Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  “Aubergine,” he said thoughtfully. “What an interesting name.”

  We beamed at him eagerly, my whole family.

  “It is, of course, the French word for ‘eggplant.’ ”

  “Oh, darn!” my mother said, unable to contain her sorrow.

  “Of course!” roared old dad.

  But we were a family long accustomed to reversals of fortune; in fact, my father had gone bankrupt misapprehending various facts about the dog track and his own competencies.

  “It suits you,” the bald diner said, smiling and turning the pages of his newspaper. “You are a little fat, yes? Like an eggplant!”

  “We call her Jean for short,” my mother had smoothly replied.

  * * *

  Clara was always teasing me. “Don’t fall in love with anybody,” she’d say, and then we’d laugh for longer than the joke really warranted, because this scenario struck us both as so unlikely. But as I leaned against this ghost, I felt my life falling into place. It was the spotlight of his eyes, those radiant beams, that gently drew motes from the past out of me—and I loved this. He had gotten me talking, and now I didn’t want to shut up. His eyes grew wider and wider, golden nets woven with golden fibers. I told him about my father’s suicide, my mother’s death. At the last second, I bit my tongue, but I’d been on the verge of telling him about Clara’s bruises, those mute blue coordinates. Not to solicit Lee’s help—what could this phantom do? No, merely to keep him looking at me.

  Hush, Aubby, I heard in Clara’s tiny, moth-fluttery voice, which was immediately incinerated by the hot pleasure of Lee’s gaze.

  We kissed a second time. I felt our teeth click together; two warm hands cupped my cheeks. But when he lifted his face, his anguish leapt out at me. His wild eyes were like bees trapped on the wrong side of a window, bouncing along the glass. “You…,” he began. He stroked at my cheek. “You feel…” Very delicately, he tried kissing me again. “You taste…” Some bewildered comment trailed off into silence. One hand smoothed over my dress, while the other rose to claw at his pale throat.

  “How’s that?” he whispered hoarsely in my ear. “Does that feel all right?”

  Lee was so much in the dark. I had no idea how to help him. I wondered how honest I would have wanted Lee to be with me, if he were in my shoes. Put him out of his misery, country people say of sick dogs. But Lee looked very happy. Excited, even, about the future.

  “Should we go upstairs, Jean?”

  “But where did Clara go?” I kept murmuring.

  It took great effort to remember her name.

  “Did she disappear on you?” Lee said, and winked. “Do you think she’s found her way upstairs, too?”

  Crossing the room, we spotted her. Her hands were clasped around the hog stubble of a large boy’s neck, and they were swaying in the center of the hexagon. I waved at her, trying to get her attention, and she stared right through me. A smile played on her face, while the chandeliers plucked up the red in her hair, strumming even the subtlest colors out of her.

  Grinning, Lee lifted a hand to his black eyebrow in a mock salute. His bloodless hand looked thin as paper. I had a sharp memory of standing at a bay window, in Florida, and feeling the night sky change direction on me—no longer lapping at the horizon but rolling inland. Something was pouring toward me now, a nothingness exhaled through the floury membrane of the boy. If Lee could see the difference in the transparency of our splayed hands, he wasn’t letting on.

  Now Clara was kissing her boy’s plush lips. Her fingers were still knitted around his tawny neck. Clara, Clara, we have abandoned our posts. We shouldn’t have kissed them; we shouldn’t have taken that black water onboard. Lee may not have known that he was dead, but my body did; it seemed to be having some kind of stupefied reaction to the kiss. I felt myself sinking fast, sinking far below thought. The two boys swept us toward the stairs with a courtly synchronicity, their uniformed bodies tugging us into the shadows, where our hair and our skin and our purple and emerald party dresses turned suddenly blue, like two candles blown out.

