by Lydia Millet
My gaze hit the wall tiles. I’d thought they were so clean, but now I saw some of the caulked cracks between them contained lines of mildew. I’d get the maids in here first thing tomorrow, I’d get down on my own hands and knees … wait. My fingernails were almost as long as the toes. Hard to believe I hadn’t cut up my scalp with them while I was lathering. My gaze flicked back to the wall tiles and I saw a line of mildew was creeping up the grout.
It was visibly extending itself before my eyes, indeed all over the white surface of miniature tiles on the shower wall mildew was creeping along the lines of caulking. In a grid of right angles a black mold was spiking out farther and farther along the network of tiles, straight angles in every direction.
“What is this,” I said, “what is this,” and tore the curtain back without even turning the water off. Wait—the water had flooded, the floor was soaked, and everything was damp. A lightbulb flickered above the vanity. In passing I noticed the tub was full, backed up, the water a sludgy gray, and a rim of scum ran around the tub over the waterline. I panicked, throwing a towel around my middle, tying it over my chest—it too smelled stale, possibly moldy. I pulled the door open and ran out into the room: there were Will and Lena reading on the bed, pillows propped behind them, with a picture book open across their laps.
Relief: she was there. She was safe.
But all around us the room seemed to be changing, though I couldn’t put my finger on it at first.
“Goodnight, little house. Goodnight, mouse,” read Lena. Her voice was muffled.
“Goodnight, comb. Goodnight, brush,” read Will. His voice, too, sounded like it was coming through a barrier.
They looked relaxed, as I’d left them, but around the bed they lay on other features shifted and altered. The desk lamp turned off and on rapidly, at irregular intervals; dust piled on surfaces and then seemed to go away, as though either blown or wiped; an object vanished and reappeared somewhere else, a toy on the round table, a glass. They didn’t take notice. Through a chink in the drapes I saw flashes of light outside. But it was night, and there shouldn’t have been light on that ocean side—so I ran past the foot of the bed to pull the drapes open where the big picture window looked over the cliffs and sea.
And I saw it was day. But then it was night, again, night in the sky and rapidly back to day. Boats appeared on the surface of the water, both far and nearer, then disappeared in an eye-blink, only to reappear elsewhere; the sky switched from morning to midday to evening to night within the space of seconds, and then did it again—this time with different cloud formations, other ships.
“Will, Will! What’s happening?” I shrieked, turning to look at him and Lena where they sat with their backs against the headboard, their legs stretched out on the bedspread.
But they seemed to be walled off. When I leaned over the bed to reach out to them something in the air resisted me. I couldn’t punch through the space around them, though I tried, increasingly desperate. Lena and Will looked the same as ever but I could see my hair growing in front of my eyes, my hair was getting longer and longer on my shoulders, inch by inch it moved down the front of my shirt, my hairs were visibly lengthening.
My little girl was looking calmly at her picture book, touching the drawings. She looked so normal, just here, just the way she should be. But I—I looked up at myself in the mirror. There was an ominous element to the growth of my hair, the choppy, almost digital-looking growth of the ends, so fast it was visible to the naked eye. There was something badly wrong. I wasn’t myself, but the image of me.
Lena’s fingernails were normal where they lay on the bottom edge of the pages of her book, bitten off a bit but normal: Goodnight, nobody, said the text on the page.
Beneath my own lengthening fingernails a line of dirt crept, growing along with the keratin.
I’d seen this somewhere, I thought, seen this somewhere before.
“OK,” I said, and made myself take deep breaths, count slowly. One of the hypnotic visions or a vivid nightmare—in any case nothing physically real, that was clear from the nails, from the hair—impossibility. I had to figure out the rules of the nightmare; possibly I could control it and wake myself up. I turned my back on Will and Lena and walked to the window again, where birds appeared on the cliff edge and then flicked away. The grass was greener, yes, the ice melted and springtime was here, even the color of the ocean changed from gray to a bluer hue, even the color of the sky.
