Open Me

by Lisa Locascio

  OPEN ME

  A NOVEL

  LISA LOCASCIO

  Copyright © 2018 by Lisa Locascio

  Cover design and artwork by Kelly Winton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: August 2018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2807-2

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6570-1

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  TO THEIS

  The soul! Its glyph is sak nik, “white flower.”

  —Mayan glyph teacher to Mayan children, Breaking the Maya Code

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Copenhagen

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Farsø

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Arden

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  COPENHAGEN

  1

  LUFTHAVN. I rode an escalator in a tall fair cloud that became the line for passport check. Mine was brand-new, stiff in its plastic cover. Inside a glass box sat a carelessly beautiful woman with light glossy hair. She flipped through the passport’s empty pages, stamping the very last, and turned her severe blue gaze on me.

  “Welcome to Denmark,” she said. Like a spell.

  Beside the baggage carousel stood a couple with matching blond haircuts, the man’s arms folded across the woman’s shoulders. She leaned back into him, rocking on her heels, and he bent and kissed her forehead through its feathery fringe. Their hands twisted together over her flat chest as she whispered into his parted lips. I swung my bag from the conveyer belt against their legs and passed through two sets of doors into a white glare.

  I thought I knew exactly the kind of person who would be waiting for me. A real ponytail-and-sweatshirt type, a casual but enthusiastic athlete whose mouth always hung slightly open in a laziness people mistook for a smile. Kari, her name would be. Or Patty. Nicole.

  A man stepped into my path and did a funny thing to my name.

  “Roxana Olsen?” Rhox-ahna Oh-la-sen. “I am from International Abroad Experiences.”

  I took in his knit hat, gray button-down, black pants. His eyes the blue of a frozen morning under brows like smudges of ash. He was so pale it was hard to see him in the bright light. He took my hand as if to shake it but didn’t close the grip. My fingers swam in his, little fish. “Sown Holmgaard.”

  “Sown?”

  “Well, you might pronounce it, er”—he switched to an American accent, folksy and earnest as a TV dad—”Søren.”

  “Oh. Like, S-O-R-E-N?”

  “S-EU-R-E-N, yes,” he said. “The o has a slash through it.”

  “Søren,” I tried.

  “Yes.” He looked down. I was still holding his hand. I let go.

  Søren led me from the baggage claim into another, higher room, where we stood silently until a train glided in. When it stopped, he lifted my bag. I followed him aboard to a bench upholstered in riotous gold and teal. At the other end of the car a woman scream-laughed, “Stop-uh! Stop-uh!”

  I caught my reflection in the window. Shiny face, oily hair with ideas of its own, my whole head overcompensating for nine hours of dry canned air. My thighs spread across the seat like squashed dough.

  The train came up from underground into a rush of green bushes. We passed windows of gleaming plaited pastry, sloping tiled roofs, a bright yellow sign with a black Scottie dog carrying a basket in its mouth. Fingers of gray light fell across the sky. The train turned and the rim of blue water on the horizon disappeared. Quadrangles of grass bordered the tracks. The buildings grew denser, penetrated by a freeway populated with white trucks and small black cars.

  “You are tired.” Søren smiled, and I noticed his crooked front teeth. He took off his hat, revealing a shaved head, receding hairline visible in his stubble. “You are at university?”

  “No. But I will be. In the fall.”

  He narrowed his eyes for a moment and then relaxed them. “You mean autumn,” he said, like there was a difference.

  I looked out the window. A damp, overcast day, not much like June. People appeared, riding bicycles. In my peripheral vision, Søren rubbed the top of his head. “I am also a student. A graduate student in literature.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I like to read.”

  “It is hardly just reading at this stage.” He laughed, stretching his arms above his head and resettling them at his sides. “I am writing my thesis.”

  I squinted at him. “Don’t you read books to do that?”

  “Of course I do. Again and again.” He bit his wet bottom lip. “We are the next stop.”

  The train went back underground, lights blinking on as we entered a tunnel. Slowed.

  “That’s cool, that you study literature,” I said.

  He looked at me, hopeful, silver eyed.

  I followed Søren down the platform and up a staircase to a wide intersection where vehicles flew past newsstands, grand buildings, sidewalk cafés with awnings over wicker chairs. The horizon was dotted with obelisks and spires, the air moistened and scented with grilled meat and spilled coffee. The low fluttering monotone of a strange language. Everyone said jet lag made you tired, but I felt I had passed through exhaustion into a hallucinatory state.

  A flashing herd of woman cyclists raced by two and three abreast, bright scarves at their necks. Søren pulled the back of my shirt, forcing me up onto the curb.

  He took my shoulders and turned me to face him, eyes wide. “Never stand in the path for the bicycles.”

  “Sorry. I’ve never seen one before.”

  He looked at me like I had pissed on his shoe.

