The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  A man was inside, lying on a hospital bed. He looked ancient but he probably wasn’t even old, just withered from illness. His eyes were open, but I don’t think he could see me. His pupils were the size of quarters. He was moving his mouth and sounds were coming out, but they weren’t words.

  “What d-d-do you want?” I kept asking him. I lit a cigarette and offered it to him, but he didn’t seem to want it. He was agitated, so I sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. I hadn’t noticed the smell downstairs because of all the chemical air fresheners, but upstairs, after I finished my cigarette, I had to breathe through my mouth. I don’t know if he was aware of my hand in his or not, but he eventually settled down and I fell asleep. When I woke up, Doreen was standing in the doorway. I could tell she didn’t like me being in there, so I left.

  I became an adventurer after my mother died. When you’re forced to acknowledge mortality you stop wasting time. Modesty, restraint, self-respect—all that is garbage. It’s all ego. I don’t have time for it. Nobody does. Even little children who have more time than anyone else, even they know better. I knew all this, but over the previous few months I’d lost track of it. Being with that dying man clarified things for me: I might’ve just met Edie, but I loved her and I’d do what I could to help her.

  I felt very alive. I got in the truck and drove to the mental hospital. I’d been so determined and had moved so swiftly that it hadn’t occurred to me to get nervous until I was in the elevator. My reflection, distorted in the metal doors, made me look deranged, like I belonged there as a patient.

  MAE

  I knocked. Dad opened the door. He opened it right away so he must have been waiting for me on the other side. We both stood completely still, the strange force field between us humming like an electric fence.

  “Marianne,” he finally said. He needed to say that to frame what could happen next, to give me permission to be her and not “Mae.”

  And then, I pulled his face towards mine and kissed him. He tasted like ash, an erupted volcano. His tongue was soft and warm. It was my first kiss. I don’t know how long it lasted. It could have been minutes or hours. I lost all sense of time.

  MARKUS

  Edie’s departure had brought a certain amount of relief. I was deep in the closet and having her around made me feel like I needed to prove my heterosexuality to everybody, including myself. I was able to have sex with her and even enjoy it on some level, but it made me feel empty and sad afterward. At the time, I blamed it on my Catholic guilt, but now I think it was because I could sense something about me was not right, but I just wasn’t ready to deal with it.

  I remember that sinking feeling I got when Edie showed up on my front steps out of breath and raggedy. And I also remember feeling embarrassed for her. It was the same way I felt when I would go over to her house and her mother wasn’t feeling well, and the house was dirty, and her mom was dirty, and her sister was round-eyed and silent. I remember one time when we got there and all their things were in the front yard and her mom was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, and Edie made me help carry her mom up the stairs and bring all their things back inside. I remember thinking it was strange that Edie wasn’t more embarrassed. If it were me, I would have died. But that was the wonderful thing about Edie, she was loyal. My parents were completely normal, boring, but anytime my mom said anything to me in public, I would turn beet red. I was so self-conscious, always thinking that people were looking at me and judging me, and then there was Edie—her mother was a mess on the floor in a pile of cereal, and it didn’t even occur to her that I would be petty enough to think less of her.

  My parents felt so sorry for Edie that they were going to offer her to stay with us while we finished out high school. They believed in doing good works, and I think my mom sensed my gayness and hoped that a live-in girlfriend would help stem the tide. The idea of Edie there for the rest of junior and senior year, I could not even handle it. I got into a big fight with my parents about it, and they were very taken aback because they thought I would want her to stay. I lied to them, said that Edie was happy in New York with her father, despite the constant despondent messages she would leave on my family’s answering machine. When it became clear that I would have to do better than that to discourage my parents, I told them that Edie was addicted to heroin and that I didn’t feel safe with her drug dealer friends. My parents are typical New Orleanians, they were all “Let the Bon Temps Rouler!” and our backhouse was frequently full of underage drunk kids, but they’ve always been terrified of me using drugs, so that was what it took.

  I feel guilty now, but it had been an issue of survival. I was doing what I felt I had to.

