Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  The problem with the insanity defense lay in the irrevocable truth that it was really her hand before her, not a mad vision from Gothic literature but her actual, entirely earthly hand, at present grimy and crusted with dirt from its long contact with the wall. Sandrine turned her head and discovered that she could make out the wall, too, with its hard-packed earth showing here and there the pale string of a severed root, at times sending in her direction a little spray or shower of dusty particulate. Sandrine held her breath and looked down to what appeared to be the source of the illumination. Then she inhaled sharply, for it seemed to her that she could see, dimly and a long way down, the bottom of the stairs. A little rectangle of light burned away down there, and from it floated the luminous translucency that made it possible for her to see.

  Too shocked to cry, too relieved to insist on its impossibility, Sandrine moved slowly down the remaining steps to the rectangle of light. Its warmth heated the air, the steps, the walls, and Sandrine herself, who only now registered that for most of her journey she had been half-paralyzed by the chill leaking from the earth. As she drew nearer to the light, she could finally make out details of what lay beneath her. She thought she saw a strip of concrete, part of a wooden barrel, the bottom of a ladder lying on the ground: the intensity of the light surrounding these enigmatic objects shrank and dwindled them, hollowed them out even as it drilled painfully into her eyes. Beneath her world existed another, its light a blinding dazzle.

  When Sandrine had come within thirty feet of the blazing underworld, her physical relationship to it mysteriously altered. It seemed she no longer stepped downward, but moved across a slanting plane that leveled almost imperceptibly off. The dirt walls on either side fell back and melted to ghostly gray air, to nothing solid, until all that remained was the residue of dust and grime plastered over Sandrine’s white dress, her hands and face, her hair. Heat reached her, the real heat of an incendiary sun, and human voices, and the clang and bang and underlying susurrus of machinery. She walked toward all of it, shading her eyes as she went.

  Through the simple opening before her Sandrine moved, and the sun blazed down upon her, and her own moisture instantly soaked her filthy dress, and sweat turned the dirt in her hair to muddy trickles. She knew this place; the dazzling underworld was the world she had left. From beneath her shading hand Sandrine took in the wide concrete apron, the equipment she had noticed all that harrowing time ago and the equipment she had not, the men posturing for the benefit of other men, the sense of falsity and stagecraft and the incipient swelling of a banal unheard melody. The long yellow dock where on a sluggish umber tide three yachts slowly rocked, one of them the Sweet Delight.

  In a warm breeze that was not a breeze, a soiled-looking scrap of paper flipped toward Sandrine over the concrete, at the last lifting off the ground to adhere to her leg. She bent down to peel it off and release it, and caught a strong, bitter whiff, unmistakably excremental, of the Amazon. The piece of paper wished to cling to her leg, and there it hung until the second tug of Sandrine’s dirty fingers, when she observed that she was gripping not a scrap of paper but a Polaroid, now a little besmudged by contact with her leg. When she raised it to her face, runnels of dirt obscured portions of the image. She brushed away much of the dirt, but could still make no sense of the photograph, which appeared to depict some pig-like animal.

  In consternation, she glanced to one side and found there, lounging against bollards and aping the idleness of degenerates and river louts, two of the men in shabby suits and worn-out hats who had pursued her into the slum. She straightened up in rage and terror, and to confirm what she already knew to be the case, looked to her other side and saw their companions. One of them waved to her. Sandrine’s terror cooled before her perception that these guys had changed in some basic way. Maybe they weren’t idle, exactly, but these men were more relaxed, less predatory than they had been on the avenue into Manaus.

  They had their eyes on her, though, they were interested in what she was going to do. Then she finally got it: they were different because now she was where they had wanted her to be all along. They didn’t think she would try to escape again, but they wanted to make sure. Sandrine’s whole long adventure, from the moment she noticed she was being followed to the present, had been designed to funnel her back to the dock and the yacht. The four men, who were now smiling at her and nodding their behatted heads, had pushed her toward the witch-hag, for they were all in it together! Sandrine dropped her arms, took a step backward, and in amazement looked from side to side, taking in all of them. It had all been a trick; herded like a cow, she had been played. Falsity again; more stagecraft.

  One of the nodding, smiling men held his palm up before his face, and the man beside him leaned forward and laughed into his fist, as if shielding a sneeze. Grinning at her, the first man went through his meaningless mime act once again, lifting his left hand and staring into its palm. Grinning even more widely, he pointed at Sandrine and shouted, “Munna!”

  The man beside him cracked up, Munna!, what a wit, then whistled an odd little four-note melody that might have been a birdcall.

  Experimentally, Sandrine raised her left hand, regarded it, and realized that she was still gripping the dirty little Polaroid photograph of a pig. Those two idiots off to her left waved their hands in ecstasy. She was doing the right thing, so Munna! right back atcha, buddy. She looked more closely at the Polaroid and saw that what it pictured was not actually a pig. The creature in the photo had a head and a torso, but little else. The eyes, nose, and ears were gone. A congeries of scars like punctuation marks, like snakes, like words in an unknown language, decorated the torso.

