Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 30

by eds. Kelly Link

  After this business with Dr. Ruxin happens, I go back to work because this is what I do after I see the doctors. The work must go on! I sit down in my Double Onyx Supreme Ease SwivelR (which the bosses just offered to me when finally I told them about her, as if an ergonomically supported back would make this whole writhing parasitic twin thing go away) and I try to do work, but whenever I get close to being able to think about doing my job Brigid comes along. Brigid is sometimes my friend and sometimes not my friend. She likes to hear about Dr. Ruxin, and after my appointments, she comes to my cube with cups of rosehip tea (she has a staggering array of asymmetrical teawares, all of vague Scandinavian origin, which fit together to form a glazed puzzle with branching coral-like arms) and lets me talk.

  She hands me the tea and looks at my chair.

  “Gosh,” she says—she is always saying things like gosh and jeepers and darn. “Your back must feel like a string of moonbeads sitting in that thing.”

  And here is the problem with Brigid: What the fuck are moonbeads?

  “You work for the SwivelR Corporation now?” I ask. “You get dividends for every satisfied customer? You want me to say I like it so you can check off some box?”

  “I just think it’s a nice chair,” she says. And now she has Thumper eyes and a quivering little bunny nose. This face is supposed to say, in a sugary lisp, “Don’t be mean to me. I’m just a little old woodland creature. I only want to be your friend.” This face makes me want to hit her with the Scandinavian mug.

  “How was your appointment?” she asks. “Was Dr. R. there?”

  I stare at her. Something about her voice isn’t right. There’s something else there. This whole Disney sidekick thing seems like a mask and I can almost see what’s behind it.

  “Why do you care?”

  I know she is going to say it. I can feel it coming. Inside, I am already groaning.

  “I’m your friend.”

  Now, I’m trying to smoke out the little twin. I fill my body again and again. I want to be a cathedral inside: empty, smoky, no little twin. I am at a rooftop dinerbar with friends (take note Brigid: you were not invited) smoking shisha and drinking Jelly Juice with vodka. The friends think we’re out having a rollicking good time, but this isn’t all that’s happening. There is something systematic happening. I am trying to poison her.

  I choose the green Jelly Juice, the one you hear rumors about, the one discerning places wouldn’t dare serve. The dinerbar is not discerning. Sometimes trash blows up the street and spins round and round up to the roof where newspapers and plastic sacks and flittering yellow tampon wrappers cascade over the tables and into gobs of ketchup and glasses of toxic Jelly Juice.

  “Slow down,” says Shelly (who is my friend—yes, I have them, Dr. Ruxin), but I just laugh.

  From the rooftop, we can see the tower: a concrete cylinder taller than anything else around, topped with two white satellite dishes. All along the column are enormous metal insects. Most of the insects are frozen in the act of walking along the column—up or down—but two near the top are in the middle of something: battle, maybe love.

  We go on happily for a while, laughing, talking over each other, passing the mouthpiece. Only Shelly cares that I’m drinking so much, the others buy me rounds. When the friends order food Shelly tells the waitress to bring me a cheese sandwich and noodle salad, but I don’t touch them; there are no cheese sandwiches in cathedrals. Anyway, I don’t want to look at the marshmallow white of the bread.

  I am in the middle of telling a damn fine story (the friends are rapt and giggly) when I see Dr. Ruxin being lead across the roofdeck. For a moment I think I’m just being drunk and silly and he’s not really there. I’ve conjured up phantoms before. But he stays too long, looks too solid, is too oblivious to my presence to be fancy. Dr. Ruxin is real. And he is not alone: Dr. Ruxin is on a date.

  Next to him, she is a giantess. A beautiful one with arms like unblemished birch trees. Not just a giantess, a goddess. She’d have to be, the way Dr. Ruxin is looking at her.

  “What are you staring at?” asks Shelly, but I just hiss at her.

  “What about our story?” cry the friends who have begun to bang their fists upon the table like adorable orphans. I try to rally and finish it, but Dr. Ruxin is too distracting. My hands are shaking. The twin is ominously still.

