The Open Curtain

by Brian Evenson

  Later, they sat on two plush chairs in the room behind the veil, the celestial room, waiting to be taken to a sealing room to be married. It was filled with men and women in temple clothing, some circling about, some sitting, some praying. Everyone conversed in the verbal equivalent of earth tones. An enormous chandelier hung from the ceiling. Rudd was smiling in a way that looked like he was about to go mad.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  She straightened her apron, smoothed it over her belly. “You don’t feel any different?” she asked.

  “Different?” he said. “Of course I feel different. I’ve just played God. That would have an effect on anyone.”

  He stopped to straighten his hat. “Did you hear?” he asked.

  “Hear what?”

  “Pay Lay Ale,” he said. “His name is in that.”

  “Whose name?”

  “Lay Ale,” said Rudd. “Lael.”

  “Stop it,” she said, covering her eyes with one hand. Her head hurt.

  “Pay him,” he said. He was speaking too rapidly. “We have to pay him. It doesn’t mean, ‘O God hear the words of my mouth.’ It means just what it says.”

  “Look,” she said. “About what you did at the veil—”

  “It’s Elling,” he said. “Your name is Elling. I named you and you accepted the name. We’ve pulled a fast one on God.”

  “The name wasn’t Elling,” she said. “That wasn’t my name.”

  “No, we changed it,” he said, nodding.

  “I don’t want to marry you,” she said.

  “You don’t?” he said, and seemed genuinely confused.

  She looked away from him, back toward the veil. The temple workers were standing near it, talking softly.

  “Who’s Elling?” she asked.

  “You are,” he said.

  “But where’s the name from?”

  “Nowhere,” he said, and turned away.

  “Why did you want to give it to me?”

  “I had to do it,” he said. “Because of the new name I was given.”

  “What name?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I can know your name, but you can’t know mine.”

  “Was the name Lael?”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You still believe that you’re living out your own life,” he said. “But you’re not. All of this,” he said, gesturing around the celestial room, “giving you a new name, having you play a role, is to thrust another life onto you.”

  “Don’t, I’m not—”

  “Listen,” he said. “What’s it about if not possession? I play God at the veil, and God lives through me. For a moment, I become God. We’re told to open ourselves to the spirit of the Lord, we act under inspiration, having breathed in the life-breath of another. That’s the message of the Gospel: anyone is subject to possession, but only the holy open themselves to it willingly.”

  “That’s wrong.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “And that’s why we’re taking charge. We don’t want to be vessels that the Lord can fill. We’ve taken on names other than those He tried to give us, and now we’re going to let them stick in our craw and never get out of us.”

  She got up and walked nervously around the room. Finally she sat down in a chair on the opposite end. She knotted her fingers together, closed her eyes, tried to pray. Her head was throbbing. Dear Lord, she began, then stopped.

  “You’re here under false pretenses, Elling,” she heard Rudd say. “Prayer won’t work for you.”

  “Get away from me,” she said.

  “I’m the only one left to you,” he said. “Without me you have nothing at all in the world.”

  He padded back to the other side of the room, sat down, arms folded. He stayed watching her.

  She felt frightened. Her head ached. She had rushed everything and now she had given herself over to a man hardly more than a boy, insane. It was all a mistake, but what else was there for her? It was meant to happen, it had to happen, it had happened. She had set something in motion and now there was no stopping it.

  A man was saying something to her, his glasses so thick she could hardly make out his eyes at all.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “You’re,” he said, looking at a clipboard, “Melinda …”

  “Yes,” she said. “Lyndi. That’s me.”

  “If you’ll just come this way please.”

  She stood, confused, and followed the man. Rudd was there, she saw, beside her. She felt utterly bereft.

  “Where are you from?” the man asked.

  Neither of them said anything.

  “Nervous?” the man asked. “No reason to be,” he said, and smiled broadly. “You only have to do this once.”

  Do what? Lyndi wondered. Her head ached so much she could hardly see. They were at the escalator and going up and then she was moving again around a circular hall. They stopped outside a room with a large altar at its center, a knee rest all around it, mirrors on all the walls, chairs around the walls as well. There were two men on chairs to either side of the altar, another man sitting behind the altar as if it were a desk. She felt like she was going to the slaughter.

  “Oh, no,” she said at the door. “I don’t think so.”

  “Excuse me?” said the man at the altar.

  “It’s all right, Lyndi,” said Rudd, holding onto her arm, his voice and manner suddenly gentle. “You don’t have to go through with this.”

  “No?” she said.

  “No,” he said, and his voice seemed actually kind. “We can go home.”

  “But then,” she said. “What?—”

  “You decide. It’s up to you.”

  He let go of her hand and took two steps into the room. Her headache was worse, casting a strange mist over everything. He was there, standing just inside the door, stretching out his hand to her, the men inside craning their necks to look at her, beaming. Let her enter, she thought. Closing her eyes, she stepped forward into what she was certain would be a disaster.

