I went out into the hall and knocked at her door. “Hello? Hello?” I didn’t know her name. No one answered, but there was a sound from inside the room. The sound of running water. I noticed that some sort of gum had been placed around the edges of the door to seal it tight.
“Hello? Hello!”
“What is it?” came the new tenant’s muffled, mechanical voice—a voice without resonance, a voice in a box.
“Are you all right?”
She laughed.
I rattled the doorknob. “Let me in!”
I turned sideways and struck the door with the force of my whole body.
“Jada!” I shouted. I knew now, I remembered. The field of ashes and then the tree, half blossoming and half burned, in the middle of the courtyard. We dragged her from the rubble. She whispered: “Water.” Her swollen face. I could picture it now, behind glass, on the other side of the door.
5. On the construction of instruments for raising water from shallow pools
We ran across the field. My legs were wet. My lungs had shrunk. There was no sound now. We would not be able to hear well for several days. We would read one another’s lips in the drifting ash, in the burned town, in the shadow of the single edifice left standing. This was the art museum. Its windows were gone. Burnt canvases littered the empty streets—we found one or two as far away as the canal. I went to the canal to fetch water for Jada. The water was the color of tobacco. She drank thirstily and whispered: “Thank you.”
We had been artists. We said that we were going to be artists again. We called the tree in the courtyard “the Tree of Hope.” “Tree of Hope, keep firm,” Jada would say. Her voice a rustle, a sigh. When she got too tired, I carried her on my back. We collected the wrecked paintings and made a mosaic of them in the courtyard, held down with stones. That was before the recovery effort started. Once it started, we saw we wouldn’t be able to keep our artwork. Jada stared at it all day, to memorize it. Nobody had a camera.
6. On the construction of an automaton representing two men drinking
It was my turn to keep watch, but I fell asleep against the courtyard wall. Fast asleep and dreaming with my eyes open.
I awake in a chair. The room all white. My arms outstretched. I am sleepy, heavy and smiling. Turning my head I can see a man on either side. One on my left and one on my right. They are draining the blood from my wrists with needles. The dark stuff runs away through a pair of tubes.
Good-bye, blood! I feel no pain. On the contrary, I am quite happy. I gaze at my doctors with tenderness, first one and then the other. My ministers, administrators, ministering angels. One has a beard, the other a beautiful gold watch. One of them loves me, I know, and the other hates me, but their work is the same, and my love for them is absolutely equal. Desire for me unites them: this makes me the center of the world. I smile at my angels, who will drain me as dry as plaster.
They are talking. Arguing. “No!” I want to tell them. “Don’t fight! Love one another!” But my tongue is too thick to move.
They have left their posts and stalked behind me. I can still hear their shouts. Now there’s the sound of a struggle, the clatter of breaking glass!
A moment later—silence.
I struggle to move my tongue. I am trying to say hello. Can you hear me saying hello?
A long stillness. Something seems to be pressing on my wrists. I am still calm, but it occurs to me that soon I will start to feel pain.
I cry out, wordless. A gurgling sound. Then I hear footsteps. Yes! Closer! Tap-tapping steps. A nurse in a white coat and headscarf comes into the room.
“Oh my God,” she says.
She makes a few efficient movements at each of my wrists. My arms are numb. She brings them together and crosses them in my lap. She has covered my wrists with white tape. “Oh God oh God,” she says, “my job, I can’t lose my job, I can’t lose another job.”
I want to tell her that it’s all right, that the universe is happy, but a strange feeling is coming back to me with the pain in my wrists and arms.
The nurse bends close. Her smell is sharp: terror and eau de cologne. “You have to move with me now,” she whispers. “You have to help.”
A feeling is coming back to me. It’s not here yet; I’m searching for it. I stare at the nurse. Her face is tense, familiar. Something inside me breaks. I lift my arms and put them around her shoulders, and she heaves me out of the chair. Together we stagger out into the hall.
What is the nature of things? The mechanism works perfectly for years; then one day it breaks.
The nurse half-carries me downstairs, to a dark basement. She shares her lunch with me for three days. She doesn’t ask my name. She doesn’t want to know anything, it’s dangerous. We play the game of “asfoura” on her phone. She lets me win.
That’s how it happens. One day something springs loose, and the clock stops. The clock is bleeding.
The nurse brings me a new set of clothes. Her eyes are red. She says it isn’t safe for me to stay here anymore. She writes down an address and tells me to go there.
7. On the construction of miscellaneous objects
The nurse holds the back door open for me. “Run.”
We’d started fighting, Jada and I. I said, “It’s a recovery effort. It’s an effort to recover. Can’t you understand that?” She said, “What? Recover what? I don’t want to recover, I don’t want to go back.” She said everything was going to be the same, it would be like it was before the struggle. I said that was ridiculous, the world had changed forever. “Everything’s out in the open.” “You think we’re going to stay out in the open?” she asked. “I wouldn’t mind going inside,” I snapped. “A roof would be nice for a change.”
