Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Letters to Dead Authors, #5

  Dear Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne,

  I stop by the dormitory at night to imagine the ghosts rushing in and out, in and out of the ranks of open mouths. The wind rattles the windowpanes. The whole building is dark. Even the night watchman is catching forty winks in his tiny room, as I allow him to do between circuits of the building and the grounds. Only I am awake.

  My “’v’”—the girl Finster—sleeps hard, her face turned into the pillow, her jaw set, as if sleeping were a task demanding great concentration, as if the night were a ledger filled with figures she is obliged to pore over in agonizing search of a missing zero. To tell the truth she faces the day with much the same look. She is a knot of incomprehension and rage, so I expect great things of her.

  Yesterday I left something on the nightstand beside her bed that I had fashioned on a walk through the countryside: a figure made of forked sticks and leaves. This was the only sort of doll I played with as a child, since my father did not hold with toys for children. It was not to be cuddled, but held secretly in the palm of the hand, and then crushed.

  It was not there last night, but she was clutching something, and I bent close to see. It was not the doll, but a stuffed toy, stubbled and blind and so shapeless that its species was anyone’s guess—was that an ear or a paw? She whimpered as I pried it from her insensate fingers, but did not wake.

  Though I can still see the letters that I form, it is dark where I sit on the small terrace overlooking the sculpture garden. Yet above me birds flash, as bright as sparks from a burning building. There is a rational explanation: The sun is setting behind the hills, and I am in their shadow, but the birds are not.

  Today I burned Finster’s toy, while she screamed and raved. That is what we do with obstacles to our ends. Only when you have lost everything can you open yourself completely to the dead.

  Perhaps I used a little excess vigor, prodding the limp form, already almost entirely consumed, until it belched enough smoke to make my eyes water.

  The terrace is the last place on school grounds to catch the sun, which is why I sought it out, after this melodrama, but darkness fell sooner than I expected, and with it has come the cold that was perhaps always there, under the sunlight. From the stone bench and the flagstones the chill seeps into me.

  Now the darting sparks have gone out and in their place black flecks of ash swoop and twitter against the deepening sky.

  In the distance, a rectangle of yellow opens, making the surrounding darkness absolute. It calves; a light moves away from the bank of lights that is the school, winding its way through the garden. It is Clarence, looking for me. He will go to the gazebo, first. Now he is at the gazebo. Then he will go to the labyrinth. Now he is at the labyrinth. He will hesitate at the entrance. He is hesitating. He will call for me. I cannot hear him. Then he will go into the labyrinth, and he will get lost.

  Next day. I left my pen and letter on the bench and went to rescue Clarence, who was very grateful to see me, though at first alarmed by my shadowy figure advancing through the shrubbery. It is strange that the domestic staff of this school, though perfectly accustomed to such manifestations of the spirit world as table-tapping, ectoplasm, and spirit voices, are nonetheless subscribers to a callow and baseless fear of “ghosts”—by which they seem to mean a white sheet on a stick, moaning.

  I thought it best to guide him back inside, and so this letter camped on the terrace overnight, becoming, as you may perceive, somewhat stiff and warped, and suffering indignities from a literary slug—see its silver footprint here. Discovering my abandoned efforts on my morning constitutional, I picked up my pen, induced it once again to flow, and am now ready to return to my topic. But I have forgotten what it was.

  No, I had no particular topic, only the feeling that something fanged was chewing its way up my throat.

  When I was a little girl I liked to shake my head until I got dizzy, my braids rhythmically lashing my face, my lips slewing back and forth and slinging spit across my cheek. I wanted to shake some obstruction out of my throat or my eyes or my ears or all three. Later it seemed to me that what I had sought riddance of was just myself. Though still small, I was already in my way. It even sometimes seemed to work, if I remember right, and released me for a few minutes or an afternoon to a paradise of clear cold air, black sticks, berries as bright as fire, and the frozen violence of blades of grass. But later I blocked my own view entirely, and no longer even tried to clear a path to that crystal world. I perceived no obstacle, because I had become it; the Sphinx was my own self.

