Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  She watches him produce a document from the side pocket on his briefcase, holding it up toward her without first opening it to look inside. The printed words list out her account’s most recent details, likely supplied by some analyst in some huge building, far away, including the date and time of her home’s trespass, a brief neutral description of the incident as interpreted by someone who wasn’t really there, and who can only report on the representation of the action, according to record. Further down, she sees details derived from their last contact—dated from today, it seems, earlier that afternoon, though the only call she’d made, as she recalls it, had not connected—somehow here transcribed and dispatched with her comments about need for further service, passed on so fast that here he is, standing at her door. And before she can finish inspecting the fine print as it remains, perhaps to suss some sense out of the interaction, the man withdraws the paper and returns it to his briefcase, his intent in making this appearance now fully certified and stamped, leaving no way from here on to turn back from what must be their business, as if every step they’d taken, she and he both, their whole lives, had been designed to bring them to nowhere else but where they are, right now, today.

  Alice feels her mouth moving again, saying something she isn’t sure of; she feels the vibration of his communicative energy as he echoes in response, using his hands to gesticulate some series of abstract gestures Alice finds her eyes tracking more than anything so far—as if it is part of a magic trick, a small performance meant to impress as well as satisfy. The man laughs then, as at a joke he’s slipped into the routine, and then Alice herself is laughing too, though more at the apparent incongruence in their interaction, still unclear in its objective or intent.

  Nevertheless, the man appears to take her chortle as progress, and so bends to take his briefcase, as if they’ll continue forward unto some task. He brings his eyes up to hers directly for the first time, and Alice realizes they’re still standing in the doorway, despite the feeling in her mind of already having brought him in, told him to make himself at home. She presses back against the doorframe, suddenly embarrassed, creating a slim aisle of open space through which the man may enter, though for some reason she is unable to step back into the house herself to clear the way, extend an arm of welcome; the man in turn accepts the outlet, their shoulders gently brushing as he sidles by. Alice imagines closing the door between them, then, leaving herself outside, locking herself out, walking off into the light alone just like that, with only the clothes she has on her, leaving him—that is, still, Smith—to have her house all to himself, while she starts over elsewhere. This could be the start of something new in her life, she thinks, and perhaps his too, each defying what already seemed to have been planned for them some time long ago, following a theoretical inevitability once based on some set of persona-defining trivialities each selected so far back neither of them could remember how or why or even by whom; no day ever not interrupted by what had once been selected as the engine of their desire.

  Then there they are alone together inside the house; the door already locked behind her, out of habit. Up close the man’s clothes smell so much like two-packs-a-day-for-thirty-years she can hardly keep from choking. The air is twice as thick with him so near no open windows, all still air. He has his own heartbeat and intentions, she understands, staring back up into his disarming sky-blue eyes, which seem different out of reach of sunlight, fake like colored lenses, looking back into her face but not quite right at her as he goes on speaking in the mute, still no more audible even up close. Still, Alice finds herself continuing to respond to his apparent points of question. She smiles and nods between the cues, mimicking listening, receiving, still centrally unsure what it is about him that makes her want to go along, beyond the fact that he is here apparently in service of a claim initiated at her request, regardless of her more immediate desire that the whole world just disappear.

  Fully inside now, away from the world’s noise, Alice can better hear her own voice, in her head, speaking too fast already, hardly leaving time to breathe. She finds herself describing the night the robbery occurred, a span of memory throughout which she has no direct account of beyond its results, elapsed in sleep; as for the actual time of break-in, all she remembers is another strange recurrence of a nightmare she’s had on and off since she was born—nude and hanging from a tree, accused of witchcraft, a fact she understands as innate to the fabric of the dream—Why is she telling him this, she wonders, in third person, unable to restrain herself from pressing forward, why right now. The only thing visible from her perspective in the dream, strung by the neck above the ground in throes of pending death, had been the presence of endless flashbulbs, their buzzing fibers knitting together all around her a spastic, intermittent light, through which, as she understood it on the inside, everyone else could see straight into her thoughts, into parts of her mind she’d pressed away, so to avoid; a psychic spectacle put on display not only for the large, hazy crowd chanting in tongues beneath her, but fed as well out through circuits, wires, to endless screens, unto all eyes, such that millions, the world over, were there to witness her demise.

  The dream had gone on forever, strung out along a drastically slowed timeline—exactly seven years, in fact, a span she understood as dictated by a digital timecode burned into the filmscape of the dream, filling the fray of her thoughts with every passing second’s exact, excruciating drag. Each moment then felt unique in agony and trauma as it passed, her system held there on the verge of strangulation and also bleeding out, stabbed and battered by caretakers assigned to make sure she stayed awake and half alive through every instant of the suffering. She could feel every cell inside her body wailing, boiling over, lapsing only long enough for her to form a passing thought of some eventual relief, though nothing changed. That night, the same as all the others, she’d hung on through the nightmare by a thread, and when she woke in searing sunlight through the window above her bed, she’d sweated out so much she could not move. She’d found herself seven years older again in mind if not her body, even more exhausted than when she’d gone to bed. It had then taken her the same duration to relearn how to operate her limbs, to find the ability to stand, such that by the time she was up again it was nighttime, the world again encased in endless dark; only then had she gone down to find the front door left wide open, the door of the vault disarmed, its contents long gone.

