by Maria Mutch
* * *
She knew the propensity of the city to obscure, how it stirred its contents ceaselessly. A person could hide in plain sight, and she thought, as she stood at a vegetable market two doors down from the café, that if her brother was in fact alive he could be doing something similar. He could be counting on doorways and crowds and traffic to blur him into the background. His face could appear in the window of a cab, or stare out from a cocktail bar; his form, stock-still, could be overshadowed by oaks in a corner of a park. A blink, then gone. Would he do that? she wondered. Would he shed one life for the illusion of another? As if the mind could be changed by giving itself another name. As if his troubles, whatever they were, resided in a sound formed by the mouth. Exhaled like smoke.
She lit a cigarette, because she was cold, and watched the café door.
“They boiled.”
Sabine turned toward the voice, which had come from a woman standing behind her. The woman seemed to be wearing numerous sweaters and jackets. She was perhaps not that much older than Sabine, but she looked old. Sabine didn’t say anything. She just smoked and looked at her.
“They boiled. The whales. They were in a tank, it’s where they lived, and they boiled.” The woman looked at Sabine’s boots, nodded, then stared into her face. “Down there, you know. Probably twenty blocks. Not like you can see it anymore. Doesn’t exist. Where the fire was.”
Sabine turned from the woman and watched the café again. The door opened, but it was some students who emerged.
“It was the Barnum Museum, 1865. You know it?”
“I know the one you mean. Haven’t been there personally. Have you?” She looked hard at the woman. “Have you been there?”
The woman burst out laughing, continued laughing so hard she bent double. Then straightened. “Maybe I have. Maybe I was the one who started it. Burned everything up. All that foolishness. The conjoined twins, the mermaid skeleton. They tried to rescue the wax figures, can you believe that? But the whales. What could they do about the whales? Not a fucking thing.”
Sabine had nothing to say.
“There was a giant named Anna Swan. Ever heard of her? Came from Nova Scotia. They got her out. Swung her out on ropes and put her in a giant carriage and she rode away. Isn’t that something?”
Sabine watched the café.
“They were belugas, the whales. One was twenty-three-feet long, and the other was eighteen. There were lions, too, you know. They fought and growled while the place burned. The snakes blistered up. The monkeys broke out of their pens and ran into the city. Imagine that. The mayhem of that. Monkeys in Lower Manhattan. Imagine the ladies with their long skirts.” She smiled slyly. “They could hide the monkeys.”
“Sure.”
The woman stopped talking, and Sabine hoped she would wander away. But then the woman said, “I know what you think.”
Sabine looked at her.
“You think I’m a cliché.”
“You don’t know what I think.”
“You suppose I’m not drawn right.” The woman smiled, and she had perfect, gleaming teeth.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“You think I have no consequence. I came out of nowhere saying random things.”
“Just smoking, you know that? Just smoking.” Sabine turned to watch the traffic.
“Find comfort in the random, I figure,” she said, nodding. “You just have to look more.”
Sabine sighed, glancing sideways at the woman. “Been looking. Believe me.”
“I want you to have something.” The woman dug into one pocket, then three others, parting one layer to reveal another, until she pulled out a folded paper and held it out for Sabine to take. “I want you to have it. It’s important information.”
Sabine took it and opened it. It was a smudged photocopy of an article from the Times—1865, the corners battered.
“It’s beautiful.” The woman rapped the paper with her bent finger. “The reporter wrote about what was in the museum. He did a line about an electric eel and an alligator. I have it memorized. He wrote, ‘An electric eel, six feet long, divided the attention of the juveniles with an alligator, who ate ducks and yearned for babies.’ See that? It’s right there.” She rapped the paper again, and Sabine could see that the sentence had been underlined. “ ‘Who ate ducks and yearned for babies.’ Yearned for babies!” She laughed again and jabbed her finger toward Sabine. “The alligator wanted to eat babies, you know, the human ones. The ones it could see outside its pen. People would come to see the alligators, holding babies in their arms. But it’s a good riff—yearning for babies, which is what I bet that reporter thought women do. So it’s conflated. Eating babies and wanting to give birth to them. What an asshole.” Her face turned sullen. “They don’t write like that anymore.”
Sabine took a drag of her cigarette and blew the smoke out in the direction of the street. “No.”
“They surely don’t,” said the woman. “The brain loves to figure out a pattern, you know, whether it’s there or not. It’s what this city is made of, how it functions. The random. You keep that somewhere safe. It’s the absurd. An investigation of absurdity. Excess. Captivity. The way we gawk. It tells you what you need to know.”
“What I need to know … ?”
“Everybody needs to know something. Everybody’s got one.”
“One?”
“A conundrum! Am I right?”
“At least one, I would think.” Sabine let the cigarette fall unfinished to the ground and stepped on it with her boot. She folded the paper and put it in the breast pocket of her coat. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. You’re welcome. You’re welcome.” The woman started to walk away, then turned back. “It’s good if you say it three times. That’s how it works.”
