The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  He was her fear because of his love for the old woman. The way she appeared to Pearl was terrible. The way she appeared to Sam was not. How could they discuss it? To Pearl, she was a presence so primal, belonging to a world so little realized, that it seemed preferable to ignore her. The others did. They had, as far as she could tell, forgotten she existed. They believed in Emma more. Sam took care of his grandmother’s needs and she demanded nothing of the others. She lived half like an animal in her room, but then again, half not, rather a dignified and rapacious matriarch with a face shaped by age and conviction into the edge of an opposing weapon. Sometimes she would smile at Pearl from inside that face, and Pearl would smile helplessly back with the sickening feeling that she was collaborating with God.

  Not the God of her mother’s faulty and romantic vision, but the true one. A God of barbaric and unholy appearance, with a mind uncomplimentary to human consciousness.

  At such times, Pearl would vow to drink either more or less. She would go to her room and brush her teeth. She would go into the library and play Clue with Trip and Peter.

  “Miss Scarlet did it in the ballroom with a rope,” she would say dismally, moving the tiny, real rope across the playing board with her large, nail-gnawed finger.

  She would cut the syrup out of Jane’s hair. She would try to eat some bread. She would take a walk down by the water. She would see Sam and kiss him. She would place her hand over his, over the birthmark that was growing on his hand. It had begun as a crescent but now it seemed more like two circles gradually approaching, about to intersect, one about to eclipse the other, with darkness where they passed.

  When he’d been a baby she had tried to scrub it off.

  When he’d been a baby she hadn’t known what to do with him. He’s been so rough and silent, so helpless in her world. And yet his eyes were so fierce and wonderful. His tiny body, so strong. She felt both reverence and disgust in watching him. She had been glad for the grandmother’s presence then. It hadn’t seemed inappropriate to be grateful. The old woman would come down to her room and help her take care of Sam. She would push back his hair and speak into his face. She would tell him stories.

  Pearl didn’t know any stories. All she’d ever heard were others’ stories, every day and every night her whole life long.

  Once upon a time the world came to an end in a wall of boards . . .

  Once upon a time the only way to keep from falling into the sky was to cling to the roots of trees . . .

  Once upon a time there was a child who wanted to run away but he had a grandmother who would not let him go.

  “I am determined,” the child said.

  “If you run away, I will follow you,” the grandmother said, “for you are my little grandchild.”

  “I will turn into a bird and I will fly away,” said the child.

  “If you turn into a bird you will need rest from flying and I will become the tree that you rest in,” said the grandmother.

  “If you become a tree, I will become a leaf and fall away from you,” said the child.

  “If you become a leaf and fall, I will become the ground that catches you,” said the grandmother.

  “If you become the ground, I will turn into nothing,” said the child, “and you will not be able to find me.”

  “If you turn into nothing,” the grandmother said, “then I will turn into next to nothing and be next to you.”

  •

  Once . . .

  Pearl had had a dream in which a man was fucking her and he went right through her and penetrated the rock behind, bringing it to orgasm. Once . . .

  Pearl had gone to school as a little girl. Waiting outside the school each day was an old man who could fart unlimitedly and with great range. He could imitate the sounds of all kinds of animals. The children loved him . . .

  Once . . . Pearl had traveled to Florida with her mother and father in the days when they were all alive. They had been driving in the outskirts of Tampa when they saw a man flying through the air. He flew from a little garden on one side of the road to an empty field on the other. Pearl’s father almost lost control of the car. They were all very upset. They learned that the flying man was a member of the Zacchini family, a circus family who invented the human cannon ball. The outskirts of Tampa was where the Zacchini family lived. They were practicing. Pearl’s father had complained to the mayor. Pearl had gotten sick that night from eating trout in a hotel.

  The meaningless hazards of life. The world that slumbered beneath the world of appearances that was the same world, both painful and boring at once, savage and playful, radiant and hideous, benignant and inspired.

  As a child, Pearl had fancied that there was a night animal at the foot of her bed. There was a small white light in the shape of a dancer which illuminated it. Pearl never had the feeling that the night animal was guarding her, or, on the other hand, that it was dangerous to her. It was merely there, dark and skeptical somehow of her, Pearl, the child in the bed. When she grew older and no longer saw it, she knew it was there still, skeptical and unknowable still, watching her from its invisibility, like a spider from a crack.

  The unknown takes on the likeness of God. The unknown takes on the likeness that will give it strength.

  In Pearl’s mind the old woman was the strongest, most dreadful thing in the world.

  When Sam saw her, however, he saw his grandmother, whom he loved.

  The world is made each day and each night anew, the old woman might have told Sam. Sometimes much the same, sometimes very different. One dreams and then one wakes and the dream is different. Everything is brought into being with a changing nature. Nothing lasts long under the same appearance.

  Sam loved her and she must have appeared to him as a figure complementary to that love. Perhaps she was a shape in a softly faded cotton dress matted with soap beneath the arms, offering chocolate, knives and picture books with warm and spotted hands. Her joints sadly swelled, her hair neatly brushed, her skin exhaling the odors of water left in the bottom of flowered vases . . .