I heard a voice in the other bedroom and went back through the interior door, reluctant to let Lena and Will out of my sight but pulled there somehow—still, all this was an effect, wasn’t it? An effect, I remember telling myself as the light kept changing up around me, lights shifted and went from dark to dim to bright. It was disorienting. But part of me also worried that I’d been drugged again and this would turn out to be another kidnapping, so I made sure the chain was on the room door. Dream or not, lock the door, I said as I went. Dream or not, lock the door.
The voice was coming from my laptop, open on the bed where I’d left it during my shower. I came up beside it and I could see the screen: Ned’s face. It was a video call, his head in a window on the screen—talking to someone else as I came up, his face in profile, but he turned and looked at me.
“A little fast-forwarding,” he said.
“What? What do you mean?”
“I hit the fast-forward button,” he repeated. “Didn’t you see? The kid. Your boy in there. They’re not going so fast, are they? You’re all alone.”
They were at regular speed, I realized. But I was sped up.
“You’re growing old,” said Ned, and smiled again. “See?”
I looked down: new wrinkles on my hands. Old hands. Somehow I’d moved through time alone—and yet still I spoke at normal speed, or else I couldn’t have talked to Ned; I still thought normally. Didn’t I?
“It’s impossible,” I said, more to myself than him. “It’s just a bad dream.”
“That’s what you do with losers, right? Isolate them. You’re one of the losers, wifey.”
“But how—why are you doing this? I was cooperating, Ned. I did what you asked, didn’t I? I don’t get it.”
“I’ve got the primaries in a few weeks and I need my pretty wife where I want her. A mental case, alone and needy. Makes them do what they’re told. Obedient. And a nice little bereavement in the family. Sympathy vote’s the icing on the cake. I look good in black. Well. I look good in everything.”
“A bereavement?”
“I took your time from you. You’ve missed a whole lot. Just take a look.”
Outside the picture window the sun was bright. Gnats and flies hung in the air. There were bunches of grass near the edge of the cliff and they were full green, bowing and dancing in the breeze.
“Ain’t we got fun?” said Ned.
Doris Day was singing it in the background. Not much money, oh but honey, ain’t we got fun … There’s nothing surer: the rich get rich and the poor get children …
I had a cold feeling. I was brittle as bone.
Had he made me a ghost?
I’d disappeared—I’d gone, slipped out of being like water down a drain. Was my girl alone now? Was Will looking after her?
“Like I said, we’re going out today,” he said. “We have a public appearance. Believe me, darlin’, it’s easier if you don’t fight it. Don’t get yourself all bothered. You won’t get anywhere, I promise. You’re confused, sure. You’re a sick woman. You’re weak. But it won’t be forever. You don’t have to go on that much longer like this. Just do what I say. OK? Put on the gown.”
I looked behind me and saw a black dress laid out on the second bed.
“I’ll see you outside,” he said. “Be on your good behavior, now. You see what I can do.”
His face went gray and for some reason I reached out and touched the screen softly. But it wasn’t warm, and fine dust came off on my fingertips. The laptop wasn’t even on. I raised my face: Lena
and Will were standing in the doorway. Will wore a suit and Lena’s eyes were puffy.
We weren’t in the motel at all but in my parents’ house; I stood in my old bedroom. There was a rush of confusion that was almost a thrill, almost velocity. Then it stilled. Here was my corkboard with its colored pushpins and ribbons. PARTICIPANT. The air was humid and close; my parents had never had central air. I heard my father’s voice: they never “held with it.” I was wearing the black dress now, I saw, glancing down—no memory of changing into it—and toe-pinching black shoes with heels so high I could barely walk on them. I’d never have picked out those shoes.
I wouldn’t struggle. Don’t fight it, Ned had said sleazily. But it did hurt more if you struggled.
Prey animals had the sense to play dead.
