Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  Well, that was fun while it lasted, or terrible, whichever, doesn’t matter, I didn’t believe a word of it, not really.

  It seems to me that it has been some time since I last spoke. Excuse me, I was burning. The fire has taken on a somewhat different quality. I have the feeling that burning is a kind of work that I am doing as carefully and thoroughly as I can. A stoker whose fuel is her own body, I am seeking out patches of skin that are not yet burnt and burning them. The idea that the fire will eventually go out, no matter what I do, leaving my work unfinished, fills me with despair. But all this strikes an insufficiently odd note that leads me to wonder if the fire is not actually a tasteless and revolting metaphor for some quite different thing on which I am likewise obliged to work without satisfaction or conclusion, and into which I have been shoveling not just myself but everything and everyone I could reach.

  At this the fire as if offended leans away from me, refusing my tinder, and I am conscious of a pang of loss. Pang. Ridiculous word. Is it a pang you feel when your heart is yanked from its socket? I cannot coax a single spark to flourish on me, and the fire goes out like a life.

  Now I stand in the place where the fire was. The shed, I suppose, though burned to the ground—a shed without a shed, just as I am a person without a person, the mere site of a demolition—and almost before I think to make up the shortfall, a shed sketches itself in around me, then goes up like a torch. These flames too die. A new fire arises: I hop hastily in, declining to examine it too stringently for inconsistencies. It too goes out, even faster than the one before.

  I pass now through a very quick succession of fires, not identical, but sharing many features, though in this one the flames are more like snow, in this like hair, and in this one burning is like breathing, and in this it is like walking a long way.

  I am drawn to wire and fire, but fire is winning. So I am my father’s daughter after all!

  But after every conflagration comes the snuffing out, a sooty emptiness that begins to seem just as important as the flames, and even in a sense the truth of them, so that as I burn I seem already charcoal, already ash, swirling without purpose or emotion on an immaterial hearth.

  Sometimes I rekindle the fire myself, holding a match to a pile of dung-soiled straw or a marbled page torn from a book. Sometimes another does me that service. Usually, I burn alone. Sometimes, others burn with me: my mother, my rabbits, little Emily Culp. In one, hyperbolic and quickly dismissed, my mother is hanging while she burns. Now it is the girl Finster in the shed, and I am turning the key in the lock. Now she is roosting on a nest of flames, undressed by flames, her hair a brighter light. I recognize the phoenix, symbol of rebirth, and see that it is also a symbol of redeath, suffering both prolonged and repeated, and my approval turns to anguish as her skin blackens, as her limbs stiffly bend and reach, as she turns to charcoal and still burns, and this time when the fire goes out it feels like mercy.

  At the same time as I pass through the fires, I see them as if from the outside, arranged in a line, along the path I have taken, and stretching into the distance. They go back, way back to the first fire, First Fire, and that should be capitalized, secretary, because that is how I think of it now, as the First Fire, a sort of institution and deserving of the dignity of a title, and not only because it is superior in size and brightness and some other, indescribable quality that it might be precipitate to call “reality.”

  However, as soon as I think that, I make out what was at first lost in its glare: other, more distant fires preceding it, whose light strengthens and steadies as I grow more convinced of their reality, until I cannot see how I ever doubted it. So the First Fire is not the first, nor can I perceive any first, only a series receding into infinite distance. Which is peculiar, to say the least, but I shall not dwell on it, especially now that I see who is in the fire with me this time.

  “I didn’t kill her, actually, if I remember correctly,” my father said. “Well, perhaps in a manner of speaking. But I couldn’t explain that to you. You were a literal-minded child. You are a literal-minded woman, I think.” There was something strange about his voice, I noticed. It seemed to me from his manner that he was speaking very loudly yet dispassionately, as one might speak to a colleague through an everyday din, and yet I could hardly hear him. Nor was there any din, naturally, except that of my heart, when I reminded it to beat.

  “Absurd,” I said. “If you were not guilty of her murder, you would not kill yourself in remorse.” But already I half believed him, already the tremendous chords of my mother’s death were dying out, leaving nothing behind but an absurd person, myself, sitting in a chair, listening to echoes and pretending she was somewhere else.

  “What?” he said. He bent to examine his shoe, then held up a finger and squinted at it. My father was losing interest in me. In himself?

  Suddenly I saw what was happening. I held in my keeping the only self my father had left; my hatred was all that had kept him from drifting away. (How could I of all people forget that the dead too die?) In vain I sought to draw him back, flaunting my yet unblackened patches, in order to appeal to his sense of duty, of work left undone; now I was like a rejected lover displaying in desperation the charms that no longer held any magic.

  My mother was already gone, had never been real, as it now seemed.

  A rabbit flounced by, a constellation of sparks smoldering in its fur. I sought to bring it to my father’s attention with gestures, to issue a terrible invitation, all the while attempting with the intensity of my gaze to hold my father and bind him, as he would bind himself if he took up the garrotte I showed him, already draped around the rabbit’s neck, no, not draped, sunk deep in its neck, its trailing end stiff with dried blood on which a single persistent fly was dully trying and failing to settle, denied a place among the more vigorous flies that teemingly beaded the black blood on the rabbit’s coat and outlined its eyes with glittering kohl, for now I saw that the rabbit was already dead and decaying despite its animation.