  Maybe this is why I like the long lost better than the living. I would not want them back: I like them just because they’re lost. The dead are not quite there, and it is being there that’s what is wrong with the living. We are too much with us. The truest part of me was trained on that crystal world outside me, or even was that world. Sticks and berries . . . Why weigh them down with meat and bone? The Long Pig of the self? Too, too solid. A wasting sickness, I thought, was the way to die. To melt, to cease, to suck your own bones dry. To wear at last so thin that you can see the world through your almost unfogged flesh. Then, when you are crystal clear, to die.

  But I did not die. So I turned to the ghosts. Nothing to make you feel that you’re not there like someone talking through your head. May I confess that I did not care nearly so much what the ghosts had to say, as simply that they spoke? I already suspected that nothing said in words we understand is alien to our human case. Ghosts speak like living men and women or not at all. It would have been a great disappointment had I not predicted it. But it doesn’t really matter. What I have always wanted was that empty feeling. That I wasn’t something like a steak in a dress, but a hole. And if a hole, then I could go through it, or was already through it, in the world at last.

  I wrote the above with such vehemence that my nib went through the paper and stuck there (you will note the scar). The pen wrestled itself out of my hand and shot into a pile of leaves, whence I have retrieved it, but how long I crouched over the leaves I do not know. Could a leaf be world enough to satisfy a lifetime’s craving? I doubt it. Maybe. The way it crunches, to dust and trapezoids. The still-flexible spines fanning out like bones of a hand. But this, what I’ve written here, is only the description of a leaf. You know what a real leaf is. You are among the leaves. You left. You are a leaf now.

  That is all,

  Headmistress Joines

  6. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  The road, the ravine, the fields, the thstles thistles are all reminding me of something, I’ll think of it in a minute. But in fact it would be surprising if anything didn’t remind me of something. You, for instance, remind me of the girl I’m chasing. Finster is her name. Yours is Grandison, as I recall. You have the air, both of you, of little old women, though they’re two rather different old women, one of them calm, effective, coolly critical (that’s you), the other sly, impudent, and full of wrath. Both of you, however, have shrewd judgmental eyes; high, rather protuberant foreheads and crimped black hair; and clever fingers that are always moving: plucking at buttons, picking at scabs, pecking at typewriter keys. Otherwise you do not look at all alike, your skin is dark while hers is sallow and you are almost twice her size. Perhaps the greatest resemblance is in my way of looking at you, because I want something from you both, though I am not yet sure what I want from her.

  From you I want, of course, your ear. Your ear and your fingers, piecing together my words, keeping me moving across the page toward the girl who must be close, maybe the next page, or the next but one, I hear a noise, if it isn’t the worms, it’s footsteps. Quick, quick, turn the page!

  No, I am getting confused again. You cannot flip forward to a page you have not yet typed, to see what is written there. That is something time does not permit.

  But wait! If what I say comes true in being said, then—listen closely—if I say what she is doing there, two pages from now, as fo
r instance, “In two pages she will be walking up a cypress-lined drive,” will it be true? Is it already true, in being said? Can I, then, determine the future?

  And if so, can I talk her into a corner and keep her there until I come for her?

  I might say, for instance, that in two pages, a little girl will be crossing a page, accompanied by the rhythmic crunch of gravel. She kicks a stone that hits the next sentence, in which is sketched out with no great attention to detail the cornered shapes of eaves and dormer windows against the sky. The reader will recognize, no doubt, the Vocational School, where, in a subordinate clause, muddy fields of thistles stretch to the distant hills.

  Oh, that’s what it was.