  EDITH (1997)

  I have the spins. I hold on to Markus’s elbow, but he is walking fast. He is walking ahead of me. He doesn’t turn his head towards me as I’m talking to him.

  Markus, I say. Markus, have you missed me? These last two months, these last two months have been shit.

  I am looking at his ear as I talk to him because he doesn’t turn around to look at me.

  Markus, I say. I say, Markus. The hedge of the nearby house scratches my arm. I lose my balance.

  My knee is bleeding.

  Ew, Edie, God. Why did you get so drunk? Sober up. You’re going to get everyone in trouble. Stop pulling on me.

  His face is in my face. He is going to kiss me.

  He is not going to kiss me.

  He pulls me up and I am on the ground again. It’s so quiet. I just realized how quiet it is out here after New York. All I hear is the blood beating in my ears. No cars or people.

  Edie, get up.

  I close my eyes, but that makes the spinning worse. I open them. I am very scared. I am suddenly very scared. My mother’s face was there when I closed my eyes. Her pupils are so black that they are holes. You look in them and you see the emptiness inside. I think, my mother. I think, my mother needs to come back. I think, she is gone. I think, she is not coming back, she is gone. I saw today. She’s not going to come back. I thought I could make her, but I couldn’t. I didn’t save the part of her that mattered. That part was already gone. It was already gone because otherwise she wouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t an accident. I saw today that I am nothing. I am nothing because she is gone already, has been gone.

  I say, Markus. I try to say, Markus, I am very scared. But the words aren’t coming out. My throat is tightening and my chest too. I can’t breathe. I can’t. What is happening to me? My mother’s neck. The scabs. This is how she must have felt, hanging there, no air in her throat, dizzy. Dizzy. Markus’s face is spinning and receding. He pulls loose and I fall.

  I don’t know what just happened. I can’t see off to the side. Grass on my face. The sidewalk. It smells bad under me, and then the swell again in the chest. It burns my throat and splashes. Markus is far away, walking back to his house.

  Markus, I try to call again, but then everything contracts again. It contracts and it’s so hot in my mouth. Hot pineapple juice barf. My nose is running.

  I crawl away from the mess I made. But the mess follows me because I am the mess. I sit up, slump forward, sit up. My face hits the grass. I sit up.

  I am empty and cold. Everything hot inside of me has come out. The sound, I realize now, is my teeth. They are chattering. It’s not fair of Mae to have left me here like this. Why is she so slippery? And Markus too. He wants nothing to do with me. He did not look at me the way he used to. Maybe he was upset because I talked about Charlie. I tried to make him jealous. I will get up in a minute. Apologize to Markus. My mother is receding already in my head, though I don’t dare close my eyes again. I keep them open. Don’t blink. Mae and I would play that game, stare and stare until the tears rolled down our cheeks. Mae always won. If she decides not to blink, she won’t blink until her eyes shrivel up and fall out.

  Did Mae know? Did Mae know I would see what I saw? Is that why she didn’t come?

  I don’t realize that I am staring a
t a truck until the window rolls down.

  Edie.

  Charlie comes out and pulls me up. I am steadier on my feet than I thought I would be, but tired and embarrassed.

  I’m sorry, I say so quietly that he doesn’t hear me. He is drying me off with a towel. I lift my arms and he pulls my vomit-spattered shirt over my head. I am not wearing a bra. I pull off my pants and throw them into the bed of the truck. I am standing naked in the street. Charlie tries to cover me in a towel, but it falls and I don’t pick it up. He is the only one who is nice to me. Why have I been pushing him away?

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I say. And then I see a shadow, something, move inside the truck.

  Chapter 8

  CHARLIE

  I was prepared for complications. I would have bound and gagged a security guard in the stairwell if the occasion called for it, but it didn’t. This was a hospital, not a jail. I got past the nurses and orderlies and doctors without a problem. As an urban explorer, I have a lot of experience going into places I don’t belong. The key is moving with confidence, having a neutral facial expression and avoiding eye contact. The last part is particularly important for me, as my stutter makes it difficult to pass unnoticed if I need to start conversing.

