Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Nevertheless the students told me that the object often remained dreadful to them long after the punishment was over; this explained the care the Headmistress exhibited in making the otherwise apparently arbitrary choice of an object. One would not want to instill in a child an ungovernable aversion to an object he had to use every day—a chamber pot, a shoe, a pen. I once saw a child flinch and cry out at coming upon, temporarily abandoned by the janitor, a galvanized metal bucket.

  The last punishment I wish to tell you about was much feared. Its principle characteristic was that it could not be recognized as punishment; it did not induce pain or humiliation or restrict one’s movements; it might even be experienced as pleasure. I could never make out exactly by what mechanism it was brought home to the sufferer of this pleasure (for suffering they assured me it was) that what they were experiencing was in fact intended as punishment, but there was no mistaking my informants’ emotion for anything but the liveliest horror. This is speculation only, but I wonder whether the reason this punishment inspired such unease was that its influence could not be contained to the local; once introduced, the possibility haunted every subsequent experience. I myself have had the irrational thought strike me, in the midst of some signal pleasure, that the sweetness of this peach or that caress might not be the simple good it seemed, but the sly retribution of the Headmistress for some injury or other. The reader will readily perceive that this suspicion, afflicting every passing moment, is itself a form of punishment, lessening one’s joy in life; indeed, the Headmistress need do nothing more than allude to the possibility of such a punishment for it to exact a cost. Such a punishment would naturally depend for its efficacy on the sensitivity of the victim; on a hardened criminal it would miss its mark. However, the students referred to it with respect verging on dread, and held the Headmistress in considerable awe.

  In one respect, however, her policies were liberal in the extreme. The lowliest student might command her respect if a ghost spoke through him. Under the influence of the dead, she would not only excuse malfeasance but would give serious consideration to amending school policy along lines suggested by the miscreant. It was almost laughable, when an infantine lisp gave way to the odd hiccuping groan of the ghost, to see her demeanor change. All that was characteristically impatient and haughty in her fled her countenance. Her eyes softened, her lips parted, and with an eager and even ingratiating air—bending to bring her ear closer to the child’s mouth—she gave her full attention to the dead.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #7

  Dear Emily Brontë,

  Doctor Beede tells me, one finger probing greedily under his vest, that it is pulmonary consumption, or tuberculosis.

  “You see?” I want to shout, for the feeling is of a lifelong suspicion confirmed. It is somehow not news. News is what can no longer distract from this.

  “The disease is slow to progress, but usually fatal,” he tells me, not entirely concealing his satisfaction. If he is waiting for me to repudiate my teachings under the threat of death, he can wait forever.

  So I approach the vanishing point of view. The horizon line I thought remote turns out to be penciled on a wall a hand’s-breadth from my nose.

  I am conscious of a strangely breathless feeling. It is not the tubercles. I believe I am having an emotion. Surely it is not fear. Though it is natural for the organism to feel a little nervous as the axe comes down. Living creatures, as a rule, are lamentably partisan in the matter of their personal survival. Ants may be an exception. On evidence, I am not.

  In fact, I am clenched like a fist, as if around a treasure I feared to lose. But there is nothing in that fist. It is the feeling of clenching, the fist itself, that I know as I. When I open my hand, it will be gone. But lost?

  But ow, ow, oh, O, I’m not, I’m not ready! There are still so many things I wanted to learn. About death, yes. But not by dying, like every Tom, Dick, and Harry!

  I am the hunter who, bent over the lion’s tracks, feels its breath on the back of her neck.

  Of course, every hunter is taken down by a lion—of some species or other. It’s just that I had hoped to examine its tonsils, probe its caries, sample its carrion reek before the great jaws close. To answer the burning question that has been my life, before, before—

  What will become of my school?

  I will take a moment to compose myself.

  There.

  —before the fire goes out.

  I will take another moment.

  There. I am dying. I do not know why that should make me weep. Who isn’t dying?

