The Elementals

by Francesca Lia Block

  “We’re going away for a little while,” John said. “To visit some friends. Can I see you when we get back?”

  I nodded, still staring at the piece of crystal. I wanted to ask if I had passed the test, if I was an initiate into their world now, but if he was saying he wanted to see me when they returned, I assumed I was. The question really was, how long could I stand to be away from them?

  When we got to the dorm, John walked me to the door of the lobby and opened it for me but he didn’t come inside.

  13. Nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet

  I went to classics Monday morning and sat in the back of the huge lecture hall as Professor Gordon, a small man with a neat, pointed beard, told us about the origin of tragedy.

  “Tragos,” he said, in a gruff voice, “which means goat dance. The first tragedies were enactments, songs and dances to praise the god Dionysus. Now we are not only robbed of our rituals. Even the gods and goddesses we have left—the actors and actresses we worship in films whom we can identify with all the traits of the traditional deities—are forced to enact mostly comedy, works with no tragic element or with potentially tragic elements that are resolved in Hollywood’s so-called happy endings. Without the performance to contain it, the tragic seeps into our daily lives with acts of real violence.”

  And as I sat there, looking down the steep sides of the dark auditorium to the small circle of light where the goat-like professor stood, I thought of Jeni again. And I thought of John’s question about the soul. Had Jeni vanished because someone had lost their soul? Could someone who killed children have a soul? Did Jeni’s soul continue on? In what form? I put my burning forehead down on the cool wood of the desk, wondering if I could set it on fire this way, and tried to stop the questions from forming again and again in my brain.

  * * *

  I was sitting on the steps by myself, forcing myself to eat some lunch, when Melinda Story walked by. Stopped.

  “Hi, Ariel. How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” I said. “You?”

  “I wondered how you like Professor French’s class,” Melinda said. She was scrutinizing my face.

  “Well, I only had one so far but it seems great. Thank you for recommending me.”

  I was shielding my eyes from the sun to look at her so she sat down next to me in the shade.

  “May I ask you a personal question?”

  I knew what she was going to ask and I didn’t want her to.

  “I’m concerned. Are you getting some support?”

  “Oh, I’m really fine,” I said as brightly as I could. “I got all As last semester and I like my classes.”

  “I just want to make sure you’re not pushing yourself too much. I did the same thing my first year and I had to drop out. I almost never made it back.”

  “No, really, everything’s okay,” I told her.

  “Do you have friends to talk to?” There were worry lines in her brow. She was so sweet. Why did I want her to leave?

  “Oh, I have friends, yeah. They’re great. They’ve been really supportive.”

  “Good, that’s what I want to hear.” Melinda patted my shoulder. “But if you need another friend, you’re welcome to come have dinner with me sometime.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t lied to her, really. I’d gotten straight As and I did like my classes so far. And I had friends. Well, not really friends, but people. I had shared two meals with them, worn their clothes; we had laughed and talked and danced and touched. I just wasn’t sure why they had let me into their lives and if I would be allowed to stay. I wasn’t sure if they would even call me again when they returned from wherever they had gone.

  Eleanor French was a slim woman in her forties who wore beautiful silk blouses, tailored tweed skirts and designer heels. She rhapsodized about the modernist poets in a smoky voice and it made me feel drunk when I listened to her. She started with Yeats, reading aloud from The Celtic Twilight about the Sidhe:

  “‘Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet.’”

  “What did these beings symbolize for Yeats?” she asked. “What was his fascination at a time when God was being questioned?”

  I had wondered about the Sidhe before; my parents were always reading me folk and fairy tales when I was little. But somehow rediscovering them in this book, which seemed, especially when read by Professor French, to be written as factual evidence of mystical experience, startled me, even more so in the state I found myself.

  I thought again of the defining characteristics of the schizoid personality, of Tania’s long arms as she waved them above her head like wisps of smoke, of the roses tattooed on her shoulders and the strangeness of her voice, of Perry’s puckish features and green polished nails and of John, always of John—the glister of his eyes, the black, black hair and the thoughts you could almost see spinning in his head, thoughts I wanted to see and understand.

  The Sidhe were tall and thin and beautiful with silvery voices and strange, capricious ways. They dealt in magic, in dance and poetry, and also in punishments for misdoings and in the business of stealing souls. I didn’t fully know yet why Yeats was fascinated with them but I knew why I was. My own personal Sidhe were gone and I longed for Perry, Tania and John as if they had taken away with them my soul.

  * * *

  Maybe I’d spoken too soon about liking all my classes because by the second week it was clear that my creative writing workshop teacher, Hamilton Portman, had chosen his favorites, and wasn’t going to make things easy for the ones he was less impressed with. I was one of the latter.

  Out the tall, thin windows of the English building I watched the sun play on the leaves, turning them brighter green. Portman was discussing the writing of a blonde girl named Jessica Steinholtz. He couldn’t seem to contain his enthusiasm; he was practically salivating.

  “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” he exclaimed. “The restraint, the visual imagery, the rhythmic quality of the language.”