  9

  First month. She awoke to finally find her head clear and him lying beside her, both of them crammed into her sister’s twin bed, her sacred undergarments strange against her body. He was sleeping, his face serene. She got out of bed, trying not to wake him, and went into the kitchen.

  She poured a glass of milk, made scrambled eggs, slightly runny, two pieces of white toast, diagonally cut. She brought them to him on a tin TV tray painted baby blue.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Breakfast is served.”

  He rolled over, opened his eyes, stared at her.

  “I made eggs and toast,” she said, “and I poured this milk.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and sat up enough to get the plate onto his lap. She lay down next to him, on her side, her shoulder nudging the edge of the tray. She caressed his hip beneath the sheet. “What’s the occasion?” he asked.

  “First week of marriage.”

  He grunted. She watched him move food from plate to mouth until he was done. He reached over and settled the tray on the floor beside the bed.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  He obediently and awkwardly did, then flattened himself back into the bed, closed his eyes.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I was thinking, why don’t we move up to my parents’ room?”

  He shook his head.

  “That bed’s bigger,” she said.

  “I like it here.”

  “But the bed,” she said. “And the rest of the room is small as well. I don’t know that I can fit all my things here.”

  “I don’t think they’ll fit,” he said. “You should keep your things where they are.”

  “But we should live together. That’s what married people do.”

  “We are living together.”

  “Share a bed I mean. A room too.”

  “This is my room, Elling,” he said. �
�I’m not going to give it up. You can visit me sometimes, but it’s mine.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Why not? It’s your true name, isn’t it?”

  She turned in the bed, away from him. “I don’t want to be married to you,” she said.

  She listened to him fluff his pillow.

  “Thank you for breakfast,” he said. “Now please let me sleep.”

  A certain pattern settled into place in the second month, with Lyndi feeling that her life had returned largely to what it had been before. School kept her occupied, mostly. She could never tell from day to day how Rudd would be. There were times he would almost seem like an ordinary person, caring and loving, but other times he was caustic, his behavior hurtful. He knew how to get her into a discussion, the conversation building quickly into an attack.

  “You don’t know when to stop,” she would tell him, eyes burning.

  “I know when to stop,” he claimed. “I just never stop there.”

  It had been a mistake to get married, she told herself, she should get out. But it wasn’t as easy as that, and he knew what he was doing: every time things seemed almost unbearable he softened, his face changed, and she was given a few days to recover.

  In his worst moods he would call her Elling, knowing it would set her off. He suggested to her that without the temple her parents would still be alive.

  “The temple can’t be blamed,” she said.

  “It makes people crazy,” said Rudd. “You saw. Finger across throat, breasts, stomach. It’s a lesson in bleeding a human body dry.”

  “It’s symbolic,” she said.

  “Blood sacrifice,” he said. “Ever heard of it?”

  He explained it to her, even though she didn’t want him to: letting a man’s blood spill onto the ground as away of baptizing the earth, redeeming a lost soul. Mormons had done that in the nineteenth century; it had clear ties to the temple ceremony; the temple rituals, the so-called symbolic rituals, were founded in blood, on the bodies of the slaughtered—

  “Stop it,” she said.

  She didn’t care to talk about it, he understood; it was easier not to think about it, wasn’t it? If that was the way she wanted to live her life, that was fine with him. Ignorance, he suggested, a certain comfort in—

  She went upstairs and into her parents’ room, slamming the door after her.

  Third month. He was wounded too, she told herself, and that was why he tried to hurt her. He was colder now; they hadn’t slept together since the middle of the second month. He was more withdrawn, less antagonistic toward her. Sometimes, walking by his room, she could hear him talking as if he were having a conversation with someone, but when he came out later, there was just him.

  She began to realize that he was seriously disturbed, perhaps a great deal more seriously than she could even imagine. There were times his eyes would flutter oddly, his speech lodging in his throat and coming out as if there were another throat hidden within. He took to staying in the house, often hiding in his darkened room the entire time she was at class or out shopping. Sometimes he would greet her briefly when she came in; other times, he wouldn’t even unlock his door, though every third or fourth day he was waiting for her out on the couch, apparently cheery. She would, when she saw him, speak cautiously to him, waiting to see how he would react.

  Once she was reading a leatherbound Book of Mormon and he came, sat on the couch, looked over her shoulder.

  “What’s that?’ he asked. “A diary?”

  She looked around for what he might mean. She lifted the book slightly. “This?” she asked.

  “That.”

  “The Book of Mormon,” she said.

  He drew closer, squinted. “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “I can see perfectly well the pages are blank.”

