by Ana Simo
The morning after, the empty tray was outside McCabe’s door, with the champagne bottle upside down in the bucket. I decided to say nothing to McCabe or Petrona. Perhaps McCabe was having a painful menstrual period or had lost a bundle of money and was depressed. I was afraid to think the obvious, that Bebe may have been the cause of McCabe’s sudden disappearance. That it was a relapse. I did not want Bebe inside McCabe’s mind, particularly not as she had long been in mine, as a torturous, unattainable ideal. Cruel Bebe, the eternal fourteen-year-old wood nymph, was my exclusive property.
Bebe as she had been at the very beginning, when I first saw her, alone on the outer edge of the male fuck circle, across from me, in the penumbra of sweaty male bodies, her eyes lazily caressing them, almost tactile yet indifferent. A slight young girl in a long, dirty fur coat, unafraid of the men, rats, and sewer effluvia under the last bridge still spanning the East River. We were the only two female watchers. The slow, silent male sexual field separated and consoled us, protective and dangerous, like the river’s black velvety bottom.
It was the night Zoë fled to Constantinople and the splendors of her elderly arms dealer. The night in October, exactly a month after 9/11, when refugee hordes broke out of their resettlement camp in the mainland and tried to enter the island (mixed in with a few marauding cannibals, some say). The Citizen’s Militia repelled them upstream and the river turned red with blood. “There’s not enough rat meat for everyone,” the girl said, as we walked the dark streets. She had just arrived from Nebraska, where things were much worse. “No one’s left there,” she said. “I’ve always been hungry.” She was white but wanted to be black. “Why?” I asked. “I want to sing like a black woman.” She said she was fourteen, but looked twelve and sounded as old as the hills.
That night, she slept on my dingy kitchen floor. I did not offer her my bed. That’s how insignificant she seemed. The next morning, she was gone. But every day she was absent, her presence grew. The details of her body, voice, and gestures became denser and stronger. I craved to see her in the flesh. I looked for her everywhere. One night, when I was beginning to forget her, she knocked on my door, and I was hooked. The electric charge between us was as potent as that in the male fuck circle. Except that we never touched. She refused, once. And I don’t ask twice. But we both kept seducing each other. What fun. All that inexplicable pleasure and grief! All that extreme passion unrelieved by the flesh! Two and a half incandescent years. Then McCabe showed up.
McCabe did not come down to dinner on Wednesday, or any other evening that week, or the next. I could no longer play the ostrich. It was a relapse. McCabe’s mind had to be cleansed of Bebe, emptied of her, and filled with me: with my suffering and humiliation and McCabe’s guilt. I realized that this was not going to happen spontaneously as in a Turgenev novel, because I did not have his lightness of touch. From now on, I would have to tear myself away from the daily joys of cleaning, polishing, and contemplating Shangri-La from the heights of Round Hill, and get to work on McCabe’s coarse brain. Every day. With discipline.
Those two long weeks with no one but Petrona to talk to, I mapped in detail McCabe’s re-education, the necessary condition for her righteous execution. I wrote it in my mind, the only place where I could write without any loss of words. I wrote it in the past tense, to thwart any potential mind reader, civilian or military, human or mechanical.
I have forgotten all but one section of the brain-cleansing method I created for McCabe. Entitled “Humility,” I composed it during my daily searches of Petrona’s car, looking for signs that she was actually taking home the food that McCabe was supposed to have eaten. (What if McCabe was not inside her bedroom and Petrona was her accomplice, secreting the uneaten food in her car?) My searches were thorough, if futile and quick. In the three and a half minutes Petrona spent in the service bathroom shedding her maid uniform and putting on her sad brown dress, I’d scan the interior of the car with a penlight, but mostly I sniffed. My sense of smell was highly developed, closer to a hound’s than a human’s. All gone now, along with my nose. “Humility” remains imprinted in what’s left of my brain because it was born, a line at a time, in the restricted space of Petrona’s dank car, at the same hour each day, with the same smells, light, and shadows. The words come back attached to the seats and the brake, the steering wheel and the filthy mat: “Humility is the ointment that heals all wounds.”
