Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

“I go on in an hour,” she says, brushing past me and into a stall.

  “Break a leg,” I say.

  I hear her jeans unzip, and a moment later the clink of her belt buckle hitting the floor.

  I turn away, look down. My hand has been fiddling with my ballpoint. Blue scribbles mar the cuff of my jacket; they almost make a word.

  I don’t know what else I’ll say to Ginevra if I stay. I leave her and walk out into the rain.

  One hour until curtain. Two dollars and eighty cents in my jacket pocket; a few cigarettes, a pack of gum. Nothing to eat, but I’m not hungry anyway.

  Rainwater collects on my hair and runs from the lank tips onto my forehead and down to my chin. My jean jacket soaks through and turns stiff. I turn my face up into the downpour: at least it can rinse some of the blood from my skin.

  Maybe it’s the chill, or maybe it’s just time, but I think the bleeding is slowing.

  I start toward the Bleaker Public Library as the rain slackens. As I reach the crosswalk, at the uppermost limit of my field of view, black birds cross the sky, one and one and one. When I tilt my face back a little to watch them, blood runs down over my upper lip and into my mouth.

  ∞

  Making friends with Ginevra was like taming a stray cat. First I started hanging around in areas where she might be found. If she showed, I didn’t approach her. I just stood there, smoking, or I read something, glancing at her secretly from behind my hair. Then I started catching her eye once in a while. Then I started smiling.

  Then I started dating Christopher Potter; I dumped him after a few weeks, but that got me introduced to Pete Janaczek, which got me the invite to Pete’s party, which got me in the same room as Ginevra while she was tipsy and expansive, and then—finally—it happened.

  All that was a lie, you know. As if I could plan anything like that. It’s only in hindsight that I realize why I started spending time in the smoke-hole in the first place. So many of the things we do, we keep from ourselves.

  ∞

  She told me the playwright was so much against the idea of his piece being performed by women that when someone in the Netherlands tried it, he banned the entire country from putting on his plays.

  “Why are you doing it, then? Aren’t you afraid he’ll ban Canada too?”

  “He’s dead. Too bad: it would be great press for us,” Ginevra said. She bit off the thread, put away the needle, and showed me what she’d been doing: adorning my jean jacket with a Violent Femmes badge.

  I resolved to go out and buy the album as soon as she left.

  ∞

  I lock myself in the handicapped bathroom at the Bleaker Public Library, and I kneel under the hand-dryer. In the rush of hot air, the last trickles of blood dry to sharp crusts within my nostrils. When I look in the mirror to gingerly prod them out, I see that I’m a strange colour, like old newsprint.

  I always thought pallor would be more attractive. I think I’ve been imagining pale people as if they were made of marble, delicately veined and smooth: not this chafed and flaking skin, with all the moles and hairs brought into sharp contrast, and the leftover summer’s tan yellowing me like dirty ivory.

  I’ve got blood on my jacket, too. As if the Violent Femmes weren’t enough.

  Without warning, it comes again. No pain this time, just a hot gush down my face as the pressure overwhelms whatever fragile membrane held it back.

  I slam my forehead into the paper towel dispenser in my hurry to reach the sink. That bleeds, too. In fact all this bleeding is making me feel spacy enough that I sit down on the toilet seat with my head on the sink, and I do nothing at all but wait.

  After a while I’m not bleeding any more, and I get myself upright slowly, like a person with a truly vile hangover.

  For some reason, I’m not using my left hand. I look at it, and discover I’m holding my pen again, in a bit of a death grip. I set it on the counter before I can make it explode, and begin the lengthy and awful process of cleaning myself up.

  ∞

  The theatre is called a black box, because it is both of those things, and nothing else. Its stage is bare but for a dead sapling planted in a bucket, and a diffuse light coming down from the grid.

  I’ve been up there: up through the trap door in the booth. I’ve spent a half-hour unhooking fresnel lights from the rack and handing them to people, because I couldn’t make myself edge out from the wall onto the grid itself, so far above the stage. If we had to hook our wrenches to our belts, I thought, why didn’t we have to hook ourselves to anything?

