Enon

by Paul Harding

  She is fitted into an outrageous, gigantic emerald green polonaise. The dress is verdant and oceanic, mossy and Atlantic green. The bodice is constructed of willow branches, stripped to the green wood, girthed tight with eelgrass. Will-o’-the-wisps halo Kate’s head. Her hair is suffused and golden, flaring, solar.

  Well, well, now.

  My, my, isn’t that interesting?

  What fantastications are these?

  I ignore the insults and the jeers from the balconies that continue to rise higher behind me, across the road, in the darkness of the cornfield. Kate is magnificent and beautiful, if not a queen then a princess, repatriated into the wood and the water and the starry sky and the cold ocean abysses broiling beyond the continental shelf, just beyond the rise, through the trees, not presiding but naturalized. Yes, I think, this must be her first pageant, an equinoctial communion, restoration after a satisfactory yearlong trial as a member of the deceased.

  A menagerie of horse and pony skeletons prance around the stage in exaggerated, ambling gaits, draped in caparisons made from their own former hides.

  A pillar of fire erupts from the top of the hill and towers miles up into the night until it breaks against the invisible ceiling of the atmosphere and fans out across the sky in flaming traceries. A great crown of fire burns miles above Enon, bejeweled with Ursa’s stars.

  Kate watches the fire from her mark onstage, in front of the whirling shutter of bones, which seem to rotate within their revolutions, alternating between the reliquaries of legends and dinner-plate leftovers, one instant the remains of leviathans and saints, the next drumsticks and short ribs. Kate cranes her neck to follow the fire up into the heights and I see that the rest of her does not move, that beneath her gown she has been clamped into some sort of frame. Her arms are raised to shoulder height and bent at the elbows so that the tips of her fingers nearly meet in front of her chest. She cannot move her arms. They are confined by some kind of armature beneath the gown and only her hands are free at the wrists. This confirms why there is stiffness in how she moves her head to look up at the fire. She cannot rotate her shoulders or her torso or her hips, or turn on her feet to get a better look at the braided column of flames roaring behind her. I can feel its heat from where I sit. She is much nearer to it, and although I have the thought that she is no longer subject to burning, I also have the sense that she is burning, and that she cannot move herself back from the heat. I can see now—not actually see with my eyes, but see in my head, know—that Kate has been fixed to some kind of rigid frame made of wooden strapping and hammered iron rivets, not so much to restrict her, perhaps, but to insulate her from the weight of the costume, a lesser kindness within a greater cruelty, sponsored by an ultimate benevolence, possibly if not probably, which I now see is laden with clots of gems and strings of pearls and made from bolt after bolt of silk brocade and lace, douppioni and zibeline, and trussed and knotted with leagues of silk ribbon, and mounted on a series of concealed panniers that spring out and upward, elevating Kate to a preposterous height just as it occurs to me that they are present beneath the fabric. Kate rises and the skirts of her dress cascade from beneath her and across the green. I can hear pulleys and winches turning and squeaking. Kate’s ascent illuminates a system of fine silk threads, tied to the tips and the joints of each of her fingers, which rise above her and disappear in the upper darkness and lift and lower her fingers according to elegant but predetermined pattern. I squint to get a look at the darkness above Kate’s head, certain there must be a scrim of black velvet, perfectly lit to blend in with the real night, that conceals a rotating brass drum bristling with stubs that pluck the tines of a metal comb. Each of the threads connected to Kate’s wrists and fingers is looped around one of the tines. As the drum revolves, her hands perform an intricate set of poses. I am terrified that Kate is going to be immolated. I panic and try to rise but I cannot move. The crowd roars with laughter.

  The music accompanying the spectacle is stilted and fractured. It lurches from wheezy calliopes to pennywhistles to ground-shaking brass to sour, scraping strings to air-raid sirens. At one point, I catch an oompah pattern sounding on an accordion deep inside the din. I tap the triplets on my thigh with my ring, middle, then forefinger, grateful for something recognizable, almost reassuring. I begin to sway my head back and forth in whole notes behind the rhythm. When I look back at Kate, she is raising and lowering her right arm and her right leg and tilting her head to the right, along with the beat I’m playing. I frown and stop tapping my fingers and Kate’s arm and leg and head stop, too. I tap my right ring finger once. Kate’s leg raises and lowers. I tap my middle finger once and Kate’s arm raises and lowers. I tap my forefinger and Kate’s head nods. I repeat the pattern with the fingers of my left hand and Kate’s left limbs rise and fall and her head tilts left. I look up into the darkness above her and see that the brass drum and the metal comb are not the mechanisms that control Kate behind the curtains but props, meant to be seen, meant to be seen within the play on the stage. I tap my fingers in a little march and Kate jerks along with it.

