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

by Неизвестный

  She didn’t answer and he went away again.

  In the morning he was asleep on the sofa. A DVD was playing; the sound was off. Somehow he’d found Elliot’s stash of imported pocket-universe porn, the secret stash she’d spent weeks looking for and never found. Trust Alan to turn it up. But she was childishly pleased to see he hadn’t found the gin she’d hidden in the sofa.

  When she came home from work he was out on the patio again, trying, uselessly, to catch her favorite iguana. “Be careful of the tail,” she said.

  “Monster came up and bit my toe,” he said.

  “That’s Elliot. I’ve been feeding him,” she said. “Probably thinks you’re invading his territory.”

  “Elliot?” he said and laughed. “That’s sick.”

  “He’s big and green,” she said. “You don’t see the resemblance?” Her iguana disappeared into the network of banyan trees that dipped over the canal. The banyans were full of iguanas, leaves rustling greenly with their green and secret meetings. “The only difference is he comes back.”

  The next morning Alan drove her to work and went off with the car. In the afternoon Mr. Charles came into her office. “Bad news,” he said. “Jack Harris in Pittsburgh went ahead and sent us two dozen sleepers. The new kid, Jason, signed for them down at the warehouse. Didn’t think to call us first.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “’Fraid not,” he said. “I’m going to call Jack Harris. Ask what the hell he thought he was doing. I made it clear the other day that we weren’t approved with regards to capacity. He’ll just have to take them back again.”

  “Has the driver already gone?” she said.

  “Yep. Maybe you could run over to the warehouse and take a look at the paperwork. Figure out what to do with this group in the meantime.”

  There were twenty-two new sleepers, eighteen males and four females. Jason already had them on dollies.

  “Where were they before Pittsburgh?” she asked.

  Jason handed over the dockets. “All over the place. Four of them turned up on property belonging to some guy in South Dakota. Says the government ought to compensate him for the loss of his crop.”

  “What happened to his crop?” she said.

  “He set fire to it. They were underneath a big old dead tree out in his fields. Fortunately for everybody his son was there too. While the father was pouring gasoline on everything, the son dragged the sleepers into the bed of the truck, got them out of there. Called the hotline.”

  “Lucky,” she said. “What the hell was the father thinking?”

  “People your age—” Jason said and stopped. Started again. “Older people seem to get these weird ideas sometimes. They want everything to be the way it was. Before.”

  “I’m not that old,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said. Got pink. “I just mean, you know . . .”

  She touched her hair. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I have two shadows. So I’m part of the weirdness. People like me are the people that people get ideas about. Why are you on the day shift?”

  “Jermaine’s wife is out of town so he has to take care of the kids. What do we do with the sleepers now?”

  “Leave them on the dollies,” she said. “It’s not like it matters to them.”

  She tried calling Alan’s cell phone at five thirty, but got no answer. She checked e-mail and played solitaire. She hated solitaire. Enjoyed shuffling through the cards she should have played. Playing cards when she shouldn’t have. Why should she pretend to want to win when there wasn’t anything to win?

  At seven thirty she looked out and saw her car in the parking lot. When she went down to the warehouse Alan was flirting with Jason while the other guard, Hurley, ate his dinner.

  “Hey, Lin-Lin,” Alan said. “Come see this. Come here.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Lindsey said. “Where have you been?”

  “Grocery shopping,” he said. “Come here, Lindsey. Come see.”

  Jason made a don’t-blame-me face. She’d have to take him aside at some point. Warn him about Alan. Philosophy didn’t prepare you for people like Alan.

  “Look at her,” Alan said.

  She looked down at a sleeper. A woman dressed in a way that suggested she had probably been someone important once, maybe hundreds of years ago, somewhere, probably, that wasn’t anything like here. Versailles Kentucky. “I’ve seen sleepers before.”

  “No. You don’t see,” Alan said. “Of course you don’t. Hey, Lin-Lin, this kind of haircut would look good on you.”

  He fluffed Versailles Kentucky’s hair.

