Interfictions

by Delia Sherman

  Translated from the Spanish by Edo Mor

  * * * *

  I like to think that literature, rather than being something, is first and foremost a way of looking, a way of living, a way of being in the world. It does not resemble the gaze of a mortal being but the faceted gaze of a fly—and why not?—the gaze of bluebottles, those brightly colored insects made of a golden green that stick themselves to anything they find tempting. Don't we writers adhere to language, to certain objects, beings or sensations, avid to take from them what we like or find suitable?

  My short story and Ulga's country were written on a rainy evening. My wife Paulina was expecting our daughter Emilia, who is now five and who first pronounced a magical word to me: “papá.” Her eyes, from her mother's amniotic depths, looked at me or gave shape to that watery gaze which soaks the story and, who knows, perhaps it was that same liquid and fluid current what brought her to my shore, like the foam of an ocean not yet mapped.

  Adrián Ferrero

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  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  Holly Phillips

  The woman from the embassy called again this morning, as she does every morning. The negotiations are continuing, she said. They had not been apprised of any changes.

  Changes, I said. I was deeply impressed by her choice of word; but then, I am always intrigued by people's private lexicons. Of course I knew she meant “changes in the situation,” but that only meant there were no fresh rumors of torture, no dead men displayed for the evening news. Change. Well, yes, injury is change. Death is certainly change.

  We'll let you know as soon as we hear anything new, she said.

  Don't let your life stop, was my distant mother's advice. Another phone call, messages from another world, the real world of home. Carry on, my mother said. Carry on as best you can.

  I stood in this borrowed kitchen, the glazed tiles cold beneath my feet, Ryan's blue terrycloth robe cinched around my waist, my teacup cooling in my hand. I wanted to think about the word “changes.” I wanted to let it carve new pathways through the erosion patterns in my brain, and why not? I'm a writer. I would never say, Words are my life, because that is too extravagant, too grandiose, but it is secretly true. My vocation is to turn the nothing of dreams into books on the shelves. Magic! See me build my castles in the air! But my bare feet were cold, and I decided my mother was right. I made a fresh cup of tea and carried it up the many stairs of this narrow city house to the attic that the absent owners converted to a children's playroom, and that I have in my turn made into a kind of office. My desk is an old door propped across two piles of banker's boxes full of the manuscripts and contracts I couldn't bear to leave behind. I turned on the laptop and without checking my email (there is no cable connection up here) I opened a new document in Word.

  The white screen, the blank page. This is the novel I came here to write. No, no. I came here because I am in love, but this is the novel I could not write at home.

  I had to get up again and go down three flights to the living room where a pile of Ryan's mail waits for him to come back—come home, I almost said. I always compose in manuscript format, it's so much easier than reformatting later, but I find the intricacies of this foreign address impossible to remember. I went back upstairs and typed it in at the top left-hand corner of the screen, then keyed down a few spaces and typed the title.

  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  Then I looked at it again, and tried it with a “The” at the beginning, but no. Too definite. There's something dreamy about it the other way.

  Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom

  A few more spaces down, and I typed Chapter One.

  And then, after a while, I got up and went down two flights to shower and put on some clothes.

  Like other cities, this one is composed of hidden neighborhoods—neighborhoods, that is, that look like undifferentiated city to the unaccustomed small-town eye. I have been exploring since we first arrived, although Ryan teased me, calling me a scaredy-cat and a hick Canuck. I didn't mind. On the one hand, I was feeling cat-like then, slinking close to the walls with my sides sucked in, somewhat inclined to growl; and on the other hand I loved the sound of those words snapped together like a couple of birch twigs brittle with ice. Hick Canuck. At an embassy dinner he whispered it in my ear to make me laugh, his voice two soft puffs of air against my neck, like kernels of corn exploding. Hick Canuck. Especially delicious since, by the standards of this ancient country, so was everybody at the table, from the Ambassador on down.

