Some Possible Solutions

by Helen Phillips

  The wind pushes against the truck like a giant palm. Thomas and I have a duet of muttering and cursing and hoping as he steers past Field 3.

  “There!” Thomas shouts.

  They’re not running anymore, they’re standing in the dead center of Field 5 like aliens awaiting their long-lost spaceship.

  And I begin to panic for real. I’ve known all along, with a mother’s knowledge, that they’ll survive the tornado. They’ve done more daredevil things than I can count, things involving sleds, tire swings, train tracks, this disregard for their physical safety another hint of what they really are, but I’ve never considered the possibility that they might leave me. That they might actually pick up and head back to wherever they came from. They’re mine, through and through, and I don’t care a bit about the rules of some other planet—I’ve loved them and raised them with the best love there can be on any end of the universe, so help me.

  In the height or depth of my labor, when everything was blurry and impossible, when I was vomiting and humming and the sky was day and night and day and night at the same time, I found myself suddenly calm, perched on a narrow precipice of calm, and here they came, luminous twin bubbles floating toward me in a beam of green light that overmastered the hospital’s fluorescence, and I opened my mouth and the beam sizzled on my tongue and deposited there its greenish gift and I swallowed the two elegant bubbles, and the calm was gone and I had to hum and hurt and hum and hurt for a while longer, and then they were stuck, halfway in and halfway out, and the nurse said, Feel the head! Feel the head!, and I felt a head, and it felt sublime, it felt wrong to feel a head coming out of yourself like that, and then they were born all at once, both of them within ninety seconds, my tiny perfect children, a detonation in my heart. I’ll never know what happened to the other pair of twins I carried for nine months, whether the aliens infected them with their alien souls, or whether they replaced them altogether, or whatever.

  But anyway, from that very first instant, I was fierce about them. The clichés don’t begin to do it justice—I’d throw myself in front of any bus, I’d give them every garment off my back, I’d drain myself dry over and over again, forever, gladly.

  Though Bill and Lill have never needed such gestures from me. They’ve been self-sufficient from the get-go, they’ve always owned themselves. Sure, they’re affectionate enough with us—they’ll nuzzle up against us when they get drowsy, and when they were babies they’d crawl over to us croaking Mamama Dadada in their brand-new voices. But there’s always been a line in the sand, a not-needing, as though we’re just icing on the cake. When they were toddlers they’d pick things up off the floor, a piece of thread or a crumb, and slowly, blissfully examine whatever it was for so long that I got scared. No matter how many times I called their names, they remained focused, showering the pebble, the key, the spoon with more attention than they’d ever shown me or Thomas. And when they sleep, their faces become so still and solemn, their limbs so shiny, that I can tell they’re traveling far away, to ingest the mercury or radiation or whatever it is they need.

  Here, now, in the middle of Field 5, they laugh up at the tornado like bullies, their broad white collars plastered to their skinny necks. Thomas parks the truck askew and we leap out and run across the field with the wind pushing us forward, and I feel hot and cold, hot and cold, and they’re waving at us like we’ve just showed up for a picnic. A tennis racket swirls above them, a frying pan, a flowerpot. We’re halfway to them when the wind flips on us and then it becomes as hard as walking in a rowdy crowd. We have to elbow our way toward them, but I don’t mind fighting through something to get to them, I always feel that way anyhow.

  They’re holding hands, hopping up and down, the wind blurring their faces, twisting and torturing every sound they make.

  “NA!” Lill screams.

  “DO!” Bill screams.

  “TOR!”

  “NA!”

  “DO!”

