Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  I try to reach out to her with my senses, but I see only the reflected light from the room behind me. She isn’t altogether gone, though. I can almost hear the echo of her words as she said my name, giving to me its meaning like some kind of gift: Pearl. A secret and underwater thing.

  The next morning, when Marni and Paul prepare to set out for the boat ramp, I tell them I’ll join them later. They don’t seem especially surprised. I hug and kiss them and tell Marni to be careful around the water and she rolls her eyes. When they’re gone, I pull on my hiking boots and a hat to keep the sun off—though when I think of those canopied trees stretching to meet each other, I don’t suppose I’ll need it.

  I’m going off the trail again. That is where Edda and Dick must have gone—I feel sure of it, though I don’t know why; it could be nothing but a story I’m telling myself, in the absence of anything else. I have no reason to be certain, but then, I don’t think reason will help me now. I can almost scent the wilderness in my nostrils; I mean to heed its call. I think that’s what they must have done. They went into the forest, immersing themselves in its warm humidity, the water and the air like a single element.

  I think of the deer that paused to look at me under the trees. Was she trying to warn me that there is danger in it? But I turned back once; I won’t again.

  I try to follow the same route I took yesterday. Almost at once I feel a presence tracking my footsteps, though when I look around, there’s nothing to see; only moss hanging from the trees like tangled hair, branches reaching towards me like pale arms. I imagine a witch, or perhaps it’s only an echo; my own thoughts, maybe. The words that come to me are great-grandmother.

  After a time I realise I’m standing in the same place I saw the deer. She isn’t here now but I think I catch a trace of her scent, musky and vibrantly alive. I lean under the trees and push the undergrowth aside and see that narrow path, barely wide enough for a deer or a human to pass. The thick canopy makes it appear almost like a tunnel. Sunlight filters through the leaves; the air is redolent of green and living things.

  I duck under a trailing strand of Spanish moss and sink into the path to my ankles—I’m not sure if it’s made of earth or water. The liquid is warm, making me think of leeches, of black and wriggling and slimy things.

  Marni’s face flashes before me and I suddenly have no idea what I’m doing here. The certainty I felt earlier evaporates. I know nothing about this place, or about my old friends, not really. I don’t know where they went or what happened to them. How could I? Possibly they’re still lost in some corner of the Ringling Residence, surrounded by its red and gold opulence. If I looked hard at their postcard, I might even see their faces peering from behind an archway or between the pillars of the balcony. I might see their eyes reflected in the crystals of the chandelier or a golden statue.

  I look up, with that civilised, normal, safe interior filling my mind, and am fixed by the sight of a hawk perched on a branch not far above my head. It challenges me with its yellow eyes. A snake dangles from its talons.

  Something inside me goes still. Here, I think.

  I don’t call out for Dick and Edda. What would be the use? But I step forward, brushing hair-like moss away from my face, ducking beneath the branches, stepping from root to root. I know I’m growing close when I see little clouds floating past me: the cotton-like seed of a water-loving plant. There is something ahead of me—not yet seen, but I feel its presence anyway. It’s shadowy under the trees and difficult to make out, but it appears to be black water. I hear the sudden loud buzzing of flies.

  With another step comes the trace of something on the air—a terrible sweetness. There is knowledge in that sound, that scent.

  It surprises me not at all when I see the pool beneath the trees. I knew it would be there, waiting for me. I peer between the branches, trying to see its surface; to look beneath. The water isn’t black after all. It is every colour—brown and blue and darkly green, flecked with shining gold. And I see another forest growing within its depths. I wonder if I will be able to reach it—to learn the secrets it has kept all these long days.

  The buzzing grows louder. I brush a fly away from my face—it has grown fat on whatever bounty it discovered here. I take another step. I want to look into the pool. What will I see—something beautiful? Will I find a nymph—a great-grandmother—a witch? Or only my own reflection: a secret and underwater thing?

  Whatever it is, it will be like a story that has already been told. I will never again be able to discover its ending—or forget what it is that I have learned.

  I take a deep breath and walk towards the pool.

