by Mona Awad
“I mean, why bother if I’m just going to tell you exactly. Where’s the fun in that? Why bother making art at all?”
“I never asked you to make . . .” and then I trail off.
He moves in closer to me, raises his brows. What was that?
I bite my lower lip, feeling myself flush.
He laughs, throwing his head back so the moonlight catches his neck, and when I look up, I can see the entirety of the black ax from the handle to the blade. When at last he stops, he looks at me tenderly. With something like love. Oh, Samantha.
I lower my gaze to my shoes, the mud they stand in.
“Do you realize they’re all in love with you?” I say this softly, accusingly. I accuse the mud.
I look up at him.
He shrugs. “Good for them,” he mumbles. This isn’t interesting to him, this news. Inevitable casualties of the Process, the Work. Can’t make an omelet, etc.
“But they’re acting like they’re . . . possessed.”
He smiles dreamily. “They’re free now . . . from each other anyway.”
“They’re dangerous, you know,” I say, recalling their shining faces warped with intensity and rage in Workshop today. Our old Workshops in the attic. With the ax.
“I’m afraid,” he says softly. “Truly.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Look into my eyes. See how scared?”
“Did you sleep with them?”
He makes a face. “Ew.”
“Did you woo them?”
“Woo?” he repeats. Ugh. “I can promise you I didn’t woo.”
“Did you hurt them?”
God, this question bores him. Come on, Samantha. You saw the scars yourself. The bruises, the bites, the hair, the voice like a void, hello?
But he plays along. “What am I, Samantha? A monster?”
Yes. And I’ve unleashed you upon the world.
I brush his hair away from his eyes because it’s driving me crazy not to see them. It’s what Caroline used to do to me. She braided my bitch curtain away from my face, pulling it onto the top of my head in a twisty crown. There you go, Bunny. But just as I’m unveiling his one forever hidden eye, he beats my hand away instinctively. Hisses at me like a big cat. When he sees me get scared, he smiles.
He cups my face in his ungloved hands. They will not charm me into submission, these real human hands on my face. I can feel the lines on the palms and everything. I close my eyes instinctively at their warmth. At their lightness.
“Samantha,” he says. “Did you or did you not enjoy it?”
Watching them humiliate themselves and each other? Scream at each other? Hug only their own pink and white, scarred and bruised, sugar-bloated bodies? Read especially terrible work that they must have written in some sort of love trance? A work and a love that mocked them? Watch them get admonished by Fosco?
He nods my head gently for me while I say, No. I did not. At all enjoy myself.
“What about Ava?” I ask.
He lets go of my face. Becomes Mr. Intensely Sincere. Christian Slater with the bomb in his trench coat pocket. Christian Slater with the baboon heart.
“What about Ava?” he says.
“Wouldn’t she be upset if she knew?”
“If she knew what, exactly, Samantha?” He looks at me until I blush.
“What are you guys whispering about down there?” Ava yells. She’s on the roof among her raccoon priests. Deep in her Drink Me.
He looks up at her like she is the sun. All he’s missing is a bouquet of twigs. A soft filter. The sky to open and let fall upon his head a spotlit movie rain that will drip from his hair onto his eyelashes, slide in rivulets down his knifey cheeks. Is he crying or is it the rain? We’ll never know. And anyway, listen to the love song swelling all around us.
* * *
—
I’m looking at him from across the dinner table. Max. Tristan. Byron. Hud. Icarus. Whatever the fuck his name is. Watching him dish the gamy stew I will devour tonight in spite of myself. Watching him pour me a blackish wine. Perhaps this is the only child I’ll ever have. Mine and not mine. Complete with his own unknowable will. Is it so unknowable, Samantha? he seems to say to me with the side of his face, though he’s turned toward Ava, always toward Ava. Does she truly know how beautiful she is? he is asking her for the millionth time.
