My father kicked off his shoes and vanished if the bus was moving slowly and he was running late. He also kicked off his shoes and vanished whenever he discovered, through mysterious channels, that terrorists had boarded airplanes.
My parents were not particular about their powers; they used them to solve both mundane and catastrophic problems. When, as a thirteen-year-old, I questioned the ethics of this, my father did not allow me to verbalize my doubts before he informed me that all problems are equally small and equally great.
On my sixteenth birthday, I kicked off my shoes and vanished. I was no longer in our kitchen. Instead, I was diving off a cliff above the Pacific Ocean. I could not tell if I was flying or falling. In the waves below, I saw the heads of giraffes sticking up, and the trunks of elephants. The sun was bright and green. I was filled with a strange weighty joy, as though the entire world had been passed on to me for safekeeping.
offspring #5
Once, a boy was given a spool of thread by a beautiful, monstrous woman. When he pulled the thread, time passed very quickly. If the school day was boring, he could pull the thread, and the afternoon would be over. If he got tired of serving in the military, if he couldn’t wait until his wedding, if he was eager for the birth of his first son, if he wanted to reach retirement, he could pull the thread; and that is what he did. He lived his life rapidly, skipping from one grand moment to the next. Soon, he was an extremely old man. It was a hot afternoon in the village. He was sick of looking at the same fields, sick of hearing the same laborers yell the same curses to one another, sick of the gruel his granddaughter had placed before him. It would be so much better if evening would come already, bringing with it cold blue light and silence and a basket of plums. He reached for his spool of thread, only to discover that less than half a centimeter remained. So if he were to pull it—! Horrified, the old man began winding the spool he’d spent his whole life unwinding. He wound and wound until he was a boy again, watching a beautiful, monstrous woman disappear into a crowd. This boy took the spool of thread home and hid it in the attic. Many decades later, long after he’d lived his entire life and was dead, someone found the spool and used it to mend something.
This summer is passing quickly, we realize; and yet it sits weightily upon us. The leaves of the trees sweat in the afternoon. At night we can hardly sleep for the heat. Sometimes we become gloomy. Our necks ache from holding our heads up under the humidity. We think of moving to a newer, gentler place; we think of our nonexistent children. Walking past the vast beautiful graveyard, we envision our gravestones, lined up side by side.
offspring #6
Suddenly and against all odds, we had the things we wanted. Our baby had been born and was hot as an oven—you held that child, and warmth suffused you. A burning little machine of life. We finally owned a home: one white-walled room with hardwood floors followed by another and another etc. The highway was just far enough away that the fast cars sounded like the sea. Our first night in our new home, we crossed the threshold bolstered by many blessings, for who doesn’t bless two young people, an infant, a new house? We walked through the first room, the second, the third, happiness transforming our hearts into fireworks. A hot little baby at the nipple! Our muscles full of invisible health! The shiny floors reflecting the full moon! Our hearts shooting upwards! No touch of doubt in us anymore!
In the final room, we came upon nine pirates sitting around our dining table. They were all dirty in different ways, missing different body parts, wearing different garish colors, carrying different rusty weapons. They demanded that we feed them. They were loud, and scornful of the loveliness of a young family. They took our baby from us at saber-point. They commented on how weirdly hot the child was, and repeated the order for a home-cooked meal. They couldn’t stop laughing. They rested their boots on the table. They informed us that they came with the house . . . that they’d always be here, expecting us to feed them. Now why did we think such a nice house had been within our price range? Hadn’t we ever stopped to wonder what might account for the bargain? Hadn’t we noticed the shadow in the eye of the real estate agent?
Our baby began to shriek—we rushed toward our baby—they blocked us with their sabers—we shrieked too and—then our—baby—blew up like a—bomb glorious hot—fire smoke exploding and—we were left there with the—charred remains of nine pirates and—our beautiful empty house and—no physical evidence at all of the—child we’d once had—
the hauntings
haunting #1
Rumor has it that a magnificent trick takes place in our apartment, so the greatest magicians come to figure it out. Their hot-air balloons fill the sky, making our hearts do somersaults. They land on rooftops and dumpsters. They’re an unkempt, smelly lot, with chaotic eyebrows. Sequins flake off their moth-eaten clothing. Their boots nick our wooden floors. They chew cloves of garlic. They squeeze in, all 112 of them, and the syllables of languages we’ve never heard pile up in our ears. Jammed together in our bathtub, we pinch our noses. An English-speaking magician finds us, yanks back the shower curtain, and says angrily, “Soooo?”