  And now I watched as Clara flowed up the stairs after her stocky dancing partner, laughing with genuine abandon, her head flung back and her throat exposed. I followed right behind her, but I could not close the gap. I watched her ascent, just as I had on the lift. Groggily, I saw them moving down a posy-wallpapered corridor. Even squinting, I could not make out the watery digits on the doors. All these doors were, of course, identical. One swung open, then shut, swallowing Clara. I doubted we would find each other again. By now, however, I felt very calm. I let Lee lead me by the wrist, like a child, only my bracelets shaking.

  * * *

  Room 409 had natural wood walls, glowing with a piney shine in the low light. Lee sat down on a chair and tugged off his work boots, flushed with the yellow avarice of 4 a.m. Darkness flooded steadily out of him, and I absorbed it. “Jean,” he kept saying, a word that sounded so familiar, although its meaning now escaped me. I covered his mouth with my mouth. I sat on the ghost boy’s lap, kissing his neck, pretending to feel a pulse. Eventually, grumbling an apology, Lee stood and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard a faucet turn on; Lord knows what came pouring out of it. The room had a queen bed, and I pulled back a corner of the soft cotton quilt. It was so beautiful, edelweiss white. I slid in with my dress still pinned to me. I could not stop yawning; seconds from now, I’d drop off. I never wanted to go back out there, I decided. Why lie about this? There was no longer any chairlift waiting to carry us home, was there? No mountain, no fool’s-gold moon. The Earth we’d left felt like a photograph. And was it such a terrible thing, to live at the lodge?

  Something was descending slowly, like a heavy theater curtain, inside my body; I felt my will to know the truth ebbing into a happy, warm insanity. We could all be dead—why not? We could be in love, me and a dead boy. We could be sisters here, Clara and me, equally poor and equally beautiful.

  Lee had come back and was stroking my hair onto the pillow. “Want to take a little nap?” he asked.

  I had never wanted anything more. But then I looked down at my red fingernails and noticed a tiny chip in the polish, exposing the translucent surface below. Clara had painted them for me yesterday morning, before the party—eons ago. Clara, I remembered. What is happening to Clara? I dug out of the heavy coverlet, struggling up. At precisely that moment, the door began to rattle in its frame; outside, a man was calling for Lee.

  “He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!” a baritone voice growled happily. “Goddammit, Lee, button up and get downstairs!”

  Lee rubbed his golden eyes and palmed his curls. I stared at him uncomprehendingly.

  “I regret the interruption, my dear. But this we cannot miss.” He grinned at me, exposing a mouthful of holes. “You wanna have your picture taken, doncha?”

  * * *

  Clara and I found each other on the staircase. What had happened to her, in her room? That’s a lock I can’t pick. Even on ordinary nights, we often split up, and afterward in the boardinghouse we never discussed those unreal intervals. On our prospecting expeditions, whatever doors we closed stayed shut. Clara had her arm around her date, who looked doughier than I recalled, his round face almost featureless, his eyebrows vanished; even the point of his green toothpick seemed blurred. Lee ran up to greet him, and we hung back while the two men continued downstairs, racing each other to reach the photographer. This time we did not try to disguise our relief.

  “I was falling asleep!” Clara said. “And I wanted to sleep so badly, Aubby, but then I remembered you were here somewhere, too.”

  “I was falling asleep,” I said, “but then I remembered your face.”

  Clara redid my bun, and I straightened her hem. We were fine, we promised each other.

  “I didn’t get anything,” Clara said. “But I’m not leaving empty-handed.”

&n
bsp; I gaped at her. Was she still talking about prospecting?

  “You can’t steal from this place.”

  Clara had turned to inspect a sculpted flower blooming from an iron railing; she tugged at it experimentally, as if she thought she might free it from the banister.

  “Clara, wake up. That’s not—”

  “No? That’s not why you brought me here?”

  She flicked her eyes up at me, her gaze limpid and accusatory. And I felt I’d become fluent in the language of eyes; now I saw what she’d known all along. What she’d been swallowing back on our prospecting trips, what she’d never once screamed at me, in the freezing boardinghouse: You use me. Every party, you bait the hook, and I dangle. I let them, I am eaten, and what do I get? Some scrap metal?

