Cygnet

by Season Butler

  He spent some time stationed in Germany. I once found a postcard from a woman named Ingrid addressed to Dad but it was in German and I didn’t know what it said. He always said he’d teach me to speak German. He taught me a couple of things like es tut mir leid and entschuldigung. I don’t remember what they mean.

  He was a boxer when he was younger. He got medals or trophies or whatever for boxing in the army and in prison. I don’t know, it seems like he really wants to be gentle, he tries to be, but he just isn’t. He’s the reason I know how to throw a punch.

  He reads all the time, sci-fi books and Heavy Metal comics. Those were the only things I can remember being really afraid of as a child. As I got older he started to recommend certain books to me—Weaveworld, Swan Song, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—but I never read them. Maybe I should, maybe they’ll help me understand him. I doubt it, though. But I wish I’d read them, I wish I hadn’t just ignored him, assumed his books weren’t good enough or something. I wish I could tell him I’m sorry. I wish I could have helped him. God, I’m so sorry.

  My elementary school friends teased me that my dad was “cute.” He has generous, weary smile lines. Tough, tired, friendly, like a cross between James Earl Jones and Che Guevara. I liked him. Yeah, I liked him a lot. No, wait, he was also an annoying pain in the ass. But if we were equals, if he wasn’t my dad, I think we’d be friends.

  Bella Freeman was born Isabella Sadler on December 30 (okay, Mom’s two years older than Dad . . . ), 1963. She’s a little shorter than me, 5'3" or 5'4". When she was a bit famous it was for her singing, but she’s a poet, really, even though she never calls herself one. She even had a book published, a little volume that she said sold well in Haight-Ashbury in the late seventies. She can speak in haikus, which was actually really amazing and hardly ever gets annoying because it’s almost impossible to notice unless you count the syllables of everything she says. She can just make up poems, out of nowhere, but she stopped writing them down, which sucks.

  She’s old-fashioned, even though she doesn’t think she is. She’ll say things like: I’m a feminist but really now, what kind of woman doesn’t cook? But she cooked tough. It was all about knife skills and building the muscles to whisk things to sharp peaks without stopping. We would listen to Patti Smith and the Pretenders and Heart and Fleetwood Mac and twirl and dance each other around the kitchen. Dinner was always late, and when it was really late she’d put down this old pink blanket she had and the three of us would have a midnight picnic on my parents’ bedroom floor.

  She has amazing breasts. I’ve even seen photographic evidence that she breastfed me, but her tits—they make me feel optimistic about my future. Maybe it’s weird to perv on your own mom’s boobs, but it’s okay to be sort of hot for your mom if you know how to control yourself. Isn’t that what Freud said?

  I used to watch her putting on lipstick before she went out. Her lips are thin. She paints them with a little brush. Her nose is narrow, her hair is jet black and silver.

  My parents are alive somewhere and I might never see them again. I’m streaming, of course. It’s making it hard to breathe. I want to say that I forgive them, even though I don’t think that’s true. But I do say it, finally. More like a wish.

  The day is getting on. I have to go. I have my wallet, though there’s nothing much in my account. No driver’s license, and who knows where my birth certificate is? Keeping my legs steady as I walk down the stairs is more urgent than thinking about that, though. Downstairs I have another look around but there’s nothing it makes sense to take. If I have nothing, no one will believe I’m a real person. Never mind, I have to go.

  Outside I stand back a little, plant my feet, and look out to the horizon. The wind laughs in my face. The surprising thing is the beauty of the view, the way the sun cuts through the tears that won’t stop coming, the sun like a flamethrower, like an incinerator. The beyond—there’s just so much of it I can’t believe I’m still breathing. I look down and see the rip in the earth, the gash with some wires and roots and pipes jutting out toward the sea, arms that have lost what they were holding.

  More noise rises to meet my ears. If it’s another slip, I could just stay put. My first and last big decision as an adult. And then no more. I only have a second, so I think fast.

  You know something’s a stupid question when the answer pops up just about the same second the question forms. Like: What’s the difference between a promise and a lie? Just an age difference, that’s all.

  And when the question and answer form at the same time, you’re just panicking is all, making mental lists of things you already know. It’s not the same as thinking.

