The Marriage of Sticks

by Jonathan Carroll

  Frannie jogged back down the hall looking baffled. “You’re right, there’s nothing there anymore. Used to be a door in the ceiling with a latch you’d pull and a folding ladder would come down. But it’s all gone. There is no fuckin’ attic!”

  “Forget it. Let’s go.”

  “The house is going to burn down and we’re gonna be in the goddamned basement!”

  I led the way. Down the front stairs, a left turn, and just before the kitchen, the white basement door. McCabe reached for the knob. I stopped him. “Let me go first.”

  The dank odor of damp earth and stone. A place where the air never changed, a breeze never blew through. Clicking on the light at the top of the stairs did little good. No more than a sixty-watt bulb, it illuminated only a few steps down and then the rest fell away into a brown darkness. I took firm hold of the rickety banister and started down.

  “I hope to God someone’s called the fire department by now. They’re having a busy day.”

  “Be quiet, Frannie.” The only sound then was the muted clunk of our feet going down wooden stairs. At the bottom, the basement floor was bumpy and felt like hard-packed earth. It was about ten feet from the stairs to the first room. The door was half-closed but the light from inside sent a weak ray out across a patch of floor. I walked over and pushed the door open.

  Days before, I had helped Hugh carry things into this room. It had been almost empty but for a couple of broken lawn chairs and an archery target with only one leg. We stacked our empty boxes and suitcases against moldy walls and discussed whether we should even try to clean the room a little. Years of neglect had left it looking like a typical moldy basement room where you store unimportant things and promptly forget them forever.

  But the room I entered now was luminous, transformed. Painted a happy pink-orange, the once-shabby walls were covered with pictures of Disney creatures, giant George Booth bullterriers, Tin Tin and Milou, characters from The Wizard of Oz. On the spotless parquet floor sat a pile of stuffed animals and other cartoon characters: Olive Oyl, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck.

  In the center of the room was the most extraordinary cradle I had ever seen. Made out of dark mahogany, it must have been hundreds of years old; it looked medieval. Particularly because of the intricate carving that covered every square inch of its surface. Angels and animals, clouds and suns, planets, stars, the Milky Way, simple German words carved with the most devoted precision: Liebe, Kind, Gott, Himmel, unsterblich.… Love, child, God, immortal. How long had it taken the artist to create it? The work of a lifetime, it said everything about love any hand could express. It was love, carved out of wood.

  Overwhelmed, I crossed the floor thinking about nothing else but this exceptional object.

  “Miranda, be careful!”

  His voice and the sight of what was in the cradle arrived simultaneously.

  “Oh my God!” The child living in my body, Hugh’s child, lay in that cradle. I recognized her the moment I saw her. I touched my belly and began to tremble uncontrollably. None of this was possible, but I knew without question that this was our baby, our daughter. Even my jaw was shaking when I managed to say quietly, “Hi, sweetheart.”

  She lay on her back in a pajama the same happy color as the room. She played with her fingers and smiled, frowned, smiled, all concentration. She looked like Hugh. She looked like me. She was the most beautiful baby in the world. She was ours.

  But she would not look at me even when I moved to the cradle to stare. Having controlled my shaking, I reached down to touch her. As my hand moved toward her, she began to fade. No other way to explain it. The closer I got, the paler she grew, then white, transparent.

  When it first happened, I snatched my hand back. She returned. Everything about her became visible again. The cradle, her bedding, the room—all remained as it was, but not our baby. I could not touch her. It was not permitted.

  Out loud but only to myself I said, “But I have to touch her. I need to touch my baby!”

  “You can’t.” I looked at McCabe. His face was twisted in fury. “Don’t you understand? It’s a setup, Miranda! Just figure out what you’re supposed to do. We’re standing below a burning house. That’s the only real thing here.”

  I could not accept that. I reached for my baby again, but the same thing happened. She faded. She never looked at me. My hand stopped. “She doesn’t see me. Why doesn’t she see me?”

  “Because she’s not here, goddammit! The room’s a trick. The baby’s a trick. It’s all illusion. Let’s get out of here! Let’s look in the other room and then get the hell out.”

  “I can’t. I have to stay here.”

  “Not possible.” He stepped around me and picking up the cradle threw it against the far wall. It bounced off, hit the floor, and rolled over face down. One piece broke off and skidded back almost to my foot.

  Horrified, I rushed to the cradle and turned it over. It was empty. Aghast, I put my hands in, but there was no child, no blanket or bedding, nothing but the empty smoothness of the wood. I was so confused I didn’t even think about McCabe or what he had just done. The baby was gone. Where was my baby?

