Guignol & Other Sardonic Tales

by Orrin Grey

  I had nine months in which to complete this procedure. If, at the end of that time, I had received no positive proof of Dr. Hartledge’s presence, then I was to take that as positive proof of his absence, and the absence of any sort of life after death. “Beyond that,” he said, “you can do what you like. Feel free to make a thesis project of it, write a book, whatever you want. Just do this for me, please?”

  He held my hand as he said it, the only time he had ever held my hand, and his skin felt like soft paper, his bones beneath brittle and hollow like a bird’s. So of course I said yes.

  It was a week after I watched them lower Dr. Hatrledge’s casket into the ground—black and shiny as the carapace of a beetle—that I found out I was pregnant.

  I never had any desire to be a mother. When friends or relations had children and asked if I wanted to hold the baby, I always demurred with some excuse.

  Before the wedding, Gavin and I had discussed the possibility of kids, and how neither of us was ready, and might never be. I doubt now that I was forceful enough on the subject, because when you’re a woman, it isn’t okay to say that you will never want kids, that you don’t believe you have within yourself the capacity to love a child. And while I was content with being a loner and a rebel and never any good, I wasn’t quite ready to be the abomination such an admission would make me in the eyes of Gavin’s family, and the world.

  When I went to Gavin with the news, I hoped that he would be as horrified by it as I secretly was. That he would say, “It’s your choice, but we have options,” and I would be given the out I needed to go to the clinic. Instead he hugged me tight, laughed. I said, “I know we weren’t planning for this,” trying to ease into the admission, but he replied, “We’re doing great, what’s the harm in trying?”

  And I didn’t say, “Because a child isn’t something that you try. I can’t return it to the store when I find out that I don’t want it.” Instead, I attempted to smile, to let him mistake the tears in my eyes for joy.

  Even then, there might have been hope. I might have worked up the nerve, in time, to say that I wasn’t ready, wouldn’t ever be ready, but then Gavin told his parents without asking me, and it was all over, my choices gone. From that moment I had to have the baby, or become a monster that they could never forgive.

  So began nine months of misery that I pretended was morning sickness and “first baby jitters,” but was actually a crawling terror of the life that was growing inside of me with each passing day. My body changed in ways that disgusted and frightened me, and I found myself doted upon by people who, up to that point, had not ever liked me very much. Gavin’s family organized baby showers, and I dutifully unwrapped brightly colored paper concealing strollers and diapers and bottles and all the other countless accoutrements that babies apparently need. But through it all I knew that it was actually the thing growing in my womb that they were showering with affection, and that I was just the vessel.

  Gavin was everything that a husband is supposed to be. He bought baby things, he got me anything that I wanted to eat, he scheduled Lamaze classes. He did everything except realize how much I didn’t want this.

  The only thing he objected to were the séances, the ones that I still went to at Dr. Hartledge’s house every Saturday night, no matter how much my stomach swelled, or how sick and terrified I felt. “That atmosphere,” he said, on one of the many nights that he tried to “talk sense” into me, “it can’t be good for the baby.”

  And I didn’t spit in his face that I didn’t give a good goddamn what was good for the baby, what about what was good for me? Instead, I reminded him that I had promised Dr. Hartledge, who had been like a father to me, who had given me away at our wedding, and who was not yet a year in the ground, and after all, we were neither of us believers, what harm could it possibly do?

  In Dr. Hartledge’s rolodex were the names of dozens of people who practiced every manner of contact with the dead that you could imagine. Automatic writers, physical mediums who claimed to channel ectoplasm from their bodies, psychics and spiritualists and even engineers who argued that what we thought of as spirits were simply energy, operating on another frequency, and that the right radio receiver could pick them up.

  One by one I called them up, and we had sittings at the old dark house where Dr. Hartledge had lived, in the room containing his books and his magic posters, the room that he had loved the most in life. We set up a round table in the middle of the chamber, pushing aside his desk and an old steamer trunk. There we would sit holding hands, or with our palms flat on the table, or our fingertips resting on the planchette of some talking board.

