I realized that my own hands now were making the same crawling shit sign. It didn’t seem as if I could stop them. I held them up and stared at the way my fingers were moving.
“Let’s talk in the morning,” the woman suggested, unaware that I was talking. “When we’re fresh for it.” She told us each to pick out a cot, of which there were four and none of them inviting. I lay down, forcing my eyes shut, but they popped right back open. My fingers strummed. My legs twitched. My thoughts jumped from Charlotte’s Web to the famous experiments in which innocent, unsuspecting spiders were forcibly drugged with various agents. And then to the famous photographs taken of the webs they’d made under the influence.
I was spinning a pretty crazy web myself, a sustained hypnagogic state in which I struggled to make sense of the images and associations coming at me like flotsam in a flood. Here a chimp. There a chimp. Everywhere a chimp chimp.
I thought that if, as Reg kept insisting, superpowers are fixed rather than relative, then Spider-Man is no more gifted than Charlotte. In fact, compared to Charlotte, Peter Parker is a piker. I repeated that a few times in my head. Peter Parker is a piker. Peter Parker is a piker.
“That’s enough of that,” the elderly woman told me and I was unsure if I’d spoken aloud or she was reading my mind. Both seemed equally possible.
“Harlow. Harlow!” I whispered. There was no answer. I thought that Harlow might be asleep and how that would mean she hadn’t taken the same pills she’d given me. Maybe there weren’t enough and she’d meant to be nice, letting me have them and bravely going without. Or maybe she’d known better than to take them herself, and it was just easier to hand them to me than to flush them. Maybe I was just closer than the toilet.
Or maybe she was awake. “I still think superpowers are relative,” I told her, just in case. “Charlotte isn’t a superhero just because she’s a spider and can leap from wall to wall on her web. Her superpower is that she can read and write. Context matters. Context is all. Umwelt.”
“Will you shut up?” Harlow asked wearily. “Do you even know you’ve been talking all fucking night? And making no sense at all?”
I responded to this with an odd mixture of monkey-girl alarm and nostalgia. And resistance. I hadn’t been talking so very much. If Harlow pushed me, I could show her what talking all fucking night really meant. I pictured how, if Fern had been here, she would have swung effortlessly up the wall, rained holy hell down on Harlow from above. I wished for Fern so hard it stopped my breath.
“No more talking!” the elderly woman snapped. “Eyes closed and no more talking. I mean it, buster.”
My mother always said that it’s very rude when people who can’t sleep wake up people who can. My father had a different perspective. “You can’t imagine,” he’d told her once over a bleary breakfast, when he’d poured his orange juice into his coffee and then salted it as well. “You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep feels toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.”
So I tried to be quiet. I began to see a kaleidoscope of webs. A great choreography of spiders can-canned across my open eyeballs, kicking leg after leg after leg after leg in waltz time. I could pan in on their honeycomb eyes, their ghastly mandibles. Pan out, see them from above, turn the waving legs into fractal patterns.
No one put the lights out. The music from the spider chorus-line transitioned from ballroom to gabber. Someone began to snore. I had the impression that the snoring was what was keeping me up. My thoughts turned rhythmical in a Chinese water-torture way: Umwelt. Umwelt. Umwelt.
The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch. Periodically, Fern twirled in. Sometimes she was five years old, turning her backflips, rocking from foot to foot, trailing her scarves, or biting my fingers gently, just as a warning. Sometimes she had the squat, heavy body of an older ape and stared at me so listlessly she was almost lifeless and had to be moved through the scene like a doll.
By morning, I’d managed to get my thoughts organized into a neat if tiresome grid. X-axis: things missing. Y-axis: last seen.
One: Where was my bicycle? I couldn’t think where I’d last had it. Maybe at Jack in the Box. I remembered the vandalized intercom with a start. Probably best to avoid Jack in the Box for a bit.
Two: Where was Madame Defarge? I hadn’t seen her since we’d left The Graduate. I wanted to ask Harlow, but was too tired to figure out how. It was a question that was bound to annoy her in the best of situations, and this was not that.
