And Yet They Were Happy

by Helen Phillips

  monster #3

  There is a creature in the park. It looks like an albino squirrel. It moves pure white and snakelike across branches. It seems to be a gentler sister to the dangerously white swans that drift, cruel and wonderful, across the brilliant black water of the lake. Once, looking upward in the usual spot on my daily walk, I saw it waiting there on a precarious branch above me, perfectly still. It gazed at me and I discovered that it had human eyes. I discovered that it knew me, and wished to know me better.

  I have disliked animals—have used weapons against a blundering bat, have felt my gut turned to jelly by possums circling garbage—but this creature didn’t evoke that prehistoric disgust.

  Yesterday, as I searched the tapestry of leaves for a flash of white, the creature dashed out from the underbrush. Lifting one paw, it gazed coyly back at me, luring me into the woods. Honored, I followed my creature off the paved path, jumped a barbed wire fence. It led me into the untouched center of the park, into woods I couldn’t have imagined—medieval woods, vines and mushrooms. The light grew darker, but my creature glowed. Eventually, it leapt into a bush, looked up at me, smiled—yes, smiled—and gestured downward with its neck. I noticed two things. First, my creature had wings! It spread them wide, bat-like but lace-like too, almost invisible. Second, there was a nest full of offspring that resembled small pieces of peeled pear, pale and slightly transparent. They squirmed over one another like slugs.

  The creature darted its neck out and bit off the top of my index finger. It sprinkled my blood over its offspring. The red quickly faded to pink on their weird, pale skin. Then the creature swallowed my flesh. Shrieking, I examined my finger. No bone had been taken. I saw that it would heal. The creature cocked its head. And I became suddenly, desperately jealous of the creature that knows what needs to be done and does it.

  monster #4

  They live over the ridge, across two rivers, beyond the valley, past three meadows. They move fast. Their arms and legs are longer than ours. Their skin shines in the light of noon. They do not tire. At midday, we’re forced into the shade. We lie there, small and hot and lazy, puffing out our empty bellies. They do not seem hungry. They notice us the way they notice the sun (which does not burn them) or the river (for whose water they do not thirst) or the stars (to whose mysteries they seem indifferent). Nothing could frighten them. This frightens us.

  When we spot them, we ache for something for which we do not yet have a term; thousands of years from now, we will settle on the right word.

  We cluster ourselves around the fire of a single consoling thought: We shall survive into the future, and they shall not. This fact has been passed back to us by a prophetess from the year 2010, and we know it is true. A second thought, less consoling because we do not know if it is true: We are more intelligent than they. We lie in the shade, thinking these things, convincing ourselves we are superior.

  But say they pass near enough that we can make out their features. Say two of them, a male and a female, come striding radiant up the ridge. Their gaze drifts down over us, at once compassionate and severe. Silver eyes. Sharp noses. Bronze skin. The unconcerned calm of predators. Our men find themselves hardening. Our women go slick between the legs.

  They each carry an object. These objects glow in the sun. What are they? Circles, someone says. Three-dimensional circles, someone adds. Globes, someone corrects. Spheres. Made of what? Rock. No, stone. No, marble. They made those? How did they make those? What are they for? No, quartz. No, obsidian. We could never make such a thing.

  They vanish over the ridge, and we’re left knowing foolish evolution will select us over them.

  monster #5

  A prehistoric girl walks into a convenience store in the year 2010, accompanied by a normal, modern young man. She has thick limbs and a large head, her features not yet entirely liberated from their origin in the face of a chimpanzee. She smells unfamiliar. No woman smells this way anymore. It’s a smell that makes you want to figure out its source. She wears men’s jeans, a t-shirt. Her feet are bare—which, unfortunately, could get her kicked out—but on second glance it appears she is wearing shoes, flip-flops lost beneath the wideness of her feet. Her hair is shiny like the fur of small mammals. She pushes it behind her ears with her big thumbs. Her skin is the color of almonds and resilient as plastic.

  They go to the candy aisle. She paws the Butterfingers. He picks one up and places it in her palm. She studies it, squints at the royal blue, the golden yellow. It pleases her. But already he’s prepared with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!—Peppermint Patties! —Skittles!—M&Ms! She encounters each object as though she’s found it after walking hundreds of miles in the forest. How aggressively brilliant it all is beneath the fluorescent lights. Starburst. Snickers. Nerds. Lifesavers. Tic-Tacs. A thousand colors never seen in nature.

