Hex

by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight

  RACHEL

  Could I have seen the disaster, small as it must have been? Could I have seen the mistake itself? Could I have seen the little annihilation death performed so invisibly, so lightly, we mistook it for air? We called it Thursday afternoon? We gave it no name and went home?

  What would I have said?

  Don’t?

  Please? Could I have begged her back from whatever she’d already done? Could I have healed her, heard her, borne her any witness, shoved her beside herself, thrown her the rope of my arm, knocked her off her only path, helped her down from the irreversible? Kissed cure into her mouth? How quickly did it turn too late? How high did the room temperature need to rise to trigger the conditioning that made her sneeze?

  I saw her. I saw her and I told myself to “chill the shit out.” She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist, her glove rode up, her wrist remained exposed, and I thought, As if. As if an Achilles heel is literally a heel, a wrist, a joint. As if we are at the perpetual risk our parents described. As if children should be leashed, dogs should be muzzled, and our snot will lift the hand that lifts the glove that exposes the skin to the toxin that will kill us quickly. As if anything fatal could be dull. As if she were some kind of incompetent. As if I knew better than she did, Rachel Simons, who was older and always so deliberate. The air conditioning had just woken up from Eco mode. I heard her sneeze and I saw her wipe her nose, so as not to lose a moment of her work, so as to lose the sum total of her moments.

  Would I have contained the power, the chemical, the antidote, the understanding, the reflexes, the speed, the dexterity, the brawn, the blessing, to undo her catastrophe? The ability?

  I wouldn’t have. I could have.

  Joan I don’t want to be myself anymore I want to be careful.

  I want to be perilously honest about loving you.

  Rachel Simons was buried in the Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, in a plot her parents had purchased the day she was born, because she’d been born unwell and with short expectancy, and they’d wanted to batch the disaster into one big buy. Then Rachel defied all expectations and lived.

  After her burial, at the reception, standing beside a hillock of cubed pepper-jack, Tom and I broke up. We didn’t deserve life as we knew it, as we lived it, in good health and half heart.

  We rode the R train back uptown and transferred at Union Square.

  Joan we have grown too chill, we species without fur, we have become shit, we have chilled the shit out, we don’t even grow fur over our skin.

  PHARMAKON

  In ancient Greek pharmakon meant poison and cure and scapegoat. It also meant potion and spell and charm. It could mean artificial color or dye, even paint. It came from roots that meant cut and throat. The pharmakon doesn’t change its name whether it’s noxious or healing, whether it destroys or repairs. We assign human value to those results. Go ahead and employ a drug either in measure, toward health, or in excess, toward oblivion. The pharmakon has no intentions; it cooperates.

  Pharmakos meant a person sacrificed to atone for a city. If the sacrifice wasn’t killed outright, she was exiled. Once she left town, the town considered itself pure again.

  Theuth, Egyptian god of writing, called writing a pharmakon and he meant a remedy. Writing will help us remember.

  Plato called writing a pharmakon and he meant a poison. Writing will replace our memories and ruin our minds.

  Derrida called writing a pharmakon and he meant an ambivalence. Writing is a tool that must be used. How it is used is not writing’s fault, or business.

  I am writing this to you in exile, in abject ambivalence, you are pure again without me, and this writing’s effect on your body, if you ever read this, will be beneficent or maleficent. Ideally both. Your reaction will be your little godliness, your power to steer me toward recovery or the end.

  BARRY

  Today Barry took a seat at my bar and ordered himself a milk stout.

  I said, “First time in Brooklyn?”

  He said, “I’ve seen Grand Army Plaza.”

  I poured his stout and set it down on an Anchor Steam coaster, made in San Francisco since 1896. He rotated the coaster under it, an inch right, an inch left, and wouldn’t take a sip.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Estlin.”

  “Mishti said this was a nice bar, it’s a nice bar.”

  “It’s a nice bar.”

