by Sarah Porter
Wearing Old Body feels so filthy, though. He’s reeking and dingy and full of holes, like a rag dress a beggar child would wear. If I can get someone else then I won’t care and he can do what he wants. Ruby is so fresh, like stockings drying on the line and clean new wool. But I don’t have her yet and Aloysius might try to sneak out on his promises, and now Old Body is banging on a door, big paw swinging hard into wood like he thinks it’s empty air, and he’s hollering, and someone is saying goddamnyouNick, don’tyouknowwhattime. And Old Body says, I’vegotthemoney, lookhere, I’vegotit.
Then I have to turn away from the living world, because the gray here flashes red-green-red and the mush starts to think it has shapes and I can suddenly see myself: lace dress and shiny shoes and doll-pink ankles. Is it Everett, almost here, showing us what he sees? Can I politely escort him now like Aloysius told me? I have to forget whatever Old Body is doing because I need to be properly attentive like they said I should. I am looking like a dollgirl, but it’s not quite right: dozens of little hand-crabs are crawling all over my dress, grabbing everywhere, and I can’t let Everett see me like this or he’ll scream and run away and then Aloysius will punish me. I have to use my whole strength to hint better, to push out a nicer shape for myself that the living boy will see: little girl, poorlittlegirl, lost and alone in this bad place. I can’t look like a horror. Even when I look my prettiest, living people feel afraid of me.
But no, whoever was coming here slides away and leaves us with gray and no-shape and sad old nothingness again. I hate it. I hate being dead worse than anything; I’d rather be Old Body so drunk he pees in his bed than be here. Everett Bohnacker is very wrong to make me wait and wait so long, so he deserves whatever happens to him, and I won’t feel guilty that I helped. I will sleep in Ruby and I will wear her hair in beautiful curls and dress her up in floating dresses, and I’ll make Everett sorry he told me to go away.
That’s what I’m thinking when I feel Old Body holding the gun tight in both hands, and then I don’t care anymore what Aloysius does to me and I rush back in a blast to that room where the paint peels in long sores. I stream back into his brain and we wrestle together—Jacob wrestled with the angel, and Old Body is wrong, I’m his angel and not his evil! He’s so upset that it makes him strong, too strong; I’m wrestling but I can’t take him over like I’m trying, and the gun rocks up and down, black hole at his chest, his eye, the sky, and back down.
Stop it please, I’ll be nicer to you from now on, I’m your angel here to save you, I chatter into his thoughts, and I know he hears me but he doesn’t listen to what I say, and then bang!
RUBY DASHIELL SLIPPERS
I am remembering, and I am not myself.
I remember being a cloud below a caved-in ceiling. In a brick house charred, its silence scratched by rats. But I didn’t care, because I was rain suspended and sustained in a velvet atmosphere so richly pillowing that my fall was too slow to be seen by the naked eye. Falling. I was not alone in this room, but I might as well have been, because what were these people to me? No one would bother us. This was a house left well alone, and not just because it might collapse at any moment. Everyone said it was haunted.
The raindrops must have been silver, because they rang out on the floor. I turned my head to see my phone’s glowing screen saying, Dashiell, it’s been over a month. I’m worried. Please just say you’re okay. Your Ruby-Ru. A blood-daubed rag beside it. I looked away, then slid the phone into my jeans.
Ruby had kept my last visit a secret, just as I’d asked, but our father found out in due course and barred me from the house of my childhood, cut me off, gutted my bedroom, and replaced my belongings with smug new trash from Pottery Barn. But what did it matter? I was rain and I washed everything away, even my father, even my sister.
Someone pawed at my shoulder and I looked again, unwilling to see. “You don’t know what I am,” a man named Harper Wills said; he’d bellied his way to me across the floor and he twined serpentine among the rags and dropped needles, his face craning up at me. “You don’t know. I’ve been dead since ’77 and this was my home. My home, where I lived with my wife. I’ve come back to haunt you all!”
