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

by Неизвестный

  Lindsey had had a happy childhood. The women in the bar didn’t know what they were talking about.

  It was almost a shame when the man who had theories about being raised by wolves came over and threw his drink in the face of the woman named Caroline. There was a commotion. Lindsey and the man who had theories about being raised by wolves went for a walk on the beach. He was charming, but she felt his theories were only that: charming. When she said this, he became less charming. Nevertheless, she invited him home.

  “Nice place,” he said. “I like all the whatsits.”

  “Most of it belongs to my brother,” Lindsey said.

  “Your brother. Does he live with you?”

  “God, no,” Lindsey said. “He’s . . . wherever he is.”

  “I had a sister. Died when I was two,” the man said. “Wolves make really shitty parents.”

  “Ha,” she said, experimentally.

  “Ha,” he said. And then, “Look at that,” as he was undressing her. Their four shadows fell across the bed, sticky and wilted as if from lovemaking that hadn’t even begun. At the sight of their languorously intertwined shadows, the wolf man became charming again. “Look at these sweet little tits,” he said over and over again as though she might not ever have noticed how sweet and little her tits were. He exclaimed at the sight of every part of her; afterward, she slept poorly, apprehensive that he might steal away, taking along one of the body parts or pieces that he seemed to admire so much.

  In the morning, she woke and found herself stuck beneath the body of the wolf man as if she had been trapped beneath a collapsed and derelict building. When she began to wriggle her way out from under him, he woke and complained of a fucking terrible hangover. He called her “Joanie” several times, asked to borrow a pair of scissors, and spent a long time in her bathroom with the door locked while she read the paper. “Smuggling ring apprehended by___. Government overthrown in___. Family of twelve last seen in vicinity of___. Start of hurricane season___.” The wolf man came out of the bathroom, dressed hurriedly, and left.

  She found a spongy black heap, the amputated shadow of his dead twin, and three soaked, pungent towels, on the bathroom floor; there were stubby black bits of beard in the sink. The blades of her nail scissors were tarry and blunted.

  She threw away the reeking towels. She mopped up the shadow, folding it into a large Ziploc bag, carried the bag into the kitchen, and put the shadow down the disposal. She ran the water for a long time.

  Then she went outside and sat on her patio and watched the iguanas eat the flowers off her hibiscus. It was 6:00 a.m. and already quite warm.

  NO VODKA, ONE EGG

  Sponges hold water. Water holds light. Lindsey was hollow all the way through when she wasn’t full of alcohol. The water in the canal was glazed with light, which wouldn’t hold still. It was vile. She had the beginnings of one of her headaches. Light beat down on her head and her second shadow began to move, rippling in waves like the light-shot water in the canal. She went inside. The egg in the refrigerator door had a spot of blood when she cracked it into the pan. She liked vodka in her orange juice, but there was no orange juice and no vodka in the freezer, only a smallish iguana.

  The Keys were overrun with iguanas. They ate her hibiscus; every once in a while she caught one of the smaller ones with the pool net and stuck it in her freezer for a few days. This was supposedly a humane way of dealing with iguanas. You could even eat them, although she did not. She was a vegetarian.

  She put out food for the bigger iguanas. They liked ripe fruit. She liked to watch them eat. She knew that she was not being consistent or fair in her dealings, but there it was.

  MEN UNLUCKY AT CARDS

  Lindsey’s job was not a particularly complicated one. There was an office, and behind the office was a warehouse full of sleeping people. There was an agency in DC that paid her company to take responsibility for the sleepers. Every year, hikers and cavers and construction workers found a few dozen more. No one knew how to wake them up. No one knew what they meant, what they did, where they came from.

  There were always at least two security guards on duty at the warehouse. They were mostly, in Lindsey’s opinion, lecherous assholes. She spent the day going through invoices, and then went home again. The wolf man wasn’t at the Splinter and the bartender threw everyone out at 2:00 a.m.; she went back to the warehouse on a hunch, four hours into the night shift.

