Babylon and Other Stories

by Alix Ohlin

  “I'm not saying you can't get there,” he said. “It's just that you have a ways to go. It's like—how can I explain this? Do you like baseball? It's like the difference between the major leagues and the minors. What you've done with my book is not wrong, but it's minor-league. I suppose it's not surprising for a novice. I knew I was taking a chance. On Sid's word, of course. He's a big fan of yours. I understand you and your husband have been friends with Sid for many years, children going to school together, that sort of thing. These sorts of connections are epidemic in our little area, I've found.”

  Finally he stopped talking. Karin knew she could never speak the thought in her mind: that she'd had to make the writing awkward and blocky so it would match his own. That he was a terrible writer. That, if anything, the problem with her contribution was that it wasn't bad enough. St. John was looking down at the manuscript, his brow furrowed pensively, and she realized he wanted her to beg for a second chance. She stood up. “I'm sorry you were disappointed. I'll send your check back.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Life is disappointment. If nothing else, the two of us have learned that much by our age, haven't we? Why don't you try again? Just pitch it a little higher this time.” Now he stood as well. “Corazón will see you out.”

  Driving back, Karin cursed St. John and all his terrible, terrible books. It couldn't be true that she had done such a bad job. She refused to believe it. At home she took the dog out, jerking her along by the leash at a breakneck pace until she dug her paws into the ground and refused to go farther, begging her with soulful eyes to be reasonable.

  For days, instead of looking at what she'd written, she plotted revenge and vowed to expose him as a hack. She could write her own best-selling mystery series, whose very first villain would be an aging writer living in a glass house; she would accept accolades at the launch party, and when St. John approached her with his pitiful congratulations she would pretend not to remember his name.

  Over time, she let this idea go. The problem was that the hospital and the town of St. Lucent and Rusty and Rose and even the custodian had somehow lodged themselves in her brain, and she wasn't prepared or able to let them ago. She didn't want to write another series; she wanted to write this one. The book, she felt, had become hers.

  She couldn't concentrate on anything else. When Marcus called, she was evasive about her work and asked him so many questions about school, his grades so far, that he got angry and said, “God, Mom, get your own life and stop bugging me about mine.” That night she couldn't even sleep. All she could think about was The Hospital Was Haunted.

  Finally she stopped resisting and started writing again where she'd left off. From here on out, she would write without lowering herself to St. John's level. Refusing to think of it in baseball terms, she'd finish the book and polish it until it shone.

  She reached the end in three weeks, writing fast and easily, not even looking back as she went. She worked in two extra murders and a romantic but steamy sex scene between Rose and Rusty, who, with those skilled hands, was as brilliantly accomplished in bed as he was in the operating room. But while they were in bed, someone else died, and Rose, tormented by guilt, vowed not to have anything to do with Rusty until the murders were solved. The streets of St. Lucent ran with blood. But at least this murder exonerated him, freeing the two of them to pursue the raping ghost together. This unity went against St. John's original outline—which kept the reader convinced of Rusty's guilt until the very end—but Karin no longer cared. In her version, all fingers pointed to the custodian until the penultimate chapter, when—surprise, surprise, and she hoped Mitchell understood how magnanimous she was being—he was cleared of suspicion. The actual murderer was the lesbian nurse. Karin felt a little bit bad about this, not wanting to marginalize the gay character, but she endeavored to make clear that there was no connection between lesbianism and homicide. The nurse was a frustrated lover, that was all; the knowledge that she couldn't have Rose had driven her insane. It was the perfect ending, because you wouldn't suspect a lesbian nurse of being a raping ghost.

  In the final pages, Rusty and Rose vowed to leave St. Lucent together and establish a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, where the sun always shone. Every last plot strand was sewn up.

  For a week or so after finishing, she was on a high. Food tasted better, and she slept long, satisfied hours. She baked cookies and sent them off in a care package to Marcus. She finally completed some of the other work that had been piling up and sent that off. She even cooked for herself, dishes with gourmet ingredients accompanied by a glass of wine.

