The Uses of Enchantment

by Heidi Julavits

  Is this the kind of thing you wonder about in the woods? she asked with an efficient I’m fine toss of her dirtying hair.

  The woods might have something to do with it, the man said. I am relieved, he thought. The last thing I need is a crying girl on my hands. But he also wanted to know what she was thinking. He wanted to ask her if she was disappointed in him. He had taken her to a cabin in the woods with fake wood paneling and a distinctive mold smell. His fire was lame. She had imagined an outcome and he had failed to deliver it.

  You weren’t wondering if I was happy in the diner, she said. You weren’t wondering if I was happy at the rest stop.

  On principle I don’t express wonder, the man said. Which doesn’t mean I’m not wondering every second of every day.

  A piece of bark on a burning log exploded. The girl jumped, spilling soup on her sweatpants.

  Whoops, she said, her composure jostled.

  Cry now, the man thought to himself. Cry now.

  But she didn’t cry. She efficiently blotted the soup spill with her napkin.

  I’m thinking this cabin depresses the heck out of you, she said.

  The girl rolled the shearling slipper tassel between her thumb and forefinger.

  The moment, he realized. The moment was gone.

  Tough, he thought, not without a fair bit of admiration. This girl was tough.

  What’s up with that poster in the guest room? She asked. The one that says WE ARE MEERKATS!

  What’s up with it? the man said. My ex-wife’s former brother-in-law was a solar engineer.

  The man jerked his head toward the rafters, his attention snagged by a shifting piece of air. The dark overhead rippled imperceptibly like the skin of a pudding. A bat, he thought. A goddamned family of bats.

  The girl picked at her slipper, clearly confused.

  My ex-wife’s former brother-in-law. Her sister’s ex-husband, he explained, trying not to eye the ceiling. My twice former brother-in-law.

  I got that, she said.

  Oh, said the man, understanding now. The meerkat is the solar panel of the animal world, and thus my twice former brother-in-law the solar engineer’s favorite animal. He believed his rarified enthusiasms were shared by the masses. Thus, for such an otherwise eccentricity-free household, we have a lot of meerkat tchotchkes.

  The man pointed to a Meerkat Society ashtray; the meerkat bookends on the fireplace mantel; the meerkat andirons.

  The meerkat rolls onto its back and raises its body temperature by exposing its black stomach to the sun, the man continued. The meerkat is a member of the mongoose family. It usually travels in a “mob” or a “gang” of thirty. That pretty much exhausts my knowledge about meerkats. We have some films upstairs of my twice former brother-in-law on safari in the Kalahari, if you’re still curious.

  For someone with amnesia, the girl said, you remember a lot.

  The man reddened.

  My ex-wife and I took a trip here after the accident, he said quickly. She wanted to help me remember. We walked around the cabin and she told me stories relating to every needlepoint cushion and piece of ski-house junk. This was cathartic for her.

  I bet it was cathartic for her, the girl said. Lying through her teeth.

  She wasn’t lying to me, the man said. He felt defensive on behalf of his ex-wife, suddenly. They had actually shared a tender weekend and he had slept with her. A woman whom he found nearly as repugnant as the woman from the general store.

  What could be more cathartic, the girl said, than to mess around with the head of the man who had messed around with her head. Who had loved girls, while pretending to be her devoted husband. Who lost her money on a crappy brownstone. Who embarrassed her at weddings.

  That’s enough, the man said, thinking he wanted the unhappy girl back. The quiet, unhappy girl. He started to connect her stories with her hostility; her stories were not made to entertain, they were made to derail him. They were weapons of self-defense.

  The girl dropped her empty soup mug on the floor; it tipped onto its side, rolled under the couch.

  She did not lie to me, the man said.

  You don’t know that, the girl said. I wouldn’t be here if you knew that for sure.

  The man nodded. Right, he thought. That’s why she believed he was here. But that didn’t explain why she was here. Why she had engineered to be abducted by him? What was in it for her? She should be scared of him, if she were a normal girl of seventeen. She should be fearing for her life. If he were to take a step back, if he were to allow his stranger-on-a-train self to view his actual self, the oddness of his predicament was blazingly apparent. Who the fuck was this girl?

