“Why does it smell like hot dogs in here?”
“Does it?”
I could have just told him that it was the barbeque soot, but I didn’t want to make him sick.
“Yeah, it reeks.”
“Sorry, this place is a dump.”
“No, that’s okay, I don’t really care about the models anyway.”
“Are you sure? There are naked people in Present Day Our Town.”
“Easter, I want to kiss you.”
And from somewhere deep within the Wonderland, I heard the sound of the bell ringing. The bell on my door, memories buried deep within. It filled my ears until I couldn’t really hear, so I stammered, “W-what?” and realized that he’d moved closer.
“I want to kiss you.”
And something seemed to take control of my body. And move me closer to the subterranean humanoid, close enough that I could smell the old wet of his skin and see my reflection in his glazed eyes, but not for long because he closed them shut and I closed mine and somehow our lips found each other and his were as damp as I’d imagined them to be, but also very nice in a way, soft and pliant, but maybe I just liked them because my lips had never touched anyone else’s before, not because they were the long-necked Lev’s lips and were especially gentle and lovely. Then he tried to pry my lips open with his piping hot tongue and I recoiled, scared and unsure of what to do next. I’d wanted to ask Julia to show me how to do it, but she’d ask too many questions. She’d make me do something bad so the long-necked Lev would stop thinking I was wonderful. She’d accuse me of things that weren’t true, or maybe they were and I just didn’t want to hear them.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m okay, I’m just, I have a cold. I’m sick. And I don’t want you to get sick.”
“That’s okay.”
“No, really, you’re so, delicate and I’m worried that you could catch things from me.”
“Delicate?”
“Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t say I was delicate.”
“Well, you’re wonderful too, then, and I don’t want you to get sick.”
He was confused and I couldn’t blame him and my heart was beating wildly, off its regular rhythm entirely, moving more like a bell in someone else’s hands and less like my heart, and I felt scared and confused and guilty and ashamed, so I told him that Mr. Ungula would be back soon so he’d better leave.
“If I give you my address, can you come over later?”
“I don’t know.”
“Please?”
“Okay.”
He wrote down his address, handed it to me.
“Go around the back, okay?” he said.
And then he opened the door and left me alone in the dark; the flashlight hanging at my side illuminating my feet, the rest of me enveloped in darkness. I felt something in my mouth, something moving the way that Lev’s tongue had moved, but this wasn’t warm; it was cold and frantic and I reached in and pulled out one of the little bugs that Lev left always behind, that crawled all over him, that likely filled his underground lair. I flicked it away.
Suddenly I heard a loud thump behind me and threw my spotlight on the model, and there, all lit up like a Broadway star, was a very miniature Julia wearing the once-beautiful rags of an aging lady of the night. She began in a puddle of red in the wet street, scabbed with fruit rinds and trash. The red dripped upward into a dress that cinched in the center and oozed up into Julia’s bosom, or bazoom. Mr. Ungula always said that bazooms didn’t exist anymore. He liked girls to look like toothpaste tubes squeezed in the middle. And that’s what Julia looked like. Cinnamon toothpaste.
“Julia, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Cripes, Easter! Can you get that out of my face please?” Her voice boomed though her stature was small.
I flicked off the flashlight and walked toward the light switch that Mr. Harp had put a star-shaped, glow-in-the-dark sticker on so we could find it in the dark. They seemed to be working now.
“Okay, there. Now what the hell are you doing here?”
“No, what the hell is that guy doing here?”
And she kicked one of the Early Our Town figurines: a drunk man who’d nestled himself into the curb for the night. Mr. Ungula had modeled him after a picture of his sister’s husband at their wedding reception. Apparently she’d tripped over him in the dark, otherwise I never would have caught her.
With the light on, Early Our Town looked happier. I could see the smiling faces of chimney sweeps, each with a healthy swiping of soot on their rosy cheeks and a ragged broom denting their shoulders. The street became a market of entrepreneurs with their whole families in tow, learning the trade of selling flowers or eggs in the street as well as cultivating a variety of marketing techniques, such as what the sound of a shrieking child can do for sales or how dressing in rags guarantees higher profits. Men in hats like steam pipes held their noses high, arms hooked with women in warm coats. I had a feeling that Early Our Town looked nothing like this, but I wouldn’t dare say that to Mr. Ungula.
“How did you get in there, Julia?” I demanded.
She flung her arms up and screamed a frustrated scream, then turned around and marched into the hotel. The mail slot in the door swung in short, fast bursts after she slammed it, which I’d never seen it do before. Just before it slowed to a complete stop, Julia opened a window in one of the top floor rooms of the hotel and leaned out on her elbows.
“Who’s Lev?”
A ball formed in my throat; my heart started flapping again.
“Who?”
“Lev.”
“Oh. Just a customer. Nothing special. I wrote his particulars in the book just like the rest of them.”
