Cosmogony

by Lucy Ives

  In my infinite wisdom, in the dark, on drugs, I decided, during the course of Murder, that the rule that did not pertain to me was the rule about blindness. In a way, this was a poignant election.

  I did not, however, wish to see—at least, not fully. This desire, too, had a deeper significance. Anyway, if I opened my eyes I would also open myself to censure, and after that I would be unable to win.

  Therefore, I squinted. It was nearly the middle of the night and all we had was the fire, so things were sort of gummy and smudged. I maintained a posture I felt was accurate to that of a person who was not looking and, for this reason, could not see. I watched as my coworker J.J., whose eyes were wide open (probably another metaphor), pointed across the circle at another coworker, Hailey, even as Gary, in his capacity as Narrator, nodded his acknowledgement.

  “It is morning,” Gary intoned, after an appropriate interval.

  We all opened our eyes. Or, rather, everyone whose eyes had been fully shut opened them.

  “There has been a murder. Alas, Hailey was discovered dead!” Gary was doing a pretty good job. He was young and conscientious.

  Hailey, who had loudly announced earlier that she had never even heard of this game, appeared perturbed. “Wait, why did I die?” she wanted to know.

  “You were undone, dispatched, bumped off,” Gary crooned. “You were murdered in the night!”

  “But why was I murdered?”

  Gary started to say something else in character, something about how no one knows the motive of a devious and successful murderer, because the murderer’s motive is the first thing that gives a murderer away, but he was interrupted by Nina, our COO, whose phobia of complaints often propelled her into literal explanations. “It’s random,” Nina said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I don’t get it.” Hailey frowned.

  “So,” Nina continued, “you’re quote unquote dead and you’re out of the game, so you can just sit there.”

  “I lost?” Hailey seemed shocked.

  “Probably,” Nina said.

  Gary was still in character. “Death comes when we least expect it. The weeping and the wailing of the villagers could be heard from miles around.”

  “For,” I said, which was also in character for me. “It’s ‘for miles around.’”

  “Thanks!” Gary exclaimed, identifying in me, I could tell, a death wish.

  I shrugged.

  “So anyways, everyone’s really upset and scared and they all go to bed with their doors locked, and once again it was night.”

  This was the signal for us to shut our eyes. I did the same thing I had done the turn before. I gazed through the furry mesh of my lashes.

  I was hoping, perhaps given my pedantic correction of Gary’s speech, that J.J. would come for me. But J.J. didn’t. She pointed at Nina.

  “It’s morning and Nina has been garroted,” said Gary.

  “What!” Nina exclaimed. “We aren’t even playing this right. You were supposed to ask if we knew who the murderer was after Hailey died.”

  Gary was unperturbed. “No one came forward with a theory after that tragic eve. The police were baffled. And now another senseless brutal slaying has rocked the quiet calm of this otherwise unremarkable rural village, somewhat renowned for its high-quality goat cheese and traditional barns.”

  “Isn’t there supposed to be a detective character?” This was J.J. now. “I think I remember playing with a detective.”

  You had to hand it to her.

  “No,” said Nina, turning to J.J. “We did it that way last year and it was a problem because the detective always got knocked off immediately. But you are,” she was addressing Gary now, “supposed to ask for accusations in between every turn.”

  “I thought I was the narrator.”

  “Yes. That’s what you do. Could you do that, please?”

  “I ask for accusations?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Gary sighed. “Are there any accusations?”

  No one said anything.

  J.J. was like, “Just so I’m clear, the narrator can’t be the murderer?”

  I kind of wanted to condemn her for overplaying her hand a bit, but then again, I knew a lot more than my fellow villagers and this was a democracy.

  Nina smiled. “That’s right. The narrator cannot be the murderer.” It was funny because here Nina was pitying J.J., and meanwhile Nina did not know yet that J.J. was the one who had rendered her dead.

  “Got it.” J.J. nodded, apparently taking this in.

