I said, stop testing me.
She said, too late, I’m testing you. I’ve decided. It’s going. What are you gonna do about it?
I took too long answering.
She said, fuck you. Just fuck you.
And she got up and walked away.
*
I’ve read in books on such things that when relationships go sour, some injured parties replay the mistakes they made in their heads, changing the dialogue in arguments, altering what was said to what should have been said, turning moments of petulance into moments of generosity, turning passages of disastrous blindness into moments of heart-affirming empathy. I have read that people rewrite the endings. I am not immune. On the stage of my imagination, she might have still had cause to tell me I was a sick piece of shit who she never wanted to see again, but I kept her from being able to make it stick. In my version, she never got watchful friends to stay with her and keep an eye on me while I gathered my few belongings and left. In my version, one male friend of hers didn’t say to me, tell the truth, you son of a bitch. You’re the one who took her cat, aren’t you? In my version, I denied it with persuasive shock instead of remaining silent and getting a chorus of angry voices replying that they fucking knew it all along.
In my version of the story, I did not stay away for months, busying myself with other things, only to slip unseen into the back of a small concert being given by her latest band of the moment, and I did not see that while her ink had spread down both arms, the zipper was well and truly gone, not even a scar remaining. I did not see her kiss a guy in the audience, and I did not see her face light up, the way it never had at any point during the year she and her zipper had been with me.
In my rewrite, she embraced the only special part of herself and had zippers installed everywhere imagination and medical reality rendered possible; one in her forehead that could be drawn open revealing skull, two on her cheeks that could be drawn aside to reveal teeth and gums, others on her arms and on her breasts and down her back and everywhere else she had never been bold enough to have zippers before. In my rewrite, we found a hood that fit her, and whenever she was at home and not dealing with my needs it was her duty to sit with her nasty face and her annoying personality packed away, while I spent hours and days toying with the feature we’d had enlarged to stretch all the way from her jaw line to her belly button. In my rewrite, she liked it, or knew that it didn’t matter whether she liked it. That, I know, would have been ideal. That would have been bliss.
I leave her alone and write it off as a learning experience.
This is the world I actually live in. It’s impossible to walk down the street, now, without looking for the zippers on the bodies of others. So far I haven’t seen any. It hasn’t caught on as a fad. But sooner or later I’ll find someone who knows that the zipper is the only important thing; or one sufficiently eager to please, or fool, into changing herself in any way I demand.
It’s only a matter of time.
In the meantime, getting ready, I’m taking classes in tailoring.
K. L. PEREIRA
Disappearer
Dori is conjuring her sister. Her supplies: a tape deck ready to play, a long teaspoon for stirring the instant coffee, a swatch she cut off the couch before she left home the first time, and of course the TV, which is the conduit for everything. The show, Taxi, has been off the air since 1983, though was alive in reruns through the early 90s at least. She remembers sitting on the edge of the orange and brown plaid couch while her sister, Erin, punched the numbers on the box-like remote, waiting for the theme-song to come bursting through the sides of the Zenith. In her memories, it is always late in the afternoon, after school but before any adults come home, even before her mother, who works second shift at the restaurant only sometimes, sits chain-smoking and drinking tall glass after tall glass of brandy-laced iced coffee at the kitchen counter. Of course, if Dori and Erin are watching Taxi, it was ages before they decided to go to the edge of the river.
If Dori can make Taxi come back, it will fix everything; it will maybe even fix her. That’s what spells are supposed to be: a fix. A guarantee that if you have all the ingredients, everything that it once took to make something real, all the hundreds of bones and feathers in a black bird or all the nuts and bolts and grease and smoke in a car, you can make that thing the way it was: true and happening, and just the way you remember it. Of course, nothing is ever just the way you remember it being. There’s always something you forgot to remember that pricks into existence at the last minute that makes it not as great as you remembered after all. But that’s ok. It’s ok if it’s not perfect. Dori’s got pieces of everything that made the past the past and she hopes that will be enough, even for it to be the way it was for a moment. A moment is all she needs.
Her life is divided (and maybe it always was), into before Erin and after. Right after Erin left (or was taken, or disappeared), Dori felt like she was the only person who remembered her. Sometimes she felt like she was on one side of a bridge and everyone else was on another. Her mother, Erin’s boyfriend, the police, they all wanted her to cross over, to move on and act like Erin had never existed, to forget. But Dori couldn’t. Do you forget someone just because they’re dead? Or gone? Do they forget you? Dori knew that it was painful to remember, and that’s maybe why her life ended up that way it did.
*
“We out of coffee again?” Strummer fixed her with his one brown eye, shaking the obviously empty coffee can at the floor. He was used to Dori drinking up all the caffeine in the house, stealing his speed. She usually scrawled IOUs in black eyeliner on the mirror, the stove, his headboard.
“Tony Danza marathon,” Dori answered, chewed fingertip tapping the scratched laminate.
There was a creak from the bedroom, the sigh of ancient bed springs, a flump from a pile of pillows. It could have been a cat but it wasn’t.
It was okay, though. Dori didn’t mind other girls in the apartment.
