Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  “Are you okay?” she says, then squints. “Are you crying?”

  Her face is appalled, like a moon. “Molly,” she says. “What’s up? Why are you crying?”

  I stare at the photo. I say something but it’s gone.

  There is a skip in time, the sideways motion of a boat, or a plane beginning to bank. She is concentrating on filling a wine glass. I’m saying more words, but the sounds are another language, part whale. I want, badly, to have some of the wine, which she doesn’t know I can’t have. The desire is fiery, almost unbearable.

  She shakes her head and replies in her smoke-filled voice. “That’s just crazy. Where’d you get that? They’re fine! The divorce is pretty fucking acrimonious, but … why would you think they were dead?” She laughs darkly. “Where are my cigarettes? That was a fucking grim thought, Miss Molly. Did he tell you that? Did he say they were dead?”

  Dead People

  “But you don’t believe in ghosts,” Stella said. She stood with Molly offstage watching five dancers who appeared to her to be barely there, as if floating in the way of ghosts, seeming to call up something from another world, a life form maybe, if not exactly the sort she considered herself to be.

  Molly was concentrating on the light, trying to decide what she thought of it. Members of a small band were on the other side of the stage, playing a composition created for this piece, full of drums, the opposite of ethereal, and this was the dress rehearsal for the beginning of twelve performances. “No, not really,” she said. “You can’t trust them.” She laughed.

  “Then why did you make a dance about dead people?” Stella was wearing her loose clothes, the ones she loved to move in. She wanted more than anything to be in one of her mother’s productions. The dancers did astonishing things, and even though Molly was always talking about the naked essence and stripping down and revealing the true person, it seemed to Stella that they were never themselves, they were always transforming and shifting and slipping away. They were clearly changelings.

  Molly

  I had had a desire to hear his voice. Desire being an acute condition, and pitiless. While Raf was out, I called Seth’s phone and listened to his outgoing message.

  You’ve reached Seth Stein. … I will return your call.

  Imagined emphasis on will. The words were jarring.

  The message itself was a lie, openly stating his absence while claiming that he had been reached. I heard a slight crackle toward the end of it, proof of a wrong dimension.

  After listening to it three times, I tried to hear the mutability of a living person, but each time the voice and the glitch were the same. I wanted the presence behind the absence, the place where he was really living. The evidence that was supposed to be held in the voice as it made its promises, I will return your call. Perfectly sincere.

  * * *

  I knew she was gone from his apartment, that she was heading back to Maine. I knew, also, that in my own apartment I still had the key to his. I had looked in the closets, tossing clothes and boxes onto the floor before putting everything back and beginning again. I tried to remember myself keeping it, even when I hated him most, and where I might have put it with the thought that I’d never forget its location. Nothing came. The one advantage to keeping so few things throughout my life, however, is the ability to find an object that I did still possess; I searched through the bottom drawer of a bedroom dresser and found it. I felt its small hard teeth, its chilliness. Stella came up behind me while I looked and put her arms around me. She had been building an enormous mobile that was going to be a surprise for Augustin, and so I left the key where it was and we went to look at her creation. We laid on the floor together, peering up into the system she had made.

  “Stella,” I said, astonished by its incredible beauty, the way she had connected the colourful threads and lines and lights, so that lying underneath, I could see a constellation that was both vigorous and ethereal. “It’s so remarkable. And it reminds me of something.”

  “What?” she said, smiling.

  “There was a man named Cajal who made wondrous drawings of cells and connections in the brain. Sounds boring, but he found the aliveness,” I said. “And this is even better—three dimensions.” I hugged her close and kissed her head. “Of course, your brother doesn’t deserve it …” Which made her giggle.

  Eventually, Augustin banged on the door and demanded to know what we were doing. He bellowed to Stella, “Stop being so lazy!” as they had a card to make for their teacher. He was laughing when she opened the door.

  * * *

  Hours later I returned to the dresser, already wearing my coat, and got the key, putting it in the pocket. I didn’t bother to change my sandals for boots. A roar in my brain made me invincible. I took the train to Ninety-Sixth Street, went to his apartment building, and let myself in. I heard people yelling on the floor above. Once I stepped inside, I had a feeling of being welcomed in, though it was only temporary. Misplaced. He was alive and not. In another time and place I might have felt his energy coming over the hill, through the trees. He might show up at the door.

  * * *

  The apartment was tidier than I remembered it. His furniture was mostly the same—the sofa unchanged, but there were two armchairs I hadn’t seen before. One had a compacted pillow that showed the invisible body pressing down on it. A mask I had given him was still on the wall. I touched its mouth. The coffee table was empty except for some file folders, filled with what I imagined were Sabine’s desperate thoughts. I left them where they were and stood looking at his bookshelves. They had grown to accommodate what seemed like every running, climbing, kayaking, adventure diary and memoir in existence. How to survive the elements; how to be self-sufficient; how to walk out of a forest, jungle, glacier, sea, or desert alive. How to turn your wind-burned face to the camera and explain the void you have just seen. A few volumes of poetry. Also: how to be happy; how to be not depressed; how to be less anxious; how to stop thinking. How to be.