Three: Where were Mom’s journals? Would she really never ask me about them again or would I have to confess at some point to having lost them? Which would be so unfair, as I rarely lost things and, in the immortal words of Han Solo, it wasn’t my fault.
Four: Where was my brother? My relief that he’d seemed happy to see me was now shot through with worry. What had he made of my coziness with the local police? What if he’d never been there at all?
The elderly woman’s son arrived and took her back to the nursing home with many apologies for the things she’d apparently said and the things she’d apparently broken. The snoring went with her.
When the door to the cell finally opened for me, I was so tired I had to lever myself through with my arms. Officer Haddick and I had a chat in which I was too beat to participate, though that didn’t seem to shorten it.
Reg came to fetch Harlow and gave me a ride home as well, where I took a shower, dizzy and swaying in the hot water. Went to bed, but still couldn’t close my eyes. It was the most horrible feeling, to be so utterly wrung-out and still mentally trudging on.
I got up, went to the kitchen, took the burners off the stove and cleaned beneath them. I opened the refrigerator and stared into it even though I had no desire for food of any kind. I thought that at least Harlow hadn’t given me a gateway drug. More of a slammed-door drug. I would never ever take it again.
Todd got up and burned some toast, so that the smoke alarm went off and had to be beaten into silence with a broom handle.
• • •
NO ONE WAS answering the phone at Casa Harlow and Reg. I called three times and left two messages. I knew that I should walk right on over to The Graduate, see if anyone had turned a dummy in. I was in a panic, thinking that I’d lost her and her so valuable and all. My bike was one thing, but Madame Defarge didn’t even belong to me. How could I have been so careless? And then, I guess, the drug finally wore off, because the next thing I knew, I was waking up in my bed and it was night again.
The apartment had a nobody-home sort of silence. In spite of having slept for hours, I remained exhausted. I dozed again, had a dream that slipped from me like hypnopompic water as I surfaced from it to a memory. Once upon a time, Lowell had come in the night and shaken me awake. I think I was six years old, which would have made him twelve.
I’d always suspected that Lowell roamed after dark. His bedroom was off by itself on the first floor, so he could leave by the door or the window with no one hearing him. I don’t know where he went. I don’t know for a fact that he did go. But I knew he missed the acreage we’d had at the farmhouse. I knew he missed the days of exploring in the woods. He’d found an arrowhead once and some rocks stamped with the bones of a little fish. That would never have happened in our current cramped yard.
On this occasion, he told me to get dressed quietly, and I was full of questions but managed to keep my mouth shut until we were outside. A few days back, I’d put my foot down in the grass and felt a sharp pain shoot up my leg. When I lifted my foot, screaming, there was a stinger in the arch, the bee still attached by a thread, jerking at the end of its tether and buzzing as it died. Mom had pulled the stinger, with me still screaming, and carried me inside, where she soaked my foot and wrapped it in a baking-soda poultice. I’d been queen bee of the household ever since, carried from chair to chair, books fetched, juice poured. Apparently, Lowell had had enough of my invalidism. We went out to the street and turned to walk up Balla
ntine Hill. My foot felt fine.
It was a summer night, hot and still. Sheet lightning crackled at the horizon, the moon was out and the black sky smeared with stars. Twice we saw the lights of an oncoming car and ducked behind trees or shrubs so as to not be seen.
“Let’s get off the street,” Lowell said. We cut across a lawn into a strange backyard. Inside the house a small dog began to bark. A light went on in an upstairs window.
Of course, I’d been talking the whole time. Where were we going? Why were we up? Was it a surprise? Was it a secret? How much past my bedtime was it? This was the latest I had ever been up, right? This was very late for a six-year-old to be up, right? Lowell put his hand over my mouth and I smelled toothpaste on his fingers.
“Pretend we’re Indians,” Lowell said. He was whispering. “Indians never talk when they’re moving through the forest. They walk so quietly you can’t even hear their footsteps.”
He removed his hand. “How do they do that?” I asked. “Is it magic? Can only Indians do it? How much Indian do you have to be to do that? Maybe you have to wear moccasins.”
