Dadaoism (An Anthology)

by Oliver, Reggie

Yes, you have. Once when leaving your dad’s house for your mom’s half-sister’s, and then from there to the schmancy prep school. “So, where are you heading?” If she told Ryan exactly that story about herself, it wouldn’t surprise him.

  “I’d rather not tell you that.” She fingered her coat collar, then stopped and held it tight between her thumb and finger.

  When she didn’t say anything else, he said, “Okay.” He was pretty sure the one all-night bus trip she’d take would be to escape school—all the girls but one were awful, and the teachers were worse—and head for a town where she thought no one knew her.

  You need to hide, he didn’t say. I know.

  He waited for her to ask him where he was going, but she only turned her head around and half-smiled, biting her lip.

  I don’t want to say where I’m going, either. Ryan actually opened his mouth, but a painful bar in his throat shoved the words back.

  It hit him, then, that almost every day of his life he would have to tell people about Tara. He would have to start somewhere. This girl could be a stranger, or she could have told him her life story every single time he cracked the paperback open. He might never see her again, or he might owe her part of his life story back. Either way, he could think of no one else he’d rather tell this to first.

  “Yeah, I’m actually going home. From school. College, I mean.” God, if it were Thanksgiving Break, with Tara’s van waiting at the station, and he could just shut his mouth right then… but he forced it out. “My sister died today.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, in the same soft tone, still shaky too. She shifted her hands, which she’d folded back in her lap, to the knee closest to him. “Had she been sick?”

  The way her eyes gleamed as she peered into his face pinned him to the corner between his window and seat. I don’t want to talk about it. But he couldn’t back out. There was nowhere to go. “No, it was a car crash. Her daugh—I mean, my niece, was there too. She’s okay, though.”

  The girl leaned closer. “I’m sorry,” she said again. The cold air from her hands sparked against his thigh. “She’ll need you. To be a good uncle.”

  “I know.” Because your uncle’s a wuss. “I’ve thought about it—I know.” Ryan did know. He was going to wait, until Emmaline wasn’t so little.

  “It’s important.” She sat back again, staring at the seat ahead of her like she could read her own uncle’s failure in the little squares of color sewn in grey. “You must have loved your sister.”

  “Yeah.” He hadn’t thought it through yet, but he knew he had. He’d loved every Tara. “Yeah, she was a lot older than me, but I did.”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” Her voice grew flatter, like she was talking to herself. “That you love her anyway?”

  She had a sister herself. Clearly. It wasn’t proof, but it was enough that Ryan stopped fighting himself. Being insane was easier, anyway.

  Yeah, it’s strange that you always loved Rossalyn, even though she hated you because her hair was frizzier than yours.

  Not so insane that he said it out loud, though. He only said, “Sort of.”

  “More than that.” She clenched her hands together, and her shoulders hunched.

  You know, Rossalyn’s going to bite it soon. “Yeah, you’re probably right.” Strangled in a nightclub, and one of her last words will be your name.

  “It’s good.” Her voice softened; her shoulders relaxed. “To hear someone say that.”

  Then he realized, in the book at least, she—Autumn—had hurt when Rossalyn died. Until the end, almost everything else in Autumn’s life was more worth worrying about than Rossalyn, but Autumn would still hurt like he almost did now.

  Now he wanted to reach over, laying his one hand over her two and gripping them both, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d vanish like snowflakes under his hot palm.

  “No problem.” Instead he clasped his own hands together.

  I haven’t asked you your name yet. But that’s because I think I know you. The words ran through his mind, but he kept his mouth shut. It was getting harder to do. And I think maybe you know me. Autumn—yes, you’re Autumn—it kind of scares me that I’m talking to you, but not too much because that part could just be a dream. Where I’m going’s not a dream, though, and I know I’m really fucking scared of that, even if I can’t feel it. With his lips sealed closed, he thought he felt the sentences, the thoughts, the feelings, pouring out of his eyes and ears, and the way she looked at him, he wondered if she could read, see, understand them. And where you’re going, for you, isn’t a dream either. You’re scared because you don’t know what’s coming, but I know you have plenty to be scared of.

