The Dark Dark

by Samantha Hunt

  “Not much.”

  This woman is filthy. Tiny capillary lines of sweaty grit swoop across her neck, following the contours there. Her fingernails are rimmed with dirt, as if she crawled out of a dug grave. A dark mole on the woman’s collarbone is so large it could be the mother ship to all this dirt. Norma feels a shiver. There’s power to this woman’s filth, a strength in knowing there’s nowhere further one can fall.

  “What’s your name?” the woman asks.

  “Norma,” Norma says. “What’s yours?”

  “Norma,” the dirty woman answers.

  “No really.”

  “Really. It is.”

  Norma does not believe her.

  “Why are you here?” Dirty Norma asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They don’t accept crazies here anymore, you know.”

  “What?” Norma asks.

  “That’s what this place once used to be. A place for crazy people. In each of the rooms.” She points down the hall. “Behind each one of these doors doctors used to sit with clipboards asking each and every patient, ‘So what’s the problem?’ and the patients would start again at the beginning, telling the same stories over and over. How they were abused by their fathers or how they were forced to raise monkeys for laboratory testing or how they saw the first atomic bombs blow up in the New Mexico desert or whatever it was that haunted them. Day in and day out the patients would sit in these rooms and tell their stories again and again, and sure, it might change a little each time, until finally the patients realized, after years of talking, that they were fucked and there wasn’t much they could do about it.

  “That’s how it works. Everybody knows that. Don’t you know that? You tell the doctor the same story over and over and then one day you realize that the story has changed, and that the new story, well, that’s your real problem.”

  Norma doesn’t know what to say. “Behind each one of these doors?”

  “Yup,” Dirty Norma says. She starts to walk down the hallway. Norma hesitates for a moment and then quickly follows. The patients’ rooms are small, and many of the metal-frame beds are still there. In the door of the first room Dirty Norma says, “Look,” and points to a murderously filthy mattress. “That’s where the kids come to do it now. I’ve seen them.”

  Clean Norma studies the mattress.

  Dirty Norma watches her. “What? Do you think you’re better than them? Better than me?” Her question’s not entirely out of the blue. In fact, Norma had just been thinking, I am better than Dirty Norma. I bet she sleeps on that dirty mattress.

  Though she tries not to, in a whisper Norma answers, “Yes.”

  “Hmm. Well, you’re not. And I can prove it.”

  “Fine. Prove it.”

  “We’ll have a contest.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll see who knows more.”

  “Okay,” Norma says, though recently she has been allergic to knowledge. She feels that people, her husband, Ted, in particular, with the hefty stack of biographies and histories he keeps piling beside their bed, collect knowledge in the same way that people go shopping and buy a year’s supply of antibacterial soap, paper towels, wedding presents, fake ficus trees. Just to have, just in case. Norma’s more interested in intuition. Still, she agrees to the contest, certain she knows more than Dirty Norma.

  “To start, I know who your husband is sleeping with,” Dirty Norma says.

  “Who?”

  “I’m not just going to just tell you. You have to trade. You have to tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” Norma says, and despite herself, has a seat on the filthy mattress to think. She’s tired. “Okay.” What do I know, she wonders. She has to think for a very long time. What does she know? “I know how to make a hot artichoke dip,” Norma says.

  “Everybody knows that, cup of mayo, cup of cream cheese, cup of canned artichokes, diced.”

  That was Norma’s recipe exactly. “Plus a little garlic,” she says, and Dirty Norma just stares without answering, as if the garlic were an unspoken and unimpressive addition. “All right. I know how to recite all the presidents of the United States in order of their presidency.”

  “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Bur—”

  “ERRRRG! Wrong,” Dirty Norma calls out. “You messed up. It’s Monroe, ADAMS, Jackson. You forgot the second Adams.”

  And Norma knows Dirty Norma is right. “Fine.”

  What does Norma know? Not much. She has no knowledge to trade. Nothing. “Come on, just tell me. He’s MY husband,” she says.

  “He’s YOURS? Like you own him?”

