The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  I tried to get up but my hair was caught in the cap of the chair. I tried to lift it off my head but that just made things worse, and my tears of pain and humiliation stung my eyes. As I struggled, I watched Sasha get up and, in that louche, swaying gait of hers, move off toward the bar.

  When I finally managed to pull myself loose, I’d torn off clumps of hair left hanging from the cap. With a sinking sense of betrayal—this had clearly been the second part of my initiation—I made my way to the door. Sasha’s reflection spiraled around the mirrored room like a brushfire. Even from here, I could feel her heat.

  “Wait!” She came to me, her pure black irises half concealed by heavy lids. She wore a patchwork suit of beige suede. I searched her face, committing its wide mouth and low brow to memory the way Narn’s customers would try to memorize the paths and byways to her hidden hut of stories and healing. But then something skittered across her eyes, and her parted lips transformed into a chasm, and I knew then that I too was lost.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” she said. She pressed a drink into my hand, her long clawed nails scraping against my palm. Her voice scratched at the digital layer in my brain, my broken system registering the intrusion. “Come.”

  She took me to a quiet corner, sat down on a love seat and made some room beside her. The crowd had thinned but those who remained were drinking hard, crumbs on their fingers, lipstick-smeared mouths around loaded silver forks.

  “I wasn’t prepared for a second trial,” I said, concentrating on not bringing a hand to my stinging scalp. “Pagan said I was in.”

  A wrinkle of irritation rippled, it seemed, not across Sasha’s jawline, but under it, like a caterpillar. “My gatherum, my rules,” she said with a heavy fluttering of her eyelids that restored her face back to its singular perfection. “One can never be too sure.”

  The candles dripped wax and the music had turned sultry. “Did I go too far?” I asked.

  “Everyone here feels more alive than they have in months,” she said. “Because of you. And it’s only your second time.”

  She touched my wrist. The opaline eye on her ring ate the light. A waiter arrived with a plate of food on a tray. Sasha took it and stabbed her fork into a chunk of meat and delicately began to chew, a drop of red juice running down her chin. With her mouth full of food, she told me that she decided to have me read every week, not twice a month as originally intended.

  “Every week?” I hesitated, thinking of Narn and how much that would ask of her.

  “Can’t have too much of a good thing.” Sasha dabbed her chin with a napkin. “Don’t worry about the scholarship. Or anything. You’re Fearsome family now.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Don’t thank me.” She put one of her unusually long fingers across my lips. “This reading’s been starved of people like you. Do you want to know why I love Wellsburg? Not just because I was born and I will die here.” The pressure of her finger forced my lips apart. “But also because Wellsburg’s history is played on the battleground between hope and fear—when the only hope is fear. And vice versa. Without terror to unite us—we’ll destroy each other.” I felt my teeth break the skin of my lips under the pressure of her silencing finger. “That’s what Fearsome Gatherum is for. It may seem like a game, and it is. But games are a metaphor for life. And for death. Hearts and minds, Meera. Losing either is not an option.”

  My lips were sufficiently open so I could, if I tried, have pressed the tip of my tongue against her finger. I felt glued to it, sutured to her like a bad graft, some scientific experiment gone wrong. I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t. I tried harder, but my lips were stuck fast to her finger. Saliva pooled and overflowed. I couldn’t swallow—her eyes were black disks haloed in red, like a total eclipse of the sun.

  “We needed to find a voice to bridge the gap between the ‘fake’ and the ‘lore.’ A storyteller for the age. Tales to conjure our deepest fears, only to vanquish them for all time. Like yours, in a word.” A tendon throbbed on her pale neck. “And don’t worry . . .”

  She took her finger away, put it in her mouth and sucked it clean.

  “. . . if you go too far, you’ll be the first to know.”

  That night, in spite of the pass Sasha had arranged to exempt me from the curfew, Pagan and some of the other Regulars walked me halfway across the bridge.