  She thought at first he was joking, torturing her in some new way, but soon realized that he literally couldn’t see any text on the page. As the month went on, she realized that a selective blindness extended not just to the Book of Mormon but to words or phrases in the newspaper, to things said on television. There was no pattern she could see to it, and four days after believing the Book of Mormon to be blank he picked it up, read a passage from it, seemed to recognize it perfectly. It came and went. There were objects too that he could not perceive and times too when she spoke to him that he did not respond. At first she thought he was ignoring her, and sometimes he was. But confronted more and more often with his blank and placid face, she began to realize it was something he didn’t control.

  When she brought it to his attention, he seemed terrified. “There are holes,” is how he phrased it, but then refused to discuss it beyond that. Indeed, only a few minutes after she first brought it up, discussion of his condition joined the ranks of things he literally could not hear. Holes, she thought, and imagined how that must have been: going through life with gaps springing up, things that read as blank and empty spaces, as if the world were unfinished. Did he see people that way as well? She wondered if there were times when he saw her face as only a smooth white plate, anonymously threatening. She would watch him, she told herself. She would help him all she could.

  Fourth month. He was hardly ever psychologically abusive to her now, but he was beginning to deteriorate, his personality giving way. Elling, he kept calling her, and it was not to needle her, but because the name kept welling to the surface of his consciousness. Hooper, he called himself once, in her hearing (Let’s just see about that sandwich, Hooper, he said to himself while waiting for lunch), but when she mentioned the name, he blanched. “No,” he said. “Don’t call me that.”

  She swallowed hard and called his mother, asked her if she knew either a Hooper or an Elling.

  “Who are you?” Rudd’s mother asked.

  “I’m Lyndi,” she said. “I married your son.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Rudd’s mother. “I’m no longer speaking to my son.” She hung up the telephone.

  “I’m Lael,” Rudd started saying. “Call me Lael, Elling.”

  “Stop playing, Rudd.”

  “I need Lael back,” he said. “Bring him to me.”

  “We can’t find Lael,” she said. “We don’t know where he is.”

  “I’ll have to find him,” said Rudd.

  The next day he began mailing letters, general delivery, to Lael Korth, three or four a day, addressed to different towns throughout the West. On the third day she took one out of the mailbox, carried it up to her parents’ bathroom, and opened it up. It read:

  lael nd’d asap STOP rudd nds hlp STOP

  why hst thou frskn me STOP pls cm STOP

  She tore the letter into tiny pieces, flushed them down the toilet. She debated taking the remainder of the letters out of the box, destroying them as well and then, considering, decided they could do no harm.

  When she went back downstairs she found Rudd in the bathroom, staring at himself in the mirror.

  “That’s not my face,” he was saying. “Who took my face?”

  “Rudd,” she said. “We have to talk.”

  “Not until I find my face,” he said. He kept ducking down, springing up in front of the mirror again, but he never seemed able to find what he was looking for.

  By the fifth month he had discovered the wooden shed in the backyard, the one her father had used as a junk shed, and had taken everything out of it, piling it all along the back fence. That was a good sign, she decided; he was taking an interest in something, he was actually leaving the house.

  She still knew it would be a good idea to call someone, get some help, but it was harder to do than it should have been. She often opened the yellow pages, flipped through the appropriate listings. There were too many names, no indication of who was good and who wasn’t. Besides, if his condition were revealed, they would take him away. She was afraid of what was happening to him but was also afraid of being left alone.

  There were a number of minor incidents, or at least incidents which, because
of the oddness of his actions over the previous few months, now seemed minor. But there was one that she classified as major. She came home one day to find him wandering around the backyard wearing nothing but his sacred garments. She pulled him quickly inside.

  “What is it, Rudd?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “The earth,” he said, grabbing the skin of his chest and tugging at it.

  “That’s flesh, Rudd.”

  “This is the earth, Elling, and these,” he said, touching each of the garment marks in turn, “are the dead. Father, mother, sister. Me.”

  “But you’re not dead,” she said.

  “I mostly am,” he said, and drew his hand across his throat, hard. She watched the skin fluster, waited for it to start to bleed.

  “You’re going crazy,” she finally said.

  “Of course I’m going crazy,” he said. “I’m wearing the dead.”

  She found him a few hours later in the kitchen, cutting the marks out of all his garments with a pair of utility scissors. He was holding a garment shirt up, examining the holes.

  “Rudd?” she said.

  “I know,” he said, regarding her through a hole, terrified. “I’ve only made it worse.”

  He paid more and more attention to the backyard shed. By month six he had removed the locks from his bedroom door, reinstalling them on the door to the shed, one inside, one outside. What was he doing in there? she asked him. “Nothing,” he said, and then, “it’s my little house.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  There was only one window and he had packed mud against it from the inside so she could not see in. She walked around the shed looking for cracks, but the few that were there had been filled with dried mud mixed with grass, and she worried that if she pushed it through, he would notice the dirt on the floor and become furious. He moved an old, broken-down refrigerator from the garage into the shed. He would not say what it was for. Things began to go missing from the freezer, things like frozen meat.