If it was poison, if I had in fact been paralyzed, I marveled at the ability of the Headmaster’s wife to have seen this coming. How had she been so prepared? And I realized that those who’ve done the most wrong will likely always exceed the rest of us in their ability to imagine and account for the worst. Or, more simply, she was insane. She was a murderer. And this was nothing more than what they did.
She was moving now, out of her seat, and I knew the time had come to deliver my defense. I could speak, at least some, I’d proven that, but my arms and legs were unresponsive. My head had been able to loll from one shoulder to the other, but not smoothly and only with great effort. She made her way to the mantel, smiling with that hollow, open mouth again, as if the expression had been scooped from the flesh of her face. I danced for her, lolling spasmodically, but couldn’t draw her attention from a picture frame she’d taken from the shelf above the fire. The frame was draped with a small black curtain, obscuring whatever image was behind its glass. She lifted that curtain, and her smile faded, replaced with something like sadness, or anger, or disgust, a feeling that made her sigh, quickly, before transforming her expression into one of firm resolve. It had to have been a photo of the Headmaster, but at what stage in his life, I could only guess. Maybe it was a photo of him as a boy.
How I managed to feel brokenhearted in that moment of mounting terror, I can’t say. I only know that I watched the Headmaster’s wife and felt a mix of things more productive than fear. I felt sadness and rage at what she’d done, at what she’d been able to accomplish and obscure, while I’d blindly crept into her grasp like an ant into a bowl of water. I felt absurdly confident too, and, in a truly pathetic moment, believed my rage would bring me out of the chair and over to her, where I could knock the picture from her hands and pin her to the ground, taking control of the situation and rescuing the others from what I was increasingly sure would be a gruesome fate. This was more than a punishment delivered upon me for the sins I’d committed, and more than the final stage of an elaborate and macabre cover-up for two jealous murders of passion. This was a woman who had been enjoying herself.
With that, the grim utility of our facility settled in. As the bodies piled up, boy after boy would continue to arrive. There would never be a shortage of boys. Sick boys, disturbed boys, boys with nowhere else to turn, like myself and poor Hannan. If she’d been eager to cast the blame and be done with it, she would have had me long ago. Instead, she was carrying on with me here, settling into another sadistic smile as she placed the picture back on the mantel, moved toward the kitchen, and vanished through the French doors, returning, after only a moment, with a butcher’s knife I recognized immediately as one from the dining hall set.
“I was happy to hope the boys had resolved the matter last year,” she said. “I won’t go so far as to say I felt relief, but I did feel that a weight had been lifted.”
The knife was too large for her withered hands, and it was laughable to think any real harm could come from such an ill-suited instrument.
“I’ve done nothing,” I thought, “no harm to anyone,” which wasn’t exactly true but was closer to the truth than what she seemed to be thinking. I felt the drool at my lip, tugging the flesh ever so slightly as it ran from the edge of my mouth when I tried to speak.
“Of course, it’s not the first time they were wrong,” she said. “There’s often more to these things than can be responsibly considered before the time to act has come and gone. Maybe it was nothing more than cowardice on my part, but I could have sworn they’d had it right.”
She approached, and I sat like a fish beaten against the bottom of a boat, working the hinge of my jaw at the smallest detectable angle.
“Do you know what else a ghost does?” she said. She brought the blade close in order to rub my lips and chin with the sleeve of her shawl. “Other than forget? Other than circle?”
I could smell on her the rot I’d noticed upon entering. I prayed back the impulse to vomit, afraid I would choke.
“They trace the meaningful gestures they made in life,” she said. “Or those they found meaningful. Like a recurring dream, you find yourself there, again and again, feeling the same, even if each time it’s a little different.”
A dream, I thought. Maybe. Sure. Was it so crazy to think I might have been responding to feelings of isolation, fear, loneliness, by playing out these dark scenarios and missteps in my sleep? It wasn’t hard to picture myself curled up on my thin mattress all this time, the voices of my tormentors traveling through the window near my desk. After all, could I remember the last time I’d actually slept through the night? I’d had dreams like this before, a body unable to move as something inexplicably threatening approached. I remembered sliding through the mud instead of walking, a rigid mass holding me under the water like a palm, my trouser leg tearing, just as I’d feared it would. I couldn’t get over how comical the enormous knife looked in her pale and fragile hands. I felt, if she were to raise it, it would tear through them like a web.
“I always thought you came here because you had some mother figure you’d disappointed in life,” she said, “and from whom you were seeking consolation. Maybe even resolution. I understand now that it might have been guilt of an entirely different nature. And though I despise you, I do hope you have found something you can take with you when you leave.”
“I’ve never known my mother,” I might have yelled, if I could have yelled. “There is no one in my life whose disappointment would matter to me at all,” I might have shouted as I ran for the door.
“That’s the tragedy of those things that mean the most to us in life,” she said. “That from where you sit, Ashley, from where we will all sit one day, they’re lost. Their influence may push us along, like a wind at our backs, but we can’t know them for what they are, and neither can anyone else.”
