The Marriage of Sticks

by Jonathan Carroll

  “I’m happy to save fifty dollars.”

  “Well, let’s see.”

  He slipped the awl-like thing into the lock and wiggled it around a couple of times. He stopped, made one more small movement with his hand, and there was an audible click. He turned the knob and the door opened.

  “Cha-cha-cha.” Standing back, he made a sweeping gesture toward the door. “Open sez me.”

  I started in but stopped. “Look, I’m sure you’ve got a million other things to do. But would you mind coming in with me just for a few minutes? I’d feel so much better if I had company in there awhile.”

  He looked at his beautiful watch. “Sure, I got time. We’ll give the place a once-over.” Without waiting he walked in. A moment’s hesitation and then I followed.

  “Uh-oh, did you leave something on the stove?”

  “No.”

  “We better look in your kitchen first.” He went right toward it. For a second that confused me until I remembered McCabe had often been in the house when Frances lived here.

  As if reading my mind, he said, “This house used to be full of weird smells. You never knew what would hit you when you came in. Sometimes ambrosia, sometimes Perth Amboy. Frances ever make you pecan pie? Sometimes great, other times absolute dog food. You’d be cleaning your teeth for three days. She was the damndest cook. Great soups, terrible meat. Never let her cook you meat! Once for my birthday—” He shoved the kitchen door but nothing happened.

  “You lock this?”

  “No.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Interesting.” He pushed again, but nothing happened. Under his breath he began whistling the Beach Boys song “Help Me, Rhonda.” He slid his hands into his pockets and immediately took them out again. He gave the bottom of the door a small kick that sounded way too loud in the silent house. He whistled some more. “This is interesting. Maybe it explains why you couldn’t get in from outside.” Taking a magenta credit card out of his pocket, he slipped it in the crack between the door and the frame and slid it upward. There came a small metallic clink on the other side.

  “There you go! I remember there’s a hook and eye on this one because I put it in for Frances years ago.” He pushed the door open.

  First came the smell, then the smoke. Not much of it but enough to stiffen the neck and make you scared. Brave McCabe walked straight into the room. Seconds later there was a metallic scraping, a crash, and he fell down right in front of me.

  “What the fuck –“

  Pieces of metal covered the kitchen floor; glass too. Some were whole, others broken or in jagged fragments. Many were blackened, others actually smoking. The largest was immediately recognizable—a silver trunk lid from an automobile with the BMW insignia emblazoned on it. There were more silver pieces among the others—the silver of Hugh’s wrecked car.

  McCabe stood up, hands bleeding. Dazed, he looked at me. “What is this shit?”

  I knew what it was. I knew too well. I never should have brought him into the house. Whoever was in here, whoever was in charge, wanted me alone in the house. Without knowing it, I had broken the rules. Now poor McCabe and I would pay for my mistake.

  I turned and walked quickly out of the room to the front door. Of course it was locked. I grabbed the doorknob and tried turning it, but nothing moved, not an inch. It felt welded shut. I knew it was useless to try finding another way out of the house.

  I went back to the kitchen. McCabe stood at the sink washing his hands. He did it slowly and precisely. Despite what was happening, he appeared in no hurry. I couldn’t think of anything to say because whatever came out would sound absurd.

  With his back to me, he murmured, “It’s here again, isn’t it? That’s what this is all about.” He took a red dish towel off a hook by the window. Drying his hands, he waited for my answer.

  “I don’t even know what it is. Strange things have been going on ever since Hugh and I moved in.”

  “Is that why Frances wanted us to come see her? Tell me the truth, Miranda.”

  “Yes. But how do you know about it? What is it?”

  “Frances called it the Surinam Toad. That comes from some line by Coleridge—the poet? She made me memorize it. ‘My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, sides, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.’

  “When I was young it tried to kill me, but Frances saved my life. It happened here in the house.” He sat down at the table. He slowly looked at the debris around the room and pursed his lips. “Here we go again. I thought all that was over a long time ago. The fuckin’ toad is back.”

  I went to a drawer and took out a box of Band-Aids. I handed them over and sat down across from him. “Can you tell me about it?”

  “I have to tell you about it now. Remember when you asked me if I knew anyone who had powers? Frances has powers. She—”

  There was a loud scraping sound. I jerked in my seat and looked across the room. The trunk lid was moving. It dragged slowly across the floor toward us. The other pieces began moving too. The room was filled with the racket of this terrible slow scraping sound everywhere, the long high screech of sharp metal edges digging a path. A deep white line appeared behind the trunk lid as it gouged a wavy path across the wooden kitchen floor.

  I reached across the table, and slid my hand across his cuts. Blood was still oozing from them; it spread onto my fingers. Standing, I walked to the closest piece of metal and wiped the blood across it. The movement, the sound, everything stopped instantly. The silence was immense.

  McCabe stuck his hands under his armpits, as if trying to hide them. “What’d you do? Why did it stop?”

  I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure. Instinctively I had known how to stop the pieces from moving, but how I knew was unclear. My mind worked furiously to put it in focus.