  But what Ryan didn't see, being busy with briefings even before the team left with the special envoy, was how, like a cat, I expanded my territory in cautious circles. I hate to hurry these things. It seemed rash to venture out into the streets and the stores—the buses! My God!—before I even knew how the light switches worked, the telephone, the stove. I mean “know” in the intimate sense, the habitual sense that does not even register the smells and sounds of home. When I am a foreigner, I am an explorer, continually amazed at tourists who can simply visit a place like this. Eventually, though, I discovered the side streets and main streets, the children's parks and the botanical parks and the jogging trails, the street with the bakeries, the street with the hardware stores, the street with the whores. Neighborhoods are such subtle things here I had to watch which way the neighbors turned when they left their doors, which way they came from with their string bags full of food. I thought that if I bought a string bag and filled it at the right butcher's shop and wine store I would cease to be a stranger, or at least a foreigner, but it hasn't worked out that way. At home the bus drivers wave even when I'm not catching the bus, the café owner teases me if I don't get my usual decaf latté with no foam. Here I don't know how to ask for no foam, and though I go to the neighborhood café they have yet to notice that I always scrape it off with my spoon.

  At least when I go at the quiet time after lunch I can sit at my regular table. Not the one in the window, it's too big for one person, but the one against the wall just down from the window corner. Today I came too early, however, and had to sit at a table in back. As I struggled through my order (I have memorized the words, but they still come out of my mouth as sounds) I consoled myself with the thought that really, there is no café in the world where a writer can't open her notebook and sit, pen in hand, entirely at home.

  I opened my notebook, and sat, pen in hand.

  A drop of rain fell on the page, blurring the forgotten words of last week. Keep it fresh and strange, the notebook said. I couldn't remember what “it” was. Something from the novel. Magic? Love? More raindrops fell, spattering on the tabletop, pinging off the saucer beneath my glass.

  "Lady, you are so far out of your place I could not find you."

  I looked up to see the rainbird perched like a crow on the back of an empty chair.

  "You found me,” I pointed out. “Here you are."

  "And here you are.” The rainbird spread his arms in a gesture at the café, the waiters, the hissing espresso machine. Crystal droplets scattered from his feathers like shining beads from a broken necklace. “I wonder why, when you have all the worlds and time."

  I ducked my head and smoothed the damp-rippled page. His black glass eyes were hard to meet. “Where would you have me go?"

  "—'Go,’ lady? You are the center. To you the worlds bend like glass in the rain."

  As he spoke more rain fell, a pattering that mingled with the roar and sigh of steam, like liquid consonants in a whispered hiss. What language did they speak? I did not know, and then I did: it was the poetry of the grass that bowed towards my chair, an invisible meadow sketched out in the gleam of spiderwebs and dew. The waiter walked by, oblivious, and the grass laughed and danced aside.

  "Come, lady. We are here.” The rainbird leaned forward on his perch, his hands between his knees, avid as a boy. “Give us your tale."

  "I have no stories in me,” I said sadly. “The only one I know these
days is out there in the real world somewhere, unfinished, out of reach."

  He tossed his head and snapped his beak in annoyance. I thought I saw a bright fragment of a severed wing fall to the floor, but when I looked, the floor was carpeted in a moss of jewels, beads of dew catching the light and colors of the busy street outside.

  "Lady,” the rainbird said, “that story is not worthy of you. Are you not the hero, the villain, the mystery, the queen? In that story you barely figure. You have made yourself an afterthought, a figment, a shadow by the fireless hearth. As far as you are concerned, that story is no story at all."

  I sat in sullen silence. He was talking about Ryan's story, Ryan's captivity, Ryan's peril. What he was talking about was no story at all. It was my life. Mine, and Ryan's, for as long as Ryan lived.

  "Listen, lady.” The rainbird was coaxing now. “Spin your own tale. Spin our tale, yours and mine. Come away with me, come back to your true place. Come home."

  While he spoke the elegant grasses moved around me, draping me in shining cobwebs, winding me a cloak of rain-gemmed strands. In every droplet there shone a story, as round and complete as a world, and in every story shone my face crowned in flames or petals or thorns.

  My face, but not Ryan's. However hard I looked, the only story he figured in was his own.