  “Can I ask you something?” he finally said.

  “Yes.”

  So can I come with you? No. She might even laugh at that. No matter how much she seemed to know. He controlled himself. “You look kind of nervous. I guess I just wanted to know if I could help.”

  She answered slowly. “I have had… trouble.” She turned back to him, smiling sadly. He wished she would just cry already. “It helps just talking like this.”

  “But—” But you’re going to get a job in this gross restaurant that’s really a front for a whorehouse, and when you won’t go along with it the owner will search your purse and find your bus stubs, figure out where you came from and who you are, because, seriously, who else has your name?, but he’ll call up your aunt, and you’ll have noticed that there’s an asylum right up the highway from your apartment… “I—do more,” was all he could get out.

  She gently shook her head. “I’m sorry. I need to be careful.”

  “You should know that you can trust me, right?”

  “I know.” She was still smiling.

  So I can get your inheritance back for you. So we’ll find someplace nice to live, with good people. So I’ll work. It’d be perfect, if she’d agree.

  Her voice lowered. “That’s why I’m sitting here.”

  “You’re safe.” He could barely believe he’d actually said it. It came out choked.

  “I know.”

  Stop smiling! He tried to scream at her with his eyes. Don’t you get it? No one alive is going to miss you. The babies won’t remember you, the chick from school has her own family, and that guy will find some other girl in Europe. And maybe none of my people will miss me—I don’t want to go home! You’re going to be better off with me.

  He opened his mouth and almost cried.

  “Thank you.” Finally, her smile was gone. “For being here now. You’ve made this easier.”

  Made this easier. Ryan craned his head back to see out the window. A familiar highway sign was rushing toward them.

  “I’m supposed to get off soon,” he said. “But really, if you want—”

  “You can’t leave your family.” Her voice rose up an octave.

  “You’re right.” Though that just made him want the bus to crash.

  “You can’t.” This time she glared, but he wondered, that with only one long dead loving mother and one school friend and one random guy who really cared about her, that her eyes should be still so bright and warm. Depths of November. Out-lit the sun. Then he thought about spending the past thirty minutes without her, and couldn’t imagine surviving it.

  “Thanks.” Ryan said. He looked down at his hands and blinked hard.

  “You’re welcome.” Her voice relaxed into its regular tone. The bus swung up on the exit ramp.

  Ryan was about to take the final plunge, and actually warn her about the restaurant owner and the asylum guard with ice blue eyes, but before he could speak she said brightly, “Oh, one thing. Look at this.”

  Eager not to know how close they were to the station, Ryan turned to see what she was showing him.

  She’d unfolded one of her cuffs, and was running her finger along a row of dark brown embroidery in the lining. She held her arm up near his eyes: his cheeks flushed with the cold. “See?”

  It
was tough to see, even with the station lights glowing through the window, but he thought he could make out the figures of tiny outlined one-humped camels, marching nose to tail.

  But she folded the cuff back over before he could be sure. “They’re adorable, aren’t they?”

  He nodded rapidly as she stood, straightened her coat, and opened her bag to retrieve her gloves.

  “Wait.” Ryan felt a new little spark of hope in his stomach. “Is this your stop?”

  “No, it isn’t.” She didn’t stop pulling her gloves on. “I’m just changing lines. I have to hurry.”

  “Oh.” His body felt heavy. It was hard to stand, and especially to lift his backpack off the floor. Everyone on the bus was rising, bustling, packing up, and the girl, who had draped her headscarf over her arm and left her red hair loose, was a few feet down the aisle already.

  He couldn’t let her go yet. “Wait.”

  She turned. “Yes?”

  “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I just have to tell you. It’ll be hard, but he’ll find you, and it’ll be okay.”

