“What the hell are you doing?”
Instead of answering, she takes her waxed paper cup from the table, dumps half the soda out of it and scoops the dirt in. She sits down again and I watch her stir the whole mess together with her straw until it’s like pudding, and then she starts spooning that slop into her mouth.
“Stop it or you’re gonna be sick for sure,” I say, but she keeps going. I grab her arm and let it go again. Her skin is too hot. Her bones feel like they could crumble in my hand. The more time I spend with her the clearer it is to me that she should die, that dying would be good for her. When she can’t eat any more, she wipes her mouth on her sleeve and leans her elbows on the table.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m just going to fly apart. Like nothing in me is solid,” she says. “Who’s to say what fixes that?”
I throw the rest of my food away and help her back to the car, but I drive too slow, still picturing her in the hard prairie light with a mouthful of mud.
Del spins the radio dial, finds a rock song with a heavy bass line, and she taps her fingers on her thigh in time. Her eyes tick around in her face like they’re trying to see everything at once, until she closes them. She rests the back of her hand on my knee and I can feel the heat right through my jeans. Her palm is unnaturally smooth, and I wonder if it’s hard for her to hold things, if they slip off that skin like it was vinyl. Looking at her makes it hard to think. Death is in her and through her and all around her, but she moves and breathes regardless.
* * *
—
By eight o’clock it’s dark out. Del is asleep, and with no conversation and nothing but dark highway to look at, I get tired quick. I find a motel and pull off. Del stirs, lifts her head, and leans it down again.
“Why are we stopping?” she says.
“It’s late. I’m too tired to drive anymore.”
“I’m in a hurry.”
“A few hours won’t make a difference.”
She doesn’t answer but closes her eyes. I check in, park the car near our room and help her inside.
“Do you want to take the first shower?” I ask her.
“No,” she says, but then she looks down at her clothes, smeared with mud.
She goes into the bathroom and closes the door. I stand outside in the dark and listen to the sound of the water against the bathtub, against her body. She showers for a long time, half an hour maybe, so that I start to wonder if something’s happened to her. At last the water stops, and I sit at the foot of one of the beds and pretend to watch TV in the darkness. Del opens the door to the bathroom and steam and yellow light pour out around her like a magician’s cloud of smoke. She is naked, standing up straight, and I see that she’s taller than I thought, taller than I am. I look down at my feet and close my eyes to stop myself staring.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I rinsed my clothes, and I wanted to let them dry.”
She steps closer and I can smell her, mud and heat lightning, black pepper and rust, apples fermenting in the high grass, all of it compressed together. She pulls the covers off the other bed and crawls between the sheets. The darkness is filled with the smell of her.
Turning on her bedside lamp, she says, “You can sleep here if you want.”
She says it the way you might offer to lend someone five dollars, and somehow that makes it crueler to say no. I want her to keep that pride. Besides, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want a hand to hold on their way out of this world, myself included. It doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you should have to beg for.
I sit beside her on her bed and she pulls my hand onto her forehead and closes her eyes. On her chest, over her heart, is a fist-sized bruise, dark purple. The flesh there looks like it would be soft and wet to the touch, like pulp. Her body is marked with blisters, scratches, bruises, veins that look like they’re trying to come through the skin. The wholeness of my own body, even with all its scars, suddenly seems unfair.
She slips a hand inside my shirt and moves her burning fingers across my chest. I stretch out on the bed, the two of us shoulder to shoulder, and we lie there for hours. Her body, where it touches me, is a razor. The hours of the night stretch and blend. I wake up next to her and find that I’m crying, that I’m clinging to her wasted body. She smoothes her palms along my back and whispers to me, and all it does is make everything hurt more. I want to chase the darkness out from under her eyes, breathe life back into her, fill her up with mud if that’s what’ll make it work. I’ve never known a woman more painful, but I want to touch her all the same.
I say, “Look, let me take you home. You’re too sick to be doing this. We’ll go together.”
She shakes her head.
“Take a good rest, then,” I say. “How do you expect to get better moving around all the time? Stay in bed a couple of days, why don’t you?”
“I don’t want to rest. Let’s drive the whole way tomorrow.”