Shut up, I hear her say, but her shut up is Don’t shut up. Ever, please. He tells her things I never thought of telling her. I hear all my own scratched-out lines on his lips. Things I whispered to the hare statue, to the trees, on the way home in the morning from hanging out. Full of the beginnings of stories. Things far too lame to ever say out loud. He says them all in a voice I know I’ve heard before. Low. Sure. Always smiling inside of itself. You never know if it’s serious or not.
“I’m serious.”
She swoons. Opens for him like a flower in the morning. Hides her already veiled face behind a lace black glove. My friend. My dearest friend. Warn her. I have to warn her. I drink more black wine and my eyes grow heavy as I watch his shadow consume us. Wanting to ask him questions. What do you want? With me? With my friend? With my enemies? Are you actually born of that hideous runt that hopped away under my gaze in the Duchess’s living room, leaving too-large prints in the snow, far too large for a bunny? Or are you born of another animal? A monster of my own making? But my lips remain shut. I drink more wine. I follow them into the living room. I watch them dance.
Drinking Ava’s Campari and soda. Bringing her half-smoked cigarette to my lips. Looking at her, his face lights up in a way that makes my soul embarrassed. It is so nakedly in love. Is hers that way? Hers is more like a slowly unfurling fist. It might unfurl all the way. Or not. We’ll see.
I watch their bodies come together and fall away as the music dictates. I watch them kiss. I watch their lips open up for each other. Something inside of me opens and opens too. Opens so wide I feel like everything inside could fly out. I’m afraid and exhilarated all at once.
Between their bodies, in the window, I see my own face reflected. Cheeks flushed with Ava’s cocktail. So dreamy and happy. A smile of such pure bliss on my lips. I look like Jonah when he is deep in his poetry cloud where nothing can touch him.
There’s another face that appears in the pane. This one is on the outside looking in. Like it was always there and I’m just seeing it now. The Duchess. Looking at me looking at Ava and Max. She’s smiling too. But it’s another kind of smile. Infuriated. Glutted with knowledge. Readying itself for revenge.
I scream.
“Samantha?! Are you okay?” This from Ava, who rushes to my side.
I point to the window, which Max goes to check. But she’s disappeared into the dark.
There’s nothing there anymore but dark. Just a moon, shining like it never shines where I live. That’s because the moon hates where you live, remember?
She was there, though. I’m certain of it. “It was her.”
“Who? Who was there?” Ava asks.
“Nothing, no one. It was just a dream. Probably. Or a hallucination. I’ve had a long day. Maybe I should go to sleep.”
“Yes,” Max says, “maybe you should.”
You’re sick, is the text I get moments later.
* * *
—
We’re on the roof, Ava and I, watching him below us in the garden. Hunched over that patch of damp green he’s been contemplating. It’s warm enough to start at last, he said this morning, staring out the window. Nefariously, I thought.
Start what? I asked, imagining the worst.
Planting, he answered.
Planting what?
Seeds.
Visions of him pouring arsenic into the earth. Setting all the grass and weeds ablaze. Putting a spell on the lawn so that it grows tall and tang
led and buries us. If I’m truly being honest I have no idea what his intentions are with the lawn or anything else.
My intentions? he repeated, when I asked him—confronted him!—the other night, drunk, the living room spinning all around us. It’s not the living room spinning, Samantha, it’s you. We were dancing together, which we almost never do. Because it’s a shitshow. Because we kill each other’s feet. Because when he goes left, I go left. When I go right, he goes right. A fucking shitshow, Ava observed from the couch. You guys could make money doing this. They would have eaten this up at my alma mater.
It was clear my use of the word intentions amused him terribly. He let out a great honking laugh. My INTENTIONS. MY intentions.
Well? I said. I was not at all amused. I needed to know. Desperately. I looked into his eyes, which I wished would stop changing color for one fucking second.
But he looked amused even by this, my desperation.
I don’t know, Samantha, he said, what are they?
* * *
—
It has been eerily silent for the past few days. No texts from the Bunnies. No tulip. No troll. No hatchet. No open-armed ghost. No phone calls. Just one email from the Lion, Fosco cc’d. Subject line: Checking in. Followed by ellipses. The message was brief. I’m afraid we need to have a chat at this point. 7 at the Cave tonight, please. No sign off. Not even an icy Best. But the white space that follows his message says everything I know he must be thinking. That I’m the one who is supposed to get in touch with him about my thesis. That it’s my job, not his, hello?