  “Can I make an accusation?” This was Hailey.

  “No,” said Nina. “You are dead. You also don’t have to close your eyes.”

  “Oh, so there’s a benefit to dying!” Hailey was pleased.

  “Are there any accusations?” Gary wanted to know. “It’s getting late and it’s going to be night soon.”

  Two people were dead and another person was the murderer and then there was Gary, so that left six of us to run the village with its pungent dairy and well-made barns. I could imagine we were already pretty short-staffed. But I thought about how the murderer was still among us, working enthusiastically alongside us, maybe even more diligent than the rest of us due to psychotic glee, eating our wholesome cheese-based meals and sleeping under our gambrels. In fact, if you counted this demented fiend, there were still seven of us to run the village. So things weren’t really all that bad yet, although they were definitely going to get worse.

  “Night falls,” Gary intoned.

  I realized, I don’t quite know why or how, that J.J. was not going to execute me. J.J., a talented graphic designer who could always find work even during a recession, was going to pick off other folks first and preserve me for the last. She would come for me near the end, when she could be assured that I would really feel it. For the time being, she was just amusing herself, killing time along with colleagues.

  Now she pointed across the circle at Keith.

  Gary nodded. He was looking at J.J. Keith, he mouthed.

  J.J. tipped her head ever so slightly, confirming what Gary was mouthing.

  It was a good choice. I felt excited. I wanted to see how Keith would die. Hailey and Nina had both died really stupid deaths.

  “The sun has risen,” Gary told us. “Although the villagers gathered together in the night, thinking there was safety in numbers, sadly the goat-herder Keith was not accounted for in the morning. When a search party went out, they found he had been beaten to death with his own shepherd’s staff.”

  Keith was making a face like a corpse that has been beaten to death.

  “Oh no!” I whimpered, playing along. “He looks like ground round!”

  “Ew,” said J.J.

  Eugene, who had so far remained silent, raised his hand.

  “Yes, Eugene?” said Gary.

  “I have an accusation. I feel like Christine [this was me] is very suspicious and I want to accuse her.”

  “You accuse Christine? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. She’s trying to get us to believe she’s innocent.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, turning to Eugene, whom I disliked but usually pretended to tolerate, “how exactly am I trying to get you to think I’m innocent?” I knew this was the very sort of thing that would make me seem guilty, and I really, really wanted Eugene to fuck up.

  “No one innocent would say what you just said,” Eugene informed me.

  “Is that so?” I asked. Eugene clearly did not understand the layers to this game. I looked over at Gary. “Gary, am I the murder?”

  “The murder?” Gary wanted to know.

  “The murderer!” I exclaimed, cheerfully sloshing more liquor into my disposable tumbler.

  “Eugene,” said Gary, “do you denounce Christine?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, too bad, because she’s not the murder or the murderer. You are dead.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not the murderer. You’re dead.”

/>   “But she’s acting so guilty!”

  “I cannot control Christine,” Gary told Eugene, which, in this moment, happened to be true.

  And this was, I should say, also the moment when, trembling with my SOLO cup, I saw the way things work, because I saw what this game really was. I had never known it before, the feeling that was currently flowing into my face. I thought of it as the sensation of an encounter with the Truth.

  Let’s return for a moment to that equation, g = (D – b)/p. I had realized, not without a tingle of elation, that by cheating at the game of Murder I’d artificially reduced my blind-spot quantum (b) not to nil but to a value that was so much lower than that of everyone else around me that it might as well have not existed. For isn’t everything in this world about context? I had no impediments and as the possible people (p) kept dying, my insight (g) was grandly growing. It would, for example, have been impossible for me to be so flamboyant with Eugene if I hadn’t been assured (1) that he was not the murderer and (2) that his subsequent death would make my inevitable triumph over J.J. all the more sweet.

