Circling the Drain

by Amanda Davis

  Lily couldn’t take it. Not only was he blind to her, but she didn’t like the ragged boy nearly as much as she had before.

  Ma, I tried to bewitch the boy who loved a horse more than me and now I think I’ve broken him.

  Her mother looked up from her tiny stitches and saw her daughter all twisted into a knot and was filled with worry. That’s no good, she said. You have to find him another horse. You can’t rob someone to find love, honey. That never works.

  A horse. A horse? Not another horse, but something. Lily had to do something, so she plucked the hollow boy from the side of the road and slipped him into her battered Volvo and drove two days and two nights without sleeping, all the time silent, teeth gritted, hollow boy staring out the window where she’d propped him so he could see the land pass.

  They came to a city where the boy had never been and Lily fed him in a loud and crowded restaurant and pushed him along a dirty crowded street but the boy seemed not to notice.

  C’mon, she said: This is for your own good.

  Then she toted him upstairs to a green platform and the boy stirred a little, surrounded by the very thing he’d never understood. He was wading knee-deep in the kudzu of man. When the subway roared in, the boy’s eyes opened wide and his heart began to pound again and Lily saw color return to his cheeks.

  Hey? she whispered: How about this?

  She waited to see what would happen, but he didn’t move while the people swarmed in, and then the silver boxes that contained them, one strung to another like an enormous caterpillar, crawled away, and then jogged, and then trotted and galloped and were gone. The boy stared wistfully after them and his shoulders drooped and Lily knew what to do.

  Another train roared in.

  Cowboy, she whispered: Climb aboard, and he hesitated but Lily gave him a firm shove and he stumbled through the open doors.

  The car was full of people and she saw him look around and wander about and then, as though on fire, he came alive, yelling: No! yelling: Lily! and ran towards the doors but they closed and the train began to leave with the boy pressed hard to the window, his fear slapping at the glass like the flat of his palms. All around him passengers moved to sit down, moved away from the boy. But as the train began to slip into the night, Lily hollered: Wait! reached deep inside and squeezed her hopes into a giant ball, then hurled it towards the front of the train.

  Which stopped.

  The doors opened and Lily ran for the petrified boy, yanking him down the platform and back to her car as it started to rain.

  He was shaking by then, his eyes wild, and she wrapped him in a blanket and once again propped him by the window and began to drive.

  I don’t know, she murmured: I just don’t know.

  The city receded and the road unfurled and they drove for a long while, rain giving way to twilight, and the boy stayed put until Lily stopped the car.

  She got out and pulled him into an open field, past grasses large enough to cover their heads, until they came to a clearing where Lily left the boy while she gathered the makings of a fire.

  They sat cross-legged in its warm orange glow and Lily stared into the flames until it seemed her mind would melt, all the time thinking: a horse, a horse, but the boy lay with his arms behind his head and an emptiness in his eyes and Lily knew there had to be a way to bring him home in there.

  Cowboy, she whispered: Let me tell you a tale. She handed him a weed to chew and lay herself back in the fine field dirt with the fire spitting and sparking nearby, and she closed her eyes and let the words tumble into stories and let the stories fly like pebbles in the air, each one landing near the boy, until they formed a ring around him, until he was safely walled in.

  Wishes and dreams, she said: Before my father died he could make anything out of wishes and dreams. I’m sorry for what I’ve done to you, Cowboy. It was selfish, I know, but I didn’t mean any harm. All I wanted was to love you the best I could. All I wanted was to comfort you, to run my fingers through your shaggy hair, and roll over and around you late at night. To be as close as we could be. I didn’t mean to untie the knot of you, Cowboy. How do I retie that?

  The stars popped out one by one, and they lay in the darkness of the open-skied evening. Lily had almost drifted off when she felt a hand in her hair, then heard the scramble of a body and felt the warmth of the boy beside her. He pulled himself close, so his belly pressed her back, wrapped his arms around her and squeezed so tight she felt every outline of the buttons on his tattered love-soaked shirt.

