by Elise Levine
Doug? Jen said, then paused long enough for me to think the connection was a wash.
I stayed on. I thought I could detect a sinking, rising sound, an aqueous sub throb, a forked-tail flick. I wished.
Then Jennifer’s voice, shark-skinned and unlovely, resurfaced. She said, Doug is Doug.
I got off fast as seemed polite under the circumstances.
I’d been surprised to still be there, in the car, north-easting I-94 and so on, so forth—December, the billboards of once-fantabulous Michigan. Eat Here, Eat This.
What there was of my family rocked, our rent-a-Rabbi rolled. Father, brother—who were they and what was I to them? Around us, the tall pines waved their arms hello, goodbye—maybe in their language these were the same word. If I squinted, instead of wet snow I saw apple blossoms. I opened my mouth. I closed it. I didn’t want to think what might be in those flecks, the dreck of dead, cold-kissed stars. I didn’t want to think. And yet hold on, I thought, unsure of what I meant while amid the bare trees, across the snow-swept swales, the winter sparrows dervished like dreidels. Like there was so much to cease to know.
Made Right Here
After the rain Bryce lost Serena in the cave. Not the cave with the original horses falling and giant aurochs. And the stick-figure guys with evil-looking spikes boning their chests and limbs? Sign of the vision quester, according to the English-speaking guide.
Though this concrete-and-rebar bogus fronted all that. Fake and fakes to protect the goods from humans with their trash oils and gases. Humans, right? Walking body bags.
Not that Bryce thought of Serena in those terms. He shouldered through the tour group on the raised wooden platform, searching for her—pale skin, wide blue eyes, cropped black hair nearly shaved on the sides. Her solid build and height not a match for his but still, should it be so hard for him to at least glimpse her?
No luck. Damp and uncomfortable, he shoved toward the path’s lip and halted for a second to get his bearings, leaning over the railing above a cubby where the halogens didn’t reach. The plasterer’s wall seam didn’t escape his notice and neither did the screwdriver jammed in among the fake rubble on the floor. He scrambled again to retake his rightful position next to his wife so he could once more point out the cheese of it all. His wife, whose idea it was to come here to begin with. To see the ancient paintings. For inspiration.
Instead, randoms. Everywhere he looked.
The old feeling returned. Bryce choking on hooks while some douche superior pounded his back and congratulated him for nailing another probable dipshit. His old days in tactical—unholstering at every reasonably credible fuck you and you too. By his second year of marriage, third on the force, Serena screaming at him, I don’t want you fucking dead, you fucking idiot, I swear I’ll divorce you. By then they both knew he’d never finish his night-class degree, never make detective, just like his old cop dad never did.
Serena’s threats convinced Bryce. Take the seven-thousand pay cut and months of ball-bruising training to secure the rank of captain in a mounted squad. Take crowd control at Springsteen concerts, tourist duty in Grant Park.
Better than the lineups of most-likelies and close-enoughs strung together as if on his dad’s old fishing line and drawn through Bryce’s intestines, barbing his throat even now in this sorry-excuse not-quite cave in France. The south of France. In this fake cave beside the real cave. Drove him crazy. He couldn’t understand. Why bother?
Because better Serena.
Hey, what’s the hurry?
Watch yourself, okay?
A tight trio of girls in front, Bryce nearly wheeled to deal with the bright remarks from behind. But even with the artificial lighting, the dark tunneled humidly above him and his brain sirened toward Serena, well ahead of him like always.
The Buffys shuffled on. Gulping clay breaths and something sharp like tin, Bryce edged closer, waiting for an opening in their ranks. The yammering continued in his wake. Where does he think he’s going, anyway? Who does he think he is?
These guys. Bryce had them made outside, ticket stubs jutting from hands, halt-go descending the paved ramp with the rest of the tour group in a drizzle soft as the strands of a web. The gray-beard Aussie sporting hiking pants with a zipper around the knees, a matching khaki shirt and one of those joke safari-style hats with a chin strap. The short, gym-built German in fancy sneaks sizing Serena up near the food cart, so help him. Their asinine questions. How much longer? Any chance you have extra brochures? Borrow your map? Askholes.