  I know what Munna means, and Num, thought Sandrine, and for a moment experienced a spasm of stunning, utterly sexual warmth before she fully understood what had been given to her: that she recognized the man in the photo. The roar of oceans, of storm-battered leaves, filled her ears and caused her head to spin and wobble. Her fingers parted, and the Polaroid floated off in an artificial, wind-machine breeze that spun it around a couple of times before lifting it high above the port and winking it out of sight, lost in the bright hard blue above the Sweet Delight.

  Sandrine found herself moving down the yellow length of the long dock.

  Tough love, Ballard had said. To be given and received, at the end perfectly repaid by that which she had perhaps glimpsed but never witnessed, the brutal, exalted, slow-moving force that had sometimes rustled a curtain, sometimes moved through this woman her hair and body now dark with mud, had touched her between her legs, Sandrine, poor profane lost deluded most marvelously fated Sandrine.

  1997

  From the galley they come, from behind the little dun-colored curtain in the dining room, from behind the bookcases in the handsome sitting room, from beneath the bed and the bloodstained metal table, through wood and fabric and the weight of years, We come, the Old Ones and Real People, the Cloud Huggers, We process slowly toward the center of the mystery We understand only by giving it unquestioning service. What remains of the clients and patrons lies, still breathing though without depth or force, upon the metal work table. It was always going to end this way, it always does, it can no other. Speaking in the high-pitched, musical language of birds that We taught the Pirahã at the beginning of time, We gather at the site of these ruined bodies, We worship their devotion to each other and the Great Task that grew and will grow on them, We treat them with grave tenderness as We separate what can and must be separated. Notes of the utmost liquid purity float upward from the mouths of We and print themselves upon the air. We know what they mean, though they have long since passed through the realm of words and gained again the transparency of music. We love and accept the weight and the weightlessness of music. When the process of separation is complete, through the old sacred inner channels We transport what the dear, still-living man and woman have each taken from the other’s body down down down to the galley and the ravening hunger that burns ever within it.<
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  Then. Then. With the utmost tenderness, singing the deep tuneless music at the heart of the ancient world, We gather up what remains of Ballard and Sandrine, armless and legless trunks, faces without features, their breath clinging to their mouths like wisps, carry them (in our arms, in baskets, in once-pristine sheets) across the deck and permit them to roll from our care, as they had always longed to do, and into that of the flashing furious little river-monarchs. We watch the water boil in a magnificence of ecstasy, and We sing for as long as it lasts.

  THE DOUBLE LENS

  by Lisa Mannetti

  A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

  —Virginia Woolf

  “Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane Eyre should be left in the red-room till I came to her myself.” “O aunt! have pity! Forgive me! I cannot endure it—let me be punished some other way! I shall be killed if— ”

  —Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

  What do you know about this mendacity thing? Hell! I could write a book on it! Don’t you know that? I could write a book on it and still not cover the subject? Well, I could, I could write a goddam book on it and still not cover the subject anywhere near enough!!—Think of all the lies I got to put up with!

  —Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

  Truth? I do not know what the truth is anymore.

  —William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

  Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage!

  —George Orwell, 1984

  April, 1975

  It was hard to say where all the trouble began, but one of the things Sue remembered most clearly was lying in bed in her fourth-floor walk-up apartment on East 83rd Street in Manhattan one night reading Helter Skelter. It scared her so badly (well-written as it was), she not only slept with the lights on for a week, she had to put the book aside every few hours and read something sane. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando—Woolf, she knew, had bouts of insanity and may have been mad when she walked carrying a large stone into the depths of the Ouse River, but her talent was enormous and she was someone a bright young 22-year-old woman who wanted to be a writer (a significant writer, like Woolf herself) could admire. Charles Manson—he was a crazy cultist—and no one around him and his decidedly unmerry band of follower-monsters was safe, that was for sure. Imagine, Sue thought: Manson thought he could ignite a race war he called Helter Skelter and take over the world and had ordered the brutal murders of seven people in Los Angeles back in ’69. She remembered the headlines and she shuddered.

  Sue Munsinger (oh how she loved that secret meaning of her name based on British dialect: Sue “Must Sing” it meant) knew she herself needed just what Woolf insisted (and in the seventies, Virginia was seen not just as a feminist prototype, but prophetic) women must have to write: Money and a room of one’s own. Well, Sue had the room (shabby to the point, she often joked, that cockroaches weren’t a problem because after however many millions of years of evolution, they’d been smart enough to avoid even taking a twelve-month lease on the studio apartment) and she had a salaried job—it just didn’t pay very much.

