by Emily Beyda
He keeps his distance this time, looking smaller and smaller until there is nothing left but clothes, a child trying on his father’s suit. He finally looks away from her, through the glass toward the cold white blur of the sign across the canyon.
“You’re not a monster,” says Max. “You’re wonderful. You’re Rosanna. No one has ever been as wonderful as you.”
The helicopter chop grows louder. Rosanna is the one to move toward him now. Max is the one to move away.
“That’s what you want to think,” she says. “You’ve been working so hard to believe it. What other choice do you have? And now this.”
She holds the camera toward him, an offering.
“This camera. This hidden camera you’ve been filming me with. My most private moments, everything. I think there must be more of them. I think there must be cameras all over this house. I know you, Max. You’re thorough. I need you to show me where they are. And then I need you to leave. Forever.”
He looks back at her again. His eyes are deep and wet and angry.
“I just wanted to know you,” he says. “That’s all. I don’t think there’s any harm in that.”
She sighs. She puts the camera down on the edge of the counter, and I can see the muscles moving under her tight dress, her body articulating itself into parts as she gets closer to him, moving with terrible slowness, like something stalking, hiding in the high grass.
“Everyone wants to know me,” she says. “But you haven’t come closer than anyone else. You just have more raw data. That doesn’t mean a thing. You’re not special. There’s nothing special about you. The only thing different about you, Max, is that you have no life to distract you from this pitiful mission of yours—to collect me, to discover the truth. But you’ve failed. Because the truth is this: there isn’t anything to know. There is no great hidden secret for you to discover. Just a sad, shallow woman who hates you. Almost as much as she hates herself.”
“Please,” he says, “Rosanna.”
“No,” she says. “It’s all been a mistake. I realize that now. Show me where the cameras are. Show me all the footage. And leave. I never want to see you again. You can have it all back when I’m dead. You can have everything. Maybe you can make something worthwhile out of it all. I certainly can’t.”
There is a long silence. Outside, the sound of helicopter seems to build, gathering like a storm, searchlights sweeping through the burned-out hollows of the hillside, looking, looking.
“I’ll miss you,” says Max.
“Oh, Maxie,” says Rosanna, “I know. Of course you will. I won’t miss you at all.”
The camera goes dark.
* * *
—
Rosanna lies still in her bed at the center of the room. I recognize Max’s gait now, in the way the footage moves, the measured rhythm of his steps as he crosses the threshold. If only he had filmed her with a handheld camera all along. I would have known the whole time.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I shouldn’t come have come back here, I know you said not to, but I wanted to give you this last—”
And he breaks off, seeing her lie there impossibly still, seeing what I saw before him, what he didn’t want to see, the bright orange pile of empty prescription bottles, the tipped-over bottle of white wine. I recognize the label, one of Rosanna’s favorites, a flinty chenin blanc. I can taste it in my mouth, the flatness, wet stone and something more bitter, a chemical ache burning my throat, nothing but the best, and I know what he doesn’t as he leans forward and shakes her, knew it, I think, from the moment I walked into this room and saw the faint ghost of the stain on the carpet beside the bed. Even through the screen, I can feel the dead heaviness of the air in that room, how it is thoroughly, utterly still. The way the air is still now. Nothing left alive. Rosanna no longer lives in that body. That body no longer controls her career, her decisions, her relationships, her bank account, Max. This body does. This body with her face.
“Rosanna?” Max says.
Silence. And then he is screaming and screaming and screaming, and he drops the camera onto the bed and I hear a sound like choking, he is trying to breathe life back into her, but it is too late, too late, even as he rushes to the window, trying to pull the night air into her body, carrying her body like it is something precious, her bones of a little bird, her hair spilling like water dark down over his arms. His body bulk darkens the window, which, as he stands there, holding her, weeping, this monster, my monster, cradling her like a baby, floods briefly with the light from a passing helicopter, dark shadows running off both their bodies. A halo, I think, a portal, opening to carry her to the world beyond. There is gentleness in the way he moves now, as he reaches toward her, touches her face, and she doesn’t flinch for once, I think, I can feel him thinking, for once she lets him touch her, gentleness as they stand together and the camera is knocked onto the floor, and all I can see is their feet poised close like they are about to begin a waltz, and then she is gone, gone, lifted up, her feet rising out of frame like she is flying, a sound like a gasp, a sigh, a rush of his breath leaving her body. The frame is bright again, a beat, and silence, the dark silence of an empty room. I can see the shadows of Max’s feet alone.