  * * *

  I stepped into the bedroom. More books. A different bed. I turned away from it. Another mask on the wall; a face in midsentence. I opened the closet quickly, then shut it. Opened it again and saw the amount of gear he’d managed to fit into a small space: helmets, first aid kits, water filtration systems, and a cardboard box marked GPS. Two life vests.

  These items were stacked from the floor and above them hung his clothes. The shapes held the contour of him, but an altered one. I stroked his shirts in the way of widows and orphans. They were skins he had shed as he shapeshifted to become a new creature. The wool of the sweaters still smelled of him.

  Over by the bed, a pair of his boots sat on the floor, still partially laced—I wasn’t sure how he had gotten them off his feet—still with dirt on them. I tried not to look at the bed, but noticed anyway the phantoms at the edge of the mattress, too engrossed to see me. I walked out of the bedroom, leaving the door as it was.

  In his kitchenette, I opened the cupboards. A faint layer of grease had formed around the silver knobs. Cans were stacked beside boxes in the way of a small city, neatly aligned, with cockroaches for citizens, most of which scattered while the others stayed in place and waved their antennae. I closed the doors on them, and stood by the counter for a moment, remembering him making me coffee. I didn’t know how sublime I would find the memory, how the gentlest thing would be the one to stick. I saw, lined up against the tiles, the seven mostly empty bottles of bourbon, rum, and vodka, alongside three containers of chocolate vegan protein powder and a box of energy bars.

  * * *

  His telephone was the same, a landline that was large and black with a rotary dial and a notepad beside it. Exactly how I remembered it and emblematic of the kind of old objects he sometimes loved. He liked new devices and gadgets, but also explorers and machines and old ways of sending and receiving messages. Imagine, he had said to me once, imagine those first sounds, coming from a box or something held in the hand. What it must hav
e been to hear another voice. On the notepad were blue scribbles, which I recognized as Sabine’s. I thought of the childhood game of telephone and the garbledness of messages. I wanted to hear from him, anything at all, even words in pencil on a notepad. A few scratches, an attempt, anything.

  After a while, I picked up the phone receiver and held it to my ear. The dial tone was an open mouth. You wonder who thinks up a sound like that, how it comes to be. It was forlorn, disconsolate. I stayed there and listened.

  * * *

  You come to a point of decision and look around, wondering, really, how arrival happened, what were the steps? You turn to see the path behind you, but the tracks are gone. If this were another kind of place, you might feel compelled to continue in the same direction, up a mountain for instance, to get a signal, any sound within the static. You could hold high your instruments, whatever they are, so they crackled with energy and noise. Maybe the beeps would be satisfying, the sounds as incessant as a hungry cat at your feet. You might hear the muffled distortion of far-off, peopled locations. The tangibility of where you used to be, and then you would know exactly how to get back.

  Luna

  The people in the van, for instance, who give her the sandwich, which she refuses because she has one already salvaged, wonder about her, notice how she is unlike other people. Is it possible to be human and more than? Her sandwich, she knows, is a perfectly good salami on rye, still with its fresh brown wrapper—a keeper, both the lunch and the paper. She accepts the bottle of water. They don’t know exactly how old she is, what her real name might be. They try to find out where she’s been sleeping lately, but she waves them away. She heads down the street, which appears damp from melting snow and ice. The afternoon is slightly warmer than usual. When her watch says 1:11 she eats her sandwich and when it says 2:22, she can cross Seventh Avenue, but not before.

  She thinks as she walks along that people resent a secret. They dislike in others what is a function of autonomy. If she exists, it is almost entirely in public, and yet there is a privacy that resides in what she knows that others don’t. You die, she has told them, and what happens to your thoughts but dissolution? They don’t know what to make of this.

  Thoughts, she says, are entirely between material substance and emptiness. They are part substance, part not, and so act as a bridge between the two worlds, she adds. Blank stares. That’s okay. They didn’t appreciate her theory on secrets, either, so she wrote it down weeks ago and carries it in a pocket:

  Secrets have density and volume.

  The region of the secret can be spacious, inside which the person (the secreter) may experience relative freedom.

  A region (a secret) by its nature creates an inside and an outside. (Outsiders can be dangerous.)

  A person with secrets may recognize the secretions of others.

  The content (density) of secret usually opposes society that surrounds it.

  Tension along border of region can be experienced as resistance to discovery.

  Discovery is bad, even where secret is inconsequential.

  Most secrets are inconsequential.

  What matters to people is not content of secret, but hidden knowledge. Equals betrayal!

  Overlooked: secrets are usually like secrets of everyone else.

  Discovery is a concussion of mass and energy.

  Followed by stillness. Silence.