  “Alan,” she said. A warning.

  “Look,” he said. “Just look. Look at her. She looks just like you. She’s you.”

  “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “Am I?” Alan appealed to Jason. “You thought so too.”

  Jason hung his head. He mumbled something. Said, “I said that maybe there was a similarity.”

  Alan reached down into the container and grabbed the sleeper’s bare foot, lifted the leg straight up.

  “Alan!” Lindsey said. She pried his hand loose. The prints of his fingers came up on Versailles Kentucky’s leg in red and white. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s fine,” Alan said. “I just wanted to see if she has a birthmark like yours. Lindsey has a birthmark behind her knee,” he said to Jason. “Looks like a battleship.”

  Even Hurley was staring now.

  The sleeper didn’t look a thing like Lindsey. No birthmark. Funny, though. The more she thought about it the more Lindsey thought maybe she looked like Alan.

  NOT HERSELF TODAY

  She turned her head a little to the side. Put on all the lights in the bathroom and stuck her face up close to the mirror again. Stepped back. The longer she looked the less she looked like anyone she knew.

  Alan was right. She needed a haircut.

  The kitchen stank of rum; Alan had the blender out. “Let me guess,” he said. “You met someone nice in there.” He held out a glass. “I thought we could have a nice, quiet night in. Watch the Weather Channel. Do charades. You can knit. I’ll wind your yarn for you.”

  “I don’t knit.”

  “No,” he said. His voice was kind. Loving. “You tangle. You knot. You muddle.”

  “You needle,” she said. “What is it that you want? Why are you here? To pick a fight?”

  “Per bol tuh, Lin-Lin?” Alan said. “What do you want?” She sipped ferociously. She knew what she wanted. “Why are you here?”

  “This is my home,” she said. “I have everything I want. A job at a company with real growth potential. A boss who likes me. A bar just around the corner, full of men who want to buy me drinks. A yard full of iguanas. And a spare shadow in case one should accidentally fall off.”

  “This isn’t your house,” Alan said. “Elliot bought it. Elliot filled it up with his junk. And all the nice stuff is mine. You haven’t changed a thing since he took off.”

  “I have more iguanas now,” she said. She took her rumrunner into the living room. Alan already had the Weather Channel on. Behind the perky blond weather witch, in violent primary colors, a tropical depression hovered off the coast of Cuba.

  Alan came and stood behind the couch. He put his drink down and began to rub her neck.

  “Pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “That storm.”

  “Remember when we were kids? That hurricane?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I probably ought to go haul the storm shutters out of the storage unit.”

  “That kid at your warehouse,” he said. His eyes were closed.

  “Jason?”

  “He seems like a nice kid.”

  “Kid being the key word. He’s a philosophy student, Lan-Lan. Come on. You can do better.”

  “Do better? I’m thinking out loud about a guy with a fine ass, Lindsey. Not buying a house. Or contemplating a career change. Oops, I guess I am officially doing that. Perh
aps I’ll become a dogooder. A do-better.”

  “Just don’t make my life harder, okay? Alan?”

  “He has green eyes. Jason. Really, really green. Green as that color there. Right at the eye. That swirl,” Alan said, draining his third rumrunner.

  “I hadn’t noticed his eyes,” Lindsey said.

  “That’s because he isn’t your type. You don’t like nice guys.” He was over at the stereo now. “Can I put this on?”

  “If you want to. There’s a song on there, I think it’s the third song. Yeah. This one. Elliot loved this song. He’d put it on and start slithering all over the furniture.”

  “Oh yeah. He was a god on the dance floor. But look at me. I’m not too bad either.”

  “He was more flexible around the hips. I think he had a bendier spine. He could turn his head almost all the way around.”

  “Come on, Lindsey, you’re not dancing. Come on and dance.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Don’t be such a pain in the ass.”

  “I have a pain inside,” she said. And then wondered what she meant. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

  “Come on. Just dance. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m okay. See? I’m dancing.”

