The Elementals

by Francesca Lia Block

  “Smart, rather useless mutts,” Tania said. “Johnny’s an English major like you. Almost has his PhD except for that pesky dissertation.”

  I pointed at Perry and he lifted his palm and lowered his head in mock reverence. “Classics. I like any culture that worships creatures with furry haunches and girls that change into trees.”

  Tania leaned forward on her elbows so that her bare arms shone in the light. “I’m in psych, actually.” Her voice was soft, confiding. “After the dysfunctional shit I went through as a kid I have a lot of experience. Now I like to use my roommates as subjects.”

  I had a vision of her sitting across from me in a leather therapist’s chair, looking like she had on Telegraph, at the tarot table, except wearing a button-down silk blouse and glasses.

  The front door opened, I heard footsteps, and followed Tania’s gaze to the man standing at the threshold of the room. “Speak of the devil,” she said.

  “Sorry.” John was wearing a suit like Perry’s, elegant but old-looking. “I got caught up with some work.” My face heated up as he looked at me. “Hi, Ariel.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t get a single word out. My throat had shut.

  “Like The Tempest,” Tania said, staring at him, but his eyes were still on me. “Let’s get more comfortable,” she went on. “Johnny, bring your food.”

  We went into the dimly lit front room, the “parlor” they called it. There was a fire burning in the grate and the air smelled of wood smoke and eucalyptus. In spite of the cold night, the room was very hot.

  Perry lit a joint and handed it to me.

  “This is what you need. It’ll help dissolve all that tension.”

  I’d never smoked before so I tried not to inhale too vigorously but it went in smoothly. My whole body relaxed into the shimmer of the atmosphere.

  “Time for some magics!” Tania said. She stood and went to the front of the room. A silk cord I hadn’t noticed before hung from the ceiling and she reached up and pulled it. Two pale blue silk curtains seemed to appear out of nowhere, hiding her from view. After a moment she pulled them apart. She was now wearing a black top hat and standing behind a small table covered with a cloth and a tall candle. Then Tania closed her eyes.

  “Fire!” she said and the word filled the whole room as if it were filling the world.

  She began to rub her left thumb and forefinger together, harder and harder. For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off of her hand, even then. As she rubbed, thin wisps of smoke emanated from the tips of her fingers. My breath caught in a gasp of wonderment.

  She picked up a silver lighter and flicked a flame to life, then put it out by stroking it slowly, much too slowly, with her fingers.

  She folded up a piece of paper, lit it on fire and then opened her palm. The flame went out; there was only a small coin there.

  She lit a string, which burned up to the top and then extinguished into a shower of sparks, turning to a scarf of ruby silk.

  I was still staring, huddled up like a child only half-wanting to be awakened from a dream, when the curtain closed. When it opened again Tania was beside me, smiling. I rubbed my eyes. John and Perry applauded but I was too stunned to move.

  “How’d you read my cards the other night?” I asked.

  She looked suddenly sober. “I’ve been studying tarot divination as part of my thesis. Parapsychology. I suppose it’s part chance and part intuition. You look so sad. But also there is something hopeful when I look at you.”

  “And the fire?”

  Her smile returned. “I can’t divulge all my secrets, can I?”

  Perry changed the music to something with an intense beat that woke my shocked-to-stillness limbs. The song was in a language I didn’t recognize and the sound was thrilling; my body didn’t want to keep still, the way I’d felt when I was a kid. But even high, I told myself, I didn’t dance anymore. Ever.

  Tania started, her arms in the air, her hands like birds, her head back and her throat exposed. She shook her hips and undulated her spine. Once again, as if her fingers were still on fire, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  Perry joined in, moving his pelvis close to hers. His hands reached out and slid down her bare back. The music thumped louder.

  “New friend?” Perry scolded. “What are you doing, girl?”

  I sat by the fire, watching them. Sweat was trickling down the back of my neck.

  “Come on, princess, don’t be shy.”

