Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Stunned, Jesse opened the door of the old medicine cabinet above the sink. Three shelves, covered with filthy strips of paper. Paper towels. Nothing. No, wait, he saw on the top shelf a single razor blade—yes, a razor blade!—slightly rusty along its edges but shining in the center.

  He tested it against his thumb: sharp enough.

  But he needed a safety razor to put it in. Otherwise how could he shave? Trembling, he looked around … around at the little room.… A lumpy bed, bare walls, wan, listless curtains made of plastic. Screens that were loose. Dead flies on the windowsill, a dead bumblebee, how could he shave without a razor to put the razor blade in? He stared out the window. His own car was parked nearby.

  Only a razor blade.

  He was crazy with love for her. He would bring her back here, right here, to this rented cabin, and on top of that narrow lumpy sordid little bed he would make love to her. He would marry her in that way. The fetus she was carrying would become his. His baby. Magic. His power as a male. But first he had to wash, he had to shave.… He unbuttoned his shirt and tore it off. He sniffed at himself under his arms. A stale odor. Panic. Alarm. Had Reva smelled this? He turned on the faucet and the rusty water spurted out, tepid to the touch; he waited but it got no hotter. Now for some soap. A bar of soap. He looked around and found only a thin, shell-like piece of pink soap … but it was enough, it would do! He began lathering the soap, then realized that he should take all his clothes off, should wash his entire body. Reva herself was taking a bath. Give me an hour, she had said. He undid his trousers and stumbled out of them, thinking of Reva bathing herself for him; he undid his shorts and stood now in his socks, trembling. The water had begun to splash out onto the floor. He worked the soap into a frantic lather again and stroked it up onto his face, up from his neck and onto his chin and cheeks, the strokes swift and hard and upward … and then he tried to wash his chest, impatient with the ticklish curly red hair, matting it down, and then his stomach, his belly, his genitals.… Give me an hour, Reva had said, backing away from him, and he had felt his soul being tugged out of him by her smile, her lazy dreamy melodic smile, the promise of her body, her name.…

  In the mirror Jesse’s living body faced him, the living surface of his soul: an opaque feverish form standing at its limits, hovering in the yellowish mirror of this room. The skin clammy, as if with terror. Whitish, clammy, unreal. Was this Jesse? His skin, which looked good enough at a distance of inches, was really a fanciful conglomeration of colors, the pigment mottled, like a quilt, all bumps and tiny hills and goosepimples and hair and moles and formations that were exotic and unintelligible, like something shaped by the warm caressing currents of the sea, or of the wind. His hands raced over his body, soaping it. Must get clean. Must get that odor of panic clean. His face, seen at a respectful distance, was a good face. But, seen up close, it was a curious terrain of slopes and ridges, skin and cartilage and freckles and small veins and hairs, brute dark hairs, pits, bumps, hollows. Reva would see him like this, she would see him up close. Pressed close. He had good, muscular shoulders, biceps that were small but hard, a good chest, a trunk he need not be ashamed of, but Reva would lie close in his arms, delirious in his arms, and he must get clean for her, absolutely clean, he must wash the shadowy pits beneath his arms, and the bluish, frail stomach and abdomen, and the monstrous part of him he half-admired, half-loathed, it was so public, so shameless, so arrogant. On that bed there, on that very bed.…

  His body swayed with a joyful certainty, a lust that radiated out from his loins to make everything glow, the most distant muscle, the bony structures behind his ears, the smallest toes—everything, a festival of parts!—glowing with certainty, with lust, with love for that woman. As he would penetrate her he seemed to penetrate himself, all the parts of himself, well-oiled and warm with a honeyish certainty, the cavities of his body aching to be filled as her body ached for him, his muscles straining to please, his organs swelling and pumping blood in harmony, in love.

  He stared at himself. His lips were loose, a loose terrified grin.