  I took the elevator to the top floor and worked my way down. There were no doors on the rooms, or if there were, they were all propped open. It didn’t take me long to find Marianne. She was sitting on the edge of her bed. I recognized her from Edie’s description—recognized the silk scarf on her neck and the hairstyle Edie had been so distressed about. I didn’t linger in the doorway, as this is the sort of thing that draws attention to itself. Instead, I came in, reached out my hand to her, and she took it. She followed me without questions or hesitation. Her roommate called after us, but quietly. Marianne seemed to be moving as though in a dream. I don’t know if she fully understood who or where she was.

  She climbed into the truck, sat primly. She seemed zonked. I began to introduce myself, but my words clung to each other in my mouth. She didn’t turn to look at me, but hit the dashboard with her palm as if to say: “Drive!” So, I did.

  The character of Cassandra was the basis of all my early sexual fantasies, but more than that, she had created the very framework for my sexual desire. Gregor and Cassandra had a romance for the ages, even in the later books, even when it was clear that things would end badly for everybody. Rather than being expansive, their love seemed to condense further and further inward—a circle, then a spiral, then a point, ratcheting the whole thing tighter and tighter, until the spring popped and Marianne went flying halfway across the universe.

  What was it like to meet the woman who was the basis of all my sexual fantasies? I don’t know. I never met her. Cassandra had existed for such a short moment on the pages of Dennis’s books—burning fast and bright. The woman in my truck was the pile of ash left over.

  MAE

  As we kissed, I had the sensation that I was breaking apart. Dad’s tongue slipped into a place inside of me that was already cracked and pried it open.

  I understand why in fairytales a kiss has the power to transform a frog into a person and bring the comatose to life. I would have stood there kissing him forever until I died, until I was nothing but a cloud of atoms. He was the one who pulled away. I remember his face. Eyes bulged, lips in a rictus and wet with spit. It was going too far for him. I was not who he wanted. I had never been her. I was a prop. No different from the golden binoculars or the little suitcase. The kiss must have reminded him of this.

  “Go change out of those wet clothes,” he said. His face was neutral. A little sad. When I reached for him he took a step back. For a moment, he had been mine and now, he wasn’t.

  My body was still buzzing as he walked into his room and shut the door. I couldn’t bring myself to move. He began to type, fast and hard. It sounded like a firing squad and I could feel every letter lodging inside of me like a bullet. I’m not sure what happened after that.

  After I kissed my father, I lost my mind.

  EDITH (1997)

  Mom and I are lying in the front room of the shotgun on a nest I made from my laundry and a couple of blankets. The room is dark except for the streetlight coming in through the broken shutters on the front window. In this light, Mom looks like herself. Her eyes are closed and they don’t bulge, and her face doesn’t look fat or yellow. It barely even looks puffy and that’ll go down. Whatever pills they were giving her that made her this way, that made her eyes swim, they will be out of her system soon. I’m so happy. I don’t know how Charlie got her out, how he convinced her to leave. I don’t care. He could have stabbed all the orderlies and doctors in that hospital and I’d still be grateful. Whatever he did, it worked. Mom is curled up on me, asleep with my hand pressed to her mouth. Her lips are chapped. I have some lip balm in my bag, but I’m worried that if I move I might wake her and then something could change. She could wake up and go back to how she was being in the hospital. So I stay still. I keep my eyes open as wide as they go because when I close them everything starts spinning. I’m still drunk, I guess, though I don’t feel drunk.

  Charlie smiles at me from the kitchen doorway. There are three rooms between us, but I can smell the kielbasa he’s frying. We bought it at a gas station. What does Mom think of Charlie? She must have liked him enough to leave with him. She didn’t like Markus. She never said that, but the way she said his name sometimes I could tell. Mmmmmarkus. Like the lash of a whip. God, he’d been such a dick. Each time I tried to talk to him he had taken a step back from me as if I was going to give him a disease. It makes me wish I had a disease just so that I could give it to him. Preferably something with lesions. Why had I even gone to him when I had Charlie? It seems incomprehensible. My Charlie. I watch him lean away from the stove and flip what’s in the pan.

