Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  “I exaggerate. But you know that.” He turned to leave. “You’re okay, so that’s good. You look like shit, but you’re okay. Now I know. I can go eat my breakfast.”

  Seth gave a small wave as the old man walked down the hallway.

  Ira didn’t turn, but gestured behind him. “And take care of that hand.”

  Seth closed the door. He surveyed the apartment, which told him nothing. Nothing was out of place, off kilter, or new, apart from the smashed window, which he decided he would have to cover with some cardboard and duct tape. He checked his phone again. Nothing.

  He picked up one of the empty wine bottles and examined it as if it were foreign to him. He was normally a bourbon drinker when he was trying to sustain a particular dullness, though his work as a bartender often put him in a position of drinking across a spectrum. Wine tended to make him hurt more, and he couldn’t think what made him choose this one, an Argentinian Syrah, except that it was the sort of thing he would drink with someone else. He rarely lost consciousness, which made him wonder if he had taken something else. There was an inch of wine still in the bottle, so he drank it.

  Sabine

  The snow had stopped. Sabine walked back to Seth’s apartment building and climbed the grey staircase with its humble black railing that she always liked because it was oily looking. She unlocked his door and went inside feeling not much of anything, until she saw the living room arrangement again, without her brother in it, and sighed. After taking off her coat and boots, she pushed up the heavy sleeves of her sweater and decided to begin the cleaning that she felt would enable her to leave. There was a rhythm and a way to it, Ellena had said to her, that was transcendent and would bring new energy. Perhaps this was why she had resisted. The inertia of the space in which Seth had stood was magnetic and self-perpetuating when she was inside it, so much so that it seemed like an unpleasant bender, one that she should simply wait out. Perhaps, Ellena had said, a good cleaning would break the spell. Sabine had felt rebuked in some way, and also misunderstood, as if some spray and washcloths could eradicate the state she was in, the state Seth was in, and the apartment, and for all she knew, the whole world.

  She would begin in the kitchen, with its crusts and grease and flashing roaches. She identified part of her resistance here, not so much because of the insects, but because of the general conditions. The cupboards were old, and two of the doors swung too loosely on their hinges, which threatened to come right out. Additionally, a bit of grout was missing on the tile backsplash that ran along the counter, and some of the grime in the corners and around the feet of the small oven had an ancient quality. She didn’t know how to clean what was already disintegrating and would crumble apart the moment she added some water. This possibility, she felt, infused the entire place. Yet the mottled, granular aspects of the apartment were contrasted with the outdoor gear that he had carefully organized in the living room and closets. It was not the cockroaches that would survive a nuclear holocaust but the plastic gear that shone with its hard, indelible brightness and self-conscious efficiency. Perhaps, she thought, she would begin in the bedroom.

  She began with stripping the sheets from the bed; Seth had a compact washer-dryer stacked up in his bathroom, so she could clean the linens before leaving. As she worked, she became aware of the idea of Seth, the phantom shape, that slept in the bed, rose to have a drink, got back in bed. During sleep he was in that other existence, the one she felt was unreachable from here, and this seemed to pair well with the place he had come to reside. Molly, too, had been in this exact location countless times, over the course of years. Sabine felt a ripple of jealousy, and, bundling the sheets in her arms, tossed them into a corner. The gesture seemed to help.

  His bedroom had two small closets, one with clothes and gear, the other with towels, sheets, and blankets, and a few boxes. She went to the second closet to pull out fresh bedding and stood, once again, peering into her brother’s belongings. Objects gained power and didn’t seem to know their place. Everything was haunted. The sheets and blankets were stacked up on shelves with surprising neatness. But neatness was one thing, disorder another. Tidiness struck her as the more problematic tone—he had been trying to keep himself together maybe, and had folded into the tight creases of the sheets, which were nearly perfect rectangles of similar dimensions—almost as if he had measured—whatever problem he had been grappling with.

  To one side of the closet, she saw the shelf of his journals. When she had first discovered them, she assumed that he had separated them out from his other books because they contained deeply personal material. But she had pored through them, especially the last entries, and found nothing; they were merely logs of his climbs and runs, whatever workouts he had been doing, what he had been eating, how much protein, what the climate had been and its effects. Page after page of numbers and measures, to a degree she found stultifying to look at. No tally of his drinking, she had noted. A few mentions of injury, including tendonitis in one wrist and some joint pain in his left index finger, and another later mention of IT band syndrome; otherwise a mostly steady progression of workouts with only minor interruptions.

  She reached for the most recent log and held it in her hands. She turned to the last page and flipped backward from there, landing somewhere in the middle at an entry about three months old. He had run a ten-mile circuit that included Central Park, on October 15 at 2:00 p.m. when the temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity 93 percent, with an east wind. He wrote the times for each mile, noting that the whole run had been a personal record. He listed the shoes he had run in, the clothing, and that he had overdressed, anticipating a cooler day. Then there, on the last line of the entry, written in the same, unvarying hand:

  Despair.

