“I’m unhappy too,” he whispered just as I brought the axe down gravitationally hard onto his heart, splitting it in two.
“Irrevocable.”
Chapter Twelve
I was grieving and inconsolable. I had never wanted to slaughter anyone, any living creature, even someone who wanted to die. I had vowed not to kill anyone. Life experiences were so much more complicated than I had realized. I left both bodies there for the police to decide whatever they would. I washed up in a bathroom, cleaned my clothes, and walked out the church door, whose lock I had broken.
I wasn’t sure where to go. The park? Jail? Under a bridge? Sparkles, where I could make some money? Somewhere no one would find me. And then I knew. Where there was a horizon of sky, water, earth. Everything was there. I took the subway. I wanted to get along with all the dead within me. We needed to reconcile. I was accumulating too many ghosts.
I was exhausted in the hurtling subway with its flickering lights. I leaned to the side and rested my head against the back of my seat.
My adolescent skin was black. I was wearing a dress with large embroidered flowers and some silver jewelry. I stopped in to see a girlfriend. When I entered I saw her mother gagged and bound to a chair. I knew the rebels were near but I didn’t know that they had already arrived. Then I saw my girlfriend facing us, eyes closed. A man tore the clothes off her ebony body, her jewelry piled on the floor, his back toward us. Her mother’s eyes darted to a knife lying across some partially cut vegetables on a table. No one else was in the room. I grabbed the knife and plunged it into his back. The man shouted and fell on the floor. My girlfriend collapsed near him. Another man rushed through the door, behind me. Before I could turn around, a machete pierced me, poking through the soft material at the stomach of my dress, eviscerating a big flower.
“Are you alright?” a man with soft brown eyes and blue jeans bent down and asked me.
“Yes.” I wiped my eyes, could smell my stale, dirty odor, even with my misshapen nose.
“You were shrieking in your sleep.”
“Nightmares.” He didn’t know the half of it.
“I can see that you’ve been through a lot. I hope you get better.” The kind man left at the next stop.
I found a scarf decorated with coffee cups in the trash at my stop. It was a bit shredded, but I wrapped it around my lower face, so no one would notice how deformed I had become. I was losing bones, muscles, and organs more rapidly as time commenced. I was limping and dizzy. All of my senses were jumbled and fading. I hemorrhaged in strange, hidden places. My face no longer resembled the Daughter’s face. Even the mole Father had placed had fallen off. I wasn’t sure each day what part of my body would work.
I still felt terrible that I had killed Father Bill even though he didn’t seem to know how to stop himself. I needed to be near the frothy waves, sun severed by clouds, sand brimming toward the rocks and crumbling wall, sand leaking into shoes and towels and drifting toward the water only to be pushed back again. Like anguish. How could Father live with himself?
I tried to remember “The Second Coming” by Yeats:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I could only recall bits of the second stanza.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
. . . twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I hopped onto the familiar crumbling wall, sat down. Not as many people cavorted in the compromised sunshine of the beach. I scanned the families. I saw her. She was sitting on a blue blanket. She awkwardly stared at her arms and legs as though they weren’t attached to her body. Her mother had an arm wrapped around her shoulder and was speaking. Her father patted her on the head and ran over to the ocean and dived in. I couldn’t see the other children. The mother lifted the girl’s chin toward her, said something, rose, and walked far down the shore. I watched the girl for a while. I found it soothing. I wondered whether Father Bill watched and eventually chose his victims or whether he knew them already. I briefly wondered about Father. The girl built small squares and circles with the sand, poured some water onto her handmade houses and buildings, then kicked them flat with her foot. She wrote something with a pencil in the sand. I couldn’t read it from where I was sitting.
I leaped off the wall, sauntered casually down to the bathers and swimmers along the beach. Sand engulfed my shoes, making it difficult to walk. It was hot, but I liked the sound of the waves and the way they played hide and seek. I was hapless in overworn, numerous clothes, passing by people in bathing suits and shorts. I had a scarf wrapped around my face, while people wore an occasional hat, or thick, white sunscreen lotion. Many people recoiled. One of my fingernails fell onto a plastic picnic cooler. I ignored it and kept on walking. I stopped near the girl. Waves separated into white spasms. Corridors of sand stretched out around me.
“Hello,” I said to her.
She didn’t acknowledge my presence. It was as if I were already gone. She pulverized a sand castle, her hands sweeping it away.
“My name’s Dina.” I held out my damaged hand.
She still didn’t look at me.
“Are you happy? Are you looking for someone?”
The girl looked up at me. Her dark hair and eyes wouldn’t stay still. She looked right through me. She answered to someone behind me who wasn’t there. “I have permission.” Her voice was high and strangled. She wiped the sand again. Her face pulsed and collapsed. “Are you a friend?”
I smiled beneath my scarf. I sat, held out a hand. “I’m a friend.” I faced the water.