9
Fishing
Two weeks later, a tall, emaciated figure glided silently into the dining room. Darkened eyes sunk in bony eye sockets; high, rounded forehead; forceful nose with delicate nostrils; thin lips; closely cropped black hair that revealed a small, well-drawn skull. The carving knife was two inches away from my right hand, but I dared not grab it. The intruder hesitated for a second, then brutally pulled back a chair and sat on it, spreading her knees.
It was McCabe. It had to be. She, a convention from this point on because she was more than that, and also less, had not yet mastered her new body. Every time she jerked her skinny frame about, as if it was still a hundred pounds heavier, I concentrated on my plate, afraid to show any awareness of her change, or her unexplained absence. Fear was the first and most enduring feeling the new McCabe provoked in me. At the time, I thought that it was compassion, fear of breaking the frail reed, the pitiful sack of bones topped by the incongruous half-mute pinhead. Now I see that it was fear not for, but of her, of what she could do to me. Had I recognized it earlier I might not be dying now under this moldy bed. It was, at the beginning, like being confronted with a body snatcher. I even felt sentimental about the old pig McCabe, whom I might never see again. I wished I had gotten to know her better.
The new McCabe ate voraciously and silently, unlike her logorrheic predecessor who forever pecked at her plate. I hardly heard her voice, beyond her short but courteous greeting at the beginning and end of each meal. It was old McCabe’s voice and it wasn’t: equally deep but stripped of its boom and reverberation, perhaps because it was filtered through a thinner frame. The burden of conversation was now entirely on me. None of old McCabe’s hobby horses resonated with her. She smiled tentatively across the table and once put her fork and knife down for a few seconds to indicate that she was listening. But her darkening eyes were pulled back irresistibly to the half-eaten steak on her plate. Conversation was made insubstantial by the intensity of her hunger. “Burning desire” became not a figure of speech at our dinner table, but a physical fact. I often expected her gaze to turn to ashes the meat on her plate, the tablecloth, even my hands, if I left them on the table. She ate noiselessly, so if I didn’t say a word, absolute silence would set in. In that silence I stared at her hands as she cut her steak and held my breath as she lifted each piece to her mouth. I always expected the piece of meat to fall back on the plate because she never stuck the fork in deep enough, but it never did.
She never mentioned her absence or her metamorphosis. Neither did I. We both pretended that nothing had changed. Or perhaps it was just me who pretended. I have no proof that she was aware of her transformation, although I tested her indirectly many times. Once I asked her if she still liked her deerskin moccasins. (Old McCabe had worn them every day. She owned half a dozen pairs, specially handmade for her at the Reservation Penitentiary in what used to be Arizona.) She furrowed her brow and tightened her lips in cartoonish concentration. “I’m not sure,” she finally said. The next day she wore moccasins for the first and only time. They fit her narrow, elongated feet perfectly, as if they had been made for them and not for old McCabe’s E-wide hooves. Her clothes also fit her new frame. They were not unlike fat McCabe’s clothes (I spotted Moschino leather pants and Dolce and Gabbana sweaters), but they looked worn. It was impossible to tell if they were the same clothes, only altered, or altogether different ones. I doubted she would own an identical set several sizes smaller. Unless she had bought them, planning to lose weight in Elmira. This seemed the only logical explanation. That was a favorite word of
mine, “logical,” constantly abused to mask my intellectual laziness and moral cowardice, and in this case, pure fear.
It occurred to me that this McCabe might like the outdoors more than her heavier predecessor, who had huffed and puffed on our excursion on foot through Elmira. I organized an elaborate fishing trip on the Wanetka River, which would culminate in a picnic by Wanetka Falls. McCabe nodded in what I interpreted as acceptance, and one morning we drove out at sunrise to a point about twenty miles upstream, with the Judge’s old canoe on top of McCabe’s leased armored Land Rover and a food basket Petrona had prepared the day before.
