Black Iris

by Leah Raeder

  “Yes, yes. Good. What else am I? Think about it in a literary context.”

  Villain, antihero, antagonist, etc.

  He kept smiling, waiting for the right answer. Grudgingly I raised my voice.

  “Unreliable narrator,” I said.

  Frawley smacked his hands together. “Bingo.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Very good, Ms. Keating.” The professor paced, his voice looping around me. “I haven’t told you the whole story. But you can tell from clues I’ve dropped that something isn’t right. I’m withholding information. I want you to believe a lie.”

  He stopped somewhere behind my desk. I didn’t turn.

  “A novel with an unreliable narrator is really two stories in one. There’s what the narrator tells us, and there’s the truth. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes one illuminates the other. Nabokov’s Lolita is the example par excellence: Humbert Humbert is so blind with lust and self-justification that he ignores his young victim’s suffering. Desire can be a powerful obfuscating force.

  “In the Romantic era, writers would often conflate desire with the concept of the muse. ‘Divine inspiration,’ in the form of a beautiful woman in a toga with one breast bared, or whatever. Robert Graves envisioned the muse as a woman inhabited by the spirit of a goddess. To love her was to be inspired. To want her was the genesis of art. It blurred the lines between lust and inspiration in a way we’ve always intuitively known they should be blurred, because desire underlies every act of creation. Yes, boys and girls, we’re talking about sex.”

  My phone vibrated against my thigh, and I jumped.

  “A writer does her best writing when she’s driven by desire. This is why romance is the most popular category in fiction, in the entire literary canon. It’s all romance. They were all writing about it, in one way or another. The great works of art, the religious ecstasies—it’s libido, transmuted to something socially acceptable. Why it was socially acceptable to talk about your passion for God but not a fellow human being is an interesting question. Anyway, in this sense, unreliable narration may be trying to tell us about a desire that can’t be expressed directly, but must be distorted, obscured. Perhaps it’s something the narrator doesn’t fully comprehend. Or perhaps it’s something she understands, but doesn’t yet accept. Ms. Keating, what’s in your head right now?”

  Bastard. He’d tricked me into letting my mind drift.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know. Close your eyes. What do you see?”

  My head was in a million pieces, in memories, in a moonlit hallway shoved up against a door, in a room where candles threw three shadows against the wall, in a catacomb beneath Umbra where you could scream your heart out without being heard.

  “Nothing.”

  “You didn’t close your eyes.”

  I humored him, if only to get this over with.

  “Please. Indulge us.”

  This dickbag. I didn’t want to tell him I’d spent most of his stupid class fantasizing about skin. Skin against my hands, my mouth. Heat. The sun burning through my eyelids, kindling the blood. A fist curled in the sand. All the grains running out, escaping. I kept curling it tighter, trying not to let go, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold on.

  My eyes opened. The room was dazzlingly bright. I’d said all of that aloud.

  “Interesting.” Frawley cocked an eyebrow. “Loss of love is an eternal theme. You may want to explore its subtleties in your work, Ms. Keating. Mr. Teitsch.”

  He moved away, leaving me shivering and forgotten in the light.

  “Close your eyes, Mr. Teitsch.”

  My hands perched on my knees, crooked as claws.

  The phone.

  One notification: photo with text message. As I looked at it the rest of the room dimmed out like in a movie, a vignette fading in around the screen.

  The photo wasn’t the shock. It was tamer than I’d expected. But I could not take my eyes from the words.

  My mind was consumed with a single thought.

  Run.

  At the end of class I darted out the door, sprinting by the time I reached the elevators. I ducked into the stairwell, skipped down three steps at a time in a vaguely guided fall. On the ground floor I hurtled into winter air and ran flat-out along the black granite beach, across the commons where the grass was dull silver and dead gold, up the bridge over Lake Shore Drive and down into the city, banging people’s elbows and hips in my haste and never looking back. It began to rain. My soles slipped on slick asphalt. My lungs burned like an internal combustion engine. At the Red Line station I cut ahead of someone and jumped a turnstile. Shouts rose behind me. I rammed through the crowd on the platform, searching. Grabbed a blonde’s shoulder and spun her around: a stranger. Every face was wrong. Too late.

