by Lucy Durneen
There’s none like the wise for making you feel a little crazy. But she nods at me, weighing up what I have to say. I am on a roll now. I am enjoying myself. What I know hollows me out, I say. It’s an unbearable thing. It’s like being given the date and time of your death. I would prefer blindness to that. Sure, says Cassie. Tell that to Tiresias. For a minute I am almost ashamed, thinking of that incident at the baths, the scandal that followed, the rights and wrongs of it all. But I am flippant to a fault. Peeping Terry? I say. Well he’s another one who knows shit.
But the strange patterns of the moonlight hitting the trees make me stop for a moment, wonder if the things I know and the things Cassie sees aren’t the same after all.
Evening, and the light fails across the garden as it always does at this time. I wade into the quiet water of the river and there is nothing but sky and the last glimpse of the sun, which has been dying since the very moment it came into being. I wear lotus in my hair and smile for the groundsman who appreciates my buoyancy in a way that I, from what once they called the Myspace angle, never could. I take a breath and sink under, roused, as I am every time, by the cold.
I have changed considerably over the years. There was a man who painted me once—in Vienna; we’ll call him Gus. He said he wanted to see me as a blonde and who was I to disagree with an artist, despite the inevitable jokes? Did you hear the one about the beautiful girl and the man who kept her chained to the kitchen sink? She ripped him limb from limb, then ate his balls with a nice Chianti.
He began me in pencil, a little rough, and then slowly, wildly, beneath his fingers I was formed, in layers of ruby and cobalt and linseed. Although it took me by surprise, I have to say the finished product caught something about me that others have missed. My smile hard, like a diamond. I knew I wasn’t the only woman he loved. I suppose he was thinking of us all as he moved the brush across canvas, the blaze of one girl’s skin, the sly eye of another. There is a song I heard once that he might have appreciated; the words no doubt will come to me.
He liked to work almost naked, Gus, in sandals and a toga, going commando as he strode about the studio like a Roman emperor. Whoever wants to know something about me, he said, ought to look carefully at my pictures. There are rumours that he painted his most famous works using a telescope, but all I will say is—that’s not what he liked me to call it.
Curfew comes through hollows of jasmine. White buds peel down from the branches and tremble like the moon in running water. The sky is a canal of stars. Who said that lilacs were the smell of nightfall? Onyx is the colour of darkness. I know of women who will not wear an onyx ring for fear it will keep them awake at night.
There is a girl, resident here for a decade or more, who waits in the trees just to listen for the sound of her own voice.
It was taken away from her, so the rumour goes, because she used it to tell stories that distracted a wife from her husband’s marital indiscretions. You can see her sometimes, shouting obscenities into the night in the hope that someone will hear and love her in the same fiery way the husband loved his mistress. More often than not the words return to her, hesitantly through the dark, like doves learning to fly home.
Another girl hides in the sky to watch over her baby son, both of them flung across the heavens in the shape of a bear because she was found fucking a god. In one session they asked us all what the moral of her story might be. There was a show of hands. The girl who was picked answered: ‘Be careful you don’t get caught.’
A little bit of Monica in my life, a little bit of Erica by my side. You know that song? Is that Lou Bega? I think so. It’s Lou Bega, the song I was trying to remember.
The shining sky and the roof of the world. This is what I see when I float on my back in the river. Sometimes I stay there until out across the world the tides turn and what is washed into the pool is water a thousand years old. Water from the Taurus mountains, cool and smooth across my skin like raw silk. From Mesopotamia a hot and heavy wind. In my mouth the taste of snake’s blood. The bile of memory. The sounds of the bees, which are the sounds of purpose. Something I ask myself: what of all the sounds in the universe we are yet to hear?
So this is Eden. We are allowed out on day release, under supervision, once a month. The last place I chose to go was a beach not far from here, at the end of a winding road dripping with white alliums. The crime rate around this place is surprisingly high; here and there you see a gate kicked in, a car keyed from front to back. But then, through the pines you see it, the glare of the sun on the causeway and the water below, something clean, renewed. With each curve of the narrow lanes we turned into the sun, leaving behind houses, telegraph poles, refuse trucks; with each curve I turned my face away, thinking this would be the moment I was blinded.