  “Sasha’s orders,” Pagan said rummaging for a cigarette. “Oh, and as a regular performer, you get a waiver on membership fees, so there’s that.”

  Performer. I liked that. She offered me a bag of her old sweaters—barely worn—and to send me a playlist of some of her favorite music, links to the trending blogs. “We’re all sisters now,” she said, smacking me playfully on the bottom. On this cold, clear November night, I actually felt that yes, it could be true. Sasha had revealed her shadowy side, but knew nothing of mine. I was unbreakable. We stood on the bridge, leaning against the illuminated railings. Ahead of us the Tower Village dorms glowed against the sky like hospitals or prisons. The stars swung from a low sky, black as pitch, and my mind flew to where meteors tore across the cathedral night and the bush was peopled with fleshy ghosts and ghostly flesh. But this is where I belonged now, on this bridge above the blue-veined mist with my real sisters. Narn had been right in sending me away. I was safer here. Eric and the ravens were one family, but this was another, bought with an exchange of fear for love. The mist over the river parted for a moment, and Pagan pointed at a yellow light moving far below and someone said, what if it’s the Hunter, and someone else said that beavers still swam in the river—but you couldn’t hunt them anymore. Someone else asked me if the beavers where I came from were as big, or as wet. And someone said they heard that beavers in South Rim had wings, like bats, and could fly. And we all made beaver jokes and I laughed and I heard my own laugh among theirs and I felt like I’d been made anew.

  CHAPTER 16

  STINKY SISTER

  “Your round,” Marvin said. It was two Fridays later at Dirty Bert’s. I was late for happy hour, and he was already three drinks ahead of me. Seemed I was always running late these days. My stunted reflection left a blue smear in the thick glass windows of the village, as nightly, I tried to leave it behind. A runt in high hair and bespoke shoes (Pagan had sent me to her bootmaker), heads turned on the Corso as I passed. I told myself it was because it was easy, with a bit of effort, to stand out at a campus where everyone else tried not to. But another part, unspoken, hoped that the stares, the whispers, were because of how I was becoming beautiful. Like Kai.

  “You’re a vision,” Marvin said. “Look at your hair. Like a black halo.”

  I blushed. I was still high from another triumphant Gatherum reading—the waves of applause, of sobs and gags still ringing in my ear. I chugged my drink and told him how Kai always said I could never read a room but that I thought I was learning. And it was true. Over the last couple of Gatherums, I had begun to gauge the muted clink of silverware, the slurp of rare meat soaking in the fragrant pools of blood. I read the discrete signal to a passing waiter for a quick tryst up against a bathroom sink. I eavesdropped on the texts Pagan sent to her dealer. But most of all, I had learned to read the collective inhale when I took my position in the electric chair. And when I opened the notebook, I heard the coded tap of the maple branches outside the window and I knew that someone out there was reading it too.

  “Nothing like rising to the challenge,” Marvin said, covering a yawn.

  I told him about how the ghost of the Hunter had appeared in my room, but he just shrugged. “It was Halloween. What do you expect?”

  “Well,” I said. “He had a gun.”

  “You’ve always been good at finding lost things, Meera,” he said through a desultory mouthful of crushed ice. “And they, you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You found me.”

  I leaned over
and kissed him on the cheek. “You okay?”

  “Can I read your latest story?” he asked.

  “You can try.” I pushed the notebook toward him, trying to avoid puddles of ketchup and melted ice.

  He leafed through it—the black feather slipped out of the pouch and he absently tucked it back in. The pages were half-filled with what I’d scrawled with his blunt pencil. My handwriting had always been poor, made even more illegible because of Marvin’s indentations—not that it mattered. Between Narn’s unspooling and my retelling, I mostly knew the stories off by heart. And if I didn’t, I had Kai’s voice in my head telling me to wing it.

  “I can just picture you,” Marvin said, miming someone fluffing out their hair. “A vision in your finery, ironically strapped into the chair. Careful not to let the steel cap mess you up.”

  “I open the notebook, mainly for show, for the drama . . .” I said, playing along.