  Yours,

  Corpse-in-Waiting Joines

  8. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  I have just spent a summer in my mother’s hand. I do not mean cupped in her palm, but inside the living meat and bone, which I knew was solid and yet was for me (and uniquely for me) a space, warmly flexile like a tent, where I could live. I did not at first recognize my surroundings; I had graduated without noticing it from my coffin-side vigil to a series of elastic passages down which I sprang, pulsing with energy and well-being. I was moving, as I eventually understood, from one finger to another. Sometimes, to please me, or to perform some job of work whose purpose I did not seek to learn, the whole hand flexed around me; I admired the smooth action of the joints; what joy to be jostled into service in a whole so admirably coordinate. It was summer and my mother’s hand because I loved it, and I lived in it for years that passed in moments, the moments in which I tell you this, dear listener, which are (like my mother’s hand) a sort of dacha within the country of the dead, a place of comfort, safety and intrinsic worth. Yes, I rest in the words about my mother’s hand as happily as in the hand itself, and that is so because they are the same thing, here.

  You should understand this, actually, because I live in your hand, too, as you type; your hands, I mean. You type, therefore I am. Of course my words come first. Or would I be speaking, if you were not listening? Perhaps it is only when you take down what I say that I say it, or am I getting confused again, about time?

  Fuck these perhapses!

  But I find I have one more: Perhaps you are the real author of this monologue. Then I am at your mercy, maybe. You might change a word, and with it change my fate, turn princes into frogs, ducks to donkeys. If the sky is origami for a moment, it might be because you said it was, though you could say that it was my idea and I’d believe it. Then you could say that it was your idea and I’d believe it. You could tell me everything I’m telling you, think I’m telling you, so that I swung, anguished, between belief and doubt, unsure whether I was inventing you, or you were inventing me, or some unholy mixture of the two. And we haven’t even talked about typos yet. Maybe even now you’re lifting your cramped fingers from the keys, stretching your hands out before you, studying them, thinking, Those are my hands, and Ha ha ha I am fooling them all. You rub your eyes, your toes curling inside your hard shoes, stuff a fold of skirt under your nates to soften the seat, return your fingers to the keys. Taptaptap.

  Of course you do not and could not do that while taking down this account of them, but a little before, or a little after. Maybe you thought, I will say that I am doing these things, and then I will do them, or else, I did those things, and now I will describe them. But why do them at all, having described them? Why describe them, having done them? If intent on carrying out a hoax, why allow the suspicion to arise that you are feeding me my lines?

  “. . . you are feeding me my lines,” you type, and you are quite correct, I am. What am I but a ventriloquist making her puppet say, “I am a ventriloquist, and the person whose hand is up my skirt is my puppet.” Why I should do that, heaven knows. One has these little fantasies of impotence. In any case it has probably fooled nobody.

  Are you receiving? Your lamp burns low, but there is enough light to see the ranked disjecta in their cubbies on the wall, though not to read the neat, small lettering on the label underneath each one. Your stomach groan
s; inside it roil the unrecognizeable relicts of a slice of bread with butter and a cup of milky tea. Soon you will need to take illegal advantage of a pause to dash to the close chamber, straining your ear all the way down the hall for the sound of my voice.

  The office door rattles dully in the frame and you look up. Someone is coming—no, the tension drains from your shoulders and you return to your work, it is only the customary bustle as day gives way to night, the doors opening and closing, the ovens roaring, dishcloths slapping, water splashing, brushes clattering into sinks, voices rising, querulous and brusque. Outside the great rivers of wind rush unceasingly over the slates, birds flick their shadows across the gravel drive, shrubs rub, over and over, the same spot on the wall, but I do not know if this is real, or ever was. I do not know if I once lived, then died, and now live on—not live, but do whatever I am doing here—talk on, that’s it—or if I ever lived at all. I do not know if anyone ever lived at all, including you. Including her. Her solid knees bristling with fair stubble. Her soft white belly with its furry, light brown birthmark. Her neck cross-creased and red-brown in back. Her bluish gray [crackle, audio break]—