  Norma mulls this over, rolling her head back and forth in her hands. “Yes,” she finally decides.

  “You OWN him?”

  Norma knows it isn’t right, but she says it anyway. “Yes. I do.”

  “Well, even so, you’ll have to guess who he’s sleeping with, and even if you do guess, I’m not saying I’m going to tell you if you’re right or wrong. I just want to see if you can guess.”

  “Damica,” Norma guesses.

  “I’m not saying one way or another.”

  “Look, I don’t really care. I’m not even sure if I love him anymore.”

  “Guess!”

  “So it’s not Damica?”

  “No. But wouldn’t that be evil if it were?”

  Norma glances around the room. She adjusts her seat up on the bed. Dirty Norma sits down beside her so that their legs are touching and Norma can feel the warmth of her.

  “I don’t know who,” she says.

  “I know. You don’t know anything and yet you think you’re better than me.”

  Norma stays silent, staring down at an old suitcase left behind in the room, maybe by one of the patients.

  “Guess.” Dirty Norma stomps her foot like a horse.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fine. I’ll tell you. It’s Linda Kanakas, you know, the lawyer?”

  “Yeah. I know her,” Norma says. She’s not surprised.

  “Finally. You know something. Your husband is sleeping with Linda Kanakas.”

  It feels good to finally know the truth. But then, in a second or two, it starts to feel really, really bad. Her eyes blur their focus onto the suitcase at her feet. It is a small leather one, an older model, a hard-shell brown Samsonite with a leather edge, probably from the 1940s. Just below the handle on the case is a simple golden latch and a monogram that is all but rubbed off, erasing its owner. Dirty Norma sees Norma looking at it. Thumbing the square of brass, Dirty Norma slides the catch to the left and pops the suitcase’s lock. The inside is lined with a forgotten pink taffeta, and the elastic of its side pockets has been stretched into an overextended deformity like a tired and spent girdle. The air inside the case smells yellow and aged. Resting inside is a stenographer’s notebook. It must have belonged to one of the patients.

  “Let me see.” Norma kicks the case so she can look inside. Her grandmother had been a stenographer for forty-seven years, an expert in both Pitman and Gregg shorthand. “That’s a stenographer’s notebook,” Norma says, demonstrating her knowledge.

  “Yeah,” Dirty Norma says, unimpressed. “It says so right on the cover.”

  “That doesn’t matter. Even if it didn’t say it, I would have known.” The wire coil across the top, the long, narrow pages divided into two columns. She thinks she might even be able to read some of the shorthand inside and she is certain that Dirty Norma can’t read shorthand, but as she picks the notebook up and opens the pad to its first page she finds its contents have not been recorded in the scribble of shorthand but are instead written in plain English.

  And so both Normas start to read from the stenographer’s pad.

  In the coffee shop off Dead Elm Street Norma pushes what’s left of her meat loaf aside.

  That’s what it says in the stenographer’s notebook. They continue reading. />
  Damica bounces The Baby on her knee. Norma looks away from their conversation out the window where automobiles are slowing and then starting under the sway of the stop sign.

  “But this is my story,” Norma tells Dirty Norma.

  “God,” she says. “You think you own everything.”

  The Normas continue reading.

  Dead Elm Street was named for a blight that struck in 1937 and laid waste to fifteen trees that once lined Elm Street. Some of the trees weren’t even sick yet, but the town had to cut them all down in order to stop the spread of the disease. And then they changed the name of the street.

  Damica’s talking. “If it’s all the same to you I’ll—”

  “It’s never all the same,” Norma says, raising her voice this time.

  “I’ll just get your lunch tomorrow. All I have is a twenty.”

  Norma ignores her. She can’t believe Damica is going to stick her with the bill again. She takes that day’s paper from her purse, opens it up between them, and, bypassing the front page’s headlines, flips to her favorite column, hiding in its pages.