  Also, I could feel Keith looking at me. He picked gently over my face and torso. He had this way of perving out where he appeared to be talking to or appreciating someone else. There was a sort of fuzzy pressure, and when I could feel this, I knew that his eyes were about to snap right onto mine, which was what was going to happen and, then, what did take place.

  Keith was thinking, Fuck this world. Also he was thinking, You, Christine, are in this world. His glassy, sober eyes, black like earth and brown like memory, rolled over mine. He was a wheel and I was terrain, maybe. I was an animal and he was telling me he had some food.

  The other thing you need to know about me and my life in this moment, such as it was, is that I had made an attempt earlier that very day to die. Even now I’m not too sure how serious this attempt was but, when you think about it, even having tried is not a thing one should ignore. I was driving, which is the worst and most shameful part of it. I was alone in the car, driving to this retreat, and along the side of a small mountain there was a curve, and I was on the inside lane and another car was coming up the (steep) hill on the outside and I swerved into this car’s lane. It was not premeditated. It was not like me. I had only seen a chance.

  I swerved back in time and thus was able to continue on within this charming day to make it to the game of Murder. But maybe this was the beginning of my loss of b: I was deviating into oncoming traffic. All I knew was that I did not fucking know. And if I didn’t know, then why not cheat at Murder?

  J.J., meanwhile, kept taking people out. Finally, a morning came when it was just me, J.J., and this guy, Art, a feckless cog with half a PhD, and we all went round and round with Gary, me, and J.J. pretending not to know what the hell was going on and Art doing his usual fumbling. Everyone else had long ago been ready for their beds but still I managed a little scene. “Let’s end this charade. I’ve known,” I said, not even lying now, “that it was J.J., all along.” And I listed off everything J.J. had said or done for the past twenty minutes, making it sound like a watertight case. My language was rough, my consonants sloppy, but I had that flawless logic that can emerge only from a string of fabrications.

  And I convinced them, was the thing. And they believed my genius and looked on me with awe for about ten seconds.

  Next, we all got up from the fire, thereby dissolving D. My g became abysmal as we stumbled around trying to remember which rooms of the rented house were assigned to which people.

  I was still fresh in this moment, though. Keith, who had stoically volunteered to sleep in the loft of the musty garage out back, a separate and somehow pointy building, hove alongside me, lugging a mattress. “Christine, can I trouble you to help me out?”

  I was married, then, you see. And I was very young. And Keith had not been drinking and Keith was not extremely high. The way things work is, everything is possible and everything is permitted. This was what everyone seemed to know, except for me, who was equipped with an extraordinarily high b. This was why my colleagues kept their eyes shut during Murder. And why everyone else, except for me and Keith, just went to sleep.

  Keith didn’t care about Murder, because Murder was a game. Who knows what he did with his eyes during its “nights.” What Keith did care about were limits, and limits were something that Keith did not like.

  Here I need, for a moment, to go back in time. I don’t think I should go very far, but I’ll go a little ways so that you can have a better idea of what sort of narrator I am. If the game of Murder ended around 11:00 p.m., let’s do about fourteen hours so we can get a glimpse of me as I appeared earlier that day, circa 9:00 a.m. It is, by the way, a Friday, late July.

  I’m sitting on the deck of a modernist construction in the middle of the woods. I’m not yet at my work retreat. Rather, I’m at a much nicer house. It’s in Connecticut and it’s where my parents live. I’m not, by the way, sitting in a chair. I’m sitting on my butt directly on the wood planks of the deck and my back is against the glass of a floor-to-ceiling window-wall that intervenes between the deck and the interior of the house. Everything about this building is boxes. It’s there on a hill on stilts.

  I’m sitting in direct sunlight. I have some cold coffee and probably a phone. Ostensibly, I’m here because I’m borrowing my parents’ car. I prefer not to be stranded at work-related excursions.

  I imagine I’ll get tan. Or, I’m soaking up some sort of health. I’m not, to be frank, doing very well. I’m working on my equations.