  Soap on his face. The lather was fading, dissolving. The water wasn’t warm enough, but no matter, no matter, he had to get clean and shaved and ready for that woman. He held the razor blade awkwardly in his right hand. How to work this? He had never tried to shave like this before. He wasn’t sure if it could be done. Stooping, squinting, he peered at himself in the dingy mirror and tried to see where he should begin. The razor blade was slippery. His fingers were slippery. What if he cut himself …? But he had to shave, he had no choice. He tried to maneuver the slippery little blade against his jaw but he was so timid that nothing happened, the blade just grazed his beard.…

  Try again.

  He got a firmer hold this time. But at the very last instant he was afraid of nicking himself and he dropped the blade into the sink.

  He picked it up again carefully, as if it were a delicate surgical instrument. Must take care. Take care. He was panting. The entire area of his mouth and upper throat ached with fever like a flame. He held the razor in place against his left cheek, and felt up and down the length of his body a sharp thrill of lust, so keen that he nearly doubled over … but he did not drop the razor blade again; instead he held it firmly and stretched the skin of his left cheek downward with one hand.… And then lightly, timidly, he scraped the blade against his skin and blood spurted out at once.

  He stared at his own blood.

  Then again, as if hypnotized, he drew the blade against the other side of his face.

  More blood.

  He was fascinated by the sudden streaming of blood. It ran thinly, brightly, through the lather. Nothing could stop it. He brought the blade down against the top of his chest and drew it against his skin—such soft skin, shivering beneath his touch—another immediate flash of blood!—and then against the very top of his stomach, the firm muscular skin. More blood. A sluggish flow. He made the cut deeper and the blood jumped out at once, as if springing forward.

  And now …? He touched his left shoulder. Another scratch. He bent and touched the top of his left thigh, frowning. And then, hesitantly, reverently, he drew the blade through the tangle of pubic hair, feeling only a light, acrid stinging, but seeing no blood … then digging the blade in a little deeper.…

  Ah, blood!

  He stood there, bleeding from a dozen places, unconnected places, streaming blood so lightly, experimentally, giddily.…

  He waited but the bleeding did not stop. He tried to blot it with the old paper towels, but it did not stop. The scratches stung. In the end, impatiently, he decided to put his clothes back on over the bleeding. He drove back to Chicago that way.

  BOOK III

  DREAMING AMERICA

  1

  July 1970

  Dear Father,

  The voice must say I love you. If it does not say I love you it is not an authentic voice.

  Today we hitched a ride with two old people in a camper. Retired, from Minneapolis. Gray-faced. Chatting, chatting. You should hear Noel chat with strangers! Sometimes he isn’t Noel but gives out other names—sometimes I am his sister—sometimes his little bride—sometimes he is from Canada, or Maine, or California, or Florida—his voice mimics all voices, changes itself to suit all ears, coddles and caresses and hypnotizes—Father, I want to come home—no, that isn’t my voice and it isn’t Noel’s, don’t listen to that voice—

  Hitched a ride to Homestead, Florida. Don’t look it up on the map. As soon as you put your finger on it, your clean pared fingernail, I will no longer be there. In fact I am already gone. Worked out in the fields for a day, I forget how long, U-Pick Tomatoes 10¢ lb.—Noel says work is good for us, you eat as you work, lots of pulpy seedy messy tomatoes squashed under our bare feet—oh, my shoulders and arms and neck are pink, red, they ache—the voice is always changing itself like the runny fluid of tomatoes, the seedy insides of tomatoes—the voice is always mimicking other voices—it is not Noel’s voice but my own, it is
always saying I love you I want to come back.

  U-Pick Pole Beans. U-Pick Avocados. Ten for a dollar here. The fields glimmer with heat, with heat waves, there are old battered buses parked in ditches, Negroes with grimy straw hats and no smiles, glancing at Noel and me without interest. Noel is so bright, so blond! But you have never seen Noel. You have never seen him even in your imagination, though you have wanted him dead and have had to imagine him to want him dead. Father, are you listening? Or are you on the telephone? The police can’t find me, I am too far away; if they tried to head me off in one of these fields they would see me melt into the waves of heat, Noel and I both melting together, dissolving—

  Can you hear the voice? Does the voice say I love you?