  LOWCOUNTRY TIDINGS

  DAN CHAON

  AS WE COME INTO THE LIVING ROOM I notice that there is a chimpanzee sitting in one of the red velvet wingback chairs by the fireplace. The animal appears to be smoking a blunt. He holds the cigar tip between his thumb and index finger and takes a long drag. His toes play with each other as he puckers his lips and blows out a stream of smoke, but otherwise his expression remains skeptical and vaguely unfriendly.

  ‘Holy shit!’ I say. ‘A monkey! That is so cute!’

  Beside me, Patch clears his throat uncomfortably. ‘Will,’ he says, and places the palm of his hand on my back, ‘this is Ward.’ Then he gestures toward the chimp. ‘Ward,’ he says, ‘This is my old friend Will, the one I told you about.’

  Ward is less than impressed. He takes another grim puff from his blunt, and then he shrugs and makes a few elaborate gestures with his hands. Sign language, I guess, because Patch responds in kind and they have a little back and forth, signing at each other in an emphatic way that feels like it’s a restrained argument.

  Then Patch turns to me. ‘Let’s go out back, okay?’

  Despite the fact that he’s lost his medical license and he’s been dealing with multiple lawsuits, Patch still has his vacation home on Pawley’s Island, South Carolina. It’s not exactly a mansion, but it’s big enough that the front porch has columns, and the house sits on high stilts above a long backyard, perhaps an acre of tightly mown grass, sloping down and gently ending at the Waccamaw River, where the root-stumps of cypress trees peek up from the water like periscopes.

  ‘Dude,’ I say, as we stand there on the back deck. ‘When did you get the chimp? That’s, like, so exotic!’

  ‘Listen,’ Patch says. ‘Could you please not refer to him as a ‘chimp,’ or a ‘monkey?’ That’s very upsetting to him.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘Sorry!’

  ‘His name is Ward,’ Patch says. ‘Just call him Ward.’

  ‘Cool,’ I say.

  Patch lights a cigarette, his hand trembling a little, and we watch the fireflies bobbing above the grass. ‘Maybe don’t use the word ‘exotic,’ either,’ he says. ‘That’s problematic.’

  I hadn’t seen Patch in a number of years. We’d been roommates in our younger days, but we’d taken very different paths after that. Truthfully, I might have never seen him again if he hadn’t come on hard times. In general, people don’t contact me unless they’re desperate.

  I look over at Patch and realize that he’s crying. Under the yellow buglight, a tear hangs pendulously from his nose.

  ‘Dammit,’ he says, and gives his left eye a hard wipe, and I pat him on the shoulder as he swallows a sobbing sound.

  ‘There, there,’ I say. I would give him a bear hug, but he has never been a person who likes to be squeezed.

  ‘My life is ruined, Will,’ he says. ‘I know that sounds melodramatic.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I say. ‘Most people have more than one life.’

  We’re silent for a moment as he considers this, and then at last he gives me a pained sigh. ‘I don’t have any idea what that means,’ he says, and flicks his cigarette out toward grass, where it nearly nicks a firefly. The knees of the cypress peer back at us, and Patch shakes another cig out of his pack.

  ‘Ugh,’ he says, and I watch him gaze up at the sky: posed, contemplative, wit
h cigarette. ‘Ugh!’ he says, and breathes smoke. The fingernail slice of moon hangs over the river, and he considers it as if it’s a design element he’s thinking of getting rid of.

  ‘So,’ he says at last. ‘You have them with you?’

  ‘Sure, of course,’ I say. ‘They’re out in my camper. But we don’t have to worry about that until tomorrow.’

  He nods, and then turns back to his assessment of the moon. ‘Ugh,’ he says.

  I told him when he first called me that he might be asked to do things he wouldn’t like. There are lots of unpleasant uses for a disgraced M.D. with financial problems. I said, ‘If you have any other options, Patch. Really.’

  It’s my job to connect normal people to bad people. And then often the bad people will connect them to worse people, and the worse people will connect them with truly evil people, and I said to Patch, ‘As a friend, I’d advise against it.’