  When she was ready, she e-mailed the entire thing to Donald St. John. Then she moved on with her life, not waiting to hear back.

  It took him three weeks to reply. One day she came home from the grocery store and found an envelope from him in the mail. Dear Karin, I'm terribly sorry to say that I don't think that it's going to work out. Enclosed is an additional payment in recognition of all your efforts. Best wishes, Donald St. John. A check fluttered to the ground.

  Without even pausing, she got back in the car and drove to his half-glass house. She almost expected him to be standing naked on the second floor, waiting for her, but he wasn't. When she rang the doorbell, Corazón took a long time coming to the door, and her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed.

  Karin looked at her. “Is the master of the house home?” she said.

  Corazón nodded and let her in. Standing in the living room, Karin heard her go upstairs and then come back down, evidently alone. Minutes passed. He couldn't just ignore her by hiding upstairs. She looked at the art on the walls, bad oils of strangely colored fruit in misshapen bowls, the kind of thing you saw in suburban coffee shops. Glancing at her watch, she saw that fifteen minutes had gone by. It was ridiculous.

  “St. John, I'm coming upstairs,” she called. “I'm coming to your office and I don't care what you're wearing.” There was no answer. She started up the stairs. The door to the office was closed. There was no sign of Corazón. She pushed through the door without knocking, and St. John was sitting at his desk, wearing a gray V-neck sweater over a white shirt, with his hands poised over the keyboard, like a photograph on a book jacket.

  “Karin,” he said, “I'm sorry. I just wanted to finish this one section before we spoke. Forgive me—you know how it is when you get in the groove and don't want to lose it.”

  She sat down across from him at the desk.

  “I'll just be a moment, I promise,” he said. His white hair was standing up all over.

  Her own hair, she realized, was a mess, too—she'd left the house in sweatpants, without giving her appearance any thought at all—but she didn't care. She only wanted to know what he was writing, if he was redoing The Hospital Was Haunted to suit his own horrendous taste. She darted around behind him, and before he swiveled in his chair and stood up to block her view of the monitor, she read: Dear Mother, I hope you are recovering well from the operation on your hip.

  “What on earth are you doing?” St. John said. His voice had risen, in perplexity or anger, and practically squeaked at the end of the question.

  “Where's the manuscript?” Karin said, and started searching the office, opening and closing folders and filing cabinets. She thought surely he would have printed it out, as he had the last time, but she didn't see it anywhere. Perhaps it was already gone, already sent off, under his own name, to his agent or editor or whoever he sent these things to. He had taken it away from her. He'd seduced her with the project and then robbed her of its satisfactions.

  “Corazón?” he called. “Can you come up here, please?”

  Corazón ran up the stairs and stood there watching the two of them, unsure of what to do.

  The master of the house, Karin thought, with a woman at his beck and call. What a life he had, this Donald St. John. “You,” she said, “are a raping ghost.”

  “And you are a very disturbed woman,” St. John said. “I think you'd better leave my house b
efore I call the police.”

  “I want my book,” she said.

  “Karin, my dear, it was never your book. It was my book and always will be. I realize that you became very invested in it. But surely you've understood all along that this is my work. You can't simply step in and take over, my dear.”

  “Stop calling me my dear,” she said, shaking her head. She saw the movement reflected in the glass behind her, her crazy halo of graying hair, her desperate and ghostly eyes. Donald. St. John made a beckoning gesture with his hand and Corazón came and stood beside him, frowning, for the first time, at Karin. She saw that he was genuinely afraid of her. He thought she was going to attack him, and Corazón, this silent little woman, was the only protection he had. “Did you even read it?” she asked him.

  “I began to,” he said slowly. “I'm afraid I didn't quite finish.”

  You couldn't afford to, could you? she thought. You knew it would be better than anything you've ever done. She took a deep breath and something slowed inside her, a quiet tectonic settle marking the ebb of her rage. She felt a great wave of pity for him, for the gigantic emptiness of his life. “I'm going to leave now,” she said. “I'm going to leave you to think about what you've done.”

