“Then why haven’t you?”
“Nowhere for me to go, really. Nowhere I want to go,” she said, and then paused. “Until now?”
I nodded. “I have a job,” I said. “I have a place. The apartment above the club.”
“That fucking club.” She laughed a little giddily, like she might cry. “You never really left, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither.”
“I’ve got Max’s car parked outside,” I told her. “We could drive back to my place. We can stop partway and mess up Max’s seat cushions. If you want to, I mean.”
She grinned at me. “Then we should go, while I still remember who you are.”
“Who am I?” I asked her. I tried not to hold my breath waiting for her to tell me who I was, what I was to her.
“You’re an asshole, Jake,” she said, and stroked my face. “But I’ve missed you anyway.”
“I’m an asshole,” I agreed. “But I’m yours if you want me.”
“I want you,” she said. “I want you, but it’ll come back, you know that, right? You’ve got to understand that. It’ll take me again. I’ll never be cured. It’ll never be over. I’m not like you. You can go anywhere now. But it will always take me again.”
I wrapped my arms around her. “I’ll keep you safe.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Aren’t you listening? You can’t keep me safe.”
“Then let it take you,” I said. “And I’ll bring you back. As many times as you need, I’ll come and bring you back. I won’t let it keep you.”
“You won’t get bored?” she asked anxiously.
I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get bored. Maybe I’ll get bored and cranky and obnoxious and drink too much and throw up in the bathroom. But I’ll still come for you. As many times as you need.”
She took my hand and interlaced our fingers.
I could see the afternoon sun through the glass door, and I still wasn’t used to being out in daylight, even to seeing daylight. I still tensed up every time I walked out a front door, hunching over in anticipation of unbearable pain. But I looked over at Isabel and saw that the hand I wasn’t holding was clenched in a fist, that she was flinching away from the sunlight and her face was twisted in something like fear. So I loosened my shoulders and put my arm around her waist.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “We’re going home. I’ve got the new Glos album in the car and you can turn the volume up as loud as you want.”
“Thank God.” She smiled up at me. “The music in this place is shit.”
And together we walked right the fuck out that door.
SERPENTS
“Will you take the path of pins or the path of needles?”
It doesn’t sound like much of a choice to Charlotte. Dark woods, sharp metal. It sounds like some kind of test. Perhaps if she gives the wrong answer, toads and snakes will fall from her tongue whenever she tries to speak. Charlotte wouldn’t mind that. She likes snakes: she likes the way they move, twining themselves along the ground. She thinks she might be a kind of serpent herself, sliding along in a smooth sine wave, wise and cunning. Serpents don’t sew.
“The path of pins.”
The scenery changes, wavers like a snake curving from side to side, and then slides away. While it is swerving and sliding, Charlotte wonders if the world is a snake as well. That would make her happy, to be a smaller snake inside the belly of a larger snake undulating through time and space. The past would be the tail and the future the head, and the massive sinuous body would coil and curve over and under and through itself in a Moebius pattern, and the past would be the head and the future would be the tail and the world-serpent would hold its tail in its mouth, a tale in its mouth, its tale in its mouth.
Snakes never blink.
* * *
Charlotte finds herself on the path of pins. As far as she can see, the dirt path is strewn with pins, safety pins, straight pins, hairpins, hat pins, diaper pins, glittering like scales along the back of a winding serpent. A careless little girl could cut her feet to shreds walking on this path. Charlotte is wearing her purple fourteen-hole Doc Martens and she can’t even feel the pins grinding into the dirt floor of the forest under her feet. She walks along, imagining the silver serpent that has shed this skin. It would be huge, she thinks, to shed this many scales, and the pins would almost be more like stiff little feathers than like smoothly overlapping scales. As she thinks this and begins to imagine the cold sapphire eyes of the pin snake and the sharp metal teeth lining its mouth, she realizes where the pins are coming from. The trees lining this path have pins where the leaves should be. These trees would be impossible to climb—one wrong move and you’d have a face full of blood and scratches. You’d probably need a tetanus shot.