  The four thirty sunset came in through three small windows in the door, stretched inward over the bar stools, and landed on his thighs. The counter surface of the bar had become too sunlike to look at plain-eyed. The walls sighed orange. Sunny’s, as an institution, had drunk its own air and felt ready for bed. Barry rotated the coaster twice, again.

  “I’m not here for any reason, Nell,” he said, reasonably, I thought, “or,” I waited, “well I can’t speak to Joan anymore. So, closest thing is, I thought I’d speak to you.” I took his complement and put it right in the bank but Barry and I have no business chumming.

  “Where is Joan,” I’d go for his information, why not, “have they eloped?”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Tom.”

  “Oh Tom bailed,” he said, as if reporting the weather. “Please. Tom didn’t want my forty-one-year-old ex-wife on his hands, when it came down to it. No, no. Come on, Nell. Please.”

  Please. I played back Tom’s lips, his forearms curled between Joan’s back and the bookshelf. The way she’d said, “I want him.” The way he’d said not a word. I felt Barry had dropped me out of a jet, through a roof, and onto the floor of my pelvis. Clarity consumed me.

  “I want your forty-one-year-old ex-wife in my arms,” I said.

  “You’ve had her there.”

  “No, only on my mouth.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d believed Tom to be capable of desire.

  Barry said, “She liked Tom’s mouth best.”

  “Tom doesn’t have a mouth.”

  “If a mouthless man goes down on a woman—”

  “The woman evaporates.”

  Joan when you told Barry about my kiss, did you call it torture?

  “And she still doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Barry weakly pounded the bar, “that’s the real injury. It’s just me, she just doesn’t want me, Tom or not. And she sure as hell doesn’t want you.”

  I looked out the door windows that grew increasingly magenta.

  “She’s totally alone,” Barry said, “suffering, and she won’t even accept my kindness,” he said, “she doesn’t want a clean start, she wants total painful destruction.”

  I lifted my phone in a spasm of melodrama and sent Tom the text message: What have you done?

  Tom had set out to get you, Joan, and was so absolutely pleased that he did. I say this with some meanness in that I’m suggesting he wanted to get you more than he wanted you, but I’m sure he wanted you too. Maybe once he got you, he wanted you more than he could bear. Maybe once the scaffolding of your unavailability came down, he saw you up close and died. You know, the way Aaron is supposed to keep some distance from the altar of the Lord. I’m not saying you’re the Lord Joan don’t worry I’m just saying you merit distance.

  I know this notebook isn’t even about you. I’m sorry, Hildegard. Hildegard, this notebook is still yours. I won’t mess it up again.

  Barry finally reached for his beer and drank a third of a pint in one sip. He said, “What should I do?”

  For the first time I felt attracted to the outright disaster of my castor beans. For the first time I didn’t want to neutralize them, didn’t want to detoxify them, didn’t want to curb their danger, I wanted to deploy them as pure weapon, I wanted their harm, I wanted to harm the man who sat at the bar in front of me. I felt a jolt of disgust run up my neck and squirmed.

  “We’re filthy,” I said. “We�
��re irretrievable.”

  “Oh, it’s smaller than that,” Barry said, “I’ve only ruined my own life.”

  I paled then because life-ruining is my bag and nobody else’s. Joan, I need a new bag. Nobody’s life is my business, not even my own. Let the Fates spin their threads. I tried to stop thinking about Barry convulsing and took my hands out of my pockets and returned them to the dusty, harmless air and asked him, “How’s business?”

  “I don’t know anything about business,” he said. “But I’ll fix the copier as many times as they need.” He laughed. “I bet you didn’t think I know how to fix a Xerox machine. I do. I’m the only person of any value in that office. The women we’ve hired are porpoises but someday we’ll hire a cutie.”

  “Remove your love life from my life.”

  “Oh, go to hell. I thought you’d understand. Don’t you hunt pussy these days?”