Like Bryce once upon a time. Asking away, asking for it—whatever it came his way. Hey, what’re you doing? through winding alleys while punks’ pit bulls monstered for his blood. One time not long before he put in for his transfer, some asshat unchained a snarler who gave not a flying for the vest. Until thank-god Luis, Bryce’s partner, who Bryce never even liked that much and still doesn’t, drew and dropped it. And wasn’t that a lot to think on? Still a lot?
Watch himself? Seriously? He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head in the dank not-cave air. He almost turned.
But the girl-knot in front of him loosened and he scraped through. Some luck to remind him of the lesson he apparently still needed to learn. At least he was safe for now. No thanks to himself, he had to admit.
Take that, German dude, Bryce thought, then added a mental pat on the back for himself. Couldn’t resist.
Forward lurch. For something like forever Bryce single-filed, feeling huge and useless, sandwiched like meat between civilians. It killed him. The walls heaved closer with every step, he swore. The ceiling shrank and he crouched as he went, the skin beneath his jeans clammy, his torso furred with sweat beneath his shirt.
The walls curved leftward and the semi-dark grew semi-darker. He spanned his arms and scooched his hands over the slippery cladding. When he took his hands away, his fingers felt sticky and sore as if stung. His eyelids half-shut as if swollen. The air smelled foul-sweet, like cough syrup. The guide’s miked voice crackled incomprehensibly through speakers mounted high on the walls, then died with a loud click. Bryce’s tramping in and out of time with those around him drummed the wooden path in tricky rhythms that coaxed an ache deep in his skull. A low hum prickled his chest.
For all he knew he was getting no closer to Serena.
He forced his eyes open another crack. Spot-lit wall paintings of upside-down purple oxen crowded red-outlined horses with black manes and tails. They all seemed like poor sketches that someone forgot to erase.
His pulse reared in his temples. How far in was he and how much farther did he have to go? Beat a retreat or keep on?
How far along was he anyway?
His claustrophobia only increased. He wanted out. Now, as in yesterday.
Breathe, Bryce told himself. Breathe, fucker. What else could he do? Throw himself on the ground and hyperventilate like a suck until a stretcher arrived. Or meditate the way his therapist and Serena told him. In with the good. Out with the bad. Flush what felt like sleeping bats from his lungs. Or was it in with the bad, out with the good?
It killed him to not remember.
He managed to hustle, no harm done, past the elegant older couple he’d previously noted, brown skinned and well dressed. So there was that, Bryce thought.
And now this large white lady. No kidding, he had no time for large ladies. Ma’am? Madame? S’il vous plaît?
Finally she turned. In the fudged light, the face on her. A brick. A painted brick with an exaggerated slash of black-red lips and pencil-lined brows. A fright-wig frizz of dyed blond that stuck from her head in a joke halo. The lips began to crawl and Bryce nearly jumped out of his skin. Monsieur. Allez, allez. Tout de suite.
But she refused to budge. She was saying other things too but he could only figure so much, and that much thanks to Serena’s tutoring, thanks to her art college French elective from nine years past, ancien
t history. Bryce could scream. Madame? And when Her Largeness smiled a mean crooked and waved her fat paws, cruelly shitting him as she held her ground? He wanted to roar.
His fists clenched and his throat scorched. He blamed France. The French. Did they even ventilate this hole?
With a soundless gasp he sucked his gut to his spine and pressed past the giant-lady cans.
He could puke but no stopping now. Nearly home free. Home—meaning Serena—or bust. The whole point, right?
He was crapped out at last into a great domed bubble he guessed at fifty feet floor to ceiling and well more than twice that in length. He halted, awed despite himself.
Floodlights swept from above and below and still failed to entirely illuminate the chamber, the vastness like something from Bryce’s childhood yearnings—a spaceship in empty space, somehow suspended in the middle of his bedroom at night while downstairs in the living room Dad and his moods screwed with Mom, or vice versa, and shit went sideways.