  I turn a corner in my eyes and find myself in a shack. A shed, actually. Actually I recognize it. Tufts of fur scud into the corners, or tug, trying to scud, at a splinter. The hutch is empty, but still pebbled with droppings. The innocent droppings. My lungs swell with all the howls I have forbidden myself. Then I toughen. Rabbits, I tell myself, fall like raindrops from other, bigger rabbits. Left alone, they would drown us all. The metaphor is extravagant but has its strong points. A mature domesticated long-haired rabbit, as for instance a Lionhead or Angora, does resemble a cloud. A Himalayan or Belgian hare naturally does not. But I digress.

  In one of the hutches the girl Finster is hiding.

  No [static], it is the rabbit I called Lady Tendertoes.

  No [static], it is a coil of rotting rope.

  No, it is a wig of human hair, a wasp nest, an apple pandowdy, a sharp cry cut short, a peacock, a telegraph operator, the fingernails of a dead man. No, I am getting confused.

  Am I [static] dead? [static]

  No, but the longer I stay here, the harder it is to tell the difference, by which I mean, to tell the time, to keep time moving along at the usual clip, so that I don’t get bored, or maybe so that I don’t get interested, maybe it’s getting interested that’s fatal, that’s a new idea. Maybe death is just stopping to get a better look at the world, that might be true, better not test it, better keep going, it’s what the living do. But time keeps slipping out of my grasp, it feels too heavy to budge, and at the same time too light.

  You know, when I have spent too much time with the timeless, the idea that things happen one after another, each causing the next in line, like a row of dominoes, strikes me as bizarre. Dominoes can fall two ways. So can effects cause causes, turn back the turning points, fold the unfolding and stack it for storage.

  So I open the door of the shed, though I feel a moment of surprise—why did I expect it to be locked?—and am back in my school. I cross the upper landing and pass down the hall, my feet crying across the wooden floor, thus. Thus the walls hold themselves upright, leaning away from me a trifle, as if offended and pretending not to notice me. At the end of the hall the window is a pewter badge of light: flat, phlegmatic. I am in no doubt about where I am going and so the door is where I knew it would be and I open it. A fly zings out [static], bangs into my left eye, then reels heavily away, thus, and the momentary pain is thus.

  Within, the door handle is fought over by sycophants eager to persuade me that they anticipated my entry. I give the handle an extra push as I relinquish it and have the gratification of seeing the door rap the forehead of the contest winner, one Mr. Mallow, junior administrator in training, whose smug expression gives way to indignation, then is forcibly reestablished, despite the red ridge rising on his forehead.

  But I have seen it all before.

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  I was lying in my bed, putting in a little extra practice. That morning while suffering through laryngeal maneuvers I had felt something pressing up from inside my throat and all my hair had stood up on my arms, for I thought I had a ghost at last. It was only a belch. How the little ones had laughed, while the great girls rolled their eyes—“Disgusting!” one had said, and another choked out, “But my dear!”—pause to retch into a hankie—“We must make allowances for her background!”

  The Headmistress, who was by chance quite close enough to hear, snapped, “I do not know what that is supposed to mean, when we all have the same background: the long, long march of the dead.” It was an unlooked-for kindness, but I had much rather she had not said it, for I saw how the girls’ merriment turned to vitriol. Later, at lunch in the refectory, they had all crowded together at the end of the bench, squabbling for the position farthest from me, while I stabbed my cutlet again and again with my fork.

  But here in the dark my recalcitrant flesh seemed to spume away. I was only a darker patch of darkness, a shade among shadows. I parted my lips, lowered what I hoped was my larynx—

  “Grandison!” my neighbor Jarndyce hissed. “Stop making revolting noises in your throat. Haven’t we all had enough of that today?”

