This Wicked Tongue

by Elise Levine

  All through July, on her ten-, fifteen-, twenty-milers, the dying fringe her vision like wheat-coloured plumes of grass waving at the sides of roads. Wish-wish. God-speed. She can’t believe she might have jeopardized her position, such deliciousness, by messing with that Marta person. Em has kept away like crazy, as much as she can and still keep her position.

  One evening she stands on the shore of the great cold lake, a light wind shirring her hair as she cups the small weight in her hand. She has driven here straight from her workout. It is almost dark, should be, but the sky is bright with clouds lit with a lingering damp. Rain likely lickety-split.

  She side-arms the small rock.

  My man. Colin, or was it Case? Her most recent death. Way to go, Case.

  In school they call it a release ritual, a little something to help the helper find so-called closure. The stone drops into the water and sinks instantly—this is the corpus. Her own personal belief is that the psyche remains consumed within her, a mossy stone turning, polishing her inner walkways—those refined allées foot-printed with her legion of dead soldiers who live on, a part of what she has experienced. Closure indeed.

  She takes off her shoes and socks and wades in. Within seconds her feet, ankles, calves, knees are aflame with cold, as if shod in giant furry mukluks of fire. Then they’re numb, vanished.

  The horizon too. The shoreline, its cicatrice of grain elevators and bridges. And further in, the dream-like contagion of buildings. All is fog, levitation. A minefield of sand and gravel and eternal sleep.

  Colin, Case. And Ken, though he’s not dead yet. Hanging in there against all odds, she reminds herself.

  She feels crafty, sly. Then she feels restored, renewed, blithe in her belief that things will work out for the best. Ken’s Marta likely won’t complain and if she does no big deal, Em can weather the resulting storm. She is that strong. Back at her car, socks and shoes on the roof as she unlocks the drivers’-side door, she stands alone, unvanquished.

  Refutation—a tattered flutter, ragged movement in the corner of her eye. A better look yields the shape of a man sitting atop a picnic bench, hands in his pockets.

  What is belief? Hope, with its sunny unblemished contours, shadowless valleys. She wishes for fishes—that instead of legs he has the single scaly appendage of a merman. That he’s her own clever fantasy replete with gills. That he has a great smile and means her no harm.

  She smiles at him. This is faith.

  He doesn’t return the favour.

  She snatches her footwear and crabs quickly into the car and secures the door. She reaches beneath the seat and snags the hidden canister of pepper spray and hooks it onto her lap. She peers out the side window. Better safe than sorry.

  The man swings his beanpole self erect and sways forward. His face is raised and he appears to sniff the mildew breeze. A haze veils his eyes. The forehead protrudes. The skin over his face is waxen and for a second, as he closes in on the car, the flesh melts from his lips, baring pitted black stumps. He is carrying something. Before she can start the engine and get the gear into drive, his arm scythes and a rock, or a tin can or marble, hits the windshield.

  She is several blocks away—a heart beat, a wink—before she notices the shatter pattern, as if once-invisible joinings embedded within the pane of glass have jarred loose. She sucks at the roof of her dry mouth. Pray? She’d hate to overreact.

  Ken dies quietly, Marta’s fingers interlaced with his, the nurses tell Em. As if she would care. As far as she’s concerned, her parents have also ceased to exist. When she makes an effort to really take them in during these last few weeks of her residency, she sees flour and fat bound with water, like those giant tasteless cookies people buy at malls, nothing but caloric content. Nothing she’d really want or couldn’t live without. Or it’s as if Em has blinked and, like that, her family and those she must administer to—with their ponderous, mopey complications—are gone. She can’t imagine any of them anymore.

  At last she drives away south to the big city, to her final year at school. Heartland, wasteland, she thinks as the hours string along. She can barely contain her speed to a sober fifteen-twenty over the limit. Her teeth chatter. The landscape grows increasingly insubstantial. Thought-curds clump in her head.