  The Neanderthal puts her hands up to protect her moist black marble eyes. She groans. He tries to embrace her, but she’s vastly stronger than he, and when she shrugs him off he’s thrown backward, offbalance. He leans against the wall of candy, breathing hard, wondering if this fantasy’s gotten out of control. Moaning very softly, she strolls, or rather, stalks down the aisle. She strokes the rows of candy as one would stroke a newborn or diamonds, any impossible treasure. She wishes to touch the unimaginable colors. She will never allow herself to be separated from the astonishing beauty of the convenience store. When they come to remove her, she will cling shrieking to the wall of candy until it falls, its riches exploding across the floor.

  monster #6

  They live there in the middle of the traffic circle at the intersection of five major roads, on that small island of grass where the city long ago planted four crabapple trees in the name of beautification. Sometimes they can be seen scurrying dangerously across six lanes of traffic, arms outstretched, holding hands, the mother and the daughter (well, it’s impossible to know for sure, but the smaller one is identical to the larger one, as though they’re two versions of the same person) in their matching gray garments. Garment, that’s the only word to describe what they’re wearing—large shapeless things that nuns might have been forced to wear on a continent harsher than ours. In summertime, they rest quietly while the humid gasoline swirls around them. The grass is not well tended—how to get a lawnmower across six lanes of traffic?—so when they lie down in it, they vanish. Sometimes the mother sits upright with the daughter’s head in her lap, but to the naïve viewer—and indeed isn’t anyone whipping around a traffic circle a naïve viewer?—she could easily be mistaken for a piece of litter, a plastic bag snagged on branch. In the fall they harvest crabapples and feast. In wintertime, on desolate nights, it’s possible to spot the tiny fire over which they roast rats seasoned with the dried chives that grow among the blades of grass. In springtime they cannot resist standing up and stretching. Glimpsed among the riotous blossoms of the crabapple trees, they are gaunt. Their faces pale and simple, like snow.

  Many facts remain unknown. How they dispose of their bodily wastes. What happens when they run out of rats, crabapples, chives. What happens when it snows. Where they get water. When they last bathed. Why they never look unclean. Their names. Their birthplaces. If they speak English. If they are human. If they are happier than we are. If they know we’ve spent our whole lives wondering what it would be like to live in the middle of the traffic circle.

  monster #7

  I see her everywhere, the Old World lady who wears girlish pink lipstick, nightmarish high heels, and a silk scarf around her neck like the woman in the fairytale whose head was held on only by a silk scarf. Her hair, bleached blonde for decades, looks like a nest for some species of small mammal we don’t have on this continent. When she scratches her head, the sound of her fingernail moving across her scalp is audible.

  I see her in airport security, where they screen her because she’s incapable of looking innocent. Her head thrown back atop her stiff neck, she permits them to pat her down. I see her in the subway, wrapped in a f
ur coat that appears faux or genuine depending on the light. I see her in the courtroom, translating the defendant’s words from Russian into English, proudly wrapping her tongue around both languages. She rarely blinks. I see her in the grocery store, buying sixteen grapefruits. Is it the same Old World lady every time, or are there many of them? The snarl of hair remains constant, the extravagant shoes, the avoidance of eye contact.

  I have always been frightened of monsters, have spotted them stalking through the woods and crouching under the bed. Gargoyles on old buildings howl at me. I’m susceptible. Monsters wish to haunt me; I see her everywhere.

  I’ve been instructed to confront my fears by following her home. Surely her apartment is the apartment of an alcoholic, dusty and incomplete, where even the brightest colors become dull. When I slip in the door behind her, she’ll take off her neck scarf and her head will tumble to the floor. Then again. Maybe her apartment is the apartment of a grandmother. A kitchen with yellow walls. She removes her shoes and dons slippers. Beneath her wig there’s a demure little bun. She brews tea. She tells me about the monsters she had to fight in the Old World, and explains the various methods a woman can use to overcome them.

  monster #8

  He and She lived in a precise garden composed of four equal quadrants and an octagonal fountain. Numerical precision is one way to honor God. There was a crabapple tree in each quadrant, and in each a different set of herbs: Culinary, Magic, Love, Poisonous. These herbs served their purposes effortlessly: pluck a sprig of mint, and a cup of mint tea would appear in your hand. Wave a stalk of goldenrod at a threatening sky, and the storm would disperse. Bring an iris to your beloved during a disagreement, and both of you would start laughing. They didn’t know what the poisonous herbs were for; when those herbs were picked, nothing happened.

  The garden was surrounded by a cloistered walkway. After many years of examining the carvings on the stone pillars, it became possible to decipher narratives, some wonderful and some inexplicable. It was pleasant to sit on the stone benches protected by the cloister. And beyond the cloister? A high and impenetrable stone wall.

  One afternoon, She fell into the dark dreamless sleep of the first woman; there were no landscapes yet to illuminate her dreams, no creatures to inhabit them. When She woke, He was gone. He was nowhere, absolutely nowhere. He’d never been out of her sight. She felt it in her chest, on the mysterious left side. She grabbed herbs and thrust them at the blackening sky, but nothing. Nothing.

