The rain turns into hail as I walk home. Even the thick blanket of hemlock branches cannot shield the road from hailstones big as mouse skulls. I’m passing by the Drake’s drive right then so I dodge up it. Maybe I can hang out in their house until the storm passes.
They haven’t replaced the door. The porch is about to fall off the house and hailstones bounce over the threshold into the hallway. I let myself in. It doesn’t seem like they’re home. Windows are shattered and green vines peek into the living room. The room with that clothesline no longer has a door. Inside it is a mountain of sticks and leaves. It looks like a huge bird’s nest. The clothesline and all of Phoebe’s clothes have been woven among the sticks. There are dark clumps jammed into the gaps. I lean into the room and squint. Hair. The dark clumps are hair.
Something small and dense unfurls pain in my head. Hailstones. There’s a hole gaping in the roof. I glance up and see white hailstones dropping out of the black, like I’m flying through space with stars speeding by.
I duck back into the hallway to avoid the hail. It roars inside and outside the house, but behind the roar I hear a noise. A creak, a keen—there is something in the kitchen. A faint clatter—a dark shape flashes across the hall. I take a step down the hallway. None of the lights work. The linoleum floor has peeled away and under my feet there is only glue and grime and cracking wood. The scrabbling grows louder. And then the shadows in the kitchen coalesce and bound down the hallway toward me. It is Mrs. Drake. Her hair is a mat that hangs down her back. She lopes with her hands grazing the floor.
I leap away and trip and stagger out to the porch. Mrs. Drake skids to a stop in the doorway. There is blood on her mouth. Her upper arms have teeth marks in them, and shreds of skin hang down to her elbows like fringe. I run out into the driveway but something makes me stop and turn around. Mr. Drake has joined her in the doorway. The beard he was growing is gone; instead his jaw is covered with oozing scabs. He wears one of Phoebe’s tiny sweaters on his head. The Drakes paw at each other. They flail their arms at me and keen deep in their throats. I flee down the road and the hail pelts my arms and the next morning I am dotted all over with little round bruises.
This valley sees very little of unrelenting grief. How was I supposed to know? How was anyone supposed to understand? We went to the memorial service and then went on with our lives.
The shuttlemen spend one evening in Squeak’s, but next evening finds them in Morocco or California or the asteroid belt. They cannot really comprehend those of us who remain within the mountains. They cannot be blamed for that.
The dead man says, “Does this satisfy you? I am here. And I have brought you a picnic supper.” But I’m not hungry and I’m not horny and I sort of wish he would leave. I bolt the door and yell through the window, “It’s amazing how you can talk so fancy and still be such an insensitive jerk.” But when I walk into the bedroom he’s lying on the bed. I scream and run into the bathroom. He says, “Pickle, dearest, I beg you, listen!” and flings out an arm to stop me from slamming the door. I slam it anyway and sever his wrist. His hand falls onto the bathroom floor and skitters across the tile, groping for my feet. Through the door I hear him moan softly in pain. “Pickle. Help me.”
Trying to move silently, I climb on top of the toilet and hug my knees against my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut very tightly and recite: feet together, ex-tend, left arm, right arm, tuck, pop! over and over again in my head. Eventually I hear him sigh. His hand scrabbles back under the bathroom door. When I’m sure he’s gone, I sag off the toilet. I just manage to get the lid up in time before I’m retching, puking up everything in my stomach, heaving so hard I think I might flip inside out. Mae? Janet? Mrs. Drake? Can anyone tell me what this means?
In Squeak’s bar, the TV says there’s been a shuttle collision. Everyone rushes outside to watch the sky. What they say is, one shuttle on a routine atmospheric trip ran head on into another one coming out of a time warp. “Cougars and time warps.” Cristoff nudges me, grinning. “Who knew?”
The newswoman lists off the casualties. The name that catches my attention is David Drum.
Oh.
According to the crowd outside, the time warp has caught the shuttles in some kind of loop. They collide and explode and a peach blossom ignites in the sky. The flower falls a little ways, begins to flicker, until very abruptly it is snuffed out, and the collision reappears higher in the sky.