I ran down the stairs and banged on the landlord’s door. This is how you forget: first slowly, then quickly. First you forget because you don’t want to remember. You forget the war. You call it “the last war,” because it’s the most recent one, and then you call it “the last war” because you hope it’s the last one, and then you don’t call it anything, and they put new turf in the ravaged municipal gardens, and the water in the fountains runs clear. And this forgetting is so pleasant! And then you stop calling the people you knew, you forget their faces. And then you find you’ve forgotten her face. I banged on the landlord’s door. “Help me! Help!” At last he opened it, sleepy and startled. His sleeve was damp. The ceiling was leaking.
Father, I have terrible dreams.
Father! Good morning, Father!
My father smiles at me, but he looks haggard. Poor Father!
I cannot look haggard, for my face is only painted.
He says we are going to visit the king today.
8. On the construction of an instrument that plays itself
I cannot see anything when my doors are closed, for my chamber has no windows. This is a pity, for I am sure the palace is splendid! My father carries me himself; he will not trust me to the apprentices. I find myself carried up into fragrant air. I hear delicate music and the plashing of fountains. This is the day! I am so nervous, I am thankful to be made of plaster and wire. These materials hide one’s feelings much better than flesh. Father, for instance—poor man, I can feel his hands trembling.
His voice quivers, too, as he explains his invention to the king. “We pour the wine here . . .” And there it is, gurgling down into the tube. He fills the receptacle to the top. “Now wait, Your Majesty!” My cup grows heavy; I can hardly bear the excitement.
Full!
I roll down and open the door. There he is. The king. He is large, like Father, but younger, and dressed in gleaming white. He chuckles and takes the cup. I am dazzled by his robe, the windows, the sparkling floor, the brass lamps hanging on long chains.
The king drinks. “Hm!” he says.
My father makes a sound like a sob. Is he so happy?
No! For the king is turning yellow. He clutches his throat.
My father weeps and falls to his knees. The room
erupts in noise. People run toward us. They cradle the king in their arms, they stroke his brow with fine cloths. As for my father, they bind his arms behind him and pull his beard. As they drag him away, he gives me one last, anguished glance.
“The king is dead! The king is dead!”
Wails clash in the air. The king’s body is lifted gently and carried away. Now the room is empty, and there is no sound but the fragile clink of music issuing from a box across the room.
Father, Father!
My father has slain my husband, and gone to prison.
How fortunate that I cannot cry. I would ruin my paint!
The room is quiet. Who will push me back into my chamber? Who will fill my roof receptacle with wine? Beneath the notes of music from the box, I can hear a roar from far below, the sound of frenzied crowds and fire. Smoke drifts in through the window. I cannot weep, but I am weeping. I remember a tree in a courtyard, half in bloom. The Tree of Hope. We called it the Tree of Hope. I remember the nurse in white, so tired, pressing banknotes into my hand.
I dreamt that I was a real woman and that I bled.
Weeping inside, I see a bright brass figure on top of the music box. A woman’s torso. The box is meant to represent her skirt. She looks calm, resigned, familiar. Is she smiling?
I feel I must speak, if only in my mind. “Who are you?” I ask. Will she hear me?
She hears. I sense, rather than see, her deepening smile. She is not afraid of the noise downstairs. She has lived through fire in her dreams.
She says: “I am an instrument that plays itself.”
How to Get Back to the Forest
“You have to puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?”
She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. I mean everybody at camp was sort of a mess, we were even supposed to be that way, at a difficult stage, but Cee took it to another level. Herding us into the bathroom at night and asking us to puke. “It’s right here,” she said, tapping the nightgown over her hollow chest. “Where you’ve got less nerves in your esophagus. It’s like wired into the side, into the muscle. You have to puke really hard to get it.”
“Did you ever get it out?” asked Max. She was sitting on one of the sinks. She’d believe anything.
Cee nodded, solemn as a counselor. “Two years ago. They caught me and gave me a new one. But it was beautiful while it was gone. I’m telling you it was the best.”
“Like how?” I said.
Cee stretched out her arms. “Like bliss. Like everything. Everything all at once. You’re raw, just a big raw nerve.”
“That doesn’t sound so great,” said Elle.
“I know,” said Cee, not annoyed but really agreeing, turning things around. That was one of her talents.
“It sounds stupid,” she nodded, “but that’s because it’s something we can’t imagine. We don’t have the tools. Our bodies don’t know how to calculate what we’re missing. You can’t know till you get there. And at the same time, it’s where you came from. It’s where you started.”