  Or perhaps she seemed more like an outlaw to him, living here in secret, amid forgotten furniture and light that had been spent a hundred years before, living in a room of bones and fur and feathers, of books chewed by mice and paintings stained with flying ants, showing him (in the sink she had made into a riverbed) how to catch fish with his hands, showing him how to climb the tree that grew outside the window (the tree beneath which Emma had buried the child that died) to the very top so that he could see through the branches (brown and dead within, but living without) the coyote who lived there waiting for the bone he’d found (after the destruction of the world) to change into a woman.

  There is another spirit in everything, she told Sam. The eyes of everything are two, a pair. And one is mortal and the other immortal. The vision in one eye lives on always. The spirit is there. And the spirit can wander and occupy any form it pleases . . .

  Perhaps he saw her mostly as this, the vision of one eye, a being only in disguise, and he conversed with her as it is said animals converse with death, knowing, the way men can’t, that death is too big to be buried in the ground, that it prefers to walk and feed among us.

  Pearl had always suspected that the entire universe was made by something more than human for something less than human anyway.

  From outside the old woman’s room, she would overhear the way they spoke with one another, in the voices they would use. Sam never spoke that way with Pearl. With her he was cautious, almost phlegmatic. He hadn’t the others’ artless ways. When he played with the others, when she saw him run and climb and swim with them, he seemed like them, indistinguishable from them, but when he was alone, when she saw him standing silently, the grace of his posture seemed another grace, his shape at rest seemed to fit him poorly. That was why Pearl did not like to see him sleeping. It was as though, in sleeping, he had forgotten how to be a child.

  Pearl would linger outside the room when she knew that Sam was the
re. The room held furniture that was not wanted anywhere else. There were murky paintings and broken chairs. The legs of a walnut dresser were placed in little dishes of poison for the ants. The metal blades of a fan stirred the air. The red eye of a hot plate glowed beneath a pan of water. The old woman rested against the window, which was curtainless and streaked with salt, and Sam sat just inside the threshold. And Pearl stood sweating without, ashamed and hopeful, entering the rhythms of their speech as a swimmer enters the sea.

  Once there was a woman, the grandmother told Sam, who went into the wilderness with nothing but a dog just about to whelp. The woman built a cabin in the wilderness and soon the dog had her pups. Each day the woman would tie them up while she went out to look for food. Several times, coming back to the cabin, she would hear the voices and cries of children, but inside she would only see the pups, tied up as usual. One day, instead of leaving the house, she hid inside it and when, in a short time, she again heard the voices, she rushed into the room where the pups were tied and she saw some beautiful children laughing and playing with their dog skins lying by their sides. The woman threw the dog skins in the fire and kept the children . . .

  Sam turned. He held a piece of wood in his hand.

  Pearl changed from white to black for winter. There were lilacs on the dressing table. Sam was two. The old woman taught him how to smile. Pearl traced Sam’s name on the mirror steamy from her bath. In the house he showed no interest in his surroundings. Outside he was happier. He wore the clothes of the older children. They would dress him as they dressed themselves. Sam was three. The fall brought storms, a drowned man on the beach. There was no head but on the arm there was a tattoo of Felix the Cat. Sam was four. His grandmother taught him all things invisible, how to think and speak and hide. Pearl took him to a rodeo in Morgansport. They watched cowboys riding in a ring. There was bronco busting, bull throwing. Pearl had gin in lemonade. Sam slipped beneath the bleachers and fell into the pen where they kept the unbroken horses. Everyone screamed but the horses’ yellow hoofs seemed rooted around him. They lowered their wild heads toward his. One of the rescuers was bitten in the hand but Sam didn’t get a scratch. Sam was five. Pearl traced his name in the moisture of her glass. Love was not there. Sam was there. He seemed so oddly selfless, like one whose time for duty had not yet come. Salt water seeped into the well. When they dug a new one they unearthed the graves of animals. Sam pointed out the white dwarfs in the sky. He could tell the sex of trees by the wood. He turned the paint that Timmy poured into his eyes to water. He changed a bird hanging strangled from a wire into a kite. Sam was six. The others played with him. He taught each of them something. The pupils of his eyes had slits. The old woman taught him how to stop his heart and start it again. Pearl heard this. She believed everything she saw. She heard cracklings in the night that was the rain. Sam was almost seven . . .

  Pearl caught the old woman’s attention. Pearl saw the bands of silver striping her cheek, the unrepentant eyes. The face was sharp and gray. The face was like a talon that could tear her apart. Pearl shrank back. Sam turned.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m making each of them a carving for our birthdays.”

  She looked at the wood scattered on the floor, at the unsubtle figures of the children, their faces blurred but their shapes captured. Sam held out the image of Sweet in which he had trapped the lines of her long, startled face, her fretfulness, her grace. He righted the others at his feet. All twelve were there, crudely and strangely done, finished but for the something which was missing in them all, the moment which all things possess, the absolute moment which is neither of the past nor the future, but of nothingness, evanescence, metamorphosis.

