The Book of X

by Sarah Rose Etter

  In bed, I keep on a nightgown that billows around me. I curl up, my head on his chest. He presses his lips to my forehead and runs his hand over my hair. I fall asleep there, his arms around my shoulders, like maybe our chests are opening slowly, like maybe our hearts are touching through our chests.

  When I wake in the morning, he is gone, the sheets cold.

  VISION

  The women on the block keep showing up with new men. The girl next door started it. She got a brown-haired man. Three doors down, that girl got a man with red hair.

  The men are polite and have sparkling eyes, inoffensive new accessories.

  Finally, I pull one of the women aside.

  “Where’d all these men come from?” I ask.

  Her eyes ricochet back and forth, then stop.

  “Man Store,” she says, all clipped, like she wants to keep the words in her mouth.

  “A store?”

  “17th and Arch,” she says.

  “That’s all I’m saying.” That night, I go to bed muttering it into my sheets:

  Man Store

  Man Store

  Man Store

  Like it is a song or a hex. I picture the store, full of men, all of their hearts beating in time.

  I save up. After weeks of small meals, I have enough. I move my body out of bed and into the shower, blast off the sleep grime. I dress and put on my face.

  The sign says Man Store in black script. A bell sounds when I push the door open.

  Inside, thick red drapes cover the walls, jewelry box style, as if someone could lift the roof off and I would begin to spin slowly to a song, that strange tinkling lullaby we all know.

  A woman appears before me, wearing a black dress. She has brown hair, hazel eyes, sharp cheeks.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here for a man, I guess,” I stammer.

  “Ah,” she says. “Have you purchased from us in the past?”

  “No. First time.”

  “Excellent! We do love new clients. What brings you here?”

  A torrent of images fills my brain: My cold body sleeping alone, similar to death, my aimless hours. I want to sob when I think about the loneliness of my life, my days like unvisited graves. My eyes fill.

  “It’s OK,” she says. “Let’s get started.”

  I follow her through a slit in the red curtain. We enter a large white room with two chairs in the center.

  “Have a seat.”

  Then the white door opens and it begins.

  A procession of men walks in perfect formation through the door, twenty of them, all wearing black shorts, nothing else. They move into perfect lines and rows, their bare chests moving slightly with breath.

  “Let’s look,” she says. “Don’t be shy.”

  The men stare forward, their eyes not even flickering or quivering, strange soldiers.

  We move through the forest of them. I smell their skins, soaps, underarms, the difference of their chemistries.

  “We have such a large variety that every girl can find something to suit her needs,” she says.

  I stop in front of a tall man with black hair and olive skin. His jaw is perfect. I can already feel the razor scratch of his stubble on my shoulder. It is already our Sunday morning. My body generates its wants, my soft parts lighting.

  I stare into his eyes for a moment and the corners of his mouth twitch to fight a smile. My heart tweaks a bit.

  “I like him,” I say.

  “Excellent choice,” she says. “You seem well-suited to each other.”

  I nod and see him start to nod and stop himself.

  “Dismissed,” she says. “With #8 on hold for our friend here.”

  The men file out of the room in an orderly way, including my #8.

  “Please,” she says, and gestures back to the chair. We sit, my body newly electric.

  “You’ve made a great choice today,” she begins. “But we must discuss payment.”

  “I’m prepared,” I say.

  “The cost for #8 is $15,000,” she says.

  “I have $7,000,” I say quietly, my stomach shooting through with the thought of never seeing or owning #8, my body hurting with total and absolute want, a lust I haven’t felt before.

  “That’s much too little, I’m afraid,” she says. “But there is another option.”

  “There is?”

  “Yes. For the money you have available, you can purchase one half of your #8.”

  The thought drives a dagger through me.

  “By one half,” she continues, “I mean that you will select the top or bottom half of #8 and we will perform a simple operation. It’s a patented surgery to separate your half. You can take your half home today, or have it delivered.”

