In this memory a clown with a red bulbous nose, overlarge shoes, baggy clothes, a white face, red mouth, and a large, floppy hat stomped toward me. I smiled. I was frightened. The clown seemed friendly and funny. I knew that deep inside he was angry. His gestures were dramatic as he blew up a yellow balloon, his white gloves clutching the inflating rubber between his red lips. He pulled the balloon away and held it aloft, gave a grin like one I had seen on Fred.
“For the birthday girl.” He smirked and held out the yellow circle to me that tried to fly away.
I must have screamed because someone was covering my mouth with a hand. I almost ripped it from my mouth. Then I smelled him behind me. His scent was the forest, blending in with trees, flowers, moss, earth, but he also smelled of blood and something charred, anger. I hadn’t heard him. He moved in front of me quickly, before I could injure him, the boy with a shock of blonde hair.
“You were calling for your father.” He blinked at me, at my size, even though I was sitting. “You don’t have to worry about Kat. I’ll take care of her.” His clothes were tattered. He was dirty and unruly and he looked a lot like the little girl.
“Isn’t that Theresa’s job?”
“Yeah, but I know you’ve been helping her and Theresa gets busy.” The boy sat down next to me as though he knew me already. He seemed comfortable. “You’re really big up close. I’ve only seen you from a distance.”
“You watch over us?” I had seen glimpses of him in the woods.
“Yeah.”
“Who are you?” But I already knew.
“Peter.”
“Why are you living in the woods?”
“I’m a hunter, like my father. I’m not interested in human company.”
“What happened to Fred?”
“I killed him.”
We both paused, concentrating on that fact. Trees bent in the wind as though they were nodding.
“What happens when people die?”
The boy surveyed the woods around him. “They become part of the forest.”
“That isn’t what Theresa says.”
“She’s got religion. It didn’t do Fred much good. He was on his way to our house. I wouldn’t let anyone harm my family.”
“It’s wrong to kill someone.”
“Even if someone wants to kill you or the people you love?” He shook his head and tentacles of greasy blonde hair stuck to the sides of his head.
I wondered how I would have felt if Greg had killed Father instead.
Peter didn’t care what I thought. He snarled at something far away that I couldn’t see, but I could hear it, a shrill, high, piercing noise.
“My father killed people too,” I confessed to the wild boy.
“I killed my father,” the boy from the wilderness said and then he disappeared.
“I saw Peter,” I told the little girl that night in our cramped bedroom.
“I told you he was out there.” Her blank eyes were intent on my voice. “He takes care of me.”
“Yes, you’re right. You don’t have to worry.”
The little girl gathered her sheets and covers, turned onto her side, stayed very still and quiet.
I returned Miss Elaina’s Greek mythology book, which was still in pristine condition, leaving it on her porch in the early morning, before we left. The dawn light was frail company compared to Miss Elaina. I wished I could talk to her again. I wanted to discuss the Greek gods. But I didn’t want to disturb her sleep. What would the gods have made of Fred’s death, Peter, Kat, Theresa? I thought of Pegasus, a winged horse who brought lightning and thunder from the heavens and helped writers. He also became a constellation, who could guide me as I made my way farther into the world.
“We are homologous,” I whispered to her front door, really meaning that we were friends. I slipped a note that claimed: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.’ said by William Faulkner into the first page of the book. I also tucked a story randomly into the book.
The Story of Sight
The little girl was growing mechanical in her despair at seeing the future. She felt composed of cogs, wheels, metal parts that ran but gave nothing more. She wanted nature, with its dark cloud confections, clutching trees, soft grass. She hoped her constant feeling of dread would soon disappear. Birds fell into her arms in their weariness with her visions of what was to come. The girl was lifeless at school, at home, at her tasks. She knew too much for her age. She carried the weight of the world, peeling back sky to expose stars, circling a spot of earth until it was comfortable. People pestered her about money, love, health. They propped her eyelids open so she could foretell more. At night her mind bloomed with predictions and she couldn’t sleep.
“Write down what you see about what’s forthcoming,” the dragonfly, her friend, beseeched her.
“If I don’t write it down, maybe it won’t come to pass,” the little girl answered.
“No,” the wise dragonfly said, “you can’t stop anything from occurring. You can only warn us.”
But the little girl didn’t want to see all those ghosts in the woods or all the different places her mind travelled to. She didn’t want all that responsibility. She liked the empty darkness. So she fell on some rocks and blinded herself. The little girl hoped then that all the people would leave her alone. I’m useless to them, she thought. She could still feel the sky being shaped by gods who beat the air with their large wings and she didn’t know what they would think about her blindness.
“What did you do?” shrieked the dragonfly when he saw her blank eyes.
“I’m making a new world,” the girl said, “one without me.”
“But without your sight you can see more,” the dragonfly explained. “It was always about what was contained in your mind and the world will need you more than ever now.”
