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

by Неизвестный

  One of them came right at me and I thought I should dodge, I was in the way, but he kept coming. Hey, lady, he said. Hey, lady.

  What? I said. Yes? The whites of his eyes were yellowish, jaundiced, and so was his skin, and his hair was dark blond too, he was a mustard-colored boy from head to foot. The others stopped running and listened.

  Can I see your camera? he said. I thought he wanted his picture taken; I lifted it to my face and stepped back. I bumped into more boys. They had stepped up behind me. Shouldn’t they be in school?

  No, give it to me, he said. I thought, What kind of town is this where they’ve never seen a camera before? And I leaned down so I could hand him the camera without taking off the strap. This brought our faces close.

  I’ll buy it from you, he said. I looked at his mouth; the teeth were brown and yellow at the edges, there were gaps that were not from lost baby teeth.

  He gave the camera one sharp yank and the strap broke at some weak link, and then he was off running and the rest of them with him, their cheap sandals slapping the pavement, all of them raising their hands to their throats with monkey grimaces of horror as they ran. I looked down and saw my hands doing the same, felt my face constricting. They vanished down alleyways and I felt grateful to them for at least not laughing while I could hear them.

  I was not too sorry it happened, I felt relieved of a burden, until I remembered the film in the camera, the pictures I had taken from the window of the train as we arrived, the pictures he had taken in the middle of the night. So much for preserving the moment.

  The sky darkened and I did not recognize anything. I did not want to take out my map, because you are not lost until you admit that you are; until then you are exploring, you are admiring scenery.

  Why would I ask for directions anyway, since I can’t understand a word they say and if I could I know they would only lie to me. I’d ask them for my hotel and they’d direct me instead back to the bone church, and I’d wander in circles there until I died, unable to find my way out, and with each circuit that boy would charge me more money, an admission fee for each lap around the bone church until I was bled dry and footsore and dead. Then they’d take my bones and add them to the steeple, or the pews, or they’d build a little washroom for the priest behind the altar. It’s not a church of their ancestors’ bones, it’s the church of unwanted tourists. It is where the uninvited and uncomprehending go to die. And they’d sell my clothes as relics, as souvenirs, my shoes made into bookends, my buttons into bracelets, my blister sewn into a little change purse with a picture of the bone church embroidered on it.

  I saw a group of people on a corner. Beautiful white clothes, raised voices. A pause, the slow telling of a joke, bursts of laughter. Women shifting their weight from hip to hip, men with their sleeves rolled to the elbows. They were drinking from green bottles, the mineral water which, according to the guidebook, came from a local spring and was supposed to have medicinal properties.

  Then I saw the head I knew so well, the curly hair.

  He was telling the joke, he was drinking the water.

  Even from this distance, I could pick him out of the crowd immediately, the way you always can with a loved one, that sudden rush, that relief. I called his name but I was too far away. The people around him were too loud, they drowned me out. I walked faster and called again.

  Hey, I called and started to run.

  I was shouting his name now and waving my arms, I didn’t care what they thought of me, what did I care? But as I got close a cab whipped around a corner and paused at the curb, and the whole mob of them swept inside, and the door slammed in my face and the car sped away. It all happened in the space of a breath.

  There was a moment when my fist was against the window and his face behind it, just inches away. Our breath clouded either side of the glass at the same point. Then he turned away and all I saw were taillights.

  But it could not have been him.

  It was someone who looked a bit like him.

  Your mind will do that sometimes when you want very badly to see someone; your mind will conjure him up before you, will draw your eye to an approximate head of hair, a close-enough pair of shoulders.

  The cab was gone but it was all right because suddenly I knew these street lamps, this tobacco shop, that housedress hung out the window to dry. Here was our hotel. The flower seller waved to me again and showed her teeth. God, she looked even older than she had the day before, how did she keep going? And the woman at the front desk glared at me as if to say: What are you doing here now, this place is for sleeping and making love and you’re no good at either.

  The seasons here are strange and vague. It feels too grotty for spring, too humid for autumn. It’s a perpetual waiting, the charged stillness before a thunderstorm. What month is it? But it doesn’t matter, we crossed some significant line when we came here, didn’t we, so the seasons are the reverse of what they are at home. Or did we lose a day? Gain a day?

  I packed my things into my half of the suitcase. We had drawn a line down the middle of it. I wanted to be ready.

  I did not hear footsteps on the stairs until evening.

  Where have you been? I said.

  What? he said. He said: This is Vera.

  Vera had the eyes like they all do, and the hennaed hair, and thick white legs. I had never seen anything like them, perfectly smooth, hairless, solid, opaque like marble.

  She said something I could not make out.

  The room was too crowded, I wanted to rise up and hover in the empty space near the light fixture until I could get my bearings. His face was something I swear I had never seen before. At least the back of his head was familiar.

  Come have dinner with us, he said.

  Did he say it to her, or me? Which side of us was I on?

  We drank bottles and bottles of wine, and I was fascinated by the way she ate, pulling things apart with her fingers and sucking out their insides. My throat closed up at the soup, which I swear was full of things still alive and swimming. But the candles were nice, and I felt happy and stroked and squeezed his knee under the table, and he gave me understanding looks all evening.