There is, in our apartment, a perfect glass globe that drifts around above our heads. When we’re away, we think of it. When we return, we’re happy to see it. Occasionally, however, it develops a crack. At first, this seemed to happen randomly, but eventually we realized what it correlates to . . . one crack becomes many cracks, and, in a brilliant crash of glass, the globe succumbs to gravity. Those nights are miserable. We lie stiffly beside each other, wondering how this happened to us, we who do not believe ourselves capable of feeling anything toward each other but love. We leave the shattered glass wherever it has fallen. We don’t disturb a shard. Later, we wake to find the globe drifting merrily above us. Our limbs lose their stiffness. We put the teakettle on and begin to use words again.
Now, with 112 magicians surrounding us, we point to the globe hovering over the bathtub. “It cracks and mends, cracks and mends,” we tell them, “but you’ll have to wait for who knows how long.” Impulsively, we dub the trick The Phoenix. “Bah!” they say. “Twenty-three tricks already have that name. And we don’t see any globe, you big fools.” They leave in a furious rush, filling the sky with hot-air balloons; and indeed the globe would never crack at a time like this (we’re holding each other, we’re laughing).
haunting #2
Every night we hear them—at least, we think we do. The sounds are just below the threshold of hearing, but sometimes they swell up. A sigh, a whispery movement. Fruitlessly, we strain to hear more. We wonder if these sounds seep into our sleep and account for our indecent dreams of red planets with purple skies, white seas filled with eager mermaids, black forests where aroused monsters roam. Indecent, yes, but can we deny that these frustrating, inaudible sounds make us smile in the dark? Ultimately, though, we conclude that they’re infuriating. Still, we can’t resist pushing our ears harder than we’ve ever pushed them, demanding so much of those tender organs that we can feel them trembling with the strain, deep inside our skulls—and suddenly we can hear everything. Something sliding moistly into something. Breaths. A nipple pinched between teeth. The desperate sigh that follows. Dirty, tender murmurs exchanged. It’s intolerable to hear such things! It makes our hearts ache! We can hear the sweat slipping down their inner arms. We can hear their goddamn skin cells rubbing off. But then again—can we? Unsure, we put our ears to the wall. And now there’s no doubt about it. Yes indeed, something’s happening there on the other side. It must be stopped! We slide along the walls, trying to identify the exact location, but the sounds seem to be coming from everywhere. Well damn. We get our hammer. We remove our stupid, cheerful photographs and begin to demolish the wall. Plaster rains down upon us. We haven’t had this much fun in—well, that’s a sad thought.
Then—we break through the plaster. And what we discover. What we discover is. Our walls are not filled with insulation. No. They are filled with enormous guts. Intestines slowly oozing. Pink
and wet. Enormous. They make beautiful, sensual noises as they move, slowly digesting whatever it is they’re digesting. Clinging to each other, we fall back onto our bed, press our stomachs together, and (oddly, terrifyingly, finally) begin to desire each other again.
haunting #3
The beautiful old proverb lady tells us that when she moved into the large and elegant house of her third husband, his dead wife started to follow her around, looking over her shoulder while she whisked eggs, giggling softly if she slipped on the bathroom tiles, standing in the corner observing the nighttime antics in the bedchamber of the newlyweds. The husband, a doctor and a sensible man, left the proverb lady alone one evening, and then the dead wife really went to town! She ran her fingers creepily through the hair of the proverb lady; she bumped her arm so that a halfjar of ground ginger went into the delicate soup; she became water and gurgled furiously in the toilet bowl. The proverb lady ran through the house, turning on every light and flinging open every window. The husband returned to find his abandoned house throwing radiance and heat out into the dark cold night. Eventually, he seduced the beautiful old proverb lady back to him. At first she came hesitantly, like a chipmunk; then forcefully, like a dragon. They installed themselves in a different large and elegant house, protected from ghosts by its curving walls (EVIL SPIRITS ONLY WALK IN STRAIGHT LINES!) and the network of ponds on its grounds (EVIL SPIRITS CANNOT PASS OVER WATER!). Confident in these superstitious measures, the beautiful old proverb lady became very happy and reasonable, and now can laugh about the night she fled the old house.
