by Lee Upton
“Do you actually think what we heard tonight—.”
“I’m going to say it was an animal. But it was a reminder too. I’ve felt that same energy before. Powerful forces are at work.”
Clint couldn’t help himself. “Weak ones too,” he said.
As Clint pretended to be asleep gnawing erupted above him. It sounded like he was inside a living thing, inside a stomach maybe, even though the sound must be coming from some small roof-dwelling mammal. To focus his mind, he made himself remember the early days with Tesia. One particular thing—the childhood incident she told him about—that was something he never figured out.
Tesia had complained that a memory came to her in flashes. Or was it a dream, a remembered dream that crossed over to resemble reality? Did he really want to hear this? Of course. Come on, Tesia.
She would have been about five years old, which accounted for why the memory was unreliable. Her father had left the family about a year before then. Her sister Becky’s boyfriend, the kind of boy who made a habit of running around graveyards, showed up while Tesia was being babysat by Becky. Clint could imagine that boy—a thick-shouldered bully always saying, “Don’t you trust me?” True to form, the boy got Becky and Tesia to go with him to an abandoned house. And then—this is awful: Tesia, a little child, was left alone in a room of that house. What she remembers: the vastness of the room. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, objects materialized: dressers, a sheeted crib, chairs. The dust was peculiar. “It was like overly aged dust. But isn’t it odd to think such a thing? Do five-year-olds think like that?” As she spoke, Clint noticed what had escaped his attention—the gold rifts in Tesia’s eyes. Her eyes had tiny rays in them, as if they had been sliced. Her beautiful and disconcerting uniqueness was alive to him.
Dust, Tesia was saying, dust was what she was sure of. Throat-clogging dust. She was upstairs in the abandoned house, alone and terrified. She was just a little girl, and in the dark her bare legs gave off a funny silky light. The moon must have come out from a cloud because there was silver at the edge of the window shade. When she turned from looking at the window, her head swimming with the deep tiredness that only children know, she saw movement. Tugging. Something was moving underneath a dresser. Tugging. Tugging. Tugging. Poking out from behind a stack of boards was a child’s leg.
The next thing she remembers: she is screaming, and her sister Becky is again with her, and the two of them are running down the stairs.
Clint couldn’t wait to do the obvious. He asked for Becky’s number, pulled out his cell phone and called her. Becky picked up, tried to remember the incident, kept failing and then, finally, it was coming back. Oh that. A practical joke. She and the boy found a doll and were hiding with it and making it move—to scare Tesia.
Lying on a cot in a cabin with a man across the room convinced of the existence of ghosts, Clint thought about how a silly trick had shattered into nightmares for Tesia. That she hadn’t confronted her own sister when the memories returned seemed like timidity or stupidity, almost as if her suffering served a purpose. After talking to Becky he had hung up the phone and waited for Tesia to show her gratitude to him for solving the mystery. Instead she left him for three days. The guy turned out to be a pharmacist.
If finding the truth was not what Tesia needed, what did she need? Try as he might, he couldn’t reach Tesia. A thin gummy sheet hung between them. A thin sheaf—the image of a prophylactic assailed him—thinner than shed snakeskin. He considered: was she trying to end their marriage? Poking at the marriage with a hot knife till it split?
Why did it always come for him: this sensation of being haunted by something he had forgotten or neglected to understand? As if on the road not taken there was some poor lost thing he’d left, not even recognizably human, this thing, and yet with a human soul.
On the morning before the second-to-last day of the retreat, when the other men plunged ahead on a nature walk, Clint asked Norman, “Are you really getting anything out of this?”
“What’s this?” Norman asked.
“The retreat.”
“I don’t know anymore,” Norman said. He looked less healthy today, less like a full-page ad. “I thought I was. I keep hoping. Kind of desperately. But then again I get stuff out of everything. I get stuff out of you. Just watching you. Stuff I don’t need to get, but it’s still stuff.”
Clint considered. “If you can get stuff out of anything and anyone—why did you come here? Why pay for stuff you can get anywhere?”
