Monsters

by Karen Brennan

  This last was a mean-spirited reference to Hans’ incessant theremin playing, the spooky sounds reminiscent of bad sci fi or a copulating cat or, less frequently, a flock of warbling mourning doves. Hans had not yet mastered the instrument which was a difficult instrument to master, though if you asked me anyone with a decent soprano could mime the sounds pretty accurately by intoning ooooo and eeeee to the tune of something plaintive.

  When he played O Mi Bambino Cara, though, in spite of myself, I was moved. There he would stand, at the helm of his peculiar instrument, a lumpen figure of a man with a large square head, his mouth pressed in a grim line, his hands like big roast beefs paddling the air—and the tender spectacle of this sad, blind-in-one-eye man, along with the Puccini—all the more poignant for being a little off-key—would unfailingly bring tears to my eyes.

  I was settling in like a cat settles in, surrendering myself to unfamiliar surroundings, marking my own tiny territory, as it were, which consisted of the sofa and a plastic chair I had moved to the window for the purpose of looking outside. It was always snowing or about to snow and it fascinated me to watch the snowflakes, which resembled swarms of large white bees.

  I began to dread the crow’s visits, however, the news of my son always discouraging—he was caught scoring heroin and the police had broken his nose; he was contemplating injecting bleach into his arm, so despondent was he; he had checked himself into detox units, rehab programs, hospital psych wards; he was cohabiting with a Mormon bishop, a blond meth freak, a black cat who subsequently died in an alley. I had to cover my ears.

  5

  There came the day, as I knew it would, when I neglected to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub while taking my shower. Hans had gone for the afternoon—god knows where he went for hours at a time (I used to speculate that he had a woman stashed somewhere, a person who tended to his physical needs and complimented him on his taste in reading, his formidable intellect and his sense of humor)—and when I had finished with my ablutions, I heard the angry pounding on the apartment door. Wearing only a towel, I peered though the little eyehole and perceived a tiny, misshapen woman with a large nose looking back at me.

  You have some nerve, she said when I opened the door. My entire apartment is flooded, thanks to you. She was not as tiny as I’d thought, nor as misshapen. She was actually quite attractive in a cheerleaderish way—a certain type of big girl with crisp incisors renowned for a lack of irony. Permit me to help you clean up the mess, I said. Which is how I came to know Rita and her various boyfriends, one of whom was perched on top of a ladder reading a book on that first visit where, for the rest of this tale, we will leave him.

  Rita was a hairdresser with her own business which had been recently revamped by a TV personality that went around revamping hairdresser salons. She was immensely grateful to this personage, claiming that her sales went up exponentially and her employees were far more respectful than before. All this was divulged after I’d done a fair job of sopping up the small lake in Rita’s bedroom with two bath towels. When I’d wrung the last of my shower effluent from the towel into a large bucket, Rita was frowning over me. Your hair needs attention, she said.

  This is how I happened to become a regular patron of Rita’s Hair Salon. I’d been cooped up in Hans’ small rooms for so long, I’d forgotten the sheer gleam of the outside world—its rivets and whorls, its dizzying frontal assault when, on my first time out, the snow-bees attacked me. Bigger and bigger they grew until they transformed to giant chickens in front of my eyes, squawking and revving up their wings like jet engines, but silent (paradoxically) perfectly silent, so that the squawks and the revving were only in imagination (nevertheless loud).

  And this is a curiosity—how the mind creates its own disturbances and how there is almost a kind of synesthesia involved when it comes to the workings of the imagination, a kind of leakage among compartments. Indeed, in imagination everything connects and overlaps—a disturbing vision is capable of hurting the ear and vice versa, and what was past returns uncannily to infect our present moments. Not only memories but stories, even the stories we held most dear as children and the thought of who we were as children reading those stories, or listening to them, our mothers’ warm breath on our necks . . .

  Which is why I tried to banish all thoughts of my son.

