by Ben Marcus
There was only one possible solution. She would take Flora into her bed, curve into her body, hold her beneath the quilt. They would both take sleeping pills and the winter would be over. But she didn’t kill Flora that night, didn’t kill herself, and now it is Los Angeles in early February.
Everything feels and tastes like spring. The afternoon dissolves into impressions, phantom images. We give them anchors, we give them language, she thinks. We practice acts of anthropomorphism, we wield the rules of grammar, but they are still creatures, pulsing.
She needs to see Flora. She is nine blocks from her school. It is afternoon and at 2:30 the fourth graders have gym on North Field. Erica can sit behind a clump of oleander and watch her daughter play volleyball near the fence. The day has become simple, transparent. She can either walk along the ocean or watch Flora move through lacquered sunlight. These are the only two indisputable activities in this world.
She walks past an orange tree, then a tree with lemons that look distended, and one with tangerines that are a sharp red. They would sting the mouth. You could bite into them and burn or bleed. You could serve such fruit at weddings or wakes. Yesterday she watched Bob pack. He was going to a meeting in Washington. He said she seemed different. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine,” she had replied.
She remembers saying this to her mother. She had employed exactly the same cadence, the precise rise and fall of her voice like a series of bells in a plaza passed by in a speeding night train. This is a lie she has long ago engraved within herself. This is the way she imagines grown-ups speak. And her mother said, “Don’t make me laugh.”
“I’m getting myself together,” she had told her mother. It might have been at the end of graduate school, during her first divorce. It might have been the winter she almost murdered her daughter.
“It’s going to take you a lifetime,” her mother said. Her mother was drinking vodka. She surveyed her coolly, evaluated her like a suit she didn’t consider worth buying. Then she smiled.
Of course, her mother and father are dead now. They are dead but not quite gone. There is an entire substratum of people like this, people she doesn’t quite know and yet they somehow linger. There is the matter of her sister with the two best friends who are dying. There are her daughter’s mystery friends that surface and are erased, names she has never heard before suddenly brandished as best friends.
“You know Alexa?” Flora begins. Erica says no. “Alexa, my best friend,” Flora continues, highlighting each of her words, obviously annoyed.
This name is not familiar. She feels defensive and afraid. “I know Robin and Claudia,” she reminds her daughter. “I know the twins. But not Alexa.”
She is combing Flora’s hair. It is night. She winds strands into tiny black braids. In the morning when the braids are undone, Flora will be adorned with vast complexities of curl. Now Flora looks like her head is a nest of snakes. We give birth to mythology over and over, Erica realizes, almost trembling with terror. We are the dried riverbeds where they hatch, where they drag their cold bodies across sand. It is from our bellies that they come.
“You’re lying,” Flora says. “All you do is talk on the phone. You don’t even drive me to school anymore.” Then she slams her bedroom door.
Now it is important that she find Flora and tell her she wasn’t lying. There are protocols for the keeping of names. These syllables are sacred. When the winds have taken everything, even the buildings and the stones and the bark, these names will remain. These are the perpetually open graves. She is going to explain this to her daughter. She will defend herself against this suggestion of desecration.
Last night her sister called with more information about Babette. She can no longer sit. She has to sleep strapped to a board, upright, held by buckles. Her bones are turning to a kind of tin. Her sister cannot pronounce the name of the new disease. She can only say that Babette is rusting. She has nightmares filled with liquids, rain, waterfalls, a recurrent beach where she watches the approach of a tidal wave. Ellen has just visited her. She says Babette’s skin smells like dust. She creaks when she breathes.
Erica knows both women were misdiagnosed, twice. Somewhere there are four mistakes and someone must be counting. Last night she asked her sister, “Do you ever talk to Lillian about death? About dying?” Erica was lying on her bed. She wanted to know. Bob had not yet gone to Seattle. Erica had shut her bedroom door.
Her sister thought for a moment. She said, “No.”
“What do you talk about?” Erica asks.