  Sickness rallies inside of me. I can’t stand the thought of hurting him. But when I think about leaving him here, everything about the situation goes crystalline.

  “Top half,” I say, thinking of his twitching corners, of the scruff, of my shoulders.

  “Wise choice,” she says. “You must care for him.”

  “Can I come back for the rest?” I ask, heart pounding.

  “Yes, as long as no one else purchases his bottom half,” she says.

  I consider another month of weak meals.

  “Yes,” I say.

  Hours later, she brings him into the red room, where I have been calculating ways to make sure my life accommodates him.

  He is perched on a wheelchair, the half of him, the torso up.

  “Hello,” I say.

  He looks up at me with drugged eyes, but the corners of his mouth lift a bit.

  “Hello,” he says and takes my hand for a moment, which is a beautiful thing, the warmth of our skins. I thank her and steer him away.

  I help him into the front seat. As we drive home, he holds my hand over the gear shift and my eyes go wet again, even though we are silent, even though we haven’t said a thing.

  That night, we lie in bed. He faces me, stares deep into my eyes, and we breathe in rhythm on my sheets.

  He takes my face in his hands.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for taking me.”

  He presses his torso against my body and our ribcages touch, the heat of our skins greeting.

  Our mouths finally meet and it’s a stunner, that kiss, it’s like a fireworks finale or a big celebration or a parade and we move our bodies even closer together and our tongues meet and his hands are on my skin and it’s so beautiful that I stop thinking about lower halves and checks, and I kiss him back deeply, my man, and I move even closer and I hold the half of him. I hold what’s mine.

  IN THE MORNING, THE SUN IS STUCK behind gray clouds, a hazy quiet to the rhythm of the world.

  I make my way to work. Bleary eyed, I stop for coffee in the shop on the corner. Inside, the walls are done in a dark wood and deep green paint. The coffee seller is cheerful.

  “Well, good morning there! What can we get you started today?”

  “Just a large black coffee,” I say.

  “Two coins please.”

  I slide them across the counter.

  “Thank you and you have a great day now, you hear?”

  I pour cream into the coffee, two sugars, stir it until it is the right sweet. I lift it to my lips to take a sip and the knot contracts, seizes, cripples my limbs.

  I WAKE ON THE FLOOR, THE FACE OF THE concerned coffee seller sliding into my view, the ceiling light creating a dizzying halo behind her head.

  “Oh my god, are you OK? Are you OK? Do you want me to call someone?”

  I shake my head and slowly wrench my body up from the floor.

  The coffee is all over me, my black dress soaked, my head throbbing.

  I make it through work, then take my body home, collapse into the sheets, sleep deep.

  THE NEXT DAY, MY HEAD IS SORE, POUNDing. Instead of work, I go to the doctor.

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  The doctor has black hai
r, brown eyes, a small mouth.

  “Well, I’ve been falling.”

  “Falling?”

  “My knot starts aching and then I black out wherever I am.”

  “Knot? What knot?”

  “I have a... well, I’ll just show you.” I stand up and lift my dress. The knot of my torso sits before us in the strange light of his office.

  “Well, wow, OK, yes, I see, OK.”

  “OK?”

  “Well, this... this isn’t something I see every day, but I have read about it. You and your mother and your mother’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw your baby pictures in the journals. You know, there has been progress with this.”

  “Progress?”

  “Well, it’s not anything established yet, but there’s a doctor here who can remove it. The knot.”

  He slides a thick business card across the table. The card stock is cream colored, thick, perfect. It reads in graphite black:

  Dr. Kuznit, Expert Surgeon

  “CAN I SEE YOU IN MY OFFICE FOR A minute?” the boss asks.

  Outside, the rain has started again. It feels like I have not seen the sun in weeks. The clouds hang low, between the buildings, we walk through them to get to work, fog in the face, the mouth, down the throat.

  “Sure.”