The girl smiled, her features wriggling into furrows that changed constantly. I could read the word she’d engraved in the sand. It was friend.
Her toes shyly whisked sand back over the word. “Friend,” she exclaimed loudly, pointing to her flat chest.
“What do friends do?” Time was still.
“Keep you company.” Her hand slapped the top of her head. Her skin was translucent and I could see her veins and fat under the glare of the sunlight.
“Well then,” I said, “we won’t be alone together.”
“Creatures are everywhere.” Her arms fanned out.
“I have many inside me.”
“Can they come out and play?” She cocked her head.
“They’re hidden.” I could feel the waves moving like muscles.
“Sometimes we eat them.” She snapped her teeth, swallowed.
“Sometimes.” I could see her mother posing by the ocean edge, stepping toward us. She would see me soon. I stood. “Goodbye, my friend. It was nice to meet you.”
She was staring at the space where her sand houses had once been. I was already gone.
Curtains fell onto the faces of the people I passed on my way back to the subway. Or they jumped away from me. The subway ran next to a river and I exited near a stack of tall buildings. One was the library. I entered tentatively. I wondered if someone behind the desks would stop me. Ghouls were everywhere; a tattered man, worse than me, sat slumped, half reading in a corner chair, an elderly woman was pulling out strands of her stringy, white hair and stacking them in an oversized bag, and a man, whose odor even I noticed in my deteriorating condition, fondled books as he sau
ntered up and down the stacks. Suffering was everywhere.
I sat at a large wooden table, surrounded by shelves. A young woman at the end of the table whispered a poem to herself, a poem composed of colors, sounds, smells, touch. It began,
“In every accident there is the victim,
lingering like perfume after an encounter.” She was weeping while cajoling everyone to write. She wrote the poem down, whether it was hers or not.
She turned toward me. “Are you wearing that scarf for religious reasons?”
I nodded. I moved to the shelf full of books about murderers. I fingered mysteries, spy thrillers, serial killers. None of those seemed right. I skimmed nonfiction about dysfunctional people who made mistakes and admitted them, people who believed they were vampires or werewolves. I tried Science, research on the body and diseases. I fell into a chair with Cloning: How to Live Forever. I wanted to assuage the terrible feelings writhing inside of me. I closed my eyes, told myself: you are capable of doing anything if you did that.
Gold Chinese letters filled the blue sign across from me. Red and black dragons perched around the ad for Better Living with Hong’s Noodles. I straddled the balcony fence at the top of the tallest office building in town. It wasn’t that high, so I could see an old man with a bent back and cane, sticks in a bundle on his shoulders, crossing a street. And a woman, younger than me, teetering on an old bicycle, laundry neatly folded over the back wheel. I smelled smoke from the factories, hot oil and spices used in woks at lunchtime. I imagined my skin slipping away, into negative space. I thought of my ancestors and mother and father’s faces when they saw me. I wanted to apologize to everyone, even to the window left open. But I have nothing since my husband left. No children. I am not strong. I swayed with my toes barely touching the railing. I held my hands over my ears as I jumped, so I didn’t have to hear my body break as it hit the ground.
My eyes flipped open. I didn’t think I could do that either. Suicide.
“Regurgitate,” I remarked as I raced to the library bathroom and made it in time to a cool, white porcelain sink. I rinsed my mouth with water from the faucet. I didn’t have many teeth left.
Back in the large library room, I decided that I was safer with a dictionary, which would increase my vocabulary, so that I would have more words to give. But my failing eyes drifted to the word “kill,” which was “to slaughter for food” and “to deprive of life.” “Murder” implied “premeditation and therefore with full moral responsibility.” Was there less responsibility when the action wasn’t planned?
I slipped deeply into the cushioned library chair, the thick, heavy book resting against my lap. I felt at home in the library. I was tired. I was going blind like Kat, but my other senses were dimming too. My bones creaked. My skin and clothes smelled of decay. I couldn’t even imagine how I looked, a shredded scarf around my face and head, my hair falling out, one eyebrow missing, not many fingers left. And those were the parts of me that were visible. I began to close my eyes.
If I died here what would they do with my body? Would they locate Father? What would they do to him? I opened my eyes again quickly.
I left the library, took the subway to the bus station, where buses hissed to their stops, reinventing their destinations. My remaining $98.46 was more than enough for the one-way ticket. People hurried by briskly. Conversations, sneezing, brakes, humming engines, bus doors opening and closing stained the background of my poor hearing. I was about to sit and wait for my bus when I saw Misty in the corner, strumming the ribs of her grocery cart. I approached her, but she didn’t recognize me, married as I was to my fetid body, and she flattened herself against the wall, moved away from me.
“Unblessed,” she shrieked at me, afraid.
“Misty, it’s me, Refrigerator.”