She raised her toothbrush. “So. Who’s with me?”
Definitely not me. God, Cee. You were such an idiot.
Apparently, a girl named Puss had told her about the bug. And Cee, being Cee, was totally open to learning new things from a person who called herself Puss. Puss had puked out her own bug and was living on the streets. I guess she’d run away from camp, I don’t really know. She was six feet tall, Cee said, with long red hair. The hair was dyed, which was weird, because if you’re living on the streets do you care about stuff like that? This kind of thing can keep me awake at night. I lie in bed, or rather I sit in the living room because Pete hates me tossing and turning, and I leave the room dark and open all the curtains, and I watch the lights of the city and think about this girl Puss getting red hair dye at the grocery store and doing her hair in the bathroom at the train station. Did she put newspapers down? And what if somebody came in and saw her?
Anyway, eventually Cee met Puss in the park, and Puss was clearly down-and-out and a hooker but she looked cool and friendly, and Cee sat down beside her on the swings.
“You have to puke it up.”
We’d only been at camp for about six weeks. It seemed like a long time, long enough to know everybody. Everything felt stretched out at camp, the days and the nights, and yet in the end it was over so fast, as soon as you could blink. Camp was on its own calendar—a special time of life. That was Jodi’s phrase. She was our favorite counselor. She was greasy and enthusiastic, with a skinny little ponytail, only a year or two older than the seniors. Camp is so special! The thing with Jodi was, she believed every word she said. It made it really hard to make fun of her. That night, the night in the bathroom, she was asleep down the hall underneath her Mother Figure, which was a little stuffed dog with Florida on its chest.
“Come on!” said Cee. And she stuck her toothbrush down her throat, just like that. I think Max screamed. Cee didn’t start puking right away. She had to give herself a few really good shoves with that toothbrush, while people said “Oh my God” and backed away and clutched one another and stared. Somebody said, “Are you nuts?” Somebody else said something else, I might have said something, I don’t know, everything was so white and bright in that moment, mirrors and fluorescent lights and Cee in that goddamn Victorian nightgown jabbing away with her toothbrush and sort of gagging. Every time I looked up I could see all of us in the mirror. And then it came. A splatter of puke all over the sink. Cee leaned over and braced herself. Blam. Elle said, “Oh my God that is disgusting.” Cee gasped. She was just getting started.
Elle was next. All of a sudden she spun around with her hands over her mouth and let go in the sink right next to Cee. Splat. I started laughing, but I already felt sort of dizzy and sick myself, and also scared, because I didn’t want to throw up. Cee looked up from her own sink and nodded at Elle, encouraging her. She looked completely bizarre, her wide cheekbones, her big crown of natural hair, sort of a retro supermodel with a glistening mouth, her eyes full of excitement. I think she even said, “Good job, Elle!”
Then she went to it with the toothbrush again. “We have to stop her!” said Katie, taking charge. “Max, go get Jodi!” But Max didn’t make it. She jumped down from the third sink, but when she got halfway to the door she turned around and ran back to the sink and puked. Meanwhile Katie was dragging Cee away from the sink and trying to get the toothbrush, but also not wanting to touch it, and she kept going “Ew ew ew” and “Help me you guys,” and it was all so hilarious I sank down on the floor, absolutely crying with laughter. Five or six other girls, too. We just sort of looked at each other and screamed. It was mayhem. Katie dragged Cee into one of the stalls, I don’t know why. Then Katie started groaning and let go of Cee and staggered into the stall beside her, and sploosh, there she went.
Bugs.
It’s such a camp rumor. Camp is full of stories like that. People say the ice cream makes you sterile, the bathrooms are full of hidden cameras, there’s fanged, flesh-eating kids in the lake, if you break into the office you can call your parents. Lots of kids break into the office. It’s the most common camp offense. I never tried it, because I’m not stupid—of course you can’t call your parents. How would you even get their number? And bugs—the idea of a bug planted under your skin, to track you or feed you drugs—that’s another dumb story.
Except it’s not, because I saw one.
The smell in the bathroom was terrible now—an animal smell, hot; it thrashed around and it had fur.
I knew I was going to be sick. I crawled to the closest place—the stall where Cee knelt—and grabbed hold of the toilet seat. Cee moved aside for me. Would you believe she was still hanging onto her to
othbrush? I think we both threw up a couple of times. Then she made this awful sound, beyond anything, her whole body taut and straining, and something flew into the toilet with a splash.
I looked at her and there was blood all over her chin. I said “Jesus, Cee.” I thought she was dying. She sat there coughing and shaking, her eyes full of tears and triumph. She was on top of the world. “Look!” she breathed. And I looked, and there in the bowl, half-hidden by puke and blood, lay an object made of metal.
Tender : Stories Page 10