LAST THINGS
Many years later, Jasmine said, “Not everyone is lucky enough to love like I do.” Then she said, “If you can’t figure it out, that’s your breakdown.” They were sitting on the floor of her empty apartment. By then she had given away or sold most of her possessions. They drank warmish water from plastic fast food cups. The cups weren’t very clean.
As she put her lips to the cup’s rim, Anthea’s stomach shrivelled. She said, “Okay, maybe, but.” She suspected that if she were standing, her knees would wobble. She didn’t want to look at Jasmine, so she kept her hair in her face, and hid from view the pulse that fluttered at her throat. She swallowed. Dry mouth. She didn’t want to drink from the plastic cup.
“There’s no neutral here, Anthea. There’s no moderation.” Jasmine stood up then. She went to the window and lit a cigarette. “Do you want to know the truth?”
Anthea said nothing. She had never wanted to be different. Jasmine dribbled smoke out her mouth, into the room, out the window.
“I don’t mean to be mean.”
Anthea made a small noise. Sometime later she would remember that noise and she would be angry, and think how she should have laughed at Jasmine with her high school slanginess and said you don’t mean to be mean but you always were kind of a cunt.
“I don’t mean to be mean, but if you don’t choose you’ll be chosen. You can’t play it both ways. We’re all going to be terminal cases, so where do you want to be when that happens? Here?” Jasmine gestured toward the dirty window, the city outside, the crows flying overhead, the lights flickering.
Anthea’s skin was clammy. The floor on which she sat was dirty, a coffee splash covered in lint beside her foot, beside that a bit of dark cursive that might be from a dropped mascara wand.
“He’s coming here. He’ll be here soon. You should talk to him. You should talk to him about where we’re going. We’re going to go north along the coast. We’re going to get out before it’s too late. We’ll be back, but it won’t be for long.”
Anthea stood up. She thought about firestorms and EMPs. She thought about leaving the city on foot, through the suburbs and the ninelane highways and the tunnels and the bridges. “The thing of it is. The thing of it is,” Anthea said. “The thing of it is.”
Jasmine looked up with a wrinkle on her forehead, like disgust. Anthea realized that she didn’t know what the thing of it was, but she said again, “The thing of it is.” The thing of it was that she had known this apartment in an earlier world. She had loved it. The place over there where she’d kissed Jasmine’s downstairs neighbour at a New Year’s party, his hand cradling her head as they lay on the floor. Over there was the place where she’d sat on the futon after she drank too much wine and wept about Hazel.
Jasmine exhaled. Then she said, “Parach, Anthea. Parach.” Whatever it had been, it was over, and the real thing of it was that. Jasmine would leave the city, she would escape the endtimes, she would follow her prophet into the wilderness. She would unhitch herself from the world. She would be pure.
Anthea set her plastic cup down on the floor between the coffee splash and the mascara doodle. She stood up carefully, for the last time seeing the window, the crooked walls and crappy construction of the crappy little suites in the old house. She looked at Jasmine and Jasmine stretched her arm out in a gesture like blessing and said, once more, “Parach.”
At the bottom of the stairs, before she left through the front door, she paused and thought, this is the last time I will ever see this stairway. She waited and listened, but Jasmine didn’t follow, and then she turned the lock to go out.
Halfway across the threshold, she thought suddenly and vividly of a day from the year before when it was raining and they had sat on that same floor and played cards, and Jasmine had shown her a gift from a boy. He had cast his cock for her in purple silicon; she kept it on top of her fridge, with her loose change, a delicately veined and textured souvenir. They had played catch with it, and when they got bored, Anthea stuck it, head up, into a dying potted plant on the windowsill, like one of those ornaments that come with bouquets. It must be gone now, in a Smithrite, or wherever one donated second-hand marital aids.
She was about to close the door behind her, and resign herself to never knowing, never ever knowing what had become of that name-forgotten boy’s cock, the one in the plant. That was when a brown-eyed man climbed the steps. He was barefoot, though it was evening on a rainy day in April. His hair was wet and his skin would be cool to the touch, she thought, if she touched it.