With her bony frame slumped on the passenger seat and her eyes half-closed, McCabe seemed at ease for the first time since her return, maybe even modestly content. We drove in silence as the cratered pavement turned into gravel, then packed dirt, then rutted tracks, and back to pavement, only to resume the cycle in typical post-Reconstruction county-road fashion. Stealing road funds had always been an Elmiran passion, even when I was five, and this road felt buttery-smooth (until it disintegrated in winter, thus requiring spring re-buttering). Reconstruction was a frenzy of thievery, here more than anywhere else. With road monies now a quaint memory, it was every man for his own patch: gravel for the rich and absent (all of Round Hill), packed dirt for the local gentry still clinging to their revivalist dreams, mud and disintegration for all others, according to their means. Only downtown Elmira had two blocks paved with stolen federal military-grade pavement. I swerved right to avoid a boulder. McCabe gasped. “Look,” she said, pointing at a flock of birds flying in a V formation ahead of us. I shot her an open-mouthed glance. “Green-winged teals,” she added, clearly amazed that I didn’t know. “Going to winter on the Gulf Coast.” It was the first full sentence that had escaped her lips. She talked about the migration of gadwalls and teals for the rest of the trip in a deliberate way, often pausing to find the right word, or correcting herself whenever she felt she had been inaccurate.
In another era, McCabe’s sudden eloquence would have been considered a miracle. Now it almost landed us in a ditch, when I lost control of the car, stunned by the unexpected, if tentative, flow of words. I had concluded by then that McCabe had become autistic. My awe soon turned into suspicion. I slowed down to a crawl for the rest of the trip, so I could record in my mind every single word she said, to analyze it later in my room, sitting at the Judge’s desk. Was McCabe’s past muteness and sudden interest in ornithology a deliberate front, a diversionary maneuver to cover whatever she was up to? (I did not think yet to add: or whoever she had become—or, worse, whoever she may have always been under the head-to-toe Moschino leather.) Or was it an outpouring of forgotten memories, unguarded by her now emaciated body and crumbling willpower?
“The Biloxi Marsh is their promised land,” she said with sudden emotion. “Men never conquered it.” I glanced at her and thought I saw tears in her eyes, but it was such a fleeting image that I cannot be sure. We were on a dusty stretch of the road with less than perfect visibility. Her voice was calmer now, almost dreamy, like someone reminiscing about their childhood. “On Christmas Day, 1624,” she said, “Pedro de Horta built a settlement at the southern tip of the marshes and left there a garrison of eighty men. When he returned from New Spain, what we call Mexico, a year later, he found only a man—a blacksmith named Álvaro Ejido—and a dog. Both were dying, curled up in a cot inside the soldiers’ mess room, a round mud-walled shack with dry grass roofing. Ejido pointed to where his seventy-nine companions had been buried, first in neat rows marked by wooden crosses, then in trenches for six or eight, and finally in a deep pit, layer upon layer of corpses, separated by thin layers of mud. The last two had died within hours of each other, about a week before Pedro de Horta’s arrival. By then, Ejido was too weak to bury them. Their rotting bodies still lay on their cots, in the larger, rectangular mud-and-grass shack that was the soldiers’ barracks. Pedro de Horta was afraid the men had died of the plague, so he ordered the entire compound to be burnt down, along with Ejido and the dog, now both dead, and the two rotting soldiers. Pedro de Horta chose two marranos—not pigs, but insincerely converted Jews—to carry out his order, because he was not going to risk the life of a born Christian. The marranos, always eager to please so that their original sin and subsequent duplicity might be overlooked in the New World, or at least not passed on to their children, covered their noses and mouths with their shirts and piled enough grass on top of the four corpses (counting the dog) to set a good fire… . ”
I interrupted, to show her that I was attentive to her story: “Like a Hittite funeral pyre.” She glanced at me. It was an imperceptible glance, but I caught it on the edge of the rearview mirror. There was that same little smile on her lips I had noticed when I invited her to go fishing, but in her eyes I saw (or imagined I saw) a flash of indulgence, as when we forgive a small child for committing an imperfect crime, like stealing a cookie and forgetting to brush the crumbs off her face.