  I am writing this on the Gulf of Mexico, on the edge of the Gulf. Noel has been gone for two hours. When he comes back he’ll have a surprise for us—always a surprise—sometimes money, sometimes other people; once he lugged a color television unplugged from some motel room, he’s so clever, and if anybody approaches him he melts right into the air, nobody could catch him! You couldn’t catch him. Couldn’t put him under an anesthetic and pare out his soul. Couldn’t strap him down on an operating table the way you did the rest of us.

  The outside of my hand is getting red, but the inside, the palm, is still pale. Clammy. It’s dirty but clammy and pale. My fingernails are all broken and black. Mother should see them! I think I will rip one off and enclose it with this letter, so you can show it to Mother and to the police for identification. Then they can match it up with me when they find me.… My hands are dirty but that’s not all. You are such a clean man. I tried to explain that to Noel but he couldn’t understand. He thinks that clean means clean hands, soap, he doesn’t know it is a jug of distilled water, a jug made of that very clean, light, unbreakable plastic, not dangerous like glass but unbreakable. There is no taste to distilled water. There is no taste because it is not contaminated.

  Did you get my letter from Savannah? That was me. I sent that for a joke. Did you know it was me? Or did you think it was really from one of your dead patients? If they could write from the dead, think from the dead, dream back on you from the dead?

  Noel is very late coming back to me. The sun is very bright, I can feel how much closer it is to the earth here than in Chicago, I am lying on the edge of the land waiting for him and dreaming of you, dreaming of him and you, melting you together. Little shells all around me. Millions of shells. I try not to think about them—how small they are—the shells of little animals but the animal meat has melted out of them—their bodies are beneath me—all we have to give are our outside bodies, our shells, trying to make something beautiful of them and then draining out of them, great piles, mountains of shells that are bodies for giants to lie upon. Noel has instructed me to rid myself of you. “You must dream back right over him,” Noel whispers in my ear. Dream back. “Dream his face and his voice. Erase as you dream,” Noel says, stroking my backbone up and down—because it was sore—and it is the center of the body, everything radiates out from it—my backbone is so sore and limp—what good did it do, Mother’s nagging about my posture? Don’t forget to show Mother my fingernail! Oh my black ragged fingernail!

  I don’t love her. The voice has nothing to say about her.

  Noel rubs his forehead hard against mine sometimes, to make me think his thoughts. They rise up in him and in me like surprised, dangerous waves. Giant birds are diving into the water here. I think they are pelicans, with terrible beaks. They rear into the air and then dive down again, suddenly, three or four of them together; my heart jumps when they crash like that, flat into the water.… Noel’s ideas are like that. Once he said to me when we were on the back of a truck, a farmer’s pickup truck, my head ached from being so tired and he said Give me a shove and stared at me, to see if I could do it. Give me a shove off onto the road, honey. But it was a joke. I think it was a joke. To see if I could kill him when he instructed me, but I couldn’t move, that is the way his ideas flash into my head sometimes like the birds diving or the biggest waves, that throw the shells around and drag them back again, up and back again, again and again as I lie here, trying to wash me away and erase what is in my head, Father, all the thoughts you put in my head. “Systematically—because I believe in order—you dream back and erase yourself,” Noel told me, “step by step, year by year, erasing the monsters so that you can be free. Then you will be mine, Shell,” Noel promised. And he never lies.

  The voice must say I love you or else it is not an authentic voice. I don’t love her. I dream about you—so tall, your head filled with thoughts like the shadows of birds’ wings, the skin around your eyes darkening with all the deaths you had to perform, death on your fingers and in your lungs. Carrying me. I remember you carrying me in your arms. I remember Jeanne frowning up at us, ready to cry, so jealous of us—Jeanne sputtering with her asthma—I can hear you talking to me in babytalk and I can hear your voice switching to another voice for Mother, the drone of your talk with Mother, necessary talk about how to get from A to B, one year to another year, I can feel myself carried high in your arms with the ceiling and the walls reeling around my head, and Jeanne so far below and Mother in another room, trying to talk to you.

  I am an unadopted baby.

