Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  He rouses himself from this fascination. He must prepare the body. She has no one else. Who else is there for this? His eyes search the room. Flowered shower curtain crumpled in the tub … bare chrome towel rack, one chalked end pulled slightly from the drywall. On the toilet tank is a beige enamel basin laid with dried grasses and wildflowers. Underneath the sink a stiff grey rag, scouring powder.

  Basin in his lap, in his hands, he sits a moment, watching her belly’s faint rise and fall. He seems to have forgotten his plan. He remembers now … he remembers everything. Memories, moments flood back to him in their tender rise and fall. He is grateful to have something now to do. Something solemn, necessary. At the sink he adjusts the temperature. Not too hot to burn her, not too chill. He adds the scouring powder, raises a blue froth with his bright-pink fingertips.

  He kneels to wash her hands. The deep blade-cuts in her left, the scratches in her right. Swishing the grey rag in the basin, wringing it dry. He is enchanted with the flexibility of her hands, the bonelessness of a small child’s. Again … left hand, right. He bathes her hands. Again. Each time he feels a little older with the popping in his knees, as he kneels close over her, across her, to the basin. Again. His head is bent low over the hand between his. He rocks again over warm, sticky knees.

  His face is lost in thought. His face is lost to sight. Time is lost to him. He has reached a place he has never been. The twisted cloth unwinds as it hangs from his stilled hands. His body continues to mark a time … a slow sway back and forth, as though to music. Perhaps there is music. He appears now to be singing, murmuring a lyric. Perhaps there is music. Small parts of the story are lost. The music, the sight of his face … the look in his eyes as he shudders, once, and asks from a place far off, what do you want from me? Small parts are lost.

  And still the white flutter behind his eyes, this confusion, this muted gesturing. There is something this flutter is concealing. Something hiding from him on the other side. He cannot keep her hands clean, though they are now more dear to him than anything. He cannot keep them clean. He has washed them many times in warm water. But now the left is bleeding more than ever. Something is very wrong with this bright, red blood, its rise and fall. She is alive. There is something else he should be doing. He has risen to a crouch.

  She is alive.

  She is bleeding to death.

  No towels there is nothing—no, not his filthy socks—he tears his T-shirt off, balls it tight against the chest wound. He holds it there, remembers she gave this shirt to him … some kind of joke of hers. The wound bleeds profusely, hot, bright. He has broken something open in her. Again. She is bleeding to death. Tie it down, bind it tight—he is tearing at the green plastic sheet, trying to rip it into strips. It is slippery, it won’t tear. It is strong, it won’t tear. Brightness spilling over the floor. It won’t tear … his weakness, its strength make him want to weep. He hacks away with a slippery shard of glass clutched tight in his fist. It is no good, it won’t cut straight.

  He is on her now, tamping the T-shirt down with the pressure of his own chest. It is tight. There will be less bleeding. Everything will be alright, he thinks this through the whiteness….

  It is warm here. The room is so white. Walls, tub, sink. He could fall asleep. He feels the smooth warmth of skin on skin. Remembers how it once was with them.

  It is only later that his arousal will fill him with a mortal, scorching shame. Now it only stirs and deepens his confusion; he lies trembling slightly, like a dog half-trained. He pushes the coat down over her thighs. With one hand he fumbles open the button of his jeans. He arches his back, spreads wide the fly. He would love to take off his jeans, feel the full, swelling length of skin on skin, but he cannot do this without lifting the pressure from her chest.

  He has taken her before in her sleep, more than once. This warmth, this whiteness … But it has been so long. A long time. He feels the need to ask. A kind of delicacy. He looks into her face, waiting, to see if she will wake.

  She is having trouble breathing under his weight. But she is bleeding. She is breathing, she is bleeding. He must stop one of these. It is important here, he knows, not to be mistaken. He must stop one of these.