  At the curb a giant bright red insect folded its wings out and back over its mirrored antennae. I blinked and we boarded a bus, Søren feeding coins into a small machine. As we pushed down the aisle, I withdrew my overstuffed wallet, dangling receipts and key chains. Would he accept dollars? I tapped his shoulder.

  He shook his head. “No, Roxana, you are paid for. In your tuition.” He turned my duffel bag on end and leaned it against his right side. He was wearing his hat again. I hadn’
t even seen him put it back on.

  All the passengers looked straight ahead, as if there were a rule against turning. At the fourth stop, a woman with a double stroller bearing twins boarded. Dark glimmered at the edges of my vision. I was so tired. I closed my eyes. There was a strange sound. The woman wheeling her stroller back and forth. What was she doing? I opened my eyes.

  She spoke incomprehensibly at me from under her frizzy hair. Søren was busy on his phone. The woman repeated herself. A man on my right gestured with his chin. A pair of blonde teenage girls seated across the aisle directed me with pink fingernails. What did they want me to do? Why was everyone so angry?

  “I’m sorry?” I said softly, not expecting to be understood.

  “Oh, English?” The woman with the stroller said. “Move. You are in the place for prams.”

  “But there’s nowhere …” I made a vague movement of my arm.

  Søren looked up from his phone, put his hand on my shoulder, and pulled me back, wedging my ass into his crotch to free up six inches of floor as he spoke to the woman in their language. She slid her behemoth carriage into the new space and set about tucking blankets around her twins.

  Søren’s heart beat against my spine. I stared at the babies’ blue shoes, counting one hundred throbs of his pulse as the warmth of his body seeped into my back. What did he smell like? What did I smell like? My toes bumped hard against the stroller and the babies turned their liquid black eyes on me. We stayed that way for two more stops, my smile blinking on and off, the bus throwing me against Søren again and again.

  Finally he pulled at my sleeve and we disembarked. The wavelike facade of a vast building curled toward a spill of cobblestones, a thick green slope of park, a low stone wall. We approached its dark front door. Søren reached for me and I looked down, afraid that I would blush, but his hand continued past my body and pressed a beige button labeled ADMUSSEN. A buzz shook the door frame. Søren hoisted my duffel over his shoulder and in we went.

  I followed him into a vast gray antechamber, vacant save for a row of locked mailboxes built into the far wall and a short staircase leading to another white door. Blue light fell from a portal in the distant ceiling. The door opened to reveal a woman’s fox-like face surrounded by a ruff of wiry hair atop her child’s body. She chirped a sound between “hey” and “hi.” Søren returned a chirp of his own, and with white claws she beckoned us into a hallway narrowed with stuff. A wooden rack held a confusion of shoes. I tripped on a bunched runner, its pattern long since stamped out. Shadows drifted in the murk at the end of the hall.

  She sought my gaze and held it. “I am Berta Admussen, American Roxana.” She could have been forty or seventy, this foxwoman, in her costume of cream quilted pullover and pencil skirt. White lashes haloed uncannily light blue eyes. She had a triangular nose and a wet pink mouth.

  I extended my hand and she gave me a card: her name and a string of numbers engraved on heavy stock. Birthe, the name was spelled.

  She and Søren issued undulant tones at each other and then she turned to me, prying a silver key from a large ring. The old-fashioned kind, with a figure-eight cutout at the top and a big tooth at the bottom.

  “The door is behind you.”

  I felt Søren’s hand, hot and smooth on my dampening palm. The foxwoman stood very still, watching us. Was he really holding my hand? No, he was feeling for the key. He wanted to get me into the room so he could go home. I gave it to him. A long low moan that neither Søren nor the foxwoman seemed to hear echoed down the hall.

  The room had the same high ceiling as the hallway, a window, a pale wood desk and chair, a small television mounted in a high corner, an armoire on carved legs, and two girlishly geriatric twin beds. Chintz curtains, cabbage rose bedspreads and wallpaper, a tall white pitcher on a stand. For light, I had a too-bright overhead fixture or a tiny wire lamp on a bedside table too small to accommodate a book.

  “Two beds,” I said.

  “Often couples stay,” the foxwoman said, as if this was an explanation. “If you will have overnight guests I prefer to be informed.” She produced her sharp little incisors in a smile. “The television does not work. Later, I will show the amenities. I do not want to bore Søren.”

  Søren stepped away from me, smiling to cover the movement. “I will go now.”

  “Wait!” I squeaked too loudly. Wasn’t this supposed to be a study abroad program? “Where does everyone else live?”

  “The others are in residence in Amager, near the university,” he said, as if I would know what this meant. Umma-urr. Was that a place? “You are a late addition.” He and the foxwoman laughed and the geometry of the room tilted, as if someone had picked up the diorama in which we stood. I was worried I would throw up or fall down or both. Whatever force had paused the scary fatigue that had built every moment of my sleepless flight completely deserted me now. I closed my dry eyes, took two breaths in, let them out. When I opened them again, he was gone.