“Shhh,” said Lowell.
We went through a few more backyards. It wasn’t so hard to see in the dark as I’d supposed. The night wasn’t so quiet. I heard the call of an owl, soft and round as the sound you made blowing across a bottle top. The deep bass of a frog. The friction of insect legs. Lowell’s footsteps, I noticed, were no quieter than mine.
We came to a hedge with a gap that we scrambled through on our hands and knees. Since it was big enough for Lowell, it must have been plenty big enough for me. Still, I got scratched by the barbed leaves. I didn’t say so; I thought Lowell might send me home if I complained. So I pointed out instead how I wasn’t complaining even though I had a scratch on one leg, which was stinging. “I don’t want to go home yet,” I told him preemptively.
“Then stop talking for a minute,” said Lowell. “Look and listen.”
The frog was loud now, big-sounding, but I remembered from the creek at the old farmhouse that a big voice could often be tracked to a little frog. I stood up on the far side of the hedge. We were in a bowl of a yard, a secret garden like the one in the book. The slopes were planted with trees and a softer grass than we had at home. At the bottom of the slope was a pond too perfect to be natural. Cattails rose at the edge. In the moonlight, the water was a silver coin, patched with the black of lily pads.
“There are turtles in the pond,” Lowell told me. “And fish.” He had some broken crackers in a pocket. He let me throw them into the water and the surface pocked as if it were raining, only upward, rain falling up from below. I watched the small and expanding rings made by the fish mouths.
On the slope past the pond there was a walkway, guarded on both sides by a pair of statues—two dogs shaped like Dalmatians, only bigger. I went to pet them, their stone backs smooth, cool, and wonderful to touch. Past the dogs, the walkway twisted like a snake, ending at a screened back porch on a large house. At every curve of the path, there was a bush shaped into something else—an elephant, a giraffe, a rabbit. I was filled with longing for this to be my house. I wanted to open the screen door, step inside, and find my family, my whole family waiting there.
Later I learned something about the people whose house it was. They had a factory that made television sets and were very rich. The dog statues had been carved from pictures of their actual dogs and marked their actual dogs’ graves. They had a party every Fourth of July with lobsters flown in from Maine, a party that the mayor and the police chief and the provost all attended. They’d no children of their own but a gentle attitude toward wayward kids who wandered through. Sometimes they’d offer you lemonade. They had thick Hoosier accents.
Lowell was stretched out on the sloping grass, his hands behind his head. I went to lie next to him and the grass was not as thick and soft as it had seemed, though it still smelled thick and soft. It smelled like summer. I put my head on my brother’s stomach and listened to his innermost workings.
I was happy then, and happy now, lying on my bed remembering this. How one night I’d gone to fairyland with my brother, and the very best part was that he’d had no particular reason to ask me along, nothing he’d needed me to do. He’d brought me with him just because.
I’d stretched out on the grass beside him, head on his stomach, and tried to keep my eyes open, afraid that if I fell asleep, he’d go home without me. Fairyland was all well and good, but I didn’t want to be alone there. Even this part made me happy to remember. My brother could have left me behind that night, but he didn’t.
In my head, I finished the grid I’d started in the holding cell, the grid of what was missing and for how long. One, my bicycle; two, Madame Defarge; three: the journals; four: my brother.
Five: Fern. Where was Fern? Probably my brother knew. I should want to know, too, but I was too afraid of the answer. If wishes were fishes, I’d soon see my brother again and nothing he had to say about Fern would hurt me to hear.
But I knew that, both in fairyland and the real world, too, wishes were slipperier things.
Five
I PHONED HARLOW AGAIN, and again got the machine. One more time I asked without pique, without drama, nothing but calm dignity as far as the eye could see, where Madame Defarge was. The monkey girl had made another unscheduled appearance, and it had landed her in jail again. When would she learn to behave with restraint and decorum?