  When it’s ready, Charlie brings me a plate of sausage. He sits next to me on our pile of blankets. An indoor picnic. I’m nauseous, but hungry. I adjust my seat, careful not to wake Mom. Outside it has started to rain. Charlie set up a metal bucket under a leak in the kitchen. We listen to the drops ping softly like a milk pail. The house belongs to the uncle of someone he knows in New York. We can stay here in the Marigny until it sells but we have to clear our stuff out every morning when the real estate agent shows the place.

  “Did you know,” Charlie says, taking a slice of sausage off the plate, “that these houses are called shotguns because if you sh-shoot a sh-sh-shotgun through the front door, the bullet goes straight through the house and out the back.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “Have you ever shot a shotgun? The shot scatters.” I belch into my hand.

  He grins at me.

  How did he do it? I want to know. How did he get her out?

  He wipes something off my chin with his thumb and answers me before I even ask.

  “I just went in there and got her,” he whispers.

  “Just like that?” I whisper back.

  “More or less.”

  “But what about the doctors and nurses and all that?”

  He shrugs, looks down at my mother in my lap. Her eyes move under her eyelids back and forth like she’s reading. “They were busy.”

  “And she just went with you?”

  He nods.

  I take the last bite of sausage. “She’s getting better already.” I hope that’s true. I’ll make it true. Charlie pulls my head towards his, presses our foreheads together. My outlaw.

  He finishes chewing and swallows. Kisses me on the nose. The rain outside is getting stronger, lashing at the window, trickling into the bucket. Inside we are warm and dry. Charlie and I are like the parents and my mom is our baby. Together we will nurse her back to health.

  MAE

  It was irresponsible of Dad to encourage me as he did, but he didn’t know, he couldn’t have known, what it would lead to. My mind cracked. Between the kiss and the fire I remember only strange shards. Jumbled bits. I was running a lo
w-grade fever for days. I wasn’t eating or sleeping. I was unwell. My mom took up most of the room in my chest, and what was left of me was squeezed in the edges around her. It was like always being in a room with a very low ceiling. A coffin.

  I remember lying on the floor, my cheek pressed to the cool wood, eye to eye with the cat as Amanda swept around me. Do animals sense madness? Does it scare them? My arms were torn up with scratch marks as I tried to lure Cronus out from under the dresser but even he wanted nothing to do with me.

  When Rose came over to dinner, Amanda tried to hide me away, bury me in blankets on the bottom bunk, but I crawled out to the table and joined them. Eating was incomprehensible. I watched what the others did and imitated them. It felt like I was chewing clumps of dirt. The food hurt my stomach. Dad didn’t stop talking. I couldn’t follow anymore what he was saying. He was at the other end of the table but he was receding farther and farther away from me. I remember Amanda’s face as she brayed at something he said. Rose laughed too. I’m losing him, I realized, and started to choke. He’s not coming back to me ever again. He’s so far away. Amanda hit me on the back, and a laugh, shriveled and tight, fell out of my mouth.

  After dinner, Amanda played the piano. She rolled her sleeves up with a flourish. Oh, how insufferable she was. I tried to climb onto Dad’s lap on the couch, but he didn’t let me. He shoved me off without even looking and asked Amanda to play another.

  The piano playing went on and on. I was the only one who noticed that her shoulder blades were jumping under the fabric of her shirt. Wing humps. She didn’t turn around, but if she did, I knew that I would see her true face.

  After each song, Rose and Dad clapped. It was as though I didn’t exist. I was beginning to wonder if maybe I didn’t, if I was only a character inside one of Dad’s books, but then I spotted the button from my yellow blouse glinting under the piano bench. I was still wearing that blouse, who knows how many days later. Amanda had tried to take it off of me but I had bitten her. Seeing that button on the floor felt like proof. If I could lose a button, I must exist.