“You’ve done an excellent job on the putrefaction,” I said—but I was dreaming, I was the fall of the sky, and the words were distant chimes. Harper Wills couldn’t have been born yet in ’77, that was obvious; he was barely older than me. “Such advanced decay in four short decades? I’m impressed.”
He floundered for a long moment, trying to parse what I’d said, his greenish face pitching in the shadows like a storm-tossed boat. Then the meaning beached on his brain.
“Not this body. This isn’t what died.”
And I laughed at him, but sleepily, the laugh rolling over vast unsteady distances. It seemed to provoke him.
“They gave me a job to do,” he said. “An assignment. You don’t know anything about it, but the way you’re going you’ll learn soon enough!”
“Of course,” I said, still laughing. “Lolling high on the floor of a squat in Queens? That’s a mission of the greatest importance. No wonder they entrusted it to a man of your caliber.”
“Pretentious little shit,” Harper snarled, but I noticed he was clutching something inside his shirt and his eyes were suddenly shifty and afraid—afraid he’d said too much. Afraid I would notice his crackling anxiety. Ah, so someone had given him a task to do, perhaps involving hiding or delivering a package of some value, and it seemed worth paying attention. I started to nod into my bundled jacket—feigning, because I was actually returning to prosaic wakefulness.
* * *
I am remembering, and I am Ruby Slippers once again.
The winter when I was fourteen and then fifteen Dashiell disappeared completely, and I called and texted him again and again with no reply. Now that I know the things our dad said to him, maybe I can understand a little better why he wouldn’t speak to me. I know all the way through my chest how hurt Dash must have been. Dash-Dot-Dot, I know you were angry, but you didn’t need to take it out on me! Dashiell doesn’t answer but I can feel him buried inside me, listening to every thought flashing through my mind. And I remember:
How afraid I was for him that winter. How wherever I walked in the city I would try to feel if he had walked there, too. I would imagine that I was slipping my footsteps into his, feeling out the grooves he’d left on the air, and in that way I would find him. My dad and Everett would talk to me and I wouldn’t hear them, because I was listening for my older brother: for the imperceptible disturbance that his coat might have stirred into the wind a week before.
And then I started sneaking into Manhattan alone, and going up to strangers in Tompkins Square Park. To people on the benches who were beautiful but frightening, pockmarked and too thin, like him. To people who looked at me with contempt, and who made me feel even pinker and younger and dumber than I was. I’d say, I’m looking for my brother. Dashiell Bohnacker. Do you know him? They usually laughed at me, or scowled, or said, Sure, honey, I can take you to him right now, in a way that I knew meant something much worse.
All through our fifteenth birthday I kept listening for the phone or the doorbell, listening so hard that the air sang like a finger on wet glass, because no matter what happened Dash had never missed our birthday before. The silence was so absolute and shrill and terrible that it started to sound like death, and I didn’t know if it was Dash’s death I was hearing or my own.
Maybe a week later I overheard a senior at my school talking about a bar at the south end of the Williamsburg waterfront; he’d gone in with a fake ID, but it was so creepy in there he and his friends left right away. Full of junkies, he said, and so after school I took the train there and then walked up and down the block out front, waiting for someone I could ask about Dashiell. Striations of wet snow sliced the sky into huge angled pieces, and smokestacks without smoke loomed across the street. So much snow kept blurring down that the gray scribble of the Williamsburg Bridge
was half-erased.
There was a big plate-glass window and I peered in, but it was too dark to see anything besides the empty front counter and a few swags of Christmas lights way in the back. A few people wandered by, but no one came out of the bar, and after an hour I gave up and started walking back in the direction of the subway. I remember that my corduroys were soaking wet, caked in white from the knees down, and how even in my thick coat I was shivering. I remember the whining scrape of my pants as I walked and the slush plopping off my boots, and how utterly miserable I was. It was the first time I felt absolutely sure that he was gone, and gone forever.