  Jessica Steinholtz was trying to control a smile that kept threatening to break out on her face. It wasn’t her fault that the professor wanted to fuck her, I thought. She was beautiful and her writing was good enough. But it all made me uncomfortable.

  We went around in a circle discussing Jessica’s piece, which was about a young man obsessed with his sister’s beautiful best friend. There was something weird about Jessica’s descriptions of the gorgeous blonde, obviously based on herself. I kept thinking she would have been wise to at least change the girl’s hair color, since the endless praising of the flaxen locks got a little embarrassing. The boys in the class were almost as enthusiastic as the professor and the girls mumbled praise, afraid to appear disagreeable.

  When it was my turn I said, “It’s really clean but I’m not convinced about the voice. It seems very feminine. I’m not sure a guy would describe her that way. ‘The Jimmy Choo stilettos,’ ‘the perfectly applied shade of her lip gloss.’ They seem a little forced, maybe? Plus, the girl’s young. Would she have designer shoes like that?”

  Professor Portman glared at me across the table. I could feel sweat trickle down the sides of my rib cage and tried to remember if I’d put on deodorant that morning. I was distracted all the time.

  “And you are an expert on how young men describe women?” he asked me. There was a slight smirk on his mouth and I suddenly understood the expression about wanting to wipe a look off someone’s face, and not gently.

  “Not always, no. But it just sounds awkward compared to other places in the story that work.”

  “And what about designer shoes? It’s true, as a very masculine man”—he winked—“I’m not aware if young women wear Jimmy Choos or not. Jessica?”

  She grinned and held out her tanned leg, on the end of which a delicate foot dangled a black high-heeled pump.

  The class laughed and I hung my head and stared at my silver Converse from Target. I should have known; h
ow stupid.

  “Okay.” I could swear the teacher rolled his eyes. “Moving on.” He shuffled his papers and pulled mine out. “Ariel?”

  I felt the panic rise. I wanted to get out of there, clenched my thighs together, trying to relieve the pressure building between them.

  My piece was about Halloween at the house. I wondered why I had submitted it. It suddenly felt as if I was standing naked before the class, blood pouring down my legs. This was private and I shouldn’t have exposed it here. Also, it made me miss them more.

  Professor Portman made me read a short section in my shaking voice. Then he dug in.

  “Firstly, I’m wondering if this is fiction at all. There seems to be no distance between the writer and the narrator. The amount of adjectives clutter the piece and make it hard to extrapolate imagery from it. Sometimes the more you describe something, the more obscure it becomes. Show us, don’t tell us what you see. For example, the Jimmy Choo shoe in Jessica’s piece is more evocative than all these detailed descriptions of the house. Also, what exactly is happening here?” He snapped the page he held with his thumb and first finger. “You mention the dead girl on the flyer but then just kind of drop it.”

  It wasn’t just me that stood naked and bleeding before everyone; it was Jeni. “The dead girl.” I’m sorry, I told her.

  The students critiqued my piece, mimicking pretty much everything Portman had said. By the time they were done I had sweat stains under my armpits. As we walked out, Kyle Langley, a tall guy in a pink Lacoste shirt and glasses, leaned over me and whispered, “You smell great, Ariel! Is that your natural odor?”

  I hadn’t remembered my deodorant and the smell coming from my body was the toxin fear.

  * * *

  But I couldn’t write my classes off; I needed to do well. It was something I could control, unlike my mother’s health, Jeni, John, Tania or Perry. And Tania had told me not to let anything slide, as if she were warning me that I had to get good grades. It had always been easy to do this in high school and I couldn’t stop now when so much more was at stake. Maybe what I believed to be my only shot at joy was at stake. Maybe my only chance to see John again.

  So I continued to study, I continued to run. I spoke to my parents regularly but I didn’t tell them much; I didn’t want to be disappointed by their vague, distracted response.

  The closest I got to another world was People’s Park where the homeless gathered. Sometimes I’d stand at the periphery at night, peering through the trees at the small area of grass, looking for something I couldn’t define. A few shadowy shapes moved there, and I wished for John’s arms around my chilled shoulders.

  At night when Lauren was in Dallas’s room I locked the door, put on my headphones and blasted the sound. Metric and Moby and Massive Attack and Miike Snow. Sigur Rós and PJ and Halloween Hotel. And I flung myself like a fool around the room with my phantom brown-eyed best girl friend until I was shaking like a danse macabre skeleton.

  I wondered, then, if it were really possible to dance, under some bitter and alluring enchantment, until your toes were gone.

  14. The cold reminder of the dead

  “‘I took one look at her head and knew she was the one.’”

  In my creative writing class Kyle Langley read a piece about a serial killer.

  He took the killer’s POV and wrote in first person, present tense about how the guy stalked this woman and killed her and then decapitated her, but for the first two-thirds it read like a love story.

  In every scene I saw a girl with Jeni’s face.

  I couldn’t breathe, had to get out of there. My legs jiggled manically under the table as Kyle continued to read. When he was through, Professor Portman nodded sagely. He was graying at the temples and his hairline was receding a little but his features were classically handsome, like an actor playing a professor in a movie. Jessica Steinholtz gazed at him with a half-smile on her glossy lips.