  Jason came over for dinner. Alan wore one of Elliot’s shirts. Lindsey made a perfect cheese soufflé, and she said nothing when Jason assumed that Alan had made it.

  She listened to Alan’s stories about various pocket universes as if she had never heard them before. Most were owned by the Chinese government and, as well as the more famous tourist universes, there were ones where the Chinese sent dissidents. Very few pocket universes were larger than, say, Maryland. Some had been abandoned a long time ago. Some were inhabited. Some weren’t friendly. Some pocket universes contained their own pocket universes. You could go a long ways in and never come out again. You could start your own country out there and do whatever you liked, and yet most of the people Lindsey knew, herself included, had never done anything more venturesome than go for a week to someplace where the food and the air and the landscape seemed like something out of a book you’d read as a child; a brochure; a dream.

  There were sex-themed pocket universes, of course. Tax shelters and places to dispose of all kinds of things: trash, junked cars, murder victims. People went to casinos inside pocket universes more like Vegas than Vegas. More like Hawaii than Hawaii. You must be this tall to enter. This rich. Just this foolish. Because who knew what might happen? Pocket universes might wink out again, suddenly, all at once. There were best-selling books explaining how that might happen.

  Alan began to reminisce about his adolescence in a way that suggested it had not really been all that long ago.

  “Venetian Pools,” he said to Jason. “I haven’t been there in a couple of years. Since I was a kid, really. All those grottoes that you could wander off into with someone. Go make out and get such an enormous hard-on you had to jump in the water so nobody noticed and the water was so fucking cold! Can you still get baked ziti at the restaurant? Do you remember that, Lindsey? Sitting out by the pool in your bikini and eating baked ziti? I heard you can’t swim now. Because of the mermaids.”

  The mermaids were an invasive species, like the iguanas. People had brought them back from one of the Disney pocket universes, as pets, and now they were everywhere, small but numerous in a way that appealed to children and bird-watchers. They liked to show off and although they didn’t seem much smarter than, say, a talking dog, and maybe not even as smart, since they didn’t speak, only sang and whistled and made rude gestures, they were too popular with the tourists at Venetian Pools to be gotten rid of.

  Jason said he’d been with his sister’s kids. “I heard they used to drain the pools every night in summer. But they can’t do that now, because of the mermaids. So the water isn’t as clear as it used to be. They can’t even set up filters, because the mermaids just tear them out again. Like beavers, I guess. They’ve constructed this elaborate system of dams and retaining walls and structures out of the coral, these elaborate pens to hold fish. Venetian Pools sells fish so you can toss them in for the mermaids to round up. The kids were into that.”

  “They sing, right?” Lindsey asked. “We get them in the canal sometimes, the saltwater ones. They’re a lot bigger. They sing.”

  “Yeah,” Jason said. “Lots of singing. Really eerie stuff. Makes you feel like shit. They pipe elevator music over the loudspeakers to drown it out, but even the kids felt bad after a while. I had to buy all this stuff in the gift shop to cheer them up.”

  Lindsey pondered the problem of Jason, the favorite uncle who could be talked into buying things. He was too young for Alan. When you thought about it, who wasn’t too young for Alan?

  Alan said, “Didn’t you have plans, Lindsey?”

  “Did I?” Lindsey said. Then relented. “Actually, I was thinking about heading down to the Splinter. Maybe I’ll see you guys down there later?”

  “That old hole,” Alan said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was sending out those old invisible death rays in Jason’s direction; Lindsey could practically feel the air getting thicker. It was like humidity, only skankier. “I used to go there to hook up with cute straight guys in the bathroom while Lindsey was passing out her phone number over by the pool tables. You know what they say about girls with two shadows, don’t you, Jason?”

  Jason said, “Maybe I should head home.” But Lindsey could tell by the way he was looking at Alan that he had no idea what he was saying. He wasn’t even really listening to what Alan said. He was just responding to the vibe that Alan put out. That come hither come hither come a little more hither siren song.