  A house! It was like a house I’d lived in all my life. It had a certain number of rooms I knew by heart, every angle, the view from each window, But suddenly this house contained twice as many rooms, all filled with unfamiliar things. But it was my house. It had always been my house—I just hadn’t known about these extra rooms and what they contained.

  McCabe glared at me, hands still hidden. “Huh? You know things too, don’t you, Miranda? How did you know what to do?”

  “Blood stops it. I… I just know blood stops things.”

  “Yeah, great. But what now? What the hell happens now?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room. I stood and listened while he did exactly what I had done—went to the front door and tried to open it. I heard his steps, the door rattling, curses when it wouldn’t open.

  His steps crossed the floor again but instead of returning to the kitchen, they began climbing the stairs. He was talking but I couldn’t make out his words. I looked at the debris around the kitchen and part of my mind thought it was funny. Miranda’s junkyard. Come into my kitchen and find a bumper for your BMW. Then I’ll make you lunch. Part of you stops being scared when the sane world of a moment ago goes mad.

  If Hugh had been in the backyard the other day, he might still be around. I had nothing to lose. “Hugh? Are you here?”

  Nothing.

  “Hugh? Can you hear me?”

  The kitchen door swung open. But it was McCabe.

  “Come with me. Hurry up.”

  I followed him out of the kitchen and trailed behind as he started back up the stairs.

  “You like dolls?”

  His question was so absurd and out of place that I stopped climbing. “What?”

  “Do you like dolls? I asked if you like ‘em.” His voice was urgent, as if everything depended on my answer.

  “Dolls? No. Why?”

  Narrowing his eyes, he stared at me as if he didn’t believe it. “Really? Well then, that’s bad news. ‘Cause they’re in the same room as before. So I guess the same goddamned thing’s happening again! Only Frances isn’t around to get us out this time.”

  “What are
you talking about, McCabe?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Then the realization hit me. “I did. I used to love dolls when I was a girl. I collected them.”

  When we reached the first floor he walked down the hall to Hugh’s and my bedroom and threw open the door. “Somebody likes dolls.”

  Before moving to Crane’s View, we had bought a new bed. There should have been only two things in that room—the new bed and a small leather couch I had owned for years. Nothing else.

  Instead, our bedroom was full of dolls. On the new bed, the couch, most of the floor. They were stuck on the walls, across the entire ceiling, the windowsill. They blocked most of the light from coming in the window. Hundreds, maybe even a thousand dolls. Large ones, small; flat faces, fat faces, round; with breasts, without; wearing jeans, dirndls, evening gowns, clown costumes…

  All of them had the same face—mine.

  “Leave me alone in here, Frannie.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “That’s what they want. They want me alone in here.”

  He glared but didn’t speak.

  “The same thing happened in here with Frances, right? In this room. The same thing. Were there dolls?”

  His eyes dropped. “No. People. People she said she knew from a long time ago.”

  I was about to respond when the first voice spoke. A child’s, it was quickly joined by another and then another until we were surrounded by a deafening cacophony of voices saying different things at once. We stood in the doorway listening until I began to make out what some of them were saying.

  “Why do we always have to go to Aunt Mimi’s house? She smells.”

  “But you promised I could have a dog.”

  “Dad, are stars cold or hot?”

  On and on. Some voices were clear and understandable. Others were lost in the surrounding swirl of tones, whines, whispers. But I understood enough. All of them, all of these words and sentences, were my own, spoken in the various voices I had owned growing up. The first one I disentangled was the line about the stars. I knew it immediately because my father, an astronomer, had loved it and repeated it to others throughout my childhood.

  My Aunt Mimi did smell. I hated visiting her.

  My parents finally relented and gave me a dog, which was stolen three weeks later. I was nine at the time.

  If I had remained in that bedroom long enough, I assume all the words of my lifetime would have been repeated. Instead of life passing in front of my eyes, my words were entering my ears. Some of them tweaked memories, most were nothing but the verbal spew of twelve thousand days on earth. I once read that a person speaks something like a billion words in the course of a life. Here were mine, all at once.

  “Go out. Wait downstairs.”

  “Miranda—”

  “Do it, Frannie. Just go.”

  He hesitated, then put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be outside in the hall. Just outside if you need me.”

  “Yes. All right.”

  The moment he closed the door behind him, the room fell silent.

  “Miranda, would you do me a big favor?”

  There had been so much noise, so many loud and clashing voices seconds ago that this one with its simple question rising so suddenly out of the new silence was especially disturbing. Because it was a man’s voice and very familiar.

  “Sure. You want a backrub?”

  “No. I’d like you to go with me to the drugstore.”

  “Right now? Dog, I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and you know how much I still have to do.”

  “It’s important, Miranda. It’s really important to me.”

  My back was to the door. Turning around, I saw an entirely different room behind me: a hotel room in Santa Monica, California. Doug Auerbach sat on the bed in there. A game show was yapping on the television. Doug was watching me as I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel.

  It was the day we went to the drugstore because he’d dreamed about doing that together. The day I flew back to New York and saw the woman in the wheelchair by the side of the freeway.

