of what was in his eyes. I held out as long as I could before I raised my arms up to him, feeling like a bit of a baby. He scooped me up and held me and looked at me, really took a moment and looked at me, and then he turned his face back to the stage and it felt like we were looking at her together.

  Later that night—or was it? How can I be sure? In the reel of my memory it’s the same night, static from the show still tingling the surface of our little life. Still in California, anyway, and she’s wearing the amazing green dress. My parents have left their bedroom door ajar and I’m watching them through the crack. He’s painting her toenails black, blowing on her toes. They’re talking about people I don’t know. He stretches his body up along her legs and kisses her fingers. She kneels in front of him on the bed, and he comes up to his knees too, and she piles all her jewelry onto him from the bedside table, kisses her lipstick onto his mouth. She reaches over again to get her camera and takes a picture. I remember the electric snap of the flash.

  Then she says she’s going to paint his toes. He jumps up, which startles me and makes me jump too, and I brace myself for what I know will come next. Daddy, dripping with Mommy’s beads and rhinestones, bounds upright onto the bedroom floor while she gets to her feet, bounces a couple of times on the bed, and launches herself, all those sparkly green arms, at the spot where he’s standing. I hear her falling against him. Mom into Dad, Dad into door, door into my face, front tooth onto the floor. They’re laughing in this sparkling pile—they haven’t even noticed me—and for what feels like forever I don’t know how to get them to see the blood on my hands and running down my nightgown.

  If I had been at school then, and the teacher had asked me to draw a picture of my family, it would have been just like that: green glitter parents in a giggling pile, and me on the other side of the door frame, brown and pink with a terrible spill of red that keeps spreading, and plain, blank, paper white all around where the edges of my memory can’t come up with any detail.

  And then I’m in our kitchen. I know the walls in that kitchen were green with pink edges, but in my memory of that night the walls are paper white and my daddy is smiling at me and making cartoon voices so I smile back. He says I look cool with my missing front tooth. Tough. But I can’t smile for very long and when it hurts too much I put my face into his neck and he closes around me like the whole entire world.

  Then I’m wearing the green dress, in love with its weight, and my parents are tangled in a heap on the floor. And the air is flowery and spicy like nectar and sap. Did we walk through a forest that smelled like this? Was it Seattle, not LA? They’re on the rug, breathing like dragons and shining their eyes at me while I sing Mommy’s song to them in Mommy’s dress, standing on a chest of drawers by an open window with the lights sitting gently on the city like my dad in all my mother’s jewelry and my mother reclining long in a black silk slip.

  It’s been a long time since I heard her sing.

  The California sky turns light blue. I pour myself a bowl of cereal. I’ve always heard grown-ups talking about the sunrise like it’s something magical, so I go to the window to watch, listening to my parents breathing in their sleep, trying not to get milk on the green dress and failing. The colors in the sky change. I thought I’d change too but I don’t. Daddy’s lips are still a little pink with Mom’s lipstick.

  * * *

  The sea is supposed to be soothing. Maybe I can isolate the sound without seeing it in my mind’s eye. I can pretend it’s the sound of pebbles falling, like those annoying rain sticks that middle-class hippies always have in their houses. Or beaded curtains swaying. Finally I’m falling into sleep listening to the push and pull, the pound and splash, the stupid sea that’s everywhere, the dumb wet thing that’s got me surrounded, and oh God, I’m going to have to take a shower tomorrow, maybe I should just get it over with now, and anyway it’ll be nice to be clean when they get here. I’ll tidy the house, I’ll cook.

  Calm down. There’s plenty of time to take care of everything. In this moment, everything’s fine. They promised they’d be back. They have to come. They have to.

  You fucking bastards, where are you?

  Sea sounds, pull, push, lift-and-drop, blah, blah, blah. Big bully that doesn’t know when to stop, slapping the cliff that holds up my house just because it’s bigger and it can.

  Fuck it, it’s too early to sleep. Never mind.

  I pull on a T-shirt and some underwear and go downstairs. I remember the newspaper I bought this morning, toss it from my bag onto the couch, and turn on the TV for background noise. It’s much harder to take the news when you’re in a room alone. Wednesday’s paper, but it doesn’t matter. I thought it would bother me, never being able to get the paper the day it comes out. The Swans buy newspapers like history books. They’re not fussed that a few days have passed since the events in them. If they need to know what’s happening right this second, they can watch CNN. On TV there’s one of those reality shows where a pro nanny comes into a troubled family and helps the parents figure out how to keep their horrible kids in line. One of the kids just threw a brick at the nanny. The mom’s crying but the nanny doesn’t flinch.

  I turn down the volume and scan the headlines. It’s hard to find anything I can bear to read. The world is falling apart. Whole chunks are crumbling, like one of those medieval maps where the world ends and shit just drops off the side to get eaten by a sea monster.

  Maps. Where are you?

  I swap the newspaper for my laptop and return to the search. Think logically. If they’re coming tomorrow they’ll be close. So I start at the dock in Portsmouth where the boats come in from Appledore and Swan, and move inland from there. There are plenty of people out, taking advantage of the hot night and late sunset, shopping in cutesy New England boutiques, eating at tables on the sidewalks. Their bodies are stiff, caught in motion like the corpses preserved in the Pompeii ash, doing normal things just before a disaster, eating, paying the check in a restaurant, pushing a stroller, tugging the arm of a straggling toddler.

  I think about the kids that people my age are having, or will start having soon. Life is going to be so boring for them. Not just because the world will have gone completely to shit by then and there won’t be much of anything left, but because their parents are going to talk constantly about how the world used to be. Remember when you could just get in your car if you needed to get somewhere? Or take a bus or a train even? Remember when everything used to be so much faster? Remember the internet? God, the internet! Remember real meat? Remember fish? I remember when I had my own house for a while. All this sp
ace, electricity all the time, taps that turned on and off. No lines for water. No lines for food. Wars all far away. Remember?

  Yeah, that’ll get dull real quick.

  It reminds me of this short story. “All Summer in a Day.” There was this little girl—wait, I should say first that the story takes place on a human colony on Venus, I think. It rains there all the time; the sun only comes out for an hour every seven years. But the kids who were born there are all used to it; they haven’t ever seen the sun, so they don’t miss it. Except there’s this one girl who’s new. Her parents have just moved the family to Jupiter or Venus or wherever and she remembers sunny days from her earthling childhood. But when she goes on and on about how nice life was on Earth, none of the Venus kids understand. She writes all this lovely sunshine poetry and gets all put out because no one gives a shit. Finally the sunny day comes, and she’s kind of psychotic looking forward to it, but the asshole other kids lock her in a closet for the whole hour the sun’s out and she misses it, which is pretty brutal, and you’re obviously supposed to feel sorry for her. And I do, kind of. Someone should have told her not to be such a pain in the ass, though.