While Charlotte contemplates the trees, something is moving very quickly toward the path, making as little noise as possible. It skids right in front of her like a schoolgirl crossing Park Avenue against the light to get to homeroom before the bell rings. Charlotte is thrown off balance; she tries to stop in mid-stride, and almost instinctively, like a snake sensing motion, she whips around to follow the movement. The result is that she tries to balance on one leg, her arms pinwheeling as her left foot waves in the air behind her. She’s almost regained her balance when she skids on some pins and falls heavily to the side, bloodying her hands, her knees, and her face.
The sun is setting. Oh my fur and whiskers, I shall be too late.
But Charlotte is not too late; she turns her head aside just in time to avoid an eye full of pins. As she lies where she’s fallen, breathing heavily, nonsense phrases slide through her head: it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye. Not needles. Pins. Charlotte takes a deep breath and stands up. She dusts pins off her blue skirt and white apron, leaving red streaks from her bleeding hands, streaks the same color as her wine-dark motorcycle jacket, with all the zippers and pockets holding her subway pass, silver eyeshadow, red lipstick, liquid black eyeliner, a fake ID that gives her age as twenty-two, a neon pink cigarette lighter, a pack of cigarettes (she doesn’t smoke), some speed, some bobby pins, a thimble, and a box of comfits. She opens her basket and pulls out gauze and tape. After bandaging her knees she puts on a pair of swimming goggles. No pins in her eyes, thank you very much. No needles either. She sets off to find whatever it was that made her lose her balance. She steps off of the path.
Aha, you may be thinking. We all know what happens to little girls who stray from the path. Do we, now?
As Charlotte walks carefully and firmly through the pin-grass growing in this part of the woods, she thinks about goggles. Do snakes wear goggles? It depends, she thinks, on whether or not they go in the water. Water moccasins go in the water. So do other snakes. She likes to watch them skimming, sliding along the surface of the water, arching their bodies back and forth. She wonders if sea serpents swim the same way, gliding in S shapes along the surface of the ocean. Probably not, she decides. Sea serpents swim through the water, not on it. She imagines a sea serpent weightless in the wine-dark sea, coiling its body in ever more intricate patterns of knotwork, flicking its tongue in and out of the salty liquid surrounding it. She imagines the same serpent pulling a fishing boat down to the ocean floor, twining the rope of its body around the boat as strapping young sailors shriek and hurl themselves overboard. The thoughts make her smile. Sea serpents, she thinks, might wear goggles.
She is tracking the quickly moving creature as she muses. Her Docs make surprisingly little noise as she goes; perhaps she’s done this before. She draws closer and sees a white rabbit, breathing heavily and shaking. Blood and mud are smeared across its paws and its fur. Its small pink eyes roll around in an even madder manner than usual.
Charlotte wonders whether or not snakes eat rabbits. Surely swallowing a rabbit wouldn’t be much of a difficulty for a boa constrictor, she thinks, remembering pictures she’s seen of other smaller snakes w
ith rat-shaped lumps in their bodies. As if sensing the predatory turn her thoughts have taken, the rabbit freezes, its ears triangulating, frantically trying to catch the sound of her breathing, and all at once it leaps down a rabbit hole that had been concealed under a mound of intricately stacked pins piled precariously like sharp metal pick-up sticks. Charlotte throws herself after it and is falling, falling down a hole whose walls flicker with images of pins with duck heads holding diapers onto babies’ bottoms, safety pins punched through clothing, straight pins piercing butterflies as they flap their wings vainly, pushpins holding Charlotte’s second-grade essay on poisonous snakes to a corkboard, bobby pins twisting her hair too tightly, safety pins through her earlobes (they had already been pierced, so it took only a steady hand and some patience). The hole is quite long and it twists and Charlotte feels as though she is being swallowed by a snake. It is not a bad feeling. She then lands with a rush on a leaf pile of pins.