  The glamour factor, Sue supposed, was in part the reason her job didn’t pay all that well. (Don’t be euphemistic she wrote in her journal, it’s hard to live on $160 a week. But at least she hadn’t had to ask her parents for money to make up the rent or pay the light bills. Still, it wasn’t The New Yorker, but she was a fact checker at the brashly sophisticated, trendy New World Manhattan Magazine and there were perks (concerts, movies, movie premiers, records, books—oh, the books!) and a certain amount of hob-nobbing with the well-known staff writers and getting fast, up-close glimpses of the famous: Truman (Capote), Andy (Warhol), Tennessee (Williams). Even if she couldn’t call them by their first names to their faces, she could refer to them as if she could when she talked to her old college pals, and who would be the wiser? It was her first job out of school and she had a terrific boss and technically she was not a secretary; she had a title, “editorial assistant,” and an apartment. What she didn’t have was time to write fiction. Not at a job where she was expected to work forty hours a week but where in fact she routinely put in huge amounts of unpaid overtime and certainly not at workday’s end when the job was done and she was dead-dog tired.

  Sometimes she chided herself that it was really her own fault she wasn’t concentrating enough on her poetry or fiction because in part, she knew, she was looking for a boyfriend (someone to love) after the betrayal she experienced when Tom Smith dropped her three weeks after they graduated from a good university in southern Connecticut. She didn’t tell herself, even though he’d been ham-handed, he was adolescent and had a mean streak; no, she blamed herself. Then to compensate for the loss, she tried working harder and, as she frequently reminded herself, the job was fun. Well, there were some nervy moments. She’d been totally relieved when she didn’t have to actually phone Paul Newman to check a quote about his latest film (Slapstick) because she’d had a crush on him since she was about twelve and didn’t think she could actually speak to him over the phone. Not even incoherently. It never occurred to her she’d probably talk to an assistant’s assistant, she was just glad the writer of that particular piece had done the checking himself and provided a short memo/transcript so the quote was deemed by the editorial powers good to go.

  Not all the fact-checking jobs were simple. One rainy Tuesday morning a long, involved feature story came in from one of the British writers (the editor-in-chief really liked the Brits and, as a group, they seemed not only fun-loving and slightly zany—one rode a bicycle in the aisles of the open-plan newsroom-style office on occasion—but very bright and well-educated, too. And oh boy, she often told herself, those accents were terrific. Sexy, too.). This particular piece had been assigned by her own boss to a thirty-something dark-haired bon vivant named Antony Barr-Thorpe and it was about a large and growing religious cult called the GeoPeople Society. Everybody knew cults were on the rise: The Hare Krishnas wore saffron robes and chanted, and the Moonies were a front for the aggressive, political Unification church and it was never a good idea to buy the flowers or incense sticks or cheapjack (as Tony called it) they sold in the process of soliciting millions one buck at a time, and Sue had no problem getting quick verification of those facts from newspaper articles and the AP/UPI wire services on that sort of general statement. Before lunchtime, she was having trouble, though. According to what Tony Barr-Thorpe had written, that while the GeoPeople Society (run by a woman who was known as Mother Taraneh) presented themselves as a group who wanted to save the planet and its people and were involved in a lot of good-works projects from drug rehab to disaster relief to working for world peace and democracy, those organizations were shells: They were, in fact, a totalitarian cult whose members practiced mind control and a host of other human rights abuses on the members who’d been sucked in and on outsiders they deemed “enemies.” Tony’s sources for the article were people who’d left GPS and according to the piece they were getting harassed like crazy: frivolous, expensive law suits (just like Moonies, this so-called church had millions and millions of dollars), they were being surveilled, their friends and loved ones were told lies about them (everything from the fact that they had venereal disease and worked as male or female prostitutes to the fact that they ran kiddie porn rings). The damages and fallout were horrific. The article came with proof in the form of pages and pages of stolen secret documents that showed the higher-ups from Mother Taraneh on down were the only ones in the know and that she and her select cronies were scamming for money and power. The newbies and low-level members came on board because they bought into a lot of the Joni Mitchell-type, anti-paving-paradise-and-putting-up-parking-lots, Earth Day philosophy and a
heady dose of self-help claptrap that was supposed to make GP happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser.

  “Tony,” Sue said, “I’ve tried calling these numbers and I don’t get through…nobody’s even answering so that I can fact-check,” she told him over the phone that first morning. And how am I going to get the officials to talk about this stuff—even though in the piece they’re just denying what you’ve written?” There were disclaimers and quotes throughout the article that said the GPS had no such policies, that their aims were beyond reproach and that the information Tony ferreted out was bogus. People, their spokespersons maintained, flat out lied. She lit a cigarette and tapped the eraser end of a pencil while she listened.

  “Look, love, their headquarters are right up there near Broadway. And their number’s listed right in the Manhattan white pages. Just call, get someone on the phone…except for their inane slogan, they’re going to deny it all anyhow…,” Tony said.