Holy shit, the shuttlemen say. Who’da thunk. Lookee there. But I don’t really feel like looking at all. Estranged or no, I’ve got no desire to watch my husband, my high-school sweetheart, bloom and die over and over and over again.
Feeling their mortality, the shuttlemen tip well. I walk home with forty dollars in my pocket. The rain is giving the valley a rare reprieve and the sky floods with pink and gold. On the gravel road where no one can see me, I skip. I kick up stones and send them skittering into the bushes.
Something has lifted off my heart. It makes me want to do beautiful things. It makes me want to check up on the Drakes, one more time.
Their roof is completely gone. The walls have fallen away and lie mouldering in the earth. Whatever gestated in that house has finally sloughed off its cocoon of plywood and sheetrock.
The Drakes are still there, though. In what was once the living room, on what was once the couch but is now a mound of fibers and leaves. They are naked, bodies cupped, having marital relations out for everyone to see. His hands clutch her breasts, and the muscles of his back ripple, gleaming in the orange light of the sunset. She throws her head back, mouth open, teeth bared, exultation painted across her face.
In the driveway I tremble. For some reason I flash back to junior year, when my ex-best-friend Janet spent several weeks believing she could become a veterinarian. She read to me from her animal books, wide-eyed, giggling, The penis of the male cat is covered by large, pointed, horny spines, or “papillae.” My body is shot through with heat, lines of fire that race from my chest to my groin.
They both freeze and stare at me. Did I make a noise? I didn’t realize. For a moment everything is silent. I am held in their golden eyes. Then they leap up with a wild noise, flinging their heads around, clutching each other’s hands. They scream at me.
Their screams pluck a note that first sounded when I was six and I lost my mother in a crowd. It sounded when Janet declared she was no longer my best friend, and when the tri-state cheerleading trophy went to a squad in the next valley. It sounded the night Davy left. But there are other notes playing as well in the raw and unchained throats of Mr. and Mrs. Drake. And the music is not sadness or anger or defiance or pain or anything else I will ever know. They no longer beckon to me. I will be left behind.
Far up the mountain I hear something else. Other screams from other voices. Other creatures calling to Mr. and Mrs. Drake.
They watch me for one last moment. It’s okay, I whisper to them. Go. They turn and leap over the collapsed walls of their house, gallop up the mountain and disappear into the deep woods.
As I walk back to my house the rain begins again but I do not feel it. The mountain air enrobes me like a force field. Rays of light extend from my body out into the void. I imagine what it is like to give yourself over to pain. To become that porous. To have the mountain seep in everywhere. To wake up one morning and find your lungs replaced by two surging hemlock saplings. Your brain turned into a black stone covered with jewel-bright moss. Your dick transformed into the barbed apparatus of a mountain devil.
I am too full, I will burst. So I laugh. HA! The mountain thrums at the frequencies of my laughter. The trees ring like a thousand bells.
Then I break up with the dead man. I chase him out of the house with a knife. His eyes are liquid with fear, not for himself but for me. “Pickle, please!” He speaks like I am a spooked horse. “I love you!”
Love, ha. As if. He has no heart. To prove this I stab him in the chest. He does not exp
lode or collapse or blow away on the wind. His lips form a wordless cry of pain and his eyes well up. A single maggot wriggles out of the wound and drops into the wet grass.
I tell him, “I don’t want to see you here anymore. Get back under the ground. You have no place in this world. I have no place for you.”
Rain plasters his hair to his head. He extends an arm to me. What a fine arm it is; muscles neatly toned, nails clean and trim.
But I keep my face expressionless and stand with my arms crossed until finally his shoulders sag, and he turns and leaves. My eyes follow him down the mountain until he has disappeared from view. Even then I don’t cry.
It seems cruel, doesn’t it? But I had to do this.
I had to do this because I am pregnant.
The dead man is the father. We used protection, sure, but early on I noticed that the used condoms all had smoking holes blasted through the ends of them. Since then I’ve had a feeling this might happen. And no baby of mine will be born into a house filled with residues of gravedust and melancholy.