  The friends give up on me and make their own stories. Dr. Ruxin and the goddess-date (even in the chair her head bobbles above him) speak to a waiter. Their table is across the roofdeck. They have a different server. I may as well be staring at him from across the Adriatic, but even with all that distance, he sees me. Dr. Ruxin sees me and he seems happy about it. Someone once told me the French say “Of course” to all surprising news to show how nothing surprises them. To be beyond surprise is to be sophisticated. Or maybe: To be sophisticated is to be beyond all surprise. I can’t remember the order, but I try to make my face like that. I try to make my face say these things: “Why, hello.” “What a treat to see you here.” “Yes, it is a small world.” “I trust you’re well.” Being sophisticated also means being predictable.

  He says something to the date, then stands and comes toward me. I will my face to be cool. She (it, the goddess, the usurper) waits at the table, smiling, patient. I can almost hear the little twin saying, Run.

  And then, just like that, Dr. Ruxin is standing before me in a suit, clean shaven and smiling and looking so warm and soft. “You look like a cookie,” shrieks one of the friends and Shelly hushes him, but everyone else curls with laughter because in this moment it seems so wonderfully apt. I try to make my face say, “I’m sorry about that, but there is such merrymaking going on here these things can’t be helped.” And: “Really, we’re all adults.” And: “Surely you can take a little jab.” And, most importantly: “No hard feelings?”

  I may be mad at him about the host thing, but I wouldn’t bear up well if he were the one mad at me. Don’t think of the figs, I think. No one here but us ants, comes the almost-answer from the twin.

  Dr. Ruxin ignores the cookie thing. “Hello,” he says. “So nice to see you.”

  “Likewise,” I say and take a cigarette from one of the packs on the table. I light it in a manner that seems especially French.

  “Those things will kill you,” he says. He shakes his head. He is so earnest. So predictable.

  “I’m counting on them killing other things first,” I say with a little glance down at where the twin lives. This feels daring. Like, really, really daring. I am giddy with this exchange. I toss my mane in a way that feels appropriately coltish. I can’t wait for him to respond.

  When he does he looks sad. “Well,” he says. “I don’t want to interrupt your party. Have fun tonight.”

  He starts to walk away. Back toward the goddess. Then, he stops and turns back to me. My pulse thrills.

  “Be careful,” he says and then he goes to her.

  After Dr. Ruxin is back at his table, the goddess turns her head to laugh at something he’s said and as she does I catch something—some look in her eyes, some momentary something which is familiar, which betrays her—suddenly I know exactly who she is: Dr. Ruxin’s date is Brigid in a goddess mask. She has listened to me talk about him and she has hatched a plan and found a way into his world; she caught a wormhole and won. He leans forward and smiles at her. It is already too late. Eventually he’ll realize she’s not a goddess, only Brigid with goddess hair and a big fake face, but he’ll stay. He is that sort and already tangled up in her hair. It will anchor him to her. They are a set now.

  There is an explosion of white. A big and round Roman candle. I’d forgotten there would be fireworks. That they are the reason we’re here. But there is something off about the Roman candle. It too is a fake—like the goddess face Brigid wears—it’s a stand in for the moon which is curiously absent from the night sky. I look over at Dr. Ruxin and the Brigid goddess. Her head has grown even larger like she is competing with the Roman candle. Each trying
to be the new moon. This is wrong, I think. They cannot do this. They cannot usurp. And then, the little twin—still alive, always alive—twists once in agreement and I cry out with the pain from her trashing body just as light once again bursts in the sky, twin explosions, red and green, which light up the insects along the tower. One row of red. One row of green. The color change occurs somewhere between the two who are fighting or embracing and for a second they look so different from themselves, from each other. They are frozen beings, out of time. And suddenly they seem really sad. Or they make me feel sad. But all this is only a moment and soon they are orange and then purple and then green all over again.

  In the morning, I wake next to a book, lying open to pages 117 and 118. Across the pages is written, in my hand: “Dr. Ruxin is Tall McGiven.” That’s what I think it says. It’s difficult to make out. I don’t remember writing it. I don’t remember much. I feel like bloody death.