Her goggles, Docs, and motorcycle jacket serve her well—no pins make it through. But her exposed legs and face are now scratched, cut, and bloody. Charlotte pushes herself up, scraping her hands as she goes. She opens her basket and takes out a bottle of iodine and methodically applies some to every inch of broken skin. She is a wound and its cure, a germ-free adolescent.
Which way is Grandma’s now? She forgets about the goggles for a moment and goes to rub her eyes, leaving bloody smears across each lens. From now on, she will see the world through the haze of her own blood.
Something about the tiling of these corridors looks familiar to her, but not until she reaches the glass booth does she realize that she’s in the Astor Place subway station. She brings the subway pass out of her pocket and waves it at the token clerk, who is not there anyway, and jumps the turnstile. She sees the rabbit on the platform and begins to run toward it, but the dirty feral creature spots her and is so distressed that it leaps off the platform, launching its battered once-white body straight out over the tracks. As it falls and Charlotte watches, it changes from a rabbit into a small mouse and scurries away into the netherworld of subway vermin.
Charlotte is disappointed. A snake certainly could have swallowed that morsel.
She is not disappointed for long, though. She is thinking about having a cigarette and whether or not her grandma would smell the smoke in the folds of her jacket or the cuts in her skin, and if she did, whether she would believe Charlotte if she told her that the smell was from the show she went to last night, when the train comes hurtling into the station at breakneck pace. Snakes have no necks to break, thinks Charlotte. Or maybe they’re all neck until their tails.
Charlotte has always loved the subway system, the dark, dank, smelly stations, the more labyrinthine, the more exits and interchanges, the better. She likes the seemingly random assignments of letters and numbers; she likes the confusion and mourned when the difference between the AA and A was dissolved. She likes it when an uptown local becomes an express on an entirely different track and when the F with no warning starts running on the A line. She likes the small signs that presage the coming of the train—the soft clank of the track shifting, the mice moving quietly to the sides of the track, the faintest pinprick of light down the tunnel, all the things that tell the girl who is paying attention that it won’t be long now. Not long. She loves the look of the stations, the steel beams and bolts and cracked concrete—the bones and organs of the city. And when the train comes, she likes that best of all, the free-fall rush of air it pushes before it, the long loud clatter and screech. Subways, Charlotte thinks, are like snakes when snakes ruled the earth.
When Charlotte was little, she used to make her mom ride in the first car so that she could stand at the door at the head of the car with all the warning stickers (RIDING BETWEEN CARS IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN; NO SE APOYE CONTRA LA PUERTA) and press her face against the glass. As the train hurtled through the darkness, Charlotte would watch wide-eyed as incandescent lights stretched out in bright streaks flashing by like the Millennium Falcon making the jump into hyperspace, only better. What Charlotte liked best was the occasional ghost station—18th Street on the 6. Abandoned, covered with phantasmagoric graffiti, but still kept lit up in perpetual futile wait for passengers and trains that would stop. Charlotte used to dream about getting off in the old stations to explore and then being left behind as the train pulled away, left to fade into the stretched and flamboyant graffiti. They were nightmares, sort of.
Charlotte gets on the train, arranges her skirt, and closes her eyes. She tries to doze but she is just too hungry. Instead she opens her basket and peels a hard-boiled egg, leaving bloody fingerprints, a murder mystery detective’s dream, on the shell and on the surface of the white, which gives beneath the pressure of her fingers and then returns to its perfect shape. She is on her second egg when she becomes aware that the shrieks and squawks of the other passengers have been drowned, engulfed by a silence, the silence of people pressing away, the silence of fear and loathing.
As Charlotte chews the second bloody bite of her second egg she realizes that the other passengers are birds, not pigeons or other city-vermin birds, but dodos, lories, eaglets, and hawks. She thinks she even catches sight of a bird with plumage all of pins, which would be painful for a snake to swallow, but perhaps she is mistaken. Slowly and deliberately she finishes her egg as a finch in the little love seat in the corner tucks into a Tupperware of living centipedes. Charlotte shifts position, which is painful because of the way the cuts in her legs are sticking to the seat.