Let me tell you something. Eden is no paradise. It’s a Category C, a rehabilitation centre, a place where men try to hide us from the rest of the world while we contemplate what they think of as our misdemeanours. But other worlds exist beyond this one. Other crimes. Other tides.
The barman does a trick with a cocktail umbrella and a bottle of Schnapps, and I clap along with the rest, mainly because I find it impossible to observe disappointment. Momentarily awake, Adam raises a clumsy toast above his head, but the glass strikes his cheekbone and a waterfall of ice and Curaçao liqueur sprays across the table . ‘Maita’i roa ae!’ says the barman, and Adam vomits a full moon onto the dark boards of the motel floor. A silk hibiscus flower floats on its tide. For a minute we stare at it; the barman and I. Then he calls out, ‘Naga! Get your ass here now!’ and the dark-haired waitress comes out with a mop and an attitude.
The barman has a crush on Adam, that much is clear. The name on his badge says Jon, but he isn’t Jon. The real Jon has been absent without leave for some time, he tells us. Last anyone heard he was pining for some sixteen-year-old who won’t fuck him. The barman says if there’s anything Jon won’t walk away from, it’s a challenge.
He tosses the umbrella again and lets it sail down until it catches in the neck of the bottle. He does it without looking at the bottle, he does it looking at Adam with the smile of a person who has nothing to lose. For a moment I am genuinely entranced. The umbrella curves around in the tiny thermal. I watch it float on a current of bright air. Magic kept alive in the sureness of the barman’s hand.
The waitress Naga mops the floor, moving through the crowd as if she is parting the Red Sea. She has the sort of beauty that worries men and makes women angry, the sort that women spend a long time looking at to be sure that what she possesses is only beauty and not something more troubling. What I look at is the camber of her hips, taking her away out the back with the mop and the hibiscus circling in her bucket. Hypnotic. Serpentine. She frowns, meeting my gaze. Then she is gone and the door slams, and opens, and slams, as though the molecules of everything around her are getting out of the way just to let her past. I go to the bathroom. I look in the mirror and fix my hair. I see that rouging my cheeks is academic now.
For a while we drink and dance, sometimes almost touching, sometimes alone, like islands in a dirty sea. Now and then I turn and Adam is there, behind me. ‘I’m drunk,’ he says. ‘Eve, baby, I am so drunk.’ He shuts his eyes. Tonight I am not drunk at all. I am perfectly lucid. When I’m sure Adam is looking I reach for the shoulders of the man in the black gloves, feeling the bones through the silk shirt that billows from his Levis like something is trying to get out from under his skin. There are moments when I want to lean in and press my head to the domed green moons of this stranger’s eyelids. But as soon as I feel that I think: it’s not up to me to make Adam jealous.
I sway for a moment and then the man in black is gone, sitting up at the bar as if he hadn’t moved away. ‘Who knows this game?’ he is saying, clicking his fingers to the barman who is not called Jon. He lines up nine glasses and swings nine measures of vodka across the tops, glass to glass like dominoes. Then he adds a tenth and fills it from the tap. He nods at the waitress,
Naga, who obligingly places the shots on a tray. To some she adds lemons, others a lime. Some are untouched. When she’s finished, the glasses are in a circle, random. One of the glasses is water, she tells us. But which one?
‘Eve,’ he says. ‘You’ll play. Who else is in?’
The men want to play for forfeits, the women prefer to call them dares. Penelope’s girls are up for it in the beginning. The first round, the waitress loses. Her eyes fix pointedly on the man in the black gloves, but he doesn’t look at her, kaleidoscopes another round of glasses out across the tray instead, shrugging. She shoots him another glare. ‘I don’t do dares,’ she says finally and returns to the mop, the steady removal of the day’s traces from the floor. Penelope is out next and the men chant while she removes her bra without working her way out of the tiny dress into which she’s squeezed herself. I stare at her breasts, low and luminous against the plastic shudder of the luau flowers, the darkness in their centre telling me that at some point or other she has been a mother. A long laugh roars through the divorce party and what I am reminded of is a school of sharks. A shiver of sharks is the true collective. How appropriate this is for animals that have to keep moving or die.