  The boy whispered: Lily, and his tears trickled down the curve of her neck and she also began to cry in that empty land, for the loss of her hopes and his horse, for the size of regret and the ache in her heart. When she turned around to face him it was almost enough.

  I’m so sorry, she whispered as he kissed her face. I’ll make it right somehow.

  Her hands were in his, her weight under his, all around them her stories in a ring, and they cried and kissed by the light of the fire, making wishes and dreams, as they moved together under the absent moon.

  But Lily slept soundly while the fire burned to embers in the cold gray dawn. She woke to the distant growl of an engine, to the zip of a car slicing the road, and then there was silence. There was the hush of wind moving through the tall grass. There were the scattered pebbles of her broken stories, crushed into dust by the heel of a boot. There was a ruined fire and the charred remains of a blue-threaded, love-soaked shirt.

  And there was Lily all alone in the field.

  No boy. No keys. Just an empty sky and the sound of her heart.

  CIRCLING THE DRAIN

  1.

  Where Ellen stood on the Williamsburg Bridge it was calm and serene. She had strolled past bridge workers, past cement barriers and, balancing on a naked girder, she was protected from traffic by the J train hurtling past. All the cars and trucks were on the other side. She could hear them rumbling behind her but it was peaceful right there, where, like a ghost, she stood unnoticed.

  Under the water it looked cool, uninterruptible, safe. Ellen imagined floating down there in a fetal tuck, drifting with the will of the river this way or that way, eyes closed, a warm ball.

  Today Ellen had woken to the sounds of fighting and the smell of curry sweeping into her dreams. The difference had been obvious and inescapable from the moment she opened her eyes. After so many days that wiped each other away, each day erasing the last with the same stroke, the same tone, this day was sharp. This day was clear and light, its meaning unavoidable, like a ringing in her ears that she couldn’t silence.

  She made toast. She drank tea clouded with the last of the milk and she watched the sky. She scrawled a note for Billy: Gone for a walk. Then she tore it up. She tried again: Gone off. Love, Ellen. Then she tore that up and finally just put on her coat and walked out of the apartment and headed for Delancey.

  She stood looking down at the water, cloudy like her tea, and the wind moved her hair around. How much would it take to jump? Would there be a moment of regret when she clutched at air while she fell, tumbling, spilling into the murky dark brown river? Or, perhaps she would dive cleanly, arcing through air to enter with a splash, leaving just a ripple behind, choosing to disappear. What do I want? Ellen thought. What in this world do I want?

  2.

  Billy had said, Don’t be such a prude, and Ellen wanted to die right then. The boy in his bed giggled and ducked his head into Billy’s chest and Ellen felt the air smash out of her. She stood frozen for what seemed like a long time, halfway in the bathroom and halfway out. The blond boy looked up again and Ellen thought he was young and panicking. Then he giggled.

  She’d come from another long day of job hunting and headed straight for the bathroom without even taking off her coat, talking all the while. As she charged through the door, she saw, out of the corner of her eye, Billy in bed.

  I feel really good about this place on Second Avenue. They asked me to come back on Saturday to talk to the owner
, so I think that’s a good sign, and after all the places…I must have been to thirty places, she called to him, splashing water on her face. My feet are killing me.

  And then she started out of the bathroom and into the crowded room that was Billy’s studio, and now was their studio, now that she’d moved all this way to be with him. Had sliced the country in half to be with him. And there in his bed, in their bed, was another body under the covers, was a skinny boy who’d been fucking Billy.

  She stared at them, her heart shriveling, her stomach a fist, and Billy said, Baby, I didn’t think you’d be home so soon.

  All she could choke out was a raspy, It’s almost seven, that would have to mean fuck you since those words clogged her throat.

  Don’t be such a tight ass, Ellen, you know this doesn’t mean anything.

  But he was still in bed, lying all cuddled up with a hand in the boy’s silvery hair and Ellen’s eyes floated out the window, past the sugar plant to the East River and the bridges standing with their legs apart.