  "Come home,” the rainbird said, and when I echoed him, “Home,” I felt the shining strands drawn across my mouth and nose, not a cloak but a muffling shroud. “Am I supposed to bury myself in my dreams?"

  "Not bury,” said the rainbird. “Live!"

  But as I sat there, pen in hand, life was wearing chains many miles to the east.

  "Even an empty hearth can make a story,” I said. I closed my notebook, paid my tab, and left without another word.

  Morning again, still no news, and I climbed up to the attic to make another attempt at work. Once there, however, I discovered I had failed to save yesterday's aborted beginning, and I had to open a new document. And then, of course, I had to go back downstairs to the living room for an envelope with this address on it, and then it occurred to me to wonder if I should be using this address on my manuscripts at all. Even if Ryan—

  Even if Ryan comes back, this posting was only supposed to be for two years. Where will I be when it comes time to discuss the book with an editor? I needed to call my agent, there were so many things I should have discussed with her before I left. It all happened so quickly, and now here I am, where morning is the middle of the night back home. Email, I thought, but the only connection is in Ryan's office, and I just—How can I explain myself to you? It wasn't the pain of missing him while sitting in his space, the space he hasn't even had a chance to make his own. It was the outrageousness, the sheer humiliating cliché of being the woman who felt the pain, the woman who had been left behind. I can't escape the pain, but surely I can escape the cliché? Suddenly my mother was the wisest person I knew. Waiting, after all, is still a kind of life.

  So I went out for food. Shopping is surprisingly painless, even for someone who is effectively a deaf-mute. Everything has a price on it, or on its shelf, and for all the weirdnesses and seemingly perverse and willful oddities of this foreign land, the cash registers still show an electronic total and the bills are all numbered in their corners just as you would expect. I do prefer fresh food, however; not only for the usual reasons, but because this alien packaging can be deceptive. Ryan and I had been eating breakfast cereal for a week when he came home laughing from a reception to say he had been served our cereal with bits of sausage and mustard perched on the little squares. I had the dreadful sense that he had told our mistake to his fellow guests, who would have laughed and offered up dumb foreigner stories of their own. I should have laughed, too, but I was overcome by that wretched playground feeling of having innocently worn the wrong tights, the wrong backpack, the wrong brand of shoes to school. What's got into you? Ryan asked me, but his voice was tender, tinged with a kind of wonder. To myself, having published a scant handful of books, I am barely a writer, but to Ryan I am an artist and therefore mysterious, even a little exalted. Where do you go? he asks me when he catches me dreaming. Where were you just now? I am too shy to answer honestly. My books are public, my airy castles open for daily tours, but my imagination is still as secret as a locked bedroom door. Read my next book, I say, and he promises me he will.

  I walked back from the shops with the handle of my string bag cutting into my fingers, and looked up outside the house to notice, almost simultaneously, the fresh post-rain light slipping under the hem of the clouds and the officious Mercedes parked illegally at the curb. The driver's door was swinging open (perhaps the movement that had caught my eye) and Alain Bernard climbed out into the narrow street. Alain is fairly young and fairly important, and he had something to do with Ryan's appointment to the envoy's staff. I don't know the details. They might be friends, but then again, they might not.

  This, of course, was not what I thought when Alain climbed out of the car. You can guess what I did think. Or can you? I'm not sure you can call it thinking, it's more like the floor of your mind giving way, like a sudden shove out of a mental window, so your heart takes flight and your stomach plummets. Alain took an urgent step toward me and I dropped my bag, loosing a single orange into the street. I wanted to fend him off, to go away, to pretend I hadn't seen him, but even in that dreadful moment the writer in me was thinking how inadequate that single orange was. In the movie version of my life it would have been a dozen oranges cascading over the blackened bricks, leaping and rolling, caroming off the curb in an extravagant emotional collapse. But what does a woman living alone, a woman who can barely force herself to swallow past the loneliness and fear, want with a dozen oranges? I bought exactly two, and one was still peering out at me through the string bars of its cage.