“I’m not Ashley,” I said, surprised again to feel my lips and throat fall in line with one of the countless impulses rattling off in my brain. There was a trick to it, that much was clear, as I was able to manage to speak sometimes, but not others. That I’d been doing it wrong for the most part only meant that it was something I could master.
“No,” she said to me. “You are a demon.”
“I’m a boy,” I thought. All I had ever been.
“I’ll admit I’m ashamed it took me so long to see the truth,” she said. “All these years you’ve been with us, and yet the cost of seeing you as you are was still so high.”
I knew she was wrong. I’d only just arrived. I could remember it. I could see everything exactly as it had happened. At least for the most part.
“You’re confused,” she said. “I can see it in the way you’re thinking. But don’t be afraid. I can’t hurt you. I can only show you what you are, and in that small way, perhaps, offer us both some relief.”
The smell of her filled my nostrils like smoke. That smell like a pumpkin on a porch in the sun. I gagged but nothing came up, and when I inhaled, it curled deeper into my lungs.
“Confession or no, you are dead and doing harm,” she said, “and I will prove it to you. I only hope you’ll take the opportunity to leave us before you hurt more of those who wanted nothing but to help you along the way.”
Fear did not leave me in this, the most difficult moment of my life. Nor did it grip my mind so completely as to wipe out every other possible feeling, forcing me to focus on it exclusively. Instead, I expanded. I became aware of new emotional textures, new contours of thought, as if a switch had been flipped, and I was capable of holding more ideas at once than I had ever have imagined, more states of being, more contradictions and impossibilities, which is why I was struck, though not entirely surprised, to find myself feeling both deeply afraid, more frightened than I had ever felt before, and, at the same time and with undeniable severity, curious. On top of everything else, I simply wanted to know the truth. I’d managed to keep my wits
over the course of our conversation, but I’d been no doubt seduced by the question of her madness, struggling to work out the degree to which she had invented the entire scenario and the degree to which she was describing the world as it actually was, myself as I actually was, and as I was—
according to my nature as she described it—unable to see myself without someone else’s guidance. And, if I were actually unable to see myself as I truly was without her guidance, if, in her absence, I was doomed to go on seeing less and less, doomed to wander this world without memory or purpose, was it true that it was a violent and unpredictable circle I would trace, or would it instead be the path of the curious, of those openly engaged with the mysteries of this world, as I would have imagined for myself, and in which case, I had to wonder, given the circumstances, would I forever be subjected to the machinations of life’s most manipulative malcontents, as I had been so far? Mad as she may have been, she was perceptive. Perceptive as she was, she had her sights set on doing me harm.
Or—I briefly, optimistically allowed—this was all a test. An elaborate staging to get me to confess to all, or one of, my many crimes, or to an unknown crime I’d been suspected of since before I’d even come to an awareness of any suspicion directed my way. The idea that this was a dream, that this was all the product of an ill-at-ease mind, came to me again and provided some small comfort, like an opiate or a fist to the skull. I thought, and thought again. How easy it is to forget. How easy it is to doubt. How plainly did the realization arrive that I tended to doubt myself most in the moments when I should have been most confident, while being assured in the moments when, as I’d witnessed time and again that evening, I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. How difficult it can be to coordinate thought and action. But how tragic the lives of those who never try. And, too, how bitterly fitting it was to realize that, after all I had seen and all the work I had done, all I had lived through and all I had thought, I was unable to move myself from the chair of my beloved Headmaster and return to the facility for orphaned boys, where the others had returned, and where a life of some unexpected kind might have been waiting, but was instead still sitting there before the Headmaster’s wife, the largest knife in her little hand, thinking to myself over and over again, You are alive, you are alive, you are alive and it is something that you know, only to have her draw the blade from my wrist to my elbow, opening my swollen veins to confirm it.
acknowledgments
Though the list of artists and artworks to which this novel is indebted would be a fat book in itself, I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit and thank the following for the undeniable influence of their accomplishments:
Henry James’s The Sacred Fount · Robert Walser · Patty Yumi Cottrell · Brian Evenson · Helen Oyeyemi · John
Clare · Guillermo del Toro · Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance · Anonymous · Fred Mustard Stewart’s The Mephisto Waltz ·
Barbara Comyns · Bruno Schulz · Marie NDiaye · Andrei Tarkovsky · Haley Joel Osment · Victor LaValle · Jeremy Davies · Jesse Ball · Wallace Stevens · Andi Winnette.
Thanks to Yuka Igarashi, Wah-Ming Chang, and everyone at Soft Skull/Catapult/Counterpoint, who worked so hard to bring this book into the world. And to Jonathan Lee, who had a colleague take a look.
Thanks to Charlotte Sheedy, my agent, mentor, and friend, who saw this book for what it wanted to be. Thanks for fighting for it, and for standing by my side since the day we met.
To the early readers of the mess, especially Daniel Levin Becker, who will one day write the theatrical adaptation: thank you.
And to bug, as always, for everything.
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