“Are you trying to insult me?”
“No. It’s an authentic question.”
“It’s fine with me if you’re trying to insult me.”
“I’m not, not even if you get stuff out of being insulted.”
“I guess I do like the idea of strength—developing it,” Norman said. “It’s not something I’m known for. It’s flexibility I’m known for. And besides it’s actual, you know, not wired. Or wireless. I guess it’s wireless. But actual. Actual people. Actual trees. Actual birds. It’s like things are happening right in front of me. It’s not—you know—spectral. Sorry for wigging you out about the ghosts. But, you know, you’re hard to talk to. It’s like you short-circuit things. You don’t hear. It’s like talking into a microphone and then the microphone goes dead, you know?”
It was a dream of water, a perfect inset of water: like the sky had been liquefied and a corner of paradise fell to earth. Why enter such a pond? It would be enough just to look.
“This might be bottomless,” Norman said, “like a quarry. A good place to get rid of things. I mean you go in there and it’s like you’re in a stew of you don’t know what.”
Most of the men from the camp were already there. But no one was going in. Or unbuckling.
Then a man who looked like a Viking—his knees were the size of colanders—strode down the bank, pulling off his shirt. At the pond’s edge he hesitated, took three giant steps, and disappeared under the water. When he came up, his hair streaming over his forehead, he was smiling.
“How is it?” Norman yelled. He danced around, trying to get out of his shorts.
Without answering, the Viking plunged under the water again.
Clint wrapped his glasses in his shirt and set the bundle on a rock. Instantly the men around him were reduced to fuzzy grayness. Once in the pond he let himself fall face forward. Even without his glasses he could see what looked like a thicket far underwater, magnified, as if a forest were flooded below him. He bobbed upright and floated on his back, the sun beating against his forehead.
Norman’s voice was echoing in his ear. “Buzzards are circling overhead. Do you think that means we’re supper?”
Clint couldn’t see anything.
“Maybe they prefer dead meat.” It was still Norman’s voice. The voice sounded like it was bobbing.
Clint played with the idea that he was floating in anesthetic instead of a mountain cavity filled by an underground spring. He swam away from the body that was likely to belong to Norman.
It wasn’t long afterwards that a wall of silver erupted like a flash bulb. Jets of spray flew into Clint’s eyes. The pond was being tilted. He rotated with all his strength and swam to shore where he hobbled to find his glasses, wiping them on his unrolled shirt.
He turned just as the Viking with the huge knees was setting a body on the bank, laying it down like carpeting. It was Norman.
Norman’s lungs were fine—given that he was shouting. At first Clint couldn’t make out the words and then he wished he hadn’t. “You wanted it,” Norman shouted. “You let it happen. You know I’m talking to you. It would’ve been perfect for you if I drowned. Afraid I’d pull you down.”
Was Norman talking to him? Was that what the splashing had been about? Was Clint being accused of nearly letting Norman drown?
The other men dropped their eyes as Clint searched one face after another. Then Clint backed up and returned with Norman’s clothes, knelt, and handed the bundle over.
Norman wobbled upright, tried to get into the legs of his shorts, and began a little hopping sequence that dispersed the crowd.
“I’d never want to see you drowned,” Clint said. He took off his glasses and rubbed away the smear that was making everything look sugared. He put his glasses back on.
“So you never want to see me drowned?” Norman said. “That’s rich. You don’t want to be a witness, that’s all.”
Clint mused on how much he hated the expression That’s rich.
Norman wasn’t finished. “You didn’t do anything to stop it.”
An unassailable belief of Clint’s: he would not willingly or consciously contribute to anyone’s suffering for as long as he lived.
The last thing Clint wanted: to return to the camp. He walked in the opposite direction of the other retreaters. Within a hundred yards, three paths converged. He took the widest. Thick with pine needles, the path died in bracken before opening out again. A rush of heat swept across his face. He set off between firs until he found another path, this one narrower.