  “Can we go now? They’re waiting.” The voice behind me was different. I turned and saw… Shumda. The Enormous Shumda, Ventriloquist Extraordinaire, Frances Hatch’s lover, the man who killed the little girl who was once me. McCabe was nowhere to be seen and I knew why.

  “It was you all along, wasn’t it? Upstairs, with the fire and the talking dolls? The whole thing was a trick; McCabe never came back to the house after he dropped me off.”

  He bowed. “Correct. I’m good at voices. But we really do have to get going.”

  “Where? Where’s my baby? Where did she go?”

  “That’s for you to decide. Let’s go!”

  “I’m not going with you.”

  “Oh, but you must. Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.

  I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.

  “It was my baby, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”

  I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.

  He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.

  “All right.”

  The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.

  The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.

  What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.

  A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be… a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.

  Stopping there, I looked left and right. It was a stadium. Walkways went off to either side and conne
cted to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.

  There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.

  My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.

  My footsteps echoed around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.

  The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.

  Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?

  As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.

  Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was his cologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.

  Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.

  Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Petluchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.

  In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.

  How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together is you. You are their thread.

  Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of all your lives, together…

  It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.

  These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Petluchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799… Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.

  When I could bear it, I turned back to the field, feeling their eyes on me, waiting to see what I would do next. Down on the grass Hugh stood next to a young woman I did not know. The baby was no longer in his arms. Watching this new woman, I tried to remember her face, but nothing came.

  “It’s your daughter when she grows up.” Hugh’s son with Charlotte, my nemesis, walked up the aisle toward me.

  I glared at him, not trusting one word. He sensed it and his expression hardened. “It’s true. I don’t care if you believe me. Go see for yourself.”

  I made a wide circle around him and walked down the stairs. There was a small open gate at the bottom. I went through it and onto the field. Hugh and the young woman watched me, smiling. She looked at Hugh and he nodded eagerly. She touched his forearm and came toward me. I stopped and caught my breath.

  She was tall and plain-looking and had big hands, my hands. Her smile was lopsided and heartbreaking. She had her father’s brown eyes and eyebrows that turned up at the ends.

  “Mama?”

  As I was about to say “Yes, yes, yes, it’s me, I am your mother,” the world behind us erupted. For an instant our eyes met and I’m sure we both wore the same terrified expression. It was the crowd. The tens of thousands of people gathered together were suddenly screaming their collective fury, their hatred and resentment of me.

  Because somewhere in the course of their lives I had selfishly used every one of them. Used them in small or large, forgotten or impossible-to-conceive-of ways to get whatever it was I wanted at the moment. I had loved them and tricked them or hated them and forgotten them, had ignored them, paid them court, stolen their hearts or said no when they offered them. I had gone into their lives blind; I had gone in knowing everything. I took their love, I took their hopes, I took their time, and I paid them no respect.

  Some of them had asked for something back, some for a lot back. Each time I gave only what I wanted or had a surplus of and wouldn’t miss. They gave what th
ey cherished or what kept them alive, what made them tick or gave them faith. What they got from me in return was nothing, wrapped in a fine empty box with tinsel and glitter on it. Most people steal because they believe what they steal should belong to them anyway. To me it wasn’t theft, it was barter: I’ll trade you what I don’t need for whatever it is about you I want. That’s fair.

  They shook their fists; some faces were purple or dead pale. One woman was so furious she wept. One man, driven mad, was throwing something at me. Nothing. He held nothing in his hand but was trying to throw something anyway. He did it over and over. Their hatred was crushing, resentment as thick as stone, hot as flame.

  And all of it was my fault.

  In the midst of this frenzy, Hugh’s son walked out onto the field and stopped a few feet from me. Another casualty. A child my selfishness had stopped from being born. He brought two closed fists up to the sides of his mouth. Then his index fingers came slowly out and pointed down. Like teeth. Like fangs.

  “You’re a vampire.”

  And I heard the word above the roar because I had already realized that was what this was all about.

  I spun around to see if Hugh and the girl had heard, but they were gone. I stood looking at acres of perfect green grass, wishing with all my might they would reappear so I could say something, anything, to them to explain. But there was no explanation. There was only that black word and it was the truth. Vampires take the one thing that keeps a person alive. Sometimes it is blood, sometimes hope, love, ambition, or faith. I took them all.

  Behind my back the noise stopped. Not even the sound of the wind. When I turned, only the boy was still there. The stands were completely empty. He stood in the same spot, his hands at his sides.

  I took a step toward him but this time he pulled back, afraid I would touch him.

  I tried to speak but my throat was thick and dry. “What’s your name?”