As muttering and chirping starts to replace hostile avian glares, the train judders and shudders, stopping suddenly. The lights go off and then back on. Charlotte and the birds stare straight ahead as seconds and then minutes drift by silently. Then the PA system emits a loud crackle of static. Charlotte doesn’t know it, but if she could play that static backward and at twice the speed it would be the sound of her mother as a little girl telling her to be careful on the path of pins. But she can’t, so she will never know. To her, it just sounds like a hoarse snake, hissing and spitting and coughing all at once. A snake with strep throat.
But you and I know, and that will have to be enough.
There is a pause in the static, and then the PA starts to play music, particularly insipid sentimental pop that seems to distress the birds as much as it does Charlotte, who has no intention whatsoever of sitting in a stalled-out subway car listening to Celine Dion. She stands up, walks over to the door leading to the area between the cars, where you’re not supposed to ride, and opens it. She steps out onto the ledge and lowers herself onto the track, followed by the birds, who are grateful for her deft opposable thumbs even if she does eat eggs. They are clearly more comfortable following a bleeding egg-eater than they are staying behind in the subway car, which is beginning to fill with hot salt water.
Charlotte walks deliberately and firmly. She is convinced that every so often she can spot a pin glinting up at her from the tracks. She may be right, or perhaps between the lights and the goggles, she is just seeing sparks, little bursts of fire as her neurons flare off and die in a brave show of fatigued defiance. The birds follow silently. Occasionally Charlotte glances over at the third rail lying coolly under its sheltering guard. The lure is strong, like the fear that you might throw yourself off the top of the Empire State Building or try to grab a policeman’s gun just because you can imagine yourself doing so. Charlotte pictures herself laying her hand against the third rail and filling from hair to boots with burning electric energy, her consciousness flickering and then running straight into the electric blood of the city, crackling through trains and streetlights, merging purely and quickly with the pulsing islands surrounding her.
She doesn’t know if the birds are thinking along similar lines or not.
The way along the tracks is long, much longer than the path through the woods, and the birds are starting to become restless, rustling their feathers and crowding forward, even pecking Charlotte’s back, although she certainly ca
n’t feel it through her jacket. One of the wrens decides that he can lead the way better and takes off straight into the third rail. His skin turns black and splits, spilling his bones and lungs, still quivering, onto the ground. The smell of burning feathers makes Charlotte vomit and she stops walking in order to rinse her mouth out with cinnamon mouthwash from her basket.
The remaining birds are looking a bit green as well, so Charlotte passes out the comfits for them to suck on.
After they have been walking for what seems like hours, Charlotte finds that they are at the abandoned 18th Street subway station. The funhouse graffiti is layered on over older graffiti; infinite strata of urban fireworks marking successive waves of fucked-up youth. Charlotte walks through the station looking like one of the garish, ghostly images wired to live. Her goggles, her blood-and-iodine-stained face and legs, her bandaged hands, her red motorcycle jacket, and her comet tail of birds all add to her affinity with the phantasmagoria around her. She climbs the stairs only to find her way blocked by an iron gate. She rattles the bars, but the grille is locked. She picks up one of the birds and pushes it through the bars. It flies away and the others get the idea. Soon the only company Charlotte has left is the dodo, who is too large to fit through the gate and can’t fly anyway. Together they walk back down the stairs.
Charlotte finds a section of the wall which has less art and is mostly painted with slogans instead. She leans back against RIP HER TO SHREDS and HATE AND WAR, removes her goggles, and takes a nap, right under GOD SAVE THE QUEEN and HEAVY MANNERS. The dodo sinks down next to her, rests its head on her shoulder, and falls asleep as well.
When they wake up, Charlotte is unsure how long she has been sleeping. She lights a cigarette, stubs it out, and passes it to the dodo, who eats it. Charlotte thinks this is all to the good, because she doesn’t like to litter. The city has enough trouble. So does she.
Burning Girls and Other Stories Page 11