  She rolls down her window, filtering, sifting the air for once-familiar impressions—dirt, gasoline. Nothing registers. Anxious, she rolls the window back up. Paste-on towns, an earth puckered with life-forms—calcareous crops, livestock too numerous and varied to tally, dragonflies and locusts pressing themselves in mad blurts to her car windshield, everything else flat planes, a husked place. How might she attach herself? Her own voice in her head is whispery and faint.

  She takes her eyes from the road and a truck blares. With a juddering effort she keeps between the highway’s painted lines. She feels she is traveling great distances, gaining inches. She stops for fuel at a large interchange and is surprised to realize she’s been in the car for hours. She is so stiff she can hardly scuttle from pump to bathroom where she pees forcefully, brutishly, like a goat.

  Back on the expressway, she fingers two freshly arisen bumps on either side of her head. She prods and pokes, claws, mauls. Breaks off to glance at her nails and sees blood.

  She has been getting somewhere, she is pleased with her progress. She’s put some real miles on her feet in preparation for the mid-October marathon, which is two weeks away. Seven more days to go before she can kick back and taper to easy short runs, carbo-load till the cows come home.

  At five-fifty a.m. she meets up with her running group by the waterfront path, nods hello all around and unzips her wind jacket. She silently gives thanks for being in school once again, for having acquitted her clinical practicum not much the worse for wear. Over by coach Doug she spies the guy she’s most recently interested in, downing an energy gel—a peacock of a plastic surgeon, likes to run with his shirt off even though the first frost is nearly here. Impossible not to notice his six pack and tell her those aren’t pec implants. Put a shirt on! she wants to scream at him. Date me! she wants to roar. She has always had a thing for attractive, eligible members of the Hippocratic profession. So when, after the three-mile warm-up loop, he cuts out from the pack and heads along a thin defile of under-utilized track, she pursues, though she loses him instantly in the pointillist pre-dawn.

  But she’s no quitter. Light welts through the in-between-season trees of the park. This morning, this great lake a damp gray bandage. Tenebrous tree tops pitchfork, striating fascia-like into the echelons of infinity—another shatter pattern, rip in the illusory fabric of wholeness. To which she pays no mind, distracted by a stitch in her sinistral side, vanished before she reaches the underpass, revenant by the time she attains the harbor.

  She is tired so she speeds up.

  Among the pealing sparrows, the doxological crows cry praise in their midnight robes—virus vectors, disease amplifiers sparked with razoring intelligence—and bursts of iridescent starlings true to their namesake bust like tiny stellar jewels across the heavens. The inhabitants of the soft-loft conversions awaken and the great city marshals its inexhaustible resources that ripen, in time, for her specialized services. As she bruits the footpath beneath buttresses of hickory, sycamore—vast plantings in carefully planned tracts—not for the first time does she marvel at the foresight, the tremendous vision of it all. Until not ten feet in front of her a man who is not her doctor-man steps out of the hedges, blunt object in hand. If only she could just power by.

  A schematics of rock, water. A dormant humming, sub-vocalize of earth and ants and worm castings, bat guano’s springy bower. Mufflers of mauve-tinted cloud. The early growing traffic a bee buzz through contracting pipes of sound. Her canopic skull in figments she can’t hold.

  Me, she manages to think as her limbic regions stroke out for good. Em.

  As she is, faceless among the hostas.


  Armada

  The first Jesus from my father’s mouth, the Rabbi startled, then he rolled—Baruch this, Adonai that, what a pro. Soon my father looked like he was boiling, curses bubbling into the December air. Twice I tried to take him by the arm, get him to settle, maybe coax him along the shoveled path and put him in the car and lock the door on him. But no go. Each time I plucked the sleeve of his old duffel jacket he shook free, swore like a stevedore, some of which tribe he’d once known personally—before retirement many years ago, he’d been the general manager of a shipping company, contending with layoffs, strikes, Ukrainian stowaways, the city in those days still a major port.

  Jesus all through Kaddish. All through my brother, soft in youth but now stiff as a sword in his black overcoat, occasionally flicking a drop or two from his face. Beside him his stick thin AnnaMaria, shivering in her tiny wrap, un-gloriously underdressed for a Hanukah burial—Jesus, hard to believe. Apparently her only dress coat was red. Apparently not even she had the nerve to pull that off.