  At the railing a girl stared down into the street, watching rain fall on the red and black lacquer of Chinatown, the twin pagodas in the distance. She wore a beanie, so I’d missed her at first, but I knew the sun-gold hair framing that face.

  I walked up as a train arrived and she didn’t turn around. She’d been standing there awhile, letting them pass.

  My body felt like a burned candle wick. I’d spent myself on the mile run. Speech was too difficult. I waited until the L left and touched her coat sleeve.

  We hadn’t seen each other in three months. Three months, one week, and four days, to be precise. I could tell you the hour and minute, too. When she turned we both stood there, speechless. This face. Missing someone is the whetstone that sharpens want, Mom said once. If it was true, then all that was left of my heart was an edge looping in on itself like a Möbius strip, slicing me up inside.

  I breathed her name.

  Blythe pulled out her earbuds and touched my cheek with cold fingers. “Are you really here?”

  The edged thing that occupied my chest gave a sharp twist.

  “We have to talk,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

  Despite this, neither of us moved. I couldn’t look away from her face. Mist lay on her skin in a gossamer film. She looked fey, unreal.

  “Come on, then.” She slung her bag over a shoulder, visibly braced herself. One glance at me then no more. “And hide your face.”

  I took a Blackhawks cap from my bag and drew it low over my eyes.

  We walked through the red arch that said WELCOME TO CHINATOWN, crossing wet blacktop scribbled with neon like leaking paint. Rain hovered midair in a diamond-flecked veil. We lit cigarettes simultaneously and both of us laughed, soft, more like sighs. Behind us the trails of our breath and smoke braided into a double helix.

  Blythe picked a restaurant at random and we sat in a vinyl booth under a paper lantern, awkwardly staring at each other’s hands on the tabletop. I stripped off my soaked coat and cap and started shivering. She ordered something, asked where the restrooms were. The server watched us walk in together.

  I locked the door. When I turned she took me in her arms.

  My eyes shut.

  For a long time we didn’t speak. We held fiercely, ribs touching, her heart beating against my breasts, every breath she took echoed by my body. Always falling into each other’s rhythm. I buried my face in her hair and inhaled that dark berry scent, my mind blanking except for her. My shirt was damp, my hair stringy with rain. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

  “God, you smell good,” she said.

  “Liar. I’m sweaty. I ran all the way here.”

  “I never lie.” She pulled back, put her hands to either side of my face. “Your eyelashes are wet. Like little black petals.”

  I lowered them and she pressed her mouth to my eyelids, one after the other.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” I said.

  Her hands trembled, touching the tiny gold cross at my throat. “I haven’t missed you at all. It’s j
ust that there’s no color in the world anymore, and every sound is the buzzing of flies, and everything tastes like dust.”

  Oh, this was dangerous.

  I wrenched away and paced the bathroom. Sickly white fluorescence on bone-colored tile. The odor of ammonia and grease. I breathed deep, filling my senses, pushing her out.

  “Sweet girl,” she whispered.

  I dug my phone out of my pocket. Returned to her and drove her up against the door. Not sweet now, our old vicious selves returning.

  Her eyes bounced rapidly between mine and the screen. Then lingered on the screen. Then returned to me, slower.

  “Who sent this?”

  “I don’t know.” I slammed my phone against the door, not caring if it cracked. It slipped and spun across the floor, faceup, the damning photo blazing. The three of us, seen grainily through an apartment window. My shirt was off. Just a black bra and their hands on my skin. His hands, and hers. The bloodied shirt wasn’t even in the frame but it didn’t matter. The words said it all.

  I SAW YOU.