  We go back into the house and I take a quick survey of the room. Very minimalist, upper middle-class Scandinavian furniture with a few folksy touches here and there. There’s a nice needlepoint wall-hanging that has a picture of a boy child and a girl child underneath a cypress tree. ‘Lowcountry Tidings,’ it says, one of those folk art things that might be worth a lot of money, and I make a note of it. It might be worth stealing.

  Ward is still sitting in the same chair looking at something on a laptop, and he glances up and does another bit of hand puppetry in Patch’s direction. I have no knowledge of American Sign Language whatsoever; nevertheless, I can intuit that the tenor of the exchange was of a quarrelling nature, and it feels kind of obvious that I myself am the subject of their disagreement. But I try not to be uncomfortable.

  ‘Hey, Ward,’ I say. ‘How’s it going, buddy?’ He just stares at me for what feels like a full minute before he finally lifts his paw, or maybe I should say hand, into a gesture of hello.

  Once I read a news story about a female chimpanzee in a zoo who had a baby, and the birth went fine, no problems, and she was nursing the infant and taking care of it like a real little mother. Doting on it, grooming it, rocking it.

  But something went wrong. One morning not long after the birth, the baby chimp died. Unknown causes—an autopsy wasn’t performed because the mother refused to relinquish the infant. She wouldn’t let it out of her arms.

  So the zoologists were interested in this behavior, and they wanted to see how it would play out. They let her keep her dead baby and they thought it was fascinating that she carried it with her everywhere, like a doll. Weeks went by, and months, and the corpse began to mummify, and as it desiccated the mother started to eat bits of it until at last all that remained was a single bone, which she continued to carry with her.

  I’m thinking about this while I make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the kitchen, and Patch and Ward are sitting on the couch watching YouTube videos on a laptop. Ward has his arm draped over Patch’s shoulders companionably.

  I’m thinking that most people would read it as a story about a mother’s grief, but for some reason that doesn’t seem like the right metaphor. I’d like to mention it but I realize it’s probably not appropriate.

  ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘Do y’all have any milk? I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk with this sandwich.’

  Patch glances over. ‘We’re a dairy-free household,’ he says. ‘But there’s almond milk.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ I say. ‘I didn’t realize almonds had titties.’

  It’s lame, but it’s an attempt. Back in the old days, Patch was a sucker for bad jokes and puns, but now I reckon he has more sophisticated taste. ‘Tsk,’ he says, and turns back to his laptop, where something on-screen amuses him. He laughs and Ward makes a laughing face as well, silently tilting his head and pulling his lips back to expose his long, sharp incisors. After a moment, I smile along with them, as one does when other people find something funny.

  At least it seems that Patch has recovered from his weepiness—back to his old self, which is good, I guess.

  In the old days, when Patch and I were roommates and best friends, people always thought it was funny. Patch is thin, short and severe, and has been bald since his early twenties; whereas I am six foot six, built like a linebacker and very hairy—I have rocked long braid or ponytail plus beard since I was a teenager. I was a stoner of low ambition and questionable intelligence, a philosophy major and player of hacky-sack, whereas Patch was a driven and neurotic pre-med, a future surgeon. Patch was raised in a tony suburb north of Chicago; whereas I grew up in a trailer park in Wyoming. And so forth. The unlikeliness of our friendship delighted our acquaintances. They said we should have our own tv show.

  The truth was, most of the things that brought us close were not apparent to the people who knew us. We both had bad habits, nasty habits. We liked to shoplift together, for example, we were both thieves and we both enjoyed telling lies for no reason, and doing light vandalism—lighting fires in bathrooms, putting nails in the tires of cars, dissolving a tab of LSD into a coffeemaker in the Registrar’s office.

  We never actually had sex, but there were some physical things that felt very private. In winter, we would sit together in our underwear underneath a blanket on the couch, watching TV or playing videogames, and we would snuggle our bodies together for warmth, and sometimes, drunk and stoned, we would wrestle to electronic dance music and blow pot smoke into each other’s mouths, not quite kissing.