  I gasp when I realize what is happening and a wall of flames bursts behind Kate and her grotesque costume ignites. She is enshrined in fire and the entire production gives way. All the staging and framing and cables and gears and winches collapse in an instant, with Kate disappearing underneath it all, and the wreckage is yanked back behind the hill without a sound and without a trace. The last I see of Kate is her pale face before it is gulped into the fire and collapsing rubble. The whole spectacle has the appearance of being staged to look like a disaster, as if the beautiful girl perishes in a catastrophe, but that, of course, is always a part of the trick. I cry out for her.

  That’s right; chuck your girl into the furnace, palooka!

  Huzzah!

  Hip, hip, hooray!

  He burns her at the stake every single night!

  And look at him crying over her—what a baby!

  Boo hoo hoo!

  Just wait until we get ahold of you!

  13.

  A HURRICANE STRUCK THE EAST COAST AND SWEPT THROUGH Enon in early August, right before the anniversary of Kate’s death. I would not have known that it was coming if I hadn’t walked to Stonepoint to try to find Frankie Shuey at the Ironsides Tap Room, so I could buy more drugs. When I arrived at the bar, Frankie and another guy were the only ones there. The guy sitting next to Frankie looked vaguely familiar, as if maybe I’d seen him on other landscaping or painting crews over the years. He was thin and his shoulders so slouched it looked like he might snap in two. His complexion was pale gray and the sharp bones in his face looked like they might split through the skin. He had thin black hair and a black mustache up under which a burning cigarette had been stuck. I could tell by how sunken his cheeks were that he had no or very few teeth left. Overall, he had the appearance of a body long abused but not especially strong in the first place. I had a sense that he was always sick, always had a cough, always had asthma or bronchitis, always needed bed rest and hot soup and a good drying out. He and Frankie sat side by side, each with a boilermaker. The already dim bar darkened more and I looked over at the two high, wide, narrow, smoked windows in the wall that faced the harbor. One window was already blacked out and I watched as someone outside fitted a sheet of plywood over the other and began pounding it into place with a hammer and nails. The guy Frankie was drinking with sat on his left, so I pulled out the bar stool to his right.

  I said, “Hey, Frankie.” Frankie turned to see who I was and turned back to the bar.

  “Hey,” he said. The guy on the other side of him looked at me and crunched up his nose.

  “The fuck’s this guy?” he asked Frankie.

  “It’s Charlie Crosby,” Frankie said.

  “Who the fuck?”

  “He’s a guy named Crosby,” Frankie said.

  “ ’Scuse me,” the guy said. “He smells like shit. Tell him to get out of here. Hey, you, Charlie Crosby; you look and you s
mell like shit—get lost.” I remembered stories about how sometimes the guys on the fishing boats that worked out of Stonepoint would stage fights on a pier or in an alley behind a bar at night. They’d make some crew member fight the toughest guy in the fleet, and threaten to beat him half dead if he didn’t. They’d get him drunk and riled up and show him a little wiry guy they said was talking shit about him and say that if he didn’t beat the guy up they’d beat him up for being a punk. They’d always snare a new guy into this trap, the bigger the better, because he’d always think that he could take the little guy they pointed out. I remembered stories guys to whom this had happened told about how all the other fishermen made a circle and got the little guy and the dupe in the middle and started taking bets about how long it’d take the little guy to put the big new guy into a coma. Every version of the story I’d heard was about how unbelievable it was what a ruthless and tough fighter the little guy had been and how the guy he’d beaten had woken up in his own apartment three days later packed in ice, so battered that he couldn’t see or eat or nearly move just to get a sip of water for a week. In all my time working on painting and landscaping crews, I’d never been in a fight and never seen one as bad as the ones they described (sometimes guys took a slap at each other, but nothing really brutal). I could see the guy sitting next to Frankie being sick and drunk and high and underfed and never getting any sleep and hauling fish or lobster traps up into a boat in a T-shirt with bare hands in roasting sun and drenching rain and freezing snow, every day that the seas weren’t too high, for twelve, fourteen hours a day, looking every second as if what he was supposed to do was die, as if it was his real job to die, young and viciously, whether through ignorance or orneriness or hatred born of destroying himself in revenge against whatever it was that brought him into this world from his mother’s womb just so that it could watch him suffer his dad’s fists and his friends’ fists and after die back out of it, ground down and broken.