Sabine watched her walk slowly up the street, the woman’s pant legs dragging on the ground, unfurling pale threads. The frayed hems were a disintegration, but also an energy spreading out, in search of something. She realized she had not been paying attention to the café door. She stepped farther out to the sidewalk to see if she could see Molly and the children. Suddenly the café door opened, and there they were, the three of them clutching small paper bags and walking in the opposite direction from where Sabine stood. They didn’t see her. She watched their receding backs for a few moments. She decided to be pulled along the block to the apartment building, the children weaving behind Molly.
The Twins
Augustin laughed. “Not sure what it is exactly,” he said, “but it’s awesome, right?”
Stella smiled and nodded, trying to concentrate. They were seated at the kitchen island, working at a collage assignment for school, My Family. Exactly the sort of thing with which she had little patience, though Augustin had been diligently cutting out shapes from magazines. Nothing to do with the project at hand, but he had found, among the large stack of images that Molly and Raf had given them, and which included theatre posters and art catalogues, numerous faces and limbs and animals and objects that were wonderfully weird.
“Well, it’s a cat, see, with a monkey’s head, pooping out blue cars and a tiny donkey skeleton.” When he finished laughing, he followed it with a large face made of breasts, penises, and open mouths that had come from an art catalogue.
Molly said, “Interesting,” when she walked by with a cup of tea. “Not taking that to school.”
“I’m calling it My Mother!” he shrieked, and almost fell off the stool, he was laughing so hard. Then he stopped, took a breath, and solemnly said, “Why do we have to do this collage, anyway? What’s it have to do with anything?”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “Hm. That’s awfully close to a whine. If you’re questioning relevance already, this is going to be a long haul.” She kissed Stella’s head. She took a spoon from a drawer, put it in her teacup, and walked away with it. They understood she was working on something. Stella pretended to be concentrating on cutting out som
e words, but she kept her gaze on Molly.
“Gussie,” Stella whispered. She was the only person who could call him that, except, occasionally, his mother. “Gussie!”
“What?!” He made his eyes bulge while smirking at her.
She swatted his chest. “Be serious. Listen to me.” She made her voice as casual as possible. “Did you see that, when we were outside?”
“Uh, nope? I guess not. Was the guy there again with the ukulele? He sucks so bad. He shouldn’t play that thing—”
She put up her hand, palm out. She waited several seconds. “I. think. we. were. followed.”
Augustin thought for a moment. “Like the time that people walked out of Mom’s show and there was the guy who wanted to, I don’t know, whatever he wanted to do. Like him?”
“Dunno,” Stella said, and shrugged. She went back to cutting out the words.
“That’s it? Who was it?”
“How would I know who? If I knew who, I would have said who. Somebody.”
“Somebody we know?”
Stella felt the knowledge fall into shadows. She pictured herself, her mother, and her brother walking along the street to their building. She was too young to have the words for the effect, the way the city behind you was sometimes swallowed by what lay in front of you. When you turned to look where you had just been, the sheer number of possessions, and the dispossessed, and the physicality of sound, tumbled together to make a space as blank and undeciphered as an old pool. It was similar to being in a deep forest, but she had only been inside a forest, on a trail with her family, once or twice; a version of her roamed a prehistoric, wordless understory, and could not be adequately expressed. She looked at him and shrugged again.
Augustin understood, however. He had merely tried to conceal what he felt in this one case to be an uncomfortable attunement. He had felt it, too, the arrival of something. It came filtered through the city flotsam, through his sister—because she was always the better conduit it seemed—and then into him.
“Okay,” he said, though he didn’t mean it. He took a penis and testicles that he had snipped out and put them on the face where the nose should be and burst out laughing.
Sabine
Sabine had watched them disappear into their five-storey apartment building, the glass door with matte black trim closing heavily behind them. On the pale stone facade between two of the windows a carved female figure she assumed to be Greek played a lyre with a distant, serene expression. Air conditioners poked out from some of the windows, and she could see potted plants on the sills, someone’s coffee cup on the second floor, the stripes of what she felt had to be a cat. The glass in the upper floors reflected a late-afternoon sea that was somewhere in the future. She wondered which windows belonged to Molly.
What to do now wasn’t evident to her. Suddenly the building seemed impenetrable and guarded. She went through the door uneasily and stood in the small foyer, staring at the list of names and buzzers. V & M, which she knew referred to Volkova & Massimo. While she had not known about the existence of the children, she had known about the husband. She had seen the paintings. She had even managed once to slip into the invited crowd at one of his openings. She had eaten several hors d’oeuvres before she decided, with the crumbs on her lips, that she was incapable of blending in and had to leave. Now, she peered into the inner lobby of the building. The stairs across the short expanse of stone tile went invitingly up, though not for her perhaps. She realized she was already too warm, that the building seemed to radiate. It was possible that carrying an absence rendered her persona non grata, that she had arrived blackened and plague-infected. Fevered. Whatever she had wanted to convey was a retreating thing. She stepped back out to the street, where the wind had picked up and the cold comforted her.
