Monsters

by Karen Brennan

  The man had cleaned his apartment, which was a surprise. The table had been cleared of magazines and dishes and the lump of laundry had been moved from the couch upon which the man sat. He patted the space beside him and gave me a smile, which did not appeal to me at all. Also I cannot abide men who want me to sit next to them on demand. Or anything else, for that matter including: blow jobs, haircuts, dinner. But this man had made a little meal of new potatoes stuffed with smoked salmon, which was very interesting to the cat who pounced on the table and gobbled up three or four faster than the man could shout RELIGION! which was the cat’s name. Then the man became annoyed at the cat and took it out on me. I understand this. It’s always better to interact with a human who will give you an argument you can smash like a Fabergé egg. What are you sulking about? he inquired in an oily, insinuating voice. I’m not sulking, I said, because I wasn’t: My exact feeling was closer to incredulity. Surely the man doesn’t think I will be his girlfriend, the man who wore horrible, radioactive-looking suits and served grandiose food to cats. Also he was much older, at least 60, so why would I date him?

  You are not really very attractive in any case, said the man, so what the hell do I care what you do? Then I spied my sunglasses on a stack of books by the wall and I strode purposefully past the man and his cat who at this point meowed loudly, whose meow sounded like someone furiously ripping up a shirt. I suppose now you’ll be going, said the man, contract-breaker. What are you talking about, I said. You got your smutty little photographs, you got your thrills. Some thrills, said the man. Shriveled titties like an old witch’s, nasty little bush-bean, flat butt. Go fuck yourself, I told the man. Dirt-hole underarm, smelly mouth. The man went on, he was still talking when I slammed his front door. Likewise the cat: rip rip rip.

  I longed to be an actress but in real life I was a typist. My fingers raced across the keys so expertly and precisely that at work they called me “Champ.” How’re you doing, Champ? my boss would say when I showed up for assignments. Here’s a couple of hot ones for you, Champ, and she would hand me a few legal documents, someone suing someone or someone divorcing someone, the kinds of everyday interactions that both characterized and doomed humanity in those frantic days. Today it was a resume, very easy because the person had hardly any work experience or education, even though there was a very nice color Xerox of herself in a bikini affixed to the bottom of her letter of application.

  In the background the radio was playing what we used to call “oldies,” but which were actually fairly recent songs meant to create the illusion of a deep-rooted past. It was during the Bee Gees that the announcer came on and in a very formal and flat voice told us what to do immediately. Of course I worried about my father and could just imagine him saying “Naya, where did I put my glasses and what is that noise, dear?” because outside a clamor of sirens and other noises had begun.

  After it was over, of course, we were all grateful. Even my father seemed to be lighter in spirits; he acquired a pair of silk pajamas and another Fabergé egg to celebrate his good mood. The maid did not quit, as she’d threatened, but instead let loose a flock of bilingual parakeets in my father’s apartment, which were very good company. The man never returned my phone calls (I left my sweater with the rickrack there and to this day I imagine him putting it to unsavory use). My boss sold her company to me for a dollar so now I am the boss of others who are like the rest of us—longing for the rustlings of history to blast our lives with meaning.

  SOULS IN TRANSIT, SOULS AT REST

  She was pregnant and jokes nauseated her. When her husband, Guy, imitated Donald Duck, the bile rose in her throat. Likewise, she had aversions to a certain kind of TV show, the news in newspapers and conversation on the telephone, especially when she was called upon to initiate some action on behalf of the family. She had no interest in sex or in the sex of the child. Guy was a botanist currently involved in the re-breeding of the “broken tulip,” a species whose varied coloring was caused by a virus borne along by a troop of microscopic aphids. She never bothered to learn the virus’s complex Latinate name. She felt the learning of facts dispensed with the poetry. She wanted the tulip alive and dazzling, not measurements or comparisons to its sisters. She wasn’t sure about having a baby.

  Was she lucky or not? What plagued her was vague, non-situational, a certain cast in the sky or the sounds of the world growing haphazard. The mundane felt threatening: an overfilled coffee cup, a rumpled sheet, the flinty, fed up expression on the dog’s face.