  “I’m sorry, Clara…”

  My apology opened outward, a blossoming horror. I’d used her bruises to justify leaving Florida. I’d used her face to open doors. Greed had convinced me I could take care of her up here, and then I’d disappeared on her. How long had Clara known what I was doing? I’d barely known myself.

  But Clara, still holding my hand, pointed at the clock. It was 5 a.m.

  “Dawn is coming.” She gave me a wide, genuine smile. “We are going to get home.”

  Downstairs, the CCC boys were shuffling around the dance floor, positioning themselves in a triangular arrangement. The tallest men knelt down, and the shorter men filed behind them. When they saw us watching from the staircase, they waved.

  “Where you girls been? The photographer is here.”

  The fires were still burning, the huge logs unconsumed. Even the walls, it seemed, were trembling in anticipation. This place wanted to go on shining in our living eyes, was that it? The dead boys feasted on our attention, but so did the entire structure.

  Several of the dead boys grabbed us and hustled us toward the posed and grinning rows of uniformed workers. We spotted a tripod in the corner of the lodge, a man doubled over, his head swallowed by the black cover. He was wearing a flamboyant costume: a ragged black cape, made from the same smocky material as the camera cover, and bright-red satin trousers.

  “Picture time!” his voice boomed.

  Now the true light of the Emerald Lodge began to erupt in rhythmic bursts. We winced at the metallic flash, the sun above his neck. The workers stiffened, their lean faces plumped by grins. It was an inversion of the standard firing squad: two dozen men hunched before the photographer and his mounted cannon. “Cheese!” the CCC boys cried.

  We squinted against the radiant detonations. These blasts were much brighter and louder than any shutter click on the Earth.

  With each flash, the men grew more definite: their chins sharpening, cheeks ripening around their smiles. Dim brows darkened to black arcs; the gold of their eyes deepened, as if each face were receiving a generous pour of whiskey. Was it life that these ghosts were drawing from the camera’s light? No, these flashes—they imbued the ghosts with something else.

  “Do not let him shoot you,” I hissed, grabbing Clara by the elbow. We ran for cover. Every time the flashbulb illuminated the room, I flinched. “Did he get you? Did he get me?”

  With an animal terror, we knew to avoid that light. We could not let the photographer fix us in the frame, we could not let him capture us on whatever film still held them here, dancing jerkily on the hexagonal floor. If that happens, we are done for, I thought. We are here forever.

  With his unlidded eye, the photographer spotted us where we had crouched behind the piano. Bent at the waist, his head cloaked by the wrinkling purple-black cover, he rotated the camera. Then he waggled his fingers at us, motioning us into the frame.

  “Smile, ladies,” Mickey Loatch ordered as we darted around the cedar tables.

  We never saw his face, but he was hunting us. This devil—excuse me, let us continue to call him “the party photographer,” as I do not want to frighten anyone unduly—spun the tripod on its rolling wheels, his hairy hands gripping its sides, the cover flapping onto his shoulders like a strange pleated wig. His single blue lens kept fixing on our bodies. Clara dove low behind the wicker chairs and pulled me after her.

  The CCC boys who were assembled on the dance floor, meanwhile, stayed glacially frozen. Smiles floated muzzily around their faces. A droning rose from the room, a sound like dragonflies in summer, and I realized that we were hearing the men’s groaning effort to stay in focus: to flood their faces with ersatz blood, to hold still, hold still, and smile.

  Then the chair tipped; one of our pursuers had lifted Clara up, kicking and screaming, and began to carry her back to the dance floor, where men were shifting to make a place for her.

  “Front and center, ladies,” the company captain called urgently. “Fix your dress, dear. The straps have gotten all twisted.”

  I had a terrible vision of Clara caught inside the shot with them, her eyes turning from brown to umber to the deathlessly sparkling gold.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Let her go! She—”

  She’s alive, I did not risk telling them.

  “She does not photograph well!”

