Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  She kicked aside a thin rubble of broken concrete as she walked away, dry clatter and a metallic ricochet off the grating up ahead; the nearest set of doors stood ajar, unlocked slabs that ground orange-rind rust into her palms as she pulled them open, damp and a deserted, erosion smell in the soot-colored shadows beyond. Dishwater light crossed overhead, filtered through broken layers onto metal beams and disused machineries, the good salvage and scrap sold long ago. She did not think she had really expected Quince to follow her. Still she looked back, through the doorway to the space where Quince was no longer smoking, once: neither salt nor dead shade, but the underworld that trapped, the burning disaster.

  She had walked home from the clinic in rich, late afternoon, clouds like rough marble shoaled above the skyline for the sun to slide around and turn the air to fire. Pigeons rose up from the roofs, the flock lifting in one noisy-winged, furling curve against the sky; a skinny tree on the corner, potted in cement and spoked iron, was putting out buds that Acacia stopped and fingered for a moment, germination swelling cool and rough under her touch. Even the storm grate smelled like approaching spring, clean and humid, as she passed. Do you want to make a follow-up now? the doctor had asked, a neat short-haired woman as bristly grey as a fledging bird, and Acacia had ducked her head and mumbled something indistinct about talking to the father, getting back to her; the sickly knot in her stomach winding tighter and colder as the woman spoke, and she wondered if morning sickness would give her enough excuse to throw up on the white-tiled floor. A promise got out of her mouth instead, I’ll call tomorrow. Keys cold in her hand, she unlocked the front door and went up without turning on the light, bare bulb hanging in a sphere of silver wires at the top of the stairs, aesthetically caged.

  Leo was at his desk in the living room, among the more portable and less fragile aspects of his work: assistant curator buried in manuscripts and orreries and cracked icons, cataloguing, cleaning, running for coffee, and sometimes his glasses had a fur of dust around the rims. He twisted around in his chair at the click of the lock, one arm braced across the overstuffed back, a manila folder in his other hand raised in familiar, puzzled salute; the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore, If you’re a Goth, where were you when we sacked Rome? in white capitals on black, Acacia had bought for him when he got the museum job. There’s tea in the kitchen, he said easily, as if he had not expected her home until much later, but it’s herbal; and when she only stood with her jacket in her arms, staring at the hardwood joins underfoot—polished with years and bare feet, the color of fresh bread, and she thought about kneeling to lay her hand against their fine-grained shine and feel where the cracks were—he put down the folder and walked across the small carpets until he could put his hands on her shoulders and ask, Acacia? What happened? No good way to start the conversation, though her skin flamed under his palms; no beautiful seams of language for this moment. Haltingly, she said, I went to the doctor’s, and watched Leo’s expression change.

  Light like antique gold sloped through the window and made his hair a corona, his face a painted mask of the sun: a frustrated summer-god, a bewildered star. But constellations never stared down from heaven and said, Oh, fuck. Weren’t we safe? Didn’t you use anything? I always—oh, fuck. Fuck. I can’t deal with this, and Acacia had never seen a solar myth come to adolescent pieces before her eyes. She tried to touch him, his name thrown out like a line for him to hold, Leo, but he was too lost in some nightmare of responsibility, already running too far and too fast for anything other than distant light to reach him. I have to think about this, he said, sometime much later when she had run out of tears, cried herself into a sore throat and spasms that he would have soothed any other time, if she had been crying for any other reason. Instead she curled in a feral tangle of sheets and tried to pin her breath down again, gulping, dry-heaving tears, head buried in her arms to keep him out of her peripheral vision. Acacia; Acacia? Listen to me, Acacia, please, I have to think about this. I have to talk to Quince. I have to—oh, my God, I have to talk to my parents. I can’t. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, and she heard the bedroom door shut even before he finished saying sorry.