  Oh, talking boards, we tried so many. A genuine Ouija board, branded by Hasbro that I bought at the local Target. Other variations on the subject, built by their practitioners. Dice with letters printed on the sides, intended to spell out words when they were randomly rolled. Actual Scrabble tiles, with the scores printed on them and everything, pulled from a black satin bag by a young man with horn rim glasses and slicked down black hair, someone I might have dated when I was ten years younger myself. Letters written on a long sheet of paper, with an upside-down glass acting as a planchette.

  Around the table were always the same people, more or less. Myself, Dr. Hartledge’s attorney Mr. Knowles, Teresa Osborne, a grad student from one of the classes that I was TAing, there to act as an impartial observer, and whatever kook or medium or psychic or weirdo we had called up that week.

  Before he died, Dr. Hartledge had given me a code, one that I had never told to anyone, not even Gavin. One he said that only he and I knew. He had asked me to memorize it, but I didn’t have to, because I already knew it by heart. A snippet from a poem, one in that battered T.S. Eliot book that Dr. Hartledge had given me so many years ago. “In my end is my beginning.”

  For nine long months I grew gravid with child, as they would have said in one of the Victorian novels that I had to read in school, and my only solace, the only hours of the day that were truly mine came in those séances in Dr. Hartledge’s old study. And yet, even they were bittersweet, at best, as time and again fakers delivered incorrect messages, or apparent true believers walked away baffled by their inability to give me what I was looking for.

  After a time, I began to long to hear those six words, to see them spelled out by the planchette, the tiles, the glass. I considered slipping one of the mediums a note, but what would that accomplish? The whole enterprise was for no one’s benefit but mine and Dr. Hartledge’s, and both of us would know the truth, if indeed, he was in a position to know anything.

  Nine months, in this case, amounted to forty séances. Forty, I was told, was a mystical number, of great import. That it appeared time and again in the Bible, most famously in the great flood that lasted for forty days and forty nights. We ended the fortieth evening with another crack at a talking board, with no medium or spiritualist or anyone else but the lawyer, Teresa, and me, but all we got were jumbled letters, from which we could make little sense. “Are you there, Roland?” Mr. Knowles asked the dark, silent air as the hands of the clock crept toward midnight. Finally, when they were just one black line, pointing straight up, and the chiming of the clock broke the silence, I pushed the planchette to the word NO.

  “The end is where we start from,” I said myself, before I blew out the candle.

  The next day I went into labor. It would have been more in keeping with my mood had it been a difficult birth, filled with terrible pain and complications, but in fact, Nathanial was born in just a few hours, and the pain and the discomfort and even the embarrassment and grief were not nearly as strong as I had expected. “It was like he was ready to come out,” one of the nurses said, and I guessed I had to agree.

  Throughout it all, I had held on to one desperate hope. I had read so many accounts online, of women who hadn’t thought themselves ready to be mothers, who hadn’t expected to feel any affection for their child, who suddenly had a change of heart, felt a swelling of love and pro
tectiveness when they held the minute creature in their arms. I had been told by so many friends and in-laws that “it’s different when it’s yours.” I had hoped that I would be one of those women, that some alchemical transformation would occur, and that Nathanial’s tiny body in my arms, his fingers wrapping around mine, his mouth at my breast, would be the philosopher’s stone that transmuted the lead of my disdain into the gold of motherhood.

  Chemicals, Dr. Hartledge would have dismissed them as. Dumped into our bloodstream to perpetuate our species, nothing more. But I was fine with that, so long as it took some of the sting from my guilt at not caring at all for this thing that had been growing inside me for most of a year.

  Gavin was there, pushing the sweat-damp hair from my forehead, beaming at me over his beard, so happy, so proud of me. I tried to be happy too, I really did, but when they handed my baby to me, my hopes were dashed. He was red and wet, a few strands of black hair plastered to the top of his squishy-looking head. His features seemed smooshed, his eyes mostly closed, his lips a puckered circle like the suction cup on the bottom of a tentacle. I felt nothing but disgust, and as I took him in my arms I began to cry, and Gavin put his arms around me and the nurses cooed, and I supposed they must have thought it was joy, or relief, or anything at all except despair, bottomless and cold.