  Thankfully, Rita’s salon did not entail much of a trek. It was a pleasant enough place with purple walls and elderly women sitting under hair-driers with pink curlers and Rita running around snapping her precision scissors which she ultimately employed on my own coiff, cutting, shaping and spraying to such an extent that I did not recognize the severe and helmeted visage—like a Roman foot soldier!—that looked back at me from her mirror.

  An old woman to whom Rita applied her energetic ministrations, from I believe Finland or Lapland, engaged me in conversation; she talked about her children and her abilities as a fortune teller, a little diminished, she admitted, with her great age. Her children and her children’s children and even their children were getting on, she said, and the whole business made her feel very ancient which in fact she was, displaying the ropey veins on her old hands with pride. Fabulous, no? she said. I am lucky to have made it so far as the world is endlessly—here she searched for the right word, then shook her head. The world is endlessly, she repeated, then laughed. Rita was teasing her hair into two towers, then situating tiny plastic windows in each. I like to do my part, said the old woman.

  Then she took my hand in both of hers and read my palm. Ah but you, she said. You have just been away on a, shall we say, sojourn during which you completed a great deal of work. It is difficult, almost impossible, to judge this work—I’m not sure why. Then you wandered, looking for that which no longer exists. Then you happened upon a friend, not noted for his warmth and kindness, who took you in. Listen to the crow, she said. Follow the snow bees. Your son awaits you. At this the old woman began to weep so profusely that Rita gently escorted her to the restroom and I made my departure.

  6

  “The Snow Queen” written by an unattractive, socially inept Dane, said Hans, is a sort of coming-of-age story. There are two children, a boy and a girl, who through a twist of fate become separated. The twist of fate is the Snow Queen herself, an enigmatic personage, beautiful and dangerous—“slender and dazzling”—who entrances the boy, invites him to ride on her sled, wraps him in her fur—“creep into my fur,” she entreats seductively, and takes him to her ice palace. We know she is dangerous because on the way to the ice palace, the Snow Queen says “And now you will have no more kisses […] or else I shall kiss you to death!”

  But the best part of the story, said Hans, is that before any of the above occurred, the devils dropped a special mirror which smashed into millions of pieces and became lodged in peoples’ eyes and hearts, causing distorted views of the world. For some reason, don’t ask me why, I love the idea of that mirror. You love contradictions, I pointed out, and calamities. No, said Hans, I love the idea of lost souls.

  The story is a ludicrously obvious tale of sexual seduction, piped up the iris. The beautiful queen, the “fur” that “envelopes” the boy, the sleigh ride to “another land,” even the palace with its postlapsarian, postcoital chill. . . . Who among us wants to surrender his penchant for enchantment?

  We are all lost souls, Hans went on mournfully, and then he went mournfully to his theremin to play a version of “Over the Rainbow” which sounded like a duck quacking. But I was still thinking about the Snow Queen, who had always reminded me of my mother, who also was given to furs and a cold house and, for years in my young life, inhabited a place of mystery. And this made me think of my son, which I did not want to do, so I changed the course of my thinking and instead thought of the power of the imagination. . . .

  So though we cannot exactly envision the matter of “beyond our wildest dreams” (I reflected) since it has not yet been revealed, we can nonetheless attach to this imaginary empty place an ecstati
c feeling, it can occupy all our thoughts and direct our smallest actions.

  As if reading my mind, a chorus of violets seemed about to chant, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder a few times until interrupted by a single rose who seemed about to discourse on that personality disorder, claiming that Gerda demonstrated all the signs of OCD in her persistent quest, her inability to banish little Kay (who was no longer little) from her mind. In a way, the roses seemed about to say, Gerda was obsessed with the irrecoverable past, with childhood in all its one-dimensionality. One could say, the roses seemed about to continue, that she was unable to deal with the complexities of adulthood, especially her own impending adulthood.

  Just then the crow appeared at the window, surrounded by its customary band of snow bees, looking a little worn out, as if it had been through an even fiercer blizzard than usual. You are both wrong, said the crow, the SQ is a Gothic story, if you will, wherein a girl has an adventure—becomes, for the moment, the agent of her fate—and in the end discovers the prize wasn’t worth it. Ha, added the crow cynically, as if this were the case with pursuits of any kind.