  What are you talking about? I said.

  Yes, I know, it’s noisy in here, isn’t it? he said.

  No, I can’t . . . I’m not following the conversation.

  He smiled at me. You’re drunk, aren’t you?

  He turned back to Vera but that was all right, he and I did not need to talk, we understood each other. He kept talking to her so that she would not start to feel uncomfortable, shut out. He was considerate that way.

  It was not until we were leaving that I saw that what I had thought was his knee was the knobby corner of his chair.

  When we went back to our hotel room Vera came with us.

  She’s very tired, he said. And she lives so far away.

  That seemed legitimate. It seemed only right to show her some hospitality since we were guests in her country.

  I tried to express this to her but she blinked her black-rimmed eyes at me impatiently and waited for him to explain. These people, they have no sense of graciousness. Maybe they have no vocabulary for please and thank you. She slept heavily, deeply, she filled the room with her breath.

  The towers outside the window had grown during the day. They blocked more sky than before. I had never been able to find them when I was out walking on the streets, I could see them only from this window.

  I suppose this is because the maps they give tourists are not entirely accurate. They want to steer you to certain areas so they can sell you cheap trinkets and marionettes and overpriced film and toothpaste. They want to force you through the gauntlet of jugglers and dancing bears and street artists.

  He seemed very far away on the other side of the bed, I could not even feel his cold feet, or the toenails that usually scratched me during his running dreams. The hump in the mattress seemed to have grown, I could hardly see him. There was a tuft of hair, or it coul
d have been the blanket.

  Vera came out of the bathroom and asked me something unintelligible, nostrils dancing.

  What?

  You should try harder to understand, he scolded me. She’s speaking perfectly clearly.

  I’m trying, I said. When are we leaving?

  I have to check the train schedule. Make some room in the suitcase for Vera.

  Why?

  She’s bringing a few things.

  But . . . why?

  You can’t expect her to use your things all the time, can you?

  She’s coming? What about us?

  What about us?

  His us seemed subtly different from mine; his seemed to involve the closed bathroom door. I was not sure, though, and did not ask again.

  I did not see him again until evening, when he came back to the room with Vera and Marat. Marat’s an architecture student, he told me confidingly. She builds things.

  But I used to be an architecture student, I said desperately.

  He said: You quit.

  Then he said something to the two women that made them laugh. Marat had a black bob and thick bangs that covered her eyebrows and most of her eyes. She was tall and angular, not like most of the women here, but I knew she was one of them.

  I watched them talking. The language has such an ugly sound, rough and rattling, they must have crenellated throats.

  Marat asked to borrow some of my underwear since she had none of her own. First she asked me, and then when I didn’t understand she pantomimed her request with ugly flapping gestures. She and Vera rolled their eyes and snickered.

  Why are you being so rude? he said to me.

  Why are you being so rude? I said.

  Now you’re just being obnoxious, he said.

  Marat snored, and Vera snored. And he snored too. I had never noticed that before.

  The next night he came bringing Vera, and Marat, and Anna and her twelve-year-old, Lars. The room was too crowded to move, the noise was unbearable. What were they all laughing about?

  He moved close to me and breathed harsh gutturals in my ear.

  What?

  He said: Make some more room in the suitcase.

  I said: There isn’t any more room.

  He said: You could take your things out.

  But I don’t want to.

  Then make room.

  But what are you doing? What about me?

  What about you?

  Don’t you care?

  What is it? Are you sick? Do you need a Tylenol?

  No! What’s going on here? I don’t understand!

  You don’t, do you, he said. And you refuse to try.

  I don’t even understand anything these people are saying.

  If you’d try, you’d learn. You’re so self-centered.

  But I am trying, I said. I looked at him and wondered when he had started oiling his hair and wearing his shirt unbuttoned like that, and where had he gotten that gold medallion? And when had he started speaking with an accent like that? Surely he was putting it on, as a pretension, as a joke, and we’d laugh about it later.

  I am trying, I said. Are we breaking up? I whispered.

  Break? Break something? he said, and I saw his eyes waver the way the eyes will when a person doesn’t quite understand what you’re saying but doesn’t want to admit it. I know that look, I had it myself in my high school French class: Oui, oui, monsieur, les legumes sont tres cheres, il fait beau, non, non, il pleut, cette fille est belle, non? Oui, oui, madam.

  Just keep nodding, smiling.

  Marat and Anna lounged on the bed, Vera and Lars leaned out the window, smoking cigarettes. He left to buy wine and came back and passed it around and Marat pointed to the tulip-headed towers in the distance and I suppose she was explaining where they were and who built them and why. She was naming all the gargoyles, and I would have liked so much to know but I had no idea what she was saying.

  And the next night they were back, and they brought the blind flower seller and a bartender named Yves and some girls who were too young to be of consequence, and someone’s uncle who needed to leave the country right away, and they all crammed their things into the suitcase so that it became an incredible snarl of hair-dryer cords, makeup cases, diapers (because there was a baby somewhere—you could smell it), rayon scarves, Walkman radios, bathing suits, rolling papers, uncooked pasta, pearl necklaces, sunglasses.

