Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  “Very neat,” I said.

  “I made it once years ago but I forgot all about it. I was cleaning out—I’ve been trying to clean out the bookcases, and—”

  “Mom.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I was wondering. You know Alison’s diaries?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you mind sending them to me?”

  She was quiet a moment. “Sure, sweetheart,” she said finally. “I’ll make copies and pop them in the mail as soon as I can.”

  I knew she would not ask my reasons for making this request, what had happened or what I was thinking and feeling that made me want them. I didn’t even bother proffering a made-up explanation. It was a little unkind of me, and I knew that; my request surely made her worry, and I could easily have told her something to assuage her concern, but I didn’t. But you have to understand how much it hurt. No, Honey, are you sure? No, Do you think that’s really the best thing? My mother hid away in her fragile sweetness, and I hated her for the ironic way her fragility protected her.

  * * *

  A COLD, clear night. Clive left the Little Sweet and headed east for some time before coming to a stop; beneath the glare of a single post light, teenage boys, T-shirts billowing from their bodies, were playing basketball on a chain-link court. Off to the side, a few young boys of about five or six played their own small game. Clive stood with his hands resting against the fence and watched. What was it about this scene that so held his attention? I stood some distance away and watched him watching the boys. They seemed to strobe with toughness and sensitivity, the two forces held in an uneasy tension. A boy dribbled the ball gracefully between his legs one moment, barreled into a defender the next. One of the young boys imitated his movements, then forgot the game and stooped to examine the clover growing up through cracks in the blacktop. A man in a tracksuit swaggered down the street in front of me, a tuckered-out girl in a tutu asleep in his arms. On the sidelines of the basketball game, a boy, still in his school uniform, punched a square of gum out of a foil packet and placed it boldly, tentatively, on a girl’s waiting tongue.

  There were girls and women, too, of course. Heading home from work in suits and pumps, in scrubs. Mothers with children. Clusters of adolescent girls with rhinestones on the back pockets of their jeans. But it was the men and boys I watched. I admit I had not done very much thinking about the inner lives of men. I was a girl with a sister. With my boyfriends, I saw now, I had never dug beneath the surface to find them where they hid. Perhaps I didn’t want their pain to compete with my own. Perhaps my story, my tragedy, had a forbidding power over men, and I enjoyed that. Or perhaps, knowing that a man, or men, had killed my sister, I was afraid of what I might find if I looked too closely—gentleness that turned over to shame that turned over to rage; ugly, unshakable desires—qualities that might suggest a universal masculine poison I did not want to know about because it would doom me to be alone forever.

  Clive continued down the sidewalk. He stopped at a newsstand and purchased a cup of coffee, which he drank as he headed north. A few minutes later, without breaking his stride, he tossed the dregs of the coffee into the street with a quick, dispassionate flick of his wrist.

  THE MATERIAL on Alison was endless, so much it seemed I would never get through it. Information on Clive Richardson and Edwin Hastie, by comparison, was thin at best. One day, I told my boss I needed to consult the archives at the New York Public Library to research some details about the Cornish coast in The Girl from Pendeen which she had asked me to confirm, and I spent the afternoon at the main branch, searching the catalog for anything I could find that mentioned Clive and Edwin. My first discovery was an academic text, Dark Travels: Thanatourism, Theory and Practice.

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: ASPECTS OF THANATOURISM

  Mediations: The Living and the Dead in Public Space

  Milking the Macabre: Ethical Considerations

  Kitschification and Mass-Consumption

  Hospitality in Hostile Spaces: Towards a New Model

  PART 2: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS

  Genocide Tourism

  Homicide Tourism

  Disaster Tourism

  PART 3: FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

  To my disappointment, the book contained only the briefest relevant passage, from the chapter on “Homicide Tourism”:

  … While Genocide Tourism is generally structured by government and nonprofit institutions, Homicide Tourism is often ad hoc, and thus represents an economic opportunity for independent local operators. Examples include Kristján Jóhannsson, who leads tours of Keflavik in southwest Iceland, a site of interest in the Guðmundur and Geirfinnur case; and Desmond Phillips, whose guided tours of the island of Saint X include visits to the houses of Edwin Hastie and Clive Richardson, suspects in the Alison Thomas murder, and a boat ride to the nearby cay where her body was recovered for a fish fry lunch. This essay will focus on the case of the Tyrolean village of Zinn am Alberg, which has rebuilt its local economy, previously dominated by dairy farming and the production of Tyrolean speck, around tourism related to the gruesome 1975 murders of the members of the Krenn family.…

  The next few books were no more informative. An encyclopedia of unsolved mysteries. A media studies dissertation on the differing portrayals of black and white female victims of violent crime from 1970 to 2000. I had high hopes for A Handbook History of Saint X, the only book I’d been able to find that focused exclusively on the island. It turned out to be a self-published monograph by a retired customs worker named David Webster, a hundred spiral-bound pages, peripatetic and ambitious in its scope, with five-page chapters on such topics as the history of the salt trade and the entirety of Amerindian civilization on the island.