“They set them on fire,” she continued, looking out the window and ignoring my interruption, “but when the grass was consumed the bodies underneath were only half-charred. The two marranos had to repeat the operation seven times (pile up the grass, set the fire, wait until the fire died, root with long tree branches into the smoldering grass to uncover what was left of the bodies, repeat). In the meantime, Pedro de Horta and the rest of his (Christian) men waited for them aboard their ship. Around the time of the fifth torching, the men threatened mutiny if they did not sail immediately. De Horta later wrote in his diary that he considered abandoning the two marranos in the marshes, but that the faces of the would-be mutineers, contorted by fear into the shape of wolves, made him change his mind. He held off his men, with whippings and prayers, through two more torchings, until the marranos came back on board. They were isolated in the bowels of the ship until they arrived in San Cristóbal de La Habana, a week later, but neither of them got sick, De Horta reported in his diary. The two marranos asked his permission to stay in the city and he granted it, since they were now old and had served him well for many years. This was the first and only time men tried to colonize the marshes.” McCabe closed her eyes and seemed to doze. We were reaching the river. “What did the men die of?” I asked. “Does it matter?” she said, her eyes still closed.
10
Sea of Tranquility
We sat in the canoe in silence, transfixed by our fishing rods and the dark green water, avoiding each other’s gaze. It became scorching hot. We did not catch any fish. McCabe insisted on carrying the picnic basket alone all the way to Wanetka Falls, about two miles up on foot and then down a steep, rocky path. She swayed under the basket’s weight and, a few times, staggered and almost lost her footing, but she cut me off with a sharp “No, thanks,” when I offered to help. I walked a few steps behind her, so I don’t know if her face showed tiredness or any emotion. When we finally sat under a weeping willow overlooking the Falls, she looked perfectly fresh.
I told McCabe how I used to picnic under this willow every Sunday in August with my parents and grandmother. I left out the Cohens, who always came along. It must have been my instinctive prudence. Call it paranoiac reflex, if you wish. While I almost never lied, I always suppressed some facts, the reasons opaque even to myself, more like unformed forebodings bubbling up from some subconscious cesspool of fear than reasons in the strictest sense, that is, reasons as a product of the brain’s actuary function, which also churns out shopping lists and tax returns. Seldom did I tell a story about myself that had not been cleansed of certain details that I feared could be used against me. Ninety percent of them were completely trivial. However, I felt safe only if I had taken something out of a story and hidden it in a mental lockbox. How did I get to be so secretive? Being a spic in Elmira and a homo to boot? Or did it have a genetic basis? Survival of the secretivest. Not a bad thing in spite of its ugly hiss.
By the time I was done reminiscing, McCabe had devoured all of her food and was eyei
ng mine. I told her she could take as much as she wanted, because I was not hungry. She ate nine chicken wings, a pound of potato salad, and half a strawberry-rhubarb pie, licking her fingers between each course, and then dozed off. I had never seen McCabe asleep. Old McCabe’s pink, fat self had repulsed me so thoroughly that I usually focused on her left earlobe when politeness forced me to look at her. I always kept a good deal of physical space between us. This new McCabe did not make me gag reflexively. There was a peculiar serenity about her, as if a plump blood sausage had been emptied out, the skin tightened and scraped with an abrasive substance, and then filled with an odorless, colorless essence. Her serenity allowed me to examine her now, with an entomologist’s cold precision.
She was wearing old jeans tucked inside half boots, and a man’s red plaid jacket over a brown turtleneck. It was the first time I had seen her not encased in leather. Her breasts had shrunk to the size of grapefruits. The freckles on her face were smaller and less close to each other, or maybe bigger and so close to each other that they gave her a new complexion, ivory replacing ruddy and blotchy. Perhaps it was just an optical illusion, now that her face was less round and the skin pulled back over her bones.