  “. . . to slow down time . . .”

  “. . . to read the room . . .”

  “. . . the bridge between you and them . . .”

  “. . . we meet in the middle . . .”

  “. . . and when you go your separate ways . . .” He passed the notebook back. “. . . you’ve forgotten who is who.”

  “They can’t get enough of me,” I said, “actually.”

  “Is there enough of you, actually?”

  There was once, I thought. Once I was double.

  “Are those new headphones?” I asked to change the subject.

  “Did some casual work at the bookstore—they’re a display set.” He adjusted them and went for a moment to that secret place of his. It occurred to me that we could be falling in love. I felt a feathery lick of desire between my legs, my bits swollen with possibility. And suddenly he was back, pushed the headphones off, leaving his silver hair sticking out around his face.

  “You know how you were raised by three sisters?”

  “Two,” I said. I was feeling drunker and flirtier than I should have been.

  “Tell me about them.”

  Happy hour was over. “Narn’s the leader, I guess. She’s the one who got to be a witch, or who found enough that was witchy in herself to grow into that role. And my Aunt Mag—”

  “So Narn’s like the mother? I mean because you call the others ‘Aunt,’ so . . .”

  I thought about it. “Yeah, I do. I guess it’s because she brought us into the world. Got the eggs—two by mistake because her eyes were never great. And fertilized them in vitro, used her botanicals and who knows what else, and delivered us herself. Alone.”

  “Risky witch.”

  “The ravens kept watch . . . never mind. Where are you going with this, Marvin?”

  “Tell me about the other one.”

  “Mag’s the baby. They changed form, like Narn, either to mask their truth or to remember it. Tattooed a map of the underworld across their face so that they would never forget what hell was really like. Not a picnic.”

  “Neither is Paradise. So I’ve heard.”

  “They pulled out their own tongue so they could never ask anyone how to get back there, knowing they’d always be tempted.” I’d never spoken of this. Not even to myself. I didn’t know how I knew it. Or even if it was true.

  “And what about the third sister?” he asked gently.

  “MIA.”

  “But out there somewhere, right?”

  “So what?” I tried to suppress my irritation with this line of questioning, or whatever it was. I heard Kai’s voice in my head say, Fuck him or forget him. You don’t need a brother. You have . . .

  “. . . another three sisters,” he was saying. “I don’t know if they’re real—like yours—or just a myth. I don’t think it matters. They come from a country further north called the Wastes. They were giants, originally. Like the ones who raised you, they change form over time. In some of the stories they’re kindly. In others they’re evil. Or malevolent, at least, harbingers—witness to or cause of bad intent, depending on the tale. They’re known to visit newborns in order to either see or allot to each child their destiny.”

  “Fun fact. But what makes you think Mag and Narn were anything like that? Because they weren’t. I don’t think either had much of an idea what they were doing. Growing up I always had the feeling of something missing, that Narn was just making it up as she went along.”

  “Bingo. Because it should have been three,” he said, eyes glassy. “Three is the last word on power. That something missing was the third sister.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning double-trouble’s not the only game in town, Meera. Rule of threes is the killer.” One-two-three with his knuckles in a puddle of booze.

  I felt a great wave of exhaustion wash over me. Pagan was expecting me at a party across the bridge. “Marvin, why does the Gatherum’s existential thrill-seeking bother you so much?”

  “It’s not theirs I’m worried about.” He shrugged. “How can you afford such thrills? The membership fees are rapacious.”

  “Good word.”

  “Look, Dorothy. I don’t mean . . .”

  “I get a free ride, as it happens. Membership has increased since I’ve joined.”

  “So have the attacks,” Marvin said.

  I clenched my fists. “You think I have something to do with this? Is this a joke?”

  “There was another one last night,” he said tightly. “No joke.”

  “I made the Hunter real?”

  “You tell me,” he said.

  I unclenched my hands, dark half-moons of blood on each palm.