  Or, said the cat, who for the first time in our acquaintance seemed to have an opinion, it is the story of incest. That story reminds me of the film Psycho only it has a different outcome. The boy escapes the suffocating clutches of the girl and the grandmother and returns to this vale of tears, inevitably resigned. The Freudian drama to a T.

  Lost souls! exclaimed Hans. After which we all fell silent.

  7

  It wasn’t until much later that I realized that Hans’ love of lost souls might have explained his kindness to me.

  I was on my way to Rita’s Hair Salon in an even worse blizzard than usual. I could not see one foot in front of me as I walked; I proceeded, therefore, in blind faith, hoping not to fall into an open manhole or stumble in front of a truck. The wind howled and buffeted my head and finally tore my umbrella from my hands and tossed it god-knows-where. I was quite cold and I was enacting that trick where you allow the cold into your body in order to nullify it.

  In desperation, I slipped into the premises of an antiquities dealer called Fiske. This was a small, sad establishment that reeked of bygone dust and spiderwebs. Fiske himself emerged from a back room with a fistful of white bread crusts in one hand, wearing a slight smile. How can I help you? he inquired politely. I explained that I was just taking temporary shelter, but I’d be happy to browse.

  Indeed, Fiske’s Antiquities was a browser’s paradise and included stuffed owls and worthogs, troops of books with battered spines, an array of boxes—little ceramic boxes, cloisonné boxes, ivory boxes—perfume bottles with semiprecious jewels dotting their circumferences, a collection of ink pens, and 19th century costumes, notably a chimney sweep costume worn by a manikin with no eyes.

  Idly peering into a wooden box decorated with the burnt wood tool of mid 20th century—its lid contained an image of a buck-toothed beaver with the word TOOTHPICKS clumsily embossed—I experienced a jolt of déjà vu so severe that I had to grab Fiske by the forearm in order to steady myself.

  Even when I’d settled into the wingback chair that Fiske was kind enough to provide, I still could not shake the déjà vu. There was an odd familiarity to everything in the shop—the boxes, the pens, the costume and especially the books. I took in their battered spines absentmindedly as I sat, running my eyes over the titles of books I had never heard of. Even so, they were familiar to me in the way that a story is familiar when you enter it in medias res and cannot shake the feeling that you’ve read it before. . . .

  It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when I spotted a copy of H. C. Anderson’s fairy tales, illustrated with the tortuous images of Kay Neilsen. It was such a volume from which my mother read “The Snow Queen,” a story that terrified me as much as the perfume of my mother.

  In the penultimate scene (I recalled), the Snow Queen tells little Kay that if he can spell the word ETERNITY out of icicles she will give him his freedom. This Kay failed to do. Instead, Gerda appeared and melted his heart with the heat of her love.

  Fiske said, I can give you a good deal on that book. But I didn’t know if I wanted to own it. I’d been away for a long time and I’d accomplished a great deal of work—only the residuals remained and at this point they no longer made sense to me. The memory of them, even now, locked in a suitcase, brought to mind a row of walls with vague, poorly executed scrawls.

  Whereas the memory of my son brought to mind the sea . . .

  When last seen, he was living in a black Camry, terribly thin, begging for food by sticking his hand out of the window. His face, reported the crow, had hardened into a contemptuous mask, and when passersby declined to drop a dollar into his outstretched palm, he spit at them. These depressing reports nullified all memories of the sea—though my son persisted at the back my mind, despite my best efforts to banish him.

  Oh beauty, oh sadness! I thought, apropos of nothing. Though perhaps it was the beautiful boy making sandcastles that flashed before my eyes. His knees scraped up.

  It was still snowing. Possibly it would always snow. It is hard to know what to do under any circumstances, much less those circumstances which require us to fight against the prevailing weather. His knees were scraped because he had fallen from his bicycle.

