Guises

by Charlee Jacob

  She glanced down at herself. She’d dressed, at least.

  (No! She was still wearing the slippers. Her little toe stuck out from the frayed corner of the right one.)

  No one in the lines of the abject would notice this. They only ever saw her upper body, swiveling like the turret to a tank as she reached for this form and that document.

  God, where did all these people come from? And why didn’t they go away? Just fade back, into that green wall. Vanish into green.

  Their hardship was palpable. Alameda felt it in stones upon her head, her shoulders, sewn up inside her belly. It was similar to walking through an area where a fire has raged, where people have burned to death, their ghosts shedding agony in wisps everywhere. She could sense such things when she was a child.

  “Did you look for work last week?” Alameda asked the woman next in line, behind which the numbers did not diminish.

  And Alameda remembered the time she was eight-years-old. She had been playing next to where a restaurant had exploded because of a gas leak. Very suddenly she’d been sick, felt heavy as if beneath a dozen wet blankets. She heard screams, faint and hissing. Saw shapes writhing gray and white.

  And then there had been this other child. Scarred until the small face was nothing but a mass of melted doll features, fingers melded together to make two flippers. The eyes were cracked blue marbles.

  Alameda had cried out and buried her own face in her hands.

  Make it go away! she’d thought in a panic. Go away!

  “Little girl?”

  Alameda had opened her eyes. A lady stood there, bending forward at the waist, asking, “Have you seen my boy? We were going to see his doctor, down the street. He broke away from me and ran here. Here, where he was hurt when the cafe burned down.”

  Alameda then glanced about, not seeing him.

  “You can’t mistake him. He’s been quite badly burned,” the lady whispered, her own edges misty with sadness.

  But he’d gone. Alameda had wished him away.

  She’d done it another time, when she was fourteen. Her mother was dying of cancer. The machines sang in burbling arietta fugue, intravenous tubes glowing a soft green that made Alameda think of the forest. Not because the hospital with its stench of antiseptics and blood was anything like a forest. Not that the hopelessness there lent itself to anything other than an ethereal contagion. Alameda’s mother had been raised among the trees, in a small house in a clearing in the Sequoia. No matter how long she’d lived in the city, her hair had borne the fragrance of cedar.

  Until it fell out in wasted clumps, lying on the pillow. As she wept, her bones jangling from the effort, saying, “I want to go home. Alameda? Will you take me home?”

  Alameda tried not to be repelled by the things the cancer had done to her mother. She couldn’t help it. This shriveled, tumorous crone could never have suckled her at her breast. She felt small and evil for wanting to withdraw, for wishing the freakish creature in the bed would die and get it over with.

  “Alameda?” The stick beast had held her trembling arms out.

  And Alameda had shut her eyes tightly, wishing her away. Where mariposa lilies arched blooms and grassy leaves, and the sun breaking over dolmens of mountains made every morning appear to be a solstice.

  When she opened her eyes again, the bed was empty. Only the cottony balls of her mother’s hair lingered to say she’d ever been dying in that place. Alameda had gone to the mirror in the hospital room, staring hard at her eyes, waiting for tears to come with which to punish herself for her guilt. But no tears would come. She found the empty place in herself, wishing her mother could fill it, would stroll into it smiling, smelling of cedar. But when it hurt enough with no one to heal the scorching hollow, she wished that away, too.

  And what about now, when she had filed more documents, added to the stack of forms saying yes they were here but we didn’t want them? Realizing she’d made those piles and taken care of many more in line. In a trance as if she were one of those walking wounded herself. Going through the motions. Only the line was still as long as before she’d lapsed into her dream.

  Or was it?

  Had she seen a glimpse of the wall she didn’t normally perceive when the throngs of unemployed swamped the room?

  Could there be fewer of the legion?

  Their faces were gray and white, creased in Greek drama masks or erased altogether until they were a putty into which Fate comically stuck its fingers. Ugly! It made her put her hands to her own face, tracing it, finding how unreal it really was.

  Yes, the lines were shorter. But it couldn’t possibly be because she’d wished some of them away, back into the wall where the government green was fleetingly replete with fir and fern-leaved mountain misery.

  But she hadn’t lost track of time before. She hadn’t worked the tide of horrible human wreckage and not known it. Yet she’d forgotten whether she’d showered that morning. Didn’t remember getting dressed. Only barely recalled seeing Alex in his recliner in front of the television, socks and trousers stiff from two weeks wearing, bearded and armpit-stained with a pyramid of beer cans beside him.

  Watching National Geographic specials and wildlife shows on the Discovery Channel. Taping them to see them again and again, room washed with green, musical with the noises of melt water, air sharp with the scent of ponderosa pine.

  Had Alameda spoken to him?

  Did you look for work this week?

  Had she only kissed the top of his head, squeezing her eyes closed so she didn’t have to witness, close-up, his ruin?

  Was the chair empty when she opened her eyes again?

  She hadn’t done that in thirty years. She’d closed off that portion of herself, terrified to name it curse or gift. There was little difference between it and gripping a gun, wasn’t there? Make them go away. Not because they needed to go to a better place or because they wanted to go…but because she couldn’t stand looking at them anymore, couldn’t bear the weight of their pain.

