Alice Unbound

by Colleen Anderson

  Hugh leans forward. “That might keep me awake.”

  “Maybe we should try the oysters. I mean, what could go wrong?”

  “I’d rather hear what’s going on with you and Richard.” There’s a wild glint in his eye; anticipating insider information.

  The Duchess looks for Richard’s reaction, but he’s gone. And someone else has joined them. Alice. Of course. She sits across from them. Quietly. Politely.

  “Nothing’s going on. Richard and I are old news.”

  Hugh pats her hand with rounded fingers. “Then what’s keeping you apart?”

  Another glass of Champagne finds its way to her. She says, “The same thing that’s kept a thousand other couples apart. Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Girl gets pregnant, delivers early, the baby dies.” Hugh’s attention wanes, but what can she do? The juicy bits are something she can’t tell. Something only she and Richard know. “We drifted away until there was too much distance to cross.”

  Hugh rubs tired eyes. “How sad.”

  Alice says, “I don’t think you’ve said it right, I’m afraid. Not quite right at all.”

  It’s hours later when Richard escorts the last guest out. He finds her in the mirrored lounge off the lobby waiting in a faux-leather chair. He sits on the other side of the small table.

  “We need to talk,” the Duchess says.

  “What’s wrong?” He reaches for her hand, but she pulls away.

  “I need to know. How much have you told about the reason we split?”

  “I—” He rubs his ring finger; a guilty habit. “I needed to talk to someone.”

  Cold panic floods her. “You know what trouble this could bring me,” she says.

  Alice’s face floats above Richard’s shoulder, smirking. There’s a tickle at the back of the Duchess’ throat. A dry cough.

  “I was very careful. You know I’ll always protect you.”

  Her heart beats too fast. She looks around, but no one is watching. Except that disembodied girl.

  “I needed to let go of some guilt,” Richard says. “Doesn’t it crush you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I didn’t share, you know, everything.”

  “How could you do this to me?”

  “Because not everything is about you!”

  A sob slips up her throat that she forces down.

  “Look. I didn’t mean to get cross with you.”

  “There’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

  Dark circles sag beneath Richard’s eyes. He covers a yawn. “What?”

  “Do you remember that night after the gala? The one when we did all those shrooms?”

  “To be honest, not really.”

  “In the room with the brass door. And there were all those insects.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “The shrooms! The bugs! Remember?”

  “Shhh. So, I don’t remember a party. Why are you so upset?”

  “Because I think that’s the night I conceived!”

  Richard is quiet for a long time, then says, “It doesn’t make any difference.”

  The sob expands into her mouth until it’s all she can do to keep it inside. She can’t swallow.

  “Why don’t you go home? You don’t look well.”

  “Good idea,” she manages.

  “I’ll send someone over to check on you, soon. Okay?” As he rises, his fingertips brush hers.

  “What do you mean, someone?” she croaks, but already he’s walking away.

  Alice’s face fades until only her wicked smile’s reflected in the warped mirror that sucks the Duchess in.

  On the night that changes everything, their life couldn’t be any better. The public adores her designs. And they praise her good works, her charity. Every event she and Richard host is a huge success. She doesn’t remember much about the party, except they end up in their hotel room, the one with the brass door. They get very high on shrooms. They’re enthralled with each other, caught up in the rapture of each other’s body. She kisses his hair, his skin. He presses his mouth against hers and hoists her up against the balcony door. Sweat suctions her to the glass. She shifts to let him slide inside of her, feels him writhe and twist. She wonders what it’s like for him to be cocooned in her wet warmth. At some point he shudders, and then she shudders, and then she feels them on her skin. She feels them under her skin. She says, “Something is wriggling. Oh God, they’re really squirming. My skin is rippling. They’re everywhere. Get them off.” So, Richard brushes her. “No, really get them off! I want you to get them off. Please, get them off!” Suddenly she and Richard are staring at each other. And the Duchess is crying, asking him to do something he can’t, because he can’t see the bugs. And she starts scratching. It’s a horrible trip. Everything had been going so beautifully. She scratches until her skin is raw, but the bugs keep crawling. Richard opens a window. Gets some water. Nothing helps. She claws at her skin. Blood runs down her arms. He grabs her hands, holds them at her sides, but he can’t contain her very long. Finally, he gives her sleeping pills. When they wake up, they don’t talk about any of it. Looking back on it now, the Duchess is sure she felt something wriggling inside of her, too. Ugly and wrinkled.

  “Too much pepper in the soup?” Jean-Archer shouts. “Not this rant again!”

  “I’m still pissed!” The Duchess started the fight as soon as she got home. Anger is good. If she’s raging, busy throwing things, smashing pepper shakers and teacups, she can’t think about Richard’s betrayal; how he told some young blonde their secret.

  “It’s not my fault you’re too self-absorbed to read a menu. It’s my best dish! I told you I was making it.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “Tabernac! You don’t hear anything that makes the slightest bit of difficulty for you.”