“Hold the door,” he said in his slow, dark voice, “I want to see Jasmine.”
When she held it for him he said “Parach!” and smiled with his mouth, until it crept into his beer-bottle eyes, and Anthea looked longer than she wanted to at his bottom lip, which was full, and the smooth collarbones at the base of his throat pressing against skin that made her think of honey.
As he passed, she smelled his patchouli and tobacco sweat, and under it a pervasive skunk. His feet were dirty and his jeans wet to mid-calf. He left high-arched footprints on the floor and up the stairs.
MRS. LAYTON AND THE EGG
At two o’clock in the afternoon, three days after her return from Duncan’s Crossing, Anthea again found herself in the Aquarian bungalow’s entrance hall. She held a white chicken’s egg in her left hand and an old manila envelope in her right. She waited among triple goddesses and divine feminines, counterfeit papyrus depicting dancing, egyptien gentlemen in short, white robes. Mrs. Layton appeared, draped and cowled in pale grey cashmere like the abbess of a particularly sophisticated holy order.
When they were seated she asked, “What did you bring me, Anthea?” Anthea had not yet decided what she would say to Mrs. Layton regarding the contents of the paper hoard beneath The Place of the Stones. It would be easier if the box had contained a still-beating heart; she imagined Mrs. Layton would know what to do with a heart.
“I took your advice,” she said.
“I gave you no advice,” said Mrs. Layton. “Though I think I asked you to bring me something.”
The egg was still cool from the fridge, and felt smooth like a beachstone. She set it on the table beside the teapot.
Mrs. Layton picked it up and cupped it in the palm of her right hand. “Eggs, Anthea,” she began, in her explaining voice, “are precious because of their potential.” Now Mrs. Layton covered the egg over with her left hand and held it to her forehead. “But that also means they are vulnerable to the unconscious currents of a household. An egg reveals a great deal about the place from which it comes. Where do you come from?”
Though she wished to remain calm, heat rose at the centre of Anthea’s cheeks and crept up her throat.
Mrs. Layton did not seem to expect an answer. “And where are you going?” She continued: “After our meeting last week I began to see more, and now I can tell you this. In the late spring of this year a man and a girl hitchhiked north along the highway. They passed through a town called Duncan’s Crossing and on the edge of that town they came to a shabby little resort called the Glass Castle. They were begging. They went to the general store and the clerk took pity on them—they were dirty and very thin by then—and gave them a box of animal crackers.”
For a long moment Anthea was preoccupied with the animal crackers. She tried to imagine Jasmine eating them on the highway beside the beer-bottle Castle, thought of them carrying the box to the very ends of the earth, first eating the elephants, and then camels. She wondered if they saved the lions for last, as Anthea had done when she was little.
When she had thought through the animal crackers she said, “What the fuck does that even mean?” Her palms were soft and sticky around her cup. “Did you know where she was going after the goddamn animal crackers?”
“Don’t use language like that, Anthea. It’s ugly. And, no, no one knew.”
“She didn’t even take water, I bet. I bet she didn’t even take water with her.”
“Anthea, the mundane events of our lives are chosen long ago. We manifest physically only what we have already decided after deep reflection and debate. You may call that fate, but it is a simple word for a complex mechanism.”
The word “fate” triggered something unpleasant in Anthea, something for which she was not prepared: a red surge, and her skin gathered into hard, painful goosebumps all down her arms and legs. If she were a braver woman, she would have hit Mrs. Layton with the soapstone reproduction of the Willendorf Venus on that side table. Hitting her would have been right and just, with the way she looked.
Mrs. Layton was still talking: “She was part of something much larger than you can imagine. For women like Jasmine, there are more important considerations than biological survival.”
Something dry and sour stuck Anthea’s tongue to her teeth. She would not hit Mrs. Layton, even if it seemed to be the only way to make it real to her, what might have happened to Jasmine, what happened all around them all the time, down here in the material where the rest of us live.
“Why are you here, Anthea?”
Anthea set down her cup, and the noise it made when it struck the table was very loud.