  And now…the lines…

  She looked down at her bureaucratic altar. For signs of the daily bloody sacrifices to have been performed upon it. The stacks of hearts and entrails excised for the gods of the vault, the spirits in the computer. /…@…{}…benefits cancelled…you are not fit to beg here…we will let you starve…vanish, please, into the wall, the green wall///<<<<>>>>.

  There weren’t nearly enough piles for the day to be over, for the rosters of jobless penitents to have been called and slaughtered. Alex hadn’t really looked up at her for a moment with his breath suddenly smelling of California poppies and filaree, a condor visible and soaring in the center of a cloudy pupil.

  But they were all gone. Even the other cubicles were empty. Well, Alameda never had gotten along with the other employees. They were a sullen lot, cold, depressed.

  Or maybe they had kept their distance from her for some other reason. The Stone, they called her behind her back. Oh, she knew. She’d overheard them.

  But Alameda knew she wasn’t really a stone. She was only someplace else in her head. A region with mirror lakes and shining conifers, where even the rodents were uplifted by the wintery mint air into not needing to walk on the ground—light as souls, all.

  But she’d held off from wishing them away. It was a conscious effort, not using power was. She’d struggled for so long, not letting anyone weigh too heavily on her, building this wall (this green wall) around her so that their heavy torment wouldn’t trigger her weapon. For it was a weapon—as much as any pistol or bomb. Instinctual, self-protective, and as violent as any temporary insanity could be. She’d vowed she wouldn’t use it, no, because who knew where they really went?

  There was suffering everywhere, grayness-whiteness-mortal gangrenous seeping from every pore of the living. One felt it, absorbed it like a low body blow, like a breath of polluted wind, and walked on. Head down. Shrugging their shoulders. Not blowing up to run amuck with a rifle. Not wishing people away.

 
But Alex had gazed up into her eyes as she bent with her kiss, before her lids squeezed together to blot his self-destruction from her. An instant that made her long to have been closer to him, to have shown him more support, to have allowed herself to lean—just once—on him. The way that branches mingled in the forest.

  The empty chair, the empty office.

  The green wall.

  No longer that dreadful government shade of poisons and decomposition. It was liberating with tarweed and redwoods, cedar cone incense and thundering cascades. She’d wished them where the marmots waddled from mossy burrows and where bighorn sheep leaped crags turning burnt orange on the horizon.

  Alameda slowly exited her cubicle, heart pounding in her ears. But she could still hear the booming of melt water and canyon river, the throaty rhetoricals of owls, the rustle of gnarled junipers in a thawing breeze. And murmurs, whispers, laughter.

  The wall shimmered, deepening with a vista of mustang clover and sugar pine, emerald-jade-turquoise. For one second a deer appeared as if painted into a mural which had come alive. It turned its magnificent head and looked at her, then bounded away.

  Alameda ran, closing her eyes, squeezing them, wishing, wishing herself away away into the wall.

  She collided with a substance not unlike water. It was solid, hurting at first, bruising her flesh, her bones. Then she sifted through it, just the way a lake would part. It was cold, snapping around her like the undulating corona of bursting fireworks.

  When she opened her eyes, Alameda was in the valley, in the clearing, trees at the perimeter lifting branches so high that the ends disappeared into smoke as they reached the sky. She could still hear the voices, detecting even her mothers, Alex’s, the legion of unemployed who’d answered, “Yes, I looked for work this week. At least I went out and looked for something.”

  But where were they?

  She was alone.

  She heard them as if they were nearby but she couldn’t see anyone. Couldn’t feel the presence of anybody.

  And she understood finally. She’d never be meant to shut herself off from others. It wasn’t the wishing away that was the killing thing; it was the closing down of her feelings. The look in Alex’s eyes that morning had pleaded for shelter in her. Her mother with her sores and skeletal memory had begged her for comfort. The people in the lines had only needed understanding.

  Alameda shuddered, tried to walk to where she heard Alex’s voice. Her nose, jaw, and shoulder slammed against something hard though nothing was there. She could clearly see the helianthella and Indian paintbrush stretching beyond. She felt with her hand: a barrier, much harder and more solid than what she’d passed through to reach this place.

  She turned the other way, colliding again with some hidden force. But she could see the sycamores not thirty feet away.

  She turned and turned, stretching out her fingers, leaning with her face, opening her mouth as if to savor some scent on the wind. As if to taste on her tongue the presence of those other freed spirits whose conversation was so close where the needles of the pine hung with moisture.

  Alameda sat down, clover bending under her thighs. She grasped a handful of larkspur. It crunched like broken glass against her palm. She almost felt calm as she considered trying to wish herself away again.

  It would do no good. No matter where she put herself, it would be the same for her. Those who sought shelter eventually found it, one way or another.

  But where did one who sought walls go?

  | — | — |

  THE BLOOM

  “All conquering are the shafts made from the Vine.”

  —Euripides

  His semen was purple. It smelled of wisteria blossoms and fennel seed soaked in vintage dark wine. It frightened me when I saw the first beads of it bubbling from the tip of his erection. I thought he was ill. I thought he was contaminated or that he had the plague.