  I think, What is the best way of quantifying another person’s face, his handsome grin, his feral stare, those lassoes that shoot out of his eyes . . .?

  Now my mother appears. It’s embarrassing because she interrupts my reverie. I’m almost at the point of believing that nothing exists in human social life except for quantities. I’ve got a very low score these days but hey, at least I have one.

  My mother is dressed in one of her Anglo ensembles: she has on a quilted vest and fake jodhpurs.

  The sun presses into my face. It sticks its hot, dull fingers in there. It seems to be getting underneath my eyes, if this is possible. It slaps me delicately, over and over, everywhere. It looks almost green to me, this light. Dark green, the sun is, striped with black, blotched with violet, a purple-chartreuse-maroon gray. I’m wearing underwear and a T-shirt, although I’m over thirty. Who knows where my father is.

  My mother tells me that she’s “going into town.”

  “Right,” I say.

  We’re both looking at my legs, which are long and veal-like. You could still hang me from a hook and sell me as a sort of ingénue. When I was in school we read a lot of British novels, but even accounting for the difference between nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century woman years, I am expiring. This isn’t even considering the fact that I am already married, which probably takes the adjustment in my favor of, whatever, like two years away. Nevertheless, my mother would like to sell me once again.

  “I could just pick something up for you,” she says.

  I don’t know what this means. In my mind’s eye, I see beautiful footwear, flattering dresses, an overpriced T-shirt that changes my life. My mother has never bought this sort of thing for me and has made me pay for all of my own clothing since I was twelve, which is why it comes from the Goodwill even now and why I don’t like money. But something in her voice makes me believe that at last something has changed. Is she ready to give me a token of affection, one that comes for free?

  Over the past several years, my mother has developed a hobby. If she did not live an almost entirely solitary life with my father she would never be able to get away with having this hobby, but given their nonexistent social circle, which gives rise to a paucity of witnesses, she can. My mother’s hobby is not really an activity. It’s a character whom she occasionally portrays when she and my father are on vacation. This character’s name is Crystal (I’m just guessing at the spelling) and Crystal c
omes out on cruise ships and at resorts, usually, as far as I can tell, in the evenings, although she can emerge in daylight, too. Crystal likes to volunteer when MCs ask for volunteers. She has a flair for the theatrical and does well with microphones. Crystal hijacks dinner shows and group tennis lessons. People recognize her later and come over to her table. They buy Crystal a drink.

  The legend of Crystal has been told to me and my husband, Hank, when we are over at my parents’ house for dinner. The legend is introduced by my father, who mutters even when he elects to speak in complete sentences. “Did you know your mother’s a star?”

  But no one cares what I know or do not know about my mother. It’s just a rhetorical question—rhetorical in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the audience for the question is/are alive.

  Hank will start looking very happy right about now. He’ll commence smiling and dangle one arm over the back of his chair. He’ll get to work on his eleventh glass of wine.

  Hank is an alcoholic but has good skin, small pores. My parents have come to enjoy his company more and more, and their enjoyment seems to occur in direct proportion to the rarity of his presence (it’s increasingly rare), as well as the derangement of his senses during the time he shares with them (he’s almost always bombed). He is, as far as I can tell, their perfect witness and coconspirator.

  “This’s gonna be good,” says Hank, as if rolling up his sleeves, although he makes no move save to imbibe.

  I’m drunk, too, but I don’t want to be. Being aware that you do not want to be drunk when you really, really are is not an easy thing to do, but there is a trick that I have learned, to which I made reference earlier when I started going on about my “space of resolve.” This trick is to get more drunk. By getting drunker, you become incapable of telling what is going on around you and can at last concentrate on yourself, you, number one. It’s a way of having “me time” in company, and what I usually found, once I’d thrown enough fermented liquid down my throat, was that “me” was sad. “Me” wanted to be doing something else. “Me” did not want to be having dinner with these people.