  Relief … he feels a dizzy urge to write the answer down. He leans down to give her his breath, seals her lips, the prince’s kiss, the kiss of life. She stirs. Under him. Now she will wake. Everything will be alright now. She stirs. He will ask if it’s okay. Her eyes open, she smiles up into his. Warmth, reassurance … those green and amber eyes, so near. The light runs out of them. Three convulsions.

  One.

  Two. At the second the fingers of her right hand claw his forearm.

  The third wracks her—the smiling face crashes into his then the head slams back against the floor. A low echo, muffled … sodden. He hears it still.

  He hears a siren, wailing now. Far off. An accident somewhere, the roads are hell.

  As at a switch being thrown pain hits him in a wave. A mix of voltages and frequencies. A raking—his arm, flame in his knees and feet, cold agony in one palm … mouth scorched, at his temple a dark bloom of pain.

  His nose is bleeding again.

  The siren is for him. He looks down over his hairy, blood-caked length. Run. He sees himself as he shall be seen, run. They will see him, they will know him they will know. He scrambles to his feet, does up his pants, turns—

  In the hall an animal cunning stops him, the small ally within. He turns back for the coat draped across her thighs, does not look at her as he lifts it, at his lucky rabbit’s foot. He remembers the phone. With a pillowcase, he wipes the receiver clean. Walks back to the living room. The cardboard box. Take the box with the name. His cunning is a friend to him, a small animal in the night. He lifts the box but pauses. It is nearly empty. A few keepsakes….

  He fills it with the things stacked neatly beside, slips through the sliding door and over the rail. He protects his hand with a pillowcase.

  The air is less cold. A warm wind has stirred.

  Into the pit of his stomach seeps an icy sensation. In the rearview mirror, as he turns back toward the boulevard, coloured lights flash gaily in the street.

  He runs away. He saves himself. He is unmasked.

  He runs.

  Let the record show it. Let it show his face. By these works he shall be known.

  BRIGHT CHILD

  [Equinox]

  Gentle Reader, Gentle Don,

  Come in. Come and dwell in me. I have prepared a place for you, I have opened a vein. Enter me quietly. Swim upstream, like a salmon, a virus, a bacterium. Come be my disease.

  Your invitation—here I sign it, I sign with me. Come, sit down to eat. We will eat cool darkness. We will spew hot light. I am so tired now, I no longer believe. In this … it is so late for theories. But I have opened a way. Here, another. Hotter, brighter.

  Will this make you come faster?

  We will eat our deaths, we will vomit up our lives. We will become each other, the enemy of both sides. How I have fought to make you me, how I have fought to make me you. And now I make us both and neither.

  This final test, it is exactly time. When I no longer believe, when none of this must be, when there is new life, new fire. Now, exactly now, a test of faith, when there is another way for me—here, I open one more to you.

  Still you haven’t come. So many times I have called. Do not be angry. Do not resent me, Gentle Don, that I have wished you other than you are. My other, the one you might have been. Have you ever seen your face? I have seen it. Here, I will burn your mask away. So you can meet him, too, face to face.

  Together you will see such wonders.

  I bring you fire. I have come to burn your house down, Don. To the ground, so you can build it new. I am so tired. I cannot wait much longer. Here, I open a new way for you. Wider, shorter, hotter. Hurry now.

  Where are you? Your supper’s getting cold. I have cooked meat for you, no fat no bone. Are you ever coming home?

/>   Sheet after sheet, I have tended this small fire. To feed you my liver, baked fresh each dawn to make you strong. To feed you my heart, cupped wildly beating in your palms.

  We too have loved an impossible love. Haven’t we Don?

  Where are you? Is that you—at the window?

  Hurry please. We can go a little way together. I’ll walk you to the door. Come, let’s go see what’s on the far shore. Of you, of me, of you and me. Do not be afraid. Bend, Don, you will not break. Bend to me. We are not made of glass. You have opened me. Now I open me to you. I am open to the future, can you be too?

  You are so late now. I hoped we could talk. I have found new things for us to talk about …

  But still you are not here, you haven’t come. You will have to finish for yourself now.

