Sixteen

by Megan Mccafferty

  “This is it?”

  “Yes. See?” My father nods his head. In one window—the upper right—a woman sits on a sill fanning herself. The terrace under her appears rotted away, so she must stay in the window, fanning with a rhythm that I would wager is very close to the human heartbeat but I have no time to check. She wears black, like me, and is lit by the room glow, with a stylish triangular hat. I would never have noticed her.

  “Come.” Father walks to the door below her and I follow. He knocks in a way some might think was coded but I know is simply his manner: rap rap-rap-rap rap. He has a nervous condition.

  “Yes?” A woman comes to the door, pulls it open slightly, and speaks quietly with my father. I am amazed that they can hear each other because behind the woman—heralded as she opens the door—is a room full of drunks. There is yelling and clinking and music but no windows to confirm the scene; the windows must be on the back and sides of the building, where the new part of the town has just been erected for miners in the last eight months. I wonder what it looks like inside, but the woman has enough respect for the respectable side of town not to completely open the door.

  “William Gainor; I had a special arrangement,” my father says.

  “Oh, yes,” the woman answers. “Around the side and up the ladder.” She closes the door.

  “We aren’t here to get you drunk, Lord knows,” my father says, which is another expression he has picked up. “You stay out of the saloon.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We move around the right of the building and there, preposterously, is a rope ladder. It seems to lead up . . . right up to two iron pegs next to a window. And this window shares its terrace with the window in which I saw the woman in black! Will this be my prostitute? How disgusting! Have I already seen her? Do I know what she looks like?

  “I cannot,” I say, looking at the ladder, then at my father.

  “Why? It’s good.” He tugs it.

  “No! I cannot bring myself to do this!”

  “Son, get on the ladder.”

  “But I have seen her! I have seen the woman I am going to defile!”

  “I don’t know if you can defile anything. Get up and shut your lip.”

  I look at him and make a promise. “I will never forget this.”

  “I know you won’t, Rutford.” And my father stands under me with his hands cupped at my buttocks to ensure that I do not fall on the first few “rungs,” and then he stays there making sure that I reach the metal pegs and the terrace. I test with my foot to see if it is rotted and find it acceptable but worthy of censure; I step off the ladder and peer over the terrace at Father, hissing about it. He stops me:

  “When you’re done, send for me. The madam knows this is expected. Do not come home alone.”

  “Do you mean bring . . . her?”

  “No! Do not come home until I take you home.”

  “Ah.” I nod, trying to think of something to say, but it is difficult for me to see my father as he turns into the night and there is a voice to my right as he leaves, perfectly timed.

  “Hallo, Mr. Gainor.”

  The woman in the window is looking at me.

  She’s yellow! Oh, the Yellow Trade—I have read about this in the newspapers that make it here. So sad. They bring these women in from the Chinese lands and they do not know what to do with themselves and end up in these terrible prostitution situations and it’s all too horrible and I am scared and ready to fling myself off the terrace, from guilt, when the woman stands up and takes my hand and pulls me in the window so fast I do not really know what is happening. We are inside a small, nearly unfurnished bedroom, and the woman in black—who has a bustle in the rear of her dress, fluffy to make her buttocks appear to jut out—is motioning to a woman in red to replace her in her spot on the windowsill. There are two doors in this room, the one that the woman in red just came out of (noise comes from it) and another that appears appropriately sized for a dwarf or perhaps a cat. This is the door that the yellow woman takes me to, turning sideways as she opens it to fit through (although we are both so small, this seems like a theatrical flourish). She closes it behind us and the room we are now in is very quiet and very small, almost like a prison cell, as I would imagine.

  The woman lets go of my hand and sits on the bed. The only object in this room is a bed. “Conjugal bed” is the term that comes to mind. I do not truly know what it means, but I know that this is one.

  “Greetings,” she says again. “Your name is William, yes?”

  “Rutford,” I admit. “People call me Rutford.”

  “William Rutford?”

  “No, just . . . Rutford.”

  “Instead of William.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you certain you would you like me to call you Rutford?”

  “If you call me William, I might not know who you were speaking to. It has been a long time since anyone referred to me by that name,” I say.

  “I see. Well, hallo, Rutford.”

  “Hallo,” I say. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Miss . . .”

  “Annabelle.”

  “Annabelle. How pleasant.”

  “Never . . . anything?” she asks.

  I nod in a way that I hope makes clear that I do not quite understand what she is asking but I am eager to please. Her hair is dark and straight and tied back behind her head, but then somehow it spills over her shoulders in a sort of sheet, shining like a shaped mineral in the candlelight. There must be quite a lot of hair, if it were to be untied.

  “You want me to take my hair down?” she asks. Perhaps she sees that I am looking at it.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You like it this way?” She grabs it and pulls all of it up, so that her neck is open.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “You like it this way?” She lets it all out and it flows over her.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You like like this?” She pulls it out to the side, being silly, looking like a lioness. She smiles but I cannot grasp the humor right now.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you like anything?” she asks. “Anything at all?”