She bought steaming french fries from a food truck parked down the block by a small triangular park and a couple of benches. She didn’t want to sit, so she stood and ate, watching the iridescence of several pigeons that bobbed a few feet away. Beyond them, a man pissed boozily against a postal box while singing softly. She had electric boobs, a juicy fruit, you know I read it in a latrine, oh, oh. He looked at her while zipping up, then walked on.
She ate another fry. She supposed that she and Molly had not ended on the best of terms. She had watched Molly resume her relationship with her brother, picking up, yet again, one of their numerous dangling threads, and understood that she herself had been, simply put, an investigation. Molly was what Ellena would have disdainfully termed a dabbler. Molly had loved—if she loved at all—not her, but her brother. It was the only time brother and sister had ever quarreled, but whatever argument was there disappeared when Seth and Molly had their final, abrupt split. After which Molly was never mentioned. But Sabine had secretly sat in the audience for no fewer than eight performances of Molly’s choreography before finally deciding she could no longer afford to lurk, even if stopping was like the cessation of morphine. She dragged out her remaining time in the city for another two years, before leaving, at last.
The pigeons scattered suddenly when a group of kids ran past. Someone’s knit hat landed on a shrub and was plucked by a man walking by in a suit, who stuck it on his own head without missing a step. She looked into the empty french fry box, then crumpled it slowly in her fist. She tossed it into a garbage bin as she turned around and headed back to the apartment building. Once inside, she pressed the buzzer, V & M, before she could feel her courage dissipate. She waited and pressed it again. When she heard the crackle, that fizz of static, she exalted. Molly’s Hello? travelled from another galaxy.
She cleared her throat. “It’s Sabine. Lemme up.”
She jammed her hands into her pockets even though they had begun to sweat. A pause formed in which ten years spun in a vortex of several seconds. Nothing more from Molly, except the brief renewal of static, followed by the hum of the lobby door and a loud clack as it unlocked. Sabine stepped through.
* * *
She felt the strangeness of being in the living room of people she had followed. To follow someone was to objectify them; to stand before them in a shifty black coat, putting country dirt on their floor, returning their gaze, was to wallow in the confrontation of their humanity, and her own. Or some such. Stella and Augustin had come to sit on the sofa, unable to keep away from seeing the body attached to the intercom voice, the clomping down the hallway to their front door. Under other circumstances, they would have sat in the way that unnerved people, sewn close together, with a prim arrangement of hands and feet, and straight backs, something from a horror film. But they sat normally, instead, and took in the presence that didn’t seem to want to sit, even though their mother had suggested it several times already. Raf had also wandered out from his studio, so that Sabine was faced with the entire coterie.
She could not help looking at Molly, however, who stood electrically pale and thin in the centre of the room, smiling warmly. But the words they exchanged came out like awkward and sporadic bats darting for the windows. None could be caught until finally Molly suggested they go to her office. Sabine gratefully followed her across the living room and down a hallway. She detected, faintly, the smell of paint. She looked back to see Raf, Stella, and Augustin watching them go with curiosity.
She refused to sit here, also, in the armchairs that were so absurdly compact she doubted she could have wedged herself in. The room was sparely arranged, a tidy desk, an enormous whiteboard with numerous images and notations, an open area beside a partially mirrored wall with a video camera trained on it. She examined, while Molly watched her, the black-and-white photographs along the north wall, trying to avoid catching her reflection in the mirror. Some of the images were stills from performances, the human in tumult or rapture or broken to bits. Others showed dancers in practice clothes grouped together, smiling.
Masks, too, hung on the walls, three large ones and two small, which Molly, breaking the silence, told her came from New Guinea, northern Canada, Japan. They pe
ered at Sabine with their grimaces, smirks, and howling mouths, their consternation and protruding tongues. They seemed to breathe on her. The sound, she felt, would be that of static.
“So.” She exhaled.
“Good to see you,” Molly said. “You look well.”
Sabine snorted.
“You’re still in Maine?”
“Yup.”
“The pine air agrees with you.”
“Doesn’t stop me from smoking, though.” She was hot and removed her coat, at last. Molly took it from her, folding it over her arm and briefly stroking it before she placed it on one of the chairs. Sabine momentarily shut her eyes against the gesture. She herself lay folded carefully on the chair.
“I emailed you,” she said. “I don’t know if you got it.”
“I did. I did get it. Yes.” Molly brought her hands together. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer it straightaway. Are you okay? What brings you here?”
Sabine watched her, something welling up inside. “So, how do I say this?” She gestured with one hand. “This might sound weird, but no one has seen Seth. He’s missing.”
“Missing.”
“Gone. Missing.”
“Since when?”
“Day before Thanksgiving. No word since. I’ve been coming to his apartment, off and on. Nothing. The police don’t know anything. Nobody knows anything.” Her shoulders sank.
Molly was silent, watching Sabine. Finally, she said, “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.” She brought her hands to her face. “You must be so worried.”