  Bickle and Lowes had hauled out five sleepers, three women and two men. They’d put Miami Hydra baseball caps on the male sleepers and stripped the women, propped them up in chairs around a foldout table. Someone had arranged the hands of one of the male sleepers down between the legs of one of the women. Cards had been dealt out. Maybe it was just a game of strip poker and the two women had been unlucky. It was hard to play your cards well when you were asleep.

  Larry Bickle stood behind one of the women, his cheek against her hair. He seemed to be giving her advice about how to play her cards. He wasn’t holding his drink carefully enough, and the woman’s neat lap brimmed with beer.

  Lindsey watched for a few minutes. Bickle and Lowes had gotten to the sloppy, expansive stage of drunkenness that, sober, she resented most. False happiness.

  When Lowes saw Lindsey he stood up so fast his chair tipped over. “Hey now,” he said. “It’s different from how it looks.”

  Both guards had little, conical, paper party hats on their heads. A third man, no one Lindsey recognized, came wandering down the middle aisle like he’d been shopping at Wal-Mart. He wore boxer shorts and a party hat. “Who’s this?” he said, leering at Lindsey.

  Larry Bickle’s hand was on his gun. What was he going to do? Shoot her? She said, “I’ve already called the police.”

  “Oh, fuck me,” Bickle said. He said some other things.

  “You called the police?” Edgar Lowes said.

  “They’ll be here in about ten minutes,” Lindsey said. “If I were you, I’d leave right now. Just go. It isn’t as if I can stop you.”

  “What is that bitch saying?” Bickle said unhappily. He was really quite drunk. His hand was still on his gun.

  She took out her own gun, a Beretta. She pointed it in the direction of Bickle and Lowes. “Put your gun belts on the ground and take off your uniforms too. Leave your keys and your ID cards. You too, whoever you are. Hand over your ID and I won’t press charges.”

  “You’ve got little cats on your gun,” Edgar Lowes said.

  “Hello Kitty stickers,” she said. “I count coup.” Although she’d only ever shot one person.

  The men took off their clothes but not the party hats. Edgar Lowes had a purple scar down his chest. He saw Lindsey looking and said, “Triple bypass. I need this job for the health insurance.”

  “Too bad,” Lindsey said. She followed them out into the parking lot. The third man didn’t seem to care that he was naked. He didn’t even have his hands cupped around his balls, the way Bickle and Lowes did. He said to Lindsey, “They’ve done this a couple of times. Heard about it from a friend. Tonight was my birthday party.”

  “Happy birthday,” she said. She watched the three men get into their cars and drive away. Then she went back into the warehouse and folded up the uniforms, emptied the guns, cleaned up the sleepers, used the dolly to get the sleepers back to their boxes. There was a bottle of cognac and plenty of beer. She drank steadily. A song came to her, and she sang it. Tall and tan and young and drunken and—She knew she was getting the words wrong. A midnight pyre. Like a bird on fire. I have tried in my way to be you.

  It was almost 5:00 a.m. The floor came up at her in waves, and she would have liked to lie down on it.

  The sleeper in Box 113 was Harrisburg Pennsylvania, a young boy. The sleepers were named after their place of origin. Other countries did it differently. Harrisburg Pennsylvania had long eyelashes and a bruise on his cheek that had never faded. The skin of a sleeper was always just a little cooler than you expected. You could get used to
anything. She set the alarm in her cell phone to wake her up before the shift change.

  In the morning, Harrisburg Pennsylvania was still asleep and Lindsey was still drunk. She’d drooled a little on his arm.

  All she said to her supervisor, the general office manager, was that she’d fired Bickle and Lowes. Mr. Charles gave her a long-suffering look, said, “You look a bit rough.”

  “I’ll go home early,” she said.

  She would have liked to replace Bickle and Lowes with women, but in the end she hired an older man with excellent job references and a graduate student, Jason, who said he planned to spend his evenings working on his dissertation. (He was a philosophy student, and she asked what philosopher his dissertation was on. If he’d said “Nietzsche” she might have terminated the interview. But he said “John Locke.”)