  The foxwoman lingered for a moment, no longer smiling, and then she, too, disappeared.

  I dragged my duffel into the bedroom, ready to spend an hour or two ordering my things. But within fifteen minutes my assembled belongings were put away in drawers or hung in the mushroomy closet. I opened the window. My view was an interior courtyard hemmed by redbrick walls. The sky was white. The scent of trees and wet pavement cooled my face.

  I went out into the dark hall with my toiletry bag, passing closed door after closed door. With its fancy sconces, crown molding, and tall, shuttered windows, the apartment bore traces of having once been much nicer than it was now. The grand parlor had become a laundry bullpen, sheets and towels stacked on dusty end tables. I ran the back of my hand against a tower of terry cloth so rough it reopened a torn cuticle. Sucking blood from my finger, I walked into the next dim room.

  In the gloom a massive dog considered me with light blue eyes. A husky or maybe a malamute, with a wide friendly face and gray-and-white fur, twice as big as any I had ever seen. When he was seated on his hindquarters, the dog’s nose came to the bottom of my rib cage. He considered me for a moment and threw up his head, howling. I took a step back.

  The dog calmly walked around me and blocked the door with his body, cocking his head to one side. He howled again, eyes glistening.

  The foxwoman materialized at the far end of the hall in a strange little hat that hid her pointy ears, holding something coiled. A bridle, a whip? When she reached me, I saw that it was a leash.

  “Hello.” She gave me her fangs, nodding briskly. “You have met Wvhobah.”

  “Is that a Danish name?”

  “English. I am surprised you do not know. For the poet. Wvhobah Frost.”

  “Oh.” I sent my mind back to AP English class. “Robert.”

  Dazzled by so many recitations of his name, the dog turned in a small circle and gave another howl, gazing at his mistress.

  The foxwoman grimaced. “Perhaps you seek the toilet?” She flipped a switch, revealing a sparsely decorated kitchen, and gestured to an orange bowl of green apples on a round table. “Please eat one if you’re ever hungry. But please do not eat all of them.” She fanged me again. A joke.

  We stood in silence until I noticed a white phone on the wall and remembered Mama and Dad.

  “May I make a call?” I asked the foxwoman.

  She nodded. “Your program has told me that you would wish this. Instructions for how to reach the US”—Ooh Us—”are beside the receiver.”

  I waited for the foxwoman to leave the room. When she instead leaned against the wall, looking at me levelly, I picked up the phone and dialed my house. It rang three times, a different sound—a mechanical tone, not the synthesized burr I was used to—before the answering machine picked up, a robotic woman’s voice reciting the number and ordering the caller to leave a message after the tone. My parents had never bothered to record a personalized greeting.

  “Hey Mama. Hey Dad,” I said without thinking, and then remembere
d. “Or whichever one of you gets this, I guess. I’m here.” I caught myself before I said where. “Flight was fine. Everything’s okay. Miss you.” I waited, thinking one of them might pick up. That was the usual pattern—Mama or Dad rushing into the kitchen to grab the phone before the caller finished talking. The machine was full of messages interrupted by their distracted, out-of-breath hellos, records of the way everything in life seemed to surprise them.

  No one hurried to answer me. I hung up. When I looked at her the foxwoman was beaming, as if I had pleased her. I shivered. Why was everyone in this country so strange?

  We continued down the hall and stopped in front of the last of seven identical white doors. “The toilet for guests,” she said gravely. I followed her inside. It was two rooms, first a small antechamber containing just the toilet sandwiched between, on the right, the door to the hall, and on the left, a door into a second, more spacious room, where a wide fogged-glass window separated a shower stall from a sink beside a tall row of empty shelves. The foxwoman showed me how to lock the shower room from the inside with a small hook and eye at the top of the door frame. This way, the toilet and shower could be used simultaneously by total strangers—the bather’s privacy guarded while the toilet remained accessible.

  “You know, with all the guests, it must be this way,” she said.

  I nodded. Was there even one other guest?

  Robert moaned again. “He is complaining,” the foxwoman said. “I must take him.” She and her dog had the same white-blue eyes, identically strange in the shadowy hall.

  At the far end of the hall she opened a door and stepped into a rectangle of light.

  “See you,” I whispered.

  I went into the bathroom, locked the exterior door, peed, and walked into the inner chamber without bothering to unlock the outer door and latch the inner. I didn’t like the idea of some stranger using the toilet just feet from me while I was in the shower room. I wanted the whole space to myself. I was worn out on public spaces after a day spent in the perpetual exposure of traveling. Besides, I hadn’t seen or heard anyone in the apartment other than the foxwoman and her beast. Solitude seemed an available luxury.