  “Postpartum depression,” is what they called the weeks and months that followed. I took a semester off from school, and Gavin was once more solicitous and kind and I could find nothing to complain about, though I was sullen and withdrawn, stared out the windows or read fitfully or simply curled up in the dark and wept. Did anything, really, but look after my baby, when I could avoid it.

  Gavin’s mother came to stay with us in a guest room, and spent hours with Nathanial, much more time than I ever did. I kept hoping that I would grow to feel something for him, that he would ever seem like anything but a squat homunculus. Even a tiny stranger would have been preferable to the inscrutable creature I saw staring out of his beady, dark eyes, the ones that his family said came from his grandfather, for whom he was named.

  A baby is supposed to be a symbol of the love that you feel for each other, isn’t it? Part of someone you love, and part of yourself. Formed by “the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment,” as Nabokov would have it. But when I looked at Nathanial I could see nothing to love. Nothing of Gavin, and nothing of myself, and worse, I felt his presence diminishing my love for Gavin, for myself, for anything at all.

  When my “postpartum depression” stretched on far beyond what anyone considered “normal,” the doctor gave me pills that made me feel numb and distant almost all the time, which I readily accepted, because I found that dull and drifting state preferable to the alternative.

  Even with the pills, though, I could only go so long without seeing my son, and as the days became weeks and the weeks became months and the months stretched on into years, I gradually got to know him, even as he gradually became more and more like a human being. A tiny stranger, shrunken and wizened, living in my house.

  It should have helped that Nathanial was a precociously well-behaved child, the kind that you see in horror movies that never turn out well. As with Gavin, there was nothing that I had to complain about. In almost every instance, Nathanial was quiet, reserved, quick to develop, or so I was told, and generally happy to play by himself. And yet the one time that he did begin to cry, loudly and inconsolably and, to my mind at least, without adequate reason, in a restaurant, I immediately wanted to strike him. I felt the itch in my arm, a physical sensation. Instead, I just got up from the table and walked away, let Gavin and his mother deal with it.

  I wanted them to shout at me, to scold me for leaving. I wanted their anger to push me away, to give me the excuse that I needed to run. But they never even brought it up.

  One of the favorite pastimes at Gavin’s family gatherings became debating which family member Nathanial had inherited which features from. No one there knew what my ancestors looked like, but every now and then they would toss me a bone, saying that he had my cheeks or nose. I couldn’t see it, though. Not the resemblance to me—besides maybe his hair, which was black as a slick of oil—nor to any of the laundry list of relatives that Gavin’s family trotted out. Instead, I began to see something else. Someone else. Dr. Hartledge.

  I told myself that it was wishful thinking, projection. That I missed the man who had been my substitute father, that I was still grieving his death, and so I was personifying his presence in Nathanial. Maybe, I reasoned, it was a way for my brain to try to trick me into loving this small person who had come out of me, who was literally made out of my flesh, and yet to whom I felt no attachment whatsoever.

  Morbidly I imagined, at times, an exchange that was far more literal. That if we were to dig up Dr. Hartledge’s grave, we would find in his coffin a shrunken doll, like a ventriloquist dummy. His physical essence somehow siphoned into my growing son.

  Nathanial was fascinated with magicians from a very young age, but he always wanted to know how the tricks were performed. He was never content with wonder. Gavin said that he took after me, but I wasn’t so sure.

  When Nathanial was only three years old, a gray streak appeared in his hair that would never go away. The doctors said that it was nothing to worry about, that sometimes it happened, but I saw in it the gray hair that Dr. Hartledge had sported throughout the years I knew him, and I remembered the pictures that I had seen in his house, of him and his wife when he was a young man, when his hair had still been black as pitch.