  She’d already requested additional grant money to pay for security cameras, but when it was turned down she went ahead and bought the cameras anyway. She had a bad feeling about the two men who worked the Sunday-to-Wednesday day shift.

  AS CHILDREN, THEY WERE INSEPARABLE

  On Tuesday, there was a phone call from Alan. He was yelling something in LinLan before she could even say hello.

  “Berma lisgo airport. Tus fah me?”

  “Alan?”

  He said, “I’m at the airport, Lin-Lin, just wondering if I can come and stay with you for a bit. Not too long. Just need to keep my head down for a while. You won’t even know I’m there.”

  “Back up,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “The airport,” he said, clearly annoyed. “Where the planes are.”

  “I thought you were in Tibet,” she said.

  “Well,” Alan said. “That didn’t quite work out. I’ve decided to move on.”

  “What did you do?” she said. “Alan?”

  “Lin-Lin, please,” he said. “I’ll explain everything tonight. I’ll make dinner. House key still under the broken planter?”

  “Fisfis meh,” she said. “Fine.”

  The last time she’d seen Alan in the flesh was two years ago, just after Elliot had left for good. Her husband.

  They’d both been more than a little drunk and Alan was always nicer when he was drunk. He gave her a hug and said, “Come on, Lindsey. You can tell me. It’s a bit of a relief, isn’t it?”

  The sky was low and swollen. Lindsey loved this, the sudden green afternoon darkness as rain came down in heavy drumming torrents so loud she could hardly hear the radio station in her car, the calm, jokey pronouncements of the local weather witch. The vice president was under investigation; evidence suggested a series of secret dealings with malign spirits. A woman had given birth to a dozen rabbits. A local gas station had been robbed by invisible men. Some religious cult had thrown all the infidels out of a popular pocket universe. Nothing new, in other words. The sky was always falling. U.S. 1 was bumper-to-bumper all the way to Plantation Key.

  Alan sat out on the patio behind her house, a bottle of wine under his chair, the wineglass in his hand half full of rain, half full of wine. “Lindsey!” he said. “Want a drink?” He didn’t get up.

  She said, “Alan? It’s raining.”

  “It’s warm,” he said and blinked fat balls of rain out of his eyelashes. “It was cold where I was.”

  “I thought you were going to make dinner,” she said.

  Alan stood up and made a show of wringing out his shirt and his peasant-style cotton pants. The rain collapsed steadily on their heads.

  “There’s nothing in your kitchen. I would have made margaritas, but all you had was the salt.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Lindsey said. “Do you have any dry clothes? In your luggage? Where’s your luggage, Alan?”

  He gave her a sly look. “You know. In there.”

  She knew. “You put your stuff in Elliot’s room.” It had been her room too, but she hadn’t slept there in almost a year. She only slept there when she was alone.

  Alan said, “All the things he left are still there. Like he might still be in there too, somewhere down in the sheets, all folded up like a secret note. Very creepy, Lin-Lin.”

  Alan was only thirty-eight. The same age as Lindsey, of course, unless you were counting from the point where he was finally real enough to eat his own birthday cake. She thought he looked every year of their age. Older.

  “Go get changed,” she said. “I’ll order takeout.”

  “What’s in the grocery bags?” he said.

  She slapped his hand away. “Nothing for you,” she said.

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE ABSURD KIND

  She’d met Elliot at an open mike in a pocket universe near Coral Gables. A benefit at a gay bar for some charity. Men everywhere, but most of them not interested in her. Elliot was over seven feet tall; his hair was canary yellow and his skin was greenish. Lindsey had noticed the way that Alan looked at him when they first came in. Alan had been in this universe before.

  Elliot sang the song about the monster from Ipanema. He couldn’t carry a tune, but he made Lindsey laugh so hard that whiskey came out of her nose. He came over and sat at the bar. He said, “You’re Alan’s twin.” He had only four fingers on each hand. His skin looked smooth and rough at the same time.