  In the car she was tempted to turn back—to go to his computer, find the copy of her book on his computer, delete it, wrest it from him—but she fought the urge. Whatever he did with it, she thought, whether he published what she'd written or did it over himself, she would be there in its pages. Some shade of her would remain.

  The dog greeted her happily when she got home, licking her hand, and she stroked her head and led her into Marcus's room. She lay down on his bed and the dog curled up on the rug beside her, no sound but their breathing, measured, rhythmic, ever calmer. On the wall was a poster of a rock band whose music she'd yelled at him not to play so loud. On a shelf stood his cross-country running trophies and a collection of marbles in a glass jar. She closed her eyes and thought of Rose and Rusty, their work at the clinic in Tucson, the adobe house they lived in behind it. They were happy together in the desert sun. Still, Rose sometimes woke in the night, listening to the sounds of the darkness. Of course, after everything that had happened in St. Lucent, she knew that ghosts didn't exist. But another part of her understood that every house was haunted.

  Local News

  The cold is killing in Cranston tonight—a homeless man, thirties, Caucasian, found huddled and frozen inside a Dumpster behind a convenience store. I drive over with Mario to film the EMTs carting him away. He's already in the ambulance by the time we get there, so the footage is just a shot of the Dumpster, rimmed by yellow police tape, and an interview with the clerk who found him.

  “Threw in the trash and there he was,” the clerk, a twenty-year-old with a lip piercing, says. “His lips were all blue and stuff.”

  The night air slashes my face. I want to ask him if his tongue ever sticks to the piercing when it's freezing cold, but I don't. Two years on the job have taught me to keep to the subject at hand. So instead I thank him, walk over to the cops, and ask the usual questions.

  “Any ID?” I say.

  When Jeff sees it's me, he turns his back and lets his partner Aurora handle it.

  “Nothing so far,” she says. “We're going to ask around at the shelter. I'm thinking he was drunk and fell asleep in there. You keeping warm, Joanne?”

  “Not at the moment,” I say.

  “You too skinny, that's why.” Aurora, who's forty-five and has grown children, thinks of me maternally. She also thinks that if I just agreed to marry Jeff and started having babies, all our problems would be solved. He's already back at the patrol car, ignoring me.

  “Go home and warm up,” she says.

  “You take care too, Aurora.”

  In front of the camera, I take off my hat, and my ears burn. No matter how cold it is, I still have to take off the hat. Behind the lens, Mario's wearing a sheepskin hat with earflaps, and earmuffs on top of that.

  “Police are investigating the death of a homeless man due to bitter cold in Cranston tonight,” I say into the microphone. I wonder why cold is always bitter, never melancholy, never peeved or furious. The cold tonight feels whiny and pissed off—something about dampness in the air, about a lack of sparkle in the frozen brown slush. The cold is upset in the manner of someone who's been unhappily married for twenty years and just can't take it anymore. I talk into the mike about the weather forecast (still cold, getting colder), the crowded conditions at all the shelters, and the need for everybody to drive safely. Cold's a story we've covered a million times before, and I can tell Mario isn't even listening. I put my hat back on and we take the van back to the station. The heat of the vehicle makes me yawn. Then the scanner crackles. I hear the code for a fire, and tell Mario to turn the van around.

  “Come on, man, really? It's ten-thirty.”

  “News never sleeps,” I tell him, and he rolls his eyes and lights a cigarette, to get back at me, because he knows I hate smoke.

  When we get there the fire's climbing up into the night, several stories of flame rising above the building itself. For a state surrounded by water, Rhode Island's terrible with fires. This one's in a dilapidated strip mall in Woonsocket, and it started late at night, which probably means no one was around. Although if no one was around, how did it start in the first place? I step out of the van and prepare to be investigative. The scene that greets me is painted in neon: the orange sizzle of the rising flames, the pulsating lights of the fire trucks, the bright jets of water arcing from the hoses. People from nearby neighborhoods are standing around, watching. A car pulls up, screeching to a stop, and a fat middle-aged man climbs out and runs up to the closest cop.