  She stared at the entry. Then she flipped through the pages, repeatedly, trying to find something similar. She eventually brought the journal to the living room, where she poured herself a drink, lit a cigarette, and sat down on the sofa so she could carefully go from page to page. It was true that despair emanated, though she couldn’t locate whether it was contained within her or the mind-numbing array of details in the log. After a half hour of searching, she closed the journal and sat back on the sofa. As ever, she had turned up nothing. She realized that whatever he had meant by despair, it was nothing new; underneath his broad smiles and relaxed demeanor—the very things that had made him a magnetic and sought-after bartender—was a darker creature, subterranean and blind. Even if he fooled others, and sometimes her, she had to concede that it had been there all along.

  She got up and brought the journal into the bedroom, then put it in her suitcase. After making the bed with new sheets, and doing a half-hearted job of tidying the apartment, she saw that it was almost midnight. She folded her clothes more carefully than usual and laid them on top of the journal. She decided to sleep on the sofa, wrapped up in her coat, with the plan to get the first train back to her car in the morning. In three weeks she knew she would return to repeat the process, pay more bills, move around a few of his objects. Perhaps she would try to see Molly again, as she had something to say, possibly about the children. What that was exactly she didn’t yet know, but in the meantime she would imagine herself curled around Ellena and the dogs in her own bed and wait to understand.

  Molly

  We have all the time in the world, as they say. Rushing is only for the other people, the ones who don’t know. Stop and look, see how beautiful. The buildings are moving, though you can’t see it. If you can’t see the river, then feel it. We’ve neglected the dead, who pile up in a way that we misunderstand and think lacks charm, lacks ease. We say the bodies shouldn’t be there. We’ve taken the whole endeavour too seriously, though we haven’t seen it.

  * * *

  A sadist once told me that he was more fully himself with a whip in his hand or some rope, but I told him he was never further away from himself. And talking during sex is a waste of energy. The narrative should fall away. The impl
ement is just a projection or a stand-in. It doesn’t represent truth, only the point at which we try to wedge ourselves into another existence. Wear a skin that isn’t ours. Later discard it.

  * * *

  You practice a dance for months, maybe in certain instances you stay with it for a year, or years. Your body takes the shape of the practice, and what has been required of the body changes the musculature, changes the body. Form follows function. I have an idea, and my idea shapes bodies, makes them different than they were before. I watch the bodies altering in subtle ways, but I can see it. And I watch the relationships develop, familiarity taking root as the bodies and minds learn the others’ weight and touch and smell. They size each other up, surreptitiously, lots of nodding when they meet, fingers colliding in handshakes. Shortly after, they will be in such close proximity that a hair from someone’s head will tangle in the weave of another’s shirt. Intimacy is just part of the work, part of the currency, and the current.

  * * *

  And the body is shaped by the mind. The irony is that Stella and Augustin do resemble Rafael in some way. They are nine years old, almost ten, but perhaps they are much older. It’s hard to say. He sees his lineage in them. His parenting, his presence with them, has worked on their bodies, reshaping them so the tilt of their eyes, the soft cups of their ears, are uncannily like his. He has helped to grow them in the belief that the material in their containers has come from his own cells. Their substance, however, even at the atomic level, is the concrete expression of a secret. Which is itself an echo of mystery.

  The Documentary

  The psychic sits with a cockatiel on his shoulder occasionally nudging his ear.

  “I only have the one. I thought about getting him a paramour, but I don’t have one, so why should he? So that’s the sitch there. We’re single together.”

  He opens a pistachio and offers the bird the nut, which is gingerly accepted. “The people up on the wall there, they’re the ones I’m working on. It’s too many. I normally don’t work on more than three or four at a time, but I got a lot of requests at once. Plus, I needed the money. The ones that are solved, I put those pictures away in my binder system, so I have a record I can look at, but it doesn’t occupy my visual field too much, if you know what I mean. The faces carry a lot of energy and can be hard to live with.

  “I try to keep things more or less tidy here, so I can focus on those people. You get to know the faces over the days and weeks that they’re up there, waiting. Sometimes I get deep into the details, and I do background research—I want to know if the families are on the up and up, especially if I’m dealing with a husband—and other times I want to know as few facts as possible because in some cases the facts are too … well, they can be noisy and get in the way—Stop that, bad bird. He really likes to chew on that, but he should stop—An example would be if the case has gotten a lot of media and the person has been gone for a while—that energy can get too big for me. I need to quiet myself and zero in on my intuition.

  “I helped locate a Russian national recently—I was excited about that—I thought she was almost exotic, you know? She was visiting here and stopped communicating with her parents back home, or that was the story, and I didn’t want to do too much digging. I didn’t even look at social media—you’d be amazed how many people are ‘missing’ but still posting on their feeds. Especially the young ones. It’s usually the first thing I’ll look into, but the feeling around this woman was strong. She had eyebrows for days, and sort of reminded me of my mother, and I got strong images right out of the gate. They’re like postcards from far-off places. What I mean is, the images can have a feeling like they’ve been through the laundry. That’s when I know I’m dealing with someone who’s lonely or isolated. If I get a ton of postcards in a short period, that usually means the person is in a busy place, usually urban, and I have to figure out which images are relevant and which are just garbage.