  She must have slept; she woke to dull cloud-light, mouth sticky and salt grit in her eyes, the blinds making tambourine noises in a wind that tasted of storms. When she sat up, the emptiness of the apartment settled around her as the chill had not. She got out of bed in a movement as convulsive as a shudder. With oils and a fine brush, Quince had half-blinded all the apartment’s mirrors, so that Acacia’s passing reflection looked back in slices and fragments from among brilliant, blasphemous tableaux. In a glade of burning green leaves, a naked woman accepted a crimson globe mouth-to-mouth from an androgyne plumed in rainbow-slick scales; another woman stood, bloody-handed, one fist still clenched around an ear of pulped, dripping grain, above her sister sprawled in her sacrifice’s blood; sheep, horses, flailing human figures sank beneath choking cobalt waves that tossed afloat a ship full of fabulous, archaic beasts. Over the dresser in the bedroom, a female figure whose wings were made of flames and calligraphy stooped like a hawk to embrace a male figure that looked upward, dumbstruck, lovestruck, ready. Gaze no more in the bitter glass: as if her heart would have given her any better suggestion.

  She smelled Quince before she heard her lover’s boots on the cement, musk and sweet burning almost tangible from where she stood; she unbent from memory slowly. Spray-painted tags littered this side of the wall, the browned scaffolding overhead and the nailed-up plywood blocking another door: an archaeology of graffiti, vivid strata she could not read. Once Leo had pretended to translate some for her, charting the dynastic rise and fall of urban legends. Apple-green glass fanned in a brittle, glinting spray about her feet. Without turning her head, Acacia said, “Why don’t you want a child?”

  Quince’s voice was a breath at her back, glancing, recitative, not soothing. “When men began to increase on earth,” she said, “and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of men were, and took wives from among those that pleased them….” Glass cracked under her heel; half a step away, Acacia felt Quince’s nearness working its way into her own skin, loosening muscles, burnishing nerves, until she waited for Quince’s mouth at the curve of her neck, telling story into her skin, Quince’s hands holding her close against hard-budded breasts and the press of desire at her groin. She had always courted Acacia with myths and mysteries. Still she held herself tightly away from even the air that eddied around Quince, breathing rain and spices and the familiar scents that meant comfort, need, companionship: nothing safe. Leo had smelled like sweet salt and brittle pages, and that had not stopped him. Then Quince’s voice slanted, wryer and less ritual—“The sons of men were also pretty beautiful”—and something untwisted beneath Acacia’s breastbone. That first day, summer in the creamy marble shadow of the museum where Leo did not yet work, where Acacia was looking at Leighton and Rosetti, Quince had given her the same sideways truth: the low-voiced speaker coming up behind her as she perused studies for John Singer Sargent’s Annunciation and Acacia turning around to interrupt, Unless I’ve really got the story wrong, it’s not Gabriel’s kid, and look at Quince, and consider whether Mary had ever wished otherwise.

  Rain dripped through cracked slates and girders, little sounds in the hollow space, as negligible as the details of Quince’s strangeness had always been: inexplicable and no one asked for answers. But Acacia had one already, that she had not wanted to hear. She said, a thin ache of a word, “So?”

  “So,” Quince said, “so,” and nothing else.

  Glass shone under both their feet, little more than reflection and razor edges in the dimness. Acacia’s fingers twisted in her hair, under her braid where loose, rain-curled strands had inked themselves to the back of her neck; one snapped and pain wired into her scalp, and she had to close her throat against the sound that wavered too close to tears for the minor, momentary hurt. Under Quince’s regard or indifference, and she would not k
now unless she looked, she felt scraped raw at the surface, pressures inside and outside wearing her to little more than a shivering handful of tears wrapped around less than a handful of life. Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face, that museum afternoon. She wanted desperately not to say whatever would come next; she took her hand out of her hair, and turned around.

  Quince’s eyes were the darkness of desolation, sounded and known, and water brimmed along her lower lids. The clotted light turned her skin to dusted stone, ancient paper, blank; she looked neither old nor young but unreal, and a sudden chill sank in Acacia’s stomach. At once, she wanted the tagged bricks to crumble dryly, let her through as she backed against them and out into the drowning, rain-swept day; she wanted to lean forward and lick at the sweat shining at Quince’s temple, salt and the crisp, feathering brush of Quince’s hair against her lips; or, simplest of all, to uncross her arms and open them so that Quince, if she wanted, could move into their circle and rest there until she was no longer terrifying, terrified, full of tears. But Quince was saying, “It’s not safe,” and Acacia would be dead and dust before light crossed that space between them.