  She said, “I’m the original. He’s the copy. Wherever he is. Passed out in the bathroom, probably.”

  Elliot said, “Should I go get him or should we leave him here?”

  “Where are we going?” she said.

  “To bed,” he said. His hair was feathers, not hair. His pupils were oddly shaped.

  “What would we do there?” she said, and he just looked at her. Sometimes these things worked and sometimes they didn’t. That was the fun of it.

  She thought about it. “Okay. On the condition that you promise me that you’ve never fooled around with Alan. Ever.”

  “Your universe or mine?” he said.

  Elliot wasn’t the first thing Lindsey had brought back from a pocket universe. She’d gone on vacation once and brought back the pit of a green fruit that fizzed like sherbet when you bit into it and gave you dreams about staircases, ladders, rockets, things that went up and up, although nothing had come up when she planted it, although almost everything grew in Florida.

  Her mother had gone on vacation in a pocket universe when she was first pregnant with Lindsey. Now people knew better. Doctors cautioned pregnant women against such trips.

  For the last few years Alan had had a job with a tour group that ran trips out of Singapore. He spoke German, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, passable Tibetan, various pocket-universe trade languages. The tours took charter flights into Tibet and then trekked up into some of the more tourist-friendly pocket universes. Tibet was riddled with pocket universes.

  “You lost them?” Lindsey said.

  “Not all of them,” Alan said. His hair was still wet with rain. He needed a haircut. “Just one van. I thought I told the driver Sakya but I may have said Gyantse. They showed up eventually, just two days behind schedule. It’s not as if they were children. Everyone in Gyantse speaks English. When they caught up with us I was charming and full of remorse and we were all pals again.”

  She waited for the rest of the story. Somehow it made her feel better, knowing that Alan had the same effect on everyone.

  “But then there was a mix-up at customs back at Changi. They found a reliquary in this old bastard’s luggage. Some ridiculous little god in a dried-up seedpod. Some other things. The old bastard swore up and down that none of it was his. That I’d snuck up to his room and put them into his luggage. That I’d seduced him. The agency got involved and the story about Gyantse came out. So that was that.”

  “Alan,” she said.

  “I was hoping I could stay here for a few weeks.”

  “You’ll stay out of my hair,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said. “Can I borrow a toothbrush?”

  MORE LIKE DISNEY WORLD THAN DISNEY WORLD

  Their parents
were retired, living in an older, established pocket universe that was apparently much more like Florida than Florida had ever been. No mosquitoes, no indigenous species larger than a lapdog, except for birdlike creatures whose songs made you want to cry and whose flesh tasted like veal. Fruit trees that no one had to cultivate. Grass so downy and tender and fragrant that no one slept indoors. Lakes so big and so shallow that you could spend all day walking across them. It wasn’t a large universe, and nowadays there was a long waiting list of men and women waiting to retire to it. Lindsey and Alan’s parents had invested all of their savings into a one-room cabana with a view of one of the smaller lakes. “Lotus-eating,” they called it. It sounded boring to Lindsey, but her mother no longer e-mailed to ask if Lindsey was seeing anyone. If she were ever going to remarry and produce children. Grandchildren were no longer required. Grandchildren would have obliged Lindsey and Alan’s parents to leave their paradise in order to visit once in a while. Come back all that long way to Florida. “That nasty place where we used to live,” Lindsey’s mother said. Alan had a theory that their parents were not telling them everything. “They’ve become nudists,” he insisted. “Or swingers. Or both. Mom always had exhibitionist tendencies. Always leaving the bathroom door open. No wonder I’m gay. No wonder you’re not.”

  Lindsey lay awake in her bed and listened to Alan make tea in the kitchen. Alan hanging up his clothes in Elliot’s closet. Alan turning the television on and off. At two in the morning, he came and stood outside her bedroom door. He said, softly, “Lindsey? Are you awake?”