“Gizzy, is your daughter—is she here? In the—in the store?”
Gizzy turns her face away and finishes writing. She hands the paper to me. “Sign this?”
I do.
“Your final check will come in the mail,” she says, and I nod. “Bye, kiddo. If you ever want your job back, you know how to find me.” She squeezes my hand lightly and puts the pen in a drawer.
Through the narrowing gap of the closing office door, I see Gizzy staring at the far wall.
Petra is waiting next to my car.
“You forgot this.” She hands me the missing key. I take it and slide it into my pocket. I look away from her.
“I just quit,” I say. “I’m leaving.” I open the driver’s-side door and drop into the seat. She gets in next to me. “Look, what do you want?” I say.
“You like me, right?”
I rub my neck. “Yes. I guess.”
“Why don’t we go out? For real this time.” She slings a heavy boot up on the dashboard. “No faded women. No dresses. Just, I dunno, movies and food and fucking.”
I hesitate.
“Promise,” she says.
I find a cleaning job at the local condiment factory, a late-night shift. The pay is shit, but no worse than Glam. One job is the same as another. I move out of my apartment and into the motel, where I can stay for free. The rooms are never entirely full and Petra assures me her mother will never know the difference.
I spend most of my time in the factory sweeping, mopping, walking past large rooms where hot, acrid blasts of cooking wine take the air out of my lungs. Barbecue sauce is brewing and the smell saturates my hair and clothes. I rarely catch a glimpse of another human being, and I like it that way. I often find myself searching the dark corners, but why would they come here? I am always afraid that I will find one trying to cook herself into the mustard, but I never do.
Months fall away. I consider going to grad school, if the government doesn’t shut the universities down like they’re threatening to. We binge-watch medical procedural shows and eat lo mein and kiss and fuck and sleep odd hours tangled up together like coat hangers.
One night, I find her standing in front of the bathroom mirror, pulling at her face in the fluorescent light. I come up behind her and kiss her shoulder. “Hey,” I say. “Sorry, I really smell like a steak today. I’ll wash up.”
I step into the shower. The water heats my skin, and I moan from the sensation. The shower curtain rustles, and Petra joins me, her skin drawn up into goose bumps. She puts her hand behind my head, heating it up in the water, and then slips it between my legs. The other one loops through my hair, pulls me against the tile.
After I come, she steps out of the shower. When I leave the bathroom, drying my hair, she’s lying spread-eagled on the bed, and I know.
“I’m fading,” she says, and as she says it, I can see that her skin is more like skim milk than whole, that she seems less there. She breathes and the impression blinks, like she’s fighting it. I feel like my feet are trapdoors that have sprung open, and my insides are hurtling out of my body. I want to hold her, but I’m afraid that if I do, she’ll give way beneath my arms. “I don’t want to die,” she says.
“I don’t think—they’re not dead,” I say, but the statement feels like a lie and is unhelpful in every way.
I have never seen Petra cry, not until now. She brings her hands to her face—the outline of her lips visible, ever so faintly, through their jail bars of tendons, muscle, and bone. A shudder runs the length of her body. I touch her, and still she has mass. A stone.
“A few months,” she says. “Or something like that. That’s what the news says, right?” She pinches the bridge of her nose, tugs her earlobes, presses her fingers tightly into her stomach.
That first night, Petra just wants to be held, so that’s what I do. We line up our bodies and press them together, every inch. She wakes up ravenous—for food, for me.
A few days later, my eyes open at dawn and Petra is not there. I flip back the covers, stalk into the bathroom, shove the shower curtain open with a slinking rattle. A chill moves through my body, and I check the drawers, the space beneath the TV, the inside of the radiator. Nothing.
As the mattress creaks beneath my sinking body, she comes though the door, her shirt sticking to her through patches of sweat. She bends over and puts her hands on her knees, still trying to catch her breath. Only when she looks up does she see me, shaking.
“Oh god, oh god, I’m so fucking sorry.” She sits down next to me and I bury my face in her shoulder, where she smells like loam.