  My stomach lurches, what with the thought of the people on the grid, and the others waiting in the wings. Or maybe they’ll be in the green room still, warming up their voices: “Round and round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran.”

  In the heat, the inside of my nose crackles. Everything that should be moist is parched, and everything that should be comfortably dry is soaked with rain: jacket, trousers, Converse, hair, bookbag. Where I had doodled Ginevra’s name in ballpoint across the white rubber toe-cap of my shoe, there’s nothing but a blue smear.

  ∞

  The lights rise on Eve Morrow and Leslie Kulyk, both in bowler hats. Their faces, bare of paint, look tired and hollow and so much older than they did during lunch period.

  They are waiting at a crossroads. It reminds me of something.

  I try to remember. It seems important. Their dialogue teases around the edges of it, whatever it is.

  Then I try to forget it, because Ginevra takes the stage.

  Ginevra Iacovini: her father owns Bleaker’s only cab company. Her mother works part time at Danylow’s, selling fine leather. Between them, they’ve raised a changeling, all huge dark eyes in a face studded with piercings. She’s taken those out for the show, and her face looks thinner and younger.

  She enters stage right, with her bowler flattening her cap of curls, a rope about her neck and a whip cracking at her ankles. The whip is in the hand of Tyra Cross; she makes Ginevra stop and start and carry her things and take the whip in her mouth and give it back. Tyra speaks, and I watch Ginevra’s silent lips.

  “Think!” Tyra commands.

  I almost miss Ginevra’s first words. The excursus. Ginevra said it to me earlier, in the smoke hole, a bit of it. “For reasons unknown but time will tell,” she said; and “plunged in torment plunged in fire”. It comes back to me now, and with it a warm metallic tickle in the passage of my throat.

  I lean my head back, pull my knees up to my chest. Above me, the grid shows faintly, black on black, behind the fresnels. Below, Ginevra delivers a stream of words.

  My hand gropes in the pocket of my jean jacket, and finds my pen, and a wad of toilet paper. I blot my nose with one hand and clutch the pen with the other, as if the pressure will help get this under control.

  Maybe it does. I swallow, less each time, while below me Ginevra’s voice rises, and with it the sounds of a scuffle.

  She gasps, and shouts, and halts.

  So does the trickle of blood down my throat. I raise my head, cautiously. Ginevra stands listless, lost and swaying. Her hat is wrecked.

  She returns to the stage again in the second act. I was afraid her part was over. She says nothing, this time. Even her hair hangs lifeless about her cheeks. Her fall is inevitable.

  She’s called Lucky. That’s irony. If I forget again in English class what the definition of irony is, I’ll only have to summon this image to my mind: Lucky, slave to Pozzo, most miserable of a miserable crew.

  When she is beaten, she whimpers once, and I think Leslie’s given her a real kick with that steel-capped boot.

  The whimper reminds me of nothing, though. The desperate remembrance in my brain has gone quiet. The blood in my head flows in the usual channels. It does not start again until what turns out to be the very last scene: Eve and Leslie, alone together once more, in the bleak light, by the spare tree. As that light dims I feel it all over, the familiarity, and with it the blood.

  Th
e applause ends. The rest of the audience rises, collects jackets and purses, files out.

  I stay in my seat, hands to my face, until everyone has gone.

  ∞

  I wake early the next day. Saturday. Dad will be in bed for a couple of hours still. I dress in my jean jacket, and go for a walk.

  From our house you can see Bleaker spread below the lip of the escarpment: a pitiful little grid of Monopoly houses and patches of orchard, and beyond it the highway. I walk the other direction, between bare fields and windbreaks.

  At a crossroads, a single tree. It reminds me of the one on the stage last night.

  No: that tree reminded me of this one.

  I stop walking, and fumble in my pockets: pen, bloody tissue, matches. My throat hurts. I light a cigarette.

  I remember something now. I come here often, on Saturdays. I wait here. Don’t I? Someone meets me at the crossroads. But who? How will I know it’s the right person?