  The exact second I realize, with knee-weakening relief, that it’s human syllables they’re shouting—it’s right then that the sheet of corrugated metal shoots across Field 5, shoots as if someone shot it from a gun, it comes so swift and sudden, bisecting the field, skimming fast toward Bill and Lill, slicing the slim bellies of my aliens. I grab my own midsection, it’s as though I myself have been cut, my dress ripped open, my gut ripped open—the twins sink to the ground, blood seeping out all around them, I’m beside them as if by magic, as if I teleported the twenty feet dividing me from them, I’m trying to gauge how badly they’re damaged, I’m holding the pieces of them together, the flaps of skin beneath her sliced pinafore, his sliced suspenders, Bill’s wound in my left hand, Lill’s in my right. It’s not for nothing I took those nursing classes—quickly I determine that their cuts are not as deep as they seem, which is a very good thing, because I have no way to acquire transfusions of alien blood, this gooey blood with its uncanny glow, my hands all syrupy now with its brightness.

  They aren’t crying—another hint, as if any more are needed—but instead gaze up at me with strained, shocked, enormous eyes. Their lean arms, their lean legs, small bleeding stars against the wheat and the dirt. We’re crouched down so low to the ground that the wind can’t find us.

  “Are we dead?” Lill wants to know.

  “Not at all!” I tell her. “Not even a little bit.”

  “Mamamama,” Bill says.

  “Billyboy,” I say. “Lillylady.”

  Only then do I remember Thomas. I look over my shoulder, assuming he’s inches behind me, his hands itching to comfort and to hold. But he’s still twenty feet back, down on his knees, his arms crisscrossed over his chest.

  It’s the blood, the first-ever sight of the blood, that’s done it. Never mind that I’ve been telling him. Never mind that they need him now, that we need to carry them back to the truck and make our way through the tornado and get home, where I can sew them up just fine and give them hot dogs with jam and put them to bed so they can visit their galaxy and fetch whatever it is they need to survive.

  “Thomas!” I shout. I know he’s the easygoing kind of guy who can adjust to anything. Why else would I have married him? Life is long. “Come here, T.”

  But he’s stuck. He’s staring at them like they are wrong.

  Noticing (noticing, they’re always noticing) their daddy’s dread, Lill and Bill meet his stare.

  “Daddy?” they request.

  But he stays put.

  “Daddy,” I command.

  “They’re glowing.” He’s shaking his head.

  “Who’s glowing?” Lill says.

  “And their blood is green.” He blinks too many times.

  “Whose blood is mean?” Bill says.

  “Yeah, they’re aliens,” I try to mouth to him so they won’t understand. But nothing gets past those two.

  “Aliens,” they murmur, looking down at themselves in wonder, examining their smudged limbs.

  “You won’t melt,” I yell at Thomas, whose arms remain crossed over his chest. “You won’t die or be poisoned or turn into an alien or anything.”

  He keeps staring.

  “Believe me,” I say, “I’ve tried everything. I’ve tasted their saliva and licked their eyelids. I’ve swallowed bits of their hair and I’ve spread their snot on my forearms.”

  Bill and Lill laugh that same mysterious laugh they’d laughed at my belly button when they were little. They’d crawl over to me and pull up my shirt and put their lips against my belly button as though they were doing mouth-to-mouth. Another hint, of course—that fascination with and amusement at their humble human mother.

  Still on his knees, Thomas leans away from their laughter.

  “Their skulls,” he chokes.

  “Whose skulls?” Lill stops laughing to ask him this, almost coldly.

  “Who’s dulls?” Bill echoes.

  I know what Thomas means. Times like this, when they get laughing, you can see the blood vessels on their foreheads s
welling, pulsing eerily.

  But those pulsing heads are resting exquisitely against my hip bones and my fingers are pinching together the flaps of their sliced tummies as tight as tight can be.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say to him.

  I look down at my two, my Bill and my Lill, and see that they have already forgiven him, that they’ve already forgiven me, that their forgiveness stretches backward and forward toward a distant universe.

  Thomas, though, keeps his arms crossed over himself until the moment when he lets the wind knock him onto all fours, and he crouches there in Field 5 like a beast, an earthly creature through and through.

  And then, slowly, crawling beneath the force of the wind, he comes toward us, hand knee hand knee hand knee hand knee hand, until his fingertips touch the oozing, shimmering blood that’s already begun to turn the soil into a new kind of mud.