  3.

  Later it is the air she will remember. The sharpness of it as she inhaled: crisp like paper. She could have been breathing paper. There was a rush of sound, like a train passing, or maybe like she was the train. Thick colors swirled and time became molasses as her legs slowly tumbled around behind her and then over her head. She thought that it was like being inside a spin-art toy. She was the blob of paint spreading thinly every which way, spindling in all directions, pulled flat, slow and hard. That was how she tumbled and then time caught up with itself and she dropped.

  4.

  In the hospital she cannot speak. There are wires in her arm and the whole room seems to be made of steel or aluminum. Everything looks metallic. Even the water she is given could be mercury, it tastes silvery and thick, but she swallows it silently. Her doctor has a huge head and seems to appear close to her face, which makes no sense to Ellen, but she knows she is fading in and out of consciousness, not able to stay in one place for very long.

  She doesn’t know his name and thinks of him as Ben: a nice name, a nice doctor’s name. She stares at the dotted squares in the ceiling and watches the dots slide around, dancing, cheerleading. Sometimes she thinks they are trying to spell something. The ceiling is a Ouija board. She cannot move but her eyes are channeling answers and the ceiling struggles to help out: the dots continually sliding, slipping, oozing around above her.

  Dr. Ben’s face looms. She opens her eyes and finds it swimming close, his eyes inches from hers. Then he stands at the foot of her bed talking to a group of people whom she can not see, except for the tops of their heads.

  Ellen can’t understand him. She knows he is talking but his sounds are not connected to words or to the movements of his lips. She can almost feel the noise of his speech underneath her head but there is no meaning, even as she strains to connect it all to language. Then she feels her eyelids pull themselves down.

  5.

  Ellen defrosted when the boy lunged for the door. Without warning she reached for something, anything. Her fingers curled around an unwashed plate and she flung it in Billy’s direction. It smashed on the wall behind him; he jumped but she was already reaching for something else: a book, which she sent hurtling towards him. Then she screamed and threw whatever was nearby and Billy yelled: Hey! and Fuck! and Ellen! Cut that out! Bam. Quit it! Smash. Ow! Thud. And then there was nothing left in her with which to throw.

  All at once everything emptied out. A wail rushed up from deep inside and Billy wound his arms around her and tried to rock her. And the wail was enormous, it came up, unpiling from her gut, until she had no more sound and it was just air blown out.

  Days and weeks followed where something in her rattled out of place. Where Ellen had once felt like a puzzle piece that fit to Billy, now she felt misshapen: broken or bent. Now she stiffened to his touch, was unsure of her surroundings. She began to believe that at any moment the very ground that held her could dissolve and she would be sucked down into empty space. Yet she couldn’t leave him; she was unable to walk away, as though she, herself, might disappear without him.

  There had been others, Ellen realized now, piecing together the stray stockings, not hers, that she had thrown away, the foreign toothbrush, the long straight black hair on the dresser top. Red lights that Ellen had gone speeding through. And now there was nowhere to go.

  6.

  One clear day, months before she found Billy with the boy, Ellen crossed the Williamsburg Bridge for the first time with an apple balanced on the flat palm of one hand. Her arms were outstretched: she imagined herself on a tightrope. She balanced the apple, believing at that moment that she would be able to heal all wounds, patch the cracks in her life, both seen and unseen, if she was able to make it from shore to shore immaculately. If she just walked perfectly across, her vision would clear and her life would rewind to a place where things made sense.

  She placed heel to toe and held herself erect, chin up. I can go from here to there. I will reach the other side and find perfection. Something will spill from the sky, erasing all this bleak, empty gray. I’ll step off the end of the bridge and when I reach land I’ll eat my apple, exhale, and rejoin the world already in progress. Heel to toe, palm flat as paper. Heel to toe, palm flat as Montana. Heel to toe, palm flat as a cracker.