  Sam smiled at her. He wore a white polo shirt. There were mosquito bites on his cheek, fading bruises upon his knees. His eyes were yellow and sparsely lashed. His eyes could bewitch her into thinking she saw a child in his grandmother’s room, in a house by the sea, in summer.

  “This is the first year I’ve made a present. Do you like them? Can you recognize them?”

  Joe and Sweet. Timmy and Jane. Franny and Ashbel. Angie and Jesse. Peter and Trip and Tracker.

  As babies they had played with the animals Aaron had made for Emma’s children, those figures that seemed more desperate than toys. And even now, with Angie being the only baby, they played with them still, now more in an exercise than a game, holding them and slipping into the thoughts that they possessed, the shadows in which the child’s thought becomes deer thought . . . bear thought . . . bird thought . . . resurrecting themselves as Aaron’s animals which he himself had made to keep those thoughts at bay.

  But these figures, though so much like the others, were children’s shapes. And Sam had made them.

  Pearl squatted to see them better. Sam was almost seven. Seven was the number of perfection, of completeness. The old woman had raised him to this age. Sam held one of the carvings up. The light caught it. It almost seemed that Pearl could see through it to a powdery image of something further on. The old woman had taught Sam how to do this. She had first taught him how to deceive himself in child’s thoughts, and then how to deceive others as to his real nature . . .

  Pearl shook her head as though she were alone. Sam couldn’t have made these carvings. He was just a little boy, too young, even, to handle knives. Pearl had gotten confused. There were just the carvings that Aaron had made. There weren’t any other ones. Aaron had seen the things he carved. He had lived with them. Aaron had lived in hell. Hell was a beast, the body of a beast, inside of which were other beasts . . .

  Pearl had gotten confused. She wasn’t even with Sam now. She felt as though she had fallen. She stood up. The door blew shut.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Pearl, don’t go, where are you going?”

  Pearl was standing by the pool. The children tugged her hand.

  “Why were you on your hands and knees, Pearl? Were you going to be sick?”

  Ashbel said, “Sit down, Pearl. Peter’s going to do a trick.”

  They pushed her gently back into the chair. The pool was empty now except for a raven drinking from the step at the shallow end. The raven was the bird who failed to return when Noah sent him from the ark. It was cursed with a terrible thirst. The raven’s wings shone like oil. It dipped its beak, it raised it to heaven. August was a thirsty month.

  Pearl emptied the last of the wine into her glass. The label floated in the glints of ice. Cherubim on a black background.

  “I have a new trick,” Peter said. “Watch.”

  He made the others form a circle around him. He wore blue trousers upon which he had painted orange lightning bolts. The boy was utterly possessed by magic. He wanted to saw the other children in half and shoot bullets in their teeth. Thomas prevented him from doing this. Peter claimed he had an old wand of Herrmann’s which had once produced fistfuls of cigars from President Ulysses S. Grant’s beard. Peter did not even want to be called Peter. He wanted them to call him Ibis the Invincible, although no one ever would.

  He had high flat cheekbones and long, fine hair, but, like Trip, he was always altering his features with ink, preferring Indian designs he copied from the Straight-Arrow cards that someone had once collected from the boxes of Shredded Wheat. Ultimately he wanted to be everything: mentalist, conjurer, escape artist. He spent hours working in his cluttered room where objects were known to have been lost for years.

  His room was an exotic market full of baubles and surprises, a fleshly heap of Arabian Bead Mysteries, Devil’s Handkerchiefs, Egyptian Water Boxes, Mystic Coins, Belts of Lightning, Flying Fish, Appearing Canes, Jumping Silks, Enchanted Cigarettes, Burmese Bangles and Vampire Blocks. The fact that the impossible was rooted in his own arduous labors did not diminish its enchantment for him. He was a true magician, forever amazed at the successes he had so carefully worked out. Occasionally, he would even demonstrate the workings of an illusion. Everyone knew about the inside of his Inexhaustible Cylinder. The inner walls of the c
ylinder seemed smooth but they were actually slightly slanted and concealed secret compartments filled with odd objects and held closed by tiny catches. Knowing this never spoiled the trick for the other children because they never knew what would be hidden there.

  “Prepare to be dumbfounded!” Peter shouted, and began to drag a string of Christmas-tree lights out of his mouth.

  “Oh wow!” Timmy screamed. He wished that he could drag stuff like that out of his stomach whenever he wanted to. It was so terrifically disgusting. All that stuff, pocked with stomach acids and flecked with Orange Crush and Scooter Pie.

  The lights fell on their loopy wet wire to the grass. They weren’t glowing. In fact they were a little grimy, like flower bulbs shaken from a bin. The lights coiled and climbed, green and red and blue, around Peter’s legs, looking insinuating and alive.

  He drew an elaborate star from his mouth. The star was large with sharp points. The tips were brown with rust. Peter twitched his shoulders excitedly.