  “What the hell happened?” I can hear him saying.

  To my surprise I spot Jeff talking to another officer, their cars parked nose to nose. I go over and stand in front of him, where he can't act like he doesn't see me. “What are you doing here?” I say.

  “Happened to be in the neighborhood. Aurora likes the soup at a place around the corner.”

  “So what's the deal?”

  “Portuguese kale, for two-ninety-five,” he says. And then he adds, because he's never sure I notice when he makes a joke, “That's the soup.”

  “Yeah, I got it,” I say. “So what happened, exactly?”

  “We're still trying to find out.” He looks at me critically. “Your nose is really red, you know. Watch out you don't get frostbite.”

  “I'll work on it,” I say. His nose is red, too, but I don't point this out. I feel it isn't my place anymore. Two weeks ago he said that if we didn't start talking about marriage, he'd walk away; this week he's barely said anything to me at all. “You're wasting my time,” was the last thing he said to me on the subject. I didn't know how to tell him that time is exactly what I don't want to waste. I have plans that go beyond the local news, beyond the here and now. I never pictured myself as a policeman's wife, waiting up for him at three in the morning; in fact I never expected, when we first spent the night together, that it would go any further than that. When I think about my future, it takes place on a stage that's shiny and huge, in New York or L.A., with me on TV at six o'clock bantering with the middle-aged male anchor in the blue power suit. My future isn't in cruising around the Ocean State in the News Ten van all hours of the night. I have to admit, though, that I'll have a hard time forgetting Jeff's warm chest and the little scar above his right eye and the fact that he genuinely seems to like bringing me coffee in bed in the morning. When your real life collides with the one you've been dreaming of, it's hard to know which should win out.

  The smell of the fire is dense and vicious—bitter, like the cold—and it singes my nostrils. The air is layered with toxic, plastic-scented fumes. Mario's filming and yawning at the same time. I scan the crowd, scouting for interviews. The fat guy who got out of the car earlier is trying to get into the store, apparently trying to get into the fire, and he's being held ba
ck, practically bear-hugged, by a cop I don't know. The fat guy squirms and wriggles like a child in his embrace. I wave at Mario and we go over.

  “Sir, is this your store?”

  The light of the camera calms him down, and the cop nods at me and lets go. Nobody goes anywhere while they're on film. He mutters in the guy's ear, “Everybody here needs to go stand on the other side of the parking lot, behind the fire trucks, understand?”

  Another hose goes on, and the noise of the water and the fire together drowns out our voices. I motion to the guy to follow me back to the other side of the lot, then glance over my shoulder to make sure Mario's not spacing out, which he sometimes does when he feels I've kept him out too long.

  “Is this your store?” I say again, pointing the microphone in his face. “What's your name?”

  In the glare of the lights his eyes are tiny and black, set back in his face like raisins in a cinnamon roll. He looks bewildered and angry. I'm not sure he speaks English.

  “What's your name?” I say again.

  “Everything … everything's burning,” he finally says.

  “In your store? Do you own the store, sir?”

  “I never thought it could burn. All the inventory—how could a store like that burn?”

  “What kind of store is it, sir?”

  He looks at the fire, then back at me. Some unidentifiable specks of ash float over us, sparks showering around them. “Water beds,” he says. “How could they burn?”

  I didn't know people still slept on waterbeds. The fire's burning ferociously, and distant shouts among the firemen sound frantic. Popping and exploding noises are flying along with bits of debris, and I realize these are from waterbeds bursting in the air like pricked balloons. The water from the hoses steams in the frigid air and all the snow around the lot is melting. I tell Mario to film some more of the fire and get back to me in five minutes, then I focus on the water-bed guy, putting a hand on his arm. When I offer my condolences, he opens up.