  She could hear the messenger approaching, feel the grind of his wheels into the swaying bridge. As he rushed past her, his handlebar caught her wrist, sending the apple soaring up into the air where it hung and then plummeted to the lower deck of the bridge. It splattered and stayed, a smear of red and white. She stood, arms down, game forgotten, and watched it for a moment, then kept walking, arms by her side now, chin still up.

  7.

  It is dark and quiet when the angel comes. He has the horrible face of a gargoyle with silver eyes and huge luminous feathered pale blue wings that twitch and stretch independent of his sparkly body. He stands still and his wings make quiet raspy noises that seep from under Ellen’s head. She tries to open her mouth but her muscles rebel and instead her nose twitches. She tries to lift her right arm but her right eye blinks and then he is gone.

  Ellen stares through the space he held and down a long dark hallway toward the nurse’s station. All the lights are out and only candles, hundreds and hundreds of candles on the linoleum floor, along the walls, illuminate the hospital and then her eyes close.

  8.

  Ellen wants to speak. It is tiresome to lie still and float around on the sea of consciousness, immobile except for occasional prodding or turning or poking. She wants very much to say something, to ask a question or two of Dr. Ben. If not about her condition, then about the candles and the hospital, but she can’t remember how. A nurse comes in and stands writing on a clipboard near the foot of the bed, then moves closer and fiddles with the bag of liquid suspended just out of sight to Ellen’s left. Behind the nurse, the walls erupt into a grassy plain. A vine explodes with drunken purple flowers and snakes slowly towards her. Ellen tries to signal with her eyes, to raise her eyebrows, but she can already feel her lids slipping, her mind turning soupy. She fights it and pushes, squeezes deep inside at something to move, move, shake, wiggle, dance! And just as the nurse walks out, Ellen’s left foot jumps! The sheets twitch but the grassy door clicks shut.

  9.

  How did it all begin? It began before New York. It began with Billy.

  After sorting the mail, watering the plants, answering the phone, making travel reservations, tracking a package and typing the last of her boss’s dictation, Ellen had gone to a bar. She’d walked out of the office and headed straight there. It was stale and empty, the perfect place to collect her thoughts after a long, dreary day. She didn’t notice the place begin to fill until she saw the film crew come in, all in black jackets and baseball caps, sticking out in the bar crowd as overtly as if the jackets had read Not From Around Here, in their fancy stitching, instead of the names of production companies.

  She had
seen them shooting that morning when she got off the bus by the office, a street corner illuminated by white light and populated by scruffy people with walkie-talkies. She’d turned around to look, joined the crowd watching the crew wait around until she realized what time it was and had to run the last two blocks so she wouldn’t be late.

  She recognized a man down the bar to her left as the subject of all the hubbub. When she’d walked by he was surrounded by lights, his blond hair coiffed, his smile sparkling. He saw her glance and she looked away quickly.

  Then he sent her a drink but she still wouldn’t look at him. What could this beautiful man, this movie star, want with her? That he picked her, out of the whole bar full of music and bodies, seemed impossible, and so she didn’t look up, just took the paper off the end of the straw and began to suck on her third Tom Collins. As she was moving the straw around to get the fizz from the bottom of the glass, he sat down on the stool next to her and stared. The band took a break and the sudden decibel drop made Ellen’s head feel like it was floating.

  Thanks for the drink, she whispered, looking down at the glass.

  Well…He drew the word out and Ellen felt herself hang on his pause. You’re a fragile one, huh?

  (Mouth dry. Heart banging loudly.) I guess.

  Can we get another round here? He leaned toward the bartender who raised his eyebrows at Ellen. Or maybe he didn’t. Things were oozing slightly on the edge of her vision.

  I don’t know Lairmont at all, he shouted over the dull roar of the band’s new set. I’m just in town on a shoot. Maybe you could show me around?

  At eleven o’clock at night? Ellen thought, alcohol buzzing in time with the band.

  Yeah. Okay. She reached for her coat.

  In the morning her head hurt terribly and the movie star was in her bed.

  I’m Billy, he said. And for a moment she couldn’t quite place him.