It was still raining—large, icy pellets—and I had no bike, so I phoned The Graduate next, to see if a ventriloquist’s dummy of Madame Defarge had been left at the bar a couple of nights before. I don’t think the man who answered the phone understood the question. I don’t think he gave it the good old college try. It seemed I was going to have to go and look for myself, whatever the weather.
I spent the next two hours wandering about the town searching for various things I couldn’t find. I was soaking wet, cold to the bone, my eyes already starting to sting again because I’d stabbed new contact lenses into them. A living, breathing puddle of self-pity. Obviously, someone had taken Madame Defarge. I would never be able to afford the ransom. I would never get her back.
Davis was an infamous hotbed of bicycle theft. Bicycles were taken on a whim; people would steal one just to get to their next class. The police swept up the abandoned bikes and sold them at auction once a year, the money going to the local women’s shelter. I’d see my bike again, but I’d be outbid and I wouldn’t even get to complain, as it was all for such a good cause. Did I want women to have shelter or didn’t I? I loved that bike.
I faced the very real possibility that the sight of Officer Haddick chatting so familiarly with me might have spooked my brother. He must know I’d never deliberately turn him in. But how many times had Lowell said to me, “You just can’t keep your goddamn mouth shut”? When I was five, six, eight, ten, a hundred thousand times? I had learned to keep my mouth shut, but Lowell had never noticed.
I returned to my apartment, empty-handed, teary-eyed, and frozen through. “My feet will never be warm again,” I told Todd and Kimmy. “Toes will be lost.” They were sitting at the kitchen table, playing a vigorous sort of card game. Most of the cards were on the floor.
They paused long enough to click their tongues sympathetically and then moved on to their own complaints—an aggrieved list of everyone who’d come by while I was out.
First Ezra, on some lame excuse but clearly looking for Harlow. As a result, he’d seen the damaged smoke alarm. There’d been a lecture. Todd and I were putting not only our own lives at risk, but the lives of every single person in the building. And who was responsible for the safety of these people? On whom were they depending? Not me and Todd, that was for damned-sure certain. No, it was Ezra himself in whom they’d put their faith. Maybe we didn’t care if Ezra let them down, but it wasn’t going to happen. We could take that to the bank.
Next, some loser, some white-guy baka in a backward baseball cap, looking for Harlow
, had given Todd this puppet-thing he’d said Harlow had asked him to return. “Ugly on a stick,” said Todd, presumably about the puppet. And, about Harlow, “Is this like her office now? Her business address?
“Because then Herself drops in. Goes and gets a beer without even asking, takes the puppet to your bedroom, and says to tell you it’s back in the suitcase as promised.”
“And ‘no harm done,’” said Kimmy. “‘As promised.’”
And then, another knock on the door! Skinny, bleached-blond, maybe thirty years old? Name of Travers. Looking for me, but since I wasn’t around, he and Harlow had gone off together. “Putty in her hands,” Todd said. “Poor sad sap.”
The fact that Harlow had hardly touched her purloined beer seemed to bother Todd more than anything else. She hadn’t even asked and now it just had to be poured down the sink as if it were a Bud Light or something instead of the last specialty wheat beer Todd had, a Hefeweizen, from the Sudwerk microbrewery. He wouldn’t finish it himself, because who knew where Harlow’s mouth had been? “It’s been Grand Central Station for kisama here all evening,” Todd said. He turned back to his card game, slamming the jack of clubs onto the table.
“You bastard,” said Kimmy either to Todd or to his ruthless jack, though I did, just for a minute, think she was talking to me.
Kimmy was one of those people I made uncomfortable for reasons they themselves couldn’t figure out. She never looked at my face, but maybe she was that way with everyone, maybe she’d been raised to think it was impolite. Todd said his grandmother, his mother’s mother, would never look someone in the eye or show someone her feet, although he also said she was the rudest person to clerks and waitresses that he’d ever met. “We’re in America,” she would remind him loudly if he seemed embarrassed. “Every customer is the king.”
Kimmy cleared her throat. “They said to tell you if you got back in the next hour, which you barely did, you should join them at the crepe place. They’re having dinner there.”
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves Page 15