by Brian Hodge
It feels strange having a woman around again, although her presence is hardly like that of a roommate; rather, a bird or some other creature that watches you with bright, all-seeing eyes. At night she sleeps by your side, although there’s no touching but for accidental brushes. You turn away whenever an erection raises, yet feel sure she must know what you’re thinking; too, she surely notices your shame over such traitorous skin, but has the grace to pretend she doesn’t.
You distract yourself some of the time with the photo albums that accumulated before the hurled brick changed everything. Page after page of memories, some fresh, some seasoned by years, all of them capable of bringing you to tears if you look at them just right.
Ellen Medicine Crow lingers behind you as you bow your head at the table, weeping, and you feel her bend lower. Feel the light touch of her hands on your shoulders, the press of her forehead at the back of your neck. She’s just sharing in your grief, but you drink in her touch with a terrible fear you’ll never know anything so tender again.
Perhaps she knows this too, and this is why she mourns.
“Why did you decide to become a healer?” you ask her later, with a drier face.
Hair shimmers as she shakes her head. “I didn’t decide. I had nothing to do with it. It decided for me. The most I ever did was choose not to fight it.”
“Suppose you wanted something else, that this wasn’t what you wanted to do. Wouldn’t you have fought it then?”
She’s patient with your honest skepticism, has undoubtedly encountered it before. “But how could I? The universe creates what it needs. All I had to do was grow. There’s no reason to make it all so difficult.”
You laugh, not cruelly. Mostly you wonder why you had to turn out so enlightened. “I just can’t buy into that,” you say, but no more. This hardly seems the time to get yourself into a reasoned argument against determinism.
Although you can see the appeal: The illusion of hands moving behind the scenes; accountability; someone or something to blame for the wretched turns life takes in this fucked-over world…
And you’re angrier than you have any right to be, aren’t you?
On the third day Ellen sends you out on an errand, something you must do by yourself. Go find a rock and bring it back, these are her instructions. At least the size of your fist, a rock you feel compelled to pick up more than any other rock.
You’ve never given rocks much thought before, wanting only to duck them when they’re thrown, but she’s the healer. You find one a few blocks away — it’s a tougher order to fill in the city than you might think — half-buried in a nest of weeds beside a stagnant ditch. It passes Ellen’s approval and she has the two of you sit on the floor, facing each other. Her face is serious, clouded even, her focus upon you total. You are the world. And you are in trouble.
“It’s more than just your skin,” she says. “It’s everything, everyone you lose and everything that breaks for you. You wonder why. Why it happens to you. Don’t you?”
You shake your head. “I already told you, I don’t believe— “
“Lie to yourself if you want, but don’t lie to me.”
Your head lowers a bit. And you suppose, possibly, you may at least entertain the sometimes notion of believing in reasons, that coincidence stretches only so far. You nod miserably, wondering if Galileo felt this way, forced to recant.
“Then ask the rock.”
You stare at her. “Ask … the rock?”
“Ask the rock, then stare at it. Stare into it, so that you see more than just its surface. Wait until you see the patterns and the shapes it shows you. When you see something … tell me what it is.” She takes pity on your failure to grasp any purpose here whatsoever. “The rock will tell you what you already know, but cannot or will not admit to yourself yet.”
So you feel like a fool, holding this flattened slab in your hand. Talking to it. Staring at it as if it’s going to talk back. Except it does, of a fashion. Stare long enough and shapes will arise, minutiae of texture and shading, and suddenly you realize what’s actually going on here. Basic psychology, fundamentally no different than staring at ink blots. Okay, you’re back on track, you can accept this after all.
“I see the top of a skull, without the lower jaw — these dark spots are the eye sockets, and there are the teeth — do you want me to show them to you?”
She shakes her head, directs you back to the rock.
“There’s a snake crawling from a broken eggshell … and that’s an axe head … there I see a little guy, it looks like he’s caught in the jaws of this primitive-looking fish.”
That makes four from the top of the rock. She stops you and has you turn it over. You orient yourself to the new topography and keep going: A curved dagger. A branch with decaying leaves. A butterfly leaving its cocoon. Screaming faces in profile.
“That’s enough,” she says, tougher to read than any doctor you’ve ever been to. What must she think of you? Does she reserve judgment at all? You watch her lose herself in thought so deep it could be a trance.
“So what’s next?” You can’t contain yourself.
“Next?” she says, and shrugs as if wondering how you could be asking this in the first place. “Go put the rock back.”
*
You’re feeling different even before you reach your door once again, as if you’ve been less than vigilant, let slip a crucial guard. You’ve as much as admitted there may be more to the world than you give credit for, a wizard behind the curtain of Oz. One slip is all it takes. Which facade will be the next to crumble?
What better proof than this: You didn’t cheat. You returned the rock to the precise spot where you found it, as if somehow Ellen would know if you conveniently tossed it in the nearest lot.
Her bag is packed and by the door when you return, and she’s obviously been waiting for you, dreading the need to look you in the eye. She does it anyway, for you are the world. And you are in worse trouble than you ever dreamed. Her gaze is brutally honest.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “But I can’t help you.”