* * *
—
The camera clicks back on. Now it is close to the grass, a blur of living green. Rosanna’s lawn, clipped close here, neat, a velvet expanse beyond the pool, sloping into the infinite distance. The sky is pink. The sun is rising. I can see a man walking away from me toward the house. I can see the slope of his shoulders, the hesitation in his walk. The door swings shut behind him. He is inside for a long time. The light on the blank white face of the house goes from gray to pink to the pale bleached yellow of bad teeth. The door opens. The man comes out. He is not alone. He is carrying a woman over his shoulder. I can see the clean white bottoms of her feet, shining in the rising sun. She is dressed beautifully, all in white, a long silk shift like the one I am wearing now, warming against my living skin. The water in the pool is dark and still. A black eye, looking up. He walks to the edge of the water. He shifts her body over his shoulder so he is holding her in his arms now, like a baby, a bride, looking into her face with something like conviction, a man performing a baptism, a miracle. Tears stream silent down his face. The world is silent around him. He descends, the fabric of his pants turning dark as the water, clean still, clear, eats him up. He walks until it reaches his waist, his arms where he carries her, and she begins to float. There is a hesitation, a beat when he cannot bring himself to let her go, and then his arms open. She stays suspended on the water, until slowly it seeps heavy into her hair, her dress, and she begins to sink down below the surface, the water rippling around her, gentle, and then still. Closing around her body. Amniotic. The man stands in the dark water, looking right out at me, so still, his eye on the eye of the camera, mine. I feel something coming into me. New life. The screen blinks black. And then downstairs, I hear a splash. Something is emerging from the green scabbed pool. One of those dark shapes is finding the light. I hear a creak. A door is opening. Something, someone is coming. Rosanna doesn’t need her old body anymore. She needs this body. She needs me. For months and months, I have been preparing. I am ready for her to come. I pull the white sheets up over my face like a shroud, look out into the soft white nothing. I close my eyes. I wait.
* * *
—
When you open your eyes, you find yourself alone. You are never alone, but you are alone now, and you watch yourself as you rise from the water and stand in the middle of the grass, overgrown, silver and black in the light of the full moon like the surface of some strange planet. You stand there for a long time, light prickling your skin, your skin prickling with water, and you can feel your neighbors watching at the windows, waiting, some distant force like a physical pressure, a push, and, you smile and smile and smile up at the distant hillsid
e, and there is always someone watching, and you are never alone, and Here I am, you think, “Here I am,” you say, out loud, “I’m here,” your own voice unfamiliar somehow. It has been a while. It has been a very long time since you spoke. The crabgrass pricks the bottoms of your feet. Your feet are soft from swimming. You have spent a long time in the water. At the bottom of the garden, behind you, you can see the mirror of the swimming pool wrinkling, small whispers where you came out of the water and you are both here and not here, in your body and out of your body, looking up at the purple night and down, down, at yourself standing in the distance, so tiny, small, and fragile that looking at yourself you are filled with an unbearable tenderness—there you are, all of you, every inch perfect, newborn. You can hear the small noises the water makes rippling itself closed. Soon it will be perfectly flat. There will be no sign you were ever there at all.
The house is dark around you, but you know where to go, the familiar steps smooth in the warm worn wood, and you’re not afraid of splinters, of knocking against things in the dark. You don’t have a body to harm. Your body is waiting for you upstairs, silent and still in that golden room, waiting for you to draw your first breath. You know this house and this house knows you, no one loves you like this house does, do they, the empty dark that has grown and grown to hold you safe, a den, a womb, the insides of a tortoise’s shell, and you run your hand down the smooth vine of the banister, wood sleek slippery, the back of a snake sliding through dark water, rising to meet your hand, to guide you, through the hallway now, the light thick and blue and dense close-pressed against you, so cool, deeply cold, a silent nook at the bottom of a dark sea, to the lit open door at the end, where you find yourself waiting in your bed. You have been there all along. You slide inside yourself and pull the sheets around you, close. You fall into a deep, dreamless sleep.
