Living Dead Girl

by Tod Goldberg

  “I’ve done some things that I don’t admire,” I say.

  “You don’t have to tell us anything,” Leo says.

  “Yes he does,” Ginny says. “He has a whole lot of explaining to do to me.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I say to no one particular, but I mean it for everybody.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Ginny says.

  BY THE TIME we get to Bruce’s, the wind has picked up and thick blankets of black clouds are hovering above the lake. The water is rolling with foot-tall whitecaps.

  “I don’t understand why anybody lives in this state,” Leo says. We get out of Bruce’s truck and the first sprinkles of the day begin to fall. “Does it ever stop raining?”

  “You’d all better stay here tonight,” Bruce says. “No use going out on the boat and getting stuck in a storm.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” I say, but Bruce just nods obediently. It’s the first time I’ve spoken in almost thirty minutes.

  I look at Ginny and try to smile. Her skin has paled since we arrived here and I think that the sun makes her beautiful. I think that Ginny requires the sun like a plant does: Without it, she would wither and die, a pale, limp twig.

  “Do you want to take a walk?” I ask Ginny.

  “Are you sick? It’s about to pour.”

  “We won’t go far,” I say. “I just want to spend some time alone with you. We can talk.”

  Ginny looks at Bruce and Leo like she needs approval. Neither says anything. She looks up at the sky and shakes her head. “Let me go inside and get a coat,” she says.

  I CAN’T LINE all of the events up in order, but I am beginning to see them again for what they are.

  I’ve learned things about humans that astonish me. I am able to pinpoint certain places in our collective time-lines when things occurred: We moved from trees, we began hunting with simple tools, we drew pictures on the walls to tell our stories.

  We’ve used pictures to convey everything from love to savagery. We’ve used them to help discover inner truths.

  Molly used pictures to work out the demons, to make the choices she couldn’t make in real life. I’ve used them to demonstrate human life, the variables we have been given. To document discovery. To dissect our existence.

  I thought I could figure out what was wrong with Katrina. I thought I could get a better understanding of her body if I looked at it.

  I am a scientist, or at least I am training to be one. I am qualified to examine human bones and tissue for anthropological reasons.

  “I want to take a sample of Katrina’s hair,” I said to Molly. It was the fifty-second straight day that the temperature had topped one hundred. “Maybe I can see something from her follicles.”

  Molly sat at her easel, her brush swiping the canvas in rough strokes, as though she were conducting a symphony. She was painting a breast. She’d been painting it for three days, this single disembodied breast.

  “You’re the doctor,” Molly said, not looking at me. “Does this look right to you?” She’d outlined the breast with thick, black lines. “Are the proportions correct?”

  “Yes,” I said, because there were no other words I could possibly say.

  I found Katrina sitting out front, her tiny hands buried in the sand. She more a wide-brimmed hat like her mother favored and her face was covered in sunblock. Her hair had grown long, well beyond her shoulders, and it fanned out softly against her back.

  I sat down beside her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Digging,” she said, her voice just a whisper. She curled her tongue out of her mouth in concentration, like her mother used to do when she was painting more acceptable objects.

  “I want to do something,” I said. “It won’t hurt. Not even a little. Daddy wants to find out why you don’t feel so good.”

  “The heat,” she said. She picked up words and sayings like a magnet.

  “I’m just going to take a little piece of your hair,” I said and she immediately swung her head around and stared at me. I thought I’d said it gently. “It’s not even going to hurt a teensy-weensy bit.”

  I brought Katrina into the kitchen and set her up on the counter. Her body was covered in cysts and open sores, though when I looked at her I never saw them. I wet a comb and ran it through Katrina’s hair, avoiding the lesions that dotted her scalp.

  “Cold,” Katrina said. “That’s chilly.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said.

  “Brrr,” Katrina said and then she giggled.

  “Quiet her,” Molly said from the living room.

  I used a pair of scissors Molly purchased months before, when she thought she was well, when she thought she might like to sew one day, and I trimmed the loose ends from Katrina’s wet hair. When she saw the first locks tumble to the ground, her eyes began to well up with tears.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “Even Mommy and Daddy get haircuts. You’re such a big girl now. Such a little angel.”

  I scooped up a handful of hair from the floor and placed it in a petri dish filled with iodine.

  “You don’t have to cry,” I said. “Everything is fine. Look.” I picked up our teakettle from the stovetop and brought it over so Katrina could see herself.

  “I’m round,” she said.

  “That’s just the reflection,” I said. “Look at your hair. Isn’t it pretty?”

  “Like Mommy,” she said.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Just like Mommy’s.” I set the teakettle down and picked my baby girl up from the counter. She wrapped her arms over my shoulders and hugged me, her damp hair against my cheek. She raised her tiny head and kissed me on my chin, where my stubble is always the softest. “I love you, Daddy,” she said.

  “My little angel,” I said and it was all I could do not to break down in sobs, because I knew then what I know now: that the end had long since been determined.

  Chapter 11

  “Do you love me?” Ginny says. “I mean, is there part of you that actually is still capable of that sort of thing?” We’re walking along the narrow beach below Bruce Duper’s cabin.

