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

by Неизвестный

  I know there is blood, but I cannot see blood. There is a way that I want to see the blood because I feel it’s my responsibility to see the blood, and it must be there, given the circumstances, but I cannot see it. I sniff but all I can smell is my own salty fluids. I focus my mind on my ears and I hear bubbles, and I hear myself swallow saliva, and beyond that I hear only what could be the ambient liquid tune of a washer or of a toilet awry.

  I hear my husband chewing. Then he rests the sandwich in his lap for a moment and unties one of the ropes around my wrists and I realize that I can feel his fingers on the rope as if it is a part of my body. I think about it, and I am not making this up. The rope is part of my body. It occurs to me that when I dream I almost never have a body, let alone a face, and then it occurs to me that this phenomenon is not one exclusively of sleep. If I am as I dream, as they say, then I am a blur to myself. Unless I am looking at my reflection I never look like anything.

  In this suspense, what of myself can I see? The hand my husband released has fallen out of my vision, but the bound one has shifted such that I can see my wrist as if I am checking the time, but it’s ropes that I see there. They say you can tell a person’s age on her hands more clearly than on her face. You can see a person’s history in her hands. I’m facing the back of my hand. I know it like the back of my hand, I think, but it turns out I don’t know the back of my hand at all. There’s not much to my hand, now that I’m finally looking. This is not, for example, a farmer’s hand. And this is a hand that has been kept clean, that has washed itself of almost everything. Skin’s a little looser than it has been, the map or lake top made up by lines more pronounced than I might have guessed. On the other side of my hand, hidden on my palm, is my future.

  Now I feel the rope dangling like a phantom limb. Now I remember how I came to this. I remember in slow motion that by midmorning—in the open space after “Bye-bye sweet-ums,” “Have a lovely, sugar,” and that final wag from my dog’s behind—in that open space the world had slipped two degrees farther in a direction it must have been shifting for a long time, like water from an eyedropper that heaps above the rim of a glass and then one more drop and it just spills. In such a way the substance of the air had suddenly thickened, becoming almost gelatinous, I remember now. I was elbow-deep in dishes and the water in the sink began to feel the same as the air, and soap bubbles felt like rubber pellets, and then I was moving through it like a deep-sea diver in all that gear, or not moving through it so much as moving with it, it guiding me as much as anything, no leading or following, just me shifting with the breath of the earth, and then these ropes growing from inside my body like extensions of my tendons as my clothes fell away, the gag rising like a scar across my face. I was moving toward the door because I wanted to get out—

  I wanted to do something—

  I wanted to change, and I wanted to change the world—

  I opened the front door, but I couldn’t move through; the planks of the porch and the wide lawn yawned before me and gravity seemed to tip and I walked on up the space where the door had been as my furniture tumbled about the room, the chandelier catching on a sofa cushion and stuffing bulging from where it tore, coffee table cracking its back over the arm of a wingback armchair. I just walked on along where the door no longer hung and my ropes coiled around me and fastened to the door frame, merged there with house; I remember the crumbling feeling of the popcorn texture of the ceiling; and I could feel the guts of the house, the pipes, the ducts, the wires, the stretching and sagging two-by-fours clinging to the drywall, and then I could feel myself stretch into warm roads coursing across town and then the country, and then I could feel myself as the jet stream and the gulf stream, planetary currents of air and water. I felt it hard, and fully. It wore me out and perhaps I slept because when I woke the world seemed as loose as ever and there I hung as if I’d been abducted by my own home.

  There is simply no end to the suspense when one becomes one’s own psychic landscape. Here, my unbound hand flops in the sunshine. My husband holds the dangling end of my rope in one hand, and I can feel the warmth of his hand, which is so familiar, as he resumes eating his sandwich with the other. I remember, and now I know. I am my home, and I am the world I live in. I am the ropes that bind me and the silver tape that stops my voice, hanging here, in this predicament. It did it to me, I did it to myself, I did it to it, all the same. My husband and I look out the window, head to head, although mine remains upside down, and outside, children are running about with soldiers. Some are helping each other onto the barbecue. They’re all squirting one another with sauce.