  My heart kicks up an old fear: I’m in trouble, he has caught me doing something bad.

  We sit down and stare at each other. For a moment, there’s a silence and the amount of trouble I might be in expands to fill that silence.

  “Did you ever notice that you’re radiating a deep sadness lately?” the boss asks. “And missing a lot of days?”

  “No, I haven’t noticed a sadness.”

  “I’d like you to work on it. We agreed you would be a smiling presence here and I just... I don’t feel it these days.”

  The fluorescent lights could be knives, if I reached up. I could shatter one in each hand and go for his throat.

  “We have some paperwork here that we’d like you to sign,” he explains. “It just says we need you to really work on your sadness. We’re willing to help with training.”

  The paperwork has a sharp edge which cuts my finger. I leave a drop of smeared blood next to my signature, the low slope of my handwriting an acknowledgement.

  VISION

  The sign on the door says SADNESS TRAINING on a piece of copy paper in thick black letters.

  “You must be Cassie,” says a woman with short spikey hair dyed blond.

  “That’s me,” I say.

  “Well, it’s been brought to our attention that you’ve been bringing your sadness to work.”

  I nod as if guilty.

  “We’re going to offer you some strategies to prevent that.” I nod again.

  “There are three strategies,” she continues. She slides a piece of paper across the desk.

  “Strategy number one requires you to put the sadness in another part of yourself. This is called compartmentalization. Think of your sadness and think of stuffing it into a square white box.”

  I picture my sadness bursting out of a white box in a green field.

  “Strategy number two relies on your imagination. You just have to imagine you aren’t sad.”

  I picture myself without my sadness. I picture my sadness in a grave, being buried.

  “Strategy number three relies on strength,” she says. “I want you to picture yourself digging a grave for your sadness and burying it.”

  My sadness has a body just like mine. We are the same shape and size. I dig and I dig and I dig until there is a hole big enough for my sadness. I shove the body into the ditch and cover it with dirt.

  THE NEXT MAN FROM THE DIM BAR IS A bronze medal: He is not deeply handsome or smart, but here he is.

  “I just don’t think the government is telling us the full story, you know?” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke into my face. His voice is high-pitched, his beard admirable.

  IN THE DIM LIGHT OF MY APARTMENT, HE is still smoking.

  “I don’t really smoke in here,” I say.

  “I do!” he says, smoking.

  He stubs the cigarette out and presses his mouth against mine. I become the plume. We move our bodies toward the bed, his hands already on my breasts.

  “You’re the full meal,” he whispers.

  I picture it like that: My body a cooked carcass, a side, a dessert, a table set to serve. He runs his hands over the knot, and he doesn’t hesitate about it, not even once.

  He rests his hands on my hips below the knot before he enters me and our bodies work together frantically.

  His hand finds my throat. He squeezes until the lack of air brings stars to the corners of my eyes, until pleasure shakes us.

  VISION

  The dark loneliness which has been hibernating in my ribs becomes a thick onyx slab that presses down over me.

  It takes all of my strength to reach beyond the weight of the slab to pick up the phone. I manage to do it, then I dial the number.

  “Thanks for calling Stranger Sleep. How can we help you?”

  “I’d like to request a visit.”

  “Would you like the same as your last order?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Fifty dollars will be charged to your account. He should be there in ten minutes.”

  I lean back against the pillow and the next nine minutes stretch black desert miserable, but I face it, I face it head on, I lie beneath the black rock and let it hurt, let it crush the ribs a bit.

  When the doorbell rings, I struggle out from under it. I open the door, and he steps into the yellow foyer. He is tall and handsome. I avoid his eyes. Now the loneliness is a large black cube resting in my stomach: square, blunt.

  “Hi there,” he says.

  “Hello.”

  I move down the hallway and he follows.

  It is strange to see him in my bedroom, a rare creature in a new environment. I imagine a bull in a grocery store.