  “I am practicing,” I said calmly. “You would be wise to do the same. You may have the advantage of me today, but my endeavor will outlast your talent. And when you are as far below me as I am below you now, you may pray that I have forgotten how you spoke to me tonight.”

  She gave a little laugh. “Oddity!” she called me, but in an uncertain tone, so that I felt that I had triumphed.

  Again I marveled at my own fluency, which was not achieved by force of will but came of its own accord when I reposed and even forgot myself. Then the words came trippingly. Was that what was meant by listening with one’s mouth? I curled my hand into a trumpet and pressed it silently to my lips. That made me remember the chth, and fumbling in the darkness I opened my one small drawer, opened the folded piece of paper I found there and tried once more without success to imagine what a “hole in the air, to blow through” might feel like. I felt nothing. Whimsically, I raised that nothing to my mouth.

  The next morning, I stood like an organ pipe between McCaughey (a little taller than I) and Ramshead (a little shorter) on the gravel drive before the school. Dawn kindling the parallel center parts in our smeared-back hair, still damp at the temples from the washbasin. Cold marbling white arms with purple, pinking elbows. My own were ashy though I had been surreptitiously dabbing them with butter from my breakfast roll, putting off the day I would have to ask someone—Miss Dearth, perhaps, or one of the colored maids—where I might get some lotion.

  A nosebleed bloomed, exciting a brief commotion down the line. I did not move. My stiff new uniform stood out all around me. It seemed to contain a larger, invisible person, within whom I was trespassing.

  “Say ah!” A hundred holes opened in the day. One chin trembled, one head dropped; a tap under the chin with a ruler lifted it.

  The stepped façade was a hot red against what was left of the night. The flush slid down its face. The foot of the building was still in twilight, as were we. Was it chance that the Headmistress opened the door at the very moment the sun reached it? She looked like a golden icon in a shrine.

  Mr. Behalf went down the rows, inserting a tongue depressor into each open mouth as we tried to translate into concrete action his murmured suggestions (“Speak in the other direction,” “Hush out loud”). I heard gagging sounds from Dixon, Wang, McCaughey. Now Mr. Behalf had reached my place; the tongue depressor was inserted into my mouth and pressed firmly down. I tried, as I had already tried a hundred times, to “find my other lungs,” hollowing the back of my throat in an effort to open it onto an elsewhere. I felt nothing but the roughish wood pressing down my tongue and a slight impulse to gag, which I warded off by sheer force of will. A chance thought flashed through
my head—something about the right amount of flour to thicken a gravy; I saw my fingers softly brushing together, letting the flour sift between them to alight on the bubbling surface of the syrupy, almost black pan drippings—a humdrum image, but wrong in some way. What was it? Oh yes, the fingers I saw were a blotchy beige, not my own brown. And then I no longer felt the tongue depressor, but something else: a voice, a word, or rather a name, pressing up through my throat, as real as a shoe.

  “Algernon!” I shrieked.

  I did not know an Algernon.

  I saw McCaughey and O’Donnell scowling as the others gathered around me, clapping my shoulders and blowing in my ears in the sanctioned celebration of a new ghost speaker. The Headmistress nodded approval. My mouth continued to enumerate Algernon’s shortcomings—“you low-down moocher, you phony, you bootlegging, womanizing . . .”

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  On Play

  I am not sure that any games played at the Vocational School really deserved that appellation. Most of the organized activities of the school were calculated, so far as I could tell, to instill a keen sense of the insignificance of the individual and the flimsiness of his or her claim to existence. Skill was not usually a consideration, nor was fun, so I was surprised, one afternoon, to hear the merry sounds of children at play rising from the field where calisthenics were ordinarily performed to grim silence or groans. I had been strolling in the sculpture garden; now I started pushing my way out through its perimeter hedges toward the playfield, dealing good-humoredly with the inevitable scratches, for my spirits were lifted by the prospect of seeing the wretches romping.