Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  “How can I repay you?” I asked, a banality I’d recently put into the mouth of Princess Xochitl. I took an anatomical inventory: bruises, scratches, aches, pains, but evidently no broken bones. “I owe you my life.”

  We helped each other out of the soggy pit, using the looping roots like ratlines on a Spanish galleon.

  “I’ve never saved a person’s life before,” said the phantom after we were back on solid ground. “Who would have guessed it would be so erotic?”

  “I love you, Carlos,” I told him.

  “And I love you, mi querido. But you already knew that.”

  I flung out my arms and, hugging my creature, pressed my lips against his mouth. He reciprocated my kiss. Our tongues fused. We laughed and broke our embrace, and then, suddenly, like the child of Mary Shelley’s prodigious fancy, Carlos Ibarra Rojo was gone, lost in darkness and distance, never to return.

  Aftermath

  Laura van den Berg

  Genevieve moved back into the house on a Monday. The place needed a good clean, she had decided, so she found a cleaning service called Aftermath in the phone book. They told her it would take three days to clean the house and that she could not be present.

  “Should we be aware of any biohazards?” the receptionist asked.

  “Biohazards?” She was standing in her kitchen, talking on the landline. She imagined she was one of the last remaining people in America with a landline.

  “Blood, fecal matter, teargas,” the receptionist said.

  “Oh,” Genevieve said. “No. Nothing like that.”

  She checked into a motel called the Sagebrush. In bed, she listened to the rattle of the ice machine. She watched workout infomercials with the volume on mute. On her last night, a man pounded on her door and shouted, VERONICA! but left before she could call the front desk to complain. In the morning, she found a toupee lying in the hallway like a dead animal.

  At first, her house looked the same, the counters and floors a little brighter from the cleaning, except the attic ceiling was open on the second floor. The steps had been unfolded, an invitation to climb. The attic had always been there, of course, though the real estate agent neglected to mention it when she showed the house. Genevieve noticed it on her first night—the rectangular door in the ceiling, the dangling string—and knew immediately that she would never go up there. Attics were home to hideous family secrets and ill-tempered ghosts and rat kings. Everyone knew that terrible things happened in attics. She had lived in the house for nearly a year and stayed true to her word.

  Aftermath must have cleaned the attic and forgot to close it, Genevieve thought. That was the explanation that made the most sense. She folded up the stairs and tried to close the attic, but it wouldn’t budge. She bent down and grabbed the edges of the door and pulled. She wedged herself underneath the door, gritted her teeth, and pushed. Soon she was short of breath and her hands were burning. The door was stuck. Something was wrong with the hinges. She looked into the dark mouth of the attic and felt a gust of air, like something was breathing on her.

  That night, Genevieve slept downstairs, on the couch, away from the attic.

  The phone woke her. It was the middle of the day. She stumbled into the kitchen in her pajamas and striped socks, wondering how long she would have slept if the phone hadn’t rung. It was her neighbor, calling to see about the house.

  “How is it?” the neighbor said. “Does it look the same?”

  “More or less,” Genevieve said.

  “I saw the cleaners go in. There were six of them, in gas masks and gloves and plastic overalls. A frightful sight, we all agreed.”

  “We” meant the neighbor and her two blind tabby cats, Dr. No and Mr. Goldfinger. This neighbor once told Genevieve that she only adopted blind cats because she hated the idea of animals watching her in the night.

  “Well, I suppose one thing is different,” Genevieve said. “The attic ceiling is open. It won’t close.”

  “You just need to put a little muscle into it.”

  “I tried.” The kitchen counter held the bright orb of her face. Those cleaners had done a truly remarkable job.

  “Your sister,” the neighbor began, but Genevieve hung up before she could say anything more.

  That night, in the bathroom, she pried the floral shower curtain off its rings. She found a hammer and a small box of nails and a stepladder. She stood on the stepladder and nailed the shower curtain over the opening. She drove the nails in fast and clean. When she was finished, the stairs poked out like a crocodile’s jaw, but at least the attic entrance was covered. Genevieve slept in her own bed and in the middle of the night, she found herself swimming back to the time her sister dressed as a heart surgeon for Halloween. She wore a surgical mask and the green rubber gloves their mother put on to wash dishes.

  In the morning, she found a puddle of flowers on the hallway floor. The little dark nails were missing from the ceiling and they were not lost in the folds of the shower curtain or anywhere else in the house, so far as she could see. She stood against the wall and chewed her nails. It was only after she tasted blood on her thumb that she realized she was chewing past the quick.

  She called Aftermath and told them what was going on.

  “One of your people opened the attic ceiling,” she said. “I need for you to make this right.” She wondered if they would ask about her sister, who had recently gone missing. The last time she was seen in the house, what she was doing.