  To hear her side of the story now, Alice realizes, is to experience it as for the first time; she feels ready to move on from it all, to let it go. Yet there is something about this man, his face, his posture, that sets her subconscious neuroses, raised to hackles in the telling, at an ease; he seems to be looking back into her as if not only really paying attention—the rarest feeling—but as well seeing her for who she is; not the question mark she’d been made to feel like from the TV, made up of only surface measures, premonitions, gut reactions, but someone struck up in an ongoing march of pain, across not only the trouble of the robbing, but the further miles of rubble in her heart. He understands, Alice imagines, he can really hear me.

  Now they are standing together in the vault, Alice finds, punching her self-awareness back out of the autopilot effect of telling and into the present, already unable to remember having led them together down the stairs and past the requirement of entering the system’s entry code without even thinking beyond language, the way one might drive for hours without realizing all the tiny motor actions spent between. But if the man is annoyed or taxed by her, by her physical vigor or emotional confusion, he doesn’t show it; he simply looks at her, calm, nodding his head, writing nothing down—perhaps he’s recording it, she imagines, or perhaps his memory is that good, or he’s heard it all before. Either way, they’re in here, live; the time is clicking.

  * * *

  —

  Alice shows Smith where the walls of the first of the two legs of the vault once had displayed the artworks, now purged of sight, the absence still louder in he
r mind than any other element in the space; she wonders if he can sense the same. She can feel him study her instruction closely as she outlines where light-altered impressions on the surface demonstrate the relief of what had once appeared, the tiny eyeholes in the plaster where nails had been inserted. She assumes the company, his overseers, already have a list of what she’d owned and for how long and at what value purchased and at what amount valued in the event of its loss, as is the case now, the very reason he is here—and yet he wants to hear her say it, her own version of the whole plot, perhaps in search of cracks in its foundation, in her persona.

  She follows suit, the language coming out of her more easily than she would have expected, despite her not quite knowing what to say. She explains how what looked when it had been here; she demonstrates the level at which each image had hung, shaping her limbs and posture as if still able to see it. His eyes remain on hers at all times, even when directed by her elsewhere; Alice gets the sense there is more suspicion in him than she’d first read, a kind of judging stance for which now she must perform, though she finds herself wanting to play into the doubt, if only to spite it, flip it over. It’s all a game, this day, this living, or it could be, one worth pushing over where you can, to watch the upturned wheels spin in futility. Yet she also wants to understand: what his experience might draw out from the flesh of evidence as it stands, and why she feels like there is something unsaid even in his perceived misgiving, his presence a checkpoint to be passed.

  It’s not until they work their way around into the vault’s second chamber, coming around the end of the only wall between them, that the adjuster’s eyes leave Alice’s. He stops mid-step, stuck staring head-on into the mirror still hanging at the corridor’s far end, just as before. Alice is surprised he notices it so quickly, when to her it had seemed to blend in so well, to disappear. She hesitates to face it directly yet herself, a sudden internal roil filling her blood in its presence, somehow even more so now with another witness—as if she herself had made the mirror, and finds herself standing now in the presence of a critic, being judged. She wrings her hands together, trying to turn him, standing awkward, looking for words to fill the space between. She feels his attention on her, by their reflection in the object’s open face, the features surely hazy from such distance, each of them almost like other people.

  The impending silence swells. Time seems to slow again, though only all around her; as if she might act outside the present on her own, undo its mettle by provoking what she wants; a feeling she hasn’t had in long enough to not know how she wants to use it. She waits and listens as she lets the adjuster do his job; she sees him raise his arm toward the wall, pointing at their image in the reflective glass, and thereby too the image pointing back out at them in return. The man’s arm is trembling, she sees, in both versions, his posture stock-still, held in file. He appears visibly thrown by the mirror’s presence, his expression in the reflection pinched and tense, almost sickly in the cramped discolor of the room’s bright. He looks betrayed, she thinks might be the word, or else exposed, as if he might not have come down here at all had he known what waited.

  “It was my brother’s,” Alice hears herself say, her voice suddenly loud and clear outside her head. She’s thrown to hear the term brother, not unbrother, though it doesn’t slow her. “He kept it hung above his bed, gifted to him on his last birthday in the house, before our parents died. It was supposed to be a family heirloom, but I’d never seen it before in my whole life, and wouldn’t for years after everybody else inside the house was gone. But my brother loved that mirror. I know because I would listen at the wall all night, almost every night for several years. I could hear him in there talking to it, singing, praying, if always in a language that made no sense; like some long spell he had to practice a whole lifetime to eventually get right, that he was performing not only for himself, but for all of us; everyone ever. I’m sure he knew that I was listening; that more than anything, I wanted to live like him, hidden away; or even to become part of him completely; to switch places, so I might feel some of the concern and the affection that his ongoing sickness garnered, all I wasn’t getting. It became like a secret kept between us he didn’t even know I knew about, that neither of us could quite control in application. This went on for what seemed years and years till he got worse; till he grew so sick they had to move him away somewhere no one would ever see him, though by then it was too late.”