  I didn’t know whether the guy with Frankie was tough like that or one of the guys who weren’t strong, weren’t tough, but were the wretched of the wretched and for that reason left alone by the brawlers, or not left alone but let be by them, allowed to be a kind of mascot. He made me feel sick and frightened but also guilty. Part of me felt like I’d like to grind him right up and out of this world, like a roach, because he was so bereft of anything like human kindness or intelligence or light. But for the same reason part of me felt defensive of him against that very same sentiment of disgust and contempt.

  I stepped back from the stool I was about to sit on.

  “Hey, hey; okay; I don’t need to stay. I just want to ask Frankie something,” I said.

  “Oh, well, fuck you,” the guy said, in a high voice, like he was trying to imitate a little girl.

  Frankie snorted out a laugh and looked at the guy for a second and looked again at the bottles lining the back of the bar and shook his head. “Jesus, Scruff,” he said. “You’re a white-hot little leprechaun today. It’s business, man.”

  “I bet it’s business,” Scruff said. He looked at me from my shoes to my hair. “Fucking gimp.”

  “Sorry. Don’t mind Scruff. He gets all fucked up whenever there’s a storm.”

  “When there’s a fucking gimp,” Scruff said.

  “I don’t got anything right now,” Frankie said.

  “Nothing?” I said. “Oh, man—I was hoping—you’d been to New Mexico.” I meant to come off as nonchalant, to keep it sounding light.

  He turned from the bar toward me and dragged on his cigarette and squinted at me. “Nah. I don’t go to New Mexico no more,” he said.

  “Last time you ever say ‘New Mexico,’ ” Scruff said. “Ever.”

  “Okay, okay. Sorry, sorry,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a jam.”

  “I got twenty Vickies, twenty-five each,” Frankie said.

  “That’s kind of steep,” I said. He was gouging me because I was clearly starting to fray.

  “How about fifty each, gimp?” Scruff said.

  “I only have three hundred,” I said. “Can you do it for that?”

  “Nope. A dozen for three hundred.”

  Scruff swigged at his beer and tucked his chin in to swallow and get his next insult out as fast as he could. I wished I could dash his brains out on the bar top. The whole predicament was so lurid and so cartoonish, so almost diabolical, though, that I just repeated, “Okay, okay, okay, okay” as fast as I could, to stop Scruff from saying anything more, and yanked the money out of my pocket and handed it to Frankie.

  Scruff looked at the dirty hank of cash. “How much dick you have to—”

  “Oh, man,” I groaned. “Just shut up, would you? Jesus, you’re a grim pain in the ass.”

  Scruff leaned back on his bar stool and blew smoke up at the ceiling and laughed and slapped his knee. “Ha! You’re worse than me!” he coughed. “You’re some kind of sad shit, Kemo Sabe.”

  Frankie opened a plastic bag and removed eight white pills from it and put them, loose, back into his pocket. Instead of being glad for the bag of twelve pills he handed me, I could only think about the eight he’d put back in his pocket. The pills were strong but full of acetaminophen I’d have to extract, and that made me all the angrier. I slid the pills into my pocket.

  “All right, Frankie,” I said. “Thanks for everything. Will you have some stuff by the end of the week?”

  “I don’t know. Check in if you want to.”

  “Okay. Thanks for everything.” I turned and walked toward the door.

  Scruff called out behind me: “I hope a tree falls on you and you die, fuckwit.” I bowed my head and waved and left the bar.

  OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IN front of the hurricane made it feel like another planet. Moisture saturated the air, insulating sound and making it feel as if I were moving through liquid, almost as if I could lean forward and gently push off the sidewalk with my feet and do the breaststroke floating half an inch off the ground the rest of the way home. The light behind the ceiling of low, dark clouds seemed to come down to the earth through water and not air. I swallowed two of the pills dry, and by the time I reached the bridge that connected Stonepoint with Barnton, across the harbor, it felt wholly as if I traveled through an underwater kingdom of refracted light and quiet. Even though there was no wind or rain yet, everyone already seemed to have made their probably needless, I thought, dashes to the supermarkets and hardware stores for batteries and bottled water and plywood and masking tape.