“I brought you the egg, but I found something else as well. The kind of thing Jasmine would have liked.” She undid the string that held the envelope shut, and upended it on the table. Bits of paper fell on the floor, Depression-era diner recipes, envelopes and datebook pages covered in tiny, meticulous printing. It was often plain English, but felt like encryption, whether by code or the disordered mind that produced them. “I found it in a hole dug under a little house. It’s called The Place of the Stones,” Anthea said.
Mrs. Layton pulled one bit of paper toward her. Anthea recognized it as a bill for scrambled eggs, orange juice and two slices of toast, from some long-gone lunch counter in Duncan’s Crossing. On the back, there were figures in long strings and multi-directional equations, an irrational mathematics that involved the alchemical sign for Sal Nitrum and the Hebrew character “aleph” and Fibonacci numbers and ð. They seemed to mean something to Mrs. Layton, and she touched them in a way that made Anthea think of bones rendered holy by reliquaries and ossuaries. “How did you know?” Mrs. Layton asked her.
“I don’t know anything,” she said.
“Then I can do something for you, as well.” Mrs. Layton slid to her knees, gray cashmere and raw silk puddling around her on the red carpet. Her eyes rolled back into her head and fluttered there, her rib cage lifted and her shoulders dropped as her arms fell behind her. Anthea crossed her arms over her chest, flung back in memory to the days when Jasmine tried to raise the dead or conjure jinn from Butter Ripple Schnapps and the evening air.
Before her, on the floor, Mrs. Layton’s face took on the quality of yellow ivory, smooth and expressionless and very old. Anthea stood up and thought I should go I should go, but Mrs. Layton said, “Parach ach Aleph leukos meloch ach Parach.”
Then she held her left hand above her head and brought it down hard on the egg that still sat beside the teapot. She smashed it flat, and before Anthea saw what was in it, she smelled a deep rot that filled the room, not sulphurous, but animal.
And Mrs. Layton stood as well. She said, “Do you doubt that this egg came from your own home? Whatever did this is with you now.”
Anthea took a step back from the table and the mess beside the teapot. She saw shell fragments, and wet, but looked away before she could identify what had been inside the egg.
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” was all she could say, and then as she made her way toward the door Mrs. Layton’s hand shot out and her fingers wrapped around Anthea’s wrist. She pulled the girl toward her and kissed her, a cool, dry kiss. And then Anthea was backing away with that ivory stare following after. When she reached the doorway, Mrs. Layton said, “You are afraid of what you have found, Anthea, I know, but I can help. There are things I can tell you, things you will want to know. But first, go to the bottle exchange, and then to the coffee shop across the street. Talk to Menander. And when you have finished, you will both come back to me and I will tell you the story of my father. After that, I think you should stay with me. Your house is not safe.”
The last time Anthea had been properly out with Jasmine, with no mention of the Aquarian Centre or Akashic Texts or Sauces Chosen for Family Dinners 1901–1905, inc., they went to eat Ayurvedic food and watch the Thursday night flamenco dancers at a place on the west side. The woman they liked best had danced el baile flamenco, and as always they had loved her shoes and talked about how she was both hot and terrifying in her imperious perfection. At the end of her dance, she stood perfectly still, her smooth, corded arms stretched upward, like a caryatid or un-Winged Victory, and Anthea had seen a snag on the ankle of her taupe fishnets and that had made the long muscles on her calves seem even lovelier. After she danced and they held the required, respectful silence, the man with the guitar laughed and sang “A Mi Manera,” and Anthea felt momentarily sentimental for high school and Sid Vicious. Around midnight they left the close, warm air of the Ayurvedic place to find something richer for dessert.
The dessert place on the east side was decorated in red-flocked velvet wallpaper, and the man who waited on them wore a black silk padded jacket with sleeves that covered his hands. Their coffee came in translucent demitasse; Jasmine ordered the lava cake and Anthea had a crème brûlée with raspberries in the bottom. Jasmine said it was a Victorian bordello in Shanghai, and scraped her fork across her plate for the last of the chocolate. Anthea ate her raspberries one by one. Outside on the street, three kids waited for a cab in front of a market, beneath an orange sign with black Arabic script.