  I climb into my bed and he follows suit, then turns to face me. He holds the side of my face for a moment, staring into my eyes. It is a calm look, the bottom of a swimming pool, the loneliness a dark triangle in the center of my chest.

  “Now?” he asks.

  “Yes, please,” and then I roll over, curling, waiting for him to do it.

  He moves his body around mine and presses, wraps his arms and one leg around me, buries his face into the back of my neck.

  I exhale and go another type of soft, a softness unrecorded before, I sink back into him, rest my body on his thighs, chest, more. He holds tighter, tighter, and then the loneliness gets small, smaller, smallest until it is a pinprick, an inverse star, a dust.

  EACH DAY, I MOVE MORE TENDERLY through the city. The pain hides in alleyways, in the shadows, the black sludge of the gut.

  I sleep on the floor now, afraid of the softness of the mattress, feathers as a trigger. I never know when I will erupt, a woman as a volcano. A small madness creeps in, a bit of air in the skull.

  At work, I stand at my desk, afraid to sit, afraid I will rupture, split.

  “Hello, tall lady!” booms the boss. “Is this a power move? Never let the enemy see you at rest!”

  I keep typing. The pain from the knot travels up my spine to my brain and floods my wires.

  When the pain comes, I leave my body, corpse up like a dead fly on the windowsill, the world hurling itself forward without me.

  “I’LL PUT YOUR NAME DOWN,” SAYS THE next receptionist. “He can see you in one month.”

  Her voice sounds like pink syrup, glistening, round at the edges.

  “A month?”

  “Mhmm! He’s all booked up!”

  “I’ll take that appointment,” I say, cradle the phone.

  Thirty white squares of hell stretch out before me.

  IN THE WILD, I WOULD BE LEFT FOR DEAD beneath black branches. At sunset, predators would smell my weakness on the air, flesh soaked with sweat, muscles floo
ded in panic.

  I wouldn’t fight; I’d lie in the long grass, motionless, memorizing the shape of their teeth in my flesh, knowing them by their mouths as they gnawed through my flesh to my bones.

  Fox

  Wolf

  Bear

  Man

  I would sing the list in the purple twilight through the black branches of the trees, a sweet death hum.

  Fox

  Wolf

  Bear

  Man

  VISION

  All night the pulsing of the fox hearts in the woods keep us awake. The chorus of the pounding hits the level of dull helicopters.

  “What if the walls start to shake?” I ask.

  “Don’t be dramatic,” he says.

  It was the same way during the owl season, when their wings stirred up the curtains every night. He never woke then.

  The foxes are different. A panic seizes my body at their sounds. The drumbeat continues. I can feel their eyes on the house. I can sense they want us.

  All night, their scents work through the windows. Everything smells of their musk, even our towels and bedding.

  “We’re on the brink of something huge,” I say each morning over cereal, which now tastes of their furs.

  He is always buttoning his shirt. He slaps my bare bottom whenever I am close enough.

  “Don’t you remember their heartbeats last night?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and puts on a record.

  The song spins up into the air. We dance for a moment, our bodies close, the heat between us returning.

  We can’t know that by nightfall, the foxes will be upon us with their rapid hearts and their gnashing teeth. We won’t know how they got in, only that their bodies rush in to fill our living room, a rabid energy to their entrance, the scent of their musks even stronger.

  We’ll wake with their teeth marks in our skin, not recalling the attack. We won’t remember a thing, not even the sweet rare pressure of their wild paws on our skin.

  BY THE 30TH DAY, THE PAIN IS SO GREAT I can barely walk.

  I take a cab to the doctor’s office, collapsed against the busted leather of the back seat, my body grinding against itself.

  “Nice day out today,” the cab driver calls.

  “Yes,” I force out. Each letter is a grimace.

  I can’t notice the sun or the blue sky. I can only writhe. Each pothole shakes the cab and levels a new wave of hell against me.