  I took another sip of the drink I’d brought with me, scared Perry would pull me up.

  But he didn’t; he was too busy dancing with Tania. John Graves did. He took off his glasses and then his dinner jacket, rolled up his sleeves. I noticed the strange black letters and the thick veins at his wrists. His skin was pale and the veins looked very blue in contrast. Perry handed him the joint.

  “You’re not going to let us make fools of ourselves alone, are you?” He had a hit of smoke, then reached out and took my hand. I flashed back to the night at the concert, how he had led me through the crowd. I had never been touched by someone like him before that. I was afraid I’d faint.

  But he supported me, his hand on my back as we started to dance to the pulse of the song. I could feel the fluidity of muscles through his thin shirt. I could smell him—a musky dampness that I wanted to bury my face in. We danced for a long time, moving around the room, sometimes touching, sometimes not, intersecting with Perry and Tania. John was so graceful, spinning effortlessly, spine and shoulders rippling, hands carving out images in the air. My feet hurt but I kept dancing. I had a flash of memory of a fairy tale I’d been told as a child, where the woman danced until her toes were gone. Jeni and I took ballet lessons when we were little girls. We loved to dance together, for hours at a time, all around the living room, taking turns choosing the songs. Since she was gone I hadn’t danced at all.

  Then the music slowed and John drew me nearer. The smell of him grew stronger and the muscles of his back tensed under my fingers. I parted my lips and tipped my head back. This would be the moment, I thought. Finally.

  And then I felt more hands on me and they were all surrounding me, dancing with me, swaying. I was caught in the middle of them, burning up with heat. I smelled Tania’s warm gold skin like smoke and roses, the smoke of roses. I saw, through my fluttering eyelids—it was hard to keep my eyes open, suddenly—Perry’s grin with the gap between his front teeth. And I heard John’s voice softly saying my name.

  I let my eyes close altogether now, waiting.

  But then I heard John’s voice again. “It’s late. I think maybe you should leave now? Ariel?” I opened my eyes to see the strange, tense silence. “I can drive you.”

  They all released me with their arms but their eyes stayed fastened like jewels to my forehead and throat and my skin suddenly bumped with cold. Then John handed me the bag with my clothes and shoes.

  “I’ll give you back the dress.” I was already fumbling with the clasp of the necklace. The weight of it in my hand felt almost sexual. I put it on the fireplace mantel.

  “Keep the dress,” said Tania. “We have more than enough. It’s good on you.”

  “Let me drive you home,” John said again but I said no.

  I took off the sandals and jammed my bare feet into the sneakers, my head lowered in shame. Why had I believed they would want someone like me at all? Had I done something to make them dismiss me so suddenly?

  “Be safe,” he said.

  As I sprinted home with tears I wasn’t sure how to explain pouring down my face, I thought of something. If Jeni had not vanished, we would be spending this night together. But she had disappeared and I had not found out what happened to her. Instead of searching I was dining with beauties. I had failed.

  10. And blood was blood

  I stayed up watching TV in the dorm lounge until dawn, then slept the rest of the weekend, hardly leaving my room except to go the bathroom. My forehead pounded with heat and I shivered under the comforter wh
ile my empty stomach churned.

  As I was going through my bag I found a joint in there; a present from my friends? I tucked it in my drawer where I couldn’t see it. And the blue silk dress was balled up at the bottom of my hamper so it might seem as if that night had never taken place at all.

  When school started again I dragged myself out of bed and went, but I was only half-there. I daydreamed about John, Tania and Perry and at night I hid under my blankets and tentatively touched myself. I hadn’t allowed myself to do this for a long time. But now I did it like a starving person taking her first small bite, thinking of the three people in the house, thinking about what would have happened if I’d stayed that night.

  After Jeni was gone I stopped wanting to kiss anyone. I didn’t even want to touch my own body because when I did I saw her face and then I just went cold.

  But now, in bed, I touched the tender marks on my abdomen. They were still there, too, proof, like the dress and the joint, that I had been somewhere other than my room, the campus, Telegraph Avenue.