  He finished his beer, paid, and tucked his stool under the bar. “Anyway, business is swell,” he said, leaving. He swung an imaginary bat over his shoulder, lowered an imaginary cap over one eye, shrugged, and said, “There’s no loving in business.”

  An old man at the back of the bar whose attendance I hadn’t taken hollered mirthfully, “Tom Hanks!”

  “Tell Mishti I miss her,” Barry said at the door, one side of his face magenta. “She’s a hell of a fuck, you should try her.”

  “I could kill you,” I said.

  Barry laughed and said, “Back when you had a lab. If Joan’s grant was going to save your life, what happens to your life now?”

  “That really isn’t your business.”

  “Sure it is. Who do you think told them you aren’t enrolled?”

  I flung his coaster at him and missed. The nontoxic material world felt hopelessly blunt and soft around its edges. I went home to dig up my castor beans.

  TOM

  While I was walking home Tom called me to apologize; I told him to try souping vegetables up in yogurt. He kept saying “I mean it” and I kept saying “crinkled carrots.” He kept saying “I’m not even sure where to start” and I kept saying “just put them right in the pot with whichever drained noodle you prefer.” After a long time he said he would try the yogurt. I asked if he regretted abandoning Joan. He asked if I regretted Joan’s abandoning me. I told him she abandoned herself. We’re the same. So he asked if I regretted abandoning Joan. I told him I abandoned me. He had enough of that and asked me how Mishti was doing. I said, “Pretty bad.” He said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I said, “Did you know that while you were boning Joan, Barry was boning Mishti?”

  I was in the mood for love.

  “I did know that. Joan was very proud of that arrangement.”

  I thought of the six of us, turned and turned around, and wondered who the seventh was, some distant minister only now climbing over the horizon to wreck us.

  “Mishti will be okay, she’s naturally phenomenal,” I said, because I’m a very bad wingman.

  “Mishti’s the only one of us I respect,” he said. “What the Jesus was Carlo thinking? How does anyone choose—what did he even choose?”

  I wanted to follow up on that but first I had to ask why he didn’t respect Joan.

  “Joan liked to look at me,” he said. “She found me mildly entertaining. Her name for me was Dope. Her idea of me was Statue Come to Life. I showed up at her door like a stripper. She didn’t respect me either.”

  “Mishti loves your mind,” I found myself saying.

  “Mishti is the only mind I know.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Mishti’s pretty magnificent, isn’t she,” Tom said, a little more softly.

  Hildegard I should have said right then To Queens with you! Fill your heart with gladness! I should have put on my father’s mother’s yenta shawl and played matchmaker, confessed every reciprocity, set the thing up, facilitated a union. But I am a wretched, minor, bloodless thing, bloodless the same as Joan, and I’d never met Nana Esther, and I’d eaten only yogurt, and I had something awful I wanted to do that afternoon and could no more feed my best friend to my ex than I could feed myself a roast chicken.

  “Are you okay, Nell,” he said.

  “I have a bed,” I said. “I have beans.”

  MISHTI

  First signs of my narcissus, scilla, glory-of-the-snow, bupleurum, larkspur. I stood in my own doorway, proud. Every bleakness had been replaced by periwinkle, byzantium, heliotrope, mauve, tea green, reseda green, mantis, and the Hooker’s green that’s halfway between Prussian blue and Gamboge yellow. My buzzer rang. That morning I’d finally convinced Mishti to leave the couch and come over but I never thought she’d actually do it, and now I didn’t want the interruption or the witness. Mishti climbed the stairs. I thought, She’ll understand. I thought, She’ll even help me. I tied my hair back so as to be fully available. But then she came in crying and I found myself saying to her, “Look, everywhere, pigheaded life!” The plastic planters at our feet sang dwarf hymns to victory. I wished I could prefer creation to destruction after all. I wished there were no Barrys provoking violence in our otherwise Eden.