  LYDIA DAVIS

  Five Fictions from the Middle of the Night

  SWIMMING IN EGYPT

  We are in Egypt. We are about to go deep-sea diving. They have erected a vast tank of water on land next to the Mediterranean Sea. We strap oxygen to our backs and descend into this tank. We go all the way to the bottom. Here, there is a cluster of blue lights shining on the entrance to a tunnel. We enter the tunnel. We swim and swim. At the far end of the tunnel, we see more lights, white ones. When we have passed through the lights, we come out of the tunnel, suddenly, into the open sea, which drops away beneath us a full kilometer or more. There are fish all around and above us, and reefs on all sides. We think we are flying, over the deep. We forget, for now, that we must be careful not to get lost, but must find our way back to the mouth of the tunnel.

  THE SCHOOLCHILDREN IN THE LARGE BUILDING

  I live in a very large building, the size of a warehouse or an opera house. I am there alone. Now some schoolchildren arrive. I see their quick little legs coming through the front door and I ask, in some fear, “Who is it, who is it?” but they don’t answer. The class is very numerous—all boys, with two teachers. They pour into the painting studio at the back of the building. The ceiling of this studio is two or even three stories high. On one wall is a huge mural of dark-complexioned faces. The schoolboys crowd in front of the painting, fascinated, pointing and talking. On the opposite wall is another mural, of green and blue flowers. Only a handful of schoolboys is looking at this one.

  The class would like to spend the night here because they do not have funds for a hotel. Wouldn’t their hometown raise the money for this field trip? I ask one of the teachers. No, he says sadly, with a smile, they wouldn’t, because of the fact that he, the teacher, is homosexual. After saying this, he turns and gently puts his arms around the other teacher.

  Later, I am in the same building with the schoolchildren, but it is no longer my home, or I am not familiar with it. I ask a boy where the bathrooms are, and he shows me one—it’s a nice bathroom, with old fixtures and paneled in wood. As I sit on the toilet, the room rises—because it is also an elevator. I wonder briefly, as I flush, how the plumbing works in that case, and then assume it has been figured out.

  IN THE GALLERY

  A woman I know, a visual artist, is trying to hang her work for a show. Her work is a single line of text pasted on the wall, with a transparent curtain suspended in front of it.

  She is at the top of a ladder and cannot get down. She is facing out instead of in. The people down below tell her to turn around, but she does not know how.

  When I see her next, she is down from the ladder. She is going from one person to the next, asking for help in hanging her artwork. But no one will help her. They say she is such a difficult woman.

  THE PIANO

  We are about to buy a new piano. Our old upright has a crack all the way through its sounding board, and other problems. We would like the piano shop to take it and resell it, but they tell us it is too badly damaged and cannot be resold to anyone else. They say it will have to be pushed over a cliff. This is how they will do it: two truck drivers take it to a remote spot. One driver walks away down the lane with his back turned while the other shoves it over the cliff.

  THE PIANO LESSON

  I am with my friend Christine. I have not seen her for a long time, perhaps seventeen ye
ars. We talk about music and we agree that when we meet again she will give me a piano lesson. In preparation for the lesson, she says, I must select, and then study, one Baroque piece, one Classical, one Romantic, and one Modern. I am impressed by her seriousness and by the difficulty of the assignment. I am ready to do it. We will have the lesson in one year, she says. She will come to my house. But then, later, she says she is not sure she will be returning to this country. Maybe, instead, we will have the lesson in Italy. Or if not Italy, then, of course, Casablanca.

