Fantastic Women: 18 Tales of the Surreal and the Sublime from Tin House

by Неизвестный

  At last, he closed the shutters of the windows tight, which was my wish, as it allowed me to see the whitework more clearly: I find I see better in the dark. A candle in the shape of a bluebird sat on the floor beside the bed, and I lit it, and turned it just-so, toward the wall. Luminous! I felt I had not, in many years, experienced such nocturnal bliss—even though the broad daylight shone outside the curtained windows, at least as broad as a day may shine in a deep and thickly wooded forest where real and grave danger does lurk.

  This activity transfixed me for hours upon hours and days upon days.

  In time, my companion and I so well established ourselves in the cottage that soon we felt that we had lived there our entire lives. I presume we had not lived there our entire lives, yet of the event that drove us into the forest to the cottage I cannot speak, and not only because I cannot recall it. But I can tell you that we had so well established ourselves in this cottage that I was shocked one morning to discover, under my feather pillow, a miniature book that had not been there before. It purposed to criticize and describe the whitework on the walls.

  Bound in black velvet, with a pink ribbon as a placeholder, the volume fit precisely in the palm of my hand, just as if it had been bound for me to hold there. Long, long I read, and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and then the deep midnight came. (Not that I knew the day from night with the curtains so tightly drawn.) The bluebird was guttering—just a puddle of blue now, with yellow claws fashioned from pipe cleaners protruding from the edges of the blue puddle. I reached my hand out to try to build the wax once more into the form of a bird, but I achieved merely a shapeless mass of color. Regardless, the candlelight flamed up and shone more brightly than ever upon the black velvet book with onionskin pages.

  In my zeal to illumine the onionskin, the better to learn about Ma Marraine and so on, I had, with the candle’s light, also illumined the corners of the room, where sat the mousetraps. Yes, this turret had corners—quite a remarkable thing, as the room was a circle. If I failed to perceive the corners before, I cannot explain . . . truly this architectural marvel of corners was a marvel inside a marvel, since even the turret itself was not visible from outside.

  With the corners of the room thus illumined, I now saw very clearly in one corner, behind a mousetrap, a very small portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I don’t know how that phrase comes to me—“ripening into womanhood”—for I would prefer simply to describe the portrait as a very small portrait of a young lady. But, to continue, I could not look at the painting for long. I found I had to close my eyes as soon as I saw the portrait—why, I have no idea, but it seems to be that my injury, rather than being limited to my crippled legs, had crept inward to my mind, which had become more . . . impulsive or secretive, perhaps. I forced my eyes back on the portrait again.

  It was nothing remarkable, more a vignette than an exposition. The girl was depicted from top to bottom, smudged here and there, fading into the background, reminiscent somehow of the Kinderund Hausmärchen—yes, you could describe her portrait as an illustration. She was a plain girl, not unlike me. Her eyes were sullen, her hair lank and unwashed, and even in the face and shoulders you could see she was undernourished—also not unlike me. (It is not my intention to plead my case to you or to anyone else, now or in the future; I merely note the resemblance.)

  Something about the girl’s portrait startled me back to life. I had not even realized what a stupor I’d lain in, there in the turret, but looking into her sullen eyes, I awoke. My awakening had nothing to do with the girl herself, I believe, but rather with the bizarre execution of this portrait, this tiny portrait—no bigger than that of a mouse, yet life-size. And it was painted entirely white upon white, just like the embroidery on the walls.

  Though I felt more awake and alive than ever before, I found that I was also suddenly overcome with sadness. I don’t know why, but I do know that when my companion brought me my nightly black coffee, I sent him away for a pitcher of blueberry wine. I asked for him also to bring me a pink-flowered teacup. My needs felt at once more urgent and delicate, and thankfully he was able to find articles in the cupboards that satisfied them.

  For quite some time, drinking the wine, I gazed at the portrait of the sullen girl staring out of miniature eyes. At length, wholly unsatisfied with my inability to decipher the true secret of the portrait’s effect (and apparently unaware that I very nearly was standing), I fell into the trundle. I turned my frustrated attentions back to the small book I had found under the pillow. Greedily, I turned its onionskin pages to the girl’s portrait. “Flat, unadorned,” the page read. The rest of the description was missing—everything except a peculiar exclamation for an encyclopedia to contain:

  SHE WAS DEAD!

  “And I died.” Those are the words that came to my head. But I did not die then, nor did I many days and nights later, there in the forest, where I lived with my companion quite happily—not as husband and wife, yet neither as siblings: I cannot quite place the relation.

  Soon, of course, I thought of nothing else but the girl in the painting. Nightly my companion brought me a teacup of blueberry wine, and nightly I drank it, asked for another, and wondered: Who was she? Who am I? I expected no answer—nay, nay, I did not wish for one either. For in my wonder I possessed complete satisfaction.

  It was of no surprise to me, so accustomed to confusions, that one morning I awoke to find the painting vanished—and not only the painting but all the little priests with the little birds from the walls. No whitework, no turret, no companion. No blueberry wine. I found myself in a different small and dark room, again on a bed (not a trundle). An old woman and a doctor sat by my side.