  From Chapter 8, “1950 to the Present Time”:

  … The death of Alison Thomas on Faraway Cay (see Chapter 11: Folklore), had effects upon our island as deleterious as any hurricane. It has been speculated that the closing of the Grand Caribbee and three restaurants on Mayfair Road in a single season may be entirely attributable to the aforementioned scandal. This scandal had the additional effect of dividing the island over the question of whether its primary suspects, Misters Hastie and Richardson, were the innocent victims of a scapegoating mission by the American press, or, alternately and, this author believes, accurately, the parties responsible for single-handedly causing an economic downturn that endured for years and bringing international notoriety to our island and its people.…

  From Chapter 11, “Folklore”:

  … Tales about the woman on Faraway Cay are prevalent. In the most widespread account of her origin, she washed up on Faraway many centuries ago in a hurricane. Nobody knows from where she came, but she can never return because as is well known, dark spirits cannot cross salt water, as a result of which she is trapped on the cay for eternity. She has white skin and long black hair and hooves for feet. Mention must be made of her odd gait, which appears in many versions of the tale, and is widely believed to be what draws people to her, as humans cannot resist that dash of salt in their sweet.

  As the stories go, she lures people to cure her loneliness. She leads them across the cay and they give chase, desperate to touch some of her wildness. At last, she escorts them to the waterfall at the island’s center. She allows them to draw near, but when they reach out to grasp her, she slips away into the mist. They try to follow after her and are drowned. A popular version has it that a new goat appears on Faraway Cay for every person who vanishes there. It is said that you can see the humanness in their eyes.…

  I shut the book in disgust. A woman with hooves for feet. Humans turned to goats. Had my sister’s body been dumped in that waterfall as some kind of sick joke? Look, the woman on Faraway Cay did it! Hahaha.

  It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that, from the time I was a small child, I’d found some solace in the fact that Alison had been found somewhere so beautiful. How many small, unconscious coping mechanisms, how many pr
etty notions, would be taken from me before I uncovered the truth?

  I opened Google Maps on my laptop, a self-punishing impulse—to lay eyes on it, to force myself to picture her there, her body beneath all that water for days. But Faraway Cay did not even appear on Google Maps. Where I knew the cay must be, there was only blue.

  * * *

  I FOLLOWED Clive for many nights and many miles. In all that time, excepting the evening when I called his name and he responded with such terror, I never heard his voice. His nights were composed of enormous stretches of silence, and this silence was now mine, too. I would return home near midnight and realize I hadn’t uttered a word since leaving work at five-thirty. Sometimes I would speak—“Hello, hello, hello,” “My name is Emily,” “Today is Tuesday”—just to prove to myself that I was still real. I did not hear him speak, nor did I observe any other evidence to suggest that his life connected meaningfully with anyone else’s. Clive Richardson was a man hiding in plain sight, drawing no attention and leaving no trace upon the minds of others. He was an island, isolated and impenetrable.

  * * *

  IT WENT on like this. And something began to happen. At the beginning of each walk, I would be filled with the fear I described earlier, with a sense of the danger posed by Clive and the risk that I was taking in following him. But after thirty minutes, an hour, the experience shifted. It happened without my noticing, like slipping from waking to dreaming. It no longer felt like I was following him, but like we were on this walk together, linked. Eventually, even this we faded away; it was no longer the two of us traveling these dark streets, but a single mind, a memory, endeavoring through the step, step, step of these constitutionals to travel beyond some perimeter it could never seem to reach. If we kept walking long enough, I would be seized by the certainty that we were not alone; we were being watched, trailed by figures who flickered on the periphery, shrouded in darkness. A hand reaching out, beckoning. The pounding of hooves. A flare of laughter, rising from the streets like steam, then gone. Shh. Don’t tell.

  * * *

  ON HALLOWEEN, the old woman in my building sat on the front stoop in her white sneakers distributing Good & Plenty to crestfallen fairies and firefighters. I had been invited to a party at the apartment of a college friend on Pineapple Street and decided that I would go. I’d fallen into arrears with my friends, ignoring messages and invitations; attending seemed an efficient means of digging myself out. The party was an annual thing, and in prior years I’d spent quite a bit of time and effort thinking up and executing my costume—the year before, if memory serves, I’d gone as Frida Kahlo. But this year I had neither the time nor the inclination, and so I put on brown pants and a brown sweater, picked up a few twigs from the tree outside my apartment, and declared myself a tree. My non-costume turned out to be a hit, and at first I was having a pretty good time, sliding into the social rhythm I hadn’t realized I’d missed. Gin and tonic in a Solo cup. Jackie squealing, “Where have you been, girl?” as she petted my shoulder. Laden chitchat with a guy I’d hooked up with a few months earlier. A group of us climbing the ladder to the peach-soft roof to pass around a joint—smoke and cold air and the stark sounds of our laughter against the glitter of Manhattan across the water.