After an hour over coffee Jasmine walked southwest and Anthea walked east. Almost home, she stopped at a street corner and listened to an old man at Bayani’s on the corner karaoke “My Way” through the restaurant’s terrible speakers. It began to rain. Inside the trickling windows they all laughed and clapped and the man bowed.
Now she was back home again from the Aquarian Centre, wondering if all the eggs in her refrigerator were rotten. Anthea stood at her kitchen window and watched the rain collect on the sill and drip down the wall where it distorted the floorboards. If the rain kept up, she thought, the water would reach halfway to the kitchen counters by morning, and then it would run down the walls to the apartment below. Above her head, something scratched at the attic floor. She thought it would be damp up there as well, but they were furry and it was probably better than a tree. Above her head there was a whole colony, and now the scratching came from the walls as well as the ceiling, and sometimes it seemed to be under the floorboards. She often thought of the dark, and all the climbers and hiders and nesters running through the hollow places behind the walls, over the beams in the ceiling. If her landlady didn’t do something, they would unmake the house, squirrels down from the attic, rats up from the basement. Chewing through the electrical, shredding the insulation, working as one with the mold in the plaster and the rot in the step.
INHERITORS
Though he had planned to knock on her door and arrive, prodigal, in Mrs. Kilgour’s enormous drawing room, Liam put it off another day, then a third. Hazel was a far more interesting and demanding project, and he quickly decided to stay in the city after he finished his week at the Temple Theatre. He spent hours walking with her, sometimes they stopped at cheap cafés, or the tea rooms that Hazel initially considered superior and more genteel. Without asking, he saw her most mornings at the White Lunch, a restaurant just a few blocks from the boarding house. He had not expected her the first time, but then he had seen her on the sidewalk, and he had stood and waved his newspaper at her and they had spent the day together.
She took him places he would not otherwise go, for rituals he did not understand, and he enjoyed, vicariously, modern adolescence: once he trailed after her through Woodward’s while she selected one handkerchief and a pair of cotton gloves, and made him hold her pocketbook while she p
aid and then carry her bag afterward; they shared a milkshake at Adele’s Café and listened to some boy crooner on the radio, while the girls lined up at the counter looked at him over their shoulders and whispered; they walked through the large urban park along wooded trails that seemed entirely wild and private. She took him through the heavy fir wood and out the other side, where they looked away from the city and toward the invisible islands and past those to the Pacific, and then the far western reaches of the sea. It was late afternoon in November, with a few bare lights winking on across the inlet, overlooking a huge stone that knelt in the water, a little Douglas fir growing out of its top. Hazel told him the story of the stone, how it had once been a man who so loved his unborn son that he and his wife and child were immortalized while purifying themselves in the waters of the inlet. He smiled at the little story and thought about how kissable she was when she was talking, and then he kissed her. And he thought of how dark and cold were the fir trees and the lowering sky, but where they touched, his skin was warm.
On these days he sometimes heard news regarding Mrs. Kilgour while he pushed Mrs. Qualey’s hash around his plate. He read the social columns of the local newspaper and learned that she was so unwell she had cancelled two parties and would not leave Craiglockhart. Each morning, he imagined approaching her, but then there was another afternoon to spend with Hazel and then it was evening and too late. There was the saltwater swimming pool on the beach—abandoned for the season now—where she learned to swim, and there were long, damp walks along the shore, and the view across the inlet to the mountains: those two were called the Lions; those others were the Sleeping Beauty, the huge figure of a reclining woman sketched into the horizon. After a few days looking for private places in parks, they were more reckless, and she came to see him at Mrs. Qualey’s. That respectable landlady compressed her thin, crusty lips and made unkind comments. They liked kissing on a tiny landing halfway up to Liam’s room. Hazel laughed and talked about convention, and after Liam used the word and explained it to her, she often called things “bourgeois,” and talked about escaping the city and its colonial respectability. She would get away, she said, and travel. She would be original. She would resist the genteel. She would not be polite.
The Paradise Engine Page 19