  “I don’t hear anything? You’re the selfish bastard that poisoned me at my gala, you idiotic, filthy, no good…” the Duchess keeps yelling at him until he stops yelling back.

  He turns and walks out the front door. She sends a Wedgwood dinner plate flying after him. As he steps off the porch, the spinning china misses him, but…it grazes Alice’s hair as she walks up the stone pathway. With a great crash, the plate shatters against one of the trees behind her. As she slips inside, the girl seems unconcerned about soaring crockery.

  “I hope you don’t mind my coming in without asking,” the girl says. “Oh my. There’s so much pepper in the air, I think I might—” The girl sneezes.

  “Why are you here at all?” The Duchess doesn’t feel bad about her rudeness. At home, she can say whatever she wants and it doesn’t matter. The public will always love her. “Richard sent you to check on me, didn’t he? I wish you hadn’t bothered. If everybody minded their own business the world would go around a good deal faster.”

  “Which is not to your advantage,” Alice says. “Just think how much quicker you’d age.”

  Oh, but the girl has a knowing smile. The Duchess narrows her eyes. “Since he’s already told you, I suppose my business is your business now, isn’t it?”

  The Duchess walks slowly, deliberately, to the last room at the end of the hallway. From her pocket she withdraws a small golden key and unlocks the door. She thinks the girl hasn’t followed, but then hears soft footsteps on the hardwood, hardly there at all.

  In the center of the room, a dim light glows inside a fluid-filled tank where a pink form floats, long catheters supplying it with blood. Cramped and huddled, the figure fills the whole space, the container forcing it to tuck into a ball.

  “Well, there it is,” the Duchess says. “The big secret. Jonas Industries is the science behind why I look so young.” The next words catch in her throat, but she forces them out. “I had them put my cells into a pig fetus and sustained it in that artificial womb. An unending supply of stem cells ready for injection.”

  “How curious,” Alice says. “Do you ever wonder what you’re
doing? Or whether you should?”

  “I’m always a top five philanthropist, you know. It’s hard to sell fashion and throw charity galas with the face of a shrivelled fig. The greatest public good is produced by the greatest private selfishness. I only wish this happened long before I turned thirty. Then I could have kept your nineteen-year-old face forever.”

  Alice steps up to the artificial womb and peers inside. Then she turns and looks at the Duchess and the Duchess looks at Alice. The girl reaches into the tank and scoops the huddled form into her arms.

  “Why,” Alice says, “it’s not a pig at all.” She holds up the wet pink thing, the artificial womb’s glow casting warped shadows upon it. Alice, eyes wide, whispers, “It’s a baby.” The Duchess puts a hand to the glass, hoping it will steady her. She’s tugged inward by the force.

  Pain. Childbirth is prolonged pain that’s supposed to end. Not for the Duchess. When she made the final push, and the baby wriggled free, the pain grew. Its body was segmented rolls of skin; its head a truncated cone with sightless eyes. She thought she was prepared for the birth, knew what was coming. But, as she looked at the scrunched-up face of her…her newborn son, nothing could fix this. An expert from Jonas Industries took the quiet baby and put him in the artificial womb. Through the glass, the infant looked like a deflated balloon, a caterpillar, a pig, a fig; its proportions kept distorting.

  It’s early morning when Jean-Archer returns. He finds the Duchess outside, lying in the rose garden. She’s covered in dirt, her hands blistered from all her digging with the garden spade. He calls to her. No response. She stares deep into the woods behind the house. He calls an ambulance, then notices a room at the end of the hall with the door wide open. It’s always been locked before.

  By the time the paramedics arrive, Richard is there, too. Jean-Archer reports nothing but a disoriented Duchess and an empty tank. Richard explains the delicate situation, relies on the paramedics’ ethics not to disclose how their son was born missing parts of the brain needed for self-awareness. That the tank was a remnant, something the Duchess couldn’t let go. But rumours have a way of starting. They begin with how the Duchess rambled over and over to the paramedics, about the first time she saw the baby. That after, she couldn’t look at Richard the same way again, couldn’t look at them the same, couldn’t accept she’d birthed something so hideous: that the designer who made her created something so revolting and used the same fabric. She’d at least found a way to put something so awful to good use, hadn’t she? Wasn’t her work worth a few occasional stem cells from a creature that didn’t know the difference between life and death? Repurposing a failed design. Using remnants to revive an already beautiful piece, keeping ephemeral, timeless. But the recounting of her words is dismissed as tabloid gossip. The Jonas Institute declines to comment. No solid evidence is ever dug up.

  “Why did you tell her?” the Duchess asks Richard much later.

  “Who?” Richard says.

  “The girl. Alice.”

  Richard says he has no idea who that is.

  “The blonde with you at the Jonas Institute gala.”

  “There was no one with me. I went alone.”

