by lize Spit
Was that PowerPoint still going? Would those pictures of me, Pim and Laurens projected on the wall, playing over and over again—each time repeating the wrong account of history—reveal how our friendship really ended? Or would they stop short, at the last photo of Jan, taken roughly six months before the summer of 2002?
I check Facebook again.
Jolan is online too, on his phone. There’s a green dot next to his name. I’ve turned off my chat to everyone except the people I want to know are online, so I can see how often they sign on, so I can assess how well they are doing, whether they too spend their days wishing they had someone else’s life. Neither Laurens nor Pim has been on for three hours. They don’t want to be anywhere but at this posthumous party. Tessie is online too, not on her phone, but from a fixed connection.
All three of us are looking at a screen right now. Tessie in Nadine’s big white villa, Jolan less than twenty meters away from me. He’s hearing the same music I am; he’s probably thinking about the same things. Maybe he stopped by Mom and Dad’s house earlier today too.
They should all be able to see that I’m online too. So why aren’t they saying anything?
I open an old group chat.
“Hello Tessie, hello Jolan,” I write. I hit Enter. The way I’ve written it makes it sound so official. That wasn’t my intention.
On a new line, I add a smiley.
August 7, 2002
FOR THE PAST two days, I’ve been acting like one of those fishermen Laurens and I used to see on the dike along the Albert Canal when we crossed the bridge on our way to school. Unless there was tension on the line, they’d never pull it out to check if they might have caught something anyway. They didn’t want to scare away the larger, approaching fish.
The best fishermen are never the ones with the most expensive raincoats, or the ones who cast their lines the most gracefully. The best fishermen are the ones with the most patience. Every time they cast a line and the bait goes untouched for a while, they have to convince themselves all over again that there’s a big, fat fish on the way, that it will bite in the next few minutes, that it’s worth it to wait just a little bit longer. All they see is the water sloshing against the dike, the mouth of the beer bottle they press against their lips.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to do—just get through the day. By not looking at the clock, not watching the hours slowly passing by, not noticing how little happens. I sit in a spot overlooking the backyard with a comic book in my lap. Every time Tessie goes out into the hall or I have to go to the bathroom myself, I force myself not to check whether she’s typed any words in the empty document.
Yesterday, I had these strange cramps in my lower abdomen all day. Only then did it truly hit me, what I was actually doing. By setting up that empty document, I was using Tessie’s most trusted confidante as bait, as a double agent.
I was sure Tessie had typed something by now. It was the first thing she did every morning—she had to pass by the computer to get downstairs. And when she went from the bathroom to the kitchen to fix herself something for breakfast, or got up to go to the bathroom, she must’ve had to type something. She must have taken the bait.
I avoided her all day. I was afraid she would notice, by the way I moved, by the way I looked at her, that I was the one who was trying to trap her. I had no idea if the document was still open, if the computer had crashed, if she had figured out what I was up to and disconnected the keyboard.
Again today, I hope the computer will continue recording everything. Running into Tessie in the hallway is harder than usual. Maybe I’m afraid these last few hours will be too much for her, that my help will arrive just a little too late.
I think of Elisa almost as often as I think of Tessie. It’s possible that she’s already over at one of the boys’ houses, that they’re having the big summer finale without me, that they don’t need me there to tell the riddle anymore.
Would Elisa remember the answer? Would she play dumb at first and then suddenly realize just how valuable the information I’d given her at Lille Mountain was? Would she call to thank me? Would her gratitude lead to something new, a friendship that could eventually replace Laurens and Pim?
Every time I think of Elisa, of how she could be with Pim and Laurens at this very moment, of how beautiful she is, I feel the double bras pressing into my chest. I’m pulling a fast one on everybody.
At the end of the afternoon, I finally have the chance to check the document. Tessie and Mom have gone to the supermarket. Mom has been letting her tag along lately in the hope that she might actually eat the food she picks out herself.
As soon as the car is out of the driveway, I dash over to the sideboard and lay my hand on the tower. It’s red-hot under the blanket, but it’s still churning. I turn on the monitor. The document is still open. The white page is covered in writing.
I use the arrows to scroll through the pages and bring the cursor back to the top. It takes a half-minute to get all the way back to the beginning. At the bottom of the document it says: “Page 26 of 28”.
I don’t read anything yet. I just let the letters pass through the ascending cursor.
Tessie and Mom won’t be gone long. There’s no way I’ll be able to read the whole thing before they get back.
I go get the printer. After a lot of fiddling with cables and shuffling around clutter, I manage to print the whole document. I click on double-sided. That way the paper will reflect how it looks in her head. Hundreds of lines, divided across the two sides of her brain.
I tidy everything up and make sure to clear my tracks. I take the stack of paper outside and search for a place where I won’t be disturbed. I sit down under the pear tree in the back of the garden, where I used to sit with the 3Suisses catalog and check off certain pictures in pencil—not of the clothes I wanted, but of the women I wanted to be.
I’ve brought a few comic books to bear down on. I lean back against the tree trunk. For a few minutes, I look out at the landscape in front of me, the driveway and the fields. Elisa’s grazing stallion has no idea that there was once a more beloved horse than him.