  “With the Russian lady there were two that stood out for me. One showed a hand with a ring tattoo, which I figured was her hand. The other was a pair of bright red gloves. The red seemed urgent to me and a little wild, and the gloves could hide or protect, right? And I felt like she was still alive. That excited me—a much better result than otherwise, yeah? Assuming we want people to be found alive. The gloves also suggested shopping. She was from a loaded family, that much I did get from talking to her folks.

  “And I had a hunch. I work sometimes with law enforcement, and so I contacted them to see if anyone was coming through the system that resembled her and bingo. Turns out she’d been having a manic spree at Bergdorf’s that she couldn’t pay for. She was arrested and gave a false name—insisting she was called Cassandra—and you know, sometimes you just want to be somebody else. With some new Prada. Anyway, they were just finding out who she was, but I do feel I hastened things along. I followed up with the parents in Saint Petersburg after that—I like to see the end of the story, you know? But this Cassandra woman—I won’t tell you her real name—she was back home, she’d been extradited tout de suite, if you know what I mean, but she was just pissed. I mean royally. She did not want to be found or found out. So I was happy for the parents, you know, they were pretty old, and they were worried. But I did wonder if I helped ruin things for her. Maybe there were reasons other than mania that made her want to be gone for a while. She just wanted a break, I don’t know.”

  The cockatiel wandered back up the length of the psychic’s arm, stopped on his shoulder and nuzzled his ear.

  “Not long after that I did get another mental postcard: it was a red-gloved hand again. The fingers were folded down, except the middle one, which was standing straight up.”

  The psychic laughed. “But you know, she was home. And that’s good. Home has some meaning, doesn’t it?”

  7

  Luna

  Death does happen on the subway, actually, sometimes at the end. One person dead as a doorpost, right there on the seat. Not that I like to witness, I just accept this particular employment. You know what some people do? Steal the copper cable out of the train tracks and sell it. I’ve watched them. You can’t tell it has copper inside because there’s a rubber casing, but they know how to pull it up and lug it to a scrapyard that’ll pretend not to see the NYCTA written on it. And I wait for the electrocution, but I’ve only seen it once, because the copper just gets the stray currents. And the two people who were with him, working this copper mine, ran off and left him, which made me think these are people who hold the polarities, you know. Courage and weakness. But I can’t rightly judge a potentiality as I might have been one of them.

  * * *

  So that’s somebody’s work. What they have to do. And that building there, which is just ten storeys high, has a lot to say. Belongs to the university now, but at one time, up on the eighth and ninth floors, there was a garment factory. The people made shirtwaists, which was a kind of blouse—think of the Gibson girl and you have the idea. Anyway, mostly women in there, hundreds of them, immigrants, and young. Teenagers a lot of them. Sketchy mitigations in case of fire, and locked doors because the foreman would seal the women in while they worked at their machines. It used to be called the Asch Building, and that wording is like a Freudian maneuver, a slip of a fiery homonym. Completed in 1901 with an incomplete fire escape, and some wood construction thrown in with the iron frame and the bricks and the terra-cotta decorations, because it was considered a small enough building. No sprinklers, and empty fire buckets. Maybe you know where I’m going with this. The fire the Volkova woman was on about, the dance she made. This is the spot.

  * * *

  The windows have been replaced, but I tend to think the frames and sills hold filaments of the women’s skirts, you know. As they waited to jump. Little microscopic threads from March 25, 1911, when the fire was going from place to place. It started in a pile of rags, they say, somebody’s cigarette or a match or happenstance. Happenstance being an altogether flammable substance. Tissue-p
aper patterns hanging from lines caught fire and started sashaying all over the place. Potentialities. Dropping themselves wherever, catching on more fabrics, until the eighth floor was engulfed and then the ninth. Panic, you see? Imagine them scattering for the doors and finding them locked, and then trying for the elevator and the fire escape. Imagine fire hoses coming apart in hands, and a fire escape that isn’t one, until overwhelmed with people it plunges down to the street. That’s some ride.

  * * *

  Fire trucks came but their ladders wouldn’t reach and the water from their hoses wasn’t enough. Many of the women jumped, either into the elevator shaft or out the windows, some with their skirts on fire. Flaming birds aiming for nets held out by men down below. But you know what? The nets broke because they weren’t designed for people falling from that height. Bodies and more bodies, hitting the cement. A terrible sound, they say. One hundred and forty-six people dead, almost all of them women, but probably there were more. Hard to keep an account of a population not much cared for in the first place, and then turned to ash in the second.

  * * *

  So that’s the trick of linear time, you know. You can’t tell by looking at the building, even though it has a small plaque. If you just walk along the street in your thoughts, you can’t see them. The ones waiting to jump, or lying sprawled out for an eternal nap on the sidewalk, all of it over in the space of half an hour. The end of the workday, and they were close to quitting time. Quitting time being the operative. Leave your life standing invisibly on the windowsill. Alight means descend from the air and settle. How about settle so hard into the concrete that I bet their molecules are still there, embedded? Atomic-level stuff. The delineation of such. Indicating the exact position of a border or a boundary. Here and then there. Plop. You are here, and then you’re not. Or you’re still there and nobody knows.