  “Not safe how?” she asked anyway, because she could not touch Quince and Leo had never waited to have this conversation. “For me? Or you mean the child?” Quince’s arms were as tightly folded as Acacia’s, pale fists tucked under black-leather elbows; her mouth admitted nothing. “Quince…. You keep saying can’t, like that fixes everything. But if there’s any chance, if there’s some kind of problem, you have to tell me. If I carry this child, if it’s yours, is there going to be something wrong with it? It’ll have birth defects, it’ll be retarded, psychotic,” she was biting off the words like bitter stalks, “what?”

  “Like me,” Quince said tautly, “and like you. And that’s forbidden.”

  “What?”

  “They drowned in the Flood, all the children of men and angels. And there have been no more since. All the beautiful monsters”—one corner of her smoky mouth crooked upward, very slightly—“long before Leo’s reliquaries and papyri, those ferns and fossils down the block—or maybe long after or somewhere in between. Somewhere else, it doesn’t really matter. Here, now: no more. The universe would not permit it. The laws of physics and angels don’t allow.”

  A desert in her mouth: teeth to tongue to palate like a cleavage of dust and wax. “You’re grander than Leo, after all. He only thinks this will destroy his life.”

  “It’s raining,” Quince whispered. Her face was not an icon. When she moved forward, tines of shadow passed over her face like expressions, writing, rewriting; a palimpsest. “Not by water, not again—there was a promise. But still, it keeps me thinking. Oh, my love,” and her hands touched Acacia’s shoulders so lightly that she might have been an echo of Leo, a ghost frozen to this conversation in a flash of time. Recursive, while it rained: a shiver went like a shockwave over Acacia’s skin and she could not imagine that Quince had not felt it. One hand angled briefly upward to cup the back of Acacia’s head, fingers sliding through her tight-gathered hair; returned to her shoulder, the point of her pulse, blood for two circling through her veins now. “Oh, God. Acacia. It had better not be my fucking child.”

  The air smelled of ozone and myrrh. Quince’s thumb caressed the shallow rise of her collarbone, sweet dry warmth against her sweating skin; the movement relaxed Acacia no more than Quince’s remote gaze, the change of dark in her eyes that Acacia could not read. Something pushed hard into her throat, horror or laughter; words came out instead. “Stop this. Just stop. You and Leo…. I haven’t been struck by lightning; his parents haven’t disowned him; I don’t care. Let it be nobody’s child. Just mine. There’s nothing else to say.”

  “You don’t understand. I love you,” and before Acacia could answer, Quince’s hands stilled. She might have smiled like this for the sight of world’s end, a sky full of fire and ash. “I can’t even take the chance.”

  Acacia drew breath to shout again, and stopped. “Quince—” But Quince’s fingers were pressing silence into her throat, tightening with less pain than burning where she should have breathed and a distant, gathering roar like thunder rending the air open, a wave toppling toward the shore. Her vision swam red and dark: the blind landscape of the womb. “Don’t….” She could not even hear the noises she made.

  “If you aren’t sure, I can’t. Please.” Quince’s voice heaved like Acacia under her hands, driven and cornered, trapped as the breath that she could not catch; her shoulder struck plywood, glass bit into her knees, and she could as easily have wrenched free of Quince as her heart from her bursting chest. She could not see Quince’s face clearly anymore, nor the ruined walls beyond, old before Acacia was born and how many cities had Quince seen rise and fall? Her lungs threshed for air. The fountains of the deep; forty days’ deluge. Nothing to salvage, this time. “Just tell me it’s Leo’s.”

  Her fingers pried at Quince’s wrists, like clawing at marble with her nails. There was nothing in her left to whisper with, no air, no thought; she heard her own voice like something pinched from sand, from the gravel ballast scattered beneath the old tracks that she had followed here, a path of stones into darkness. “It could be Leo’s,” and before the fingers could loosen, her vision clear and the choking fire in her throat turn to air again, she got the words out. “And it could be yours.”