  You will be my clay. Bright Child, this is what I’ve waited so long to tell you. You will be my greatest art, as I am yours. We were always twins, we are ever other. We are made of dark and light, we rise to fall to earth again, through nights without end.

  Bright Child, born of Night. Who are you?

  You are not you, I am not I. Is it really true that two in one must die?

  You walk to me through fire, through night. There is such a brightness in your eyes. That flows from us, that flows through you and me. Have you seen? See it on our hands—see? Feel it running through our hands, so lightly.

  I hear you at the door. I call out to you.

  And oh, Bright Child, God … how I have loved you, these long years.

  JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ

  Alan Trueblood, trans.

  Si los riesgos del mar considerara,

  ninguno se embarcara; si antes viera

  bien su peligro, nadie se atreviera

  ni al bravo toro osado provocara.

  Si del fogoso bruto ponderara

  la furia desbocada en la carrera

  el jinete prudente, nunca hubiera

  quien con discreta mano lo enfrenara.

  Pero si hubiera alguno tan osado

  que, no obstante el peligro, al mismo Apolo

  quisiese gobernar con atrevida

  mano el rápido carro en luz bañado,

  todo lo hiciera, y no tomara sólo

  estado que ha de ser toda la vida.

  If men weighed the hazards of the sea,

  none would embark. If they foresaw

  the dangers of the ring, rather than taunt

  the savage bull, they’d cautiously withdraw.

  If the horseman should prudently reflect

  on the headlong fury of the steed’s wild dash,

  he’d never undertake to rein him in

  adroitly, or to wield the cracking lash.

  But were there one of such temerity

  that, facing undoubted peril, he still planned

  to drive the fiery chariot and subdue

  the steeds of Apollo himself with daring hand,

  he’d stop at nothing, would not meekly choose

  a way of life binding a whole life through.

  EPILOGUE

  THE PLANE BEGAN its slow descent somewhere over Montana. From six miles in the air the blond earth was like a pelt, the matted flank of an elk in spring. I knew this country, searched it now for some sign of the season. Patches of snow in gullies, the faintest green on south-facing hills. At maybe two miles up, the patterns emerged. I’d forgotten this. No two fields ploughed or cut or seeded alike. Like a factory floor of shredded wheat; or microchips on some planetary circuit board. From lower down a twisted circuitry of coils and glints, of rivers in wooded draws. Then the sprawl and jumble of suburbs as we banked for the final approach.

  On May 8th, 1995, I flew back to Calgary from Mexico City, after three days in London, three weeks in Mexico, thirty-six hours without sleep.

  And after having known Beulah Limosneros little more than three years. It felt like ten. Ten years up the Amazon. Things I could not begin to explain even to myself. But I needed to, more than ever now.

  It felt like lives. The life before her, the time with her. The slow time of forgetting. The lifetime since she called again on Valentine’s. Another since the equinox.

  I drove a rental directly to the Foothills Hospital. I’d called Dr. Aspen once or twice from Mexico. She was evasive about Beulah’s progress, a little defensive. She seems to have been hoping I would be of more help. I would have liked that too, but before. When it might have made a difference. Before.

  I found my way to Elsa Aspen’s office.

  She took a long look.

  “Remind me never to vacation in Mexico.”

  That beautiful, reedy voice, so much richer than over the phone. Dr. Aspen was still receptive to our working together. Beulah had no friends here that either of us knew of. “Friendship,” Dr. Aspen said, “can be a powerful thing.”

  I stood looking at her.“I’m the last person you should take for Beulah’s friend.”

  “You’re what we’ve got. It was you she called. Maybe not the best choice…. Anyway, you won’t be alone with her.”

  “So—what, you take notes, while I sit at her bedside patting her hand—‘Wake up, Beulah, wake up, it’s Don, your old friend’?”

  “You don’t know, do you?” She frowned slightly “Of course you don’t. I’m sorry.”

