In the bath, once the water is in my ears, ninety-five percent water becomes ninety-six percent. I swallow a gulp of bathwater, ninety-eight percent. That is as close as I get. I sit up with my knees bent and wait for the water to still. The water breaks my shins. I do have shins. I do have legs. To be one hundred percent water I would have to get my entire body under the surface and then some. I am small but I am going to need more water.
I move in the tub and the water begins to lap from side to side making a ruckus. Just then I hear a floorboard creak outside the bathroom door and my heart jumps up into my mouth. It tastes like a bad word. I stand bolt upright in the bathwater, prepared to defend myself. I think of the gray man from the attic. I think of a bunch of bounty hunters as a swarm of black flies just outside the door. I strain to hear what is moving in the hallway but I have disturbed the water by standing. It is making a splashing noise, giving away my location to whatever spooky thing is creeping around outside the bathroom door. A floorboard creaks again, long and low, as if in pain. I breathe heavily. My blood rushes away from my lungs and flows instead to my ears that are trying so hard to hear the bad thing in the hallway that has come to get me.
“Hey,” the bad thing says outside the door. I suck in my breath. “Hi. It’s Jude.”
I don’t answer him. He might walk in and I am standing naked in two feet of water. Plus I left some pee unflushed in the toilet. He opens the door but does not step inside yet. I cover my stomach with my hands and arms. I cover where I am the bluest. I hear him breathe and in he walks. He stands a bit frozen and stares like a bridge between his eyes and my body. Eventually the bathwater calms down. I tuck my chin to my chest. “What are you looking at?” I ask him. Jude sees but doesn’t answer. “Get out,” I say but he doesn’t move. I shut my eyes. I feel like my skin has never seen the light of day. Jude imagines that without moving. Like he’s the first. I lift my head. I don’t want to be the Mormon girl in love with Donny Osmond. I listen to him breathe and I stare at the oldness of his hands. He watches me until the air between us feels as thick as electricity right at the transformer.
He starts to tell me a story while he stares at me. He has a seat without looking away. “There was a town north of the Kuwaiti border. It was tiny. We only knew it by number coordinates, not by name,” Jude says. He rubs his hands across his thighs. I imagine I am between them. “They didn’t tell us the name on purpose because bad things had happened there, things that broke the rules of war. Its coordinates were on a list, an Army list of words we were never supposed to say, so that if we ever encountered someone from the media and we didn’t know they were with the media we wouldn’t slip and mention, ‘fear,’ or, ‘intestines,’ or, ‘bodies hung out to dry like laundry on a clothesline,’ or the name of that town, or any other phrase that was on the official list of things we weren’t supposed to say.” Jude looks at me. “My palms are getting wet,” he says and looks down at them. “I feel like your name was on that list. Like you are off limits. Like if I say your name or if I touch you, I’d get court-martialed, found guilty, and executed.”
I don’t say anything.
He stares and stares. “Sorry,” he says and starts to back out the door. “I thought there was something wrong with you,” he says. “Your mother told me you had been in the water forever.”
I stand naked, looking at Jude, concentrating on becoming one hundred percent water so that I could slip down the drain and out to sea or at least I could slip down Jude’s wrong pipe and fill his lungs, lovingly washing away every breath he takes.
THE KNIGHT
I feel a bit funny after Jude has left, like I forgot to trick him in some way that I was supposed to know but had forgotten or had never learned because I’m not from here. Instead I felt like I had been tricked. Again. And an old defense from grade school welled up in me. I went up to our roof. I hadn’t been there in awhile. Not since the day four boys in my tenth grade class covered the hair on my head with duct tape. They told me it was a scientific experiment so I let them do it.
When I was young I retreated here rather often because from the peak of the roof I would will myself to imagine the entire town getting flooded and filled as the ice caps melted, as the ocean crept higher and higher. From my roof I thought I’d watch those boys sputter and drown. It wasn’t an experiment. I thought if they tried to grab hold of my roof while the water was rising, I would walk over to the rain-gutter edge and squish their pale fingers underneath my tennis shoe, though usually in my imagining I had on my father’s steel-toed work boots because they were more effective at finger crushing.
The dormer window out to the roof is already open. I swing one leg through and the rest of my body follows. My mother is already sitting on the roof. “Mama,” I say very quietly at first, scared to startle her when we’re up so high.
“Hi,” she says, while I scramble up the incline to where she is seated. A few old houses in town have widow’s walks—the small square rooms or flat platforms built into a roof so that women left behind by fishermen husbands could look out to see if their men’s ships were ever going to come in. We don’t have a widow’s walk, so my mother sometimes just sits on the roof with binoculars around her neck. She acts as if she’s just looking at the ocean, the birds, or the waves but I know she is looking for my father. From here we can see just about everything, all the houses in town and past them the ocean straight out to the horizon line.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Just reading.” She shows me the book. “It’s about a mermaid. I have been looking for it. I wanted to give it to you. But your grandfather had it filed in the Gs, for ‘German author,’ he said.”
“What happens?” I ask.