  “Impossible,” the receptionist said. “It wasn’t us. We never clean attics.”

  “You clean biohazards!” She was getting all twisted up in the cord. She could hire contractors to cement the attic shut. She could check back into the motel. She could move.

  “Yes. But we don’t do attics.”

  “You clean teargas!”

  “Especially that attic.”

  Later she wrote a long letter of complaint, addressed to the CEO of Aftermath, and put it in the mail.

  The truth was she couldn’t remember the last time she saw her sister. At the start of winter, her sister had come to stay with her. Genevieve had not seen or talked to her sister in months. One day she just showed up. This was a small house, without a guest room, so they shared a bed, like they did when they were children and scared of thunderstorms. They watched Late-Night TV and ate chocolate pudding. Her sister petted Genevieve’s hair and called her “Genie.” Sometimes her sister got sad. Sometimes Genevieve would hear her crying in the shower. This wasn’t such a surprise, though: Her sister had always been sad.

  “What have you been doing all these months?” Genevieve would try asking her.

  “Oh, you know,” her sister would say.

  They had known each other for their whole lives and that was the best answer she could get. Oh, you know.

  I don’t know anything, Genevieve longed to say, but she worried she would only make her sister more sad.

  None of these times was the last time.

  The contractor came to give an estimate. He wore a white construction helmet and carried a clipboard and when he saw the open attic ceiling, he shook his head and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s not a thing we can do about that.”

  “Can you at least try closing it?” Genevieve sighed. “The hinges are stuck, but maybe if a man tried.”

  He held his clipboard tight against his chest. He eyed the attic ceiling, like it might be aware that it was being discussed. “It’s not a question of strength.”

  “Please,” Genevieve said. “I’ll pay you anything.”

  “Don’t ever call me again,” the contractor said.

  She listened to the clomp of his boots as he left the house. She unfolded the stairs and sat on one of the lower rungs. If the attic was going to be such a menace, it could at least give her a place to sit down.

  Genevie
ve wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there before she remembered the sound of her sister’s footsteps coming up the stairs, her face appearing in the hallway, her pale cheeks puffed from crying.

  “What’s wrong?” Genevieve had asked.

  “Oh, you know,” her sister had said. “It’s nothing, really. I just don’t want to leave.”

  “No one says you have to leave.” Genevieve remembered listing the ways she could help her sister be less sad. Pancakes with whipped cream, walks in the woods, buddy-cop comedies, daffodils, long drives that ended in ice cream. It would have helped if her sister had been willing to leave the house.

  Her sister had walked right past her, coming to rest underneath the attic ceiling. She looked very tired, like she hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks, which Genevieve knew was impossible, since they had been sleeping in the same bed, their tongues sweet with chocolate. She stared up at the attic ceiling like it was expecting her. She touched the string.

  “Don’t go up there.” Genevieve’s breath had turned quick. Her heart felt like a ringing bell. “There’s absolutely nothing up there.”

  Something was about to happen. But what?

  Still, that was not the last time.

  Genevieve stood up and went downstairs, frowning at the trail of dirt the contractor had left behind. She put on her coat. She got into her car and drove away and never went back to the house again. She left the attic ceiling open and for all she knew it stayed that way forever.

  Many years later, when Genevieve was an old woman, she lived on a freighter ship that traveled the world. She had been all over Europe and South America and New Zealand and Australia. She had been to the Horn of Africa. She had crossed the Black Sea. The crew called her St. Genevieve, for the saint who saved Paris from Attila the Hun. No one called her “Genie.” If anyone asked why she chose to live on a freighter, she would say, “On ships there are no attics.” Once she saw a passenger reading a novel called Aftermath and was relieved when he disembarked in Christchurch, never to be seen again. A small part of her was always listening for someone who used the phrase “Oh, you know.” In recent years, she had become too weak to leave the ship, but she could sit on the deck in her wheelchair, a blue wool blanket tucked around her legs, and watch the activity in the ports. Currently she was bound for Guadeloupe.

  In the Caribbean Sea, a young man who had been traveling on the freighter for six months committed suicide. She saw his silhouette, glinting and angular in the sun, on the far end of the deck and then he was climbing and then he was gone. It was a windy day, and it looked as though the weather plucked him right off the boat and dropped him into the sea.

  Before they lost this man to the Caribbean, she had not said or thought the word “suicide” for years.

  On ships, there were many superstitions. You weren’t supposed to whistle or eat bananas. Fridays were bad luck. So were flowers and pea soup and priests. If you saw a dolphin swimming alongside the ship, you were supposed to make a wish. Genevieve liked to wish for only the most hopeless things. For the universal eradication of attics and sadness. For laws that held cleaning crews accountable. For the warmth of her sister’s body in bed, for sweet chocolate on their tongues, for their laughter at the laugh track on Late-Night TV, for the only person on earth who had ever called her “Genie.” For time to be as retrievable as a bucket raised froma well. For the young man to climb out of the ocean and walk across the deck in the shining sun and, at last, tell her what it was like in the After.