No. Of course not. She’s got you talking to rocks — where can you go from there? And why are you crying?
“Think of what you saw. The symbols, their meanings.”
Again, they drift forth. Images of transition, of death to old lives, emergence into new. Pain and torment and tools of their infliction. These weren’t in the rock and you both know it, just as surely as you know their true origin.
“You’re undergoing a change,” she tells you. “You’re becoming someone or something else. I’m sorry. It’s not for me to interfere with this.”
“Because,” you murmur, “the universe creates what it needs. And you wouldn’t dare tell it it’s wrong, would you? That it’s got no right to do this to me. Would you?”
Your voice grows more ragged as she backs away from you, and how you wish her eyes looked younger, less knowing, less certain.
“What does it want from me?” you scream as Ellen takes flight down the stairs. You’re sliding to the floor, arms wrapped around yourself in defense of the cold you suddenly feel. “What does it WANT from me?” Her footsteps fade, leaving you with empty stairs and hollow corridors, where even your kindest neighbors must now hide behind their doors if they don’t want to see what you’ve become already.
*
You spend days dwelling on all the people and institutions and ethics into which you placed your faith, only to have them now failing you. Not that you cast blame — it isn’t in your nature to blame. You come to realize that the city is the only thing that hasn’t let you down. Solid and gray, it’s always there. Not that it takes notice of you, but at least it doesn’t spit you back. These days that’s a lot.
So it’s inevitable that it becomes your true home after you return from a movie one night to find that your apartment building has burned. And you cry not for yourself, but for her, the way her existence has been systematically erased. Even her clothes
are now ash, plus all the photos that kept her alive. She might now have been no more real than a daydream.
You sleep in your car, park where you can, walk when you’re no longer able to tolerate its confines. Your crusted skin becomes a barrier between you and them, all of them, with their safe and placid lives. You used to be one of them, but no more — perhaps this is why they no longer see you.
You could get away with a lot, with this new invisibility.
You wonder what it all means, and why you were chosen to play the fool’s role in this grand illusion. This whole city a stage, with so few of its players even aware of their own parts.
That most peculiar woman continues to wave at you from afar, her hideous red grin more lascivious now. Sometimes she seems to laugh. She knows, oh, she knows all right. Your secrets are hers and always have been. Does she find you during your random travels or do you naturally gravitate to wherever she happens to be?
Does it even matter, when in all likelihood you’re destined for each other?
The next time you see her she’s waving from the third floor window in a monolithic old apartment building of gray stone. Its gables and cornices look heavy, vast, crumbled by the decades. Its walls stand mottled by years of water, seeping and trickling. It looms over you, set against a blue-gray evening sky threaded with hints of dying rose. The block you’re in is a gauntlet of bare trees. Their leaves underfoot weave a ragged, wet carpet, slick and spicy with decay.
A few steps closer, a shift of light and perspective — you now notice the gargoyles perched on the building’s corners and nestled above its eaves. Winged, horned, they hunch and squat above you in silent dominance, caught there like corrupted souls, or grotesque children birthed from granite.
They alone watch your entry to the building.
You find the stairs, and they beckon you up. One floor, two — what a chill this building holds, a mausoleum in the middle of a world that only looks sane and ordered. Cabs and cable TV would never know how to find this place.
The third floor.
Hallways are many, but you follow the most likely one, that will lead you to her. Your footsteps are small clicks in a greater hush made not of silence absolute, but small echoing murmurs heard through the walls. Someone is crying somewhere, and someone else laughing. Elsewhere, children are singing, but it’s no song you’ve ever heard, and not a song for children’s throats.
The door you decide upon is stout, peeling, as scabrous as your face. Unlocked, naturally, but you knew it would be. Another hand might not find it so, but for yours the knob twists easily.
It stinks in here, of mildew and unwashed bodies, but nothing you couldn’t get used to. Sometimes you crave a friendly touch so much that you think you’d welcome it from a leper.
And you thought this place would be emptier than you’re finding it. At least two dozen people are here, along the walls, but there’s no furniture to speak of, and no one sits together, no one talks. Mostly they stare at the baseboards and the floor, some the ceiling, like gray strangers in a doctor’s office. Waiting for their name, their turn, the expected surrender of their bodies.
In another room you find no one alive, just a jumble of blue limbs, bodies with hands bound behind them, thumbs tied together with wire. You can’t see their faces clearly because all the heads have been covered by plastic bags, then cinched around the necks with rubber bands. Most of them died with their mouths open wide, straining against the plastic, sealed forever.
One of them looks like Stavros, but you can’t be sure.
You find her in a room glaringly lit by a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. A moist, yeasty smell surrounds her, but maybe that’s just imagination, because her skin reminds you so much of dough. A roll of fat bunching about her thick waist, she kneels on the floor before a middle-aged man who lies naked and trembling on a tabletop. Her arm, her right arm … you can’t find it, and for a moment think she must only have one. Then you realize:
She’s working it up inside the man. He shudders, groaning, as one bony foot pedals ceaselessly in the air, like a tickled dog.