  I’d dabbed on peroxide and plastered a few bandaids. The world was shining and perfect, the sea left a moustache of white foam on the shore. In a while we’d go home, make sandwiches, tell stories. Did I read him the story of the Snow Queen? I think not. It would have frightened him. Although my mother who looked uncannily like the Snow Queen read the story to me.

  In those days I would have done anything to protect my son.

  If I were to encounter him now—in an alley, say, covered with snow—I would not be able to melt his heart. My love, unlike Gerda’s, has gone cold. It appears that we are doomed to go our separate ways, to continue in the darkness of our own making, half-blind, and no longer who we once were.

  That’s the way most stories end, I mused sadly. Not with roses blooming, not with the onset of summer, not hand-in-hand.

  In moments, I would pay Fiske the required amount, tuck the book inside my jacket and head into the fray.

  IMMINENCE

  Red-shouldered hawk sits on a wire waiting for the doves which he will kill. We sit in the car watching the hawk await its prey. Red-shouldered hawk, very stationary, very beautiful, very noble, with a bold slice of orangey red on each shoulder. We light cigarettes and observe. We observe the spaces in the sky which are empty. We observe the smoke filling the car’s interior like an image (such as the hawk) fills the caverns of our imaginations. With our usual composure, we observe the ruthlessness of nature: one creature about to swoop upon another. Red-shouldered hawk snaps his head to the left. In the distance, the tender clamors of doves about to descend. Is all life so misguided? we wonder. We light fresh cigarettes. The real show is about to begin.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  The author wishes to thank the following publications in which some of these stories have appeared:

  Crowd, Cutthroat, Four Way Review, Interim, New World Writing, Ocean City Review, Ploughshares, Prompt Press, Slant, Sonora Review, Story Quarterly, and TriQuarterly.

  “Pete, Waste Lab Technician,” appears in Winesberg, Indiana, (Indiana University Press, 2015).

  “10 Birds” appears in Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Prose by Contemporary Women Authors, ed. Nava Renek, (Spuytin Duyvil, 2008).

  “The Snow Queen” appears in My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, ed. Kate Bernheimer, (Penguin Books, 2010).

  I am immensely grateful to friends and esteemed artists/writers who have inspired me along the way, especially The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers which has given me a spectacular family. A special thanks to Martha Rhodes, my brilliant editor, to Ryan Murphy who designs gorgeous books, and to all the rest of you up there in the Tribeca loft, slaving away in the name of literature. To Steve Ro
maniello and Beth Alvarado who have many times loaned me their generous, insightful ears, and offered encouragement. And to Rachel, my heart, whose presence is everywhere in these pages.

  Karen Brennan is the author of six books of varying genres, including poetry collections Here on Earth (1989), The Real Enough World (2006), and little dark (2014); AWP Award–winning short fiction Wild Desire (1990); story collection The Garden in Which I Walk (2005); and a memoir, Being with Rachel (2001). Brennan is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, and her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in anthologies from Graywolf, Norton, Penguin, Spuytin Duyvil, University of Georgia, and University of Michigan, among others. She is professor emerita at the University of Utah and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her website is karenbrennan.org.

  Publication of this book was made possible by grants and donations. We are also grateful to those individuals who participated in our 2015 Build a Book Program. They are:

  Jan Bender-Zanoni, Betsy Bonner, Deirdre Brill, Carla & Stephen Carlson, Liza Charlesworth, Catherine Degraw & Michael Connor, Greg Egan, Martha Webster & Robert Fuentes, Anthony Guetti, Hermann Hesse, Deming Holleran, Joy Jones, Katie Childs & Josh Kalscheur, Michelle King, David Lee, Howard Levy, Jillian Lewis, Juliana Lewis, Owen Lewis, Alice St. Claire Long & David Long, Catherine McArthur, Nathan McClain, Carolyn Murdoch, Tracey Orick, Kathleen Ossip, Eileen Pollack, Barbara Preminger, Vinode Ramgopal, Roni Schotter, Soraya Shalforoosh, Marjorie & Lew Tesser, David Tze, Abby Wender, and Leah Nanako Winkler.