Strummer nodded and slipped on a pair of decaying Vans, grabbed a five from the jar marked “drug money” that sat on the top of the fridge, and headed out the door. Dori knew he was only going to the store but she started imagining what it would be like if he never came back. She decided that she didn’t care that much. Not really.
*
Here’s how Dori rediscovered that she could conjure things. One night, she succeeded in calling Taxi up from vaults of the TV station basement (where all good shows went to die). She was very drunk. Not fall-down-vomit drunk, like she got when she drank wine. The kind of drunk that comes from taking one shot of tequila every half hour all day long. She could feel the equilibrium of blood to alcohol to sweat in her body. Everything was completely balanced in that everything, her heart lungs liver were saturated and equal and now she could exist in the magic place between wakefulness and dream and intoxicated and totally fucked up.
No one else was home; they were either still at the party or passed out in the street or on the subway somewhere. Lots of kids lived here in the factory, trying to be artists but really being too drunk and high most of the time to create anything. Dori was sitting on the floor beside the television, trying to remember the thing that is always in her head, the song she had been trying to remember for years. She simply started chanting “taxitaxitaxi” long and slow like the best kisses, the plosiveness of tee and ex popping on her tongue, and then through the magic of tequila and wishes the theme song came to her, she hummed it loud against the side of the TV, its electric heat pressed to her cheek. She could see herself on the couch in front of her, sitting in the exact same spot as she always had when Erin was around; the girl on the couch is already almost sixteen16, her life already on its way to wrong. She had forgotten that she was full of magic back then. That she could make things happen, appear and disappear. But soon after then, that special time when magic lit her limbic system without her even trying, her days were taken up with blotting everything out with Jim Beam and her nights were ringed with the blue smok
e of Parliaments and the memory of Erin was already almost gone, fading out like a program the antenna of her mind couldn’t quite grasp onto, couldn’t quite pierce with its skinny aluminum body. The show only came back on that night for a minute or two before the electric flickered off because no one bothered to pay the electric bill again, but Dori knew what she’d done.
*
Erin had loved Taxi. She loved that it was a way station, a port from which all the characters came and went and if they wanted to they always had a car ready to take them across one of the million New York bridges and from there, anywhere. Erin was always telling Dori that everything was a bridge, even Erin was a bridge, something Dori had to cross to get to the rest of her life. The characters on Taxi reminded her of that, she said. People who were just searching and trying not to be stuck on one side or the other. Erin said:
—They’re like people we could know, you know? In New York, you could find anyone.
Dori liked Taxi for the oddballs, of course, people that she thought she’d never know, like Latkae and the Reverend. But Dori also drank jar after jar of pickle juice, licked freshly mown grass (for the tastesmell), and flushed her mother’s cigarettes sometimes. Dori lived weird. When she was almost grown-up a boy she was sleeping with would tell her that she was just five degrees off of everything, which threw the whole world off kilter into outer space.
*
Dori knew another spell that her life had proven true: if you stopped thinking about someone, anyone, from the man who begged for change at the truck stop (Jesus H. Christ, her mother would say, get a job, as she shifted her skinny freckled legs in their wooden platform sandals), to the neighbor’s dog (which was fine because Dori hated dogs), to your best friend, to the man with the blank face that she wasn’t supposed to talk about, they would disappear. You wouldn’t notice at first—they’d get grey around the edges and then you wouldn’t see them so often, though really you wouldn’t think about it, because you were in the process of forgetting already, the process of erasing them; they would go away, bit by bit by bit until one day they weren’t there anymore and maybe you wouldn’t even notice. This happened a lot. After Dori and Erin and their mom moved across the river the first time, Dori’s best neighborhood friend forgot to send postcards or call when her mom was drunk-asleep and soon even the friend’s face started to disappear in Dori’s dreams, a big blank question-mark of a spot, like the bottom of a worn shoe whose size has been sweated away and then after a while Dori’s mother said: Who? when Dori asked if they could take a trip across the river to visit, like the friend never existed at all.
Erin was the first one to prove that this spell worked. Everyone (Erin’s sweet-dumb boyfriend, who had been the meat-packer at the Grand Union until he was fired under suspicion of murder and kidnapping and lots of other things; her mother who just smoked and drank until she pickled and ashed herself when Dori was 17, and maybe even the blank-faced man) pretty much forgot Erin until one day she was just gone for good. But that’s getting ahead. The spell worked loads of times before that.
*
One time when Dori and Erin were bored, or maybe just fed up with the adults in their lives, they tried to cast a disappearing spell. It was September summer, early Fall, maybe-Winter-would-never-come kind of weather.
—I’ll bet I can disappear for the long weekend and no one would notice.
Erin pursed her lips in a rude, grunty way, like Billy Idol in all those music videos on that new music video station. MTV played music videos 24/7 and Dori and Erin watched it until their eyes felt like they would melt out of their heads.
—But where will you really be?
Dori had read a lot of books about the secrets of the great magicians and knew that nothing really disappeared, not for good. It was always hiding somewhere obvious but where the audience would never think to look.