  HOUSE OF MUFFLERS DECLARES BANKRUPTCY

  Drake and Kanakas celebrate a victory

  Linda Kanakas, lawyer for Drake Industries, stated that justice had been served as she and her client left the courtroom yesterday. Judge Burger ruled that Marguerite Eddell, proprietor of House of Mufflers, was in trademark violation not only for her unlicensed use of the word “of” in advertising materials but also for the silent, yet understood “the,” as in “The House of Mufflers.” Eddell was fined twelve thousand dollars, a sum that Eddell complained she “just couldn’t pay.” The Third United City Bank will be handling her bankruptcy claims.

  Norma stops reading. There is a photo printed beside the article. It is a picture of Linda Kanakas at some sort of black-tie affair. She is wearing an elegant black evening gown with the tiniest crystal teardrops stitched into the bodice. There is a man standing beside her, a man who has been cropped from the photo except for one hand that is resting on Linda Kanakas’s arm. Norma looks very closely at this hand. The blood rises in her neck.

  “I have a story for them,” Norma tells Damica, hitting the paper. “Hector Donoso.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember Mary Donoso and how her father got deported back to Honduras and she got bumped out of our school district because her family had to move into Section 8 housing because her mother couldn’t afford rent anymore without Hector’s paychecks?”

  “Sort of,” Damica says, petting The Baby’s head.

  “Linda Kanakas was the one who called INS on Hector.”

  “Hmm.” Damica looks out the window. “Linda Kanakas,” she says, and chews her lip. “That was a long time ago. Yeah, I remember.” Damica looks Norma straight in the eye, as if trying to tell her something without saying it, as if she is Superman with X-ray vision. Damica exhales loudly. “Norm, how’s it going?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know.”

  Norma knows what she means. “I got my period yesterday.”

  “Oh, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen, Norm, I have a friend who tried to have a baby for four years. Four years. Can you imagine?”

  Yes, Norma thinks. Yes, I can imagine that.

  “Well, what do you think happened?” Damica asks.

  “I think that after four years she finally had a baby or else you wouldn’t be telling me this story.”

  “Well, you’re right. That’s exactly what happened.”

  “How old was she?”

  Damica looks cross and doesn’t answer that question, so Norma knows that the girl was probably twenty-two years old or some other annoying age a lot younger than Norma. Or at least her husband loved her. “You know what did the trick?” Damica asks.

  “What?”

  “Adoption papers. I swear. You and Ted should fill out adoption papers, and then I promise you, you’ll get pregnant.”

  “I’ll think about it.” But what Norma really thinks is that all the people who had babies after trying for fifteen minutes should just keep their mouths shut because they don’t know shit about how this feels.

  “I have to get going,” Damica says. “Will you hold The Baby for a second while I get my stuff together?” Damica reaches her foot underneath the table, feeling for her diaper bag. She holds The Baby out for Norma to take.

  Norma looks over the edge of the paper. “Let me pee first.” Norma folds the paper, grabs her pocketbook, and slides out of the booth.

  The stalls of the ladies’ room are made of cool aluminum. Norma rests her head against this coolness. She doesn’t actually have to pee. She just has to stand inside the metal walls of the ladies’ room for a minute alone.

  GIVE ME A CALL. 1-800-FUCKIN’A.

  Norma fingers the writing. She pulls her cell phone from the very bottom of her purse and dials 1-800-382-5462.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, 1-800-DUBL-INC. Doubles Incorporated, providing goods and services for the Procreation by Division Industries. How may I help you?”

  Norma swallows hard.

  “Hi, yeah. Can I talk to someone in Customer Service?”

  “Please hold one moment while I transfer your call.”

  Norma holds. The Muzak kicks on. “Sometimes when we touch, the honesty’s too—”

  “Hello. Doubles Incorporated. How can I help you today?”

  Norma loves that song.