“It’s not good,” she says. “Her name is Undine. Your grandfather says the word is Teutonic and means a female from the water. Undines like humans. They are soulless unless they marry a mortal.”
I smile a bit, as if saying I told you so.
“Why are you smiling?” She turns to me. “Why would you want to be soulless? It’s a sad story. This Undine.” She holds up the book. “She falls in love with a knight named Huldbrand and Huldbrand loves Undine too, but he also loves her stepsister, Bertalda, a mortal. So Undine’s uncle, he’s a river spirit, is disgraced. He takes Undine back down under the water and tells her she must kill Huldbrand or else he will.”
“What does she do?” I ask.
My mother looks at me and pulls her shoulders back, pulling away from me to gauge my reaction. “Undine kills him.”
“Oh.” I look away while she stares. She is making me nervous and so the very tips of my lips curve microscopically into a smile. But because she is my mother, she sees it, the microscopic smile. “Why would you want to be anything like that?” she asks. “You’re nineteen. Why would you want to hitch yourself to some sinking ship like Jude? I mean Jude’s nice, but you’re young. You should travel. You should move to New York City. See the world. Meet people.” She turns away to look out towards the ocean.
I don’t really like people, I think. That’s why.
Just then her expression grows wide and she raises her binoculars to her eyes. “What’s that?” She stands up, excited and pointing to a spot where the waves break. There is something floating there, some sort of mass—trash or a rain slicker or maybe just a seal. I suppose it could look like a man, but not if you looked at it for too long.
“It’s a log, Mom. Or a trash bag.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod yes. “Yeah, Mom.”
“Because for a second,” she says, and breaks the thought off there.
“For a second you thought it was Dad?”
She looks at me with a twisted mouth. Her mouth is twisted from having told me to do one thing while she always does the exact opposite.
“You should move to New York City,” I tell her, and she nods slowly and very slightly without looking away from whatever it is floating in the sea foam.
Jud
e has a headache. I tell him to lie down. I tell him I’ll rub his head. We are at his house. I rub the crown of his head and his temples. I am nervous. I fear I am doing a bad job, that he won’t like it, but after a few moments I feel him relax his neck and jaw and I am glad.
Sitting this way, his neck is very close to me and his blood is only millimeters away from that. Having Jude’s blood this close makes me think of wrought iron in taste and texture, like the bumpy veins of a man or a horse, and it’s so rare that anything on land will make a warm bit of difference to me, sunk as I am. I’d take Jude’s neck down under the water and for few minutes it would still be red and hot as a horseshoe in heat.
He closes his eyes and I’d like to wrap my arms around him. I’d like to push the hair from his face and trace the lines of his nose. I’d like to hold my finger below his nostrils for a long time, until it is damp from his exhalations. Then I’d put the finger in my mouth and drink Jude’s breath. It probably would taste like alcohol but I forgive him for that. There is little else to do here besides get drunk and it seems to make what is small, us, part of something that is drowned and large, something like the bottom of the sea, something like outer space. Drinking helps us continue living in remote places because, thankfully, here there is no one to tell us just how swallowed we are.
“I like you,” Jude says. He opens his eyes. He has small drops of sweat bulbing on his brow.
“I like you,” I say, and more than anything I do. Jude would never make me think of a timetable or a bank account or a good job, whatever the fuck that means. He’d never make me think of any of the ugly things on dry land. Despite all that is not right with Jude, nothing I do with him is ever held up to the light for judgment. He never thinks I am odd or weird or poor or perverted or wrong. He’d never say, “You’re a real nut job.” I’d sit in his dirty laundry for days and he would understand. He would even bring me a cup of soup while I sat.
I want to tell Jude what it was like when he went to the war, what it was like to be waiting at home for him and wondering whether or not he would be killed. But I never do. I don’t want it to be a competition about which of us suffered more. I never tell him that when he was in the war I tried to wrap my arms around the dresser in my bedroom. My cheek was doughy from sleeping where I’d been crying and the dresser’s corner left a red imprint. “Kiss me,” I said and kicked its leg when it didn’t. The varnish smelled sticky and old, like Worcestershire sauce. I stuck out my tongue to taste it but became scared that the emptiness of the dresser would suck me into its vacuum. I let go.
Or that when Jude was in the war I opened up the hole in my chest. I stored some new things there. There was plenty of room. Things like nail clippers, thread, addresses. Those things easy to lose that drive you mad to find. But every time I went to find them, they’d be gone.
When Jude was in the war I liked to imagine how difficult it was to get my letters past the war censors with their big black markers. I doubt that there are actually censors anymore, but I’d imagine them all the same. Sometimes I thought that what I had written to him would arrive looking like this:
Dear Jude,
Today my and I found a It was
a with black and spots on its
.
Love,
When Jude was in the war I cleaned empty hotel rooms for money. In most of the rooms a man had taken a woman or girl and loved her with her face against the wall so she couldn’t see him. When I cleaned at the motel I’d touch the wall with my own face. I’d pretend he was behind me. I couldn’t see him. He was in the war. The walls tasted like salt. Imagine how the wall and the women and the girls feel through each winter and each war, standing with their faces up against a wall, playing one love scene they recall over and over again, like a video movie or the memory of something that broke.