  The darkness crushed down on her.

  But now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle….

  Rain was falling on her face, freshwater cold that tasted faintly bitter as tarpaper and smoke, salt drops warm as the amniotic sea where a pearl of flesh drifted, moored between worlds. Far above her, against the wrung-out wash of sky and shrouded sun, someone was saying, “Fuck me,” over and over, like a prayer. Her throat was full of cinders. Half in Quince’s arms, her head fallen back against Quince’s shoulder and a freezing glaze of rainwater seeping into her jeans, Acacia blinked and tried to speak, made a noise like breath ceasing. Quince’s arms tightened around her, eased as she struggled, spasmodic in a terror that sluiced out of her as abruptly as her strength; she heard Quince’s voice, half-crying and hasty, “I won’t, fuck me to God, Acacia, I won’t!” and a different darkness slipped up over her before she tasted Quince’s tears again.

  She opened her eyes to clouds like wet slate, sun sliding toward evening and the rain still as cold, Quince’s arms wrapped close about her and her throat just enough less ravaged for Quince’s name. It might have been a question.

  “I don’t know.” This voice had never whispered to her in bed, in a museum, over tea; Quince had never shivered like this. Answer and denial at once, “I don’t know. If it’s mine….”

  Acacia said softly, “Mine.” As suddenly and unconditionally as a small child, she wanted Leo; she wondered if he would hold her through that word, single and irrevocable; if it would make a difference. “The others?”

  Quince’s throat jerked, a swallow of nothing like a flinch. “I have no children.”

  A scrape of ash in her mouth. “You are a monster.”

  One of Quince’s brows raked an amused, caustic angle; she bent as though to kiss Acacia’s forehead, stopped. “I’ve never been anything else. Not in this world, how could I be?” Her face was very quiet. “And you never thought I was.”

  “No….” Acacia shifted in Quince’s arms, enough to see her profile like weather-carved stone against the flat brick facade, punched-out windows and hanging gutters, motionless as rain traced her parted lips: a gargoyle from a painted mirror, a shadow of cataclysm at the back of her eyes. The question faded on her tongue, unasked; she said instead, “I don’t accept a God that would ruin the world for anything as beautiful as your child.”

  Momentarily, Quince’s smile was real and rare as a falling star. “As beautiful as your child, too. You’ve never believed that: that you are beautiful. I must have told you enough times. You and
Leo, you amaze me, always. Even now.” The smile slid away with the rain. “Especially now.” Wind drew damp nails over Acacia’s skin and she waited beneath Quince’s silence, her gaze as distant as when Acacia had come up to her beneath the gutter, centuries ago, no time at all: the messenger. “This I know: fire, water, fucking locusts, it doesn’t matter in the end. This place, that you like so much? Times change. Everything falls apart, sooner or later—rusts, dies, dissolves, decays—and nothing, no matter how cunning, how profitable, how lovely, lasts.” Quince’s voice was very soft, her body where Acacia leaned very still. “Nothing.”

  “Yes,” Acacia said, as softly. “I know.” But she lay in Quince’s arms anyway, for this moment, and they watched the rain fall.

  ∞

  Bleaker Collegiate Presents an All-Female Production of Waiting for Godot

  Claire Humphrey

  I stanch the blood with a handful of toilet paper. Red wicks through the white, and then the paper wilts and shreds. I toss the mess in the bin.

  I breathe through my mouth. I lean over the sink and watch my blood splash down and diffuse into the water from the running tap.

  The door swings in and shoves me against the countertop.

  Swearing: Ginevra’s voice. She stops when she meets my eyes in the mirror.

  “Crap, Deirdre. Not again.”

  I shrug.

  “You’re going to the doctor, right?” Ginevra says.

  “Next week.”

  “…’Cause that’s not normal.”

  “I’m not normal,” I tell her, thickly.

  On another day, she’d comfort me. She’d walk me to the nurse’s office, or call my dad to come pick me up. Today, she’s already in makeup, and alight with nerves. She smells of cigarettes and Noxzema. Her fingers touch the back of my neck, then skate away.