  Alice can’t place the source of this account in her memory, can’t remember how much of it is even accurate once stated, though it feels no less true than whatever else; as if at last she’s establishing a version of the story she might believe in ever after. Where are the facts within the facts? Regardless, the adjuster’s posture relaxes at her telling, either bored or awed or both; his arms fall limp at his sides, his pupils dilate, his face—still in the reflection—looks tuned-in and open like a child’s. The widened silence that fills in around her voice thereafter, where she pauses, seems only to feed the rising fire as it stands, each transition in their interaction giving way to more speech lurched from the first, a suffocating kind of freedom as from behind a mask.

  “The next time I came across him—I mean my brother, Richard—he was all over the TV. It had been almost exactly seven years. They said he’d killed at least a dozen people since then, maybe more. Hunted them, kidnapped them, kept them, did not feed them, filmed them, called it art. He was going by a different name by then, and he’d put on a ton of weight, up to like four hundred and fifty pounds, but it was clearly him. I could still see the same child in there he’d always been: his eyes so unmistakable, even given how much he’d grown, what had come over him, more than flesh; something he had been designed from birth to perform, he felt, and so he had performed it, without what seemed any other choice. I really do believe that: how there was no other way he could have turned out, no matter what else he might have wanted, what better life might have soon arrived. It was written in him, and all around him. He’d been selected, and at the same time he volunteered, by remaining in his person, taking his own orders, from the condition of himself. They did him a favor, I believe, by finally cutting off the option of his life, or so was claimed: The verdict was that he would be executed by lethal injection four days before my thirty-seventh birthday, drawn up as headlines in all the papers, though I never saw any subsequent report confirming completion of the event. Instead he just kind of disappeared from public eye, left unmentioned far as I saw ever thereafter, which seemed like a relief at the time, absolving us at last of hearing about him, even his demise; and yet as years passed I found its lack of confirmed resolution even worse than an ongoing stay, as each night when I closed my eyes to sleep I saw his face behind my face, as if he had always been right there inside me; his thoughts squirming in the silences between my own, holding me over in my own flesh, feeding off me; his prints all over everything I touch.”

  Sweat is pouring profusely down the adjuster’s skin now, Alice notices, his pallid flesh clearly visible through his white work shirt. There is a developing uneasiness in him, she senses, some kind of breaking off from past intent, where out of a bearing once rigid with influence, he has curled up and wound down inside himself, in shock. Alice raises her hand to touch him on the shoulder, gently, as a friend, so as to verify he’s actually still there. And though she can indeed feel his flesh’s texture against hers, actual as any, the lines beneath the surface seem to waver, thinning in real time. He still will not look at her directly, only at her face in the mirror; he is grinning, for no reason she can place. When he speaks she hears him clearly, as if her touch alone is the sole conduit through which his presence may be parsed.

  “My own father had this exact same brand of mirror,” she hears him saying, “or one just like it, in his den when I was young. I wasn’t supposed to ever go in there, as an unwritten rule, though the door was always open. He’d sit in there reading for whole days at a time, not even standing up to eat or use the bathroo
m. He always read from the same series of books: bound in black leather, no titles or name of author on the outside. It was impossible to tell the difference between editions without opening them, which I wasn’t allowed to do; he insisted that no one must touch them besides him, as the price he’d paid to make them his was worth more than all our lives combined. Anything we wanted to know about their content could be transmitted through him, he said; all you had to do was ask. And so he would come into my room at night to ask me, to give his answers, though no one other than him cared.”

  Why is he telling me my own story? Alice wonders. As if it were his own story to tell, as if he had lived it in her place, taken it over. Does he really believe this anecdote was his? Or is he trying to use her life against her, to scare her off or wear her down, to in some way get down to what really happened? He even seems to have absorbed her tone, implanting himself into her disposition, in narration, tapping into all she remembers of her life. And yet his version isn’t quite the same as she would say it, slightly shifted in ways hardly noticeable to anyone but her, and even those impossible to prove beyond her mind.

  He refuses still to look at her directly, speaking aloud toward the mirror as if speaking to himself more than her. Along the edge of their reflection, within the captured room, the glass begins to fill with something like a mist; the mirror is sweating, it appears, the air suddenly tacky, humid, traced with heated moisture that seems to well from pores in the mirror’s surface, bloating out; the very dimensions of the room in the reflection become muddled over in the mix, more and more vague around their flesh. And still the voice of the adjuster seems unfazed, resisting any impending panic, regardless of what seems to be burgeoning between them; as if the story is the story, all there is now, the only remaining common ground.