  RIKKI DUCORNET

  The Dickmare

  I t all boils down to this: does she present to the Dickmare or not? She fears the lot of them, those perpetually inflated Dickmares, their uncanny magnetism matched only by their startling lack of symmetry. Yet she has been summoned. A thing as unprecedented as it is provoking.

  And she has awakened with a curious rash. It circles her body like a cummerbund. A rash as florid as those coral gardens so appreciated by lovers of bijouterie. A rash having surged directly—or so she supposes—from her husband’s anomalous—or so she hopes—behavior.

  Once, she had thought her husband admirable. Admirable his thorny cone, his sweet horny operculum, his prowess as a swimmer, the beauty of his sudden ejections, the ease with which he righted himself when overturned. Not one to retreat into his shell, in those days his high spirits percolated throughout the yellow mud they optimistically called home.

  Adolescents intellectually annihilated by lust and hopeful mysticisms would engage her husband for hours on end with thorny topics such as why Noah built the Ark without once questioning the High Clam’s outburst of temper. And if the High Clam loves the fishes and the shelled fishes best (after all, they did not suffer during the forty days and nights of rain but, instead, benefited)—why were they snatched in numbers from their naps and served up Top Side boiled in beer and dressed with hot butter? And her husband instructed the small fry with cautionary tales featuring the terrible Kracken who swims on the surface of the waves like a gigantic swan downing mischievous little mollusks at will—the fear of the lie quieting both their wanderlust and their exuberance (and some were so shellacked with fear they slammed shut never to be heard from again).

  The old-timers too came to her husband for advice, sleepless in expectation of those fearsome migrations they were impelled to entertain periodically for reasons beyond everyone’s grasp. It seemed that everybody was in need of advice all the time anymore, and that her husband’s ministry never ceased.

  At first she had been proud of his popularity, or rather, had done her best not to hate the constant tide of traffic and bavardage. She would shut her eyes and cling to anything, to debris—a rotting hull, a stump of pier, a branch of filifera. And she would dream unfructuous dreams of the secret arms of rivers that are said to feed the sea—uncertain waters flowing from an unknowable source (because Top Side)—a source she wished to find.

  Her husband’s popularity came to a sudden halt right after a doleful interlude with the Cuckfield quintuplets, whom he had surprised in their daily rotations over by Sandy Bottoms. Now no one—not even the Squamosas who wear their digestive tubes in their arms—will give either of them the time of day. Once so admired, her husband has taken his problems to a Dickmare—and there is a scary rhyme the small fry trill about him:When the moon is out

  and the bivalves hop—

  and cannot stop,

  and cannot stop,

  and a shadow steals above . . .

  tell me! What is it?

  What is it? My love!

  —a Dickmare who orders up nacreous pills from the oyster shop, pills that resemble toothed hinges and, once swallowed, produce an egg capable of sprouting fins and swimming. These days her husband’s conversation is as rare as a clam’s liver. He has lost the instinct for cordiality, and his capacity for mobility is sorely compromised. He has developed two pairs of buccal palpi, and even if he had wanted to, she would not want him to kiss her. When in motion he takes no great strides, but instead stretches out his foot so slowly that she—who stands at the ready with a glass of water (these days his thirst is prodigious)—fears the tedium will kill her. But then, having set the right foot down, he withdraws the left so suddenly that, crying out, she drops the tumbler, wetting her apron. When he is mercifully out the door, another unexpectedly vigorous push with his left foot sends him headlong into his vehicle.

  Is it a squid or a calamar?

  When her husband returns he wishes to engage her. Occupying the recliner, he kneels on his knuckles, inching forward with one hand on each end of the apparatus. This, she fears, may lead to further disability. She can tell he has taken the other pills, the ones the size of a grain of linseed, which, like those the size of a split pea, and unlike those the size of a small haricot bean, are, at the instant of ingestion, spat out upon the floor. She stands at the ready, her small broom resting at her side.