  “No.” I know the answer to that. I have been saying it my whole life. “I hate everything.”

  “Oh,” Annabelle says. “Well, this is going to be easy. Come here on the bed and we will talk and find out if you are truly hopeless, and then, if not, we’ll find what you like!” She pats the bed next to her. I sit.

  “You seem smart,” I say.

  “I am.”

  “How did you get here, then?”

  “By boat.” She smiles.

  “I mean, why did you get here? If you’re so smart? Why not get married? More foolish girls than you get married.”

  Annabelle shrugs. “I did not want to get beaten.”

  “Ah. I understand. Ahm. Where are you from?”

  “China.”

  “Why did you leave China?”

  “I had to. My father got in trouble. I had to go. Why do you hate everything?”

  “It’s all hopeless and disgusting.”

  “Life is?”

  “Yes.”

  “You feel people are stupid?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “No one understands you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I do.”

  “You do not,” I say.

  “How come not?”

  I sigh and lean back on the bed. She is being paid for this time. She cannot leave. So I say the Basic Premise: “We are all going to die. We are going to die, and once we do, we will not get to go anywhere and we will not get anything permanent, not our gravestones or the love of our friends or families or our art . . . it will all crumble and fade. The only permanent things are the constellations and we will not get one of those—they are all used up. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Except the word constellations.”

  “It’s the stars. In the sky. The shapes
that they make.”

  “Oh. I had different ones. I do not know the ones here.”

  “Well, no matter, the point is no one will remember us when we die, and even if they do, it will be for only a short while. And while we are here we suffer idiots who know nothingand cannot comprehend the greatness that lives inside us, and often these idiots are not only our friends and teachers but also our family, our parents, with no expectations for us other than to grow up and breed like animals, and we really are just animals—”

  “I never knew my parents,” Annabelle says.

  “That is unfortunate. My mother died,” I say.

  “Your father remarried? You have a false mother now?”

  “Yes!” I smile. “She’s terrible.”

  “False mothers are the worst. I am happier to have none.” She is lying back on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, same as me.

  “Look at that stain.” I point. “Looks like China, yes?”

  “Where?”

  “That one.”

  “That?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t . . .” She pauses. “I don’t know what China looks like.”

  “You don’t know what it looks like?!” I jump out of bed. “You really are—” I am about to say a simpleton, a fool, a silly prostitute, deserving brothel dweller, but looking at her in the face in the bed, I find this difficult to undertake. “You are denied some basic knowledge,” I say. “Let me show you.”

  “All right.” She sits up.

  “Are there writing materials in the room?”

  “Only this.” She leans over the bed and reaches under, pulling out a small, capped container of ink.

  “Nothing to write on?” I ask.

  “You want to write?”

  I nod.

  “Write on me!” Annabelle says, and she puts herself back on the bed with her arms spread to the wall and her torso stretched out. “You can see, don’t worry.” She unbuttons her dress from the back very quickly and has it off in a pile like a small dog by her feet, and under it there is some sort of undergarment that I don’t notice so much because I am looking at her bare breasts, which have nipples on them, and it feels as if large blocks are falling into place in my mind and I shake quickly as if I have an illness.

  “Uhgag . . .” I believe I say.

  “Don’t be scared,” Annabelle says. “I enjoy your company, Rutford. Come and write on me. What were you going to write?”

  “I was . . .” I look at her. “I was going to depict China . . .”

  “Do it! Please!” She cranes her neck to look me in the eyes. “Please.” And she puts her head back down and splays her body out like a young tiger, I would imagine. In a book I saw a drawing of one stretching; I never expected it to have a human application.

  I sit next to her on the bed and open the bottle of ink. “It’s . . . it looks like this . . .” I say, dabbing the ink onto my fingers. This will be difficult to wash off, but some part of me remembers something, playing with clay in a stream somewhere in my old home, pressing it and feeling it flatten in my hands. It was difficult to wash off, too. I dash my fingertip against Annabelle’s skin—

  “Ack!” She giggles. “Cold!”

  I keep going and, staying very concentrated, not looking at the breasts, I make a more-than-serviceable map of China. I have seen it in atlases enough that even the curvature of the skin is no impediment; I end up with a fine representation.

  “Now look up at the stain again,” I tell her.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “And now look at your stomach!”

  She lifts up on her elbows. “That’s China?” she asks.

  “Absolutely.”

  “It looks just like the ceiling!”

  “As I said.”

  “That must be why this is my room, then!” she says. “With my country all over it.” The ink is drying on her. She turns to me. “You are a very kind young man; I like you very much,” she says. She rolls back and forth on the bed and the ink on her body presses another print onto the bedsheet. “A third China.”

  “I— Thank you,” I say.

  “It is your birthday, the madam says, but you are very kind to me.”

  “I . . . Gugkle.”

  “I can be kind to you as well. You wish to do things now?” She touches her breast to show me that I can do that, if I would like.

