DOWN HERE, A LABYRINTH
It was easy to blame Carl for our end: his attentions turned to other women. He left me after I became boring and stifling. Hardly any time had passed since the night we wished we could stitch our rib cages together; toward the end, we tried to figure out our “love languages” from an online quiz so we could reconnect, but the results were inconclusive because our only shared love language was dread.
I forgot, though. About Henry. One week after I met Carl, I saw Henry for the first time in five years. I didn’t know I was afraid of him until I saw the way my fear made him smirk. He had been inside me the entire time, and he might not ever leave. Of all the things that have happened to me, he might have been the worst: the chronic exposure, the slow death. Maybe my body will never expel Henry: his dirty fingers left their spirits sealed over my mouth. I adopted Henry’s methods of hating me, learned to pop my own pimples before he could. When I look at the ice-pick scars on my cheeks, I wonder, Did he make that one? Did I? Was scarring my body our shared love language?
Hell is not the underworld or the land of the dead. Hell is not where you go when you die. Hell is a place you get to while living. You get there through men. I kept looking for a husband, but nearly every body was a door to hell. I’m drowning in a lake of fire, barely keeping my mouth above magma.
DOWN HERE, THERE IS A WAY OUT, BUT DO YOU REMEMBER IT?
In his essay on mental telegraphy, Mark Twain wrote:
Now one of their commonest inquiries of a dreamer or a vision-seer is, “Are you sure you were awake at the time?” If the man can’t say he is sure he was awake, a doubt falls upon his tale right there. But if he is positive he was awake, and offers reasonable evidence to substantiate it, the fact counts largely for the credibility of his story … Now how are you to tell when you are awake? What are you to go by? People bite their fingers to find out. Why, you can do that in a dream.
I have known my whole life that magic is real. If the otherworlds of heaven and hell and the TV portal exist, there must be others, too, and I should be able to get to them. Dressed in a baggy black dress, knee socks, and pointed black ankle boots, I drip oils onto dried leaves in a black cast-iron pot sitting on my altar among crystals and a laser-printed copy of the hallway photo of my great-grandmothers. The moon is full and I am going to start a fire. Carl is avoiding me and seems to wish I would not talk to him. I cry so hard the capillaries around my eyes burst into red pinpricks. My mom texts, Supermoon tonight.
DOWN HERE, NOT A DOOR BUT A CANOE
Say I went down to the land of the dead to find my great-grandmothers and ask them how to live. In the land of the dead, place of opposites, I would find their stories reversed. The husbands wouldn’t die young. Maybe there wouldn’t be husbands at all. After a month in the little house, I was told in a dream, Your house is the key, but I saw no speaker and no house. No husband, either. When Carl and I met in a coffee shop to catch up four months after the breakup, I knew he had died. He sat across the table gray-faced as a cadaver, hair whitening, hands clutching a coffee mug as though it was his heart he was trying to warm. The light had left him and the springs that supplied his veins had dried. I asked him what was wrong, but he didn’t know. I thought there might not be a spirit in that body at all.
I didn’t know I had sacrificed him. I thought he was the one who had chosen to go. While I had been in the underworld that summer when Venus was invisible, he’d sat on a throne, entertained by girls, and I couldn’t get out without sacrificing him so I could ascend to heaven.
DOOR TO HEAVEN
I love the little house, but I know it’s nearing time to leave. Anyway, I don’t think it wants me to stay.
In the first house my realtor shows me, a sign on a bedroom closet door reads, 3rd floor through here. Behind the door, we see shirts hanging on a rod, but behind them, there’s a secret door. The thought thrills me until I see it leads to a dark, dusty murder attic. We don’t ascend.
Days later, we see another attic. This one is finished, bright, and clean. I look out the window onto the city and cry. So many stairs above the dead-bolted door to the street, at the top of a castle, I feel safe. I must be in heaven. I tell the realtor, “This feels like a book I read.” I will sacrifice anything, anyone, to stay here and feel this safe forever. But I already did: my husband’s cadaver is in my soul’s basement. I put it there; I could only ascend to freedom alone.