  I don’t like to think about being born. If you had adopted me I wouldn’t have had to be born like that. You and Mother were going to adopt a baby for so many years—a little brother for Jeanne and me—“baby brother”—I was ready for a baby brother but he didn’t come. Jeanne was ready for a nightmare but it didn’t come. Jeanne’s face all mottled but no baby brother came.

  “Imitate his voice in your head,” Noel told me. He weighs me down and keeps me from slipping off into the sky. His soul weighs mine down, otherwise it would trail up into smoke and be gone. Noel. My lover. “Imitate his voice in your head. And then you will be free,” Noel said. But I can’t do it. Can’t make your voice come out of me. Or hers. It is only my voice saying I love you I want to come home and I have to press my hands against my mouth so that Noel can’t hear that, otherwise he would grind my face into the sand here until I suffocated. “Imitate his handshake,” Noel said. I have seen you shake the hands of many men, Father, stooping eagerly to them because you are taller than most men, frowning a little, your face going cloudy and baffled as if you felt yourself colliding with other people as if with mysteries, was that it …? Dense cloudy faces, souls. Try to figure them out. People stick in me the way they stick in you. Can’t slide off them, even my slippery body can’t slide away. Your smile had to be coaxed. You stared at me without seeing me and then a form appeared that was your daughter and you saw her and then you smiled. But not before. What did you see before you saw me, when you were staring at me?

  If I could get behind your face, Father. Manipulate your handshake. If I could make your voice sound in me, in my head. Your tufted eyebrows, your red hair lighter than mine—your strange light green eyes, like mine—why can’t I see out of them? Then I could see myself. The daughter. Then I could erase myself and be free.

  Noel says: You came out of a cell expelled by your father, and you must go back into that cell.

  A cell is like an eye, with a dot in it. Is that the soul?

  Mother had nothing to do with it. I don’t dream about her. I see her in flashes the way you see old stray memories of strangers, people you didn’t know you were seeing at the time. Somehow they get inside your brain. I see her at the front window of our big house, staring down the big front lawn, staring at the street.… I see her nervously pulling a bedsheet up to cover something, so that I wouldn’t see … blood on Jeanne’s bed, was that it? Blood in the shape of a star.

  Close your eyes, Shell. Place your finger upon a certain day, the beginning of what you remember. That was what Noel told me before he went away. Write your father a letter.… Your father is a famous man, with such grave pouched eyes and a noble forehead, he deserves a letter of love! In your own voice, S
hell, and not in mine. You have to do this yourself.

  Noel came running to me, Father, a pounding noisy weight on the stairs, his face bright and panting, his hair flying, his voice already threading into my head, my precious brain, and the buttons on my dress squirmed at the sight of his hands. My heart was already fattening up at the sight of him. Something unbearable about him, his purse of a mouth. A ringing sound set off by him next to me, oh I could not help myself—little Shelley thinking in terror I could not help myself. He wasn’t the first anyway. Not the first. Not the second or the third either but after that my mind fades away. Don’t ask questions.… Father, you don’t want to know! Don’t want to know how I could not help myself!

  Of your two daughters it is Michele who cannot help herself. Jeanne does very well.

  My father is a famous surgeon, little Shelley giggles. Makes herself dizzy. Your eyes look light and transparent but mine look opaque—an imbecile is growing out of me—sometimes I can’t read, Father, it frightens me when I can’t read the billboards along the highway, the letters don’t add up to words and I think I am in another place like on another planet where the language has changed—but Noel tells me I will be all right, Noel sings in my ear and puts me to sleep—

  Once I was terrified and couldn’t stop screaming but Noel brought me out of it. Made me laugh instead. Oh I laughed and laughed! The muscles of my sore face jumped around like crazy, careened off the walls, jumped back into me. I was terrified because a book was going to fall off your shelf and onto my head, the book was by a man named Lord Brain. I had to explain this to Noel but I couldn’t stop screaming. The book was about brains. I used to look through it in your study. It was by a man named Lord Brain and it was about brains. I saw the diagrams, I read the words.

  Think of November 22, 1963.

  Can you remember? Remember for me. Help me. Noel says I must remember and I must begin at the beginning. Father, I love you, don’t call the police but help me, listen to me.…