  Why don’t I ever think of this when I’m elsewhere? Is it so terrible? Is it just so large?

  When I have finished my cigarette, they come for me, and I remember everything.

  ∞

  On Monday I meet Ginevra in the graveyard after typing class. She’s drawing, perched in the big tree, up in the branches.

  Every tree is the one from the play, I think. Strangely familiar, and awful, and full of meaning that vanishes if you look at it directly.

  Ginevra closes her sketchbook and swings down when she sees me coming. We kick our way through the drifts of leaves that have gathered around all the stones. My mother’s buried here, on the far side, but I haven’t told Ginevra that, so I steer us the other way, out the north gate.

  I know a bridge, across a little creek that rushes down from the escarpment. The bridge is rusted; bits of it come away on my fingertips when I stroke the iron. We lean on the rail and watch the water trickling below us. Light rain begins to fall.

  “So,” Ginevra says.

  “It was…. I want to say it was amazing, because it was. More than that, though.”

  She glances at me from behind the fall of her hair. “You got it?”

  “It got me, I think.”

  “I thought you’d get it. You always have that look.”

  My turn to glance at her.

  “You know. I used to see you by yourself, just leaning on the wall or something, with your hands in your pockets—”

  “You used to see me?”

  “Sure, I did.” She takes a long drag, and exhales slowly, deliciously, into the autumnal air. “The deep one, we used to call you: me and Chris and Pete, back when we were wondering who you were.”

  She had a name for me.

  “I don’t think it’s about God,” I blurt.

  “I don’t, either. And I’m Catholic. I think they’re waiting for something…more personal, if that makes sense.”

  “More vital.”

  “More important.”

  “We sound like Didi and Gogo.”

  “It gets into your brain, a bit.” She smiles ruefully, and looks away. She’s wearing her bowler hat from the play, an old white waffle-weave shirt, and a denim vest. Her lips were wine-red, earlier, but some of the colour has come off on her cigarette. Her eyes flash wide and dark like the eyes of an owl after sundown.

  I wish I could kiss her.

  Instead I watch the water, which falls, and the leaves, which also fall, and the rain, which—ah, whatever.

  “You’re kind of a mess,” she says.

  “I guess.” I look down at my shoes. The toe-caps are smeared with ballpoint ink, and I thank the rain for smearing it before Ginevra could see what was written there; it might have been her name.

  “Me, too,” she says quickly. “All of us. There’s so much we don’t know.”

  I know, I almost say. Just for a moment, it’s all there. The cause of my troubles. The thing for which I wait. The meaning of the crossroads tree.

  But if I speak, something will burst in my head, and I’ll spill blood all over the rusted bridge and the place where our hands rest.

  I hold very still. The tide of blood recedes, and with it, the knowledge. All but the memory of forgetting, and the sense that time is short.

  After a last inhalation, Ginevra drops the butt of her cigarette into the water. The tiny light hisses out, and there’s only the smoke from her lips.

  ∞

  The Ghost Party

  Richard Larson

  “I don’t want to go,” said Charlee as she rode in the passenger seat of the old Bronco through the dark and quiet streets outside of her tiny, depressing town. Even though by now she actually did want to go. The beer was helping. She just had to keep drinking. At least that’s what Taco had said when he handed her the first bottle, her face still puffy from crying.

  “This should take the edge off,” he said.

  Charlee finished the beer quickly, and Taco passed her another from the cooler that he kept by his feet as he drove. She wondered if the main reason she kept Taco around was that he was old enough to buy booze. A few years older than her—well, probably more than just a few—and surprisingly persistent about hanging out with her. He was sometimes even sexy, in the right light and after the right amount of drinks. Charlee downed her next beer as quickly as the first. They were headed to the ghost party at the edge of town and she figured that a good buzz might better prepare her, or at least take her mind off the mortifying shame of what had happened earlier that night.