So I leaned down and picked Lena up, though her weight made me stagger on the too-thin heels. But she was real and solid. I knew from her red eyes that she’d been crying and I squeezed her hard, maybe too urgently. Had all of us been frozen there? Had we all been suspended on Ned’s whim, or only me? I tried to see if Lena looked older … I was flailing. It was possible, faintly possible that her face was more angular suddenly, but whatever slight change I might imagine wasn’t obvious like my long talons. I tried to keep them from scraping her back as I held her; I’d rip them off. They were like parasites on me.
“Mommy, I’m hot,” complained Lena.
I put her down and as I turned away bit at the longest nail, ripped the white edge of a thumbnail off with my teeth. But then—they weren’t long anymore.
And the hairs on my legs? I leaned down to look beneath my tights. They were black tights, semi-sheer, and I could see no hairs through them. The skin on my calves was smooth. I straightened up again and was holding out my hands, looking at them dazedly, when Ned appeared behind Lena in the hall. He wore a black suit, true to his word, and a silver-gray tie, and looked like he’d stepped off the pages of a magazine.
“My father,” I said, and it hit me whose death this was—I wasn’t the ghost after all.
It had happened without me. He was all gone, and I’d missed him. I’d been absent. There was a picture in one of my mother’s photo albums: my father as a tiny boy in a white suit, sitting on the back of a horse. Or maybe it was a donkey. It was a blurry, black-and-white picture.
That little boy, I thought.
How would my mother ever forgive me for missing it? How would my brother?
Had my father lain in bed, had he grown thinner, the way the dying do? He might not have missed me. I hoped he hadn’t but I would never know.
“You were always a daddy’s girl,” said Ned.
“You were a rotten son-in-law,” I said, as though it was news.
He kept smiling, as always. His smile never wavered now. It was a rictus.
“You took his money and you even took his dying,” I said.
“Mommy?” said Lena. It was as though she hadn’t heard me; I was glad and ashamed, ashamed for speaking that way in front of her. “Can we go now? Nana says they’re going to play a pretty song for Grumbo at the funeral. She said they’re going to play ‘The Skye Boat Song.’”
“Take my arm, kiddo,” said Ned, bowing his head in Lena’s direction.
She clung to Will for a second, she would much rather have walked with Will, it was awkwardly obvious, but finally she lifted her hand up to Ned’s.
I walked right behind them, fearfully close; as I stepped into place at their heels, I clutched Will’s arm for a moment where she’d let go of it.
“Let go of that thing right this fucking second,” said Ned through gritted teeth. But he was facing away from us. As though he had eyes in the back of his head. “You’re my wife. You remember it.”
“How did you know how sick my father was?” I asked weakly. “How did you know before we did?”
“Whatever you need to know, I’ll fucking tell you,” ground out Ned. Then he turned and whispered over his shoulder, almost tenderly, “Bitch.”
My stomach flipped but Lena was looking elsewhere and waving at someone: she hadn’t heard the tone or the words. Again she seemed to be immune. She was usually so observant—it was as though Ned had a wand.
We stepped out onto the front porch, where I saw my parents’ grass was yellow and dry. There were flags flapping from porches down the street: it was Independence Day. Out past the awning, where the shade stopped, reigned a bright blank July heat, cicadas whining in the trees. A small group of photographers stood on the lawn. Had Ned hired them? Would a real news outlet spend money on pictures of a candidate’s in-law’s funeral?
Ned wore a solemn expression, making the occasion momentous—such was the power of his bearing—and curved a graceful arm around me in a supportive gesture. He was between Lena and me, seeming to shelter us both, there on the porch: the father of the family, presiding over a sad wife and innocent little girl.
Will had fallen behind somewhere—that he had even been allowed to come was surprising. Ned couldn’t have liked it; maybe my mother had pushed. There were limousines at the curb, and my mother was getting into the first. We joined her there, Ned and Lena and I (I looked back and saw Will headed across the dry grass for limo number two). My mother slid in beside Solly and Luisa, already seated.