I make an offer. I sign a contract. My hired home inspector finds the furnace exhaust duct broken. “This whole place is probably full of carbon monoxide,” he tells me. I go outside and nearly faint. Two emergency rooms won’t take me in, even though I tell them my brain is dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. I lie on the couch in the little house, taking deep, rhythmic breaths to calm myself while I die. Of course, I live, because I am not poisoned: I’m panicked, unable to cope with the thought that a house, like a man, could be dangerous in invisible ways.
Four days before my first date with Carl, I moved into an apartment building constructed at the shift from the 1920s building boom to the 1930s depressive halt. I brought him through the foyer I remember as vintage-opulent (though thinking harder reminds me it was just aged) and showed him the elevator. I called it, opened the cage, stepped inside with him, and let the metal snap shut.
Except when he went away that summer and, in some sense, never came back, we spent nearly half the nights of that partial spring and partial summer in that building. There exists an elevator in which we are always caged, kissing for the first time. There is a room with cracks near the ceiling where we have always been infatuated and hopeful.
Every morning, I woke up first and memorized him. Part of me knew he would be leaving soon. When Venus disappeared into the underworld right after we met, I was naked, dead on a hook, even though I thought I was living. Death, really, is transformation, the work I was put here to do. When Venus arrived at the first gate the day he broke up with me, she was ready to go back and collect the things she set aside. Before I could return to heaven, I had to make one more sacrifice. Before I passed through the first gate, I had to lose Carl.
Now I am in the underworld. I have to sacrifice another husband. I don’t have one. But as I write the word husband, he texts me for the first time in ages, asking whether I’m coming home soon.
In The Adventures of Mark Twain, Satan’s voice was created through the combined speech of a woman and a man.
I’m standing in front of two doors. A guardian stands in front of each. One guardian always tells the truth. The other always lies. I don’t know which is which. I can ask only a single question.
What is the question?
As I write, I remember. I forgot about my golden birthday: four months after Henry and I began dating, I turned twenty-five on the twenty-fifth. He crocheted me a wool hat I loved so much I’d wear it even in the heat. He bought me a decadent chocolate cake and drove me in a large loop around Washington and Oregon to places I wanted to go: the Twin Peaks diner, a cabin near a lake, a historic hotel on the Columbia River, and a hundred-year-old Portland saloon-hotel where my recent ancestors may well have drunk. We did fight; I don’t know why. I only remember I was drunk and he was mad I didn’t eat the whole cake. I don’t want him to have been kind, ever. I don’t want to remember feeling loved. I remember the hat, folded on the passenger seat when he picked me up, and the feeling in my gut like a swim bladder buoying me, and that’s when, for the next year, I black out.
The question I always ask is, Is it real? My memories, their love, mine, the selves they show me. But that’s not the question that solves the riddle about the doors to heaven and hell. The answer is this: What would the other person say?
I’m coming home for work a week after Carl writes. One black morning, I leave the little house and its slushy alley; a few hours and two airplanes later, I’m across from him in a diner. There, then here, so real.
But he’s distracted. We cut our food into small pieces. I’ve found five
different ways to ask him how things are going.
“I feel like you’re on the other side of a shut door,” I say.
“Am I?” he says. “Maybe I am.”
It’s his turn to ask me a question, but he doesn’t, so we stare at our plates in silence. I decide I have something to tell him: “From the moment I first met you, I’ve wanted to live inside your skull.” I watch the door fling open: a full-face smile escapes before he can shut it in. I always tell the truth, so I don’t say I love you. When I thought I did, I was probably just having a feeling, and without alcohol or my psychotropic blunting fuzz, all feelings came in hot. I know I am drawn to him, curious about the great riddle and what he means to it, which might be a version of love, but it’s not the one I’m dead set on finding.
In the evening, his band plays a show. We stand and listen to the other bands. While he and his probably-pleasant girlfriend—how would I know, she and I don’t speak to each other—stand ten feet from me, talking inaudibly and mask-smiling, I feel a man watching me from across the room. When I glance over, I swear I see Henry, short and oxen in a Gore-Tex jacket and fat skate shoes, so I remain very still until I can study him enough to know it’s just some leering stranger. From the other direction, I feel the whites of Carl’s eyes, and we look at each other. He leans toward me and asks if I saw someone I know. I ask him if he saw me recognize a guy. “No,” he says, “but I heard you thinking.”