  When I crossed the town line from Barnton into Enon, the quiet and stillness seemed to deepen even further. I felt as if I were the only man on earth, as if I were floating through some uninhabited, primeval realm. Only jellyfish and I would watch the vast nets of lightning being cast across the sky above and the rains churning the ceiling of our watery kingdom into sizzling, unmappable topographies, and hear the muted roaring of the winds over the face of the water, and watch with our simple eyes the atmosphere cooking and boiling and synthesizing itself so that when the storms quieted and passed and the sun shone back down on us, we would step onto the sand with our brand-new feet and walk out of the carbonated surf onto the fern-littered shore. What was that first clot of plasma not merely cooked by lightning? What colloidal smudge shivered and convulsed at the charge for an instant? What Adamic fleck of aspic was that? What first, shocked self that then became the first corpse?

  The clouds looked like fiddleheads of oily liquid curling across the watery sky.

  I took two more pills when I reached home and poured some whiskey in a coffee mug that read, SOMEONE AT AYERS MIDDLE SCHOOL APPRECIATES ME. I crushed the eight remaining pills in a decorative mortar made of green onyx that I’d bought Susan for Christmas the first year we dated. I ground the pills with the pestle until they were a fine powder. I tapped the powder out of the mortar into a ramekin and added a teaspoonful of water and mixed it with my finger until it made a smooth, consistent paste. I put the ramekin in the freezer.

 
My daydreams about floating in primitive oceans gave way to fairy-tale equations, like spells or the sorts of drawings to which I imagined the girls drinking wine and reading tarot cards in the cemetery might at some point be or have been attracted and drawn in chalk or spent a long windless night rendering in colored sand on the lid of a crypt, enchanted that someone might come along before a breeze scattered the sand and look at the beautiful, apparently diabolical but in fact harmless design and feel a worried thrill, but perhaps even more delighted at the possibility that no one besides the owls above in the trees would ever see it before it dispersed. The bookcase at the back of the kitchen was still stuffed with old tapes of movies and kids’ shows, and with the plastic containers in which Kate had kept her felt markers and crayons. There was a round bucket full of fat, rainbow-colored sticks of chalk. I took the bucket to the living room and drew a stick of bright red chalk from it. I stepped up onto the couch and lifted the mirror hanging above it from its hook and threw it across the room in the direction of the armchair, half-hoping it would land quietly in the seat, half-hoping it would fall short and explode all over the far side of the room. The mirror landed on one of its corners a foot short of the chair. Its glass broke with a single crack, almost like a gunshot or an isolated detonation of thunder in the middle of an otherwise peaceful snowfall, and the frame tipped onto the chair and stopped dead. I stood up on the back of the couch and leaned against the wall and reached up and over as far as I could to my left.

  I wrote on the wall, Let the world be W.

  Below that, I wrote, Let Kate be k.

  Below that I wrote, Therefore, let Kate’s death be (W – k).

  Let I be me. So I is now (I – k).

  I was never good at math or logic. My thoughts quickly became confused as I tried to demonstrate the calculus of grief, to draw up a circuit or graph or model written on the wall that captured the function of loss. I could barely figure out a long division problem, though, so my variables and function signs, sigmas and trigonometric equations quickly gave way to hieroglyphs, because I had to find a way to factor in the gothic girls in the graveyard, and Aloysius’s voice box (a v inside a rectangle), narcotic vectors (skulls and crossbones, color-coded, according to the pill) and blood alcohol (the old xxx from cartoon jugs of moonshine, plus or minus a number from one to five, based on degree) and the tame birds in the sanctuary and the pattern of the paths there and the shifting lights of the constellations of my sorrow. I had to attempt to fold hope (H) into the emotional tectonics, too, as subtle and rare a particle as it was, because even if at any given coordinate its value was statistically equal to zero, even if at any given moment it was no more than the hope for the return of hope, a single grain of it still contradicts a universe of despair. I drew mandalas and particle accelerators and calendars made up of concentric moving circles and ox-turn algorithms.