  I had meant to ask John Graves about the marks. Why were they still there? I had taken off my clothes in front of Tania and she hadn’t seen them, or pretended not to. I had not spoken. It was like I was a girl from one of the Greek myths. But no one had cut out my tongue except for me; if I spoke I’d be the one to lose.

  And what would I have said? Why did your touch leave a permanent mark? Would that have upset him, pushed him away? What I wanted from him was something bigger and more final than just his gentle, bruising touch. It was escape from a life of pain into one I didn’t understand but wanted. Theirs.

  * * *

  One day I walked up to the front of my English class to turn in the assignment and I heard some stirring behind me. There was a cramping in the pit of my stomach and I reached back to touch the seat of my jeans. Something sticky on my hands.

  Someone snickered. The window was open and a cool breeze raised goose bumps on my arms even though my face was flaming. Melinda Story said softly, “Ariel, would you like to leave early today?”

  I went to the ladies’ room and put in a tampon but there was nothing else I could do except walk all the way back to the dorms with my sweatshirt tied around my waist. It was just menstrual blood, something my mom had always told me to be proud of, never ashamed, but it seemed like a revelation of everything that was wrong with me. And blood was blood; it made me think of something frightening that I wanted to keep out of my mind at all costs.

  * * *

  Melinda Story stopped me two days later as I was leaving class.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

  “If you want to talk…”

  I shook my head. “I’m okay, thanks.”

  She leaned her face closer to mine. “There’s a fairly good counseling center here. If you’d like I can help you find someone.”

  “Oh, I’m already going, thanks, though.”

  Actually, I’d stopped seeing Ronnie Wang. I wasn’t good at hiding my secrets from her. Every time world hunger or environmental disasters made me weep she got more and more suspicious.

  * * *

  In my psych class, before the final, I was going over the mental disorders and reread the definition of schizotypal.

  “Odd beliefs or magical thinking, as well as an inability to maintain close relationships outside of the family.” Hadn’t that been me since Jeni disappeared? I thought about John, Tania and Perry. I wondered if I really was ill—not just an impressionable Psych 101 student; that would have explained everything. I wondered again if the people in the house were real at all. The marks were still there on my abdomen but I’d read about people who thought they were abducted by aliens. They found scars on their shins and arms, on the webbing between their thumbs and first fingers. The marks were real to them but who was to say what was real and how those marks had gotten there? And maybe I’d bought the dress at the used-clothing store on Telegraph. It looked more like a rag now than I had remembered it from that night.

  I began to read fairy stories ravenously, as if hidden in their pages I would find some clue as to who these people were. I checked A Field Guide to the Little People out of the library and stared at drawings of brownies, elves, fae and shape-shifters as if they were real, as if I might recognize in them some reminder of Tania’s neck, Perry’s smile, John’s eyes. Even though the dark stories made me queasy and gave me shivers, I thought they were better than reality, especially when reality was goblins replicating in my mother’s body and stealing my best friend away without a trace.

  Whatever or whomever my new friends were I was better for what had happened. I hardly noticed Lauren anymore; nothing she said bothered me. Light looked more beautiful to me than it ever had. Touching the water in the fountain on Sproul Plaza. Shifting through the leaves of Strawberry Canyon when I ran the trails there. Glittering in a metallic haze. I could smell the seasons changing in the air. The breeze from the bay brought salt and minerals. The homeless people were like trees that had come alive to walk the avenue. Everything sounded more intense, too. Drummers on the street sent their beats through my skin. The bells of the campanile made me see streaks of color in the sky. The poetry Melinda Story read to us in class with her soft voice—John Donne, John Milton, John, John, John (did it mean something that they all shared this name?)—sent chills along my spine and made the finer hairs stand up on the nape of my neck. I wept but even that had a heightened air, in spite of what Ronnie Wang believed, as if my tears were for the sky and earth and sea and stars as much as for myself. The only sense that seemed weaker was taste—the only food I wanted was theirs; theirs the only drink that could slake my thirst. I was changing. I was falling apart. Or maybe I was just discovering who I really was.