“It’s got to be another eighteen hours.”
“Please. I’ll pay you if you want, let’s just go.”
“For Christ’s sake, don’t get insulting.”
She wakes me up at dawn, trailing her fingers along my cheeks, and I’d wager she didn’t sleep the whole night. As soon as I’m dressed, she walks outside and gets in the car, and I don’t argue.
By dusk my eyes feel like they’re made of glass, but we’re near the coast. I shake Del awake and ask her where she wants to go. She presses her hands against the window and squints into the darkness. “It all looks different than I remember it.”
Whenever we pass someone on the street she calls out to ask for directions, and the people point and wave us along, if they answer at all. We turn onto a bigger road with cars buzzing past, and as soon as we do I can smell the ocean. Del shivers in the seat beside me and grips my knee. Against the skyline you can see the lights of a carnival turning on, first the Ferris wheel, then the booths, sending up a blaze of bulbs and neon to replace the fading sunset.
“This the place?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I think so. It was just an empty boardwalk last time I was here.”
She leans against me as we walk down the midway, our arms looped together. Del looks all around her, gawking as if she never saw a carnival before, like she fell asleep in her bed at home and woke up here and can’t figure out what the hell happened in between. We come to an amusement stand and the barker starts in on me, “Win a prize for the pretty lady!” He’s got to notice how she looks, but I guess carnies have seen just about everything. He smiles at her like she’s Miss America, and I give him two dollars for a stack of baseballs to pitch at the milk bottles. I hate this game—they weight the bottles so that it’s almost impossible to win—but I do all right, three bottles down.
“Anything in the bottom row,” says the barker.
“Pick what you want,” I say to Del.
She gets one of those glow necklaces and puts it on her head like a crown. The strange light makes her look almost normal. We buy an ice cream and a funnel cake and eat them next to the roller coaster.
“This is almost like a date,” she says.
“I learned better than to date crazy girls like you; it’s always trouble.”
“Do you date dead girls? I bet that’s even worse.” She smiles, but it’s not a real smile, and she starts crying.
“Come on, now,” I say, and I put my arms around her and hold her head against my chest, green light from her glowing crown climbing up into my eyes. The roller coaster swoops over us, the people scream. The merry-go-round stops and a bunch of kids climb off and run past, laughing as they go. Del looks up and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Sorry,” she says.
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“I thought I wa
s going to make it.”
“Who says you aren’t?”
“I want to go down to the beach.”
We find the stairs that lead us to the sand, and as soon as we take five steps the light and the noise from the carnival start to fade. I put my arm around her waist to help her walk. The sand is white and fine and cool as Christmas, and it’ll turn your ankles if you’re not careful. We go down to the water’s edge, where the footing is better, where the waves sweep against our toes. Del takes her shoes off and throws them into the ocean before I can stop her.
She takes my hand and guides it in between the buttons of her shirt, over her breast, presses it against the bruised spot on her chest. The flesh is even softer than I’d imagined; my fingers sink into it until I can feel her bones through her skin, and below them the shuddering of her heart.
“This is what I feel all the time,” she says, “only it’s the whole world beating.” She pushes my hand closer until I’m afraid my fingers will go right through the skin, and that heart sounds like it could devour me.
Del
For a moment, with Troy’s hand against my chest, I can almost imagine a life all my own, almost understand how that could be fulfilling. He holds me to him and I am alive wherever his body touches me. But ghosts with my face surround me, six other hearts echo my heartbeat. There is nothing I can give him because nothing I have is mine.
I step away from him, across the sand. A moist breeze skims my shoulders and I feel myself dissolve, as if the salt air could unravel my genetic code like a piece of knitting. Nature won’t have me, won’t let me buy my life with their deaths. Aberrations, abominations, Nature wants us gone. Who knew the world was so unforgiving, so eager to cull?
There are shells, says Helen, don’t cut your feet, and every shell touches the sole of my foot seven times. There is nothing strange in this anymore, that she can choke to death on her own blood while I sleep in a roadside motel, and yet still be with me days later, whispering in my ear. Walk into the surf, my sisters say, the ground pulls out from underneath our toes. The waves are sevenfold in their coldness, the salt air seven times as pungent.