After a while, only Adam and the man in black are still playing the game, most of the glasses discarded, the girls quieter now, sitting in the loose, tired positions of those who are waiting for someone else’s signal to allow them to leave. But Adam is restless too. ‘You know what,’ he says, standing up. ‘Your game bores the crap out of me. Eve, go get your bag. We’re out of here.’
‘The tide’s in,’ says the man in the black gloves, flipping open his wallet. ‘We’re here until morning. Let’s make it interesting.’ He offers me another joint. ‘You’ll like this,’ he says, bringing it to his nose, licking the tip. ‘Manali. Produced by hand.’
Adam tosses a bill on the bar. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Okay. Ten says I don’t get the water.’ But something in the older man’s glittered eye seems to hold him. He throws in another ten. The room grows with the silence. Adam sucks in his breath and adds three more notes to the pile. ‘Come on. Fifty. Fifty says I don’t get the water.’
‘Fifty it is,’ says the man in black.
But when he drinks, for the first time, Adam gets the water.
‘It had to happen,’ I say. The man in black says nothing, slides the bills across the bar and pockets them. Adam is nonplussed. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘A hundred says I don’t get the water twice.’
But when he drinks, it’s water in the glass. In the air is the edge of something suspended, like a note held by a single instrument while the rest of the orchestra breathes. There was a concert I once saw like this, where between movements, a wave of clapping travelled through half the audience before someone realised the mistake. Then something occurs to me, something I think I have been aware of for some time, the thing I have been trying to remember. The Flaming Sword is not what it used to be, but there are still some high profile visitors. ‘Is that who I think it is?’ I say to the barman, shrugging my shoulder towards the man in black as he sets up another round. ‘It’s not–?’ But the barman doesn’t answer. He looks up, seems to notice me for the first time. ‘Why? You interested?’ he says.
‘Double or quits,’ the gloved man is saying to Adam. ‘But it’s my risk. What are the odds you’ll get the water three times in a row?’
The odds don’t change, I want to tell him, but Adam’s already drinking, grimacing just a little. It’s water, and the man in black smiles, counting his money.
‘You want to go again?’ he says.
‘Stop it,’ says the waitress. ‘He’s drunk. You’re taking advantage.’
‘Bullshit. You’re fine, aren’t you, sir?’ the stranger asks Adam, expertly shuffling the next round of glasses about the tray. ‘See, Naga? He’s fine.’
I want to tell him not to be stupid. Adam. But it is almost a relief, this curiosity, my own unchecked need to see how far he will go.
How far turns out to be six and a half thousand dollars, half on the table outright and the rest in chits made out of napkins. He doesn’t—we don’t—have this kind of money and Adam knows it. But he sits quietly, like a child waiting for instruction.
‘Okay,’ says the man in black, when he has finished counting the napkins. He tips the contents of all but two of the glasses into the ice bucket on the bar, stacks the empty glasses high. He beckons to the waitress. He looks Adam straight in the eye. ‘It’s been an expensive night,’ he says, ‘and I’m going to give you a chance to sleep easy. Those odds weren’t on your side.’ He looks a little distressed at the thought. The concern, it almost seems genuine. ‘So I’m changing the rules. I want to reward those kind of odds. One last shot. Fifty-fifty. You get the water again, the money’s yours. All yours. But here it is. I don’t play for free. You can keep your money, but’—and now he looks squarely at me. ‘I get your wife.’
‘Fuck you do,’ Adam says and laughs. But the man in black is not laughing. He looks a little confused. He scratches his neck, purses his lips into a knot.
‘You get the water, you keep your money and I get your wife,’ he repeats. He passes the glasses to the waitress who scowls into the tray. ‘I’m being generous here.’
