Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Oh, I hope she is real, because if she is not, how can I slake this save her burning in my throat?

  If she’s real, she is inventing the world around her, too, there being no other way to travel here. Golly! I might turn the page and see, say, a gloomy water mill, whacking the stream with black and rotting paddles, a stream that is not speaking or even thinking of anything, least of all of me.

  How happy I’d be just to stand on a piece of dirt I didn’t have to shit out first, if you’ll excuse the expression.

  Secretary, mark for redaction.

  Let us get out of this ravine now. Suddenly I have had quite enough of it. Fields, that’s better, and I do not mind the rustling in the grass, if it is grass, though there is no wind here.

  It is possible that, just as I have remade the landscape, I could remake her. There is another possibility, however: that if I could remake her, she could remake me! And do not be alarmed, but if she could remake me, then she could make me. And if she could make me, she may have already made me. In which case I do not exist and never did.

  [Pause, static.]

  Oh, I consider it unlikely. It is not at any rate as likely as the opposite hypothesis, that I made her, and even that is less likely than that we are both here, self-made, or made by God and our parents, if you prefer, which I don’t. But it is just possible that she, running through the land of the dead, imagined herself pursued, wanted to be pursued, and so created me to follow her. [Pause.] It would even answer some questions, as for instance, why do I want to catch her? Students have disappeared before, if I remember correctly. When it happens, I feel some regret, if only for lost revenues. I even fetch them back. I believe I fetched you back, once. But I do not generally hurl myself through my own mouth in hot pursuit. Why this time? I wish I could remember. Is it possible that I care?

  Why not? Other people care, it would seem.

  Is it really easier to believe that I am a figment of her imagination, that I wish to follow her because I was created to follow her, having no other purpose?

  Yes, it is easier.

  Though even easier to imagine the cognate possibility: that I created her so that she might flee me, because I wanted to chase something I could never catch.

  The problem, of course, is that I cannot really care about something that I invented solely so that I might care about something. I am not such a sucker as that.

  Suppose that she did invent me. Did she just want someone, anyone, to run after her, or me in particular? Surely the wish for an unspecified “someone” would not produce me of all people. But would she really bring into being someone (me) who imagines that she (me again) could bring her (Finster) into being? Would she—could she bring into being someone who really could bring her into being? Or even someone who actually had?

  Oh I am lost. [Static.]

  Oh where am I. [Static, sound of breathing.]

  That was a close call. That’s why only the strongest personalities ought to safari here, those who can hold on to an idée fixe for grim life. I have the grip of a raptor, but my concentration lapsed, I forgot that in the real world effects may not precede causes. Nota bene! To such rules we travelers must adhere, arbitrary as they seem. Books may not write their authors. Little girls may not invent their fathers, I mean their mothers, I mean their teachers.

  We are not in the real world, however, as is obvious from the tiny lowercase letters dropping like ash on my sleeves, gathering in the folds of my gown. Here, it is probably possible. Possibly probable, though if so, it is equally probable that I invented her so that she might invent me. So that I might invent her. So that she might invent me. So that I might invent her. So that she might invent me. So that I might invent her. So that she might invent me. So that I might invent her. Are you getting this down? Dear listener, you may think that this can’t go on forever. It can. Here, it can. Death is where everything goes on forever. [Laughter, extended fit of coughing, several words inaudible.]

  So, the road. My road. To the school. I plant one foot on it. Then another. Then another (no, not a third foot, the first one again). Obediently, the world assembles itself around me: rutted track, grassy fields, scattered trees.

  A little more detail, please. Road: brown, ridged, its puddles reflecting the clouds. Grass: black and curly as your hair. Tree trunks wet. Leaves shuddering, showing their ribbed undersides. Smell of ozone. Letters falling.

  As I said, it takes a strong personality.

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  Mother Other was waiting in the hall when I emerged. I had the impression that she had been standing there—patient, stolid, almost inanimate—ever since I had gone inside.

  “That was quick work,” she said, not entirely approvingly. “You earned the right to call yourself a student, first of all, and I must say I was surprised that you got even that far, and yet you’ve gone farther and made your way, God knows how, into the private service of the Headmistress.” Gesturing to me to follow, she set off down the hall, adding over her shoulder, “I certainly didn’t see anything special in the poor, small, and approximate personage you appeared to be. But it seems I must adjust my opinion of you. The Headmistress does not bestow such a privilege without good reason.”

  “You had better adjust not just your opinion but also your behavior!” I said, with an impressiveness somewhat impaired by the necessity of taking a few skips down the echoing hallway to catch up. I almost laughed, hearing myself speak so boldly. Nonetheless, a secretary had the right to expect considerations that a mere student could not, and I decided to press my advantage. “You can start by bringing me my suitcase, which you seem strangely reluctant to relinquish! I wonder what a person like yourself could want with my poor belongings. Can it be that you suspected from the start that I would distinguish myself? If so, you should have been on better behavior, since someone who has the ear of the Headmistress is in a position to demand respect from those who are less fortunate, even if they have earned some status of their own through long if not necessarily distinguished service.” And now I did laugh, appreciatively, as if at someone else’s words. As before, I felt that I was receiving assistance from some nearby quarter and was buoyed by the feeling that I was wanted. I had been very little wanted, lately.