  The door swings open before Finster reaches it, though there is no one on the stoop to welcome her. She hears an indistinct hum, perhaps the sound of my voice, punctuated by the taptaptap of someone typing, unless it is a branch tapping rhythmically against a window, then pausing for a moment, then beginning once again, taptaptap. The little girl will go inside. Followed, a page or so later, by an older woman, her face intent and rather gaunt. Myself, though at the moment I have not even reached the first vantage point from which, because the school is on a slight rise, the main building can be seen across the playing fields, though still some distance away and largely concealed by the trees that make parts of the grounds dark, cool, and damp even in the heat of summer. Shortly the first of the cypresses that line the drive will appear, dark strokes against the eye. It is natural to slow, now, as the view narrows between the thickets at the margins and is cut short by the curve of the drive as it rounds the depression that becomes a marshy pond every spring and a shrinking, stinking disc of mud by midsummer, and breeds exceptionally large, wiry but unwary mosquitoes and frogs that I have been told are edible. This is all reasonably plausible. On a sunny day one’s shadow eclipses successive frogs that, their basking interrupted, burst skyward. At this time of year, the tadpoles have not yet lost their tails, and so we need not expect frogs on the drive, but later in the season every visitor will see a score of them, and hear, though this is less plausible, the blows of their heads against the undercarriage of whatever vehicle transports them, as they, the frogs, fling themselves unwisely into greater danger than they would have faced had they simply waited for our shadows to pass over. And now the swamp is left behind, or will be left behind, when we arrive at the slight eminence from which we catch our first glimpse of the red brick building heart-hot in the sun.

  I do not know why I am suddenly rehearsing the mellow formulas of our part-time and superannuated tour guide, Miss Cavendish, bringing back the past, when what I meant to do was anticipate the future, except that around here the past has a way of becoming the future. In a world without time, these distinctions have very little meaning. Such that I sometimes wonder what law, if any, bars the future from a premature debut. Perhaps here all times coexist, in which case my ghost is already here somewhere, has always been here, holding my place like a finger in a book.

  Possibly I am that ghost. Would I know?

  Thumb bursts the paper cranium of a puffball, dark cocaine of spores smokes out—I—I am—I am lost [static]—no, no! Compose yourself!

  Resume.

  But I am getting nowhere. Literally, perhaps. So I say to myself, I actually chant, thus, “I have a goal, I have a goal, I have forgotten what it is, but I have a goal . . .”

  “All right, then”—I interrupt myself (none too patiently)—“what is your goal?”

  Stumped? No. My goal is:

  To find the girl.

  It comes whelming back.

  Someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity, havoc, ruination, snatch her back, fetch her home, recover her, remember her, save her!

  And with that I am at the steps.

  They are just as I remember them. Well, they could hardly be any other way. Since the school is constructed from my knowledge of it, it conforms perfectly to my expectations, though I will not say that I notice no difference—not exactly. The very fact that it disagrees not at all with my expectations disagrees with my expectations to some small degree. I have never passed a day without noticing for the first time some minute detail—a spider descending on an invisible line, a small crack in the woodwork where the joiner bungled.

  Details of no significance. The wealth of the world.

  I open the front door. Go in. The light is the same, lifting my heart in the same way. The floorboards are scuffed in the same places. From below rises the familiar muffled clank and roar of lunch preparing. I could easily forget that this is not the real school, and slip into my usual routine. Eventually I would decide that it was time to go to the land of the dead, forgetting that I was already there. I would throw myself through my own mouth, and find myself—where? Here again, about to throw myself through my mouth? As I would do, only to find myself, again, here, about to throw myself through, et cetera. Tunneling down a mucus-walled passage to no birth. To tunneling without end.

  But I am forgetting the child. I hurry upstairs, and find myself somewhere else.