  After lunch Norma takes a left off Dead Elm Street onto Larre Road, pronounced “Larry.” Norma can’t stand people who have cars that work. Everyone, it seems, drives a brand-new car. And all these new cars have perfectly functioning air conditioners. No one drives with the windows rolled down. There are no clunkers on the roads anymore, and to Norma this is a sign of America’s great moral failure. Which is why about two months ago, about the same time her car broke down for good and she didn’t have enough of her own money to replace it and Ted told her he wouldn’t buy her a new one since she hadn’t taken care of the first one he bought her, Norma began, slowly at first, dragging her house keys across the doors and hoods of other people’s cars. She didn’t think what she was doing was that bad in light of all the other things she could have done. For example, she could have started carrying a bowie knife to puncture tires or a screwdriver to pry open the hoods of other people’s vehicles and unscrew their oil filters or slice the coolant hoses or reverse the positive and the negative cables on a car’s battery. She hadn’t done any of those horrible things. She hadn’t started blowing up car dealerships yet. No.

  Norma takes a right, turning up the driveway of the home for troubled people. She slips inside. “Hello?” she calls, but no one answers. Norma makes her way up a central staircase that twists smoothly as she goes. “Hello?” she calls again, but there is no answer. Norma goes right. “Hello?” she says. She glances behind herself and up overhead. She freezes. Directly above her the ceiling is horribly stained. A large brown mass of dripping discoloration that, because it has spread out in awkward and uneven rings, seems to throb. There must be a leak, Norma thinks, staring at the stain, studying its contours. She circles below it, without taking her eyes away from the mark, neck craned backward, arms linked across her chest. She stares, mesmerized. The stain looks a little bit like a fetus, a fetus with four legs.

  “Boo.”

  And there she is.

  Norma has a question for Dirty Norma. “Where’d you come from?”

  “Where do you think I came from?”

  “Well, I heard about this thing. Procre—”

  “Procreation by Division for Morons?”

  Norma says nothing.

  Norma also says nothing.

  “It’s just, I’d been trying to have a baby for a long, long time.”

  “Oh boy. They really got your number. What’d it cost you? That thing’s a racket. R-A-C-K-E-T! Plus,” she says. “Those kits never work. D
id you get it at Walmart? Their kits NEVER work.”

  “Then where’d you come from?”

  “Guess,” Dirty Norma says.

  “This again?”

  “Guess.”

  But Norma knows she’s lying. Norma knows exactly where Norma came from.

  She’d paid the extra $19.95 so that they would ship it express. “Sign.” The deliveryman had thrust his handheld computer clipboard in front of Norma’s face for her to sign. The box was no bigger than a supermarket paperback. That can’t be it, Norma thought. But it was. She signed. He shoved the package forward. That was it. The deliveryman was gone and Norma was left holding her Home Procreation by Division kit. She waited in the doorway, staggered. She looked left, looked right. She disappeared back inside the house.

  Norma took the box into the kitchen and used a steak knife to stab it open. There was nothing to it. Norma felt like an idiot. Inside the box was a paper foldout of poorly photocopied instructions and a palm-sized petri dish with a cover and a bright red bottom. That was it. $67.98. Magic Rocks, Norma thought. Sea Monkeys. Garbage. She stepped back from the box, and for a moment she felt like such a fool that she was tempted to throw the whole thing in the trash. But she stopped herself. She walked away and checked in with the chat room. Not much had changed there. Still a bunch of women who couldn’t have babies. She turned away from the computer. She chewed at the side of her lip. I’ll just read the stupid instructions. So she did.

  Remove lid from petri dish, being very careful not to touch inside the dish. Spit into the petri dish. Make certain you wait at least an hour after eating, drinking, or brushing your teeth. First-morning spit is the most effective, but spit from any time of the day can be used as long as you wait an hour after eating, drinking, or brushing your teeth.

  Norma looked at her watch. It was probably at least an hour. She collected a small pool of saliva in her mouth and, hanging her chin directly over the dish, she dropped warm spit from her mouth.

  Cover the dish with the lid and set in a dry, sunny place to gestate.

  Norma covered the dish, set it on a windowsill that gets afternoon sunlight, and turned back to the instructions to see what would happen next, but that was it. There were no more instructions. There was no Soon you will notice, or Wait 24 hours, or If you encounter a problem, call. There was nothing more.