When he tells me he and his girlfriend are going to move away from the open door that’s letting in the cold, a look passes between us. His girlfriend swerves and ducks to avoid walking into it. I’m working something out, he tells me without words, and without words I say, I don’t like it, but I understand it. I move closer, too, but only after he’s onstage. I watch his fingers jogging up and down the neck of his guitar, his boot tapping pedals, and I keep feeling his eyes flash at me, but we can’t look at each other. Not with me down here, him up there, and between us, a long hallway between his locked heart and my fistful of broken keys. Not when he’s descended, and in this black-walled, cave-like corner, I can’t see him. Suddenly, it’s my door that’s shut, because I want him more than he wants to be free, so I must be contained. I tell him I’m leaving. He doesn’t object.
I’m not standing in front of any doors. There are no guardians to question. What would the other person say? I’m tired of wondering. I want to find a way to heaven, but I’m not in a corridor at all: I’m outside in the city I left, a place so bright the moon’s shine is useless.
3. And how does this make you feel?
a. Indifferent? Curious? Skip the rest of this footnote.
b. Uneasy? Are you wondering what I’m trying to do here? Do you think I made an error? Did you flip back to the previous epigraphs? Do you worry you’re missing my meaning? Do you like my epigraphs? Have you ever been to church? Have you ever cast a spell? How do you feel about being asked a question? A rhetorical question? A hypothetical question? An intrusive question? Have you ever played devil’s advocate? If you don’t like my epigraphs, let me play devil’s advocate: What if you don’t actually know what an epigraph is for? Or, at least, not here, where I am the center.
ROCKS, CAVES, LAKES, FENS, BOGS, DENS, AND SHADES OF DEATH
All my life,
since I was ten,
I’ve been waiting
to be in
this hell here
with you;
all I’ve ever
wanted, and
still do.
—Alice Notley
If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.
I swear I would never leave him.
—Louise Erdrich, “The Strange People”4
ROCKS
I was told that I grew up at the foot of a mountain, but Jenny Jump is just a hill. It hardly has a summit. That tree-topped bent knee rising over the lake passes for a peak in Jersey.
People say Jenny lived there a long time ago, in a small white house under a cliff with her father. She was nine, picking berries or playing atop the cliff, the day a savage Indian, or a bunch of them, supposedly came to ravage her. She called to her father, but he was far below. The Indians were coming for her. Her father cried, “Jump, Jenny, Jump!”; so Jenny jumped from the high, rocky cliff to her death.
One online account of the Jenny Jump story says her father intended to catch her. As a child, I assumed he wanted her to die rather than be kidnapped by Indians: the story could be a tidy example of the cinema trope of the fate worse than death, a phrase that once referred exclusively to rape, especially one that took a girl’s virginity. Catholic school prepared me to spot these narrative tropes: I memorized dozens of virgin martyrs’ stories, sickening accounts of girls and women whose commitment to purity for Christ never faltered, even as pagan men tortured and killed them. Agatha’s breasts were amputated. Agnes’s body sprouted an impenetrable hair coat to block rape, and a burning at the stake failed before a soldier beheaded her. Lucy, after an eye-gouging, wouldn’t burn, either, so her head, too, was severed. Maria Goretti was stabbed fourteen times after refusing a man’s advances. Cecilia bled out for days after an executioner failed to cut off her head. Dymphna was beheaded. Juliana was beheaded. Justina was beheaded. Catherine of Alexandria was strapped to a spiked wheel, which broke, so she was beheaded. Apollonia’s teeth were shattered and then she was burned at the stake. Ursula was beheaded.
Jenny jumped.