  ∞

  The first ghost parties popped up way out in the middle of nowhere, south of the highway where everything was hills and winding roads. No one was told about them. People just showed up—people, and ghosts. The ghosts came out of a big bonfire and mingled among the living. Living people became ghosts, too. The ghost party was a give and take: you gave, they took. And then you were one of them.

  The parties were noticed at first by truck drivers who saw the light from the huge bonfires and called the cops—and the cops, after examining the empty fields, never found any evidence of a party, the whole thing having disappeared in the night like a sinister traveling carnival. Lately, though, it seemed like the ghost parties were getting closer and closer to home, creeping toward town from the places where everything fell off into an endlessly dark expanse of ancient trees hiding secrets that people usually drove past too quickly to ever wonder about.

  Charlee’s friends had told her that the ghost parties lasted all night and into the morning, and that no one noticed the sunlight until they were already driving home. But Charlee’s friends had never been to the ghost parties themselves, and none of Charlee’s friends were ghosts. The whole thing could just be gossip from older girls at school who had probably only heard about the ghost parties from the community college guys they were hooking up with on the weekends. And those guys had probably made the whole thing up.

  That’s what Charlee thought, at least, until Taco called while she was lying in the dark, face down on her bed, wanting to die. When Charlee answered the phone, Taco said, “I found the ghost party. And I’m on my way over to pick you up right now.”

  ∞

  Taco was Charlee’s version of a community college guy to fool around with on the weekends, except that he hadn’t even tried to go to college, and the two of them did more than just fool around. Not sex, exactly. Charlee considered it more of an exchange of ideas. They got drunk together and laughed about how stupid the world was, and sometimes she would let him touch her. Almost like she owed him at least that much.

  One time she even told him about her father, which she later regretted.

  Charlee: not the hottest girl in school, not the smartest, and not the best player on the soccer team. She had to work to keep her weight down and studied harder than everyone else to get a B+ and could maybe, with more practice, warm the bench on varsity someday. And until her improbable best friend Amanda came around, all of this was fine—Amanda, who wore the right clothes and scored a recor
d high on the SAT when she was only fourteen. Amanda, who played varsity her freshman year. Amanda, who made Charlee want to be better at everything.

  And also, being all of the things that Amanda was, Amanda made Charlee want—

  Well. That was the problem.

  ∞

  “Earth to Charlee,” said Taco, glancing over at her as he drove, a beer nestled between his legs. In the oncoming headlights his face glowed brighter and brighter before it suddenly went dark again. And Charlee laughed because if Taco was Earth then she was definitely Mars. Maybe even something past Mars, something no one had found yet.

  Taco was watching her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “About what?” she asked, but she knew. There had been a desperate text message sent in a moment of weakness. “Girl stuff,” she said now, a lame attempt at changing the subject.

  Taco shot her a look. “Right,” he said.

  But girl stuff actually was the problem. It was supposed to have been only an emergency study session for Monday’s history final. Just the two of them sitting around in Amanda’s pink bedroom, learning about oceans, how sea travel was such a big factor in allowing different cultures in history to trade goods and share knowledge—and also, Charlee noticed, to generally screw everything up. Isn’t it best to just keep to yourself and figure out how to make it on your own? This was what Charlee wanted to know. Especially now.

  Because she had tried to kiss Amanda.

  Not just out of nowhere. Amanda had been the one who suggested stealing some of her brother’s pot from his underwear drawer. She knew that he kept it there because she had once made out with one of his buddies, who—horny and desperate—had told her.

  “It’ll help us focus, right?” Amanda said, giggling as she opened the plastic bag, and Charlee agreed because she needed plenty of help focusing on something else other than Amanda’s skin, her legs, the dimples that emerged when she smiled. Even if smoking pot sounded like it would provide exactly the opposite. Which, of course, turned out to be true.

  ∞

  Obsessing over a girl was definitely new for Charlee. Her occasional fooling around with Taco was fine, and there had been a few other boys here and there. One time at a party she got stuck in the kitchen with Tommy Carlton and he had shoved his crotch against her lower back as he reached around for a beer, and she had thought, well, maybe. Until he vomited in the sink.