* * *
—
I listen to the footsteps coming up the stairs. I listen to the pause at the door, the slow steps into the room, scared. But there is nothing to be afraid of. Someone pulls the sheet off my face. His own face, leaning over, so close to mine, is wet and vulnerable, the face of a child who has fallen, who keeps falling, who is waiting for help, bravely deciding he will not cry. I know this though my eyes are closed. He turns my left arm over, his fingers lingering on the wrist, and I hear him gasp at the warmth of me. Somewhere deep inside, I feel a fist unclenching. Whatever it is holding, I let go. There is something half remembered there, some other name, the contours of a profile glimpsed in a dark mirror, a bad dream disappearing back into the muddy depths of sleep. I feel the memory lighten, fuzz, fade. Disappear. I open my eyes. I breathe in. The air is brand-new in my lungs.
“Darling,” I say, and he crumbles. I open my arms. The weight of him is familiar, strange.
“Rosanna,” he says, his voice breaking in the middle. “Rosanna,” he tries again, a sob, a promise, a prayer. “Rosanna,” he says. “Rosanna.”
Acknowledgments
It’s impossible for me to convey how grateful I am to the incomparable Jennifer Jackson, my editor, for her boundless enthusiasm, her thorough and thoughtful notes, and talking me out of paying forty dollars to go to the Trolls Experience. And none of this would even be happening without Molly Atlas, the amazing, the steadfast, who believed in this weird little book and this weird little gal from day one, thank you. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my teachers, Karen Russell, David Gates, T. Geronimo Johnson, Doug Dorst, Susan Morrison, Rebecca Bell Metereau, Tom Grimes, Lauren Elkin, Martin Reichart, and Eugene Osatachevski. To Ivy Pochoda, my mentor, my friend, for showing me how to be the most amazing and supportive member of a literary community, and Jennifer duBois, for being the most amazing and insightful reader, advisor, and Uzbek lunch companion. To Maria Bustillos, for hosting the best dinner parties and writing a million letters of recommendation. Thank you to all the attendees of the BAE Systems reading series, for reminding me of the joy of creativity and looking so damn good in my dresses, especially Clare Murray and the chickens, Louisa, Hildegarde, and our beloved Sandwiches. To my friends and readers, Marilyse Figueroa, Jeff Karr, Eddie Mathis, for your love and letters. To Maytal Eyal and Cleo Elfonte, for letting me be their human audiobook. To Erin Salada, commute companion, empty house dance party kween, and Molly Moltzen, president and founder of the Adventure Club. Vlad Beronja and Ellicott Pacheco, for the day trips. To Megan Forbes and Roja Chamankar, for the beautiful translations we worked on together. To Robert Meador, for introducing me to the fine art of American masculinity via cage fighting and being my friend. To Caroline Compton, for taking me in and introducing me to the fine art of the soap opera. To Patricia and Eva Munoz, for keeping me in groceries while I wrote the early drafts of this book; Jessi Cape, editrix extraordinaire, for always supporting and believing in me; and Brandon Watson, for taking a chance on a stranger who emailed you her column idea. To the Casablancas family, Juliet, Julian, Cal, and Zephyr, for your enthusiasm and love and (in Zephyr’s case) napping so I could edit. To the Babitz sisters, Eve and Mirandy, for being my first models of life as a bohemian creative lady. Most of all, to my family, my parents, Kent and Nancy, for your constant love and support; my siblings, Lauren and Jackson, for making up stories with me on long road trips; Kate and Michael and Sophie, Lauren and Adam and Daniel, Carolyn and David, Nanaw and L-Dog, Grandma Mary, and especially, my grandfather Joseph Beyda, for believing in me, always, unconditionally, and letting me write in all your houses. Most of all, to Hari, love of my life, light of my soul, for being the best listener and best reader and best roommate and the best person I know. My life is so much better with you in it.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Beyda is a writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. This is her first book. She hopes you liked it.
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