  My hands knotted in Blythe’s hoodie, nails meeting flesh. “I don’t fucking know who. But someone saw us. And they know.”

  SEPTEMBER, LAST YEAR

  The mattress was the last thing left. I was about ready to collapse atop it, but Blythe kicked my ankle and said, “Not yet, lazybones.”

  My entire life fit into the bed of Dad’s truck. Kind of crazy that you could pack it up and drive for an hour and become part of a new universe. It was the last weekend before college began, autumn stealing in, wrapping the edges of leaves with gold foil, cranking up the blue in the sky till it reached that agonizingly pure shade that hit you square in the gut like a fist. I sat on the tailgate in the shade of an elm, sunlight lacing through the leaves and laying a filigree of fire over my skin.

  “Got a smoke?” Blythe said, joining me.

  I gave her my pack.

  “There’s only one left.”

  “All yours.”

  She lit up and took a drag, then gave it to me.

  The radio was on in the truck, playing Lorde’s “400 Lux,” the backbeat slow and boomy like the last languid pulses of summer. I laid my head on the mattress, drumming one foot on the tailgate. Blythe snapped her fingers with the snare and we kept time together perfectly. In moments like this I could forget I ever had a past life. There was just now, blue sky, warm asphalt, our skinny colt legs in cutoffs, me and my best friend. I’d worried about moving to Chicago because the more people there were around me, the more alone I felt. Little wolf in a big wood. With her, though, I was never a nobody. She scorned the hangers-on who mooned after her and instead got into poetry-quoting matches with me, asked my opinion on a work in progress, listened to me angst about my writing. We’d stay up late drinking coffee and smoking and talking. We could talk forever. I traded the cigarette back after each drag and during the bridge she caught my hand and said, “I’m glad you’re here,” and my heart felt so large and light I could let go and watch it shoot up into the leaves like a balloon.

  “Look what the cat dragged in,” an unfamiliar voice said.

  Someone stood in front of the tailgate.

  “Holy fucking shit.” Blythe jumped down and tossed the cig, though we’d only finished half. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you, too, slut.”

  They flung their arms around each other. It took a moment before I saw the new girl clearly: tall and tawny-skinned, a mane of sable hair raveling around her shoulders. She wore a tennis skirt and tank like a ball gown. Blythe could be cocky, but this girl was operating on a whole other level. She exuded majesty as if her every step fell on red velvet. Her big, dark eyes made me feel infinitely small.

  I instantly knew who she was.

  “When did you get here?” Blythe said, still hugging her. The girl’s eyes stayed on me.

  “Drove up this morning.”

  “He didn’t tell me you were coming.”

  The girl smiled indulgently.

  “He doesn’t know,” Blythe said. “Christ. He’s gonna freak.”

  “Is he here?”

  “Yeah, upstairs. We’re moving in—” She finally remembered me, and yanked my arm. “Get over here, you misanthrope. This is my roommate, Laney. Laney, this is Armin’s sister, Hiyam.”

  Cue dramatic organ music.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Likewise.” Her eyes narrowed in cool amusement. She raised her face to the sun, breathed in deeply, then looked back at us. “I’m dying for a cigarette, bitches.”

  ———

  After the squealing (Hiyam) and the sighing (Armin) and the private talk (Blythe and I pressed our ears to the bedroom door but only heard her whine “Armin-joon” over and over), I finally had my own room in my very first apartment. Our place stood at the top of four steep flights like something out of Edward Gorey (L is for Laney, who fell down the stairs), in a neighborhood that pretended not to be Humboldt Park, but basically was. Armin called it the kind of place where you could play “Firecracker or Gunshot?” on a summer night. Blythe called it “an authentic American experience” and refused to let Armin buy us anything, including a nicer neighborhood.

  “Don’t let anyone own you,” she said, “and don’t be owned by anything.”

  “And try not to get shot,” Armin said.

  Blythe rolled her eyes. “Drama queen.”