  I suppose I should take out my things to make more room for the others but I don’t want to, not yet; I suppose we are leaving any day now, any day. The train schedule, where did he put it? He’s always losing things, it’s one of his endearing quirks. This is something he and I will laugh about later, I am sure, but for now the noise is getting unbearable, the baby crying all night, and these people with their constant talking. What can they possibly have to say to each other?

  The room is so crowded that I spend my time walking the streets. But these people everywhere, I don’t know them, I don’t want to know them, it’s impossible. It’s only natural to want to be with the person who understands you. True communication is the most intimate thing there is; you don’t want to share it with everyone.

  Earlier today, in a small grocery store, I stood in front of a thickfaced cashier for an hour with a package of crackers in one hand and two bills in the other. She would neither take the money nor acknowledge my presence. A standoff. I know my mouth was open, I know sounds were coming out. But I had lost the guidebook, with the native phrases spelled out phonetically. I think some boys stole it to roll homemade cigarettes with its pages.

  The cashier’s eyes followed a fly beating itself against the window. She was in no hurry. The shadows lengthened. Time passed. Common courtesy , a voice in my head said over and over. Common courtesy. I admired her head. A big, solid head. It would look good on the bone church.

  My own skull, I realize now, would never fit in. It is too oddly shaped. Too pointy.

  I suppose if it all gets to be too much I can leave, put my things in a plastic bag, get on the train with the spacious vinyl seats and the empty beer bottle rolling up and down the aisle, go on ahead to the next stop listed in the guidebook, if I can remember it, and he will catch up with me as soon as he can.

  But I would hate to leave him here all alone.

  The hotel room now is just a mass of bodies, cookstoves, tents, shanties, music, dancing arms and bobbing breasts, boys pitching pennies, stray dogs, the burned smell of someone curling her hair, a bazaar of stalls selling rugs and copper kettles, laundry hanging on lines overhead, the endlessly overflowing toilet. The walls are grease-stained, the bare bulb a small sun. He is still there among them, shaking hands, kissing men on both cheeks, kissing women on the lips, as is the custom here. His face is tanned mahogany brown, though as far as I can tell he never goes outside.

  Every time I catch sight of him in the crowd I ask when we are leaving, and he looks past me as a stream of incoherence pours from his mouth. I am sure he just does it so as not to offend the others.

  It would make them feel left out.

  SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM

  The Young Wife’s Tale

  There once was a king who came to his throne only after a long period of trouble. Everyone, everywhere, felt relief that he had at last returned to them, but no one felt it more keenly than the young wives of the men whom he led. What possessed them was more than relief; it was a deep, mysterious joy that the king’s return had set astir. Their husbands would no longer be leaving for war, they told themselves. Their children would grow old under the eyes of their fathers, and the land would prosper, and life would be restored to the rhythms they could not even recall. So they said to one another as they bent their heads and pounded clothes in the cold streams.

  In truth, the young wives were stirred by the king’s bravery, and his extraordinary beauty. Never before had they seen a man as beautiful as he. They wondered whether it was the years in exile, his time spent wandering despised and alone, that had give
n him his grace. His eyes said he understood all the sadness in the world, and his worn face said that he would do everything in his power to defeat it. These qualities, combined with his dark, lank hair and his roughened hands, made the young wives almost frantic with a longing they couldn’t describe. But they would see it reflected in each other’s flushed, stricken faces, and know that they were not alone in what they felt.

  The women’s love caused them to act in strange ways, some small, some not. One wife awoke in the morning, climbed from the bed, went about her tasks and heated the water, without once opening her eyes. She was reluctant to enter out of her dream. Another, in the early days of winter, would slip behind her house, take off her clothes, and stand turned to the sun, unmoving as stone. Among the youngest of the wives was a girl who disappeared for long spells into the forest. Each time she would eat a little less and roam a little farther, in the belief that she might faint at just the moment the king was striding past, and he would stoop down to the ground, lift her up in his arms, and revive her. Why she believed this was a mystery. The king did not hunt in these woods, nor did he travel alone anymore, nor did he travel on foot. Maybe she was searching for the exiled king, the sorrowful king, and believed she would find him in this forest. But he would be at once the king adrift and the king redeemed, because look, in her dream, how he lifts her from the ground.

  In time, the king died and passed into legend. He was remembered in songs and paintings and books, and then for a long while he was forgotten, as the paintings blackened and the books moldered and other, shorter songs came into fashion. Such a very long time went by, it seemed possible that the king and his hard struggles, the peace that followed, would be forever lost, as if his beauty had never existed, and he had never walked this earth or looked up at this sky. But there was an old university where, one night, a scholar discovered the king, either in a trance or in the stacks of the library, and once again his story came to light. First, he appeared in a pair of essays, then a book whose unlooked-for appeal inspired several more volumes, followed by rock-and-roll albums and animated cartoons, underground fanzines and doctoral dissertations, and, finally, a film.