  Like:

  They’re never coming back—

  it’s not the same as going down with the ship—

  sure people would care, but not many and not much—

  oh God, oh God.

  Maybe people believe in God because it gives them something to picture. I even go in for it, kind of. Why wouldn’t God be some old-ass Santa lookalike, a fat white fuck on his stupid cloud island? It means that if there was a God, he’d have actual balls you could really kick him in and a face to slap and scream in. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do! Do you hear me, motherfucker? You’ve got a lot of fucking explaining to do!”

  People believe in God because you can try your best and do everything you’re supposed to and nothing happens. God’s the sense that real life doesn’t make. People believe in God because life is malicious.

  “You’re doing this to me on purpose!”

  Alone in front of the sea and the rocks with my house falling down, I scream my throat to pulp.

  Then the noise, the demand, is coming from the other direction. The bell. Someone’s ringing the bell. It’s time.

  At first I’m stumbling, almost crawling, my arms helping me keep moving along the little dirt road as my Tin Man joints ache. Soon I manage to get myself upright, and then to walk and almost run, looking like I’ve been in an earthquake or a war. Like my house has fallen down.

  A glint of blue interrupts my peripheral vision, gagging blue and flecked with froth, and again I turn my face inland, straining, willing the chapel to come into view soon. The sea is the acid belly of a monster who eats dead bodies. We’ve been feeding it from coastlines and off the sides of boats forever. Walk the plank! Man overboard! Shark attacks, naval battles, plane crashes, tidal waves that take people who were minding their own business (sometimes pretty fucking far from the stupid ocean) and pound suction-cup muscles through the frames of their houses and drag them screaming through coughs of stinging salt water, groping for solid things to hold on to, crying without being able to know they’re crying because the salt water the stupid salt water is all over them and it’s too similar. Kids who go out too far because they don’t know yet what “too far” means and no one told them, not in a way they could understand—just “don’t go out too far” without any way to measure how far is “too far,” not even a word about how to judge it. It’s not like they didn’t try, these kids. They did everything right, they weren’t trying to be contrary, they just didn’t know, and got caught in the undertow. It’s not their fault but they’re the ones who suffer.

  And people love the sea, love it, even though everyone knows it’s full of shit and garbage and toxic waste and thousands of years’ worth of dead bodies. They ride boats across it for fun. They get in it, let it touch their skin. They let it up their nose, open their eyes and let it graze their corneas. Well, they can have it. My lungs strain, my legs are a mess of bug bites and nettle stings. I’m sweating in the rising heat, but the sweat dissolves and that’s how I like it. Not big-fish-little-fish. Dog eat dog. On land.

  The ocean seems like the least attractive place to be a dead body. Water getting into everything, bloating your cells, teasing layers of skin apart. It’s a flabby, pallid burial, fish nibbling puny bites, everything inside of you chilled to jelly and oozing out in slow motion. The opposite of
a mummification. I’d rather be wrapped up tight, left in the desert to dry. Shrinking in the arid chambers of an actual building, something someone made on purpose. (For all I know, the ocean’s an accident, a mistake, a by-product.) In the afterlife the mummies will be the supermodels, skin and flesh air-dried to their skeletons. The sea-buried freaks’ll have to develop sparkling personalities to get by.

  But I know neither will actually apply to me. I’ll die and go into a box, down into the ground where it’s dark and quiet but solid and familiar—or into a flaming chamber and then a smaller box and into the air and then (shit) probably into the sea. I’ll end up as ash-mud on breakers, but I won’t be around to care.

  When they cremate people, the artificial stuff inside them doesn’t burn. I bet they throw away huge boxes of awesome stuff from paupers’ cremations. All kinds of pacemakers and silver teeth and plates and pins from broken bones that set badly. When I go back to the Bad Place maybe I’ll make sculptures or jewelry from dead paupers’ unburned parts, the stuff that stuck around because it was made of different matter.