There’s that goddamn word again. Particulars. I wanted to excise it from my vocabulary with a scalpel, cut all of its roundness out of my mouth.
“Yeah right.”
“Yeah right what?”
“I just saw you kiss him, Easter! I watched you!”
“Goddammit, Julia, why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“And you called him wonderful, Easter. You think he’s wonderful.”
“I said he was a little bit wonderful.”
“He called you wonderful, too. I told you that you were wonderful. I told you first. Why do you care so much that he says it?”
“I think you’re the most wonderful person in the world, Julia.”
“Well you sure don’t act like it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You want me gone for good. You want to marry a boy and live in a house like ours and be just like The Mother. Fine.”
And with that she slipped quickly back through the window, slamming it shut behind her.
“Julia! What are you gonna do?”
But there was no answer.
She wouldn’t be back tonight. She’d gone away somewhere I could never know. I locked up and left.
About halfway into heading home I changed my mind and decided to go to Lev’s house. I didn’t really want to at first. I wanted to just go home, bury my face in my pillow, wait for Julia to creep in next to me, apologize over and over again. But another part of me wanted to taste his lizard mouth again, to have the bells fill my ears and fill my head and fill me up the way that I knew he was supposed to, the way that Amelia’s boyfriend did. The way that god, so long ago, had filled me with life and then delivered me to The Mother in peach skin.
I walked all the way to Princess Street and knocked on the back door. After a minute he opened it, smiling wide. We went through his kitchen and into the basement, which was his room. It was cold down there, and damp, and smelled of wet wood and laundry soap. The carpeted floor looked like the multi-colored pebbles of a fish tank, moving somewhat with scribbles of bugs here and there. I sat on the long-
necked Lev’s bed and he sat next to me, my ears still full of the sound of the bell, so much so that it felt like it was spilling out in the form of hot liquid.
The long-necked Lev sat next to me. He flicked the television on to a quiet, snowy channel so we’d have some light, but not too much. I wished I had my bandana. I wished I could put it over my face.
He told me that he was sixteen. I nodded and said, “That’s all right,” though I don’t really know what that meant. He said, “How come I’ve never seen you before now?” and I said, “I don’t know,” and trapped my hands between my thighs, glad that it was so dark down here, underground.
I didn’t know exactly what to do next. Amelia had demonstrated through her boyfriend’s car window the mating habits of primordial dwarves like her, but not of regular people like me.
And suddenly I felt scared and longed so badly to be in Julia’s arms, to tell her all about tonight, to tell her I only wanted her. But the long-necked Lev had already put my hands in his and was saying something too quietly to be heard over the bell. And before I knew it I was lying down beneath his cold blanket that smelled hairy and dry. And I finally tasted his honeydrop ears, which actually tasted more like raw potato. And he kept kissing me, moving that hot heavy tongue around, not unpleasantly, but I would rather have been lying next to Julia, watching car headlights from outside move through branches and over her sleeping cheek.
We didn’t make it through all of the things Amelia had done, and I was happy about that. Later he walked me outside to my bike and when I finally got home there was no Julia in bed for me to whisper my secrets to even though she would probably have plugged her ears and told me she didn’t want to hear it anyway.
The hanging
When I woke up the next morning, Julia was home again. She asked me to follow her into the laundry room where she was preparing to hang herself and wanted me to watch. This was a new twist on an old favorite. Julia had hanged before, plenty of times, but it was never a suicide.
She appeared as a witch once, in a book I was reading, and together we wrote a whole hundred pages of us talking while she rode in a wooden jail that had been strapped to a wagon. I pictured her with her feet hanging out through the slats in the back, her ankles brushed with the weeds sticking up from the dirt road, her long dress pulled up and strategically situated to accommodate the unladylike surroundings, her manacled hands kissing wrists and resting on one thigh. Face sooty, but she was happy. That was the first hanging.
Another time she hanged herself accidentally, fetching a long orange extension cord from the garage. It looped down over the rafters, concentrated in brambles on top of them, where it was dark and damp and nasty. She was standing on a stepladder, a wadded section of the cord already in her arms, then reached too far, slipped, and before she knew it an orange loop had grabbed her by the neck and refused to let go. When I found her she was already dead, and I felt bad that she’d been all alone.
I sat with my legs crossed on our laundry room rug while she fixed a hard, unnaturally yellow rope around the metal bar in the closet. A chorus line of men’s collared shirts on either side.
“Julia, you don’t have to do this.”
“I do, Easter.”
“You don’t!”
“I do. You’ve made your choice. You want to be like everyone else. You want Lev. And friends. And to be regular. You know that if you stay crazy you probably don’t even have to get a job when you grow up? You can just live in a special home with me forever and The Parents will pay for it.”
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t really want that. I can tell.”
“I do want it, Julia, but I don’t know. I want other things too. Can’t I have both of you?”