  “I don’t know if it’s possible right now,” I say. “Nothing seems solid to me. Like this is a dream we’re all having. I know that 1 feel very strongly for you and that I will love you again. That I need to.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “It’s like a sliver beneath my skin,” I say. “I just keep trying to claw it out but I can’t force it. It’s coming, I think. I really do.” I take Ginny’s hand, but she wrenches it free.

  “That’s bullshit,” Ginny says. “You’ve lied to me about everything. You never planned to marry me, did you?”

  “We’ll go back to LA and make it work,” I say.

  “You think I’m just a little girl,” Ginny says. “I’ll never be as good as your wife. I’ll never give you the same things she did. You’re ungrateful, you know. You probably wish I wasn’t even here. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I say. I want to tell her that it’s like flying with paper wings—that when you’re a child, it seems possible—but when you grow up it just sounds doomed for failure. “I want you to be proud of me, Ginny. You’re going to have moments in your life where you feel like I do. You won’t want people to think you’re crazy because you do things they don’t like. But that’s how I feel and you’re not part of it. Not right now at least.”

  “You let your daughter die,” Ginny says.

  “I didn’t,” I say.

  “Sheriff Drew said you did,” Ginny says.

  “We made mistakes,” I say. “He doesn’t know anything.”

  Ginny stops walking and glares at me bitterly. “I don’t know anything, Paul. You haven’t told me a single thing.”

  I put my hands on her waist and am surprised when she lets me keep them there. “I want to explain things to you now,” I say. “I want to fill in the spaces. I just don’t feel right dropping it all on
top of you.” I lean forward and kiss her once on the lips.

  “I hate you,” she says, her lips still touching mine.

  I can feel the heat radiating from her body. She is more alive to me right now than she has ever been. We kiss again and when Ginny closes her eyes, I open mine. I stare beyond her face and see the swirling water and the black clouds. Her hands are in my hair and I feel her eleventh finger.

  “I hate you,” she says over and over again, her words beginning to lose shape for me. Beyond her words, beyond her face, beyond the rolling lake water and the storm clouds, I know that Ginny exists for me right now. I know that she is alive and she has emotions and that to her I am something enormous.

  Ginny presses herself hard against me and slides her hand down my back, squeezing at my flanks. I close my eyes and Molly is there. We are walking along the Santa Monica Pier. It is summer. Our hands are intertwined and we are swinging them back and forth. The air is warm and breezy and children are running in front of us, eating cotton candy and dragging balloons.

  It is an event that never happened.

  “I love you,” I say, to this vision in my mind.

  “Don’t say that,” Ginny says, pressing me down into the sand. “Don’t ever say that again. I won’t ever love you.”

  WE LAY IN the sand talking, our voices calm, rational. We could be discussing the grocery list. The rain falls now in a steady torrent, but the air isn’t too cold. Ginny’s face is flushed. There is sand in her hair, eyebrows, stuck to her chin. Our bodies are twisted together so that for a moment I don’t know whose body I’m touching—everything below my head feels numb, useless, dead.

  Ginny props her head on my chest and then tilts it back to catch the rain. I look in her mouth and see her teeth, her gums, her pink tongue. She gulps at the rain like an animal, like she is standing before the last pond in a receding wetland.

  I did not kill my daughter.

  I made a choice of who could be saved between the three of us and who could be sacrificed. It was a simple task that natural selection would have dictated in a different time. I wasn’t well, of course. These are not decisions I would make today.

  “It tastes so salty,” Ginny says dreamily, like she has forgotten that she doesn’t love me.

  I was afraid that I wasn’t alive. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. At night, I would put Katrina to bed and then I would sit beside her, watching her chest heave, her face twitch. I would imagine what she would look like if she were a boy, a different girl, our other children.

  “When you get back to LA,” Ginny is saying, “I’m going to drop out of Pierce and transfer to Valley or Moorpark. I think we’ll appreciate each other more that way. We’ll have more distance. I think that’s important.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Distance and time.”

  “Are you ready to tell me everything?” Ginny says.

  “Yes,” I say. “Everything I can remember.”

  I AM GUILTY of this: I have made my life off the carcasses of the dead.

  My parents made the first mistake—I should never have been born. When my mother died at sixty-two after her childbearing and child rearing organs conspired to kill her (ovarian cancer followed by breast cancer that finally claimed her), I knew for sure that everything I’d become had been set in motion years before.

  As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian. My parents took a loan out on their home so that I could go to a private school for children adept at science. I rode a bus two hours from Walnut Creek to the Bay Area Science Magnet in Palo Alto in order to spend six hours each day sitting in a classroom with kitchen gloves on slicing through the organs of animals, trying to figure out how each worked. I once tried to rig plastic tubing to the heart of a fetal cat so that I could run water through its veins, but I couldn’t make it work. I was encouraged to experiment, to explore my science. But it wasn’t about science. It was the feeling of touching the insides of these beasts, of seeing the things they’d never seen, of probing within their bodies, of coming closer to God than I had any right to come.