“Ordinary things,” her sister told her. “Who’s playing good tennis. Who got a face-lift. Whose kid is in jail. The weather, the economy. You know.”
Erica does know. When her father was dying, when he was decaying in front of them inches from their faces and almost in slow motion, it was the one thing no one ever spoke about. Father had the cancer stench. It was a kind of rancid yellow that made her think of tortured fruit and strange rotting cargoes abandoned at sea and something terrible done in rooms with unshaded light-bulbs, abortions, perhaps, or children being photographed naked. Her father’s skin became translucent. He was a region of rivers. You could look inside and see his infinity of blue sins.
Erica wants to ask her sister if she remembers this but she doesn’t. They never speak about their parents or the way they died or what their lives might have meant. Their parents simply disappeared, like a species that vanished overnight. It’s as if they never were.
Erica realizes there is an entire ghost substratum inhabiting her. She’s become aware of how much time she spends thinking about people she doesn’t know and will never know, doesn’t even want to meet once. Not just Lillian and Babette, these secondary tragedies she’s internalized, not just Flora’s profusion of suddenly found and lost best friends, but how she thinks about movie stars and European royalty and the state of their marriages.
She doesn’t do this consciously, she would never permit herself to do this consciously. But when she takes her emotional pulse, when she looks directly inside, what she’s been thinking about during a three-way traffic light, during a wait in a line at the bank, is Elizabeth Taylor and her new husband, the former carpenter and drug dealer. What do they do together? Do they attend AA meetings? Do they work the twelve-step recovery program? Do they promptly admit mistakes and answer crisis hotlines? She thinks they secretly drink and take drugs. Liz shows him what she has learned about pain pills and champagne. And he initiates her into the sordid avenues of hard-faceted white, the great internal winter, cocaine.
Now, during her leave of absence, when she can take her emotional pulse repeatedly with concentrated deliberation, she realizes she has been colonized by the insubstantial, something leaking, broken and generic, out of the self-destructing culture. It’s a kind of collective virus.
She used to think about Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. That was when she lived with painters, when she lived in lofts above Indian restaurants and afternoons smelled of curry and the sun set in a sequence of saffrons, when she thought the bungalows behind hedges of sunflowers along the Venice canals were holy and her parents were not yet dead.
She didn’t try to imagine Sylvia Plath and her husband in bed. She didn’t envision Virginia wrapped in the arms of a woman, rain falling, and what they might have done with their mouths. She visualized instead the kitchens where they brewed tea, the patterns of painted pink rosebuds on the cups, and the way the wind sounded as if it had just been eating ships. But the graphic couplings she now considers, the intricacies of bodies and proclivities, this she has saved for television stars.
It is 1:30 and she is four blocks from Flora’s school. She can sense that Lillian is going into a coma. That’s what Lillian was afraid of when she telephoned Ellen and wept, “Don’t let them send me home. I feel like I’m drifting in and out.”
Erica closes her eyes and there are acres of faces within her. She is even replete with the spouses of men she barely knows. How many afternoons had sh
e imagined her lawyer’s wife? She did this for months during her first divorce, staring at the photograph on his desk. A blond woman with ice skates balanced over her right shoulder. A woman wearing a green wool sweater and sunglasses. She was often tempted to ask her name. She finally decided it was Ingrid or Justine. She was good with dogs and gardens, never got migraines, enjoyed baking.
It occurs to Erica that what she wants to research is not history as it actually is or was, but some more fragile peripheral version, in its own way filled with untamed ambiguity. It would be a history of the undead, the flickering partials and the almost.
In these regions of ambivalence are the men she almost married. Erica has reconstructed pieces of their lives, a conversation, a newspaper clipping, an accidental sighting, something overheard. She might have stayed with Derek in Maui. Or the photographer in Spain. There are the lingering pulsings of these multiple almost-hers, standing on balconies of apartments and villas, watering geraniums, wearing a white slip above cobblestone alleys, above a plaza or a bay.