The water sings between my fingers, surges around my knees and shins as they press into the sand. Drink deep, my sisters say. This is where things crumble irrevocably, where there is nowhere left to go. We’ll become salt. We’ll become storm clouds on the water. And then emptiness, one to seven to one to zero in the space of twenty-three years. Science will have nothing to do with us anymore, nor we with it. We will be just a void in the cosmos, a dark place in the sky where there was once starlight.
FOR MY DAUGHTERS,
NAMED FOR MYSTERY AND WISDOM;
MAY LIFE OFFER YOU
SOME OF BOTH.
Acknowledgments
As I set out to write these acknowledgments I feel like I’m back in high school, trying to find the right words to inscribe in yearbooks. Let’s hope I can do a better job this time around.
I have been fortunate enough to find other writers who have become both my trusted critics and my confidants. Mike, Cindy, Scott, Eric, Jen, Maggie, and Joe, for a decade of honesty, wine, and friendship, I cannot thank you enough. I’m amazed by your talent and resilience and count myself lucky that you took me in all those years ago. Kath and Gary, thank you for your keen eyes, your humor, and your advice. Tess, as much fun as we’ve had together, what I want to say most is just send it out; it’s already more than finished, it’s gorgeous. Maureen, where would I be without all those long walks in the park and late nights where we decoded every glory and flaw in the world of literature (and everything else)? I didn’t know I could still find friends (and writers) like you this far along. June, thank you for being the person on the other end of the phone at just the right moment, to make me laugh at both the world and myself. And Kaethe—lady, what can I say? You’ve talked me through the most tangled parts of writing and of life, and I don’t know how anyone can be simultaneously such a gifted artist and so humble. I will always be grateful for the day you stepped out of that car and into that cornfield.
I have also had more wonderful teachers than any one person deserves. I want to thank Mr. Earl Feigert, at Hickory Elementary School in Hermitage, Pennsylvania, who gave me my first creative writing assignments when I was in the third grade. It was an early chance to find out what I really love in life, and I’m grateful for it. Debbie Reaves not only taught me to analyze literature in a way that made it seem like an adventure, but also showed me what it meant to be a feminist in all the best senses of that word. Samantha Chang, Chris Offutt, and my other teachers at the Writers’ Workshop provided much-needed support and a wealth of creative intelligence. Stephen Lovely gave me the opportunity to teach creative writing to high school students for nine years, and they in turn taught me more than I could have imagined. Thank you to Kevin Brockmeier—I feel blessed to have had a teacher who is such a master at creating both fairy tales and beautiful prose, and who has given me so much help and encouragement over the years. And Connie Brothers, I know you’re not a writing teacher but I’ve learned more while walking with you to your next appointment than seems possible. Thank you.
For her help in the process of writing and publishing this book I want to thank my agent, Sarah Levitt, who stuck with me through the years, advocated for me, and gave me a good firm push when I needed it most. Thank you to Laura Van der Veer for giving me my chance and for her great edits, and to Annie Chagnot for her wonderful editing, her enthusiasm, and her help at every step along the way to completing this book. Special thanks to Zainab Adisa and her family for taking the time to read “All the Names for God” and offering me their cultural perspective. And to Elsie Byrde, for the translation of “About Prince Surprise” in The Glass Mountain and Other Polish Fairy Tales, which inspired the story “Anything You Might Want.”
Finally, I want to thank those closest to me:
Langston, for not becoming famous before I even got my first book published. That would have been embarrassing.
Duncan, for always treating me as a serious artist, even when I resisted.
Andrea, thank you for taking time off from being superwoman to be my cheerleader whenever I needed one.
Marty, my one, true Magician. Thank you for being brave enough to build a life made of magic, and encouraging me to do the same.
Thank you to my father, for filling my childhood with endless bedtime stories and always supporting my ambitions, even though they were so different from his own.
And to my mother: lover of words; teller of tales; my first, best writing teacher; and no mean writer herself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANJALI SACHDEVA’S fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was director of educational programs. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, and Mexico, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go. This is her first book.
anjalisachdeva.com
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All the Names They Used for God Page 20