  That it was a trick of the circle of candles.

  That it was a trick of the moonlight.

  That it was the twisting of my senses by the drug we’d shared.

  These things I thought.

  I asked myself, what do you really know about him?

  We’d met only moments before at Fig’s. The Place Of Spirits it said below the name on the door. They didn’t serve alcoholic beverages inside. It wasn’t intended as a pun. They had a little menu card threaded on one side with slender white lace, cream letters on an embossed background. The patron made his choice:

  The Petals Of Ecstasy

  The Stamen Of Power

  The Bud Of Genius

  The Blossom Of Becoming

  The Seeds Of Love

  The Pollen Of Dreams

  “Fig’s”, my ex-lover David whispered over the phone.

  “A new bar?” I muttered, surprised he’d called at all. We’d broken up seven months ago.

  “Not a bar. A club,” he corrected me, his voice hoarse, hard to hear. “Unusual.”

  He said this last word giving slow but accented attention to every syllable as if each were a separate word in an invocation to Eros.

  “Where is this place then?” I asked him, faking some annoyance but secretly intrigued. Why would he share this with me? When I’d left him as he’d pleaded with me to stay, he’d been stricken. I’d thought he’d never get over it. Perhaps he was hoping I would come so that he would be able to see me again. Convince himself that I looked as lonely as he sounded.

  “It’s at the south end of the city, at the very edge before everything grows wild,” he replied gratingly. “And, Michael…they have a strict dress code. You have to wear a white silk shirt. Michael? Silk.”

  The last word was sibilant, the ‘k’ exhaled until the phone receiver vibrated in my hand.

  I snorted. Silk? “What for?”

  “They won’t let you in without a silk shirt. Like the places that insist on black tie, only different.”

  Was that a tiny muffled giggle on his end?

  “I don’t own any silk,” I argued.

  “Buy it. It’ll be worth it. You’ll get every inch of your measure at Fig’s,” David whispered and hung up.

  David always been so melodramatic. I chuckled, sure I knew what he meant by that closing comment.

  What could I do after a weird build-up like that? And if I were to see him again, would it be so bad? After all, I was lonely. I hadn’t left David for another man but because my relationship with him had grown so confining, so boring. I’d tried everything to liven things up beyond my standard moderate vampirism: vaudeville black mass, bondage, even artful sadism. What did he do with his scars now, I wondered. His marks from the whip, the serrated half-moons on his buttocks where I’d bitten and he’d writhed in the strange pleasure of crossing bleeding thresholds? How did he explain the runes burned into his papery foreskin that only became legible when he erected?

  How did he tell to a new lover these things we’d done? Assuming that he had a new lover.

  If he had one, was he a monster like me?

  He would have to be, for weak men like David needed guidance, impetus, managing. They begged you to make them yours, make them suffer as they deserved, own them like slaves. Devour them in ruthless bits. In the end, however, the tables turned. They wouldn’t let you go.

  It was easy to find another monster like me. Even one as I was who went for blood, making lovers swoon in the illusion of being held by a force from beyond the grave. Monsters who weren’t shaped like mincing pseudo-Draculas but had modeled themselves more after the genuine impaler: a warrior and a hellraiser. Who knew the truth: that blood was only flavor. It was the act of taking it which was the real power.

  What was hard was finding the truly compliant masochist. A passive devotee who would work to pay for his dominant lover’s expensive fang-implants. Better than any letting-blade edge. And for the bank-acount-draining (and riskily illegal) steroids which gave their master that hint of superhuman, supernatural strength. As David had done for me.

&
nbsp; Maybe one more fling with him, an evening of the meat of his slim hairlessness (carefully shaved and slowly plucked) and the dusky buttermilk of his emission. Not that I would suck him of course. That was his job. But I could smell it from behind him as it shot forth onto the opposite wall, running down the glossy eggshell latex like melting vanilla ice cream.

  As for his shit, that was always fragrant, earthy but verdant because he was a complete vegetarian. This abstinence from all carnal ingestion also made his blood more palatable. I wouldn’t tolerate sourness in the blood.

  It annoyed me that I’d not already heard of this Fig’s. Usually when a new and deliciously outr‚ place opened up for our kind, the word was all around within a night. But I’d not heard of it from my friends nor overheard it at any of the places I frequented.

  (Were people deliberately keeping it from me?)

  It was a joke, the white silk thing. It must be. It was probably David’s way of taking me down a peg or two. Humiliating me in front of strangers. He would be there with another man who was dog hairy and hung with razors. David would introduce me as his former amour and Hairy Dog would guffaw. This dandy? Well, I’d take back my boy and show him some true degradation until he wept in my arms for forgiveness.

  The savor of David’s peculiar rust and salt still lingered, slickly in my saliva. After all this time.

  I had no trouble finding the place. It was the last establishment at the very end of Dover Street. Just as civilization terminated and the forest began. Most cities petered out in a straggle of seedy convenience stores begging to be robbed and cheap motels with roaches and peep holes. But this wasn’t true of our city. The boundaries were clear between where people lived and where the wild was.