  Seth

  He sat in his living room with his laptop open on the coffee table. After finishing the wine, he got his bottle of bourbon and drank straight from its mouth. Then decided that if he was going to make any gesture at all toward clear-headedness, he should at least drink from a glass, so he washed one and settled back on the sofa. His hand had begun to ache, which justified the bourbon, and he flexed his fingers, the mystery of the cuts coming to mind again and causing him to glance at the cardboard and duct tape that now adorned his window. His phone was momentarily lit with a text from his friend Jason, wondering if he wanted to go for a climb later. He answered simply: No. He didn’t ask Jason for information, if something had gone on the night before because he knew Jason would know nothing about it, and the truth was that he never asked other people to fill in the details of a blackout.

  He leaned forward to his laptop and clicked the start button of the video he had queued up. He drained his glass and sat back to watch Molly on the screen. She was being interviewed and he had the sound muted, just so he could watch her without distraction; her face, her gestures. The video was recent, she was now forty-eight, but she seemed ostensibly the same, only with more pronounced wrinkles around the eyes. He had watched the video numerous times in the last week, and various others like it, or ones that were recordings of her choreography, and even footage of her when she was in her twenties and still dancing. But this particular interview captivated him because of the closeups of her expressions and the sound of her voice. And the presence, halfway through, at exactly 15:12, of her two children, a boy and a girl. The interviewer, a man in dark slacks and a close-fitting T-shirt and who seemed to be a dancer himself, asks them about their design participation in one of their mother’s projects. They both answer with such composure that the interviewer laughs, and the boy and the girl simply watch him with their dark eyes, hands in their laps and slight smiles. The camera comes up close to the girl first, and then the boy, and then backs up once again, and this maneuver is what Seth played, over and over. Girl, boy, the faces, dark eyes with thick lashes, cue the vaguely amused smiles, back up, again. Girl, boy, Stella, Augustin. The interviewer says their names numerous times: Stella and Augustin.

  * * *

  He left the apartment wearing his jacket open despite the cold. He was without his phone so he could escape prods and reminders and the dark sea of its face when asleep. He decided against the Ninety-Sixth Street station, wanting to walk instead, heading south and stopping for bourbon at a pub and then stopping for more at another, winding his way over the course of four hours down to Christopher, weaving then over to the bookstore on Broadway, where he lingered in the self-help section but purchased nothing, before making his way further south to West Houston and then up Sullivan. By this point, much of the day was gone. He found a bench on the edge of the park and sat down.

  The haunted sycamores were especially dark against the sky, which was blue and sun-filled, and he judged it to be an uncomfortable contrast. It made his eyes ache. People with strollers and dogs passed by, and some students in sweatpants and wool hats, and not too far away from him was an older woman, bundled in layers. He had seen her before, various times over the years, as he had wandered the city, and she as well, so that their paths had crossed enough to cause recognition. He rubbed his nose, which was extremely cold, and wondered how she did it. How she survived. She stood at the corner, gesturing as she spoke, sometimes to the ground, or to the tree, a squirrel or a bench, depending on exactly where she was situated. She would talk for a while, and then walk a few paces, stop and begin again. She gestured at things he couldn’t make out, nor could he understand her words. No one listened to what she was saying, however. If the people walked while looking at their phones, they deftly stepped around her without looking up, but otherwise she appeared to go unregistered. She spoke, effectively, to the air, to people only she could see. She spoke at the ground, then looked up at the sky and pointed. It lay over them all, so blue and unfeelingly.

  * * *

  She knew the man was there. Sometimes she had seen him run, and in all sorts of weather, which she approved of, since she herself faced every kind of climate, and often he wore very different clothing and seemed to weave or walk loosely in a way that was unlike the tautness of his limbs when he ran. He careened between being two people, another thing with which she had familiarity. She spoke to her unseen listeners about the history of the English elm on the other side of the park, and glanced at her watch, which told her about the time, three forty-five, and its potentiality. She noticed the man shift on the bench, looking we
ary, as if he might lie down, and she was sure he would, but then he straightened and she was surprised as he stood up. For a moment he looked right at her, unflinchingly, seeing her fully, and she regarded him in return. Then he walked by her, giving her a nod, and she turned slowly to watch him go. He crossed the street and moved along the opposite sidewalk, past an old man in a wheelchair and a child on a bike. He became smaller, then smaller still, and she squinted so that he was merely a black shape, a shadow. A bit of ink. Her vision wasn’t so good these days and then she couldn’t see him anymore at all.

  Another Questionnaire

  Do you believe that someone waits for you?

  What about the things you made—do you imagine that they also live and that those things wait for you on the other side?

  The other side of the ground I’m lying on is an arrangement of compacted ground and bones and pipes and the networks of tree roots. Cables and tunnels and sewers and stones and insects. The remnants of that tenacious river. My body knocks at the door, and begs to be let in.

  * * *

  “No! Don’t do this! Don’t you fucking give up!”

  “Please—”

  “Is she—”

  “Please stay.”

  * * *

  The man who searches for his wife years after the tsunami says he feels closer to her when he is in the ocean.