“I thought it’d happened already,” I whisper. “I thought you were gone.”
“I just needed to get out into the morning,” she says. “I wanted to feel my body running.” She kisses me. “Let’s do something tonight.”
When the sun sets, we go to the trucker bar behind the motel. The beer tastes watery and the glasses sweat. We sit at a table with pictures of fox heads and people’s names carved into the scarred wood. Petra has discovered that she can pass small objects through her fingers sometimes, so she drops coins into her hand as we sip our beers. I can’t watch.
“Let’s play darts or something,” I say.
Petra lifts her fingers and tries to grab the quarter on the table. Her fingers pass through it once, twice, but on the third try her hand seems to blink into the physical universe again and she gets it. She sinks the quarter into the jukebox. I ask the bartender for darts and he hands them to me in an old cigar box.
We take turns throwing them at the target. Neither of us is very good, and I bury one in the wall. Petra’s laugh is dark and liquid.
“My aim has never been good,” I confess. “When I was a kid, we used to have a beanbag toss game that my aunt bought us, and I literally never once got a beanbag into the hole. Not a single time. We’re talking literally years of my life. My brother thought it was the goddamn funniest thing he’d ever seen.”
Petra stares at me. A handsome smile pulls at the edge of her mouth and then vanishes, replaced by a flattened expression. Then she says, “Your family sounds really fucking nice.” The word nice is like a splinter of glass.
I have been picking up my phone every few days, intending to explain to my family that women are sewn into dresses and I’m working at a factory and am living in a motel with the daughter of a seamstress who is also dying though not exactly dying. I can’t. The last time I talked to my mother, I assured her I was solid and safe, though I confessed to her that I’d had to delay my student loan payments again. I made up stories about the day’s clients, and it must have been believable because she sounded relieved.
“They are,” I say. “Maybe you’ll get to meet them one day.”
“I wouldn’t bother. I’m on the way out, right?”
“Jesus fuck, Petra. Don’t talk like that. And don’t talk to me like that.”
She falls into a sullen silence; absently picks at a zit on her chin. She finishes her beer, buys another, her dart tosses becoming less precise, yawning wider and wider from the center target. I don’t like the way she is pulling the darts out of the board—like she’s yanking on an opponent’s ponytail. After the fourth game, her hand blinks out mid-drink and the glass falls, beer and shards of glass asterisking on the wooden floorboards.
Petra walks over to the board. I can see her opening and closing her fist, feeling for substance. In the moment that matter returns to her, she rests her hand, flat and palm down, on the wall. Pulling the dart from the target, she plunges it deep into the back of her hand, just below the knuckles.
From the back of the bar, someone yells, “Holy shit.”
I crash past the table and grab Petra, though not before she has plunged the needle of the dart into her hand twice more. She is screaming. Blood streams down her arm like maypole ribbons. Men get up quickly from their stools and chairs, some of which clatter to the floor. Petra flails, howling. Her blood spatters the wall like rain. A stocky man
in a black baseball cap helps me drag her out the front door. I half-carry, half-haul her across the icy parking lot. After we have gone a few dozen yards, she seems to soften in my arms. For a moment, I am terrified she is fading again, but no, she is still solid, just limp with exhaustion and stubbornness. A dark trail marks the path we have taken.
She refuses the hospital. In our room, I disinfect her wound, wrap it in gauze.
We have never fucked with such urgency as we do in these weeks, but she is fading more and feeling less. She comes infrequently. She withdraws for longer and longer periods of time—one minute, four, seven. Each episode shows a different view of her—a skeleton, ropy muscles, the dark shapes of her organs, nothing. She wakes up sobbing, and I rope my arm tightly around her torso, shushing gently into her ear. She reads rumors on the Internet about how you can slow fading. One message board talks about a high-iron diet, so she steams enough spinach to feed a large family and chews on it wordlessly. Another recommends ice-cold showers, and I find her trembling and goosebumped in the bathtub. She lets me dry her off, like she’s a child.