  At least the freaking cold was working in my favour, since beneath my parka was a pantsuit that used to fit but was now tighter than drying rope. Earlier that morning, dressing in my mother’s disorderly bathroom, dizzied by thoughts of what to keep, what to toss—useless for the final journey her dull manicure scissors, eye cream, four nearly finished jars of Vaseline, what the fuck?—I’d handled my belly fat then sucked it in and yanked the zipper, tortured in private places.

  I was thinking though that the cold could be even colder. I imagined a rent-lung clarity, vapour, a vacuum-packed nothing. Freedom through freeze drying. Rebirth as astronaut-drift in an unblinking beyond. Escape.

  Instead there was the snow. Was it ever coming down, fogging the surrounding hills. Leaving not much to look at except each other, the hole in the ground, and the lilac-coloured coffin, dainty, impractical, pre-selected by mom herself and about to be wholly surrendered while we blinked, unfathoming. We were fudged, smuzzy. Something we weren’t before.

  For one thing, we were in a section of the cemetery reserved for the deceased of a local Labour Zionist congregation. My father, who hadn’t attended a service since my brother’s bar mitzvah, and certainly counted himself as no member of any group, had purchased the double plot here because it was by far the cheapest available, in his books a moral victory of sorts. Making small talk with the Rabbi pre-service, my father had make-believed about synagogue so-and-sos there was no way he knew, holy days he’d last celebrated in the Antediluvian Era. When the Rabbi asked how many years my father and mother had been married, the answer was a fantasy beast of a fifty, the best creation had ever bestowed.

  A creature called Dummy, I’d immediately thought—what my father used to call my mother when, during their frequent fights, he broke a lot of furniture trying to break her warrior silence. Hearing my father’s lies, I’d wanted to call him out. Of all times, I’d fumed, re-tightening my thick scarf. Of all places.

  But with the Rabbi reciting and my brother mumbling along, my father totally lost it. Jesus, he shouted, tears streaming his cheeks. Jesus! I steadied my gaze on the shovels spiked like spears in the hard dirt heaped around the grave’s perimeter. There was scaffolding too, and wide straps, some kind of gizmo for lowering the box and conducting the business at hand.

  I kept my back turned on pretty much everything else. I’d already seen there weren’t many mourners hanging around for any of this. Only AnnaMaria managing, despite her shaking and quaking, to leaf her hands through her thick hair. Only a few unimportant relatives—an aunt and uncle, childless people my mother had never cared much for. No friends.

  My mother had been embarrassed to have lung cancer. Years of smoking, what she’d openly referred to as her filthy habit, had caught up to her. When she’d received her diagnosis eight months ago, I’d worked to convince her not to say she had breast cancer instead—which she thought might gain her greater sympathy, pink ribbons, stuffed toys, balloons. Some prize. The whole thing made me realize how much my mother must have lived confused in her head. My own head swam just thinking.

  So when my father began racing the wooden plank alongside the grave, backing and forthing over the now-descending casket with its cargo of emaciated sheet-wrapped body, I let him be.

  The purity of that sheet had been important, evidently. Keeping it that way had caused some consternation.

  I’d driven all night and part of the early morning to arrive at my parents’ apartment crammed with a riot of meds and a ripe cat-litter box, my father exhausted and possibly incorrectly, dangerously drugged into brief acquiescence accepting coffee, a buttered roll—the bread not too far past its use-by date. And—the phone call. This from some clown at the funeral home. There was a problem. In accordance with custom, they’d wrapped my mother—what was left of her—in a white sheet, but as sometimes happened with the dead, the guy explained, she was a cauldron inside of stomach acids and bile emitting a staining fluid at the mouth.

  Took me a moment to comprehend. The only way to keep the sheet pure was to sew her lips shut. Permission was being sought. My father, too out of it to deal, passed on the matter.

  I didn’t hesitate.

  All those times I’d begged. Eat, please. Anything, especially toward the end. Mushy pasta with bottled over-salted sauce. Simulac by the teaspoonful. In those last months I’d desperately tried to ark as many calories as I could into her. Get her to pack some on. Get her to live.