He was entirely alone. Which meant he could think—undisturbed—about his life. In other words, Tesia.
He didn’t understand the sort of men who blew their wives away with a shotgun. He did understand stalking. Being married to Tesia—it was like stalking in slow motion. He would never leave her. She knew that. It was like the men who came for her knew that too. Which gave him hope. She’d grow out of it. Or she’d grow older. And this crazy desperate horror show would stop. They had an unspoken agreement. If he could endure the wait. He had to remind himself: those men weren’t giving her what she really wanted. Although neither was he. Obviously she didn’t know what she wanted. She didn’t understand herself. She liked to terrorize herself as much as she liked to terrorize him.
He must have been walking for at least another half hour before the path nearly disappeared again. Piles of logs were spattered with bomb craters of lichen. More brambles blocked his way. He thought that he might be approaching, from the opposite side, the berry patch he and the other men visited earlier in the week. He smelled ash from the dead ring of a campfire. Further ahead a circle of yellow grass looked burned by a giant magnifying glass. To his left, more brambles in bundles. A briar snagged at his shirt, dragged at his arm, and broke the skin. He tripped on, before stopping to clean the steam off his glasses with his shirt.
Past a stand of birches he caught sight of a pond that made a perfect round impression, as if a meteor stunned the mountain and for a thousand years rainwater dropped to form a silver cavity. He thought of going there, stripping off his clothes, walking in and not caring. Maybe he’d float. Maybe he wouldn’t.
All he knew: it was a good thing—to be alone. A good thing. Although he couldn’t get himself to think full thoughts for more than a minute. For now, it was enough to experience the hot wind, to listen for the sounds of rushing water somewhere up ahead.
The hair rose on his neck. A heap of something. Off the path.
He shivered, thinking he was seeing a rubber prop. Instead it was skin. A human body, a body like a pelt—flattened and naked, with dark nipples. Brambles were piled against the body and more brush. He found himself moving forward and bending over the woman, despite his terror. He made his palm graze the body’s bare stomach. Under his hand: soft heat.
He pawed around the ground and found nothing to cover her. She must have been dragged here after her clothes were stripped. He took off his shirt and pressed it across the woman. He hoisted her body into his arms, her head hanging over his elbow, her neck exposed, her abdomen crumbled up against him. His wadded shirt fell off her. Whoever had done this might come back. Or an animal could find the body.
He was running with the woman in his arms, stopping when his knees gave. She was slippery and her head wobbled. He tucked his neck in and saw that a bruise had spread to her ear. He stopped again, drawing up his knee to push her higher and fold her against his chest. He listened for the sound of water, but no, it was traffic, an engine heading over the rise.
He ran hard until he was in a ditch, splashing through water, and then stumbling out, nearly dropping the woman, nearly letting her body graze the ground again.
Then he was on the side of a road and then in the middle of the road and shouting and not knowing if whoever was in the truck on that isolated stretch of gravel might be a killer or someone innocent who would stop and save the woman.
The sweat in his eyes and on the lenses of his glasses kept him from seeing whoever was in the truck racing toward him while he held the naked woman in his arms. As he held her out—she was heavier by the second and sliding again—it flashed through his mind that the sight must be terrifying, as if he was offering a sacrifice to the world, as if he wanted to offer this vulnerable body to anyone in the world who passed, when the truth was—even for a stranger—he would sacrifice himself first.
As the truck barreled toward him he closed his eyes from the dust and felt, he could not then know why, a terrible sense of power. The sensation was familiar. It was just that never before had he known it to be power.
You Know You’ve Made It When They Hate You
Moi and The King: Charity Performance Nearly Worth the Ticket
Last night’s opening of The King & I, in which costume design trumped character, turned the tables on the painful posing of the original, revealing the sodden colonial politics underpinning the tired enterprise, from the remarkable hoop skirt of Anna to the exciting cummerbund of her countryman. Molly Crane as Anna overwhelmed the role until this reviewer wondered if the production shouldn’t have been called Moi & the King. She was in mediocre vocal frame and bent on too heavy-handedly stirring the sexual waters between herself and the polygamous Siamese monarch. Generally her role is played with some subtlety and a dose of British rectitude. Or what the British want us to suppose is rectitude. Here we have an Anna salivating for her king and ready to flash her knickers every time she executes a turn-about in her hoop skirt, marvelously designed by Mary Achtenberg with delicate hand-embroidered detailing.