TEST CASE
I know this is not uncommon, but I’ve always required very little prompting to convince myself that this is a scientific experiment. Just my life, specifically. Almost everyone else is in on it. Jude’s either innocent or he’s the lead scientist. I’ve always wanted to be a scientist so I’ve tried to make friends on the other side, people who might risk passing me a dangerous hint from the resistance, saying, “There are others like you.” That hasn’t happened yet.
Jude gets paid daily when he fishes and if he’s done well he’ll come by the house. “Let me take you out to lunch,” he says, because he has a small pile of money. We usually go out for Chinese food. Jude’s hair looks Chinese, soft and black like a Chinese crow. I wonder how the two pieces of evidence work together in the experiment.
“Jude, have you ever thought that your life was an experiment?” I ask.
“Why yes,” he says. “Yes I have,” he coughs. “I think that’s an entirely natural thought.”
I see. He’s trying to throw me off the scent. I knew it.
“Testing,” Jude says. “Testing,” because he pays for our lunch and he stares at me silently for extended periods of time. On my side of the experiment those actions commonly mean, “Take me home with you and kiss me.” But Jude drives me to my house. “See you tomorrow,” he says and leaves. Sometimes he’ll even go before I can get my keys out of my pocketbook. I tell myself, “He’s got to get over to the lab and type up a report: Subject delusional—she wholly believes in the elements we fabricated for this experiment, namely,
love
death
ocean
mercy
The words fall like drops in some ancient water torture. When I get home I tell my mother, “I’ve always wanted to be a scientist.” I am hoping that if I tell her this again she will let me in on the experiment.
She doesn’t. Instead she says, “I’ve always wanted to be a Christian Scientist. Why don’t we become Christian Scientists together?” She is not serious. She knows little of that church—the same bit most of us know about their not going to doctors. She thinks that she would like to be one of them because of how, years ago, she lost a baby at the hospital. She wishes she had become a Christian Scientist before she went to the hospital. I tell her, “The baby was dead inside you before you got there.” But she likes to blame the hospital.
“What does their name mean?” I ask her. “Why are they scientists?”
I am thinking that if she says, “Because they conduct secret experiments instead of going to church,” I will join up. But she doesn’t answer me. She stands staring out the window, holding the hole in her belly.
METAMORPHOSIS
It is early. I can’t rest. So I walk to Jude’s house while the street is still asleep. The street is dreaming it is the silver asphalt of fish scales, and it looks that way, too. Jude’s house is locked up. I go around back and lie down on the small stair landing outside, though it is cloudy. I imagine the curves of the woman he has in there and his hands on them. While I wait I hear lots of things, particularly one noise that sounds like choking and I think, “Good. He has killed her.” I sit up.
Beside me on the staircase is the molted exoskeleton of an insect and the insect who has come from inside. The exoskeleton looks like a brown paper bag, though the insect’s old hands and feet and antennae are exact, not like a bag but like the real thing. The insect, now outside its spent skin, looks damp and buttery. It becomes apparent that eventually, in a few minutes, the insect will unfold itself into a dragonfly. I can tell by the silica wings, still sticky.
Eventually Jude opens the door but only he comes out. I look inside behind him. “I didn’t know you were here,” he says.
No one else is with him. In the short time that I waited for Jude, not too long, the dragonfly matured enough to fly away. So I hated it because I knew that would never happen to me.
MUTINY, BOUNTY
We’ve been fogged in for five days. The fog makes me both love and hate the weather. I hate it because it brings me down, but I love it because if the foul state continues I won’t have to do anything important with my life, and in many ways I a
m quite happy in that knowledge.
The television talks about those who couldn’t make it through the winter. People who ran out of oil over a weekend or had a slippery car wreck, or a man who went overboard in the weight of a net, or someone who got electrocuted listening to the storm radio in the bathtub, or someone whose liver finally gave out from drinking too much.
Karen, the deaf girl, was here for dinner and though she’s gone now my mother is still feeling quiet. She is sitting in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room reading a book about the Italian Mafia. Jude and I are trying to watch television for the fourth night in a row but my grandfather interrupts. He has been reading some odd dictionaries I got him at the library’s yearly sell-off. One is a Russian-to-English from the 1950s. “I don’t think you’ll believe what I found,” he says. “A word, can’t pronounce it. We don’t have a word to match it but we should. We should develop it tonight because the word means, ‘the feelings one retains for someone he once loved.’ ”
“Hate?” Jude says.
“No, not that feeling.” My grandfather looks at Jude with disappointment.
“Betrayal,” my mother says without looking away from her book.
“No. It’s the little house love moved out of, maybe a hermit crab moves in and carries the house across the floor of a tidal pool. The lover sees the old love moving and it looks like it’s alive again.”
They are all wrong. There’s a reason why we have no word for it. You don’t get to keep the feelings for someone you once loved. Once you’ve washed your hands of that person, all those feelings, all that dirty water is washed out to sea. There is no word for that dirty water.
The Seas Page 7