Near the end of the 1992 film adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, violins throb while the petite white Alice shuffles to a cliff’s edge, never taking her eyes off Magua, the Huron villain who just ate a man’s heart. Alice’s blonde hair covers her cheeks but doesn’t obscure her dying eyes. She looks left. We see the cliff’s impossible face. She looks back at Magua for nine whole movie seconds. He lowers his knife, but not much, and flicks his fingers to beckon. The shot moves back to Alice’s face, and her head turns, and we see Magua’s hand wait as she shifts her body forward and steps off the cliff. Shot from below in slow motion, she falls, all skirts. Magua walks away.
The TV Tropes website has a listing for “No Escape but Down,” but this down is not an escape. It is a decisive end. And trope is inadequate. Even plot device is not enough. Before I knew how to write my own name, I knew that women jump off cliffs to die. I’ve known Jenny’s story longer than I’ve known what story means—longer than I’ve known the difference between history and figment.
What’s currently called New Jersey was first inhabited by people around thirteen thousand years ago, after the Wisconsin Glacier melted. People moved as animals moved. About a thousand years ago, the Lenape people began making permanent villages, growing crops, trapping animals, and fishing the rivers.
Lenapehoking came to be New Jersey through forced sale and threats. In 1524, Giovanni da Verrazzano, working for the King of France, arrived uninvited on the shore. During the 1600s, Europeans brought their war and wants to this world they called new. I’d like to explain what happened, but it bores and confuses me. Exploration, patroonship, charter, survey, mapped, municipality, transatlantic trade, laws of inheritance, loyalty to the crown, quitrents, proprietors, common law, Articles of Confederation, Great Compromise: these words are a new world, rich with subtext. I don’t know how to understand Wikipedia saying, “The Swedish and Finnish colonists generally lived in peace with their Dutch and Lenape neighbors.” In fourth-grade New Jersey History class, my first schooling about Indians who were not murderers, would-be child rapists, or ghosts, I learned about the Lenni-Lenape, the first nation the United States signed a treaty with after declaring independence. Lenape place-names describe the land and what happened there before settlers tore into it. Aquashicola: the place where we fish with bush nets. Mahoning: at the mineral lick. Lopatcong: winter watering place for deer. Hokendauqua: searching for land. Settlers made new names: Liberty, Hope, Harmony, Independence. I imagine the naming was a kind of white magic, an incantation against the wickedness they believed w
as striated into the bedrock.
I lived in a county called Warren, as in a system of underground rabbit tunnels; I’m from Mountain Lake, the name of both a lake and the unincorporated community surrounding it. The lake is one of many glacial pits left on worn ridges wearing the plush mantle of deciduous forest. An hour northeast, the Franklin Mineral Museum, at the site of a famous defunct zinc mine, holds a massive collection of minerals, many found nowhere else on earth. Some are fluorescent, absorbing and emitting light.
This magnetic land of glowing rocks holds more ghosts than average. New Jersey’s identity story is, in part, a volume of tales of deaths, hauntings, and malingering Indian spirits. Most of the stories are unremarkable: someone sees a little girl but there is no little girl; someone hears a fife but nobody’s played a fife in town for hundreds of years.
In Haunted New Jersey: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Garden State, Patricia A. Martinelli and Charles A. Stansfield Jr. write that in the hilly Highlands region of north Jersey, early white surveyors blamed witches and bad spirits for the spinning compasses, unaware that the land was packed with magnetic iron ore. The authors wonder, “Do ghostly apparitions cause magnetic fields that can affect electricity? Or are ghosts somehow a result of magnetic fields? Or perhaps both?” They write that psychologists consider ghosts manifestations of emotional unrest and unexpressed fear, while ghost experts claim hauntings represent the trauma of a person who died tragically and experiences those final moments in a loop, unaware they’re dead.
Revolutionary War stories dominate the New Jersey ghost storybooks I have on hand. I am short on sympathy for unsettled undead whites who fail to find relaxation in an afterlife following their tussle over nationhood in a land already filled with nations. Ghosts are tethered to land, unable to detach and drift to the beyond. Over the last five hundred years, shiny things have repeatedly enraptured settlers: gold, anthracite, petroleum, uranium. Settlers once so feared the forest that they’d barely venture beyond their landing spots, but they came to need so much land for villages, fields, and herds that everyone foolish enough to have been living there for thousands of years would have to move or die.
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