  When she first encountered the ghost, she felt calmness fill her like a lake. At the banister, she watched a white face go by wearing a blue robe. Too typical, she thought. It went into a closet, she heard the latch click and considered following or letting it alone to pilfer the dresses and slacks. She’d been reading a book on breastfeeding, how to squeeze the nipple and palpate the breast like a wine skin, and therefore a bullfight sprang to mind, the only one she’d had the misfortune to attend where the bull was stuck with banderillas, then staggered and died on the spot. She’d been fooled into thinking the bull would not be killed, that it was feigning death. How stupid and gullible she’d been. Thus she went from breasts like wineskins to the bull’s slow dying—first it stumbled on one leg, then its head nodded, then it crumpled like a tent when the stakes are suddenly removed. So eloquent, this acting of the bull, she’d stupidly thought. This was in Mexico. Now the ghost.

  Minutes later, she tried to recall the ghost. Had it been a white gown? And the hair, what had the hair been like? She thought at first blond with a few tendrils, pre-Raphaelite, or a darker French twist, but had to admit she’d lost the hair. The face had been startling, but on reflection she was unable to describe it in any meaningful detail because what startled were not the features. Or even the pallor, though there’d been unmistakable pallor, blue-green like a plastic skeleton. What struck her was a jagged quality unassociated with the usual fear or anger or sorrow or despair, and so it seemed to her the ghost bore into the closet some alien emotion, but very powerful. It stunned her into calmness and caused a lake to rise within her, to slosh up behind her eyes so that she knocked against the cherry banister, holding on. Still, though, the ghost was typical, banal, its coloring like that of a plastic skeleton.

  Guy returned in the evening with gifts, a new book on childhood diseases, candy, flowers from the experiment, not tulips but anemones with black eyes and flung in a bottle green vase she loved and set on the dining room table to pollinate her stacks of catalogues and white plates. She told him about the ghost and he loved her most this way, eyes shining, cheeks flushed, though about the ghost he was skeptical and patted her head which should have infuriated her but didn’t. Maybe I did imagine it, she thought, because to imagine for her had never been an evil or shameful mistake, but something springing from a higher impulse to recreate and charge up the world. But she longed for the ghost to appear again because in another way she was curious.

  Then in the wee hours, something blew the soaps off the top shelf where they’d not been handled in two years and in the morning she found them in the sink, one as if a bite had been taken out. It’s the dog, said Guy, but how could the dog go that high and the teeth weren’t the dog’s teeth, she knew, but gave Guy a glass of juice and allowed him to pour and stir her coffee and butter her toast. She wore her dark blue Chinese robe with the fuchsia and green flowers embroidered on the back which always made her feel like Colette, and when he left for the day she enjoyed sitting in the window seat at the top landing of the stairs with a book and her cup of tea on a velvet cushion. The dog sprawled at her feet.

  She heard the footsteps the next day—something running very fast over her head, which would be the attic. The dog was nearby and pricked its ears. Perhaps there were rats, you never knew, in this weather creatures tended to seek shelter, even a squirrel or perhaps a raccoon which she’d heard of once getting into a household and becoming one of the family. So she went to the attic still wearing her dark blue Co
lette robe because this was a day she’d decided not to do anything because she didn’t have to, which she told herself frequently because wasn’t the body at work making a baby and wasn’t the job of the mother to stand by and wait? The attic was empty of all critters, real and imaginary and supernatural.

  But since she was there, she pried open an old trunk that had belonged to the former owners and was stuffed with newspaper and read some of the pages which made her exceedingly sleepy—a forest fire, a dead politician, each story ran into the next. Even the dates blurred in her vision and when she tried to pay attention she found it especially hard to focus. There was a ruffle over by the small window, but it was only a thread of wind coming through to move against some fiberglass batting. After a while she found also in the trunk a pillow, yellowish with cabbage roses, leaves through which mice or rats had chewed, and a scrap of thin blanket with which she wrapped herself, assuming the fetal position, and slept for two hours that way.