  And when I turned back to my father a doubt struck me: Was it even he? The upper lip seemed shorter, the forehead higher, the pouches under his eyes more pronounced; a patch of hair under the chin bespoke a carelessness in shaving uncharacteristic of his punctiliousness; the smell of burning that I should have thought would never leave me was gone, replaced by an astringent, medicinal smell that reminded me of nothing at all.

  And now I wondered a worse thing, whether my father was kind, had always been kind, would never hurt me and thus never by doing so bind me to him and himself to me. Whether I had no hold on him, whether he was already turning away from me, gathering himself in, with unspeakable, intolerable mildness was becoming something I could not name because it was the end of names.

  But without my father’s cruelty, what was I? Was I to be left with nothing?

  Well, exactly.

  Now there is another flurry of fires, but they are not at all credible, cellophane and wind machines, spotlights and colored gels; they seem cynical, even sarcastic, and I dismiss them with an impatient gesture, brushing the tepid sparks off my unscorched skirts with a few quick strokes.

  Perhaps I, too, am losing interest. The story that I have been telling myself is in pieces, and I am holding the shears. Call me Atropos. Or call me quits, for if in death no time can pass, then terrible as all these figments are, their order and thus their meaning is not fixed. Fires can erect factories, then, and bring forth fathers. Nooses can give dead mothers life. Sisters, for that matter, can take hearses home from potter’s fields, and green sheets spread themselves on decent beds, and husbands lie down under them beside their wives. A blow from a coal hod can rouse a corpse to life, and pens can suck the words they wrote right off the page, and leave all blank, and white, and innocent, and unharmed. And then goodbye to guilt and grief, and oh yes, pride and hope and yearning too. Goodbye to clever fingers tapping keys, for I have not forgotten you, but I will.

  Because I am not so su
re, after all, that I will be coming back, in any form that you would recognize.

  Somehow I had forgotten that death was no more lasting than life, that it was just one more misconception in the series that would, not culminate, there could be no culmination, but return again to life, and still not stop there, but keep right on through other, future deaths, and whether or not the dying finally perceived that death was simply another turn of the wheel made no difference, since understanding this was only another moment of temporary paralysis in the streaming.

  I was going into something that I did not understand, for all my studies, but I had not failed. Understanding was the business of living, it was not what one did with death, death was not understandable, not because it was mysterious, or withheld its meaning, but because it did not address itself to the organ of understanding.

  But even this understanding is leaving me now.

  The flames are already nothing. The garrotte. Rid myself of that, too. The blood-soaked paw. Dispose of it. How cold the lack of air on my face as I see that one can learn to live without anything, even pain.

  Learn to die, I mean.

  And so it melts away—the world, in all its pride of seeming. All that is solid and sullied becomes air, by which I mean breath, by which I mean words. And I am running, my feet (I have feet?) sinking into marshy ground, it feels marshy, but there are no cattails, no frogs or herons, it looks like bread sauce, like chewed paper, a sauce of paper, across which as far as I can see leads, why not, a line of slushy footprints, smaller than the ones that I myself leave behind me as I steer my (as I see when I glance back) unnaturally straight course to the horizon line, it really is a line, inked, not perfectly straight, a blot troubles it here and there, soaking into the sky, but I don’t know why I speak of the unnatural, it is all unnatural here, or natural, depending on your opinion of Homo sapiens, but it is certainly surprising, the straightness of my path, since it gives evidence of uninterrupted progress toward my goal, when I was under the impression that I had been tracing labyrinthine paths through sub-sub-basements and in and out of closets for an eternity. Of course, like all histories, it may have been concocted retrospectively, to tell a story calculated to please me better than that other, but if so it hardly matters, here all stories are true stories, until another story controverts them, taking its turn in the light of truth. The most important story here, for me, with my face now turned toward the future, is the one that the footprints before me tell, that the girl is still ahead of me, stomping into a future of her own. I even imagine that I perceive, looking at her prints, something of her character—stubbornness, curiosity, pride. She is a page away, no more, maybe less, maybe a paragraph away, a sentence—

  I see her! It’s her! There can be no doubt! The sharp shoulders slightly hunched, the chin jutting, the stiff black hair sticking out in pigtails of which the left one is coming undone—

  No, it’s no good. I try to catch her in a sentence, like this: “Here she is!” or “I see her!” or “Lo!” but either she is immune to invention, she alone in this world of figments, or my power to invent is flagging, or was never as great as I thought it was, or I simply do not believe my own lies anymore, or all of these things, or something else I have not thought of.

  But wait! I see her now!