“Blow it off,” Ava says now, lighting a cigarette and passing the Drink Me.
“I can’t.”
“Well, give him a big fuck you from me. Tell him no one I love gets fucked with and lives.”
“You love me?”
“What a question. Of course. No one loves you like me.” She smiles at me. She means it. With her whole soul. It is holding itself open like a hand, palm up.
Ava, I love you.
“Ava, Max isn’t real.” As the words leave my lips, I stare straight ahead at the dripping trees.
“What do you mean he isn’t real?”
I take a breath. “I mean, I made him.”
She laughs.
“I’m serious,” I whisper.
“You made him,” she repeats.
I nod. “Yes. From a bunny.” Closing my eyes. It’s all too terrible.
“You made him from a bunny.”
I nod again. “Don’t hate me,” I plead. “Please don’t hate me.”
“Samantha, look at me. What the fuck are you talking about?”
So I tell her. Everything. About the Bunnies. About the boys. About “Workshop.” What happened after she went away. How I made this boy only I didn’t know it at first because he didn’t seem like a bunny boy. At all. He was so different from the others. He was actually so real seeming, I didn’t know he was a bunny myself. Until later. And by then, he’d already hooked up with her. I tell her he loves her because I love her. But I tell her he’s also fucking with the Bunnies. To get back at them. Not because he loves them or anything. He hates them. Because I hate them. Which makes sense. Anyway, I think he’s stopped now. Fucking with them. I’m not sure. They might still be in love with him. They might be pissed. Definitely they are pissed. Probably plotting something. Look, it’s all very unclear. This question of intentions. This question of what everyone wants, of where this is all leading in the end. All I know is we could all be in very grave danger. And it’s all my fault.
I tell her this with my eyes on the trees, branches brimming with pale green buds. I don’t dare look at Max, who is still down there in the garden, shoveling. I can hear his spade turning the earth.
Ava’s not saying anything. Is she dead? Did I kill her with my words? No, I hear her breathing quietly beside me, smoking. Her pulse making her rain scent bloom. But I can’t bear to look at her.
“Well,” I ask, after another excruciating stretch of silence, still looking at the trees drip-dripping away, “aren’t you going to say something?”
“About what?” she says. Her tone is flat. Frighteningly flat.
“About what I just told you?”
She looks at Max, his broad, treelike frame bent at his task. His ripped arms gripping the spade, shoveling. Probably even his sweat is foresty.
“I think you’re a brilliant artist. And I applaud your work.” She looks at me and I see there’s a laugh brimming there under her straight face.
“What? Ava, no, this is real, what I’m telling you. It’s real. I mean, I know it sounds insane. . . .” I trail off, hearing the manic quality of my own voice.
I turn to look at her, but she’s looking down at Max. He isn’t hunched over. He’s standing up. Looking up at her from where he stands below. He waves at us. At her.
We both watch him wave. Dark hair covering one eye. Earnest face. Waving and waving and waving. His hand high above his head.
She looks at him, then back at me. She looks at me for so long and so intently I want to look away but I don’t. Then something in her expression shifts. The laughing lightness fades. And something terrible dawns in her eyes. “Samantha—”
“I’m sorry,” I say quickly, cutting her off. “I don’t know where I came up with that story. Crazy. I guess I’m still pretty messed up.” I shake my head. Look at her.
The shift is still there, in her face. The lightness doesn’t come back. She’s staring at me in a way I can’t bear. I turn away from her, letting the bitch curtain fall.
“You should get going. To your meeting,” she says.
No more talk of blowing it off. I start to climb down the ladder, clumsy under her gaze, then suddenly I am possessed by a terrible feeling. I stop and turn around and slip and almost fall and kill myself.
She’s still sitting there, no longer watching me, but watching him.