  It’s a work-wide vacation (god bless patriotism or something), so I make pink paprika eggs and eat them in front of the television. A lady is talking about fireworks. More fireworks. Awesome fireworks. Everyday fireworks. How could we live without them? It is more firework talk than I enjoy with my breakfast. I made the eggs too pink and slimy and have to swallow them like medicine, but eggs are the only thing I can manage these days. It’s the twin. She revolts when I eat anything else. There is something in eggs she loves, so I eat them over and over to keep her tame.

  At my last appointment one Dr. Muscley and Hairy frowned over my cholesterol. “That’s not good,” he said. He gave me a little book and asked me to write down everything I eat. I don’t want to be the freak who writes down egg after egg after egg, so I compose a breakfast that I think a Dr. Tall McGiven will approve. Oranges. Apples. Yogurt. The sort of unimaginative things doctors respond to with thumbs in the air. I go ahead and fill out lunch and dinner (full of the lean proteins and fresh, green vegetables I know he will like), though lunch will be a hardboiled egg pulled from my pocket and eaten in the park, while I hide in poison ivy. Dinner will be alcohol. I am always teetering between coddling the twin so she won’t hurt me and trying to kill her.

  Hangover or no, I have something to do. I dress in a swirl of earthtones, browns and greens, a stripe of clay red. I am like a walking tree. It is beautiful. My camera-on-a-string is the only ornament. The string goes over my neck and the little camera slides under my shirt and discreetly hangs out in the crook of my bra. This is a good hiding place. The twin hides under some ribs and skin. This is a better hiding place. Or it would have been if she’d just kept still.

  I have lived my life in three stages. Stage 1: No pain, no knowledge. Stage 2: Pain, no knowledge. Stage 3: Pain, knowledge. I am hoping for a Stage 4: No pain, knowledge. But the Doctors McGiven bite their lips at this and say, “Let’s wait and see.” I would be fine knowing about her if she’d stop hurting me. Or, I think I would. In the best of all possible worlds, I go to the doctors next week and she has vanished.

  The best thing about living by the river is I can walk out the front of my apartment building, cross the street and be in Quadrant Four Park just like that. The worst thing about living by the river is the smell. If I bury my face in my pillow I can smell tar and gray goatfish guts and hair dye by-products from all the dye factories in the commercial zone above Quadrant One. My parents live in that quadrant next to a gigantic bread factory that makes the fluffiest, most marshmallow-y white bread anywhere. I remember the smell of baking bread waking me up for school every morning. It was so much better than an alarm clock. But there was this: I was crazed by it and would chew hungrily on my fingers until breakfast was ready.

  My parents, who may very well still work in that factory, smelled of the bread, too. It is sad that my parents won’t let me visit anymore because I miss that smell.

  Once I’m in the park I blend into the trees. You can’t see me unless you’re looking for me and no one is. A natural immunity to poison ivy lets me stray from the path and I weave and tunnel through thick and scratchy foliage. Whatever they’re dumping into the river it isn’t slowing the growth of these plants. They are bigger and healthier than anything in a city has a right to be. Still, I’m sure somewhere something is dying because of that river. This thought sticks in my brain for a while, turning over and over as I weasel through the brush. Questions: Could I drink the river water? Would it kill the twin? Would it kill me? Or, would the twin thrive on it, shoot up like these plants until she takes over all of my insides and I am replaced entirely?

  Would Dr. Ruxin like the twin-me more than he likes the me-me?

  I settle in a spot with a good view of the path, sit on a bed of poison ivy, and pull out the little camera, ready to snap compromising shots of people riding bikes illegally through the park.

  It’s an under the table thing, me taking pictures for a guy in the Parks Office. He’s supposed to take them himself, but does not have a natural immunity to poison ivy. He finds the people in the pictures—the tiny camera has a sonic pulse that record’s the bikes’ serial numbers—and issues monstrous tickets. The Parks Office gets money, he keeps his job, I get a tidy little cut and the assholes who ride on the walk-only path get punished for their wanton rule breaking.