  “I do not . . .” I think about who this really is. She may be alluring in a different way from anything I have seen before— certainly more than any dusty schoolgirl with teeth missing or my false mother—and she may smile and look at me, but she is paid to do these things, all of them, paid by my father, a worker like everyone else in this world, working toward money, never wanting to know anyone or anything. How can anyone touch these women? They are a constant reminder of what they are. I look at the rash of color in her face.

  “Come . . .” she says. “If you do not touch me, the madam will be angry.”

  Well, I cannot say anything to that. I do not want to anger anyone. I reach down.

  “No bussing, no kissing usually,” she says. “But since you are so young and kind, I can do this.” She leans up to do this thing that I have heard and read about so much but never seen performed. I was not aware of the mechanics of a kiss. What she does scientifically is maw at my lips for a few seconds before prying them open with her tongue, which is unexpectedly warm and eager and soft and pointed at the end. Then she uses her tongue inside me to loop around while saliva—that is what it is, I wish there were a more beautiful word for it—drips out of me into her. Such a strange ritual. I pull back.

  “You don’t want?” she says.

  “I liked showing you China better,” I say.

  “Forget it.” Annabelle sits up quickly on the bed and reaches under it again, maybe for more ink for me to write on her. I look at her hair and question what went wrong in the room while she fiddles about and comes up with a new object, a pipe made of ivory.

  I have never seen such a thing before. The pipe is long and dirty. It has a smell that is unlike any smell I have smelled on earth, but once I smell it I definitely have a recollection of it somewhere—I always knew that this smell existed; I just had not come across it before. Annabelle puts the pipe in her mouth theatrically and sucks in at it, showing me what I have to do. I am not certain whether this is a part of the sex act, but having been unable to find a suitable definition in the dictionary, I am willing to accept that copulation could involve a pipe.

  Annabelle stands up and walks across the room, which intrigues me greatly—it is as if her legs and torso are moving sideways and back again, opposed to one another, on a hidden set of pendulums. Her body swings. I stand up to see if I can imitate it—

  “What are you doing?” she asks. She is now at the corner of the room by the candle on the floor. “Sit on the damn bed!”

  I do so. It is difficult for me to synthesize and accept that I have disappointed a prostitute. But part of me is very proud.

  “Now listen.” She comes forward with the pipe, puffing at it just slightly, enveloping me in this smell that is, I realize, a bit like a new spice in the kitchen, a secret spice that there was no occasion to take out and partake in previously. “You aren’t ready for any women, Rutford. You need to relax first many, many times.”

  “Yes, Annabelle.”

  “That isn’t my real name. Take—”

  “What is?”

  “What is what?”

  “Your real name!” This is important.

  “Rutford, never mind. Take this pipe and put it in your mouth.”

  I do so.

  “Now pull the smoke up into your mouth.”

  I do so.

  “Now hold it there, just hold it.”

  I do this as well. I want to ask why—

  “I see your mouth moving and you better not be talking or thinking. Just hold that smoke in there. Let it go when you need to.”

  I do. I hold it for three and on
e half seconds. Then I pull the pipe out and let it go. I look back at Annabelle, whose name is really not Annabelle, and put the pipe on the floor.

  “You are supposed to pass it to me.” She smiles.

  “I will remember,” I say.

  “Better?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Oh, you’ll be fine.” She smokes from the pipe herself, then puts it back under her bed. Then she moves next to me and holds my shoulders with her small soft arm.

  “My shoulders are very bony,” I apologize.

  “Shhhhh, just relax,” she says, and while I have never written it down or told it to anyone, I have a theory about how my brain works. I have always thought that each one of my thoughts must, deep down, be represented by a particle, just as the scientists know that all matter is particles deep down and that these tiny particles are indivisible, which is why they are called atoms. I know that I must have brain particles as well, one for each of my thoughts, because when thoughts run in my brain, I can feel them butting up against one another, clashing and merging and flipping in circles, or breaking through, as is the case when I am thinking clearly, busting out of my mouth in a coherent mastery of concept and going out into the world.

  But now I am lying on the bed with the woman I know as Annabelle and all of the thought particles in my brain are moving much more slowly. She has increased gravity in my spine and they are pulled down and only the thoughts that register pleasure are allowed to circulate. I turn to her and stare at her pretty face and realize that she is a very special girl; she knew my secret. She knew that I liked to be half-asleep and she has put me there again. I look up at China on the ceiling and China on her stomach and the China on the bedsheet and think that maybe with her I can be like this more often.

  The Grief Diet

  Emma Forrest

  He was at the kitchen counter eating peanut butter with a tablespoon when I asked him the question that had been nagging me since I learned how to talk.

  “Are you going to die one day, Papa?”

  I had on OshKosh B’Gosh dungarees, red with hundreds of tiny falling ice cream cones that he’d jokingly try to lick. Although I was only seven, they were for age ten. I wore all my clothes too big, willing myself to grow. He was wearing a battered caftan and a three-day stubble.