The white papers in my lap reflect the sunlight. It’s not that I want to start reading. The letters are both repulsive and attractive at the same time.
A cardiogram is to a heartbeat what this printout is to Tessie’s thoughts. I’m not supposed to see this. I’m not a doctor; I can’t help.
But I don’t have a choice, just as I have no choice but to look at flattened pigeons on the street for at least ten seconds, to examine their crushed skulls, their twisted intestines, because the only thing that would make it worse would be if their death didn’t horrify me at all.
On the first pages, everything is written in lowercase letters, Arial, size 12, exactly as I set it up myself. I start out reading very slowly, to let it really sink in.
But within seconds, I realize it’s not written in any decipherable language. There are no recognizable words, no content. The only thing that makes a bit of sense are the numbers; sometimes counted up to ten, sometimes alternating between even and odd.
Since the keyboard was never fixed after Jolan spilled lemonade on it, the A-key sometimes gets stuck. Halfway through the first page, the A’s start creeping in, more often and longer. By the sixth page they count for about a third of the letters. From there, the entire message reads like one long scream.
After fifteen pages, the Caps Lock is switched on. Judging by how far along in the document we are, it must have happened last night. Tessie couldn’t have possibly noticed this herself; nothing lights up when Caps Lock is turned on. The transition from small to large letters forms a clear separation between what was written on the first day and what was written on the second. But it remains meaningless. No concrete sentences, no message, no information, no explanation for her odd behavior.
But the capital letters do create a strange tone, angrier, more powerful. I look up from the sheet.
The stallion has his t
ail high in the air; he’s taking a piss. As long as Elisa isn’t out there with her horse, she could be with Pim and Laurens.
I get up, walk back into the house and grab a notebook and a highlighter. I have to decode whatever there is to be decoded. I need to know how bad Tessie is. Because whatever is wrong with Tessie could’ve been wrong with me; we’ve been through the same things. And yet, I’m not the one typing like crazy on a switched-off computer every day. Somehow, I’ve escaped this, but I can’t remember how, which way out I took.
I start highlighting all the letters between the many A’s, until only the original, intended ones emerge. I look for meaningful terms, names. I write down all the words I encounter, one by one, in my notebook. In the margin, I keep a tally of the ones that appear more than once.
It’s mostly articles, a few simple words that could have been typed deliberately or by chance—stand, lamp, sip, till, cut, crab, oreo.
On page two, there are three letters that jump out at me. Eva. My name is repeated more often than any other combination of letters. Every time I add a tally by my name, a sharp pain ripples through my lower abdomen. Twenty times. Jolan isn’t mentioned once.
Maybe there’s something about the layout of the keyboard that makes the E and the V two letters that are often struck by random typers, and the A, well, it’s all over the place. My name is simply a matter of all the letters being in the right place. “Jolan” would be a much greater coincidence.
Halfway through the stack of papers, the car pulls into the driveway. Mom and Tessie step out and start unloading the groceries from the trunk. Tessie carries a crate of beer to the workshop and sets it down in front of the door, next to the empty crates. Her shoulder blades are sharp and jut out of her back, as if she needs to let them puff up with air.
Mom grabs the least heavy shopping bags first.
Tessie walks back to the trunk to get the second crate of beer. Only then does she notice my presence. I hide the stack of papers under the comic books. She waves, but I don’t react—she can’t come over here right now.
With a straight back, she hauls the next crate of beer to the back of the house. Her pants are too big, and she doesn’t have a free hand to pull them up. With every step, they slide down, exposing her crack.
I turn back to the pages. There must be something to distill from them: a message, a secret, an escape plan, a series of goodnights like the one she has to recite every evening.
The old Windows isn’t an authority that Tessie has to report to, it’s become her very operating system.
I’ve been sitting out here for half a day. I don’t realize how much time has passed until I notice that the long, skinny shadow of the tree trunk that was on my left when I came out here is now on my right.
All of a sudden, Tessie comes running towards me. I quickly stash the papers between the comic books.
“Look,” she says, opening her hand. It’s empty.
“Oh, well, I caught a grasshopper. But he escaped.”
She sits down next to me. We both look out at the fields. All of a sudden, there she is, in the pasture in front of us—Elisa. She saddles up the horse and climbs up effortlessly onto his back. There’s a good chance she hasn’t met up with Laurens and Pim yet.
“You know what I heard?” Tessie asks.
She looks straight at me. Her eyelids flutter above the thick gray circles under her eyes. It looks as if her face has just decided to accept the dark, saggy skin. She’ll never be able to get rid of the bags, no matter how much she sleeps.
“What?”
“Mimi poisoned the last horse.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she bought rat poison from Agnes a few days beforehand.”
“Agnes sells rat poison?”
“She used to.”
“Why would Mimi do that?”
“You’ll have to ask her. Maybe Twinkle was too expensive to take care of and nobody was riding her anymore anyway? All I know is she didn’t want the vet to do an autopsy. That says it all.”
“I think we have to go in and eat,” I say.