I will have a daughter. I will name her Lele, after the girl in Lance Harbinger’s number-one single, because honestly that is the most sublime music I have ever heard. I will explain to her that her father was a liar and a traitor, who betrayed his comrades-in-arms and so was executed by them. Together we will come to forgive him.
I will take her out into the night when it’s raining. I will hold her up into the sky just like she’s about to do her own seven quarter cradle. “Lookee there!” I will yell, and thunder will crash and lightning will split the sky into a thousand feline grins.
Don’t say I’m nuts or anything. I’m not. I know this will make baby Lele cry. For each of her wails, I will wail louder. She will howl and I will scream. We’ll rend the air so terribly that the rain will be afraid to fall on us. The raindrops will stare at us as they go by.
If our lungs are strong enough our wails will carry up the mountaintops and the untamed things will pause. If we are lucky, Mr. and Mrs. Drake will prick their ears. They will remember the long-ago day when they blessed me and called me kind. We will pull them down the mountain, and the cougar too, and all of the windswept creatures with bright fangs and brighter eyes. All around us, behind curtains of rain, beasts will cavort and moan and tumble. My lawn will be churned into a black swamp. The mud will splash up on my calves as I leap up, to bring Lele closer to the sky.
That is how I will let her know. That is how I will tell her, my perfect child, just how far I would go for her. Because the truth is, there is nothing the Drakes did that I would not also do. We are all three human beings, after all. Maybe they would disagree, but I know better. I saw what they did and it is what humans do for each other. They tear the roofs off their houses. They peel bands of skin from their arms with their own teeth. They let themselves be penetrated by the giant thorny penises of wild cat-men. Because otherwise, what would we be? And what is love, anyway?
Later at night after I have laved the mud and rain and white flecks of animal spittle from Lele’s face, I will lay her in the cradle. I will pull the quilt to her chin and tuck her in. I will hum to her a gentle version of the song that bears her name. I will listen to her hushed exhalations and feel my heart expand, until she and I are all that exists in this tiny valley, ringed by these black mountains, on this desperate planet, under the trembling stars. I will stand in the doorway until she has fallen asleep. I will not let her grow up in a world without fear.
Rich People
Nobody stopped me. I smiled at the doormen like we were old friends. I followed the other guests and walked like I knew exactly where I had to be. The hallways were dim and reddish. Sometimes I made wrong turns and had to double back; even then I walked surely. As I got farther into the house there were more people about, and a deep humming pervaded the air. Some guests had hooks embedded in their necks and shoulders that trailed long graceful streamers. The flickering sconces made everybody look like stained-glass saints.
Finally I reached the ballroom. Usually such places are a disappointment, but here the floor was a rink of gold. The walls soared up, the ceiling obscured by vapor and heat and candle smoke. Everywhere people stood and spoke to each other, their mouths bright clots of blood that slid around their faces. I moved through the crowd and caught flecks of conversation like insects in my hair.
“She’s really opening herself up to the opportunity of this country,” someone said.
“That submarine is just not a joy I want to live without any longer.”
So this was the hum. It was as though they were putting on a show for me, though they were not. Even their most unguarded selves were a sumptuous performance. I felt awe.
Nearly every day I have passed by this house. I know its outside like a favorite picture book. The shards of glass embedded in the top of the garden wall, the gargoyles vomiting dirty water. I had always imagined what lay inside to be painted in colors that my eyes could not comprehend. Instead it felt as though I were descending deeper into my own brain. Anything I could think of existed somewhere in the ballroom. I saw a woman so laden with diamonds she had to bend over and crawl on all fours. The strands of diamonds hung down all around her body and over her head, making her look like a shaggy, sparkling dog.
A butler stepped into my vision, offering to squeeze truffle oil into my mouth from a dropper. I let it fall on my lips and then thought why the hell not; I kissed his meaty neck with reverence. Under his skin, his pulse deferred.