  THE WORST

  Other, terrible things had happened, but this was the worst: a Friday night and we had free tickets to either a 6:30 or 8:30 movie, so, after meeting on a frigid street corner beside a cold golden statue of either a pregnant woman or a bull, we went to the theater and discovered that one movie was about child prostitutes in Bangladesh and the other was silent. Don’t get us wrong, we like silent movies, but already the world was silent enough. It had been silent for days now. Even though the pretty girl at the counter assured us: There will be music, there will be live music, a live musician, still the word “silent” stuck with us and we couldn’t bear it so we left. Abandoned by our plans, our images of “a movie in Manhattan,” maybe “dinner at a diner afterward,” we had nothing to cling to but our swiftly fading conviction that we could make fun anywhere, out of anything, like people who make love in the laundry room or station wagon. We walked up the cold boulevard commenting on dresses in store windows (but it was too cold to look at such dresses, I had to turn away from the sight); we welcomed an alternate sight, the sight of a cathedral, until we noticed the men dying on the steps of it. They weren’t dying, not really, I guess, but then again we’re all dying. The dying men burrowed into dirty sleeping bags. Then: a hotel. Walk in like you own the place, like you don’t have holes in the crotch of your jeans where your thighs rub against each other, like your shoelaces aren’t dirty with dog shit, et cetera, like you’re wearing lipstick rather than Vaseline. You’ll see the lobby is made of pure gold. That vase containing a hundred burgundy roses—it takes up far more space in the world than you, it produces far more beauty than you, you shrink before it. Crumpled up this way, I ruined the illusion that we owned the place, now we’ll never know how much more gold, how many more roses, we might have seen in the bathrooms off the lobby; we left with aching bladders. There was one last thing we could do: a store where I had sometimes been known to purchase something like a normal person. Limping with failure, we approached that store. What it had was clothing of many colors and what I wanted was clothing of many colors. I fingered the sweaters. Help me, I beg of you, help me. It was then that it happened, right then, the worst part, my hand touching many different sweaters at once: royal blue, heather gray, bubblegum pink, traffic cone orange, despair. They play loud, confusing music in this store, music designed to alter the electricity that dictates your desires. It goes without saying: we left empty-handed. Don’t dare look back at the racks as you exit.

  HOW I BEGAN TO BLEED AGAIN AFTER SIX ALARMING MONTHS WITHOUT

  I saw her on the bus and she disgusted me even then. She was eating something out of a clear plastic container. Something white and liquidy, yet she was eating it with a fork. I could not tell what manner of thing it was. Animal? Vegetable? Mineral? There were small chunks in the white liquid. I imagined playing Twenty Questions with her. Does it involve tuna? Does it involve mayonnaise? Is it sweet? Is it salty? Is it meant to be served hot? Is it meant to be served cold? Is it kosher? She tipped the container toward herself as she ate and the white liquid started to drain out one corner onto her black nylon tracksuit. Eventually she noticed what she’d done and it brought a smile to her face. Not a smile of shame, I might add. When I once again looked over, she had something unidentifiable in her mouth, clenched between her teeth, about to be torn open. My intestines seized in horror—with what strange food would she confront us now? Slowly, though, I came to see the thing in her mouth for what it was: a small square packet containing a single wet wipe.

  But it was not only the white food; also I could tell she was having her period. Her face had that combined flush and pallor, at once swollen and sallow. Such an internal, indecipherable thing, you might think, yet I can always identify a menstruating woman, particularly in the unkind glare of public transportation after dark.

  All that, just on the bus, and meanwhile I had problems of my own.

  * * *

  And then, when it came time to switch to the train, she too got off the bus. She too climbed up all the many stairs to the elevated station. The outward-bound platform was abandoned but for me and her, the white substance now turning cold and flaky on her black tracksuit, surely giving off the odor of wet wipe combined with tuna fish—though I’d never dare get close enough to smell it myself. Across the tracks, on the inward-bound platform, a pair of teenagers kissed and clung to each other and kept warm. It was the first cold night. I tried not to be inordinately envious, except of the faux-fur-lined hoods on their jackets.