  “You are making a silly mistake,” said Mother Other, nettled by my laugh, “if you think that, having won your way into the inner sanctum of the Headmistress with unusual speed, you will as quickly win her confidence. It’s even possible that she admitted you just to keep an eye on you. I wouldn’t be surprised if she identified you as a troublemaker from the beginning, and is only biding her time before putting you out on your ear. But”—here she sucked her lips into her mouth, so that they quite disappeared—“that’s not for me to say.”

  She led me silently through an odd little dogleg corridor, poorly lit, and turned onto a wider hallway lined with closed doors. The round window at the near end, against which gusts of rain were rattling, gave me the clue I needed to identify my surroundings: we were approaching her office once again, but from the opposite direction. “The secretary finds her way unerringly through the labyrinthine corridors,” I said to myself with satisfaction.

  Mother Other was saying, “You’re correct in thinking that such notice from the Headmistress is a rare honor, and even I feel a little awed when I think of it, but that awe is for the condescension the Headmistress is showing, not for you, and you entirely misunderstand your position if you think that it entitles you to throw your weight around and give commands to people who have proven their worth”—she pinched a key out of her reticule and rattled it angrily in the lock—“over what you correctly identify as years of loyal service. The reverse is even true. The higher your position in the school the less you should put yourself forward. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the most successful student would be one who isn’t here at all, despite appearing on all the rolls: an empty uniform, a cavity in the shape of a
schoolgirl, and whose voice is about as loud as a louse’s.”

  She pushed open the door and I followed her into the office, which seemed smaller and dingier than it had that afternoon, and reeked of cat. “It would certainly be more comfortable for you if I took your words to heart and made myself scarce,” I said, as she threw open a closet and began to rummage through a heap of clothing and other odd articles—a fencing mask, an animal trap, a hat block. “But you’ll excuse me if I take my cues from the Headmistress herself. Or failing that, use my own judgment, rather than relying on advice dealt out by someone who is if anything farther from the horse’s mouth than I am, advice that if not intentionally misleading may well reflect some fundamental misunderstanding.”

  I would do anything, anything, I thought, to speak like this forevermore, smooth as a politician or a printed page.

  “The horse’s mouth?” She cast a choleric look back at me from the depths of the closet. “Is that any way to speak of a woman whose dignity ought to make you weak at the knees? Better not to speak of her at all!” She tugged at the handle of my suitcase, already half buried in the heap. “If I do misunderstand the Headmistress’s intentions, it’s because they are far beyond what the rest of us can grasp, including young ladies who don’t know anything and yet have a high opinion of themselves.” Grunting, she hauled it out, employing her foot to hold back an umbrella and several hair ribbons that had attached themselves to it. “Here’s your portmanteau. You’re wrong in thinking that I had some desire to keep it; in fact I’ll be glad to be rid of it, and have been waiting impatiently for you to take it off my hands.” She thumped it down before me, adding, “After you have fetched any little keepsakes from it, you will have to check it into long-term storage. It is too large for your personal area.” She stepped back, folding her arms.

  “I won’t deny that I was afraid I might never see it again,” I said. I picked it up, almost overbalancing, and teetered to the door. On the threshold I turned. “I beg your pardon for my mistakes, this one and any others I may have made since arriving here. It’s true that I know nothing yet about how things are done here, but how can I learn except through the help of those I meet along the way? And perhaps one day I may myself be in a position to help those who had the foresight to help me.”

  Mother Other said nothing but clumped to the door and held it—though it was already open—as I dragged my suitcase through.

  The case seemed even heavier than before, and as I lugged it toward the dormitory I became possessed by the irrational conviction that Mother Other had put, had perhaps planted something in it to discredit me. I laid it down, flipped open the clasps, and lifted the lid.

  A clawed cloud of fur and feathers exploded from within. I fell back on my hands. The cat, for it was he, whisked out of sight, leaving the shape of his body impressed into my belongings, along with a welter of bloody feathers, not a few tufts of his own white fur, and two tiny clenched bird feet.

  After a moment of blank terror, I saw what must have happened, and that it was perfectly innocent after all, if trespass and slaughter can be called innocent. Mother Other, having pawed through my things, must have left my suitcase ajar, and later shut it again without noticing that the cat, having caught the bird, had found there a cozy place to torture and then eat it. I considered my possessions, now dotted with clumps of bloody down—a flowered nightgown that was too tight across the chest and that in any case I would not be allowed to wear here; a little stuffed donkey named Doe, well worn; a book or two (one still bearing the stamp of the Academy for Disadvantaged Girls in Brooklyn, New York). They looked naked, forlorn, embarrassed. What had I wanted them for? I threw them away. I checked my empty suitcase into long-term storage. It is probably still there.