  But when I climbed back down into the hot, raucous party everything was wrong. I looked around—there was a girl dressed as a Warhol painting, her face covered in red dots; Jackie was a “sexy farmer,” a canny critique of the Sexy Halloween Costume that nevertheless allowed her to show off her midriff. My gaze pinged from face to face in the semidarkness. What was I doing here? Clive was out there, and I was not with him. I tried to get myself to stay, to enjoy myself, but I was startled to find that I could no longer tolerate a night away from him. I slipped out early without saying goodbye.

  Looking back, I can see that my pursuit of Clive Richardson was beginning to be about something more than gathering clues, that I was falling under the grip of something I could not control. But I did not allow myself to see this then. Maybe if I had, it all could have ended differently.

  I got a lot of flak for publishing my memoir. People said it was a shameless cash grab. I got called a hanger-on, a fame whore, a starfucker. I don’t think any of those people actually bothered to read my book, because if they had they would have seen that I wrote every word of it straight from my heart.

  After I found the girl, I went to therapy. I worked with a life coach. I embraced a vegan diet. I tried Xanax and Zoloft. I got into reiki and did a four-day silent meditation retreat. I even followed this guru for a while. Her hugs were supposed to cure you, it didn’t matter what was wrong with you. During her North American tour, I went to see her at the Sheraton near LAX. I waited in line for three hours. When it was my turn, I approached the dais and the guru wrapped me in an embrace so powerful it felt like it originated at the center of my soul. I swear I could feel it wiping everything away. A new beginning. Or so I thought. But on my drive back to Santa Monica, I was stopped in traffic on the 405 and it happened again—the girl appeared in my mind. That bloated white arm, reaching out to me.

  My therapist said that intrusive thoughts and images are an extremely common neurological phenomenon. To stop them, I simply needed to retrain my mind; he told me that it is not only possible to rewire the brain’s neural pathways, it is easy. Plasticity is exactly what our brains are designed for. Whenever the image of the girl intruded, I was supposed to imagine that I was in the checkout at the grocery store. On the belt were different grocery items and each item was a thought, and the girl was just one of these thoughts, and I knew which items were healthy and which were not, and I could choose which ones I picked up and which ones I put down, and I could watch these unhealthy thoughts travel away down the checkout belt of my mind. I just had to put her down and pick up something else. I spent hours putting down the girl and picking up yogurt, avocados, blueberries. But the longer I spent there, the more I tried not to see her, the more I saw her. The light blue polish on her nails. Her hair swirling upward in the water.

  Eventually, I decided my only choice was to accept her into my life. I still see her, but when I do, I just … say hi to her. I call her by her name. Hey there, Ali. I tell her I like her nail polish. It is not okay, and I don’t think it ever will be. But I have found that this way, I can turn her from a body into a girl. And I feel damned proud that I was able to find my own solution when all these supposed experts couldn’t help me.

  I’ve been thinking about going back to school to become a licensed mental health counselor. Wouldn’t that be a second act nobody expected from me? But actually, I’ve always wanted to help people. You want to know the real thing the men I dated had in common? It wasn’t that they were celebrities. It was that they were broken, broken dudes. He was the most broken of them all. Ironic, isn’t it? I made him go to that waterfall because I thought it would heal him, but instead I think it’s the thing that broke him for good.

  GHOSTS

  IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. Clive has experienced several periods like this since he arrived in New York nearly two decades ago, seasons of paranoia when the girl is in the wind, when even the hiss of the radiator is full of her fury. It lasts a few days, sometimes as long as several weeks, but eventually things go back to normal. Each time it passes he thinks it will be the last time. It is over, dealt with. But it never is, is it? The old fears, the old voices—we have found you, we know, everybody knows—stay dormant for months, years, and then, sure as the tides, they come back.

  The littlest thing can set it off. A girl rolling her eyes at her mother in the backseat of his taxi. A whiff of artificial strawberry. During that terrible episode with Sachin, all those years ago, the trigger was nothing more than the hostility with which Sachin looked at him, which made Clive certain that, somehow, Sachin knew. This time, it is even smaller than that, a silly mistake. He thought he heard the name that is no longer his, and now she is everywhere. She haunts him, a ghost skulking at the edges of his vision.
She shape-shifts, appearing in the forms of other people. She is a girl in an NYU sweatshirt on a delayed subway train, beautifully bored. She is on his block in a pleated charter-school skirt, bathing in the adoration of the boys around her, thrusting out her chin just so. She flashes out from their eyes and catches him in her gaze.