  I stood in the corner watching a part of my life happen. Again. Only this time there were two me’s in the room—the one living the moment and the one who watched.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” James Stillman said as he walked out of the bathroom. Dog Auerbach and Miranda continued talking. They did not react to him. “Where’s Waldo?” James smirked, and that look, that one precise facial expression I remembered so well down the years was as frightening in that moment as anything else.

  “Why am I here, James? What am I supposed to do?”

  “Stop whining and asking questions. You’re here because someone wants you here, Miranda. Figure it out! Stop playing the poor little puppy. You waste so much time crying why me.”

  His voice was cold and mean. I stared at him and he stared right back. I began to move around the motel room, looking carefully at everything, hoping for a clue, listening to the two talk. Light from the window lit the half-filled water glass on the night table. An orange candy bar wrapper lay twisted on the floor. A book. A green sock on the bed.

  “Can I touch things?”

  James smirked again. “Do whatever you want. They don’t know we’re here.”

  I reached out and touched Doug’s arm. He didn’t react. I shook him, or rather I shook but he didn’t move. He continued talking. I picked up an ashtray and threw it across the room. It banged loudly against a wall but neither of them acknowledged the sound.

  I walked to the window and looked out. The afternoon sun was a used-up yellow-orange. Out on the sidewalk a bum wearing a brightly colored serape and a black beret pushed a supermarket cart filled with junk. Two kids on skateboards whizzed by. He shouted at them.

  The first surprise was that I could hear every word the bum said, although the window was closed. Next was the realization, like a hard, unexpected slap in the face, that I suddenly knew everything about this man. His name was Piotr “Poodle” Voukis. Sixty-seven years old, he was a Bulgarian йmigrй from Babyak who had worked as a janitor at UCLA for twenty years until he was fired for drinking. He’d had two sons. One was killed in Vietnam.

  On and on, my mind flooding with every detail of this man’s life. I knew his most intimate secrets and fears, the names of his lovers and enemies, the color of the model motorboat he had built and sailed in Echo Park with his sons when they were young and life was as good as it would ever get for him. Then I saw the room at UCLA hospital where he spent desolate months sitting by his wife’s bed as abdominal cancer dissolved her insides until there was nothing left but a dark and fetid pudding.

  Everything about him, I knew everything in his now dim and addled brain.

  Aghast, I turned away. The second I did, my mind emptied and I was myself again. Only myself.

  For a moment.

  James said something and without thinking I looked at him. At once I saw the rushing view through the windshield of his car as it sped toward his death in Philadelphia. I saw the tattooed words on his last lover Kiera’s wrist. I experienced his feelings for Miranda Romanac—nostalgia, resentment, old love… all wrapped tightly around each other like leaves on a cabbage.

  As with the bum on the street, the moment I looked at James Stillman I became him.

  This time I screamed and staggered. Because of a fear that was not my own: James was absolutely petrified of me. Having become him, I knew why he was afraid and what had to be done. I am not a brave person and have never pretended to be, so what I did next was the bravest act of my life. I have regretted it ever since.

  Looking around, I saw what I needed, but was so unbalanced that I scanned the room twice more before it registered. A mirror. A small oval mirror above the desk.

  I looked into it.

  A man in a black suit and floor-length silk cape stood alone in the middle of the stage of a giant theater. He was tall and handsome, immensely alluring in a frighteni
ng way. Everything about him was black—his clothes, patent leather shoes, gleaming hair like licorice. Even the intense whiteness of his skin accentuated the darkness. Just looking at him, I knew here was a man capable of real magic.

  Staring directly at me, he said my name in a thundering voice. How could he know my name when I had never seen him before this night? With one languid hand, he beckoned for me to join him on stage. I looked at my mother and father, who were sitting on either side of me. Both smiled their permission and enthusiasm. Father even put his hand against my back to move me more quickly. The audience began to applaud. I was terribly embarrassed to be the center of attention, but loved it at the same time. I sidled out of our row and walked down the wide aisle to a short staircase on the side of the stage.

  At the top of the stairs an easel supported a large poster announcing the name of the performer:

  The Enormous Shumda

  Shumda Der Enorm

  Bauchredner Extraordinaire

  As I climbed the stairs the audience clapped harder. Worrying I would trip and fall in front of everyone, I walked carefully to center stage, where the man in black stood.

  He put up a hand to stop the applause and it died instantly. There was a stop while all of us waited for what he would do next. Nothing. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back. It went on too long. Unmoving, he stared into the audience. We waited restlessly but it went on and on.

  Just as people began to whisper their dismay, shifting impatiently in their seats, a dalmatian wandered out onto the stage. It darted back and forth sniffing the floor excitedly and came to us only after it had jittered around like that awhile. Some in the audience laughed or scoffed out loud.

  Shumda did nothing to stop the titter. He continued his silence and staring. We stood in front of hundreds of people but the only thing that had happened since I’d stepped onto the stage was the arrival of the dog. When it felt like the whole theater would explode with tension and exasperation, the dog leaped in the air and did a perfect back flip. On landing, it bellowed out in a beautifully deep man’s voice, “Be quiet! Have you no manners? What’s the matter with you people?”