  You wouldn’t be here if I knew, the man said. Which still doesn’t exactly explain why you’re here.

  The girl smiled. Doesn’t it? she said.

  I don’t think so, the man said.

  Oh, she said. You’re right.

  So then, the man said. Why are you here?

  A good question, the girl said. I’m surprised it’s taken you so long to ask it.

  There hasn’t really been…the need, he said. What he meant was: It had happened. Things happen by happening.

  True, said the girl. But now there is a need.

  There is, he said.

  Something understood between us has been destroyed, she said.

  Not necessarily, the man said.

  No, that’s what you think.

  OK, the man agreed. That’s what I think.

  Your back is against a wall and you’re wondering why. Why would you let yourself be backed against a wall by a person you don’t even know?

  Can’t I be backed against a wall by a stranger?

  You’re backed against a wall when you know what the other person wants and this conflicts with what you want and there’s no satisfying the both of you. But you don’t know what I want, and this is starting to frustrate you. Or this is how I’m reading your take on the situation.

  My take on the situation, the man thought to himself, is that you are a disturbingly odd girl, and despite the fact that I am older than you and outweigh you by eighty pounds, I feel endangered in your presence.

  Maybe, the girl said, maybe, like your ex-wife, I’m also out for revenge.

  That makes no sense, the man said. I’ve never done anything to you.

  Actually you have, the girl said. But I don’t blame you, as I’ve said. I’m not out for revenge against you.

  Ah, the man said, relaxing slightly. You’re using me to get revenge on another person.

  The girl made an angry cross-hatch with her thumbnail, impressing a red X onto her ankle. Her ankle, the man noted, was as small around as any normal person’s wrist and scarred—not a pretty ankle—but something about its evident bones and its scars made it, and her, unspeakably alluring.

  It’s OK if you are, the man said. Using me for revenge.

  If I am using you, well, at least I’m offering you something in return.

  What’s that again? the man asked.

  I’m offering you your lousy forgotten life back.

  The electric cuckoo clock on the wall commenced its hourly foolishness. Four o’clock. Thank god, the man thought. Though, as an insomniac, the idea of night usually made him anxious, in fact he couldn’t wait for this day to end.

  I suppose that’s a fair exchange, the man said.

  So you admit that your wife lied to you, the girl said.

  The man ran his hands through his hair and stared at the meerkat andirons, their squirrel-like arms raised in clawed confrontation across an abyss of smoking logs. What was the point in disagreeing with her?

  Chadwick

  NOVEMBER 9, 1999

  The roads were empty, the temperature now well below freezing, and the prior rain seized into an even slick of ice. The stress of the poor driving conditions winched Mary’s shoulders as high as her chin. She lowered the volume of the distantly live symphony performance on the radio, but found the noise of the wheels leav
ing the patches of salted road for the soundless swaths of friction-free ice deeply unsettling. She re-cued the symphony. Eventually she spotted the beetled form of a salt truck ahead of her, its load rising humplike above its orange metal container. She followed it, not minding that it kicked a salinated slush onto her windshield smoothed by her wipers to gauzy streaks, creating a prism through which the truck’s rear lights were stretched and multiplied like a hundred bug eyes.

  It was 10:42 p.m.

  She’d once known a shortcut to Chadwick—a series of badly lit back roads, each turn a potential failed vector that would deposit her in a tree trunk, a mailbox, a six-foot-thick wall of arbor vitae—and though there was no need for a shortcut at 10:42 on an icy November week night, shortcuts were ingrained in her by her father, a man for whom finding a good shortcut was like stealing a game of golf from an opponent with a far snazzier set of clubs. Each shortcut he discovered between the wealthy suburbs was further proof of the superiority of his working-class street smarts, his way of tunneling more stealthily through this foreign world he called home. So she’d taken the short cut, turning off the lit and salted route onto a side street so narrow it might have been someone’s private drive, she’d negotiated the potholes and the stretches of icy road where it seemed that her aunt’s station wagon had been converted to an unsteerable hovercraft, the brakes flurrying the air like a pair of useless rudders. Eventually the road looped back to the main highway—a place she had no intention of ending up, a place she found herself relieved to be.