  “Don’t go,” Alan said. “Stay a little longer. Lindsey has plans, and I’m lonely. Stay a little longer and I’ll play you some of the highlights from Lindsey’s ex-husband’s collection of pocket-universe gay porn.”

  “Alan,” Lindsey said. Second warning. She knew he was keeping count.

  “Sorry,” Alan said. He put his hand on Jason’s leg. “Husband’s collection of gay porn. She and Elliot, wherever he is, are still married. I had the biggest hard-on for Elliot. He always said Lindsey was all he wanted. But it’s never about what you want, is it? It’s about what you need. Right?”

  “Right,” Jason said.

  How did Alan do it? Why did everyone except for Lindsey fall for it? Except, she realized, pedaling her bike down to the Splinter, she did fall for it. She still fell for it. It was her house, and who had been thrown out of it? Who had been insulted, dismissed, and told to leave? Her. That’s who.

  Cars went by, riding their horns. Damn Alan anyway.

  She didn’t bother to chain up the bike; she probably wouldn’t be riding it home. She went into the Splinter and sat down beside a man with an aggressively sharp cologne.

  “You look nice,” she said. “Buy me a drink and I’ll be nice too.”

  THERE ARE EASIER WAYS OF TRYING TO KILL YOURSELF

  The man tried to kiss her. She couldn’t find her keys, but that didn’t matter. The door was unlocked. Jason’s car still in the driveway. No surprise there.

  “I have two shadows,” she said. It was all shadows. They were shadows too.

  “I don’t care,” the man said. He really was very nice.

  “No,” she said. “I mean my brother’s home. We have to be quiet. Okay if we don’t turn on the lights? Where are you from?”

  “Georgia,” the man said. “I work construction. Came down here for the hurricane.”

  “The hurricane?” she said. “I thought it was headed for the Gulf of Mexico. This way. Watch out for the counter.”

  “Now it’s coming back this way. Won’t hit for another couple of days. You into kinky stuff? You can tie me up,” the man said.

  “Better knot,” she said. “Get it? I’m not into knots. Can never get them untied, even sober. This guy had to have his foot amputated. No circulation. True story. Friend told me.”

 
; “Guess I’ve been lucky so far,” the man said. He didn’t sound too disappointed, either way. “This house has been through some hurricanes, I bet.”

  “One or two,” she said. “Water comes right in over the tile floor. Messy. Then it goes out again.”

  She tried to remember his name. Couldn’t. It didn’t matter. She felt terrific. That had been the thing about being married. The monogamy. Even drunk, she’d always known who was in bed with her. Elliot had been different, all right, but he had always been the same kind of different. Never a different kind of different. Didn’t like kissing. Didn’t like sleeping in the same bed. Didn’t like being serious. Didn’t like it when Lindsey was sad. Didn’t like living in a house. Didn’t like the way the water in the canal felt. Didn’t like this, didn’t like that. Didn’t like the Keys. Didn’t like the way people looked at him. Didn’t stay. Elliot, Elliot, Elliot.

  “My name’s Alberto,” the man said.

  “Sorry,” she said. She and Elliot had always had fun in bed.

  “He had a funny-looking penis,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” Alberto said.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she said.

  “Actually, do you have a bathroom?”

  “Down the hall,” she said. “First door.”

  But he came back in a minute. He turned on the lights and stood there.

  “Like what you see?” she said.

  His arms were shiny and wet. There was blood on his arms. “I need a tourniquet,” he said. “Some kind of tourniquet.”

  “What did you do?” she said. Almost sober. Putting her robe on. “Is it Alan?”

  But it was Jason. Blood all over the bathtub and the pretty half-tiled wall. He’d slashed both his wrists open with a potato peeler. The potato peeler was still there in his hand.

  “Is he okay?” she said. “Alan! Where the fuck are you? Fuck!”

  Alberto wrapped one of her good hand towels around one of Jason’s wrists. “Hold this.” He stuck another towel around the other wrist and then wrapped duct tape around that. “I called 911,” he said. “He’s breathing. Who is this guy? Your brother?”