  I became fascinated with finding the roots of man, of trying to see how we had evolved. I yearned to see what was inside of me, to make sense of the feelings and sensations I’d always had. I needed to be able to compare what I was finding in these animals with what I knew was bearing down inside of me: Why had I ever been born? Why wasn’t I a dog, a cat, a possum? What made me any different from these animals?

  The first cut I made on my own flesh was on the backside of my thigh. I was twelve. I carved four squares out of myself and placed them in Ziploc bags and then buried them beneath a tree for three days. When I dug them back up, my specimens were black and shriveled. I compared my dead skin to the skin of a raccoon I’d found in a text book.

  We looked the same.

  I kept cutting myself, looking for proof that I was different than the animals I was finding. The more I dug into myself, the more I became obsessed with finding some kind of center. It felt like I could just keep slicing away and nothing would happen.

  My mother found me out back with the carcass of a fetal pig I’d brought home from my advanced physiology class. I was seventeen. I’d made an incision along the top of the pig’s head and was peeling the skin back over its eyes; just as the book I’d gotten from the library on human pathology described. I was writing notes in my sketchbook about my impressions, my feelings, the way it felt to be so close to the center.

  “Good God,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a homework assignment.”

  “What did you do to your hair?” she said. I remember her voice sounded hoarse, like she’d been running.

  “I shaved it off,” I said.

  Mom looked down at the pig. “Why do they make you bring these things home?”

  “I get extra credit,” I said. “They’re going to let me be a teacher’s assistant next quarter. I’ll be helping other kids.”

  “Where do they get these animals?” my mom asked. She stared at the lines I’d drawn bisecting the pig’s head into hemispheres.

  “They’re already dead,” I said.

  My mom lifted up my sketchbook and began flipping through it, through the diagrams of my specimens, my skin comparisons, my conclusions. She stopped at a drawing I’d made years before of her standing in the kitchen. I’d charted the way her words seemed to fall out of her mouth and shatter. I’d broken her words down by the letter, the sound, each word taking on a new significance.

  “Paul, what are you?” she said.

  “I’m your son,” I said, because that was all I could say.

  “I thought you stopped all this years ago,” she said.

  “I never stopped,” I said.

  “Dr. Loomis told me that you’d grow out of this,” she said. “That puberty would fix you.”

  “I’m trying,” I said.

  “This ends today,” my mom said.

  But how can you stop when it’s the only thing that makes you feel alive? The only thing that tells you there is a purpose to your life beyond eating, breathing, procreating?

  I tried my best to become normal. In college, I joined a fraternity and made friends with people I never would have met otherwise—people not obsessed with science, only obsessed with being college students—and found that if I was distracted long enough, I didn’t think about the words and images that had plagued me for so long. I discovered what it meant just to be a kid, just to live life for what it was then: a series of unrelated events that I had no control over; had no chance to wreck.

  The error I made was assuming it would always be like that, as long as I kept perspective.

  I TELL GINNY about how I met Molly, about how we began dating, about the first time I realized I was in love with her. We were sitting on the floor of her dorm room at UCLA eating pizza. Her hair was long and tied into a ponytail. She was wearing overalls.

  “I just looked at her and knew that she was the person I wanted to marry,” I say.r />
  “Do you have moments like that with me?” Ginny asks.

  “They’re different,” I say. “I’ve experienced so many different things that I can’t believe in that innocent kind of love anymore. It’s just not possible to me. But I never get tired of looking at you.”

  Ginny frowns in a way that I have come to believe is her way of resigning herself. This is my life, it says. This is the person I have dedicated my life to.

  “Molly was my first,” I say.

  “But you’re mine,” Ginny says.

  Yes, I think. Perhaps she finally understands that you never outlive your first; that I will haunt her.

  The rain begins to turn from a sprinkle into a full shower.

  “We should get back,” I say.

  “They’ll be worried,” Ginny says, gathering her clothes. “I told them we’d only be gone a few minutes.”

  I grab Ginny’s arm, softly this time, and stop her from putting her clothes back on. “I want you to understand something,” I say. “I’m not dangerous. I’d never hurt you. Those drawings you saw—those were from another time. They weren’t me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever understood you completely,” Ginny says. “I’m not scared of you. Plenty of people are smarter than me, but I think I can tell when I should fear someone. You’re sick, though. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “I used to be,” I say. “When I did those drawings—I don’t even remember when I did them—but I was sick and Molly was sick and we missed our little girl so much. I can’t explain it all to you yet, because I’m not clear where it all fits. It wasn’t me, though. You have to believe that. It wasn’t wrong. It was—clinical.”

  “I don’t know what I want to believe about that,” Ginny says.

  “I guess I’m not terribly proper,” I say, “but all you need to believe is the truth.”

  “You’re young for your age,” Ginny says. “I always thought adults were supposed to have all these issues worked out by now. Why is it, Paul, that you dump everything together and never unsort it? Do you think that’s the right way to live? I don’t. I hope I’m not like you when the time comes.”