  I told her most of the flowers were purely good, only the castor was poison. I told her she herself was our prime blossom. I told her I had an idea about using the castor poison after all, an idea about Barry, a kind of terrible idea. She walked farther into the apartment with an increasingly crazed gleam of inspiration in her eyes. Finally she sat on the floor, leaning back against the castor pot.

  “Don’t move,” I said, “I have refreshments.”

  I went into the kitchen and had forgotten where I’d stored the new and unusual snacks I’d purchased for her visit. My kitchen stared at me dumbly, unaccustomed to containing anything. After a round through all cabinets, I found my Mary’s Gone Crackers, my ladyfingers, my king-size Reese’s, and a knife to cut both the peanut butter cup and a little goat cheese called Sonnet. I felt indisputably abundant.

  “Please,” I said, placing the cutting board at her feet, “it’s all right, we’re disgusting but we’re civilized.”

  Mishti gulped and seemed to barf a little in her mouth. She looked at me with an expression that said, I don’t know and I didn’t mean it and Fuck and Where did I go?

  “Here,” I said, and ran back into the kitchen to fill her a glass of water.

  I handed the glass to her and she waved it away. She stared at the floor as if it were receding.

  “Mishti,” I said, “it isn’t worth all this, what’s going on?”

  Mishti spat some dark mucus onto my new rug.

  “Hey,” I said, and got on my knees beside her and leaned in to feel her forehead and saw the deep handful of dirt clawed out of the castor soil.

  “Nuh—” was the sound I made.

  Sweat poured from Mishti’s forehead.

  The ambulance said it would take a moment to get to Red Hook, that I should encourage her to vomit, to purge herself via every orifice.

  I

  The doctor wanted to know whose baby it had been, and of course nobody could tell him. Only Mishti knew, and she lay with the blood cleaned off of her, unconscious, attached to an IV, stable. Tom sat beside her, gripping her elbow.

  They gave her low-dose RhoGAM because the fetus’s blood had mixed with hers and her body would soon react by producing foreign antibodies that would stay in her own blood forever. The anti-D injection would stop the hostile antibodies from forming and keep future pregnancies possible.

  Tom wrote down every medicine she received: what time, what dose, what purpose. I told him he was really rising to the occasion. He looked up at me from bed level and said, “The annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love.”

  “What love?” I said.

  “I don’t stand a chance with her,” he said, with a very sm
all, very mischievous smile on his face, “but she’s got to give me a chance.”

  Mishti spasmed slightly in her sleep.

  What is this instinct women have to accommodate pain?

  I grew the perfect dose of a poison—does not kill, only stupefies and ravages—Give me that, the women round me said. We have thirsted, paid, and begged to sample toxins. Why want bad love? Joan what else is new, you were right and I got it wrong. No danger will contain its own safety. Our detox project is just for show, for prizes, it won’t change the fact of the matter. Speed can’t compete with intention. The bad thing must be done, and then undone, intentionally, sequentially, by a person who chooses to survive.

  I look at the antiseptic toxic waste bucket filled with Mishti’s shed matter. There it is, the seventh angel, and where is the eighth?

  Spring in New York is so short it hardly comes. It sneaks in, a little warmth you can’t deserve, an indulgence to be hidden or eaten quickly. It’ll be hot soon. Then very cold again. But today, a little warmer. A little more light in the light.

  In the waiting room I wipe the corners of my mouth. They are sites of constant, mysterious accumulation. It feels good to wipe them dry.

  I want huge hard conviction again I want oak trees.

  They say Mishti will be just fine. They say they got her in time. They say she’s lucky to have such friends, and that a girl so beautiful is likely to have good friends. A girl so beautiful is more likely to be despised and eviscerated, but Mishti is unlikely. They called the incident unlucky, intentionally unlucky.

  Joan you aren’t here. I don’t hold you or any place. I’ve appointed my rooms and exercised my limbs. I’ve sunned my skin with the shortest days of the year. I’ve smelled more than roses, and roses. I haven’t forgotten you and I’ve left you entirely behind. I’ve welcomed and re-forgotten my own beauty.