  She stepped closer. “It’s always that way.” Quickly she leaned forward, reached over, and didn’t quite brush his cheek with her finger. “Start being a good uncle.”

  He nodded as he rubbed the cold spot on his face. “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” By the time he’d turned around and slipped on his backpack, she was gone. He would have chased after her, but his legs were too heavy and sore.

  Everyone had left the bus before Ryan got off, too. On the way out, he glanced through a window overlooking the parking lot. Then he thought he saw her standing out there, just for a second, her bright hair shining in Dad’s headlights and dissolving in the wet breeze.

  Jewel. He thought. Out-lit. Then he went outside.

  Visiting Maze

  Michael Cisco

  She showed me the capacitous, transparent form, descending from out of clouds of the greyest darkness.

  “It is a visiting maze,” she said.

  The great glassy wheel with countless inner compartments impressed itself onto the soft landscape. The firm ground yielded to it like flesh.

  “It travels,” she explained, and turned, showing her eyes. “It follows me. Ever since I was a little girl.”

  I took her in my arms, and she came no closer.

  “Don’t put me off. I don’t care about that,” I told her.

  She placed her hand over my mouth.

  “It is more than a maze. It is a visiting maze,” she said, earnestly. Her mouth shone with saliva that spilled from a deeply hidden, transparent fountain, always a little too much of a nectar I longed to drink. It would have disgusted me in anyone else. In her mouth, though, this inflamed me.

  “It already surrounds you,” she said. Her voice sank. Disappointment mingled with satisfaction in her voice.

  *

  She showed me the shining, invisible walls that rose from a rain-washed street, now inundated with sunlight.

  “It is a visiting maze,” she said.

  The blinding glare of its unseen walls smarted in my eyes. I blinked, and the images would not disappear. They surrounded me in my own, inner obscurity. I reached out for her, found her waist, and drew her to me. She came no nearer.

  “It is not made only of physical walls,” she told me. “It is made of events. It consists also of glances, comments, small gestures, terse notes...”

  My hand parted her garments and I stroked the skin of her waist. I turned into the lane with her at my side; the lane was feathered with ivy that sparkled with drops of rainwater. A breath of air from out of an open cellar door stirred the leaves; their glints lanced my eyes.

  “That was the minotaur’s breath,” she murmured.

  I pulled her roughly toward me, to kiss her. But the face that confronted me was a doll’s, fixed.

  *

  She met me where two hallways join, and showed me where to find the chamber in which she habitually slept.

  “Why can’t we go now?” I asked, hoarsely.

  “It is a visiting maze,” was all she could tell me.

  *

  Her face showed at the window of the little restaurant.

  “It is a visiting maze,” her glance silently told me. She turned her attention back to the minotaur sitting beside her, and he lowered his shaggy head to her bosom.

  Wandering through the town, I was more and more lost. Glory settled in diaphanous waves above the walls. The day was filled with hypnotic green life. All living things bathed and were suspended and were entranced in its warm haze. There was only one dead person in the town. He travelled its lanes and byways. He searched for nothing but searching further. He was his own minotaur.

  The maze never deserted him. It waited just within the gauze of the day’s glory, rampant, like the sound of a choir shouting.

  *

  A memory accosted me, a moment after I’d caught sight of her, crossing the bridge.

  “It is a visiting maze,” the memory said.

  The corridor had exactly the shape of her body in her dress. It followed me like my own shape. I hurried after her, following the thread of memory. I turned a corner and was brought up short again by a blank wall. On it, were her eyes. On it, was the slight pulsation in the hollow of her throat. And all over it there were all of her eccentricities, hanging like trophies.

  *

  “Oh, don’t imagine,” the voice said, “that, simply because you have become so estranged from them, and hide them at the end of convoluted pathways, that your emotions are safely out of the way! Don’t imagine you are beyond their reach! Their reach is terribly long! Long and elastic! The interminability of the corridors is a fond dream of yours. That tempest is still with you! That white derangement waits inside with all its fury, yet patiently biding its time, crooning to the night air, knowing it will not wait forever, not even all that long. It is a visiting maze—only visiting, you understand now? It has lost none of its power to seduce and intoxicate you with misery.