  What awakened her was the final fragment of her dream about the ghost and this time she felt shaken. The white face staring straight ahead as though it were either blind or saw something invisible to humans. She believed it had been gazing down the long line of its own past, its memory littered with stones and gardens and decaying vines, so brittle they seemed to crack the gutters from which they swung. She gathered her belongings then, for she had brought with her a number of talismans for the trip to the attic: the book on breastfeeding, the wilting anemones in their vase, a yellow sweater that last year she contemplated giving away to the thrift shop then thought the better since it was warm and seemed still to hold in its stitches some part of her life, a time in a Chevrolet, locked in a boy’s arm, and then a meal which had been exquisite. She wanted nothing so much as to come back into herself unsmudged by the ghost’s visitation, but it was not so simple.

  The attic’s little window was a sheet of typing paper and the trunk some florid passage from a book, sitting on a hooked rug from her grandmother’s and gathering up a bunch of silver jacks, a tiny red ball. She remembered the passage which began: “And now, at dawn, I am casting myself into the presence of another.” Still, as much as the mind was prone to wander she could not dismiss the fact that she no longer felt the same way about him. It was more than the jokes, the Donald Duck way of his to make her unsuccessfully laugh, it was something which seemed to shift in her soul, as in a tropism, seeking another direction. This is why the ghost offered possibility and a way of coming out the other side of a closed situation.

  That having been pondered, she snapped the trunk shut and went downstairs to eat Saltines which were helpful with morning sickness, she’d read, and at the moment she thought she might feel queasy, a feeling that made the room seem off-kilter and diminished in size. Still, she was relieved that finally she was experiencing one of the normal symptoms of pregnancy (she could not help thinking of Rosemary’s Baby when it came to peculiar pregnancies) and she headed for the pantry stopping once on the way to steady herself against the flowered upholstery of a chair back. In the act of pausing, however, in that beat when a person staggers somewhere, then grasps something, then experiences that first millisecond of relief, as if something in the body has been nudged aside in order to create an aperture to the light and, more importantly for her purposes perhaps, to air, she happened to gaze out of the window to her front porch, which was painted green and had columns, where she saw the ghost sitting calmly on a railing, raking her fingers through her hair which she now noticed and committed to memory was long and reddish and somewhat tangled. Simultaneously, the nausea evaporated.

  Soon enough, he began with his cheering up program, once again imitating Disney characters and making a few to him humorous faces and generally annoying her beyond measure. She came very close to slapping him as he juggled a potato, a beet, and a zucchini whilst singing the Barry Manilow classic that begins “in the Copa, Copacabana.” Instead she retired to her room, feigning exhaustion and asking not to be disturbed. The most terrible thing, she thought as she removed her watch and rings and dropped them into the silver cup on her dressing table, the most terrible thing, she thought, as she stripped to her bare feet and slid off her elastic-waisted jeans and unhooked her enormous brassiere, was when someone loved you immeasurably more than you loved them. It is this which stifles and chokes and fills the throat with bile. At this moment the door sighed and the dog’s nose poked into the room and sniffed out the situation, whether or not she would be able to tolerate its presence, then entered and ambled slowly toward her, proffering its head for a few behind-the-ear scratches. The dog hardly ever annoyed her. It sat patiently while she brushed her teeth and dabbed assorted moisturizers on her face and finally, it climbed into bed with her and nestled into the arch of her back and began instantly to snore in a way that soothed her.

  For his part, Guy sat at the kitchen table distracting himself with photographic plates of tulipa, reflecting that the variables in breeding were somehow equivalent to outside forces such as virus, aphid attack and so forth, deducing that in this way an equation could be made which might predict the characteristics of their future child more precisely. He felt despised. Her arrows cut him to the core. He believed himself to be enveloped in a feminine mystery whose arms tangled darkly around him and which he resented. As a scientist he knew he ought to be able to find his way into the light, which he yearned for, remembering a time in which the two of them poured over the pictures of Italy, the basilicas, the Madonnas, the yellow sky beneath which they held hands walking up big hills strewn with ancient rocks. Absently he doodled petals, sepals, and resisted thinking of her who resisted his best most valiant efforts to please, who resisted his arguably strongest and most caring self. He imagined going into the room and nudging the dog off the bed, but did not do this.