  The moment I snap the first picture of the day I remember seeing Dr. Ruxin at the roofbar. In the next moment, I remember Brigid was there. There is a somersault-like tightening in my stomach and I feel the twin flutter. What if the insects eat her? I can almost hear the twin say. For some time I’ve had the secret hope that the insect sculptures along the tower would come to life and tear around the city. They would liven things up.

  Question: Could the twin-me destroy Brigid? If she could would it be worth it?

  The twin has been monitoring my thoughts; how else would she know about the insects? Now, this is the thing my brain is stuck on: a giant cricket chomping on Brigid’s head, the Scandinavian mug dropping from her hand (still moving with life for a moment after the head is gobbled), birch limbs falling to the floor and bursting into a powdery mess of flour.

  And then, in the park: “How are you?” Brigid asks.

  It seems I have conjured her up just through thought. It seems she is standing right in front of me. In exercise clothes. She is really sweating. She is really here.

  Why is she here?

  I shrug and stand up, shaking off a poison ivy leaf that has stuck to my thigh. I am shaking. “Hung over,” I say. “But fine.”

  “No,” Brigid says. “How are you?”

  I stare at her. Why is she here? Something is off. Her usually placid brow is furrowed. She seems worried.

  She’s not the goddess any more, only Brigid. But still, but still, but still. Something is wrong. Why is she here? She’s crazy. She’s following me. The only explanation.

  “I am fine.” I say it with definitiveness. That’s the way to make crazy people go away. Hold your convictions. Stare them down. They’ll give. And she does.

  “Okay, be safe,” she says. “So long,” she calls as she jogs away.

  So: So long? What is she up to? Why is she here?

  When I get home, a handful of butter-colored pansies are on the floor in front of my door. A mystery, I think. I like mysteries.

  Even though I no longer eat it, whenever I go to the store for more eggs, I buy a loaf of bread from the factory. I don’t sit around wondering whether it’s one my mother or father touched. At least, I don’t do that for long. I untie the twisty, slide the loaf out of the plastic bag, stick my fingers into the loaf and pull until a canyon tears it is two. Then, I bury my nose in the center of the bread and hope for the smell to transport me back to another time.

  It doesn’t work. Not really. The smell isn’t quite right. The bread has always been sitting around on the grocery shelves for just a little too long. I get close, but never all the way there.

  Shelly invites me to a bar. I’m surprised, but I’ll always take a socially acceptable venue for attempted murder of the
twin.

  There is an “I heart Beirut” bumper sticker peeling off the wall above the entrance and I can tell from the door that this place thinks it’s too cool to serve Jelly Juice. It is also too cool to let Dr. Ruxin in. So there’s that.

  This place is the latest in a string of stunt bars, each trying to outdo the others with daring and danger. The disclaimer: By entering this establishment you consent to possible sniper attacks for the entertainment of fellow patrons. The management is not responsible for death, dismemberment, injury, psychological trauma, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Two drink minimum.

  I order a bluebubble and water, though I don’t know why, it is my mother’s drink, not mine and it is the wrong drink to order here, the look on Shelly’s face tells me that. It may not be cool, but bluebubble has the delightful habit of knocking out little twins. It also has the unfortunate habit of making me think of my parents who now pretend not to know who I am. This, like many things, started when I found out about the twin.

  Shelly orders the punch and the woman behind the bar smiles in approval. It is the house specialty and I consider changing my order; I want to be approved of, too. Only, when the punch arrives it has something that looks like severed baby fingers floating around in it and I feel sick.

  Feeling sick makes me think of the roofbar (one thing always leads to another which always leads to Dr. Ruxin), and Dr. Ruxin and the Brigid-goddess. This makes me mad. I imagine luring Brigid to the top of the satellite tower and shoving her off the top. I imagine her getting caught on each insect on the way down, each time thinking she’s saved, only to have the insect shake her off and let her fall a little further.