Jason, telephoning her at the university two years ago. She was working late. He was drunk. “I’m drinking fifteen-year-old scotch and it’s been fifteen years since I fucked you. Come over.”
Erica looked out her office window, noted the low soiled mountains and considered it. It was August in Southern California and everything seemed burned, even at night. It was the time of the avenues of scorch and the unraveling of an indelible yellow.
She could reach into the substrata of the barely known, make a date, meet in a motel in Long Beach, maybe, or in the Valley, Van Nuys, perhaps. It would have to be an urban suburb where no landscape could intrude, where it wouldn’t be about beaches and palm trees, but California as it really was, back roads the color of mustard, smelling of onions and vinegar below hills where nothing could grow. In a valley of brush and sage and sand they could know the real nature of their hearts. It wasn’t the stuff of postcards. But they knew this already. That’s why she hung up.
We carry the undead with us, she thinks. That’s why it’s so hard to walk, why her boots hurt and the sun sears. She still packs for Jason, still takes him to Hawaii and London with her. She stands at her closet, one closet or another, hearing him say, only red or black. You’re a Toulouse-Lautrec whore. Anything else on your skin is an atrocity. And she finds herself repeatedly choosing these colors, in nightgowns and coats, tablecloths and socks.
Maybe she will tell her colleagues it is the history of the partial she wishes to explore, the terrain without specific intentions or borders. This is what she is thinking as she approaches Flora’s school, as she sits on a lawn next to a rock with a bronze plaque nailed to it. “Dedicated to Maurice J. Finelander, 1918–1964.” What did that forty-six-year-old man die from? Did he suffer, turn translucent, did he drift, could you look inside his chest and chart the avenues of his disgrace?
After she sees Flora, she will go home and wait for her sister to call. Afternoons are punctuated with desperate news about Lillian. Sometimes Erica telephones first. She has never called her sister so often, not even when their mother had a heart attack. They haven’t spoken this often since they shared a room in the summer house.
“What’s the latest with Lillian?” she will ask. Her eyes will be abnormally wide, she will take big breaths, as if there is some quality in the late afternoon wind that she requires.
Perhaps it has something to do with the enormous subterranean architecture she is discovering with its roots, shadows, and branching networks. This is beneath her feet all the time. This is what children sense under the bed. This is the secret structure of the world, and children feel this hidden spine. This is why they need stuffed pandas and teddy bears. This is why she has walked to the school to find her daughter, to tell Flora she would never lie about the names of the almost-known.
Suddenly, Erica recognizes a complexity that makes her decide to turn back. She wants to tell Flora that certain fragments seem like lies but they are not. It is simply the other world with its decaying possibilities casting luminous debris. It is not deliberate. There is no malice. But names get lost here. They are like seashells washed up on a wide night shore in a season of not enough moon. Inside each shell is a name, and the sea speaks it clearly, says Alexa, Flora, Lillian. But there are winds, the intrusion of partially forgotten winters that in memory are a stark and insinuating blue. And Erica realizes that she cannot tell this to Flora. This is a stretch of beach you must find for yourself and then only in a drowning season.
Erica walks home on a boulevard where the sidewalk is planted with rosebuds, bird-of-paradise, and iris, and she is thinking about events in the subterranean world. Here are the traffic accidents we almost had, but didn’t.
Here are the planes we missed that might have carried bombs on them. Do the almosts form an architecture? Is that how you navigate in the cities of the undead?
Later that week, her sister calls, desperate. Lillian has run away. She’s had a paranoid seizure, perhaps from the drugs, or maybe the cancer has metastasized into her brain. No one knows. She just took her raincoat and wallet and disappeared from the hospital. Her neighbor saw her get out of a cab. Lillian explained that she had come back for her cat.
“What should I do?” her sister Ellen asks.
She imagines her sister holding the phone, pacing, staring out the balcony. The wind has been blowing, a Santa Ana from the desert. Everything seems a form of fleshy yellow. It is a night of skin. Lamps are insignificant. The moon is so inordinately bright she thinks the savanna must have been like this, rocked by streaks of yellow with the intensity of seduction and prophecy.