‘Eve,’ Adam says, helplessly. ‘Eve?’
It was only money, I want to say. But I don’t.
And it is only now that I am aware the bar of the Flaming Sword Motel is almost empty.
The barman who is not called Jon has started to cash up, scrolling the till receipt into a little leather purse. He is one of those people whose tongue basks on the bottom lip to indicate concentration. ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ he says.
‘No trouble,’ says the man in black. But suddenly there are three men standing behind him and the air is not the same. The optics behind the bar glint like savage rubies under the security light. One of the men puts a hand on Adam’s arm and as he jerks it away it seems, for the first time, that he too has noticed the way the man in black looks familiar and distant in the same glance, the way your own self seems to retreat and resurface in a photograph of yourself at an age you cannot physically remember. ‘Say,’ the man says brightly, as if he has just thought of the idea, ‘What if your charming wife picks for you? Eve? Which of the glasses is it?’
Adam rubs his eyes, dazed. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he says. ‘It’s just a goddamn game.’ But he looks at the wad of money in front of him and he sits down, because it turns out the decision is not so hard to make after all. ‘You can’t do this,’ he says, without looking up.
‘You bet your life I can,’ says the man in black. ‘Or your wife’s. Just so we’re clear. So which one is it to be? Eve?’
There are so many misconceptions in the world. For example: you think it was an apple, my downfall, but when did anyone ever actually tell you that?
I look at the two glasses in front of me and try to sense it, to feel the one that contains the water, as if that is going to make any kind of difference to anything. I close my eyes and think of the movements of her hand, the waitress, the shapes that she drew across the tray, again and again and again. The tap of silver against glass. And suddenly I am back outside the Flaming Sword, where bottles tumble from the wheelie bins, and the dogs snarl and scavenge on leftovers, and down across the causeway the tide is turning. What washes over the stones is water a thousand years old. From the east comes a current of ice. From the west, a hot and heavy wind. I think of the tail of that mermaid, thrashing in the dunes while her severed body convulses, cursed with the muscular memory of swimming. And there is the waitress, Naga, silhouetted against the sea wall, her cigarette a fevered dot against the heavy red line of her lips.
‘You got something on you,’ she says sullenly, stepping into the light. ‘Looks like blood.’ She gestures underneath my ear with a movement that looks for all the world as if she is miming slitting my throat. I see the shape of her hands, the silver ring that curls about her index finger, weighing i
t down, strangling it. There is a garnet for the snake’s eye, the little forked tongue licking at her nail in a slice of aquamarine. I touch my hand to my neck. ‘It’s lipstick,’ I say with relief, bringing my hand up to my face. ‘It’s just a bit of lipstick.’
She looks at me for a minute longer than is necessary, trying to read something in my face, something that disappoints her and evades translation. When she finally speaks, the words are familiar, not déjà vu but pulled up from somewhere old, and real, as if recorded and replayed from an ancient airwave. ‘You got some nerve, girl,’ she says. ‘Messing with my man right in front of me.’
I open my eyes. Some things you cannot unknow. The fact that I will spend a lifetime, many lifetimes, yearning—it means I have little to lose. So I choose a glass, and I say, ‘This one.’ I hold the cold glass for a minute, circling it in my hand, tilting, rotating. I say it again, louder. ‘Definitely this one.’ Then I throw it in Adam’s face and he sobers up very fast.
I turn around and walk to the door, to the pitch dark skyline, to the edge of the water. And as I walk it comes to me, from far away, the distant feeling of something ripe in my hand. How I threw it lightly into the air, like a ball and I how I caught it hard, like a stone. Well as well this apple as any other.
I remember–
And there goes the knowledge coursing through me like a disease, and there goes the juice running down my chin; in my mind I can taste it, bitter and old, and in my head there it is again, that feeling, young and sweet, and what I feel, what I taste, is the moment the fruit breaks in my mouth and I know. I walk to the door and I think of it, how I bit down hard.
I think of it now, and I bite and I bite and I bite.
What we talk about when we talk about rockets in the night