I’d walked a block when I heard footsteps hissing in the snow behind me. It was still late gray afternoon and at first the noise was just another element in the desolation, like those steps didn’t have any identity apart from me and how awful I felt. Then they started to come a little quicker and closer, snapping at my awareness so that I knew I had to pay attention. Each footstep sent a tiny vibrating current through my body, and I was looking around for strangers I could yell to, just in case.
I was passing the open mouth of an alley when the steps burst into a run, and before I could turn around I was slamming into the alley’s shadows, then driven face-first against the brick. Tense hands gripped my wrists and pinned them to the wall above my head, then one shifted down to seize my mouth, and I was sure I was about to be raped, or worse. The man holding me there was tall and thin, and a sweet, feverish stench glutted my throat while I strained to pull free. He pressed in, grinding my right cheek against the wall.
“This is only a test, Ruby-Ru,” a voice said. “The Emergency Broadcast System is here to inform you that your broken corpse will be found in an alley much like this one, if you don’t desist from what you’re doing immediately. My social milieu is not at all a suitable place for you to put yourself into circulation. You will not come looking for me again.”
Dashiell! I tried to say. I had to see you. I had to know you were alive. How could I worry about whether or not it was dangerous? But he still wouldn’t let go of my mouth and all that came out was a muffled groan. My saliva slicked his palm and my body felt watery, buckling and sliding away from me even as Dash pinned me there.
“Whose decision is it, Ru? When and in what manner and condition you see me?” It was his voice but also wrong, wild, rasping. “What right do you have to treat me as some beast, to hunt me down and snap your precious mental pictures of me against my will? If I don’t call, if you don’t see me, you should know that it’s because I’ve decided that’s in your best interests. You won’t be seeing me now, either. I’m a wraith. I’m the dusk come to devour you. Nod if you understand me.”
I didn’t understand, not really, but I nodded. Because I was afraid in a way I’d never been before, the world slitting through me in shards of ice. Because Dash seemed so crazed that I would have done anything to calm him. The hand clutching my wrists relaxed but he still held me squeezed against the bricks, his body crushing my back, shoulders, thighs.
“You have a task in front of you, Ruby Slippers, if you want me ever to forgive you for this extraordinary violation. You will walk away. You will not speak one word or turn or try to look at me. You do not have my permission to see me like this. You do not have my permission to remember what happened here today. You will return to your life as a good little girl, and you will keep your image of me as bright and clean and blazing as a supernova. Nod.”
I nodded. Dusk mingled with the snow. I still couldn’t completely take it in, though: that this was really him and not just in my head; that he truly would force me to leave, after months apart, without ever holding him or gazing at his face. The cuff of his leather jacket rubbed my neck as he pulled his hand from my mouth. For a long moment we stayed like that, our feet sunk in slush and dirty water crying into our faces, both of us breathing hard. Maybe Dash was checking to see if I would break his rules and speak, but I didn’t. I was too stunned, even if I’d wanted to.
“I think you’re ready to go now, Miss Slippers. I think you can emerge from this detour into foulness with your heart still pure. Remember not to look at me. Look now, and I swear you’ll never see me again.” He leaned sideways and kissed me: a slow kiss on the edge of my cheekbone, so that a single scroll of his filthy hair wavered in the corner of my eye.
Then he let me go, stepping deeper into the alley, and I made myself walk away from him. His presence exerted an overwhelming gravity all over my nape and skull, and I stumbled from the longing to run back to him, but I knew I couldn’t give in. He’d meant what he said and I had to fight the weight of his closeness, to grab hold of the nearest corner and pull myself around it and back onto the street. I walked for the next half block with my eyes closed and my fingertips trailing along the wall, to stop myself from glancing around. It was only when I nearly tripped on a crack that I let myself see again.
The air was full of indigo dust and a thousand moons were falling.
I must have reached the subway, made it home somehow, but this is where the memory breaks. I didn’t say a word to anyone, not even to Everett, because I didn’t know how to whisper about that encounter in my own mind, much less describe it to anyone else. I said I’d slipped on the ice to explain the scrapes on my face.