“I’m coming,” she says so I’ll go in first, and she can use the back door without anybody watching.
We’ve already started eating by the time Tessie joins us at the table. She took advantage of the fact that we were all gathered in the kitchen to type, to make up for the passages she missed today.
She looks at the carefully arranged sandwich fillings on the cutting board. Mom has layered the cheese slices like scales to make them look fancier than they really are and added a few slices of cucumber as garnish. There is also a plate of smoked mackerel topped off with chopped onions. Dad slaps a piece of fish onto a slice of bread and starts picking out the bones. He sets each one he finds in the corner of his placemat—penalty points for Mom.
“What’ll it be, Tessie?” Jolan asks.
For a while, Tessie says nothing. She’s considering her answer.
Dad starts counting down from five. When he gets to one, Tessie snatches up a slice of cucumber.
Dad’s favorite threat used to be: “I’ll give you a swat on your bare behind in front of the whole town.” He used to say this a lot to keep us in line, weekly almost.
Every time, I imagined it what it would be like—my bare butt bent over on Dad’s knee on the church steps. I wondered who would come to watch.
He almost did it once too, with Tessie. She was still just barely small enough to be carried. She had done something wrong at the table, I don’t remember what, knocked over a glass of milk maybe, or said something rude. Dad got up, jerked down her pants, swung her over his shoulder and hauled her out of the house.
“Don’t move,” Mom snarled at me and Jolan. The dog whimpered with her nose pressed against the window on the sliding door.
We stayed in our seats and listened to Tessie cry and scream all the way down the Bulksteeg towards town—with every step, we could see Dad’s white hair and Tessie’s bare behind spring up over the top of the hedge. We were sure he wouldn’t really do it, but we weren’t sure if Tessie knew that. The screaming didn’t stop until they turned off the street.
It happened on a Saturday. We were eating mackerel then too.
“Can you pass the butter?” Dad asks. Tessie hands him the butter dish. The slice of cucumber is still on her plate. Nothing on the table matches. I’ve recently learned a few rules of color combination: yellow doesn’t go with green.
“Can I put the Nutella on the table?” I ask. I know this is against the rules of this household—no sugar in the evening.
“I won’t have any tomorrow morning. I’ll eat cheese. It’s all the same in the end, and that way Tessie can have something sweet now,” I say.
“This has nothing to do with the amount of chocolate,” Dad says.
Maybe that’s one way to recognize the families in which even the most basic things aren’t right—they try to compensate with all kinds of ridiculous rules and principles.
I stand up, walk over to the cupboard and take out the store-brand chocolate spread. I slam the jar down on the table. Jolan lowers his eyes. Mom and Dad keep eating in silence. As long as they’re not sober, we’ve got stronger counterarguments.
I see Tessie hesitate. She wants to honor my rebellion, but she also doesn’t want to cross Mom and Dad if she doesn’t have to. She looks at me. She looks at Mom. I smile encouragingly.
She spreads a thin layer of gooey chocolate on a piece of bread.
For the second time in the history of this family, Dad doesn’t ask whether she’s having chocolate-covered bread or bread-covered chocolate.
The Gnawed-off Foot
AFTER THE PERIOD of nighttime solidarity rituals, Tessie started asking me for a story every night before bed.
“Aren’t you a little old for that?” I asked.
“Never,” she said.
She didn’t really care about the plot. All she wanted was for me to use as many diminutive words as possible, fo
r the world around us not to matter anymore, to be cut off from the arguing voices around us. The stories were mostly variations on the same theme: someone ending up safe and sound, there was a threat of a natural disaster, but everyone was saved.
The day Elisa was transferred to the sixth grade and I refused to finger the blackberry jam in front of all the girls, it was particularly cold. I remember this because I had lent Elisa my mittens that morning and my hands were freezing on the way home from school. That evening we ate pea soup. Mom always made pea soup in that kind of weather. She’d always say she was going to invite the postman in for a cup, but in the end, all the leftovers went in the freezer.
That evening Tessie begged me for a story, but I couldn’t think of one.
“You can choose. One story or two,” she concluded.
I always thought Tessie was a good negotiator, but it suddenly occurred to me that I was just a bad refuser.
So, I started telling a super-babyish story about two little bunnies, hoping that she’d say, “That’s enough, you can stop.” But she clung to my every word.
“The little bunnies hopped and hopped, but they had no idea what was brewing off in the distance.”
I paused dramatically and sat up straight in my bed to emphasize the severity of the looming threat.
“A big, huge tidal wave. Higher than our house!”
Another pause.
“Well, to make a long story short—the two little bunnies were just about to hop back down in their hole when the bigger bunny got his foot caught in a hunter’s trap. The little one wanted to help, but there was no time. The big bunny was stuck, and the tidal wave was getting closer and closer. ‘Bite my foot off!’ the big bunny squeaked, but the little bunny didn’t dare. He’d never bitten into anything but carrots. The big bunny begged and begged, but the little one had no choice but to leave him behind. He hopped down in the hole in the nick of time and shut the watertight door so the tidal wave couldn’t touch him. Outside, the water washed away everything in its path.”