On a warm Sunday, Petra wants to go for a hike, so we do. Spring seizes the valley in fits and spurts, and today the paths through the woods are muddy. Snow melts and drips water into our hair. We follow a creek that is practically a living thing, surging messily through its own curves and bends.
We take a break in a sunny clearing and eat oranges and cold chicken. Petra has taken to treating every meal as her last, so she peels the skins off the pieces of chicken and chews on them with her eyes closed, and then on the meat itself, and then she sucks hard on every bone before throwing it off into the trees. She sets each wedge of orange in her mouth reverently, as if it is the Eucharist, bites into the meat, and pulls the rinds away like hangnails. She rubs the peels against her skin.
“I’ve been doing some reading,” says Petra in between pulls of ice water. “It turns out that they think that the faded women are doing this sort of—I don’t know, I guess you’d call it terrorism? They’re getting themselves into electrical systems and fucking up servers and ATMs and voting machines. Protesting.” She still refers to them in the third person. “I like that.”
The woods are quiet but for the hum of insects and twittering of birds. We peel off our clothes and soak in the sun. I examine my fingertips against the light, pink-amber halos around the shadows of my bones.
I lean over Petra and kiss her bottom lip, the top. I kiss her throat. I bury my hand between her thighs.
Around us, minutes inch over the dirt like ants, tumble into the swollen stream, are carried away.
We find a chapel among the trees. The pews are even and rigid, and stained glass windows line the walls. Our footfalls echo along the stone floor. The air is hot and we kick up dust that weaves through the light.
We sit down in a pew that groans beneath our weight. Petra lays her head on my shoulder. “Do you think faded women ever die?”
“I guess I don’t know.”
“Or age?”
I shrug and press my nose into her hair.
“So I might be twenty-nine for all of eternity.”
“Maybe. You’ll be haunting me when I’m a hundred and you’ll look fantastic and I’ll look like shit.”
“Nah, you’ll be a beautiful crone. You’ll have a cabin in the forest and there will be rumors that you’re a witch, but the kids who are brave enough to get close will get to listen to your stories.” She shudders so hard I feel it in my skeleton.
I see movement out of the corner of my eye and I stand. In the window depicting Saint Rita of Cascia, a faded woman is clinging to the lead, her fingers curled around the cames as if they were monkey bars. She is watching us, rocking on her heels, popping in and out of the glass as if she were treading water. Petra notices her and stands next to me. In her hand, I see the votive of a prayer candle.
“Petra, don’t.”
I can see her throw muscles twitching. “I can set her free,” she says. “If I break it, I can set her free.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Don’t tell me what to do. You’re not my fucking mother.”
I gently circle her wrist and lean into her hair. “I love you,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said it, and it tastes strange in my mouth—real but not ready, like a too-hard pear. I ease the votive from her hand and slide it into my jacket pocket. I kiss her temple, her jaw. She turns into my body. I think she’s going to cry, but she doesn’t.
“I miss you already,” she says.
I run my hand along her back, and as I do I am certain I see a flash of my own muscle. My stomach tightens. The chicken and oranges protest, press up my esophagus. “We should go back,” I say. “I think it’s gonna be dark soon.”
The faded woman won’t look away. She smiles. Or maybe she is grimacing.
We come out of the woods like we’re being born.
…
In our room, we watch the news, our bodies curled together in the soft blue glow of the television. Pundits point fingers at each other, screaming as the cohost between them shimmers and wavers under the studio lights. They are talking about how we can’t trust the faded women, women who can’t be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow.
“I don’t trust anything that can be incorporeal and isn’t dead,” one of them says.
The woman blinks away midbroadcast, a microphone tumbling to the floor. The camera scrambles to look away.
Before we go to bed, I set the votive from the chapel on the nightstand and light the candle. It flickers comfortingly, casting the furniture against the wall like shadow puppets.
I dream that we go to a restaurant that serves only soup. I can’t decide what to order, and she laughs and stirs the bowl she’s already received. When she pulls the spoon out, there is a jellied, ghostly hand twirled tightly around the handle, and she pulls the faded woman up and up. The woman’s mouth is open as if she’s crying out, but I can’t hear anything.