  This stuff is probably not important—I wouldn’t even bring it up, except I recall there was this one time when we were tripping on mushrooms, and I was giving him a scalp massage and he leaned back and was like, Will, what sound does a gorilla make? And I was like, ‘oo-oo-oo,’ and he was like, keep doing that, and I kept on rubbing his head and making my ape noises and he put his hands down the front of his pants and began stroking himself and it was slightly uncomfortable but I accepted it because I was ’shrooming and it seemed like everything in the world was good and acceptable.

  And now I feel like, meeting Ward: hmm. What’s that about?

  None of my business, really.

  I finish my sandwich and they finish their video and then we go out onto the back deck and sit in some sweet Adirondack chairs, passing a bong between us. Patch puts on some music. The weed is some kind of indica dominant strain, very physical, and the chirping of frogs in the river seems to pulse pleasantly against my skin. There are schools of tadpoles in the shallows of the river, Patch says, and if we hear a splash it’s probably baby alligators come to eat them.

  ‘Alligators!’ I say. ‘That’s so cool.’

  ‘Oh, they’re a nuisance,’ Patch says. ‘Our neighbor found a ten-foot monster in her pool last week.’

  ‘But they don’t attack people, right?’ I say. ‘I’ve always heard that they’re more afraid of us than we are of them!’

  ‘Not really,’ Patch says. ‘They’re not terribly aggressive, but I wouldn’t call them shy, either.’

  He takes a sip from his very strong screwdriver, which appears to be about 7/8 vodka, and shrugs. ‘In any case,’ he says. ‘We won’t have any problem disposing of corpses, if need be.’

  Patch had become a minor crime news celebrity in the past year because it was discovered that he had been using an argon beam to burn his initials onto the organs of people he’d been operating on. This came to light after one of his patients had another surgery performed by a second doctor, who reported that Patch had branded his initials in elaborate cursive on the patient’s liver. I’m not precisely sure how it was discovered, but it shortly thereafter was revealed that he’d graffitied a number of people’s internal organs with his signature over the years. It didn’t hurt them—the wounds were cosmetic, tattoos they couldn’t see and wouldn’t have ever known about.

  Yet some felt violated by this, and a considerable scandal ensued.

  Lawsuits followed, a revocation of the medical license, public excoriation on social media, the scorn of his community. Then came the retreat
to the vacation home in South Carolina. I’d be curious to know at what point in this timeline the chimpanzee was purchased—from a medical research facility, I’m guessing? But it’s hard to figure how to worm such questions into casual conversation. I imagine that Ward doesn’t like to be reminded that he’s a pet with an owner.

  Instead, we spend a long time discussing our favorite episodes of Night Gallery and Black Mirror, exchanging entertainment gossip about music groups that we liked when we were in college. The drummer of one of our favorite rock bands had joined a doomsday cult, according to Patch; the lead guitarist had quietly died of a heroin overdose.

  ‘Ugh,’ Patch says. ‘After a certain age, doesn’t it seem like all you talk about is the passage of time?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘That’s weird,’ and I watch as he exchanges a melancholy gesture with Ward, a clarification or an aside, I don’t know, but Ward grins broadly and hands me the bong and I take it and make a point of not balking that there is monkey slobber around the mouthpiece.

  I take a hit and hold it in, look down at the river and the cypress trees and the fireflies. There is a windchime that is making its sweet, puzzled xylophone sounds, and the singing of the frogs that the alligators haven’t yet eaten. I was nervous about how our meeting might play out, but now I’m feeling more relaxed.

  ‘Do you mind if I take off my shoes and socks?’ I say.

  Patch starts up a monologue about sheep-human hybrids, and pig-human hybrids. Chimeras, he calls them, and rambles for a while about blastocysts and genome editing technology, and goes into a long explanation of what an RNA-guided DNA endonuclease enzyme is—the upshot being, according to Patch, the technology now exists to grow human organs inside of pigs or sheep, so if you wanted to you could keep a herd of them with your DNA, just growing replacement organs for you as needed.