  As she approached the town limits of Chadwick, her mood began to shift, from vaguely anxious to self-castigating and hopeless. It was late. For all she knew Dr. Hammer had a wife now, he had young children who had been in bed for hours and whose early waking curtailed his evenings, making it impossible for him to reach ten o’clock in the evening without nodding off over his book or TV program.

  But even assuming Dr. Hammer was still awake at 10:55 p.m., what guarantee did she have that he would talk to her? She struggled to remember the last time she’d seen Dr. Hammer but couldn’t recall the specifics or even the nonspecifics because the meeting, whenever it had been, had failed to preannounce itself as final. Logic told her that the meeting took place on Beacon Street at Dr. Hammer’s publishing house, located in a three-story brick house with a functioning dumbwaiter that the secretary used to move files and sandwiches between floors. After she’d terminated her treatment she’d met Dr. Hammer only three or so times, and always in the company of her father and the editorial assistant, to go over the Miriam manuscript. Hard facts were unthinkingly changed—her name, the street on which she lived—while more slippery ones had to be verified and reverified, as the editorial assistant flipped through the page proofs with his pencil, erasing marks next to the fact-checker’s queries. It was a confusing business; she was asked to swear as accurate, for example, her statements that Dr. Hammer claimed to be untrue. Yes, she’d agreed. It is true that that is a lie. Everything is correctly false.

  But maybe there’d been something more celebratory to mark their final meeting, a lunch she’d forgotten, at which he’d handed her the finished book and written his inscription (For “Miriam”). Or had the book quietly arrived by mail, already inscribed? She didn’t remember. The book was so long lost that its arrival, too, had been obscured.

  But what most needled her at the moment was this recent meeting (she presumed there had been a meeting) between her mother and Dr. Hammer. Roz had sent her mother to Dr. Hammer armed with the same address—wasn’t this the thing “of interest” she’d used to tempt her mother into her office? Still, the many unknowns nagged her. Her mother, after all, had never technically met Dr. Hammer. Of course she’d met the man, but not so far as he knew. Had she appeared to him, these many years later, still pretending to be her own sister? Or had she appeared as herself? Of course, he would respond. Of course you weren’t who you said you were. He would invite her into his house, where there would or would not be a wife, children, etc. And they would talk about…what? The material. Some relationships are more predisposed to succeed due to a familiarity with the material. Years after the fact, Mum and Dr. Hammer had sat in matching armchairs flanking a table with cups of tea or maybe, depending on Dr. Hammer’s extracurricular vices, a glass of scotch, white wine, some gummy half-congealed coffee liqueur he’d been dragging around since graduate school. They had stayed up all night and, because her mother’s self was prone to wander, she had discovered, as Mary had discovered, her natural ability to be Dr. Hammer’s most perfect patient. She had confirmed all the self-fortifying suspicions that kept him awake at night. Yes, her daughter had lied to him—and then lied about lying. No, he had not been a bad doctor, a devastatingly wrong judge of character, a plain old sucker. He had been betrayed by a young girl who, they both chose to agree from this more charitable distance, was more to be pitied than blamed. She craved attention; once one avenue had been exhausted she’d done a U-turn and, with Roz’s help, reinvigorated interest in her case. And then—nothing. She had faded into obscurity, she had moved to the Northwest, she had failed to yield. Hyper radiant that she was, she had burned herself out before she was even twenty.

  A gristly possibility, Mary thought. A years-later postmortem that effectively rendered her unnecessary. No wonder her mother had refused to see her; the closure her mother had required was attained without any help from her. Mary was Miriam, the hyper radiant, her mother might have concluded; she’d inhabited her imagination’s crafty geography as a way to refute the confused call of adolescent sexuality, which meant she was neither a liar nor a slut; she was an artist. Roz’s investigation, the inquiry by the Massachussetts Mental Health Governing Board, the court case—none of this discounted what her mother and Dr. Hammer resurrected as the real story. Together they assured themselves: Mary’s abduction was, as Dr. Hammer originally claimed it was, all in Mary’s head. Together they’d agreed to forgive her. Closure all around. The end.