Part III
The City
Chapter Nine
Mack’s truck rattled along the highway, bouncing Theresa, the little girl, me, and the load of equipment tied down in the back. It was noisy inside and out. I tried to cover my ears with my hands. I didn’t like the clamor and discord. I was nervous and elated about the city. I wore my washed and patched clothes, repaired shoes. I carried my notebook, tucked away in a sweater pocket.
Theresa had handed me the $110 she discovered in my clothes before she washed them. I placed the money in my pants pocket. “I want to give you some money for helping me too,” she said.
“I’m not interested in money,” I told her. “You and Kat need it.” I tried giving her my $110, but she wouldn’t accept it. “Kat will be happy to have the room to herself now.”
“She’s fond of you, Mara.”
“Obstinate,” I told myself to keep the sounds away.
I had all the possessions I needed. One of my kidneys had stopped working and an eyebrow had peeled off that morning. I looked less human, battered, large, and distorted. Colors whisked by, cramming themselves into my eyes. I was relieved to be reaching the mythical city before my body completely fell apart in front of Theresa and Miss Elaina. The little girl wouldn’t care since she couldn’t see me anyway, although she could sense so much. In the city I could be unknown and unnoticed.
After several hours the houses grew closer to one another and the traffic denser. We reached cement streets, tall buildings, buses. We parked near some cars on a busy street. I finally removed my hands from my ears. Then I wanted to clap them back on. A continuous roar filled my ears, honking, conversations, doors opening and closing, cars following one another.
“The noise’ll hurt for a while and then go away when you get used to it.” Theresa patted my arms.
“I’ll get used to it?”
She nodded.
We all left the truck. I was the only one not returning. Theresa took Kat’s small hand. Stores lined the street
s and were filled with people searching for what they needed. Mack slipped into one of the larger stores with neon signs and equipment stuffed into the front window. I studied people as quickly as I could, but they were hurrying. None resembled Theresa, Kat, Mack, Miss Elaina, or me. Many were dressed in their Sunday clothes and anxious to get somewhere without seeing or hearing anything that would stop them along the way. I breathed a sigh of relief because none of them would notice me, even if I was taller than most of them.
Theresa kissed me on my cheek and handed me a piece of paper. “This is my cousin’s address here in case you need it.” Everyone left me standing, perplexed, in the middle of the street with people eddying all around me. I knew I had to pretend to be going somewhere in the huge, dissonant city.
The city was a living organism, like the forest, that disintegrated and tried to reconstitute itself. I jumped into the back of a bus along with several other people when it opened an accordioned door. People helped me figure out my change for the fare box although they were reluctant to touch the coins in my palms. The driver handed me leaflets about city routes and pointed to his signs. I didn’t care where I was going. A stream of advertisements flowed above our heads. I saw myself reflected in the bent steel over a wheel, and I was a large wardrobe filled with a disheveled woman. No one sat near me. I watched the disinterested people inside, reading a newspaper, lost in their own thoughts, looking out a window, quiet and pensive. Then I watched the streets surrounding the buildings and the people that navigated them. There was an endless supply of every kind of person. I felt alone without Theresa, Kat, even Mack or Peter. No one knew me although I was swimming around people.
“Anonymous,” I whispered to myself. I knew I could go anywhere, do anything. The forest still lived inside me, as did all the other Maras. The bus passed places I could have stopped and lived in, apartments with laundry hanging from balconies or tall plain buildings with empty basketball courts and weeds growing through the sidewalks. I wondered what Father was doing now, working, or downstairs in the lab, or making his own dinner? I had seen enough of the city from the bus, a museum, the opera house, a department store all lit up and full of extravagant merchandise, the small pathetic trees that seemed to apologize to the wind. I began to feel at home in this constant sea of people. After all, what was I made of?
The bus driver’s face studied me in the mirror that faced back, but he didn’t say anything. I slipped off the back of the bus after memorizing its route, which looped three times around the city and its sliding, filthy river. I entered the nearby cavernous subway that echoed when feet rushed through there, a stampede of people at certain hours. I consulted a pamphlet, understood money and change and barely fit through the turnstile. I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go. A train surged by, its wind brushing my hair away from my disintegrating face. Another train roared by soon after. Its doors slid open, and I was thrust inside, along with a crowd of people. Everything clamored underneath the sidewalks. I could hear every conversation, every bit of clanging and noise from the trains. The new sounds were overwhelming. I slapped my hands over my ears as the subway train squealed at a turn. Fluorescent lights blinked on and off. Although it was well lit inside the subway cars, the passageways were dark and arterial. The map that showed how they ran beneath the skin of the city was multicolored and splayed in front of my face. Sometimes it resembled one of my bad dreams, but I was learning the city inside and out. It reminded me of my own body, sections and transportation centers that functioned as legs and arms, government offices that were brains, the mouths of restaurants, the ears of antennae and satellites, the windows and video devices that were eyes. It was familiar, the construction and reconstruction done by men and machines, stops that released you, allowed you to return to the outer surface of skin again.
“Greg, you’re a naughty boy,” I overheard someone scolding a child, who was holding a stuffed dog in a seat across from me. My head snapped toward them.