Her mouth sewed itself shut again. She stared at me. “Yes,” she said, “Refrigerator, a good name.” Her windmill arms quieted. “There are more rooms to show you, full of the unsavory, if you dare.”
“You need to take your medications,” I told her gently.
“I have another weed to pull.” Her eyes flung themselves toward me. “What happened to you?”
“I’m ill. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious.”
“I’m already part gravel.” She dug through her cart, pushing aside a packet of light bulbs, crumpled, beige sheets, a man’s shoe with the laces hanging. “Look what I found!” She held up a crutch and cackled. “Good for crowd control. Here.” She thrust it toward me.
“Thank you. I could use it.”
“Are you lost again?”
“I’m leaving now.” I would miss them, Carl and his dog, Berserk, Misty, Theresa, Kat, Peter, the girl on the beach.
She tilted her head. “Anything received must be shared.”
“Here,” I held out the rest of my money, cascading the bills and coins into her palms. She scooped them quickly inside her tattered sweater.
Misty’s face lit up. “You have to turn the sign off when you’re gone.”
“It’s hard living in the city. I can see that. It’s a fractured life.” I was already leaning on the crutch.
“That jail was full of glued appendages. You were smart to recover from it.” She winked at me.
I could see dirt collecting in the fold of her eyelid, the supratarsal crease. My appearance wasn’t much better. “Goodbye.”
“My hair’s made of glass. I can’t find a dress unless I unzip myself.”
I patted her hand. She was agitated.
“We can’t go anywhere near them.” She nodded at all the people.
“Are we really that different from them?”
“We’re not welcome here. But we can scavenge for photographs of the party.” She unearthed a picture of a cow, showed it to me. “Nothing’s happened here before.”
I turned away from her. “Please take your medications.” Otherwise there wasn’t much left to tell her. My bus had arrived and my body still obliged my mind’s wishes. I teetered up the bus steps using the crutch. The driver assisted me. It was the hour when daughters considered killing their fathers, sons their mothers. I sat toward the back. The seat hurt my buttocks and my stomach seized at the effort. I rested. I wasn’t sure whether I had failed in my life experiences or not.
I picked an aisle seat because my impending blindness would occlude me from seeing much of the scenery as it flew by out the window. I could hear a dog’s frenzied bark echoing from the station. I had to shoo a pesky fly away continuously with my hand. I removed the notebook Miss Elaina gave me. I could write even though I had sustained a hole in my arm and attendant bruises. As the bus began moving I squinted at the streaks on the window. I would relinquish my past while the white line behind the bus unspooled. We passed the river, whose water no one could drink or swim in. Was there any part of me not ready to break?
The bus was empty. My spine was disassembling; rents in my flesh began to fester, one part of my neck unbuckled. My nearby window passed a smattering of clouds, trees thrashing in a wind, a slanting house. The weight and gravity of that wind would be too much for me now. I had no choice but to embrace what I had become, a life amid death, my patchwork body failing me.
“Moribund,” I gave myself, no sound, only my lips moving. Then I fell asleep.
I was arranging letters into words I didn’t know. Maybe it was another language. Maybe it was a language I already knew. I was young, large, a Childcloud, fresh, lovely. My mole was perfect. I separated the letters, brought them back again, rearranging them. Some of the words were familiar. I opened a book and marveled at all the sentences. They were meaty with good, complex words. Someday I would understand them.
I enjoyed the smells in the house, a human, food. Every object gave off some kind of odor, a lemony table, a minty rug, a footstool like tea. The sounds were still overwhelming, the tick of a clock, scraping of a chair, liquid
s pouring, opening and closing drawers, doors, lids, books. I tasted everything, licking the fireplace, the toilet, lamps, locked windows. Especially the windows, which I imagined held the flavors of clouds suspended in air. I was curious. What were they for? Why wasn’t I allowed out there?
My father started to open the door into my room, “My darling. . . .
I awoke to a young boy, in shorts with cropped red hair, pulling on my sleeve. My elbow became disjointed, my scarf fell with the tussling, revealing a bit of my face.
“Yuck,” he grew closer to me, “what’s wrong with you? You look scary. You were crying really loud in your sleep. You look really gross.” He ran back to his mother, who wore a gold headband. He climbed into her lap.
She whispered, “Be nice to people who are different, Donnie. You can do that for me, can’t you?”
The boy nodded.
An older lady with blue hair a few rows in front of me turned around and mouthed hello to me. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m fine.”
The bus rumbled and sometimes passed a car too quickly, but I grew used to the rhythm. I was in pain, my kidney and heart ached, but I extricated my notebook, the one that had belonged to Sandy Shane. I pulled out and crumpled the two pages I had already written on. I held it close to me so I could see what I had written.
Three Ways of Looking
1.The living wear the arms of the dead,
I fall into them, out of context.
I make the same mistakes without trying.
The Solace of Monsters Page 16