We, too, laugh. Firstly, because we adore the beautiful old proverb lady. Secondly, because we are exceedingly modern people and do not believe in ghosts or intangibles. We understand that love is transferable, and do not judge widowers for seeking joy somewhere. Yet unbeknownst to you, I laugh for a third reason: if you marry another woman after me, I will stand in the corner of the kitchen, staring at the two of you as you cook and eat. I will creep around the bedroom; I will run my fingers slowly through her terrible hair.
haunting #4
I am in love with an alien. This must be kept a secret. He’s a slender, elegant alien in a gray suit. Alien love is different from human love. There’s no infidelity in my loving the alien. He sits in the orange chair in our living room, legs crossed, gazing benevolently at me. Does he look human, you may wish to know. Well—yes and no. He has a head, a neck, two eyes, two arms, two legs, etc.; he wears a suit made for a man. Yet I wouldn’t take him outside. He couldn’t pass for one of us. His skin is grayer than ours, his limbs more elongated. But more importantly, he’s not—how to put it?—not firm around the edges. The lines that define where he ends and where everything else begins—they’re sort of blurry. So we’re confined to the apartment, and the daytime, since at night he vanishes altogether. As the sun sets, his shape becomes ever less convincing, and by dark he is no more than a slight fragrance, which my husband scarcely notices upon returning home. “What’s that smell?” he says. I say, “I used cloves in the stew.”
You may wish to know how we met? I was sitting here, working, as always, and then there he was, in his elegant suit, in the chair. My heart choked. I guessed first that he was a murderer, then a rapist, a robber, a ghost; only on the fifth guess did I get it right. How do we spend our days? He watches me while I work, and while I cook. We listen to the radio, though music sometimes seems to jangle his ears. I nap, and he sits beside me, drinking water. He grins when I tell tender stories about my husband. And when I’m upset with my husband, he smiles sadly. He knows only six words of my language.
At midnight my husband says to me, “You’re as beautiful as an alien.” At noon the alien reminds me, “The beloved is always an alien.”
haunting #5
In this home you’ll find twenty-seven clocks nailed to the four walls. We thought it would be fine; when we received them, we accepted enthusiastically. But all the delicate tick-tocks are making us crazy, altering our heartbeats. Why do people give clocks as wedding gifts? Is time briefer once you’re married? Does it need more dividing up until it turns into nothing?
Our home is a booth perched alongside an elevated section of train track. Strangers in passing trains might observe that this booth is caught inside a web of graffiti and has narrow, miserly windows. Perhaps they think, “What an awful home that would make.” But it suits us just fine. True coziness can be achieved only in juxtaposition with that which lacks all coziness. We have one bed, two bowls, two cups. A bookshelf and a teakettle, a row of seashells and a quilt sewn by a witchy grandmother. We enjoy clinging to each other to stay warm.
Ok. To be honest. Sometimes it’s not cozy. It’s lonely and strange up here. As tidy as we keep our home, we’re powerless against the blackish haze that creeps in through invisible cracks. Sometimes the electricity vanishes and the toilet fails to flush. Though we nuzzle deep into each other, still we wake stiff, cold, sad. And always those clocks nag at us.
Some nights we hear a mystifying voice. It says, There’s horses here for everyone. This sentence fills us with a sensation we identify as nostalgia, though we’ve never in our life ridden a horse. There’s horses here for everyone. We can think of no words more hopeful than these.
One frigid morning, we’re awoken by an unfamiliar smell. We look out our window to the street far below. There, blocking traffic, is a herd of horses. Hundreds of them. They’re enormous, forceful. We run down, down, until we’re near them. Their rumps are strong and golden and chestnut and velveteen and powerful in the sunrise. Their hoofs make irregular tick-tock sounds on the pavement. They face west.
haunting #6
In this version of the story, I look at the clock in the night and it reads 3:21. I look at it a few minutes later. 3:16. A few minutes later, 3:53. Then, 2:47. I wake you. Something’s wrong with our home. Odd things are always happening. Even time can’t keep itself straight here. We conclude that it all must have the same source; in the predawn darkness we use miniature flashlights to search for irregularities, any cracks where hauntings might enter. (If only the man at table 14 were here to help!) Eventually we do discover an imperfection. Beneath the sun-stained couch, a gap between two floorboards; one gives a quiet creak and loosens. We yank at it, bloodying our fingernails. Then the gentlemanly floorboard springs upward, inviting us into the cavity beneath. We can’t see what’s down there, and it’s not the kind of place into which one wishes to stick one’s hand. “Let’s make tea,” I suggest, stalling. “And turn on some lights,” you add. But neither of us stands. Instead, we reach into the darkness and feel something long, rectangular, plastic. We pull it out and recognize it: a sign, black, printed with white letters. CHAPEL. This belongs over the bureaucratic window in City Hall where marriage papers are signed. We replace the floorboard, drag the couch back, and return to bed.