  Suddenly She recalled the pillar they’d never been able to make sense of. This pillar had carved into it their unmistakable garden itself. But the garden was empty; the crabapple trees bare; the herbs shriveled; and, in the shadow of the cloister, indeed hiding behind the very pillar into which this scene was carved: a monster made of faces. His face was a face, his torso was a face, each arm was a face, his hands and feet were faces, his legs were faces. For the first time ever, She screamed, and in the garden the leaves of the crabapple trees began to turn gray.

  the regimes

  regime #1

  They come in the night. I, who sleep naked, stand up wrapped in a sheet.

  “Ten minutes,” they say. They throw a suitcase on the floor. “You can bring whatever fits in here. We’ll wait outside.”

  The quilt my aunt made, which could keep me warm wherever we’re going? But that would fill the suitcase entirely. Socks and underwear, a toothbrush? But what a waste of space on necessities. The green party dress my mother bought me, the most expensive item I own, and attached to certain memories of certain nights? But how frivolous. The thirty-three notebooks I once filled with poetry, which in another era were my most precious possession?

  Outside, they stomp their boots. “Eight minutes, sweetheart!” they shout.

  The time has come to be sensible. I put on four pairs of underwear, two pairs of socks, jeans, sneakers, three t-shirts, a long-sleeved shirt, a sweatshirt, a coat. Hat, scarf, gloves. But I’ve done it all wrong! I should layer my joyous skirts under my green party dress. I should tape notebooks of poetry to my stomach. And the suitcase is still empty.

  “Three minutes, baby!”

  Too late now! It’s got to be my books. It doesn’t take long to fill the suitcase with Neruda and Shakespeare. But when I try to lift it, it falls lopsided out of my grasp. The books splay across the floor. Then I remember my essential medications. They’re in the secret dresser drawer, beside my wooden jewelry box, which reminds me of the pearl necklace my mother left me when she died!

  They come up the stairs. “Ready or not,” they say. They open the door. “Apparently not,” they say when they see the disarray of the room. I cling to the dresser, hot, bundled, my medications rolling on the floor at my feet, the strand of pearls dangling from my hand.

  “Ok,” they say, grabbing me. “No suitcase for you. Let’s hit the road.”

  Tomorrow night, they will come again. And the next night. And the next. And the next.

  regime #2

  There was a photographer who lived in a city with many spires. The problems he faced were small and delightful. At what angle should the bride tip her parasol? How to get thirty schoolchildren silent and smiling for one second? Where to direct an old woman’s chin so as to remind the viewer of her as a girl? How to capture a lull in the screams of an infant, transform the simper on the face of a teenager, prevent a toddler from tearing down the velvet drapes. He had many painted backgrounds (a meadow in the Alps, a street in Paris, an Italian villa, a barnyard, the principal cathedral in this selfsame city) and chests of props: scarves, teddy bears, plastic ferns.

  Times changed. The photographer was instructed to remove the colorful backgrounds from his walls. People were brought to him in the night. They ran up to him, pulled on his sleeves, asked questions. His was the first unmasked face they had seen since all this began. But he knew nothing, said nothing. Their clothing was to be removed. They were to be photographed in three different positions. How sadly their genitals and breasts hung. He did certain things. Emphasized warm sepia hues when developing the film. Allowed the littlest children to hold a teddy bear while they were photographed. Allowed the shyest women to keep their undergarments on. He was punished severely for doing these things, and then no longer did them.

  One night, a very weak woman was brought in. The photographer recognized her. They’d gone to grade school together. Her hair had smelled like graham crackers. She had been skilled at drawing perfect circles. Now her hair was falling out in patches. Her breasts were extraordinarily small and her hips extraordinarily wide.

  The next night, a very weak woman was brought in. The photographer recognized her. They’d gone to grade school together.

  The next night, a very weak woman was brought in. The photographer recognized her.

  The next night, a very weak woman was brought in.

  regime #3

  In our city, there was a museum. In that museum, there was a section of wall from an ancient house. A fresco, the sign informed us, from an inner courtyard. We’d stare at that fresco for many long minutes. “How can you be so red, 2,058 years later?” we wanted to ask it, and did, speaking very softly so as not to seem eccentric. Three elements were depicted in the fresco: a pale yellow courtyard floor, five pale green columns, and that red, red wall behind. It made our heads spin, the realization that this fresco rendering a courtyard was once part of a courtyard. But wait—in fact there were four elements depicted—in the fresco’s bottom left corner, we spotted the delicate outline of a grape-leaf. This grape-leaf disrupted the perfect symmetry, and we became immediately fond of it. Suddenly we understood that the creator of this fresco had been mischievous, like us, and we wished we could have bought him a beer. We’d have asked him “How can you be so red, 2,058 years later?”, drunkenly confusing the artist with the product, and he’d have answered our question as though he were the fresco itself, saying with a grin, “I am so red 2,058 years later because—”