  Oh, God! No, don't think it, it's nothing like that, there's no bad news! Alain, who read everything in that single wobbling orange, snatched up the fruit and then snatched up me, holding me tight against his double-breasted diplomatic wool while he cursed himself in both official languages, his feet awkwardly straddled across the fallen bag. This was very dramatic but I'm not really fond of drama outside of books. I stiffened like an offended cat and after a moment Alain let me go.

  Jesus, he said, I'm such an asshole. I just came to see how you are.

  I'm fine, I told him. I should have also told him he wasn't an asshole, which he isn't, but I did not. I bent and gathered my suddenly pitiful bag from between his polished black toes and held it mutely open like a beggar's cup to receive the escaped orange. He dropped it in with a precise movement of finger and thumb, and that picture—his hand with its watch and starched cuff, my white, nail-bitten fingers, the orange—looked like another frame from the same movie, the kind of image that makes the instructor hit pause and say to her class, Now what is the director trying to say with this shot? To which I say, God knows. Me, I've always written for my characters and let theme take care of itself.

  Alain followed me down the area stairs and in by the basement door. Thanks to my mother's advice I wasn't embarrassed by a dirty kitchen: no depressed sink full of dishes, no distractedly unswept floor. I put the groceries away and filled the kettle, but Alain said I looked like I needed a drink. Taking this to mean he wanted one, I led him upstairs to the living room where Ryan keeps a supply. I will drink for pleasure but not for comfort, and the afternoon whiskey tasted like medicine.

  You haven't called me, Alain said. Tell me how you've been.

  I've been waiting, I said.

  I look at this and think how cold I must have sounded to poor Alain, who after all has better things to do in this crisis than hold a hostage's girlfriend's hand—at least, I hope to God he has better things to do. Are we all just waiting, waiting, waiting? This is my faith: that somewhere, men and women who have known Ryan far longer than I, who have worked with him in situations exactly as crucial and frightening as this one, are talking, pleading, promising, b
lustering, threatening, using every psychological trick and political strategy to bring him and the others home. And yet here is Alain, drinking Ryan's whiskey and looking at me with an intense, intimate, questioning pain in his eyes. Shall I tell you my secret thought? I am not vain. I swear I am not, I may never recover from the astonishment of Ryan's declaration of love—for me! of all people!—and yet, fairly or not, I can't help but question the source of Alain's concern. He has always watched me too closely, with too much tension around his eyes. But how would I know? Maybe what I see there isn't wanting, but guilt. He was still calling himself names when he left. I locked the door behind him, went up all those stairs, and turned the computer on. To hell with the address. I typed the title, spaced down, and once again tapped out Chapter One.

  Morning. The same phone call, the same woman, the same lack of news. No news is good news, the koan of cynical times. For an instant after I hung up the telephone I wanted, I desired, I longed to be with Ryan, wherever he is. Let me wear the blindfold and the chains, let me sit in the dark, in the icy water of the flooded cell. Only let me be there instead of here, like this, thinking this, alone. But then I had to laugh, for Ryan was probably longing just as powerfully, and infinitely more sensibly, to be here with me. I toasted a piece of bread I knew I wouldn't eat and sat with the plate between my elbows and my teacup pressed against my chin. Ryan and I usually share a pot of coffee in the morning, but these days the caffeine sends unbearable twitches down my nerves. I can't tell you now all the things I thought sitting at the table this morning, but I know my mind circled a long, long way before it looped back to the city, the house, the novel waiting unwritten upstairs.

  The kitchen only has windows looking out on the skinny garden in back. Gardens are important here. This one is very tasteful, with clean, patterned bricks and shade-loving plants, and right now all the beds are full of narcissus and crocus, their watercolor hues freshly painted by the rain. At home there is snow on the ground, but here we have flowers and new leaves on the trees. After a while I pulled my notebook out of the bag that had been sitting on the counter since yesterday, and just then I saw the first flicker of movement at the top of the garden wall. Just a pale flash at first, as if someone in the lane had tossed a bit of burning trash into the yard. But no: the paleness clung, and doubled itself, and became two paws. The rest of the intruder followed in swift installments, an elbow, a head and foreleg, a torso and a tail, until a cat entire dropped down into the bushes at the foot of the wall.