“No. You’d rather kill me for real.”
“No I wouldn’t.”
“Do you know about hell, Easter?”
And I thought that I did. Hell was living in The Tooth House without Julia. But instead I said, “No.”
“Hell is a library,” she said, tightening her fresh knot.
“That really doesn’t sound bad, Julia.”
“That’s because I’m not finished. Hell is a library of books containing every word you’ve ever said, and videotapes of everything you’ve ever done.”
“So what. Do you have to watch them?”
“No, you don’t have to. But would you be able to help yourself? It would be unbearable. I couldn’t resist, but I would hate myself after.” She gave the noose two good, hard tugs. “Plus, even if you could resist the temptation, you’d eventually get so bored that you’d do anything. And the only thing to read is stuff that you’ve said and the only thing to do is watch yourself.”
“Is there food?”
“I guess, yeah; if you still need food to exist, there can be food.”
Julia became exasperated with me easily. She disappeared into the kitchen and I ran my hand backward against the rug, agitating the fibres, attempting to make a pattern. Julia returned to the laundry room with a footstool.
“Stop that,” she said, placing the stool in the closet beneath the noose.
Then she got up onto it.
“Stop what?” I asked.
“Rubbing the carpet like that. It’s gross.”
“Who took the videotapes? Who wrote everything down?”
The more I thought about it, the more horrible it seemed.
“I don’t know, Easter. It’s hell, okay? It was all recorded in some demonic and mysterious way. Cripes.”
She put the noose around her neck, tightened it.
“All right, well, I guess that does sound pretty terr-ible.”
“I know, right? I really think that would be the worst possible thing in the world. That’s why that’s what hell is like.”
“Doesn’t killing yourself make you go to hell?”
“Oh, Easter, there’s no hell. And even if there were, I wouldn’t be going there.”
“Because you’re not real.”
“No. Because I’m such a good girl.”
Then she kicked the stool out from underneath her feet and let herself hang by her neck from the metal bar. She flailed her arms and got them all wrapped up in the white collared T-shirts, pulling them off their hangers and letting them get tangled up around her wrists. She looked like a bird now, trying to fly with long, white wings, useless, especially in a space as small as a closet.
She kicked her feet around. They searched for the footstool even if they didn’t realize that’s what they were doing. I wasn’t going to put it back. Julia had made me promise to let her go through with it. And, as usual, she made me promise her that nothing weird was going to happen to her body after she died. As though once she was out of it she still had some right to it. As if there was really a body there at all. Which there wasn’t. But Julia was still my sister and I was bound to honor her wishes for that reason. I sat and watched her body until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, and when I woke up on the rug the next morning her body was gone and she had put the white shirts back neatly on their hangers.
Two days later I dreamed her funeral. Which I’d never done before. And lying on the ground like this in The Woods made me think of how it must have been for Julia: looking up at the sky, cliffs of dirt on either side, craning over the edge the gloomy, pulled-down faces of all the people who had helped The Mother to change our diapers when we were kids or let us raid their purses for gum or mints so long neglected that the crackle had worn out of the cellophane. Every time someone peeks into a coffin, they always raise that little tissue to their snouts, like they’re scared that something is going to fall out. Which is actually quite gross. But really, who best to witness snot falling out of your nose than a dead girl. She’s not going to tell anyone. She’s not even going to notice. And if she did, she’s not really in any place to judge, considering an undertaker
has just seen her six ways from Sunday. Cold, naked, unable to resist any position that he decides to put her in.
Or maybe when they raise the tissues to their noses, they’re trying to protect themselves from something. Some infection of the dead writhing in the soil, waiting to leap up into an open mouth or flared nostril. If there were any type of ground you were going to catch something from, I guess it would be the cemetery ground, percolating with the volatile exhalations of the recently diseased. Or, in Julia’s case, hanged.
It looked like the casket was going to swallow Julia up. Like the maroon satin fabric had once, deceptively, been pulled tight over the open bed of the coffin and when Julia decided to lie down on it she started getting sucked, tightly, into some anonymous hole. Holes are always something to be wary of. In movies, in books, you never hear of someone getting trapped in or falling down a safe, fun, comfortable hole. In fact, holes really get a bad rap when you think about it. I actually quite like holes.
Anyway, there she was: paused, suspended, saved, before she could sink all the way to the bottom. So slow you could barely tell that she was sinking further, frame by frame, fractions of inches, no one could tell but me. I sat between a pair of relatives I’d never met before. Two elderly aunts. Both with long noses that stuck out like tent poles beneath short black veils that obscured their faces but showed their chins and necks. They both sat with their arms knotted around their chests, floral sleeves dampened where a few big fat tear drops had escaped without being noticed, chins doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and dimpled with frowns as they watched Julia’s coffin lower into the rectangular hole.
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