  “Poor dear,” the old woman murmured. She added that I would do well to take courage. As you may imagine, the old woman and doctor were at once subjected to the greatest of my suspicions; and as I subjected them privately, I also protested publicly, for I knew I had done nothing to lose all I had learned to love there in that mysterious prison or home. No: I should have been very happy to be lame and blurred, to have my companion bring me teacups of wine at night, and in the morning my coffee and rolls. I never minded that the rolls were so tough to the bite that my teeth had become quite loose in their sockets, as loose as my brain or the bluebirds in the forest when their nests are looted by ravens.

  Cheerfully, the doctor spoke over my protests. He said that my prognosis relied on one thing, and one thing alone: to eliminate every gloomy idea. He pointed toward a room I had not noticed before.

  “You have the key to the Library,” he said. “Only be careful what you read.”

  JUDY BUDNITZ

  Abroad

  The trip was not going as planned. The train was supposed to take us to the white-sand beaches and white hotels high on cliffs and the burnished tans that we could step into and zip up like a second skin. Instead it deposited us in this place where all the buildings looked covered with smudgy fingerprints and the only water in sight was running in the gutters. The sky was overcast, lumpy, a poorly plastered ceiling.

  The guidebook says there’s a railroad museum here, I said. And a bone church.

  We weren’t supposed to stop here, he said. He went up to the ticket agent caged behind a wire grill and spoke with him and came back and said: The next train’s in three days.

  Three days?

  If you don’t believe me then you go ask him.

  Oh, but I don’t want to bother him, I said.

  So we went to see the bone church. If you can believe it, that’s exactly what it was—a church made entirely of the bleached skulls and preserved leg bones of some very old people. A row of skulls arched over the door. They all looked alike; I would not have thought that people’s bones were so uniform you could stack them up like bricks.

  He saw my face and said: Don’t be sad, I think they were already dead.

  That was his idea of a joke.

  We were the only peopl
e there except for the boy at the entrance, who held out his hand for our admission money. His shorts were too short, his sweater too big for him. A cigarette drooped from his mouth. He spoke sharply at us, I could not understand a word. His face was unreadable, hard and perfectly immobile, as if the bones were on the outside.

  Don’t give him money, I said.

  Why not?

  How do you know he works here? I mean, he’s not wearing a . . . a badge or anything. He could be anyone.

  So what?

  How do we know our money’s going to the, the bone-church people? He’s probably going to keep it for himself.

  So what if he does? He’s probably related to these bones one way or another. Look at him.

  I looked and it was true: the boy’s head belonged up there with the others. A face hard enough to break your hand.

  We spoke in whispers when we went inside. Because of the boy. We whispered because we did not want him to feel left out.

  I was surprised by how white they were. I expected old bones to have the stained yellow of a smoker’s teeth. To go inside was like stepping inside the rib cages of a thousand people, hearing their phantom heartbeats fluttering around like moths, or like strolling through the whale skeleton at the natural history museum.

  There’s a blister on my heel, I said. But these shoes never gave me trouble before.

  What are you complaining about now?

  Nothing.

  Behind the bone church lay a cemetery, which seemed superfluous: why put them in the ground when you could add another wing? I wanted to take a picture but thought it would be rude, like photographing sleeping people. I had bought a camera for the trip, an expensive snouty thing I did not know how to use.

  The buses were white and red and did not seem to have any scheduled stops. You had to stand directly in their path to get their attention.

  These people, I don’t know what to make of them, he said. Their faces are so old, but not in the usual way. They seem to age from the outside in rather than the inside out; rather than a sagging and puckering, it’s a buildup of deposits. It’s as if anything that life’s ever thrown at them has hit them in the face and stuck there.

  Your pants are too short, I said.

  What’s wrong with my pants?

  They’re wrong. Nobody else’s pants look like yours.

  I think the problem was in the way he wore them, the set of his hips. They demanded attention, those pants. They were swaggering pants. The men we saw on the streets all had a slow, low-stepping shuffle, as if they’d wet themselves.

  We saw no restaurants. What, do these people never eat? That is why they seem so pure and walk so slowly. We asked some local people, who looked at our clothes and directed us to the McDonald’s.

  Perhaps they misunderstood us. We did not want to be the kind of abrasive tourists who think that if they speak their own language loudly enough the locals will eventually understand. So instead we spoke apologetically, fumblingly, as if our own language was foreign to us.

  A place . . . to eat? Food . . . restaurant? Sit down, inside?

  He mimed hands to mouth, a waiter with a tray, pulling out a chair, made the universal check-please gesture.

  They were not fooled.

  The night came down suddenly, like a lid being clapped on. We found our hotel; we had not been looking for it but there it was. Our landmark was the woman in dark glasses with her flower stand across the street.

  Why are flower sellers always blind? he said.

  They’re born that way, I said.

  She waved at us and smiled.

  We climbed the stairs to our room; they were so steep we had to use our hands. I looked closely at each stair and each one had a different kind of debris: buckles, beads, beetles. I wanted to lie down and sleep right there. I was exhausted. What do these people want from me? To make me climb all these stairs!