“Ava.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say. But I don’t move. Can’t bring myself to leave her, even though the shingles are crackling beneath my feet and I feel myself starting to slip again.
“You’ll still be here?” I ask. “When I come back?”
She smiles. “Of course I’ll still be here. Where would I go?”
35.
Hello?” I call out in the Cave. But all I hear is the echo of my own voice bouncing off the drippy walls. Darker than usual. No womblike warmth about it today. Didn’t he say 7:00? But there are no clocks in the Cave. There are no lights in the Cave. Even the door I came in by has already blended into the black.
“Hello?” I call out again.
Nothing.
“Alan?”
No answer. Just my echo. Calling and calling his name.
Probably fucking with you. He likes to fuck with you, remember?
Waiting for him, looking for his shape in the dark, I feel my heart starts to pound. The silence and the dark gather into his quiet judgment. Into his pedagogical and psychosexual strategy. Into his sleek silhouette. That appeared in the alley that spring night at the party. That night where nothing happened, nothing at all happened. That came out of the dark like a dream when I was so drunk the sky and earth had crashed into one another. Cuntscapades! I’d screamed then stormed away from Jonah, down the alley, into the tilted night. And there he was, standing where the alley meets the street, leaning against the bricks as though I wrote him there, wearing a T-shirt of a monster devouring a girl, black branches climbing his bare arms. Standing absolutely still while the alley rocked like a ship.
“Samantha,” says a velvety voice now. Male. Lilting. Thistle and heather swaying gently on a crag.
Hearing it in the dark, I shiver, though I tell myself I should be relieved.
“Alan,” I say, putting the relief in my voice, my echo revealing the tremor. “
You’re here.”
I look around but there’s nothing but black.
“I’m here, Samantha.” Patience eternal. “Where are you?”
Visions of leaving the alley with him. Getting into the passenger seat of his car. Watching him drive us somewhere. Where are we going? I didn’t care to ask. Then, at a stoplight that he nearly missed, that he had to drunkenly slam on his brakes to catch, I saw the Bunnies through his passenger window. They’d moved their drunken hug-fest to some bistro terrace near campus that sold champagne by the glass. Though I kept staring straight ahead, right through the windshield at the eternal red light, I saw them see me in his car. See us. I kept my chin up, my stare straight. Think whatever you want, think the worst, I dare you. I glanced at him out of my eye corner. He was looking straight ahead at the windshield too, literally looking as straight ahead as you can look. And I knew that he’d seen them too. That he’d seen them see us. And then suddenly it was all wrong. Me sitting in his car. Us together. My crossed legs in lace tights full of holes, my heels dangling from my feet, my wildly swaying mind, the way the sky and the earth were at such odd angles with each other, the terrible glimpse I caught of my face, its expression, in his side-view mirror. All wrong. And him. Beside me in the driver’s seat. Trying to appear sober. Waiting calmly for the light to change. He was all wrong too.
“Samantha,” says the voice again now. Velvety. Closer. Though I see nothing in the black but the black.
“Where are you?” I ask.
I barely remember getting to his apartment that night. Dimly recall stumbling up some dark spiral staircase that seemed to wind up and up forever. Sitting across from him in his ever-spinning living room. Our slurred talk skipping from one book to the next, from one topic to the next, like we were on a jerky fast-forward. Telling myself it was just like all those other times we’d talked and wasn’t this nice to finally be talking again. Except this time I was doing all the talking. Except this time I spoke loudly, like I wanted to be overheard by someone outside. Speaking my words with such exactitude. Like the names of things and people and books weren’t slipping from my lips, spilling onto his floor like wine. As though it weren’t all wrong. Him watching me, saying nothing at all. Like I was a play he was already deeply familiar with—had seen many productions of—was frankly slightly bored by at this point, but there were some good parts coming potentially, depends. Depends entirely on the production. I said I was glad we were talking again, even though I was the only one talking. Talking into a silence so loud it felt like a live thing in the room. That seemed to be growing, gathering shape and shadow, no matter how much I kept talking like everything was fine.