  “A labyrinth has a heart, and a secret at its center.

  “The maze is heartless. It is only a worried passage from one point to another. The points it connects mean nothing in themselves. It is only a visiting maze.”

  *

  She showed me her body, unvirgin, of radiant gold.

  “It is a visiting maze,” she told me.

  The maze guided me to her, and never left me. She drew my body to her. I was not any closer.

  The maze had been speaking about me. But to whom, if not to me?

  “He loves her,” the maze said. “But only because she knows the maze.”

  *

  I was painted with her gold. I passed her in the aisle, without giving her a second look.

  “It is a visiting maze,” my silence said.

  “He loves the maze,” I heard the maze say. “He does not love the woman.”

  That’s why he abandoned her at Naxos and went back to the maze. He couldn’t stop moving in a maze-like way, outraging himself, forever going back over his convolutions. He went away, but drew no farther from her.

  She searched for him, and, in a cul-de-sac she recognized too well, she found a dummy that turned to her with a dull, mechanical, grating sound in the throat.

  The Houses Among the Trees

  Colin Insole

  Many years ago, when I was young, I tracked and found one of the missing. In quiet, desolate areas of the city, I alone noticed that someone was leaving garlands of wild flowers. Common hedgerow blossoms of dandelion, buttercup, daisy and sloe had been interwoven with grasses, ferns and reeds. Each garland contained hundreds of individual blooms, threaded with great intricacy of pattern and artifice. These delicate creations were placed unseen, deliberately hidden from the teeming crowds, in broken lift shafts, derelict railway sidings and abandoned supermarket trolleys. Their perfume and beauty lasted but a few hours and then faded into a heap of ragged vegetation.

  I recognised him immediately from a score of poster
s requesting information. On a spring morning, he had walked out, laughing, to buy milk and bread for his family’s breakfast. No trace of him had been found since that day.

  I watched him, self-absorbed in his art, as he selected subtle shades of yellow, picking or discarding flowers and strands of grass. Not a word was spoken or glance exchanged; but we understood. Ours was the silent acknowledgement between outcasts and pariahs.

  I knew that close by was one of the houses with its inner facade of furniture, books and ornaments. And hidden behind them were the rooms and passages where, beyond the shallow needs of food, company and entertainment, he sat in an empty chamber, weaving wreaths of grass and buttercups.

  But few of the lost retain even that transient contact with the bustling futility of the world. I do not speak of those who are taken by force for lust, revenge or sport and then discarded or buried in secret. Theirs is a different sorrow. Nor those who die by their own hand, unseen and undiscovered. I speak of those who walk in solitary glory, away from the world, to find perfect seclusion.

  As my commuter train rolls across the hills of the southern counties, I see the isolated cottages and farm buildings, hidden in valleys and copses, and speculate which ones are the secret houses among the trees. They always appear unoccupied, and a curious rambler, peering through the dust on the windows, would observe only the fading interiors of yesterday’s fashion. A vagrant might force entry and find shelter for days without suspecting their true purpose. But eventually, the forlorn emptiness of the rooms would worm into his soul and he would resume his wanderings, leaving the house and its occupant untroubled.

  *

  I have known of the houses ever since a hot summer of simmering quarrels and despair when I was nine years old. My parents always waited until I was in bed but still I heard the voices rise and the doors slam. After each crash I listened for footsteps and the reassurance that the house was still occupied. For even then I knew that eventually they would leave and seek the isolation of the missing. To hide the sound of their anger, they played the symphonies and piano concertos of Beethoven. When I heard the narcotic dream-encrusted slow movement of the Emperor Concerto, I could drift into sleep, knowing that soon they too would be in their bed.