  11. Things that are there that you can’t see

  Christmas was coming and I’d be going home for a few weeks. I wasn’t relieved the way I would have thought I’d be. I wished, for the first time then, that Bean was real, that I could have gone home with her to her imaginary house full of imaginary brothers and dogs and good food that no one would force me to eat but that I could enjoy watching them gorge on. No one would be sick and no one would be too beautiful or too desirable and no one would be missing.

  During finals week I shambled around in a daze. The light wasn’t numinous anymore by then; it hurt my eyes. The loud sounds made my ears ring. Every muscle in my body was tight, my jaw clenched like a vise and when I had to take tests I broke out in ice-sweats. The sight or sound of Lauren caused the same reaction. On the streets, I startled easily, thinking someone was watching me. The huge homeless man, especially. I saw him more than I would have liked, lumbering by or rocking back and forth on street corners, head cocked to the side, always looking. At night I lay awake, a vision of him looming above me, flexing his hands. What did it mean?

  In my notebook I wrote, The giant is watching. Then, when that didn’t help me sleep any better, I called Officer Liu.

  “There’s this guy,” I said, when I finally got him on the phone. “This homeless guy. Really tall?”

  “Burr Linden.” I could almost see the annoyance on Liu’s face, the way his fingers tapped impatiently on his desk.

  “Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Every time I turn around he’s watching me. On Halloween I think he was following me. He gave me this flyer for a party. And now I see him all the time.”

  “Burr’s been on the streets for a few years now. Was a student. Then institutionalized. But he walked and no prior record of anything but vagrancy.”

  “Was he ever questioned in connection with…”

  Officer Liu cleared his throat. “Miss Silverman, I’ve told you, we’re on top of things. Now, if you have a specific incident to report I’d be happy to assist you, otherwise I think this is a waste of both of our time, frankly.”

  * * *

  No help there
. So in order to sleep at night I smoked one hit of the joint I’d hidden in my drawer. I didn’t want to use it up—my only proof of the people in the house besides the marks that were still on my stomach—but it was the only way I could rest. When it was almost gone I put the rim of ragged, burned paper back in my dresser. Their mouths had touched it. Their mouths that could provide me with both pleasure and oblivion.

  * * *

  As soon as the last final was over I got on a plane and flew into the Valley and my parents were there at the airport waiting for me.

  My mom looked different; right away I knew why they hadn’t wanted me to come home. She was wearing a scarf tied around her head and she’d lost a lot of weight. Her face looked drawn under the makeup she had on; it was rare to see her made up at all. I tried to smile in spite of how hard it was with the lump clogging my throat.

  We hugged and I had to struggle not to pull away first. It hurt too much. If I let myself I’d dissolve in her arms and she was the one who needed comforting now. I couldn’t let her see my tears. I also wished that I wasn’t so thin, that I had some cushioning for her, a soft place.

  My dad hardly seemed to register that I was there. I’d never felt that from him in my life. If anything, he’d always been too attentive. We joked that they should have named me Miranda, also from The Tempest, Prospero’s daughter, not his sprite. The overprotective, bookish Prospero was a lot like my father. He hugged me stiffly and, picking up my luggage, hurried toward the car. The smog was so thick that the sky just looked like a solid wall of pale gray and if you didn’t know there were hills in the distance you would never have believed it.

  It made me wonder about other things that are there, things you can’t see.

  * * *

  My parents did their best. They didn’t bring up anything that might be disturbing to any of us, which meant we didn’t talk much at all about anything of depth. If the conversation got tense, my dad asked how things were going with my therapist and left it at that. But I knew they were trying to make the stay nice for me. We pretended to be happy, pretended that everything was fine. We went to movies, out to eat. My mom even took me shopping at the mall on the day of Christmas Eve.