  “Alice! The blonde. Looks like a younger me, like every blonde you’ve dated since our divorce.”

  “I haven’t dated anyone since our divorce.” His voice is so quiet.

  “The blonde, the blonde,” she says until her voice goes quiet, too. “The one you told about the baby. The one you sent to check on me.”

  He insists he sent no one. And the person he told about their split was his therapist, bound by confidentiality, that he hadn’t revealed anything damaging. He suggests that, perhaps, the Duchess should see his therapist, too. But, he doesn’t push it. He can’t force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do. He never could act against her wishes. Not in that vulnerable moment long ago when she asked him something on the promise he wouldn’t tell.

  Now, she asks for sleeping pills. He gets them.

  As the years go by, the Duchess continues her charity support, but leaves the house less and less. Without stem cell injections, the wrinkles start; tiny fissures that later crack wide open. She can’t bear to show an aging face to the public. They wouldn’t look at her the same. When she dies, she hopes they print the Paris photograph, not the one with her face contorted from heaving and rage. The one that shows her in the right light.

  TWIN

  Danica Lorer

  There was only ever one

  suffering from vanishing twin syndrome.

  The dum, dum, dum

  an extra heartbeat remembered, one heatbeat

  a heartbleat

  weakly throbbing in the womb

  that only had space

  for one.

  Mother named him

  held him

  kissed him

  once on each cheek

  once on the nose

  never suspected

  more than one

  perfect son.

  The dee, dee, dee

  a first child song

  mimicking the little black-capped chirpers.

  Flitting alone

  only wanting to share

  sunsets and musings

  scraped elbows

  and stories of the sea.

  He asked his mother

  where his brother was

  the one like himself

  begged her for another.

  “There will only ever be one.”

  She sighed

  hands folded

  over an empty belly.

  Hide-and-seek

  was only ever hide

  no one to seek

  when he found the place

  dark and musty

  under the porch

  where the caterpillar spun

  around and around.

  No one to find

  no matter

  how hard he looked.

  Alone, lonely

  wishing for the (br)other

  he remembered

  from the time before

  his time walking

  breathing outside air

  tasting wild strawberries.

  He left his mother

  in a flooding puddle of her own sea-salt tears

  an ocean amniotic.

  Kissed her twice on each cheek

  packed double what he needed.

  He could set the extra clothing on the ground

  use it as a mirror.

  In a stranger land

  he found his own way.

  He spoke in riddle rhymes

  one voice while standing on his two flat feet

  one voice rose while he balanced on his head.

  It was a trick of the golden light

  bouncing between the trees

  casting shadows

  over the water.

  He believed

  everyone believed

  there were two.

  Dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-Dum.

  A whisper

  to his inner ear.

  The walking, breathing one was losing

  the memory of his own words

  and poetry.

  Tried to hum, to recite

  to remember the lyrics

  his mother mouthed at his cribside.

  The one absorbed by

  early loss

  once unviable was gaining

  a power

  to manipulate the eyes

  see clearer

  lift a leg

  without yet owning a body.

  Facial features melted away

  caught something alien beneath

  a way of holding the corners of the mouth

  a tic

  a twirl

  dancing so fast

  one could never tell

  if it was one, or two

  or four, or sixteen.

  Who would lead?

  Who would follow?

  Who was growing strong?

&nbs
p; When there was no one else in the forest

  would anyone hear the single twin fall?

  Clapping one hand?

  Dee, dee, dee

  he felt his own

  feet slipping

  out from under

  held on to walls to hold his ground.

  His chest cavity

  too full

  to catch his breath

  he held it

  turning blue.

  His own voice

  raised

  a pitch

  pitched forward

  until he felt

  almost

  consumed

  by something

  he no longer

  longed to see

  or hear.

  Something scratching in his

  throat.

  His ears

  a drumskin

  vibrating

  too loud.

  He tried to silence

  the growl

  the murmur

  the buzz of something budding

  stretching, clawing

  underneath the muscles.

  He tried to give up looking

  for the other

  dropped the desire

  to be doubled.

  Changed his signature.

  Tweedle Dee.

  He approached

  an expert,

  a magician of the mind

  who measured success in inches

  a mad man

  whose obsession

  lied and truthed

  on the size of a brain case.

  The physician’s

  sleight of hand

  shone a light down his throat

  stuck a tube in his ear

  yelled

  to see, to hear

  if anyone lurked

  inside.

  Medication to soothe

  the cake to grow bigger

  the drops to grow small.

  The illusion was easier with smoke

  and a broken mirror

  shards like butter knives

  left even more reflections

  more faces

  more facets.

  Knives to cut into skin

  surgery to separate.

  One trying to cut a part, apart, a part

  to carve out a place to fit the other.

  He’d spent his life

  searching for the other face

  seeing sneers and grins

  eyes, and jawlines

  in tree bark, clouds,

  and the patterns on the floor.

  He pulled at his ears