In the cool car with the air-conditioning blowing into our faces Lena sat between Ned and me and sang in a high little voice.
Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward! the sailors cry;
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.
Across from us my mother wore an expression both peaceful and relieved, maybe. Alone now, without my father, but probably also relieved. She avoided looking at Ned as though there was a blank space where he sat.
Lena, who only knew the chorus, sang it again.
I tried to discern from my mother’s face, then from Solly’s whether they were angry at me for being trapped by Ned this whole time as my father was dying.
But Solly wasn’t looking at me at all: he was looking at Ned with open contempt, with raw hostility. Luisa nestled into his side, her eyes cast down. Miserable, I thought, and polite. My mother patted Luisa’s knee and they smiled at each other sympathetically.
I turned my head toward Ned, slowly and slightly so that he wouldn’t notice. He’d dropped his falsely protective arm off me when we got into the limo and also dropped Lena’s hand; now he was looking down at his phone, as usual.
There was his neck, its even tan, the sweep of one lock of hair over his forehead, his perfectly clean ear. There was the faint scent of his cologne. I kept looking, I kept gazing at the graceful tendon of his neck, the clean shave along his jawline. And just when I was about to turn away—feeling my eyeballs throb dully from being rolled to one side too long—I saw a movement on the skin. Just for a second, just for an instant, I saw an L-shape made up of pink-and-white squares flash onto the skin before they disappeared.
I swear I saw him pixelate.
I didn’t say anything, my tongue was stuck in my throat, but as we got out of the car I found myself scrabbling at his sleeve. Lena was walking ahead holding my mother’s hand; I had Solly’s and Luisa’s backs in front of me. We were on display again as we stepped onto the cemetery’s gravel footpath—I didn’t see the photographers yet but there were mourners around us, others were parking and walking over to the gravesite—and so, again in the open air, Ned turned to me smiling. The smile was perfect, too: restrained, as though in grief, and yet compassionate.
“How are you doing it?” I asked, a bit pathetic. “What are you doing?”
“I’m playing with you, honey, that’s all,” he said softly, and tapped one temple. “You let me in when you started ‘clearing your mind.’ That New Age horseshit is good for one thing: access. Safer when you had the therapist in the room, but then you started to do it all by your lonesome, didn’t you. With the little earbuds in, all walled off from other people and wit
h your mind wide open.”
“The hypnosis tapes?” I squeaked.
“You threw open the doors and I walked in. So now I’m tinkering. I’m just tinkering around a bit with the little wife’s thalamic nerve projections. I can do that now. I can make you see what I want you to see.”
He’d effected some kind of amnesia. If not a dream he’d given me, it wasn’t far from it, I guess, a thought, an idea, a mental frame. Drugs, maybe? Could this be pharmacological, and his mind-control brags just a component of his intricate manipulation?
“But I don’t know what you mean,” I said. “How can you—
anyone—?”
“I have the skills,” he said. “Ever since I took the kid. Added bonus. You just take what you want. You know that, sweet thing? The more you take, the more you get. It just starts to pour in. Talk about miracles.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “I don’t …”
“The same way money gives you everything, so does power. It’s like one of them math curves, rising steeper and steeper. That’s how power grows once you grab it. How’d you get through thirty-some years without even knowing that much? Stupid. I can make things happen without even being there. I kept you on your toes. The subway, right? The freeway. And the house. It’s nice for me, watching.”
“But not—that isn’t possible.”
“Not only possible. Easy. With neurons so much is easy. Didn’t your little Hearing Voices club tell you that? Haven’t you learned anything?”
“So you’re saying you can get into my—”
“I have the keys to the kingdom.”
“What kingdom?”
“I can slide my fingers,” and he leaned over and whispered close, “right into the holes in your head.”