For Bryce, in bed upstairs, this mega floating. No Mom and Dad. No bedroom window or fall breeze rustling the sycamore’s leaves as it brushed the window panes. No cold spring soccer games behind school after school. No school. Zero scarred-knee Tom or scab-elbowed Josh bombing bikes to the Lucky Superette or late-summer long-afternoon shadowmen on lawns, heat fevers. Zip snow days or Dad’s lake trout singing in the frying pan. No slug of tongue trapped in Bryce’s mouth and dying its wet slug death night after night, rain or shine. No crying. And each night, if he concentrated enough, nada even on what he wanted so badly to see that he nearly saw it. No Bryce even. Just a rising into a dark so dark no stars infiltrated.
The rest of the tour group straggled in and dispersed. He stepped to one side and waited for his eyesight to adjust to the spooky lighting.
For the first time since entering the replica cave, he felt decent. Since entering France with its cheese after stinking cheese, to which he was beginning to take hard offense. Serena’s doing. Her while in France. Which she’d only repeated seven times a day the past week. He guessed each one counted for each year since she’d graduated and mooned over the idea of this trip. And so the cheese stench off him when he relieved himself each vacation morning, because even in France she kept him to his celiac’s diet. Which given their budget, as determined by Serena, permitted a lot of the stuff on the affordable picnics in the according-to-her storied parks of Paris. The meals, the locations—she’d masterminded it all.
His gut gurgled. He again sought a sense of the room’s largeness. Beyond the floodlights, scallops and crests in the stucco ceiling resembled a brisk breeze stirring water, frisks of fish there for the scooping—what he imagined as a kid when his off-duty dad disappeared dawn to dusk, though Bryce begged to go too.
Now, on the cave floor, his fine feeling completely vanished. English and French and whatever sloshing whateverly around him, Bryce thought he might as well be seven again, waking alone to a rabid babble in the middle of the night. Dying for the aliens to rescue him.
He scanned the perimeters of the cement ballroom for an exit. No escape as far as he could tell.
Besides, Serena had said here, so here he was more or less. It was another question where she was. He rose onto his toes and pivoted. Still no go. An obstacle course of cement squiggles rose from the floor and messed with his sightline. Stalagmites? Stalactites? Serena would know. He suspected she knew everything.
Her doing his stink and her doing his diagnosis, which took her a couple of years unearthing third-opinion doctors, deciphering insurance forms, nag-calling the insurance company. He had her to blame, he liked to joke, for the loss of his stomach ills and general crappiness. His blood pressure dropped. He dropped the meds and the mood pills. His pre- pre-diabetic blood sugar resolved. This past week he half joked that he blamed her for his good fortune.
He knew it wasn’t entirely fair but right now he blamed her for this fake cave.
For a second, studying the strange formations before him, Bryce thought he heard her laugh. He trotted to the ballroom’s far side.
Then he was unaccountably muddling among the outcroppings. Swirls laced the cement in peculiar patterns. One twisty formation, thinner than the rest, extended floor to ceiling like a flimsy support, as if it alone kept the cement from crashing down. Condensation dripped with little urgency around its delicate curves. If Bryce wanted he could snap the thing in two.
He thumbed a groove and thought again how Serena planned it all. The trip. Today’s tour. She’d scrimped more than usual given his pay reduction so that with the new improved Bryce she could freely ogle the tapestries and sculptures and other foreign whatnots she’d once studied in school and even now copied in weird ways into what she called her work. Which he could never for the life of him figure. Not the copying. Not her paintings. But his confusion didn’t matter. Not to her. She’d cut costs and strategized and today driven the tiny rental car south. During the drive she lectured him on how these reproduction cave paintings and this cave had been constructed over the course of twelve years to mimic the authentic one next door, closed to tourists.
She’d frowned when he scoffed. Went as deep silent on him as the indecipherable reveal-conceal of her art.
Like the spaceship of Bryce’s childhood, the meaning of her enterprise fatally eluded him.