  She hadn’t wanted any of it.

  Yes, I told the funeral guy. Yeah. Go right ahead. You do what you need to do. Do it!

  He seemed taken aback, stammering a few words before cutting short the call.

  I hadn’t cared. Here was some news. All along my mother had been full. On her surface, mute suffering, blankety-blank. Inside, a delicacy of churning eels and lobster claws click-clacking—tref, impure, an unbridled unclean. In death she was well provisioned. The proof—just some foam breach-burping the surface.

  But here now was my teetering, imprecating father, here was the snow curling like the crests of waves over the leagues of the dead. While I was taking my magic carpet ride into the past. Please, the Rabbi was saying. I’m afraid. Your father could fall.

  My brother started and the Rabbi shrugged apologetically and peered at his shoes. Hefty numbers, scuffed and salt-soured, clearly they’d seen better days. Like his face, the flesh listing, skin pouchy and pocked. He was not an attractive man. Tell AnnaMaria that though. Unmoored from my brother’s side, she hove closer to the Rabbi and was cocking her hip, maneuvering her trembling bits and pieces. Now the Rabbi looked really scared. Worse, instead of directly retrieving my father, my brother dallied, selecting the best shovel for the job to soon come. This lawyer in his fine cashmere blend, former brat who from the ages of four to twelve my best friend and I picked on mercilessly, before he transformed into an untouchable teenaged Doobie Central, all torn jean jackets and Lynyrd Skynyrd black armbands—I had to admit, watching him now as he hefted the shovel, he’d manned up nicely over the years.

  Jesus, Jesus, my father called.

  The Rabbi shot me a pleading look. Like I was the one prolonging things indefinitely.

  I walked. I’d done it before, a lot. The second I’d turned eighteen. Cities, provinces, countries, whole emotional territories shipped and skipped. Good riddance. So I walked forth to collect my father and possibly dodge my brother, thinking big deal. Soon I’d return from whence I’d newly arrived, to my bullshit job tallying columns of numbers for a questionable nonprofit and my squamous low-rent apartment squirming with learned bullshit papers—though I certainly couldn’t be said to have sailed through school, I had over the years amassed degrees this, degrees that until I was an impoverished pack rat of esoteric knowledge, with murderers and thieves for neighbours. Someone with places to go, people to see. Including a new young guy—the young dudes getting younger while I got on—wh
o I was secretly entertaining designs for, and even more covertly not.

  I went. This time toward what was left of my family. The wooden board nearly bestride the grave was soaked and slippery and I inched toward my father minus my mother—my father chuffing and capering bareheaded since, moments before, a flapping gust had disappeared his yarmulke. At the opposite end of the pitching plank, my possibly pre-pre-divorce and probably very fed-up brother was walking too.

  Took a death grip to halt my father’s wind-milling right arm. Just in time, as my brother now bore straight toward us with his shovel. Jesus—who and what were we anyway? Uncivilized, bereft of dignity, sure. Otherwise, I had no idea.

  Not that I was beyond imagining some other life. Desire like melt, river runs throating deep-cut banks. A cock-salty, scorched caramel scent to the stirring breeze. Not that everything had to be about sex, but.

  I was so there.

  Until I remembered. On my way here, gripping my device with one hand while steering with the other—scudding between ruts and potholes, mind trammeling apparitions of black ice—I’d called my oldest best friend from the road. This after speaking with my brother, father, weeping, scratching and gouging, packing, canceling meetings at the office.

  My cell was for once getting brilliant reception.

  Becca, she rasped into the phone—before she’d found what she called her spiritual center as a born-again, she’d been a shit disturber of epic proportions. Becca, she graveled a second time in her semi-destroyed voice. I’m so, so sorry.

  And then, before I could so much as get a sniffle in sideways, she went off on her sister, Kitty. There was a John involved. Or a Shawn, or Sean. Cast of thousands.

  But Jen, I managed to get in, choking back a plug of snot. How’s Doug?

  Surprised me, for sure. Doug was her recent ex-ex who, for a not-so-recent while, had been mine. Why ask about him now? I swear sometimes, my brain!