—The den closet. I’ll keep the door closed and hide behind the coats if anyone but you tries to find me.
Erin had clearly thought this through. Erin always knew all the answers to everything.
—What about going to the bathroom? And eating? I could probably only sneak you candy.
Dori was clunky-clumsy then, didn’t know how to move her already-woman’s hips so that they didn’t bang into walls and corners and startle the people she was trying to slink away from.
—You could sneak me a four-course meal, dweeb. No one is ever going to know. And I can go in the middle of the night when no one is awake.
Their mother almost never slept at night unless she was really drunk, so this was a risky proposition, but Dori thought it might be fun to sneak things to the closet and pretend she knew nothing. Her most important job, they decided, was going to be to make sure Erin didn’t run out of cassettes or batteries. Erin had won one of those new Walkman players for selling the most subscriptions to the Reader’s Digest or something. Erin was good at making the things she wanted appear, just like that. Dori suspected that she was just as good at disappearing things, too. Dori was extremely jealous of this ability but always agreed to help with whatever Erin wanted to do anyway because really, she loved Erin and there was nothing else to do. They’d hadn’t known about the river’s edge or met the blank-faced man yet.
Dori was glad she wasn’t casting the spell, only helping. She was terrified of the closet. There was a mirror on the back, and once, when Erin was angry at Dori for something, she pushed Dori inside and sat with her back against the door and wouldn’t let Dori out until she chanted Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary in front of the mirror. Dori was extra scared because she knew that Bloody Mary came from mirrors. You only had to call her and she would come, just like that.
—Keep going! Erin said, her back heavy against the door. Don’t stop until you feel her stinking breath on your neck.
Dori wanted to stop but she knew she couldn’t or else Erin would never let her out. She sucked in breath after breath between hiccoughing out Bloody Mary’s name until someone wrenched the door open and screamed at her:
—Who the hell are you talking to? It was their mother. She had a cigarette that was mostly ash, dangling from the filter like one of those impressions of bodies from Pompeii, the ones that looked like they would collapse if you breathed on them.
—Erin. Dori said. She locked me in and made me—
—Jesus H. Christ. Stop talking to yourself all the time. Her mother slammed the closet door but it only bounced back, Dori’s reflection coming fast towards her then quickly away again, like there were two of her moving at completely different speeds.
Erin never stayed mad at Dori for long, though, and that’s why Dori couldn’t stay mad at her either. She would always help Erin, no matter what. Especially when she wanted to do magic—disappearing and appearing and other spells.
In the end, they almost won, almost made Erin utterly and completely disappear. They would have totally won but it was Easter, the only only time their mother made them dress in one of their pale plaid dresses that hadn’t even fit last year and go to church. When their mother couldn’t find them, she stood in the kitchen with the fish-limp dress hanging by its faded tag off the hook of a metal hanger and she’d screamed until Dori felt like her ears were bleeding. It wasn’t clear to Dori until much later that their mother had completely forgotten about them and had been on her way out the door until she realized she couldn’t very well show up to Easter church alone. How would that look? At the time, Dori was more worried about what their mother would do to them, especially since she’d threatened no more TV ever if Dori didn’t reveal her secret hiding place. Dori thought about this hard, her too-small dress cutting into her ribs (the black velvet one that her mother was always calling morbid and trying to throw away) and making it hard to breathe, until, finally, she was forced to open the closet door, the mirror catching the early light and making copies of all of them, the reflection in the cheap glass showing several mothers and Erins and Dories.
—This is where you’ve been? Jes
us H. Christ. Take that goddamn morbid thing off and get your ass to church. Their mother shook the dress, making its mothball smell dance with dust particles in dim light of the closet.
Erin shrugged and pushed herself up off the floor. She pressed past both Dori and their mother and instead of going out the front door, climbed out the window. Dori knew Erin was going to go find her boyfriend, who was probably aching for her, positively pining after so many minutes and hours and days without her (Dori learned the words aching and pining from the romance books she stole from the library; she tried to remember them and use them in everyday conversation so she wouldn’t forget).
Their mother gripped the dress in her fists. Dori followed her into the kitchen and watched as she threw it on the kitchen floor and then muttered:
—You don’t appreciate anything. That’s why we can’t do anything nice.
Then she swirled dark rum into her coffee glass, threw it back, and slammed out to her car and then probably to the Church. The dress stayed on the floor for weeks, deflating into the linoleum until it was almost flat and Dori almost didn’t have to step over it. While the dress was being disappeared by being ignored, Erin was disappeared by being forgotten like this, over and over and over. Sometimes Dori would talk to Erin and their mother would tell her to knock it off, which also didn’t help Erin stick around. Their mother never really understood Erin, anyway. Never really loved her. At least, Dori didn’t think so. Erin hadn’t ever seemed to care about that though.
Dori was like the dress: not so much forgotten as ignored. She could read her stolen romance novels and secret magic books and comics and sit in trees and be the one that was remembered at supper time, at bedtime, whenever she did something just five degrees off of everyone else. The only time she wasn’t ignored was after Erin was truly gone for good and then the police questioned her but it was too late and they didn’t believe her anyway.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 30