  She disappeared with Hiyam on a cigarette run. Donnie had come with me, and we helped Armin clean the apartment. My brother and I spent half the time horseplaying while Armin grew increasingly withdrawn. When I walked into the bathroom he was kneeling on the tile, forehead and arm propped on the sink. He’d stripped down to his undershirt, a fine rime of sweat glazing his skin, buffing it like bronze. Sweat turned his scent into the aroma of wet cedar chips. I drank the air, mesmerized.

  “So why’s your sister here?” I said.

  “She deferred college for a year.”

  “Because of rehab?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she going to live with you?”

  His shoulders heaved. “We haven’t worked that out yet.”

  I put a hand on his back, lightly. The hard curves of muscle made me want to press tighter, to follow them as they spun around his bones. Boys are so beautiful when they don’t realize how powerful they are. When they hold it with quiet grace, oblivious to how easily they could rip the world apart. Once, in one of her Byronic fits, my mother said she wished I’d been born a boy. You’re like me, she said. Hunter. Taker. This life will be a cage for you. I didn’t understand until I got older. Then I wished it, too. Every fucking night.

  Armin tilted his face upward. “Laney.”

  “Yeah?”

  “No pills around her. Please.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me.”

  I took my hand away. “I said I won’t.”

  “I’m not trying to be a dick. She’s my—”

  “I know. I have a brother, Armin. I would kill you if you ever put him in danger.”

  He stared up at me with those dark doe eyes. “You should stop, too.”

  “I can handle it. I’m sorry your sister can’t.”

  I made for the door and Armin stood, reaching past me, swinging it shut. His arm hung over my shoulder, his heat enveloping me without touching.

  We didn’t move or speak. Only breathed, slow and deep. Every tendon tensed and drew my skin so taut the pressure of air against it was agony. A body has a way of wanting to be touched so badly that the touch itself will hurt, but so will remaining untouched. Nothing helps.

  “Don’t lead me on again,” I said, turning. “Don’t touch me if you’re not going to fuck me.”

  He pushed me against the door, his mouth coming down on mine.

  I had
nothing to hold on to but him. He lifted me beneath the knees and his skin was like hot metal, sticking to me, searing. I’d kissed him dozens of times but this time was different. This time led to something irrevocable. My fingers curled in his hair and kept curling till he groaned and bit my lip. I tasted salty tin and laughed. He silenced me with another kiss. This one was less vicious but more intense, too intense, his tongue finding mine again and again, his torso coiling against me, snakelike. My legs tightened around him. I was wet as fuck. I was coming apart. I had kissed boys, fucked them, taken them into my mouth, given my body up to everything they could do to it, and it hadn’t felt like this. It hadn’t felt like anything. Every time I tried to get space and regain control Armin filled it effortlessly, driving me back until I was walled in on every side, nowhere to go but into this heat, this blazing white-hot oblivion.

  A door slammed and girlish laughter spilled through the apartment.

  I pressed my cheek to Armin’s, breathing hard.

  “We’ll finish this later,” he said, his voice raspier than usual.

  Then the party began. We ordered pizza and mixed cheapo cocktails of Bacardi and Fresca, which Hiyam said was “so college.” We limited ourselves to one drink out of respect for her sobriety but that was enough to make Donnie flushed and bright-eyed. When Armin turned up the music, Donnie danced. My shy little brother who hid in his hoodies like a turtle in its shell. Blythe whispered something in Donnie’s ear, and his flush deepened, and the two of them pressed close, her hands sliding over his hips.

  I looked away.

  Hiyam blew a smoke ring and said, “Your brother is so hard for her.”

  My brain smoldered. People moved around me, talking and laughing while I sank into the couch, chain-smoking, lost in my own head. Shadows tilted across the room, folding up the light into little squares, sealing us in dark envelopes.

  “Laney. Come here.”

  Blythe peered at me from a doorway, looking like she was up to no good.

  I met her in the kitchen. She had the bottle of Bacardi and one glass.