  Two thoughts rush in fast. One is that they probably don’t say “pauper” anymore. They probably say “indigent” or something more PC and less Dickens. The other is a kind of self-scolding: stop thinking about them. They’re alive. Somewhere. And I’ll never see them again. They’re not in boxes; they’re on a bus or a train or a boat. Their flesh and fillings are in the same place—my mother’s skin, smooth and tight over her cheekbones, my dad’s forearm muscles and big hands, graying sideburns and gray-brown eyes.

  Marie’s house appears on the left, good-witch purple with tall stalky wildflowers and grasses and blossoming creepers all but obscuring the paint job. But the usual prog-rock soundtrack doesn’t greet me, even when I get really close. The doors are closed in all the little white house-shaped houses with gray roofs, and the Psychedelicatessen is shut up tight with a skull-and-crossbones flag hanging over the porch railings. All the cigarette butts and glasses are gone from in front of the Relic. Rose’s grocery looks warm, like she could be inside. I push the door—the bells jingle as I pop my head in—but she’s not there. A few more paces up I see her outside the chapel. Swans are filing in. She must hear me getting closer because she looks up, kind of startled. For a second it seems like she might come down and meet me halfway. But she just frowns at me and shakes her head. So I speed up, running to her outside the chapel, frowning too now, trying to remember what I decided I was going to say, but, fuck me, fuck, I never thought of anything, and when I try to open my mouth, just to say, Please, let me in, please, Rose very quietly says, “Don’t,” and goes inside.

  Turning away from the chapel means turning toward the ocean. I close my eyes and let my face fill up with salt, over my cheeks and up my nose and down my throat. Drowning.

  When I open my eyes, Mrs. Tyburn is holding out a white handkerchief. “Oh, my lamb. My little lamb without a flock. Lost little lamb.” The handkerchief is soft and has that clean laundry scent I only normally smell when I’m pilfering Lolly’s wardrobe. I want to blow my nose into it but I don’t think I’m supposed to. I try to thank her but I just squeak and sob more when I try. She looks like she gets it, anyway.

  “I only have a moment, my dear. The others have assembled and we’re going to start our discussion.”

  Do I tell her I can’t go back, that it’s over? That my house is teetering, slipping, that it could be going over as we speak? “Rose says I can’t come.”

  “And she speaks for us all when she says that.” Some things can make your bones twist and break, hammers, daggers, bombs, tidal waves. Mrs. Tyburn sees. “We all know how you feel about the Duchess. And we appreciate that it must be difficult for you to lose someone close to you, yet again. A season in hell, a season in hell.”

  Her words melt and make me feel more still. The pain that grinds my bones to powder has a name now.

  “You must understand, though, that this is not entirely about the Duchess. We’re all going her way. We are, not you. We’re not all going to suffer from dementia, of course, but we are dying of old age, in our own ways, in our time. We’ve all come out here to die, for ten or twenty or forty or sixty years. Who knows. This place has a purpose, and it is not your purpose.

  “If one wanted to wax philosophical, one might say that you’re dying too, but not like we are. So, my lamb, as warmly as I and Rose and many of us may feel toward you, this is, to put it simply, not your business. This is no place for you. Now I really must go in. You may keep the handkerchief.”

  I twist the white cotton and watch her walk away. She’s so small it’s almost like she’s being carried like a piece of pollen in the air.

  Sobbing, grimacing, I dig my toe into the dirt. This is how I knew it was going to go. My mind replays it but it doesn’t change. I can’t even force the image of my having said the right thing, granted a seat at the back or space to stand, being allowed to listen, raising my hand when both sides have had their hearing and the motion is finally raised. I can’t see my hand going up to let her go or let her stay and wait.

  I head the rest of the way north to the Oceanic. At least, for once, finally, I’ll have a chance to really be alone with her. The sea spreads out beyond the lawn, sapphire blue and sparkling incessantly like a Diana Ross drag queen. I head up the wide staircase and across the big porch, which I’ve never seen empty before, even at night, up the stairs and into the Duchess’s room. White flowers, white walls—the breeze through the big window dilutes the pollen’s perfume. I sit in my chair next to her, listening to the machines that breathe her lungs and beat her heart. I get my body to beat in time with hers, open my mouth like hers, close my eyes. And because I know it’s safe, that all the Swans are eulogizing and yea- or nay-ing down at the chapel, I lift her thin white blanket, and, being careful of her tubes and sacks and things, crawl into bed with her, into the scent of the flowers, and the clack, bleep, suck, drop of her life support, and the breeze, and her soft, warm body. Even she won’t stay with me, not even if I beg.