I rode a surge of blood or ocean. Imminently it would break upon the shore and I would learn something about myself. Seeking air I clicked across the golden floor, slipped through the glass doors and out onto the balcony. The night was sharp and alien. Many people mingled out here also, styling themselves explorers on a new planet. A woman lifted an ancient diving helmet off her head, shook out her long hair, and smiled to her companions. Behind the house a balcony jutted out several stories above the ground. I went to the edge and looked over the railing. Glittering below was a fountain, a wide expanse of water in which many fish the size of men, and a young boy, had been turned to stone and now pissed and spat water elegantly through the air. Beyond the fountain was a severely curated lawn. Beyond the lawn someone had practiced the art of creating fragrant wilderness, vines and weeping trees that trembled in the breeze with desire. Beyond the trees I could see the lights of the city and the place I had come from.
A knot of people next to me laughed dangerously. One young man held a knife in his palm. Everyone backed away from him, licking their lips. He pinched the spine of the blade between his thumb and forefinger and flung the knife high up into the night. It vanished into the darkness, and he was so rich—everyone was so rich—that it never came down.
Earlier that day I had decided it might be easier to talk about myself as though I were a separate person. For example:
Fuck that Suya, what a fucking pig! Would you get a load of the place she lives in? Hair and candy wrappers and disintegrating snot rags in the corners. She promised to vacuum this weekend, but when has Suya ever kept a promise? The counters and stove going gummy with dust and crumbs and thick grease.
There she is right now, curled on her ass in one corner of the futon. She digs an M&M out from a crease in the cushion and checks to make sure the old woman is not watching before she pops it into her mouth. Watch how her eyes close momentarily at the sweetness of the candy, as though it is the only brush with the sublime she can ever hope for.
The fan stirs dead skin cells around the air. Suya woke this morning with a dark room in her mind. She does not know either how to enter or close the door. She wonders if the old woman can detect her thoughts. She doubts it. This idea is both solace and intolerable to her. She swallows her candy-flavored saliva, and then her mouth is bare again.
A wail reminds her to rise and walk to the bathroom. White flecks of toothpaste spit coat the mirror like sea s
pray. Long dark hairs cling to the walls of the shower where Suya has pasted them. Pink scum rings the toilet bowl. The baby is strapped in its bouncy chair on the tile floor. It is coolest in the bathroom, and the baby’s skin had been feeling hot to the touch.
When Suya sticks her head through the doorway the baby begins to bob and flap. White-tinged bubbles cluster in the corners of its mouth like amphibious eggs. The baby wails again and some of those bubbles slide down the creases of its chin, drip into the bib. Despite this Suya does not go to it. She stands at the threshold, the fingers of one hand resting barely on the doorframe, and she looks.
This is not Suya’s baby. That is not Suya’s mother. There is a fourth resident of this apartment, a man, the center around which they orbit. The crone is his mother. The baby is his child by a woman who loved him in the past. Suya loves him in the present. Because she is an idiot, whether he loves her in return is not a question she has asked. Yesterday morning he went out to pick up lozenges and made the choice not to return home. In the time since then he makes this same choice over and over.
In his absence, Suya feels the strands of fake motherhood, daughterhood, attempt to grow between herself, the crone, and the baby, like the filaments of an invasive and relentless algae. Revolted, she swipes at her shoulders. She tilts her head and tries to view the baby not as a being but a mark, a record, a proof. Once he cared for someone else as much/more than Suya, and he continues, in some way, to care for this person. Suya grooms her jealousy like she might enter it into a pageant. She tilts her head the other way and pictures the baby without any skin.
How rich were they? Here’s how rich.
Rich enough that they could live forever and never be hurt by anything. Or else, rich enough that they could be hurt by everything and never need to worry. Some people there were even rich enough that they could slice off little bits of their own flesh and serve it to their friends on top of rice balls, like sushi. They nibbled each other, and then there were little gilt comment cards on which they rated their friends based on freshness and tenderness of flesh, superlative mouthfeel, choiceness of cut. I stood by the buffet tables and watched two young people descend into a quarrel over the poor ratings they had given each other. They rolled their eyes and sneered, their lips still flavorful with the fat of the other.
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