Perhaps we’ve fixed the problem. Perhaps things will be different now.
But we have no confidence. Probably our assorted clocks will continue to behave strangely, dinging and donging at impossible moments, jumping around with no respect for time. Probably the CHAPEL sign will leave a rectangle of weird dust wherever we put it. We toss and turn. On the movie screen of my closed eyes I see fires sometimes, sometimes floods. Other times the screen is blank, or there’s a whale or monster in the distance. You flop over in your sleep. I say to you the best thing I can think of. The floodwaters are rising, yet we shall have a party.
the monsters
monster #1
It is too terrifying to—
First I must describe the woods. They are soft and low; the trees are small; there are many ferns. These woods are the least dangerous woods. As children, my sister and I always had trouble working ourselves up into that pleasant state of fairytale fear—of a stepmother, a witch, a dragon—we wished to achieve. We stayed until nightfall, waiting for the trees to become malevolent, but they just stood there like grandmothers. Now, grown up, we’ve become grateful for the mildness of th
e woods. We go walking—discuss husbands and houses—but listen here! Listen here!:
Yesterday we saw a monster in the woods. We did. We did. Listen! This is not a story from a different era. This is not an attempt at metaphor or surrealism; this is not an attempt to drag mythology into the modern world. I am telling you: it is the year 2010, and yesterday, walking in the woods, my sister and I saw a monster. He emerged from among the small trees. Our woods were as bright and undangerous as ever. The monster—he had skin the same color as ours, but it looked thick as an elephant’s and hung heavily off his bones. His arms were long, his neck skinny. He would’ve been seven feet tall if he hadn’t been stooped over, dragging his four-fingered hands along the ferns. He got so close that we could see his bloodshot eyes. He did not respond to us, but he was aware of us, like a commuter in a subway car. He was awful, I’m telling you. Patches of hair on his scalp. Between the legs there was nothing, smooth as a plastic doll.
It makes sense, doesn’t it, that this is how they would appear, first penetrating our most gentle and unmagical places? I’ll go out there today, and tomorrow, and the next day. I want to see him again and again, forever. I want to see his horrible self; this is what my sister and I were waiting for all along.
monster #2
The adults drink drinks and get nostalgic while in the other room the kids watch TV. They discover a channel showing a gray field stretching far into the distance beneath a gray sky. This might sound boring, but two things make it not boring. First, it’s three-dimensional. It’s so easy to believe this is not a TV screen but rather a window, and if you were to climb through, you’d be standing on that field. Second, way down the field, something is moving ... coming forth. The kids stare at the screen, mesmerized. Elsewhere, the oblivious adults pour another round. They’re getting so nostalgic! They’re thinking of certain glowing green fields. Meanwhile, the thing keeps coming. As it gets closer, the youngest kids hide their whimpers beneath scornful declarations. “This is boring,” they say. “Change the channel!” they chant. But the older ones enjoy the terror shooting through them. The thing’s skin is gray and thick, hanging heavily off its bones. Its arms are long, its neck skinny. It is very tall but it stoops, dragging its hands in the dirt. It has patchy hair on its scalp. It approaches them. When they see its bloodshot eyes, even the older kids want to change the channel. It looks at them too knowingly, as though it is aware of them, as though there’s no TV screen between them and it. “Change the channel!” they command. Someone hits the button. The channel doesn’t change. Someone hits it again. Still, no change. They pound the button. The thing is right there in the foreground. “You’ll never be able to change it,” it says in a high, weird voice. “Turn off the TV!” someone yells. Someone pushes the power button, but it won’t turn off. “Unplug it!” someone yells. But even when the TV is unplugged, the thing remains. They scream. They feel its bloodshot eyes on them. When the nostalgic parents come to see what’s going on, they find an empty room. On TV, a peaceful scene of a gray field.
And Yet They Were Happy Page 9