  I ask her what to do. I know I have to go, today, right now; my parents might never find me, and I have nowhere else to go. By the time I’m a Wrinkly there won’t be a Swan to die on. No Shoals at all. Just ex-ice-cap water and wars in the Bad Place.

  New York was awful when I lived there before, and it’ll only be more expensive, meaner, with fewer jobs for someone like me—no skills, no diploma. I don’t even think I have enough ID to enroll in school if I wanted to. It’ll probably smell even worse in summer. And this summer’s really fucking hot. Anyway, Manhattan’s an island, too. Not a safe bet long-term. Hell, maybe I should move to Detroit or Columbus. The Midwest could be the east coast by the time I’m a Swan. Should I move there and get ahead of the wave? Stake my claim in a safe space on high ground in a little place with a well? Is it too soon to hide out already? There’s so much more of the world to see. Will it be scary to be back? Will it have changed too much for me to know how to act? Or maybe it will have been me who changed too much.

  Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

  What is it like, having the world change so much? From when you were born, I mean. Was it just too much of a leap between the world you first became aware of and the world you were in when your brain stopped firing and popping the way it’s supposed to? Maybe it’s a kind of exhaustion, so tired you can’t think straight, and soon you can’t do anything—eat, hold your head up, keep your eyes open. I feel so exhausted I could sleep for a hundred years. But it would be just my luck that I’d wake up and everything would be gone. I’d wake up drowning.

  Still, I just want to rest. Without thinking or dreaming. Whatever you’re doing, lying in this bed strapped to tubes with tape and needles, it doesn’t look restful. If I could have it my way, I would be dead for a week. All I want is a break from existing, something deeper than sleep.

  Clack, bleep, suck, drop.

  It’s time, isn’t it? I know. I go to her dresser. Lift the lid on her wooden
box of keepsakes. Her driver’s license and her Indian Head penny go into my pocket. Her license is still valid. I wouldn’t be able to drive with it, but if I needed to use it to apply for something else, like a passport . . . Her birthdate, 1929—I’ll say it was a typo, obviously it should be 1992. Just look at me, come on. You know the DMV; their systems are a mess. I can picture it—it could work. And the name, Jesus: Bryony Nuala Euphemia Featherstonhaugh. No wonder people call her the Duchess. What a fucking mouthful. But lots of people have names they have to grow into. I’ll grow fast. The penny is just for luck, like a brave, that’s what she said. I’m going to need it.

  Outside I’m feeling lighter. The day has turned pretty. I spot a cluster of yellow dock and stop on the grass, chew the leaves into a thick green paste, and rub it over the bites and stings on my legs and linger, staring at a bee clinging to a purple thistle nearby. It reminds me of someone sucking my nipples and I laugh out loud, grateful for the joke. It would be nice to have someone to point it out to. Never mind.

  There’s the ocean. There it always is, waiting for me. And now I have to cross it.

  The seagulls bark like guard dogs.

  Bells tinkle gently as I let myself into Rose’s shop. The earthy smell coats my nostrils. I want to leave her a note or something, but there are no words anymore. Her playing cards are stacked next to the cash box; I fan through and find the queen of spades and leave it on top. I place a nickel on top of that for the three apples I place in my bag. She’ll know it’s from me, as a thank-you, an I’ll never forget you. An I love you, even. Rose will appreciate that.

  I let myself into Mrs. Tyburn’s house with her old-fashioned key, tiptoe into the foyer and through to the living room, scanning the ground floor. Fabergé eggs, porcelain figures, the grape shears and olive pitter, a small but really heavy picture frame, a shiny walnut box with satin lining. And the cash she keeps in the drawer by the chair where she has her martini in the evening. Everything is heavy, even the envelope of bills. Everything feels solid and steady, in its proper place. Too easily missed. And I can’t be someone who robs old ladies, especially not Swans. I’d be taking much more than fancy eggs and pointless silverware.