  Five Poems

  Bin Ramke

  FALL. THINGS. SUDDEN (I)

  There are real differences between a system that really did construct itself over time and computer programs that we write running on hardware thatwe build. The logic of natural selection requires self-replication.

  —Lee Smolin

  I thought it was my life I was living but I now

  know better (learned later)

  to know better says

  quality of knowledge varies: good better best

  Paul of Tarsus on the road struck down by

  light/best knowledge

  never the same again. I crossed the street

  myself to be struck by a Ford

  & after surgery was the same.

  “Assume any relation betwixt x and z that you please.”

  —Isaac Newton

  Knowing numbers is the easy part, you say

  onetwothreefourfive

  Subitize: know the number of immediately

  without counting; usually three or fewer

  a subitized swarm of stars would be a wonder;

  Αστερεσ μέν ἀμφι κάλαν σελάνναν

  ἆιψ ἀπυκρύπτοισι φάεννον εἶδοσ

  ὄπποτα πλήθσισα μάλιστα λάμπησ

  ἀργυρια γᾱν.

  The stars around the full moon

  lose their bright beauty when she,

  nearly full, lights all earth

  with silver.

  (Sappho) quoted by Eustathius of Thessalonica,

  six centuries later

  *

  It was my body but I could not do with it

  what I wanted; the hands must be visible in public

  the genitals not. Parts opened parts closed.

  The law of noncontradiction could also be called and

  is, the law of contradiction. This is itself a kind of dialetheism:

  A new law is a new word, or old, a new word is a new law;

  many musics make light linger, or fade, or be forgotten. Lyrical loss.

  The boy-body made noises, not music. Sound not song.

  But there was a code he heard he wanted to break

  to know better. Biology belongs to all, a democracy

  of desire and mortality. No matter how twisted

  the strands. Call it “nda” call it “dna” call it “and” it is

  difference. Deference, too. Mom and Dad determine child.

  Three elements taken three at a time.

  *

  Out of the egg the new

  inherits the body, builds new parts,

  lives a little. It knows better

  than to think. So Mom and I sat

  in the sun waiting for Dad

  we were moving to a new house

  in a new city and I forget

  were we happy about it

  we looked at a Papilio glaucus

  and I asked How long does it live?

  Yellow egg green caterpillar brown pupa

  we did not know: the caterpillar has a fake face

  to look fierce, the pupa forms in a leaf

  to look like the tree, the female adult

  looks like a different butterfly which is poisonous …

  which was the better knowledge …

  Dad returned. The tiger swallowtail drinks nectar

  especially of the honeysuckle, Abelia, Caprifoliaceae.

  I know better than I knew.

  A LONGING

  To think that true

  which appears unlikely

  —W. K. Clifford

  I will tell you the story of your life.

  Like the butterfly her chrysalis

  there on the branch abandoned.

  It began in time and ends. It began in space

  and ends. It began as a thing and

  will end a thing, shriveled and shriven.

  I am not walking through a garden as I write

  I am not observing the haunted viburnum glistening

  under ice because the day is cold in spite of sun

  shining bluely and burdened. But I would walk

  where the old bark broken may not
revive—

  Schopenhauer said time is uniform, no part

  of time differs from any other, like this snow

  before we walk … but what happens in time

  xylem and phloem, today and yesterday

  or tomorrow, for that matter

  in your time your life with your eyes closed

  the images arise and haunt

  never the same mind twice

  it is snowing in the garden and we are not there.

  We can smell the white flowers and the green.

  We can smell the ice below.

  THEODICY FOR BEGINNERS

  The first half of the alphabet

  is for known quantities: a is known,

  b is known, a + b = x

  the second half of the alphabet

  is for unknown quantities

  solve for x delta y over delta x

  as x approaches zero …

  *

  We did watch the cloud-colored moon

  against the night-colored night—

  is it night also on the moon?

  The moon is where night lives

  one night every month.

  We did watch the sky-colored cloud

  that morning from the airport, through

  the acres of glass the wall

  where Southwest Airlines

  passengers waited for the first

  flight out of the day. The day

  was the color of the sky-colored

  clouded sun rising into spectacle.

  We were all preparing to fly

  miracle of air of the weight of air

  in earth gravity.

  *

  The world consists of objects, properties, and relations.

  Functions and propositions. Eyes can be closed

  or opened. But some eyes cannot be opened.

  “Open” is a curious concept.