A week later Dash called our dad and we all went out for brunch together. Dashiell was too pale and thin, his eyes too glassy, but you could tell he’d made an effort to look as scrubbed and beautiful as he could. And he was so sweet and playful with me that I was almost convinced he didn’t remember what had happened at all. I started to wonder if that bizarre afternoon had been real, or something I’d imagined—except that he was better about keeping in touch with us after that.
Dashiell remembers. He always did, and his memory of that day and mine twine around each other. I know now why he acted the way he did. I know that if our dad hadn’t said those brutal things, hadn’t accused Dash of trying to corrupt me, then when he saw me through the bar’s wide window he might have chosen very differently. He couldn’t stand to let our father be right, so his pride stopped him from coming outside and hugging me and taking me someplace. I can’t tell where.
* * *
I am remembering, and I am Dashiell Bohnacker. I am of two minds, and my memory navigates among my sister’s thoughts. I know she hears me, and I choose to let her hear without restriction. Living as we are at such close quarters, webbed into the same synapses and veins, I might as well allow her to know me better.
I let her see it, projected high and glowering: that burned-out house in Queens on a lightless day late last February; that is, almost precisely one year after our chance meeting in Williamsburg. Five days after she and Never turned sixteen and I took them both to the movies with borrowed money, our father watching out the window in a hysterical flutter for the moment I’d deliver them safely home again.
Remember, then, Ruby-Ru, as if it’s all happening again, afresh, this very moment; consider it my gift.
I went back to the squat in Queens, having stolen a glimpse of what Harper Wills secreted on the property; idiots, whoever they were, to entrust a hapless junkie like him with a pile of gold coins, along with an odder item whose significance I wholly failed to grasp until much later. The fact that Harper had followed through on their instructions at all—that he’d hidden the package, however ineptly, rather than simply vanishing with the contents—suggested that they must be exceptionally dangerous idiots. He’d clearly been cringing in terror of his employers; that observation had kept me too wary to mess with their belongings until now, when I found myself with no other means of support at hand, and some overdue bills to pay.
I hadn’t been back here in a year. The place was dark and silent. I’d heard rumors to the effect that even the most desperate squatters had abandoned the house some time before, since anyone who slept in it was visited by dismaying dreams. Saw dreadful apparitions mingling with the grime. For my purposes privacy was all to the good, of course.
I was sure that the money was in here somewhere, since Harper had spent too much time skulking in odd corners for it to signify anything other than a hunt for a hiding spot. But I was anticipating a long search, probably involving torn-up floorboards and avalanches of dead rats. I had a battery-powered lantern with me and a crowbar, and I thought those simple tools should be sufficient to my task.
As usual, the front door appeared to be boarded up, but it was all a sham: the boards weren’t attached to the door itself and I merely had to turn the knob and then duck below the planks into unrelieved must and gloom. I’d enjoyed the abandonment of staying somewhere so unapologetically degrading during my time here. I’d enjoyed traveling from this vile hovel into Chelsea, showering at Hugo’s studio and changing into the clothes I stored with him, then after work going off with my grotesquely spoiled and much older girlfriend Alexis, if girlfriend was the proper term, to a dinner that cost more than Hugo paid me in a week and from there to her extravagant bed. I liked constructing my life out of the most extreme contrasts available.
By the February day when I returned here both Alexis and Hugo were behind me, and their disapprobation was a matter of complete indifference. Even the resulting inconvenience of being so utterly broke could be amended, so I thought, with a few hours in this stinking darkness.
I was only a few steps inside the door when the stench—of feces rat and human, of desiccated mice, stale sweat, and charred wood—seemed to rise up in an animate miasma. It assumed a roughly humanoid form just behind my left shoulder, regarding me. For another few steps I was able to dismiss the impression as absurd. The house was groaning all around me and the suggestion of a looming, hazy figure at my shoulder was getting ever more insistent. I finally spun to confront it, with the confused idea that I could dissolve the thing with the pure force of my disdain. I couldn’t see much in the dimness, just a blur of motion, and then something collided with my head. Hard enough to drop me, whatever it was; possibly a loose board.