  That night I lay awake under sheets tight as bandages, listening to all the new sounds around me, and staring up into the darkness, which the swaying boughs outside the tall unshuttered windows made to shift and flicker. There were tears cooling symmetrically in the cups of both ears. Occasionally a new tear slid down to join them. Donkey Doe, Donkey Doe! I thought. I felt I had committed a murder of which I was also somehow the victim, and that the school had made me do it. But slowly my misery eased. I felt how my breath was emptying invisibly into the volume of air above me and being replaced. Someone passed the open door with a lamp; vanes of light turned across the floor, glanced across my bed, bent up the wall, raced into the rafters, and vanished. “She has come. She has not yet proved her worth, but the school knows its mistress,” I said to myself, of myself. “She smiles. She turns her face into the pillow. She sleeps.”

  I smiled. I turned my face into the pillow. I slept.

  Thus, my first day at the Vocational School.

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  On Methods of Listening

  Sooner or later, all talk of listening comes back to the ear. Training it is a large part of the curriculum. The young students spend hours quietly attending to the different sounds the wind makes chivvying the ivy on the walls, hustling dry leaves across the playfields and gardens, cracking a rope against a flagpole, dragging a sharp stick across a window, or thwacking the heavy, stained sheets hung out to dry. Then they move on to softer sounds: a crumb of dirt rumbling down an anthill, a rose petal snapping open, the footfall of a fly. The first few times that on my own rambles through the grounds I came across a solitary, still figure all in black, with goose-pimpled legs and runny nose, standing half inside a bush, face intent, or hanging over the crumbling ring-wall of the well, ear cocked to its depths, a laugh was startled out of me, but I soon grew accustomed to the sight, and would sometimes stop and listen for a while myself, trying to figure out what the child was hearing.

  I gathered that listening to the faintest knocking, creaking, and rustling was meant to tune the ear to the often very similar sounds made by the dead. For the voices of the dead never sounded fully human. They had a strangely impersonal, accidental quality that made it difficult to attend to them for long; one’s attention lapsed, letting them subside into background noise. At times one had the impression that this was, in fact, what the modest dead wanted. The fanciful will sometimes catch, when listening to the wind, what sounds like a muffled word or two. Just so, the students sieved the rattle of grass seeds, the sizzle of horseflies for hints of meaning.

  At first I thought this was teaching by analogy, that by cultivating an aural pareidolia the listener sensitized herself to the hints of rational language in the hissing, seething diction of the dead. But no. Apparently the dead really did speak in these accidental noises, not just through the throats of the experienced channeler. Any hole the world opened could become a throat, any object impinging on another could be a tongue, teeth, velum, alveolar ridge.15

  How can this be? “Maybe to the dead,” the Headmistress said, “there is not much difference between a human being and a cabbage leaf perforated by a worm. The cabbage, too, may feel that it is special . . . To congratulate oneself on being human may be sheer parochialism. Ought ice to be proud that it is not water? Well, necrophysics tells us that inanimate objects are to us as water is to ice, the same substance in a different state.”

  I cannot pronounce myself wholly convinced, but the possibility has made my relations with the world around me a degree more cordial. I feel myself surrounded, if not by mothers and sisters, then at least by cousins of some degree, and often seem to catch a fleeting family resemblance in the tiled corner of a public washroom or a rag stuffed into a broken windowpane.

  I should not leave the subject of listening without mentioning an eventual change in the views of the Headmistress. While the official position of the Vocational School was that all sounds were semiotic when properly understood—a principle laid down by the Headmistress herself—her private views were undergoing a transformation. She was no longer convinced that even human speech was semiotic. That we generally made sense of it was no proof that it made sens
e; we are also prone to discover faces in mildew stains. When we think we are conversing rationally, we are merely, like a tree, rustling.

  I have not yet spoken of music. I remember a gray morning early in my stay when, still groggy from a sleep both too deep and too brief, I thrust open my casements and leaned out to try to identify the sound that, mingling with my dream to supply the hoarse bellow of a charging ice-walrus, had interrupted my repose. Though I heard nothing out of the ordinary, I decided to investigate. I splashed a little arctic water onto my unshaven chops, threw a coat over my robe and slippers, and slip-slapped down the deserted stairs toward the Chapel of the Word Church, through whose doors a few stragglers were hurrying. At the last minute reconsidering, having not yet been expressly invited to attend services (especially not in pajamas), I impulsively plunged into the shrubbery, to the detriment of my slippers, and took up a position under a stained-glass window that probably looked better from the inside, representing something gruesomely anatomical that later revealed itself to be a part of the inner ear.

  So it was there, up to my ankles in grass so wet from dew that I might as well have been standing in a pond, that I first heard the orchestral silence (punctuated by the odd gasp) of twenty-six stutterers in concert. Later I would learn it was the old workhorse “Music for Stammererers” (sic) that I had heard—if one can call that hearing. I had the strange feeling that music was being sucked out of my ears rather than fed into them. I thought I caught a snatch of an organ-grinder’s song I had heard a couple of days before, and of the exertions of my landlady’s daughter back home, plunking her way through The Well-Tempered Clavier. Afterward, wading back through the grass, I felt quiet and hollow.

  I eventually came to love this music, in which the tension between being unable to say and being unable to stop saying that is most characteristic of the stutterer’s speech was elevated to an aesthetic principle.