  With aqueous indifference, the camera lifted its eye.

  “Listen, forgive us, but we cannot be in your photograph!”

  “Let go!” Clara said, cinched inside an octopus of the men’s restraining arms, every one of them pretending that this was still a game.

  We used to pledge, with great passion, always to defend each other. We meant it, too. These were easy promises to make, when we were safely at the boardinghouse; but on this mountain even breathing felt dangerous.

  But Clara pushed back. Clara saved us.

  She directed her voice at every object in the lodge, screaming at the very rafters. Gloriously, her speech gurgling with saliva and blood and everything wet, everything living, she began to howl at them, the dead ones. She foamed red, my best friend, forming the words we had been stifling all night, the spell-bursting ones:

  “It’s done, gentlemen. It’s over. Your song ended. You are news font; you are characters. I could read you each your own obituary. None of this—”

  “Shut her up,” a man growled.

  “Shut up, shut up!” several others screamed.

  She was chanting, one hand at her throbbing temple: “None of this, none of this, none of this is!”

  Some men were thumbing their ears shut. Some had braced themselves in the doorframes, as they teach the children of the West to do during earthquakes. I resisted the urge to cover my own ears as she bansheed back at the shocked ghosts:

  “Two years ago, there was an avalanche at your construction site. It was terrible, a tragedy. We were all so sorry…”

  She took a breath.

  “You are dead.”

  Her voice grew gentle, almost maternal—it was like watching the wind drop out of the world, flattening a full sail. Her shoulders fell, her palms turned out.

  “You were all buried with this lodge.”

  Their eyes turned to us, incredulous. Hard and yellow, dozens of spiny armadillos. After a second, the CCC company burst out laughing. Some men cried tears, they were howling so hard at Clara. Lee was among them, and he looked much changed, his face as smooth and flexibly white as an eel’s belly.

  These men—they didn’t believe her!

  And why should we ever have expected them to believe us, two female nobodies, two intruders? For these were the master carpenters, the master stonemasons and weavers, the master self-deceivers, the ghosts.

  “Dead,” one sad man said, as if testing the word out.

  “Dead. Dead. Dead,” his friends repeated, quizzically.

  But the sound was a shallow production, as if each man were scratching at topsoil with the point of a shovel. Aware, perhaps, that if he dug with a little more dedication, he would find his body lying breathless un
der this world’s surface.

  “Dead.” “Dead.”

  “Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.”

  “Dead.”

  They croaked like pond frogs, all across the ballroom. “Dead” was a foreign word, which the boys could pronounce perfectly, soberly, and matter-of-factly, without comprehending its meaning.

  One or two of them, however, exchanged a glance; I saw a burly blacksmith cut eyes at the ruby-cheeked trumpet player. It was a guileful look, a what-can-be-done look.

  So they knew; or they almost knew; or they’d buried the knowledge of their deaths, and we had exhumed it. Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat and continued to shine on.

  But then a quaking began to ripple across the ballroom floor. A chandelier, in its handsome zigzag frame, burst into a spray of glass above us. One of the pillars, three feet wide, cracked in two. Outside, from all corners, we heard a rumbling, as if the world were gathering its breath.

  “Oh, God,” I heard one of them groan. “It’s happening again.”

  My eyes met Clara’s, as they always do at parties. She did not have to tell me: Run.

  On our race through the lodge, in all that chaos and din, Clara somehow heard another sound. A bright chirping. A sound like gold coins being tossed up, caught, and fisted. It stopped her cold. The entire building was shaking on its foundations, but through the tremors she spotted a domed cage, hanging in the foyer. On a tiny stirrup, a yellow bird was swinging. The cage was a wrought-iron skeleton, the handiwork of phantoms, but the bird, we both knew instantly, was real. It was agitating its wings in the polar air, as alive as we were. Its shadow was denser than anything in that ice palace. Its song split our eardrums. Its feathers burned into our retinas, rich with solar color, and its small body was stuffed with life.