The King—one of the newest Korean neighbors in our venerable burg—acquitted himself with dignity in the midst of Anna’s incessant bosom-beating innuendoes of sexual congress. One could see that he felt oppressed by the shrewishly seductive manipulations of Anna, a widow who recklessly inspired a romance between one of the king’s countless concubines and a shirtless youth.
The surprise of the evening was John Fostergarth, whose hapless portrayal sent laughter to all corners, once the audience realized the joke: the representative of British imperialism was staggeringly at odds with himself and his position. Fostergarth’s mimicry of stage fright propelled gales of mirth throughout the otherwise often puzzled audience. His reedy figure, excellently attired in evening clothes of a fit and condition rarely seen locally, slowly became saturated with the self-consuming perspiration of the colonialist frustrated by his own unruly instincts. As with his compatriot Anna, we were led to intuit the venality beneath the skin of civility. Given secrecy and opportunity, the hoop skirt and the dinner jacket are flung aside as impulses from the gutter fly.
Such an unpeeling of the mendacities of xenophobia is nearly worth the price of admission for this chestnut, with musical direction by Timothy Flock. Superb costumes by Mary Achtenberg. . . .
Shampoo, Please!
Can someone wash this musical right out of our hair? We know its message: its flagrant attempt to naturalize the desire of an empire attempting to control far distant real estate, the despoiling and the selling of our own special islands. But what’s South Pacific without manic dancing by unrepentant youths? We know the boar’s tooth ceremony is a big crowd-pleaser. But call me a cock-eyed pessimist, the mature killer, the mysterious Frenchman in this hare-brained production, is younger than Nellie Forbush, who simply sounds developmentally delayed. The tired, pinched-looking star behind this vehicle is Molly Crane. Are we to find xenophobia charming? No naïve waif is she from
Little Rock. Her doubling up preposterously as Bloody Mary might have worked if the audience hadn’t been baffled into submission.
John Fostergarth fills the bill as Stew Pot, swallowing the role whole and belching up a more-than-competent performance in what is otherwise a carnival of incompetence—except for costume design, by the delightful and talented. . . .
My Fat Friar
The rain in Spain falls mainly on this musical. With a lil bit of luck you’ll miss it. Molly Crane as Eliza Doolittle hardens the heart and then some. Impossible to believe a transformation will take place from filthy flower peddler to stately avatar of elitism. Wilfred Oneff as Henry Higgins takes on a preposterous role with aplomb, despite his sorry voice.
John Fostergarth, still quite new to the stage but certain to be a favorite, pours on the charm as an idle dandy at the horse track.
Molly Crane almost comes to life when she warbles “I Could Have Danced All Night.” Here we believe her—and see shining beneath the grease paint a glimmer of what might have been. A tiny ray of sunlight in a chilly production.
Unfortunately, you can’t change a tramp into a delicacy, especially one with a backwoods accent. Who wants to see a lady clacking about onstage in a sheath with ropelike sash? In early scenes we might be tempted to call the play My Fat Friar. But costume is necessary to suggest the tawdry Doolittle’s class-jumping aspirations. . . .
Why should Roger Dillingham, the reviewer for The Pattwell Gazette, despise Molly Crane? For despise her he did: her artificial gestures, overinflated, unforgettable. Once, halfway through Oklahoma!, he snuck a detective novel out of his raincoat and began reading by penlight until she came back onstage—her hair stacked on her head so idiotically that he couldn’t concentrate on his novel again. Of course she performed without any sense of irony. Of course she floated onstage like a helium-inflated troll.