  No, I am lying again. It is a bag of sand on a passing wagon, it is the light on a thrashing bush, it is a flock of birds or a colony of bats or a swarm of bees or a herd of dik-diks, each a slightly different hue, like daubs of paint, coming together entirely by accident, to compose the figure of a girl who squats to examine something on the ground, she is in no hurry, then stands, now she runs a little, she is using these words as stepping-stones, they give under her weight, slightly, springily, she is not very heavy, but even before I can finish this description, she has leapt to the next one, in which I mention, now, the white dust rising up around me, and is running on ahead of me; the light is shining on her and is part of her, she is not me, she is not me, it is what I like about her, that she is not me, but maybe she is me after all, or maybe it’s that I’m not me either. Dust rising. Sky lowering. Paper sauce sucking my feet, paper wind wrapping around my face, white dust falling, in my mouth, in my eyes, in my bones. Even if I were to say I saw her, how could I ever believe it?

  I sit down.

  I have the impression that I sit for a long time.

  I shall not bother with the usual tired caveats: if one may speak of time, et cetera.

  A white cat appears and sits beside me for a while, then lollops off, long ears glowing persimmon orange with a sourceless light.

  From time to time I seem to hear someone saying that all this has been cruel and pointless and for that reason has value. It has the stench of truth. But I am not sure what exactly all this designates. It may not matter. Surely I would be justified in taking all to mean all.

  I doubt it, though.

  And what is meant by value, that is another question.

  Another interesting communication: That the dead do not speak, that every word they seemed to say to me, all those years, was in fact said by myself, to myself. Naturally this perturbs me. But I rally, because if I am the only one speaking, then there is certainly no reason to believe everything I hear; I am capable of telling a lie, as I have good reason to know. But I am not quite easy in my mind, for am I not here relying on the claim in order to dismiss it?

  Another communication follows close upon the last, varying only slightly: that all this has been deception, pure deception from the start, and for that reason true.

  But although if I could trust this dictum (whether or not I understood it) I might take some consolation in it, I am not quite easy in my mind about it. For I could probably come out with any number of similar formulae myself, without meaning anything by them—that I am cruel, and for that reason kind; that I do not exist, and this is my soundest credential; that I shall never succeed, and this is the only hope for me, et cetera, et cetera, you get the picture.

  That I can say these things does not mean that they are not true, however.

  Or does it?

  I don’t feel well.

  Don’t feel well, what nonsense. I feel nothing. The feelings have fallen away with the stories. Gone the rebellious, conniving, or sycophantic underlings, the desperate acts, narrow escapes, flood, fire, blood. I am in my last story, I think. My burial plot, you might say. It is very simple. You know this story. Everyone knows it. It goes like this: I’m going to die.

  [static] I’m going to die! [static]

  Page white eye white lying still lying half sunk in marsh of chewed paper. Wind with its burden of dust and ash of old bones old books sifting ceaselessly over my face, white falling across a white sky dust falling sideways left to right, ceaselessly. I remain where I stopped (apparently), sunk in a cavity my own shape, my face turned upward offering to the heavens (heavens! Really, Sybil) my mouth still speaking, thus. There is little room for me between white and white, not cold not hot lukewarm no wind no calm, particles of ash clinging to a screen white hair not mine curling in air forming letters of no words in an Arabic without origins. Great piles of gray, ground bones ground books piles of white of salt of teeth or again ash the blind eye of the sky sees me without a pupil stares down blinkless all dry white fire falling through my bones sand through an hourglass whisper of scales on sand of sand ghosting off the knife-sharp crest of dune, sun with no source, sun with no sun, sun that is everywhere, sun that I am, beats in my bones, wind that is no wind, wind that is everywhere, on which I am carried while lying still, hoots through my bones, hisses and whistles in my womb, near me an animal pink of snout is gnawing with yellow tooth on a sardine can or tobacco tin the repetitive sound like the sound of my blood in my ears, wruhh wruhh wruhh, perhaps the child is in the tin, what child, I forget, no there is nothing in the tin. Near me a dress full of air gesticulates slowly and near me an empty hat drops onto the sand with a soft sound. I try to roll over. Perhaps
I roll over. I roll over. Yes. Good. Now my face is half in the sand. Good. One eye is full of sand. Good. It sees no less than the other one. Sand flows into my mouth, slowly, with overlapping swells, I let it come. Each grain a soul. I am content to be among them no more nor less than they. My throat fills with sand, apparently I do not need to breathe, not yet, or not at all, not anymore. Is this what I want, I ask myself, and I answer, near enough. The witch has caught up with Nix Naught Nothing after all.

  But there is something still bothering me. Some bug in my eye, some sliver in my thumb. As everything else dishevels and softens and falls open, Finster still sticks in my craw.

  And then I see her. After all, it is this simple: If I say so, it is true.

  She is right in front of me. Write that down. It is Eve Finster. Here she is. Eve Finster. I see her. Eve is her name. She is crouching in the margins, crumpling the paper a little; she is ink-stained around the mouth and fingers, as you are, dear secretary. She is holding something in her cupped hands. It appears to be moving.

  I perceive that it is a world.

  I get up. I creep toward it.

  These invented worlds have a leaning toward catastrophe. If you have visited a gallery of coin-operated mechanical marvels you will have seen how the little skeletons do bounce out of coffins and closets and holes in the ground. So I know what to expect. Flames and rabbits and piano wire. Or a woman in black, holding a coal hod, a dumbwaiter open behind her.