  So easy.

  Mary pinballed recklessly through three rotaries, she ignored the CAUTION signs that admonished her to reduce her speed now that she was approaching the Village of Chadwick. Main Street quickly corroded into increasingly crimped and hobbit-size storefronts before lapsing into wall- and hedge-lined blackness. Here Water Street picked up the thread as an unlit and unassuming artery wiggling off the main drag, its erratic zigzags approximating the shape of the invisible coast. As with most Water Streets, no water was visible from the street.

  Mary peered at the walls for house numbers as she drove, slowly now, her desire not to overshoot her mark deflating her sense of recklessness. A stone wall gave way to a newish brick wall, then a hedge, then another stone wall. Dr. Hammer’s number—48—was plainly visible on a generic black metal mailbox that emerged from the ground at a thirty degree angle, victim of repeated batterings by the winter plow. His driveway slid through a narrow gap in the brick.

  The problem with rich people, Mary thought, is that they’re impossible to stun. She stopped in the middle of the street, not wanting to turn into Dr. Hammer’s driveway. Her headlights would pique him, give him crucial seconds to wonder what the hell as she parked her car, walked to the door, rang the bell, predispose him to categorize her visit as an unwelcome surprise. Nor was there any shoulder on Water Street where she could leave her car. So her only choice, as she saw it, was the least noble one: turn off her headlights and drive up to the house in the dark.

  Mary extinguished her headlights and instantly the space in the brick into which she was turning extinguished as well. But she had already begun her turn and so, trusting that she’d aimed properly, she confidently drove Aunt Helen’s station wagon into what she abstractly experienced as a hardened piece of night.

  Her skull hurled toward the windshield, spared a concussion by the just-in-time retraction of her seat belt. Outside, a mini avalanche of brick bits and mortar ricocheted off the station wagon’s hood. Mary remained in the driver’s seat, stunned to n
ear fury by her stupidity. She opened her door and stepped into the dark, instantly tripping over a long, pipe-like something—her axle?—and pitching clumsily forward onto her hands and knees. From this humbled position, she surveyed the damage. The front of Aunt Helen’s car was so badly crushed it appeared to have been swallowed by the brick wall. The mailbox and its now broken post, over which she’d tripped, had caught in the car’s undercarriage; it now protruded at a perpendicular angle from behind the front wheels. Attached to the mailbox—by a severed chain—was a carved wood sign, the gilded cursive wriggingly alive in the glow cast from the car’s interior light: WANDERSLORE.

  She looked toward Dr. Hammer’s house, tensed against the explosion of dog barks or the sudden blazing of porch lights—but nothing. No one had heard the sound of Aunt Helen’s car striking their brick wall, or they’d heard it and attributed the noise to a more likely source, like the salt truck hitting a pothole.

  Her earlier desire to speak with Dr. Hammer was replaced by an overwhelming impulse to flee the scene. Better to simply disappear and allow the situation to resolve itself, however inaccurately; she could approach him again in a few days, maybe even a week, and she would either confess to running into his wall or she would not. The station wagon she could return to the spot in front of her house from which she’d removed it. She could allow Aunt Helen to believe that she’d drunkenly hit a parked car on her way to see her nieces. Aunt Helen, once properly saturated, forgot the majority of her pre-drunk day. She would view the crushed front half of her car, she would quietly slip the key into her ignition and drive home, operating on the theory that the fewer people who knew about her accident, the less chance of being caught, the less chance of her insurance premiums skyrocketing, the less chance that the world would have to publicly acknowledge that she was a drunk. What dismayed Mary, as she played out this scenario in her head, was how stupidly easy it was to be dishonest. People needed to be more vigilant. People needed to be more paranoid. People needed to realize that the least probable explanation was the most probable explanation. My niece stole my car to drive to see her former therapist, she ran into a brick wall trying to take him by surprise, and then she tried to gaslight me. But if Aunt Helen weren’t such a shirker then Mary wouldn’t be able to be a shirker either. Dishonesties bred dishonesties. Lies encouraged tiny epidemics. She should know.