You watch, a voyeur, until at last she grins at you. Red, so red. A tangle of greasy hair obscures her eyes, and she licks her lips as if she’d like to kiss you.
Not yet. Not yet. You’re not that desperate yet.
“Get started anywhere,” she tells you. Her voice is low and, for a woman, almost gravelly; not unerotic. “That’s the one thing about this place, the work’s never done.”
“I … I don’t understand.” At least you’re being honest. You think.
And she laughs, fisting her arm another inch into the man. “I remember when I was like you.”
“How? Like how?”
She grins again. “Asleep.” Then she tilts her head back, and you know her eyes must be closed in something like ecstasy. Her mouth curls into a sneer, lips skinning back, and she’s gritting her teeth, little gray pegs that rim her jaws.
“So few innocents,” she says, “and so much time.”
The man cries out, suddenly and sharply, and with the thick sound of membranes giving way she yanks her arm out. It glistens, and in her hand is clutched what may be his heart. It’s so hard to tell, though — you think it should be red, but mostly it’s clotted black, as if riddled with disease.
“Thank you,” he breathes, head lolling back, and at last his leg drops prone, exhausted, spent. “No more, please, no more…”
She rests the organ on the sparse gray mat of hair sprouting across his sunken chest. “You know better than that. With men like you, there’s always more.”
She has her arm back in up to the elbow before you can turn to run, run from the building into the welcoming night, where you have no name, no longer even a face.
*
In the months since she died you’ve frequently found yourself driving the Landry Expressway, even when you have no good reason for being here. You drive it one direction, turn around at an exit chosen at random, drive it the other. Giving in to a need to linger where your one true love met her end, you suppose. Or perhaps your need is baser still — tempting fate, catch me if you can.
Red-eyed, red-faced, you burn gas this night as if there’s no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. The world has surprised you, has shown you things that a year ago might not have even been allowed through the filters that all brains keep in place to strain out whatever can’t be tolerated. Now, though, you’ve been prepared, and it will take so much more to surprise you.
Traffic has been thinned by the lateness of the hour, but here you are in white line fever. When you see something hurtling at you from above you don’t even swerve. The windshield implodes, a brief storm of pebbles of safety glass showering your bed, your home, the final sanctuary left to you. The brick ricochets off the passenger seat, slamming into the ceiling, then the dashboard. Surprisingly, you feel little fear, knowing that you can’t be killed. Not here, not like this. You’ve come too far. Something has invested much cruel effort on your behalf.
You’re standing on the brakes. The car spins out across two lanes of screaming traffic, and then you’ve broadsided a chainlink fence that shears apart to let you through. You’ve barely come to rest on the other side before your equilibrium is restored and you scramble from the car. Others have slowed to look, to marvel, as you emerge as unscathed as anyone can expect. Dusting yourself clean of glass, seizing the brick that was meant for your head…
And you run.
Backtracking, running parallel to the expressway, you pound toward the ramp that lets drivers on from the overpass. The city, the night itself, has turned red in your eyes, and you wonder what they’re saying about you in those cars that swerve to miss you on the ramp. They notice you now, don’t they, these people who once were you.
You crest the rise, stand for a moment beneath a sky full of gathering clouds. Down below you can see the fresh loops of rubber left by your tires, and on the other side of the overpass you see them, two figure
s running from the scene of the crime, and now you obey the purest and most instinctive impulse you’ve ever felt.
Whatever has filled you, they’re no match for it. Run as they might from the expressway, deeper into mazes of brick and asphalt and corrosion, you gain on them in a matter of minutes, until they are close enough to bring down like deer before a wolf. You hurl the brick while yet on the run, and it arcs past the shoulder of the nearer fugitive, toward the leader, thudding solidly into the back of his head. Was there ever any doubt? Something guided it there, as surely as it was first guided through your windshield.
They go down in the street, one tripping on the other. The one you’ve struck doesn’t get up. The other scrambles for his feet but you’re there, upon him. He rolls over to face you, eyes feral in their terror. He can’t be more than fourteen years old.
He thrashes beneath you with skinny stick limbs and unkempt hair, and you retrieve the brick. In your grip it feels light as a dream, heavy as an anchor. With the first downswing you crunch the boy’s eye socket. The second unhinges his jaw. The third staves in his forehead and stops him from moving after one final, frenzied convulsion. He makes a much easier target, until there’s no more point left to hitting him.
The other one is trying to crawl away by the time you finish, legs dragging weakly behind him, knees too weak to support his weight. The back of his jacket is already slick with the cascade of blood from where the brick first connected. You wonder who his parents are, how they let him end up like this, with no more regard for other people than bugs on which they might drop stones out of boredom. You wonder if they’ll miss him. Or instead shed a few token tears, then go on their way, creating other monsters, other demons who haunt these lands, these canyons, these buttes.
Demons. Yes, that’s it. That’s what he must be. You know what they look like now. You know what makes them. And most of all you know why they’re needed.