A businessman and businesswoman. Matching gray suits, black briefcases, identical scary-scarecrow smiles. Flattened looking, like road kill. Surrounding them, a border of olden-time ladies in long purple dresses lounging on carpets of grass while white unicorns nuzzle the women’s laps. Kid hefting a baseball mitt and grinning his whole body at a blue sky. Instead of a ball in his glove, a stone inscribed with Egyptian-looking hieroglyphs. Beneath his feet, boulders incised with same.
Serena herself—a reasonable copy thereof—with her black spiky hair and high cheekbones and black-rimmed eyes. She’s sitting naked on the toilet in their very bathroom. Very naked. Stretching her arms over her head like she’s sleepy, nipples erect. The mole on her left breast sprouting its three wiry hairs, which she refused to pluck. Three replicas—only much longer—waving from her business-as-usual bulging outie like giant insect antennae. Worse, a weird smile on her face, same as in the other paintings.
So many paintings, from a foot square to six by five or more. Sometimes Bryce caught himself imagining there were some too small for him to notice. And some so big only a god-eye could make out the pattern, fit everything together into a whole that made sense. Either way, things she’d been at without him knowing, her way of keeping him in the dark.
Her paintings played tricks on his mind and on hers too. When it came to fixing Bryce, she was all over it but her own so-called work dragged her down. She’d spend long days in her basement studio, then peg each new painting unframed over the couch in the living room. In Bryce’s off hours he’d watch TV and catch sight of her in the hall side-eyeing her handiwork. The looks on her always mashed his heart. Hope. Fear. Distaste. Distrust. More hope. After a moment she’d vanish around the corner. Hey, what’re you doing? he sometimes called but she never answered, just creaked up the stairs and shut the bathroom door. After a while he’d hear the toilet flush and the water run. A few days of this and he’d come home from a shift and the painting would be gone. Probably added to the stacks downstairs and in the garage. Occasionally over the years he’d nose around and notice the stacks had disappeared and new ones sprouted. He learned better than to ask.
Sometimes she scrutinized Bryce the same way she did her paintings, the exact series of expressions messing her face. On the drive over to her friend Janel’s for dinner or in a crowded movie theater, robots and rockets rattling the screen, he’d catch Serena at it. What? he’d say, and she’d shrug. And then for a few days something like Bryce would hang on the wall above the couch. Recently on his mount Scottie, who Bryce hadn’t warmed to yet. And was considering replacing, seeing if it were po
ssible, getting a replacement. In the painting, poor dumb Scottie, only better. Regal, not the drab creature retired from competition hunter events by his former Ritchie-Rich coke-head owner and donated to the force. Rumour was she’d turned her life around through her love of horses—of Scottie—then forgot all about him when she went off to some swank school. Bryce imagined her married eventually to a rich broker who’d knock her up with two kids of her own and stow her in a four-bedroom, five-bath in Wheaton. The kind of place and people Bryce and Serena scoffed at in the old days as boring and spoiled. Unlike Bryce and Serena. A cop and an artist. As a couple, how original was that?
The old days, he thought now. When did they end, anyway?
He still believed it though. On his own he didn’t amount to half as much as he did with her. She added value, for certain.
Though they confused him, her paintings proved it. In the most recent one, both he and his horse sported lips flayed wide by guywires and pulleys into smiles so broad it pained Bryce to contemplate. A giant lance tucked under his left arm jutted protectively beyond the animal’s arched neck while a small sword stuck through Bryce’s poor celiac paunch, which spilled pink roses. On each—visible when Bryce peered super close at the canvas—stitches of scoffing inchworms.
An earlier painting featured Bryce on bended knee in a yard of tall dark blue flowers, beaming while rat-sized bees scurried through the air. Nose to paint in the living room, Bryce noted the tiny gold-bullet buttons on his brush-stroked dress blues, which for real he mostly only wore for the funerals of his brotherly-sisterly fallen.
Original, all right. He got what he asked for. Mostly he was okay with it. Sometimes though he wondered what Serena saw when she looked at the real him. Him? Or some other Bryce she’d fashion to her purposes.
Sometimes Bryce, the real Bryce, wanted to shake her.
Calling all spaceships, Bryce would then think, recalling how as a kid the thought had soothed him.