Then, under the harsh light, our plastic seats vibrated as the train hurried along the tracks until it abruptly stopped and threw its doors open again. I closed my eyes.
“I’m coming around to your way of thinking,” I said. I was a slim woman with black shimmering hair and boiling eyes. I wore red lipstick. I was gripping a handrail by the steps on a shaking, speeding railroad train. I was near the threshold that separated the train from the outside world. My hair flew every which way.
“I need to live as much as I can to make up for the lives of the others that were lost in the war,” the man with an extraordinary nose said. He was terribly handsome. He thrust his head out, past the train steps, into the green and brown landscape which we were speeding by. “Let’s see what’s out there for us.” The wind pushed his features askew.
“The world is free,” I answered him.
“As it should be.” I think he said.
The man took my hand in his and we looked at one another. The wind stole our endearments on the steps. I knew I would follow him wherever he went although I didn’t always agree with him. We jumped off the train together. He rolled past some grass into a ditch. I landed on some rocks, and I could hear my bones breaking.
I opened my eyes, exiting haphazardly where the train stopped. The sign proclaimed Random Street Station. I had a headache from the lights, the noise. Vortexes of dust spiraled into dancing esophagi on the cement ground as I rose onto the streets. I missed the affection of animals and stared at a small black and white dog and the elderly woman owner walking and halting at a fire hydrant. Sirens blared while the rumbling and honking of vehicles seemed incessant. I smelled fried food, perfume, cake, coffee, bread, soap, flowers. The air was dirty. There were too many odors. I had to strain them, simplify them, toss them aside. I grew hungry and my leg muscles stiffened, my gait becoming a lurch. Red and black began to swirl around my head and bright silver sparks circled it like a tiara.
“Olfactory, permeable imposter,” I whispered to myself as I fell through a maze of city streets into a park that was more decorous and tame than the forest. I found some gnawed donuts, a half empty soda, and a peanut butter sandwich in a trash can. I sat behind some benches and ate greedily.
A family walked by with a child in a stroller who pointed at me and laughed, mewling, “Monster girl.”
Her mother tapped the child’s tiny finger, said, “Don’t be rude.”
But I agreed with her. I was scatterbrained, brokenhearted, a Mara surfeit, and I didn’t have any plans on how to survive in the city. I could contact Teresa’s cousin. I reached into my pocket and discovered that I had lost the piece of paper Teresa had given me with the address. I probably misplaced it in the subway. I crawled back towards some bushes. It was becoming dark and some streetlights began to glow, the sound of footsteps and wheels on the pavements lessened. Fewer cars streamed by on a road past the far trees; their headlights were caught in the burgeoning tree branches and turned over by the green leaves. It grew peaceful in a strange, intrusive way. I curled under a bare bush, the ground was still warm and the grass flattened. I fell asleep.
“You’re becoming obsolete,” Father said. “See,” he stated, pointing out my detached knee cap that had no place to go. Then he inspected my ears, eyebrows, ferreting out missing fingers and toes with his eyepiece that enlarged what he saw. “What’s next to go?”
“I don’t know.” I was sullen. “Did you give my parts expiration dates?”
He laughed. “You have a good sense of humor.”
“It’s better than yours, apparently.” I tapped the pocket on his white coat, found the edges of his Photographs. But when I removed them to study the Mother, Daughter, and the Scientist in their usual poses I discovered that the pictures had been torn into small pieces. So the arms, legs, necks, heads, and torsos of each person were all jumbled and mixed up with each other. I lay the parts out on the operating table and tried to reassemble them into the original Photograp
hs. As I grew close to finishing one person, I’d find an extra piece of an arm or a hat or too much hair, so I couldn’t complete even one that was exactly the same as my memory of it. I became frantic.
Father lay his hand on mine, calming my nervous fingers. “Things change.”
“I don’t like this.” I glanced at my remaining toes as though they were disappearing as we spoke, three, two, one. “Why? Why am I coming apart? Why am I becoming invisible?”
“Ha, ha,” Father bellowed. “Now I’ve created the Invisible Woman.”
“It isn’t funny.” I was sulking.
“You’ve always known that the body parts could only last so long.” He removed his eyepiece. “I need to replace them periodically. You already know where they come from. You remember Greg.”
“I need a carapace.”
“It wouldn’t stop the process. And you wouldn’t be human.”
“Vicissitude,” I gave him.
“Agglutinative problems,” he countered.
“Synaesthesia,” I volleyed. “Harmony between all the parts,” I bowed my head as if I was praying. We were getting technical.
“I can fix you if you let me. You know that,” Father said. “Just look around the room.”
It was then that I noticed all the dead bodies piled up everywhere, surrounding our feet. Bodies of women, mostly, lined the laboratory floors, curled in every corner, stacked up against the walls. In some places they were a few rows deep. Their open eyes stared at me, their limbs flopped and useless. Several children and men were randomly included. I suddenly smelled them, a slight rotting mixed with formaldehyde, the newly dead.
The Solace of Monsters Page 12