  I walked down the platform, away from the kids and away from her. Beneath the elevated station, the most enormous graveyard in the city. It stretched for blocks in every direction, releasing only negligible smells and sounds. A hint of grass in the process of freezing. The hum of a passing truck, miniature echoes among the tallest headstones. It was a grand place, the graveyard, and I liked to look out over it. I liked to search for headstones with my name on them; if the lettering was large, it was easy enough to read from the platform, and I’d found my surname more than once. But that was a game for daylight. Alongside the outer edge of the graveyard, a sports field with six towering fluorescent floodlights. The field seemed to float above the graves. The grass was still bright green. The shirts of the players glowed red and gold. It was hard not to mistake their far-off, anxious, screaming voices for the voices of young zombies emerged from the graveyard to play soccer.

  But get this: she had followed me all the way down to the dark end of the platform. She stood not more than eight feet from me. I should mention that she was pretty and young. I attempted to feel an affinity for her, an affiliation, but it was not possible. Too fresh in my memory was the image of her slimy fork and menstrual face. It seemed we ought to acknowledge each other, two young women amid all this desolation, but instead I looked away. In the distance, a suspension bridge stretched over gleaming black water. Not that I could see the water, since many ugly things blocked it, yet I could imagine it, dark and oily in the night, multicolored with the frenetic task of reflecting the city. Atop the enormous steel structure from which the suspension bridge hung: two blinking red lights. Usually it’s a lovely thing to see blinking lights from afar, yet these lights I did not enjoy; they did not blink at a pleasant pace. They should have gone blink—blink—blink, but instead they went blinkblinkblink. I turned my attention back to her. She stood there, motionless, perhaps staring at the blinking red lights. I leaned out over the track to check for the headlights of an approaching train. There they were, still several stations away. Perhaps she too leaned out over the track and spotted the remote train; whatever the cause, something changed, something compelled her, because suddenly she was stepping toward me. There was nothing to do but meet her eyes. As I mentioned, she was young and pretty, with a friendly face, and it was not as much of a strain to smile at her as I’d imagined. I awaited her innocuous question: Excuse me, do you have the time? Excuse me, how many stops to Sheepshead Bay? Excuse me, does this line connect to the B? Excuse me, is this the inbound or outbound? Excuse me, but where did you get those jeans?

  Watching her step closer, I wondered if we co
uld have been friends.

  Or maybe it would be something slightly less innocuous than a question—a statement. God, it’s cold. I saw you on the bus. Ah to be a teenager in love. Thank God the train’s coming. It’s creepy here by the graveyard.

  She stopped near enough that I could see the crusty whiteness at the corners of her mouth. I turned my gaze to her feet and anticipated her voice; high and cheery, I guessed.

  “I really” (high and cheery indeed) “grossed you out on the bus, didn’t I?”

  I looked up at her, disbelieving, my heart going swift and hard. How dare she notice, how dare she accuse me.

  “It’s one of my grandmother’s specialties, in case you were wondering.”

  Her eyes were bloodshot. I watched the poor capillaries doing the best they could. I prepared myself to inform her that she had not grossed me out at all. But then my heart started to mess around, as it had tended to do in recent months, shivering and jabbing inside me.

  “Anyway,” she continued, sparing me, “this is kind of awkward, but do you have a tampon I can borrow? I’m desperate.”

  First: I was right! Second: Where would she go to insert this tampon? Third: A tampon cannot be borrowed. Fourth: I had an unopened box in my bag. Fifth: I remembered him in the fluorescent drugstore asking me what was the point of buying tampons, given the situation.

  “Sure.” I attempted joviality. “As long as you promise not to return it.”

  She grinned. I laughed nervously.

  “I knew you’d be the right person to ask.” She said this in a scary, meaningful way, and my fingers were quivering as I unzipped my bag and pulled out the brand-new box of tampons and tried to break through the packaging. Meanwhile the train was approaching, she was staring at me, the plastic continued to defy me, I yanked out a pen, she stared at me like she knew something, I jabbed the pen at the plastic, the plastic gave way, I grabbed and peeled.