  “Look, it’s not your fault, Dorothy. But just think about it. What if there is something in the combination of your stories, the Hunter myth, and some kind of ill intent that makes it all real?” He held up three fingers. “Rule of threes, remember?”

  I got to my feet.

  “Tell me something.” I wiped the blood off my hands with the napkin, scrunched it up and dropped it into my glass. “Do you ever feel guilty for eating your twin?”

  Once said never unsaid. Or taken back. My word-vomit flopped and squirmed between us and I saw It—how things could never be the same between us—and It could never be unseen.

  He got up after a moment. He shouldered his bag, heavy with books, a wary sorrow to his movements that registered through my rage. “I’m sorry, Meera.” His face inflexible and careful. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I used to think like you do. Like I had it all under control. Like I could choose a mask, be the entertainment, distract the Regulars with my exotic shuffle while working on my next move. Exit Stage One. Until I realized that, yes it’s true—the whole world is a stage, blah blah, and I was never going anywhere. And I realized that the real reason I loved them seeing me is because I couldn’t bear to look at myself.”

  At the next reading, instead of Pagan calling the session to order, it was Sasha who glided to the electric chair. The crowd froze with cocktails halfway to their lips, soft cheese melting in their mouths. She stood beside the chair in a white polyurethane pantsuit that hugged her Amazonian curves. Her feet were bare, heavy shackles around each fine ankle, and one around her neck. “I think we all know why we’re here,” she said.

  All eyes turned to me. Pagan stood among them, her lips chipped as a cherub’s. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked away. I put down my drink and took my place at the chair, with Sasha standing behind me. I opened the book on my lap.

  “Close it,” she said. And so I did.

  She leaned in and brought her lips to my ear. “Start from the beginning,” she whispered.

  My legs turned to jelly. Standing at the precipice I felt her hand at the base of my neck, and I was terrified, but more turned on than I’d ever been in my life.

  I was on.

  “Once,” I said in my best cracked voice,
“there was a beast with no butt who wept tears of shit.”

  Behind me I heard a sharp intake of breath, and a soft moan like someone in the sweetest of pain.

  Afterward, I sat alone at the bar thinking of Marvin, feeling ghastly. My brown eye radiated heat—the blue one a chilly indifference. The sound of Sasha’s shackles jangled on my nerves. She shoveled cake into her mouth yet grew thinner every week, the striking contours of her face ever mobile, asking me about a plot point, a character. I thought it would make me feel safe, but it only made me invisible, my stories the mirror in which my patron would never see me, only herself.

  Where was I?

  Stories teemed in my head. How much of them came from Narn’s incantatory babble and how much from me? Or Kai? I no longer knew. As the memories of my life in the Blood Temple grew stronger, as the scrappy recall of the dark years living with my dead sister conjoined itself to that of Narn’s patients, to the drovers in the Five-Legged Nag and my own lonely imaginings on Narn’s porch serenaded by the birds, I remembered more each day. I remembered the Father’s slides of the Hairy Virgin, the Boy with the Upside-Down Face, the child broken on the rack of its mother’s monstrous imaginings. I thought that if memory were a bird, it would be black of wing with an unlikely ruffle as rosy as the dawn, and how it would eat out its own heart with a sad-baby cry.

  I clutched the notebook like a security blanket—my notes scribbled across Marvin’s ones and zeros, the folded corners of pages that I wanted to come back to—I would carry it and never let it go, and the black raven feather stuck between the leaves would be all the protection I needed.

  Against myself.

  * * *

  My dead sister stinks more and more each day. Gluey clumps of her scalp congregate in the bathroom sink. Bad-joke bugs crawl from her mouth and die on my pillow just like in Middles Bunk. Her hair is coarse and greasy and black as pitch. It is so long that she trips on it. Her good eye sputters like a bulb. I love her but I am scared of her. There is hunger in her gap-toothed smile, a need in her midnight caress that makes me want to blush and gag at the same time. She smooths the frizz from my pimply forehead and takes me in her arms.