“We’ll drive the streets and find her,” Erica decides. “I’ll pick you up.”
Flora has suddenly appeared. She is always barefoot, soundless. She simply materializes. She is holding her math book open at her hip. Flora could survive in the night, with her head of uncoiling snakes. She seems to be waiting for something. Erica knows what her daughter is doing. Flora is stalking.
Bob has returned from his conference in Seattle. He is staring at her, watching her assemble car keys, wallet, jacket, watch. He studies the objects she is sliding into her pockets as if he plans to collect evidence. He is standing in front of the living room door as if he intends to guard it.
Earlier, when she was cooking dinner, Bob asked if she had gone to the library. He had telephoned and she wasn’t home. She examined the tip of the knife. Her husband didn’t understand that she was never going back to the library. It didn’t contain the artifacts she needed. Then he asked what she had done all day.
“I don’t remember,” she said. She was holding a knife. It felt hard in her hand. She put it down. She could feel the moon through the window. It occurred to her that there was no history, only the etiology of yellow.
Now Bob says, “Where are you going?”
There is always this moment, she realizes. The where and the why. The demand for coordinates and specifics, the number of acres, who saw the troops, which direction and how many. There is always this and the way sometimes you don’t answer.
“It’s Lillian,” she says, walking quickly toward the door. He is heavier but he has trouble with his knees. She could outflank him if she had to. “She’s roaming the streets. She’s lost her mind.”
Erica considers the invisible artifacts she has recently unearthed. She thinks about mapping the subterranean strata. What sort of tools would she need, what form of illumination?
“But you don’t even know that woman,” her husband says.
“I do know her,” Erica replies. “I’ve never known anyone so well.”
Flora is staring at her. They look into one another’s eyes and Erica realizes communication is dimensional, like something knitted, a rope or a net. Then she is walking into the yellowed night where the wind sounds like a rushing river, there is a lashing of branches, and the leaves are clinging to stay on.
YOU DRIVE
CHRISTINE SCHUTT
She brought him what she had promised, and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or she thought she said, “I like your skin,” when what she really liked was the color of her father’s skin, the mottled white of his arms and the clay color at the roots of the hairs along his arms. Long hair along his arms it was, hair bleached from sun and water—sun off the lake, and all that time he spent in water, summer to summer abrading the wild dry hair on his head, turning the ends of his hair, which was also red, and deeply so, quite white. “You look healthy,” she said to her father, and he did, in high color, but the skin on his face also seemed coarse to her—not boy’s skin, her father’s, not glossy, close-grained skin, but pitted and stubbled under all that color, rashed along his jaw and neck, her father’s skin: rough. She touched him, and it was rough skin, his cheek. “Just testing,” she said, and smiled at her father. “Shaving,” she said. “I used to watch Mother’s guys at it.”
Her father said, “My youngest daughter still”; then he took hold of her hand and kissed it. He was quiet. Holding her hand against his leg and looking out at a roof where a fat woman waited for her dog, her father was quiet. “What a dirty place this is,” he said. “That poor dog is ashamed of himself.”
“Look at my hands,” she said. “I have seen lots of things,” she said, changing the sheets of incontinent patients on rounds made twice a night—all of them up, anyway, these old howlers, mean and balked and full of worry. The naked woman with her pocketbook is crying after baby while the farmer at the nurses’ station slaps the counter for a drink. “Where the fuck,” the farmer says over and over. “You should know this about me,” she said to her father. “I can take care of myself.”
“So tell me what you have seen,” her father said, and she told him about her mother and the guy with the criminal haircut. “Can you imagine?” she asked her father. Imagine the two of them, inviting her in after, turning over the pillows and fanning at their chests by lifting up the sheet. And there was more, she said, a lot more, but it was her father’s turn. “You promised,” she said. “The wife.”