  I became obsessed with the idea of Dr. Hartledge’s corpse slowly shrinking away, his flesh vanishing, his bones reducing, as my son’s grew.

  Was this paranoia? Schizophrenia? I had read about women who drowned their children, poisoned them, locked them in freezers. Were these the kinds of thoughts they had, before committing such an act?

  Perversely, while my delusions made me afraid of my infant son, they also made me more fond of him. They gave me something to connect him with, some way to see him as more than just a tottering golem, a creature. In his dark eyes, so dark they were almost black, I could imagine Dr. Hartledge looking out, and I could remember that glitter in his eyes on my wedding day. It wasn’t the love of a mother for her son, but for a while it was enough, and gradually I stopped taking the pills that the doctor had given me, started paying a little more attention to Nathanial.

  I found that I could bear the touch of his clammy hand without flinching, that I could care for him as a mother should, if not with genuine affection, then at least with tenderness. It was enough to placate everyone around me, to let Gavin feel freed up to treat me like a person again, and not like an invalid. It was enough, I supposed, to make a life.

  Gavin and I started going on dates again. One night a month we’d leave Nathanial with Gavin’s parents and we would go out to dinner and then catch an old classic at the revival theater in town. Laura or Vertigo or Forbidden Planet. Or we would go to a concert at the university. Gavin had been in a jazz band in college, and though he never played anymore, he still liked to go and sit in the dark and listen to the horns.

  One night, when Nathanial was five years old, Gavin and I were playing a game of Scrabble in the living room, with candles and glasses of wine, while Nathanial played with his toys on the floor next to us. When we were done, Gavin went up to shower, and I lay on the couch with my eyes closed until I felt Nathanial tugging on the sleeve of my robe. “Can I play with the tiles, Mommy?” he asked, and I said of course, as long as he stayed where I could watch him.

  He dumped the tiles out of the satin bag onto the hardwood floor, and turned them all over, until the letters were facing up. He pushed aside the two blank tiles, and then began to rearrange the others, his brow furrowed in concentration. He would push a few letters together, as if trying to form a word, and I
smiled, both at his acumen, and at his struggle.

  As he worked, I drifted, my fingertip faintly circling the rim of my wineglass, making it sing. I thought, for some reason, about school, about the way that the light had filtered into Dr. Hartledge’s office through those high, high windows. About the motes of dust caught in the air. A snippet from Four Quartets came into my mind, thinking of those dust motes. “At the still point, there the dance is.”

  I was startled from my reverie when Nathanial proudly announced, “Done!” I leaned out from the couch to look over his shoulder, to see what word—perhaps real, perhaps nonsensical—he had managed to spell out from the Scrabble tiles. Instead I saw a string of tiles, broken up into small groups with one long stretch near the end. Not one word, but six. “In my end is my beginning.”

  Nathanial beamed up at me from his message, his eyes looking nothing like his grandfather’s, and my wineglass fell from my hand.

  for Dr. Hatcher,

  sorry I kind of made you the monster in this one.

  Author’s Notes: Written for Ross Lockhart’s Tales from a Talking Board, this is emphatically not the “talking board” story that I would have expected myself to write, but it’s the one that came out when I sat down at the keyboard.

  I dedicated this story to Dr. Hatcher, who was one of my philosophy professors and really was my faculty advisor in college. A lot of the elements of Dr. Hartledge are lifted directly from my real memories of Dr. Hatcher and his office, but the real Dr. Hatcher was into fly fishing, not stage magicians or ghost debunking. I’m sure that he would have happily debunked a ghost or two if the opportunity had presented itself, however.

  Dark and Deep

  The place was right where Sophie had said it would be: the middle of the desert, in a low-slung yellow building under a sign that asked, demanded, “What is IT?” in eight-foot letters that dripped black paint. All around in every direction the ground was baked hard and crumbly, like a cake left too long in the oven. The closest thing to water was the heat haze that hung everywhere in the air, and the sweat that gathered at her temples, her armpits, and between her breasts.