  A sawdusty haze that dries my tongue. The twanging of strained strings. Smell of glue. I know the neighborhood. I don’t like it [static], I don’t want to be here! But it’s too late. They pile out of a fold in space, the men in suspenders and bowler hats and neat mustaches, the balding men inclining the shining, mute, and earnest faces of their craniums to their work, the men in aprons smeared with glue to which the sawdust sticks. There are even a few women with long skirts and bobbed hair and plain, unfriendly faces saying, “Now, Miss Joines, don’t disturb your father at his work.” They do not like me, think me an unnatural child, uncanny in my silence and my mourning dress, and so I am, but is that my fault? I did not make myself, or, well, something wrong there, never mind, I hoist high the lunch bag by way of explanation and continue straight-backed and cool to his office, where under the sounds of sawing, planing, gluing, sanding, I continue saying, as if I had never stopped saying, as I did not stop thinking, have never stopped thinking, “Why didn’t you die? A mistake, I guess, but one you can correct and really should.”

  [Burst of static.]

  Then sawdust swirls up; who on earth has opened the window? The varnish will be ruined! My eyes sting and stream tears, the contours of the room disappear, I am lost [echo, crackling, several words indistinct]—no, wait, control yourself—

  A voice, I suppose it must be mine, is saying, in a low, reasonable tone, “Is it not really better to die? You will die eventually anyway, and probably in a disgusting condition; why wait? What of value have you contributed? Your inventions? What inventions? Your factory? It was here when you arrived, you teethed on its hammers, took varnish for your colic, learned to count on its keys; you would make more of a mark by shutting it down than you have by keeping it up. Your family? Your daughter would dig out her ovaries with one of your own antique silver teaspoons to put a period to your line, if she did not doubt, as you doubted, that she is even yours.

  “You have been worse than insignificant; you have actively disimproved the world. One woman loved you, enough to marry you, and you killed her; now no one loves you, nor ever will. God doesn’t. God cannot exist, since if He had made you, He would have smote you down. Since no one made you, since you squirted the short distance from absence to ignominy through the purest chance, you will have to do the smiting; the one positive contribution you can still make is to negate yourself.”

  There is no answer, only the wet munching of a man chewing his mustache. [Background noise.]

  “Look up. Does that beam look familiar? There’s where you strung up the one person who ever loved you, employing a treble string for the purpose. Nothing like rolling up your sleeves alongside the boys, eh? Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty!”

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  “No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth. I did not say gargle, or whatever it is you think you are doing
. You, girl. Grandison!”

  Still holding the rolled paper cone to my mouth and with most of my attention directed toward the vicinity of my tonsils, I did not recognize my own name until I heard it again, this time from much closer to. The instructor had stopped directly in front of me.

  “Grandison, I am speaking to you. Cannot you hear me?”

  Since I spoke, without thinking, through the cone, my “Yes—no—I can” came out unexpectedly loud, and muffled giggles rose from around me. I lowered the cone, flushing.

  “It is yes, sir, or yes, Mr. Behalf. You are new here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have conceived a dislike for this exercise?”

  “Sir?”

  “You are crumpling your trumpet.” Happy laughter greeted this observation.

  I looked down. I was more than crumpling it. I had crushed it into a ball and was kneading it compulsively.

  “Take this one, and try to refrain from destroying it.”

  “Yes, sir.” My cheeks burned.

  “Now try once more, without huffing, or puffing, or gagging, or fizzing, or anything, to listen with your mouth . . . No, no, no!”

  All my life I had borne the double burden of my stutter and my skin. Coming here, though, I had thought at least to halve my load—had looked forward to the novelty of being celebrated for my stutter, instead of mocked. I now learned better. Everyone had a stutter. What mattered was how well one employed it to summon up the dead. And that I could not do at all, nor even imagine how to start. Was it all a bunco game? The exercises we did seemed pointless (and some of them hurt), the teachers’ instructions frankly nonsensical. Seeking to “breathe backwards,” I might forget to breathe at all and fall off my seat in a faint, or inhale my own saliva and suffer a coughing fit. Not even among my cousins had I been made to feel such a ninnyhammer. The littlest of my fellow beginners, scarcely half my age, was more adept than I.