  “Good work, Kyle. It’s very effective. Creepy as hell. You get us right inside his head and then when we realize where we are, bam, it’s too late. I think some people may be offended by this piece.” He panned the table with his cool blue eyes and I looked down quickly. “But that can be the beauty of something. When you know you got ’em.”

  My stomach cramped with hunger and with fear. All I wanted was to hear the clock tower chime.

  When class was finally over I watched Jessica gather her things slowly and come over to Portman, who stood at the back of his room by his desk. There was something so intimate about the way they leaned in to speak to each other, about the way his gaze dripped over her body, that I looked away quickly. She laughed and tossed back her golden hair.

  I thought, Am I just a prude, jealous bitch? Who needs to get laid? (Where is John? Why hasn’t he called?) Or is there something fucked up about having to see your forty-something teacher fall in love with an eighteen-year-old student in public?

  I really wasn’t sure which was true. Maybe both. I walked out of the classroom, down the dim hall, down the steps and into the day. I had my iPod on, listening to Björk—her otherworld voice making me feel more vulnerable, lost, in the wrong place. The sun hurt my eyes and I wished I had sunglasses.

  I felt a hand on my arm and jumped, thinking it was Kyle Langley, maybe. But it wasn’t.

  It was John Graves.

  I had never been this close to him in the daylight before. It was hard to believe he was really there. His skin looked very pale and he wore sunglasses; I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

  I reflexively kept walking, fueled by a blast of adrenaline. It seemed dangerous, somehow, to be speaking to him here. I couldn’t let the worlds blend; I might lose the one I cared about more.

  “May I speak to you?”

  “Not here,” I said as I kept walking.

  He reached out suddenly and grabbed my hand, a bit roughly, and we walked along toward the edge of campus this way. I followed behind him, stumbling a little. My legs were still shaking. I needed to eat something.

  As if he’d read my mind he said, “We’ll get lunch.”

  We made our way down Telegraph and then he turned and pulled me through a bamboo gate to a small Japanese garden. The restaurant was quiet, cool and dark and we sat at a booth where the waitress brought us steaming green tea the color of murky jade.

  “How are you?” he asked. He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes looked tired. “We just got back.”

  “How’d you know where I was?” As I said it, a queasiness stirred in my solar plexus, a mixture of pleasure and mistrust.

  “You told us your classes. I know the English department pretty well. I’ve been here for years.”

  “Then why don’t I see you more?”

  “I mostly work at night.”

  I tugged reflexively on my ponytail holder and let my hair down around my shoulders.

  “Why are you so suspicious?” He sighed. “I really missed you.”

  I didn’t answer, couldn’t tell him how much I’d missed him, too.

  The waitress came to take our order and he asked her for rice, miso soup, edamame and vegetable tempura. He turned to me. “Is that good?”

  I nodded. My mouth was already watering.

  When she left he said, “I was worried about you the other night. I thought about you the whole time we were away but I wanted to give you a little space. I know it was intense.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. I looked into the liquid jade in my cup and lowered my voice. I was afraid that if I expressed any frustration with him for not contacting me, he’d leave.

  “How’s it going?” he asked. “In school and everything?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why you guys care.” I really meant, Why didn’t you contact me while you were gone? Where were you?

  He reached across the table and took my hand. I startled but let him hold it for a few seconds before I drew it away.

  “You’re important to us, Ariel.”

/>   “Why? You don’t even know me. I’m nothing. I’m like any other girl you could find on campus except probably less interesting.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Then why?”

  “Listen, Ariel. You don’t have to question me so much. Or yourself. Tania and Perry and I are just freaks who happen to have the resources to indulge ourselves more than most people. We don’t want to scare you. But I’m drawn to you. I wanted to know you better. You seem important to me, almost familiar, and I want to understand that connection better, okay?”

  The moment was too intense; I was relieved when the waitress brought our soup. We ate in silence for a while. I didn’t really want to talk, I didn’t want answers; I just wanted the sensation of warm food in my belly. When we’d finished the meal he said, “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  I squinted at him. “What?”

  “Angels.”

  * * *

  We took BART into Oakland and got to the graveyard in the late afternoon. The winter sun was hazy gold through pale clouds. Gray tombstones and crypts stretched out across the hillside among the oaks, pine trees and ginkgos. The silence of the dead hung over everything, even in the exposing light of day. As John had promised, the angels were all there with their eyes raised to the faded blue sky.

  “I love this place.” He walked beside me, trailing his long fingers, grazing the stones. “I never understood why people don’t.”

  I moved closer to him so that our arms almost touched. My knees weakened and I lost breath; it was hard to continue up the hill. The air smelled pungent with pine needles.

  “I like them,” he said, and I couldn’t look at him. I had to focus on my feet on the ground. “People used to come and dance. They weren’t always just austere.”

  I imagined what it would be like to dance with John in the graveyard, to dance on the graves. Did he want to dance on the graves?

  “They’re comforting, too,” he went on. “In a weird way. They remind me of being part of nature. Like what the Romantics believed. That we go back when we’re ready. No heaven or hell.”