  The fine salmon pink of her husband’s cheeks has darkened, and his skin exudes a peculiarly pungent odor reminiscent of dead eels. Provoked by the prescribed medicaments, within the hour she knows he will turn upon himself like a wheel in motion.

  Her husband displays his lamellar and vivid portions. He wishes to excite her curiosity as, he tells her, she has excited the Dickmare’s, who, having asked to see her photograph and at once been satisfied, extends an invitation to his grotto. The Dickmare suggests that she is distinguished from the schools of others of her kind, by a brilliancy of eye that, added to her moist plumpness, renders her the most appealing analysand he could aspire to. She is a treasure, the single form reflected in a plurality of lesser forms, or rather, she is that plurality reflected in a singular form.

  Unclear as to what he has said, still she cannot help but be moved—as creatures such as she, so fraught with disappointments, swarm within his reach, easy prey for lesser contenders, those who do not have access, as the Dickmares do, to the tops of rocks, nor have they access to the medicines. And it is true: she is lovely, vitreous and permeable, her bottom globular. Aroused, she is luminous in the dark. So round, so smooth, so readily ablaze in her posterior part! No one, she muses, has noticed these things for a very long time. And so, after all these months watching her husband pull himself across the floor in fractions—a transaction that is always accompanied by frequent vomitings and the prodigious thirst—she weighs her chances. Risky business!

  Or is it a Dick . . .

  After all, the Dickmares are known to unspool and push their pistons forward with such alacrity a subconical cavity will be stunned into service before it has a chance to ignite. And she fears that rather than excite his compassion, the curious rash now tumbling to her knees like a Samoan’s grass skirt will excite his scorn and, what’s more, his wrath. Yet it is also true that she has just that morning shed her shell—a thing both temporary and wildly appealing. If she is at her most vulnerable, she is also at her most charming. The rash, she hopes, may well be a function of this transformation, her heightened state. Her beauty—she can see it now—has never been more poignant.

  It boils down to this: might the Dickmare provide a pill less bitter than the one she has sucked ever since the Cuckfield fry gave voice to their many peculiar complaints? Might the Dickmare assuage her loneliness and her humiliation? Is she afflicted enough to dare seek out a questionable success with an Upper Mudder known to be sensuous, furious, and cruel? And she so fragile! So amply furnished with tender sockets and delicate rosettes rotundular and soft. Yes, above all she is soft. And so easily impressed!

  It is said at Death—and once the flesh has dissolved into the limitless bodies of things so small they cannot be perceived by the naked eye—the soul is swept away by a current called Forgetfulness and carried to an edifice of foam so impalpable no one has ever seen it. She wants to be the one to see it and to inform the others as to its nature.

  JULIA ELLIOTT

  The Wilds

  The Wild family moved into the house behind ours. The splitleve
l had been dead for two years; its sunken den had become a nest of slugs and millipedes, its attic a froth of bats. Eight brothers now flung their restless bodies around the property. The largest Wild, a greasy, bearded boy of seventeen, shut himself up in the den. The littlest Wild, a tangle-haired half-naked thing, rumored to be a biter, lurked around in the shrubbery. The Wilds kept cats, lizards, and ferrets. Rabbits, hamsters, turtles, and snakes. A bubble of musky ammoniac air enveloped their home like a force field, and the second you dared step through it you felt dizzy; a hundred arrows whistled around your ears. Their mother was frequently seen hauling in bags of supplies, and when she climbed from the battered exoskeleton of her station wagon, the boys would jump her like a band of hunger-crazed outlaws, snatching cookies and chips and tiny shrink-wrapped cakes. They’d scuttle up into the trees. They kept quiet up there, waiting out their mother’s fits. She was a lumpy, old-fashioned lady, forever in a rumpled dress and panty hose, with a pouf of hair as golden and crunchy as a pork rind. She’d tear her hairdo into wilted clumps and shake her fists at the trees. “I’m having a nervous breakdown,” she’d say, sometimes falling to her knees.