  There was a racket at 3 a.m., which turned out to be the ghost emerging from her closet and scattering wire hangers on the floor in front of her dressing table. The dog leapt from the bed, exited the room, she heard the clicking of its toenails on the stairs, then for hours she heard it walk around the house wailing. Meanwhile, the ghost studied itself in the dressing table mirror and now wound something about its head, some scarf with a poppy pattern, she hadn’t worn it for years. The overwhelming feeling was not fear but acceptance. It did not occur to her to banish it or even to question if she had the power or the right to order it around, but soon it left of its own accord and in its trail she heard a bizarre hissing, as of snakes. Then she was overcome with a desire to converse with it, to discover its history, its connection with the house, but it was too late. Oh come back, she thought in her mind, not saying it aloud for fear it would summon the husband and preferring solitude.

  Guy slept on the sofa, essentially a kind man with a vision which included the birth of new varieties of life, because the amazement was in making this kind of thing out of your own ideas rather than watching them unfold as in a film. This is why, sleeping deeply on the sofa, wrapped in a camel’s hair coat, head on the hard end-cushion which cramped his neck viciously, there was a feeling of it all being worthwhile, that is to say, the sacrifice he made or was making was like money in the bank. This kind of tit-for-tat thinking was foreign to her who dreamt instead of the ghost’s white face, its eyebrows very thin and brown and arched wryly over its eyes. In her dream, the ghost was trying to tell her something. It sat at the foot of the bed and spoke for hours, revealing its story whose flavor was melancholy and even suspiciously melodramatic, she thought in the dream, but there were so many facets and facts they seemed to float around her head and then leave via the opened window just before she woke up. She had not remembered leaving the window opened. The dog had not returned.

  Two weeks went by in which Guy refrained from the Donald Duck imitations and other attempts at humor and she was able to occupy the same bed with him snoring, along with the dog, two-toned throughout the night, with no ghostly interruption. Ravenously she read about childbirth and rearing and childhood dis
eases and child psychology and psychosis and educational problems and obsessions and paranoias and toys, outfits, types of sandboxes, and eating disorders. At the end of every day collapsing in front of her dressing table mirror on the small tufted revolving stool she’d purchased at the thrift store, she’d explore the changes in her complexion which she feared was not only darkening but inexplicably turning bluish.

  One night she rose at 3 a.m. (always at 3 a.m.) according to her digital clock and wandered restlessly to the window where the snow was falling dizzily, and she watched everything below the window being erased by the snow. For a moment she reached out to the sill in terror that this could be so, that a seemingly benign force of nature had the power to obliterate while, at the same time, staying dizzily in the sky, within the line of her vision, and that there was no escaping it except to close the eyes. It was then that she felt a long, cold exhalation on her shoulder and smelled the ice breath of the ghost.

  Suddenly she knew the ghost’s name was Helen, though how she knew she could not say. It came to her with a certainty: Helen. Its name was Helen. She reached behind her to touch the robe of the ghost, imagining the texture of it like plastic wrap or even snow, but it was nothing, just air, neither hot nor cold. It came to her then that it had been imagined, all of it—the ghost, the cold breath, the white face floating through the room, ‘Helen’—and that the fantasy was linked to the bearing of her first child. It was a kind of hysteria, she reasoned, that bespoke her anxieties about giving birth as well as the death of her old self, free of motherhood and wifehood, wandering aimlessly along the sidewalks in New York City where she’d lived for a brief ecstatic year a while back. She began to think it was a projection, the ghost literally the film of the subconscious flung from the mind onto the world of her house. The result: the ghost. Now the ghost had a name, Helen, and this name more than anything returned her to her senses and she saw herself as if for the first time, flawed from the inside, prone to visions and escape hatches.