When I wake, I am sure Petra has gone for a run, before I realize that my hand has sunk into the luminous cavern of her chest.
I tip into her completely, choke like I’m being waterboarded. She wakes up and screams as I flail around inside her.
After a minute, we calm down. She moves away from me, to the edge of the bed. We wait. Seven minutes go by. Ten. Half an hour.
“Is this it?” I ask her. “Is this it?”
I don’t want to leave, but she is turned away from me. I stand up. She does not look at anything except her own hands.
After a long time, she says, “It’s time to go.”
I cry. I slip on my boots, their heels chewed up by my uneven footsteps. I look at her there, gone, and she finally turns and I know she can see my body, still solid enough to be limned in light, moving about the watery afterbirth of the sunrise.
I close the door behind me, and I feel my nerves fire on and off. Soon, I’ll be nothing more, too. None of us will make it to the end.
Only half of the mannequins in Glam’s windows are clothed. It’s the end of the season. The shop will rotate, soon. The stock will go—somewhere. The lights go out, the gate rattles down halfway. Natalie stoops beneath it and pulls it shut.
She stands up and sees me. She looks thinner than I remember. She nods ever so slightly and then takes off into the cavernous interior of the mall. I hold my old key tightly in my hand. It fits the lock—Gizzy never bothered to change it. The gate slides up loudly. The pinking shears are stuck in the back of my jeans, where I could carry a gun, if I cared to.
I cut the places where one thing is stitched to another. I unlace bodices. I can see them, the women, loosened from their moorings, blinking up at me. “Get out,” I tell them. I tear at the hems and seams. The dresses are coming apart, looking more alive than I have ever seen them, the fabric splitting away from the form like so many banana peels, flaps of gold and peach and wine. “Get
out,” I say again. They are blinking, unmoving.
“Why aren’t you going?” I scream. “Say something!” They do not.
I pull away the panel of a bodice. A woman stares back at me. She could be Gizzy’s daughter. She could be Petra or Natalie, or my mother, or even me. “No, fuck it. You don’t even have to say anything. Just get out. The gate is open. Please.”
A flashlight beam dances over the far wall. I hear a deep voice. “Hello? Who’s there? I’ve called the police.”
“Please, go!” I scream, even as the security guard tackles me to the ground. From the blackness of the floor, I see them all, faintly luminous, moving about in their husks. But they remain. They don’t move, they never move.
EIGHT BITES
As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing.
I have dreamt of inhaling underneath water and this is what it feels like: panic, and then acceptance, and then elation. I am going to die, I am not dying, I am doing a thing I never thought I could do.
Back on earth, Dr. U is inside me. Her hands are in my torso, her fingers searching for something. She is loosening flesh from its casing, slipping around where she’s been welcomed, talking to a nurse about her vacation to Chile. “We were going to fly to Antarctica,” she says, “but it was too expensive.”
“But the penguins,” the nurse says.
“Next time,” Dr. U responds.
Before this, it was January, a new year. I waded through two feet of snow on a silent street, and came to a shop where wind chimes hung silently on the other side of the glass, mermaid-shaped baubles and bits of driftwood and too-shiny seashells strung through with fishing line and unruffled by any wind.
The town was deep dead, a great distance from the late-season smattering of open shops that serve the day-trippers and the money savers. Owners had fled to Boston or New York, or, if they were lucky, farther south. Businesses had shuttered for the season, leaving their wares in the windows like a tease. Underneath, a second town had opened up, familiar and alien at the same time. It’s the same every year. Bars and restaurants made secret hours for locals, the rock-solid Cape Codders who’ve lived though dozens of winters. On any given night you could look up from your plate to see round bundles stomp through the doorway; only when they peeled their outsides away could you see who was beneath. Even the ones you knew from the summer were more or less strangers in this perfunctory daylight; all of them were alone, even when they were with each other.
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