  I sat a long moment across from her, looking past her desk, to the hills beyond her window. I thought about the many things I did not know, no longer knew, about not wanting to hear another.

  “She’s awake.”

  “Awake.”

  “For two weeks now. But hasn’t spoken. No, her mind is fine, I think. She writes. Quite a lot, in fact. She’s let me see a note or two. Her mind seems fine.”

  “But then you didn’t know her before.”

  “Which is where you come in, if you’re willing.”

  “She has family.”

  “That she refuses to see. Except the brother.”

  “And?”

  “He has her trust. I don’t want him to lose it.”

  “Which is where I come in.”

  “It’s thankless, yes…. I had no idea you’d find good news so upsetting.”

  “Has she asked for me?”

  “I’m not asking you to violate her trust, just general impressions. I’ve decided not to talk to the brother at all.”

  “So she won’t wonder.”

  “She knows if you’re here, it’s because I’ve okayed it.”

  “And she’ll know why.”

  “So if she talks to you …”

  But she did not talk to me. I did not go in.

  I got as far as glancing through the window panel in the door, where I was to wait while Dr. Aspen went in to prepare her. No farther. I had no business being there. I could not act the friend, though it was why I thought I’d come—why I did come. We had done enough to each other. She had her whole life before her.

  Two beds, one empty. One name tag at the door. I didn’t get a clear look at her in the bed under the window.

  Stalling, I asked Dr. Aspen why Beulah didn’t have her own room—her father was not short of money. No, it was a precaution, easier for the nurses to keep an eye on things. But never mind that now. I stopped the good doctor as she reached for the door, I told her no.

  Elsa Aspen was straight about one thing: she didn’t judge. Not a trace of irritation in her eyes. “I understand,” is all she said.

  I hoped, just then, she might explain it to me.

  On the following day, May 9, Relkoff brought me a packet, sent from Mexico. Late for my birthday by just the one day. A slight imprecision in her calendar. The packet contained Beulah’s last few chapters from the Yucatán, in a tone I’d never heard. But then there was a lot I had not heard.

  I wondered if these chapters really were the last, though it said they were. I wondered how many more little packets of dread she might have sent, and which of those might still reach me.

  And, small parts of the story were already lost.
r />   In the afternoons, usually, I stop work on the manuscript to take drives out through the foothills.

  Once, a long time back, this land was described to me as the undulation of an ancient breath, in one of my father’s rapt disquisitions on geology. These were natural histories with the texture of myth, tales of alien chronologies and inscrutable motivations—vanished seas, and inexplicable returns. Rambling chronicles of titanic uprisings and eruptions. All the hecatombs—the vast dyings. Weaving from ditch to ditch, he’d especially loved to talk about oil, as this rot that lights and warms the world.

  Lately I drive those same roads and wonder how he is. Still maybe in that motorhome in Arizona, the last time I saw him, exhibiting the first signs of his own father’s senescence, the thing he feared most. Oblivion ahead, oblivion behind. Roaring, as he had for years, half-drunk, from the one to the other. Telling stories constantly now, afraid of forgetting, of some final interruption.

  I’d gone down to find him, just after I married Madeleine. It must be ten years ago. To tell him, to ask if he would meet her. He sat in a recliner, arms on the velour armrests. Seeming not to have heard, he started in on the old stories of work accidents and sports and brawls, all with uncanny detail, as though the chemistry of a memory had just torn loose and drifted through his mind. Blocks of ice broken free of a floe, or dislodged sections of a puzzle. He would finish and start to cry, sobbing like a small, inconsolable child, then fall asleep like a child. And in a minute or an hour wake up talking, in the middle of another story. Over and over for hours. Hundreds, I’d heard them all. But never in this much detail, never all together.

  For years, we’d driven everywhere together. From the time I was too small to sit and see out. Instead I stood on the hump of the drive-shaft behind the front seat and peered forward, my eyes just clearing the seat-back. We drove for hours like that, we drove for years.