  Our room was tall, like two rooms stacked on top of each other, and dark. There was a bulb set in the ceiling, but it was so far away its light gave up and died before it reached us where we lay on the bed. There was a long slice of window that ran from floor to ceiling and showed us the spires and towers and crested weather vanes of a city we had never seen before.

  It’s just a travel poster, he said and tried to scrape off a corner.

  We had thought that making love in a strange place, between foreign sheets, would bring us together. But the bed seemed determined to keep us apart. It didn’t sag in the middle; it had a sort of hump that kept us sliding away from each other.

  I felt more familiar with his body than with his face; his body was finite, known, a region explored and mapped and marked with little dots indicating theaters and hot nightspots and restaurants with easy menus.

  What’s this? he asked.

  You know . . . my appendix scar.

  What’s this?

  I don’t want to talk about that. Don’t touch it.

  Did you hear about that woman? he said. Now he was touching the lump of fat on my hip. The rest of my body isn’t so fat, just that one place. Why does he have to touch me there?

  What woman? I said.

  The train . . . I think she was a tourist.

  Was she pretty? Was she thinner than me?

  I don’t know. It was in the paper. She was waiting for the underground. With her husband. They were on their honeymoon, people thought. She had a yellow dress. They were waiting for the train, and she was a tourist, you know, she didn’t understand how fast the trains come, and how close, and this one didn’t have its lights on for some reason. And she was holding her husband’s hand. She was leaning out.

  I bet he pushed her!

  Why do you say things like that? She fell, and the train came and sliced her clean in half. And this is the strange part. The conductor realizes what’s happened and brakes the train. The husband is standing on the platform, and half of the woman’s body is on one side of the tracks, half on the other, and the train in between. All the husband can see are her legs. He knows he doesn’t have time to dash around either end of the train to be with her head so he leaps off the platform and runs to her legs and holds them, caresses them. Like this.

  Oh don’t. That’s sick.

  And the strangest part, the reason I’m telling you this, is that the people on the opposite platform, the ones that could see her head, they swore she could feel him, she knew he was touching her. She said his name. Even though the rest of her body was ten feet away. Isn’t that amazing?

  Did she die?

  Well of course she died. But that’s not the point.

  I think those people were pulling your leg. They were lying because you’re a tourist. Did they try to sell you a watch next?

  You don’t find that story amazing? The power of love?

  I think you got it wrong. I think she jumped. I think she had a sudden glimpse of how miserable her life would be, being married to that man, and she decided the only way out was to end it right then.

  Why do you ruin everything? A beautiful story and you ruin it.

  We slept, with the humped mattress between us and the window casting a long strip of grayish light across our bodies.

  I opened my eyes and the clicking went on. Clicks and flashes of light.

  What are you doing? I said.

  Did you know you smile in your sleep? he said. His hands were holding the black snout to his face. He changed the focus.

  Click. Flash. Blackness.

  What are you doing?

  Preserving the moment.

  What moment? What moment?

  It’s gone. You just missed it.

  Then I must have slept, because the next thing I knew was yellow morning light, sounds of people shouting in the street, smells of bread and garbage. I heard shrill little-girl voices singing a pop song with the words all garbled. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes in a way that would leave them red all day.

  Clanking, splashes, heavy breathing. Someone was mopping th
e hallway, right outside the door, ready to burst in on us at any moment. These people, they won’t leave you alone, not even for a minute. They’re always trying to get in.

  Remember when we first met? I said. We used to talk for hours.

  Endlessly, he said. Interminably. It still feels like that sometimes.

  Guess who, I said in his ear. His eyelashes were tickling my palms. He twisted away and stood up. I got up too.

  How long have we been here? I said.

  A day? Two days? I forget.

  Are you going to the train museum? It’s the only thing to see besides the bone church.

  I’ll see you tonight, he said and was gone. I sometimes wondered why he didn’t just grow a mouth on the back of his head since he seemed to do all his talking turned away from me.

  I was going to shower but I didn’t, the people here don’t seem to bathe at all and they are not too offensive; they smell of cedar, of pine straw and smoke. The young women don’t wear underpants, the old women don’t wash their hair, they just cover it with greasy scarves and go about their business.

  The people here all understand English, they just pretend they don’t. You can tell.

  The blister was even bigger than the day before, an amniotic sac of salt water on my heel. But I wanted to wear those shoes.

  The train museum was housed in an old station no longer in use, a single room; there were some photographs, maps, model trains; beer served in the back. A big box for donations. All the signs printed in their illegible backward mirror-writing. No one there. I don’t care about trains but I made a point to look at everything.

  On the wide front steps there were boys dressed in towels and sandals, playing soccer. I walked through the middle of their game; I did not mean to but honestly there was no other way. They were dribbling the ball up and down the steps, shouting to each other, there were complicated rules involved, some had their hair shaved close, others had hair that had never been touched but you would never mistake them for girls. They had not yet discovered Band-Aids there. Each child was a mass of scabs.