The Uncanny Reader

by Marjorie Sandor

  Granana doesn’t understand what the big deal is. She didn’t cry at Olivia’s funeral, and I doubt she even remembers Olivia’s name. Granana lost, like, ninety-two million kids in childbirth. All of her brothers died in the war. She survived the Depression by stealing radish bulbs from her neighbors’ garden, and fishing the elms for pigeons. Dad likes to remind us of this in a grave voice, as if it explained her jaundiced pitilessness: “Boys. Your grandmother ate pigeons.”

  “Wasn’t much for drawing, was she?” Granana says. She taps at stick-Olivia. “Wasn’t much for swimming, either.”

  Wallow visibly stiffens. For a second, I’m worried that he’s going to slug Granana in her wattled neck. Then she raises her drawn-on eyebrows. “Would you look at that—the nudey cave. Your grandfather used to take me skinny-dipping there.”

  Wallow and I do an autonomic, full-body shudder. I get a sudden mental image of two shelled walnuts floating in a glass.

  “You mean you recognize this place, Granana?”

  “No thanks to this chicken scratch!” She points to an orange dot in the corner of the picture, so small that I hadn’t even noticed it. “But look where she drew the sunset. Use your noggins. Must be one of them coves on the western side of the island. I don’t remember exactly where.”

  “What about the stars on the roof?”

  Granana snorts. “Worm shit!”

  “Huh?”

  “Worm shit,” she repeats. “You never heard of glowworms, Mr. Straight-A Science Guy? Their shit glows in the dark. All them coves are covered with it.”

  We never recovered Olivia’s body. Two days after she went missing, Tropical Storm Vita brought wind and chaos and interrupted broadcasts, and the search was called off. Too dangerous, the Coast Guard lieutenant said. He was a fat, earnest man, with tiny black eyes set like watermelon seeds in his pink face.

  “When wind opposes sea,” he said in a portentous singsong, “the waves build fast.”

  “Thank you, Billy Shakespeare,” my father growled under his breath. For some reason, this hit Dad the hardest—harder than Olivia’s death itself, I think. The fact that we had nothing to bury.

  It’s possible that Olivia washed up on a bone-white Cojímar beach, or got tangled in some Caribbean fisherman’s net. It’s probable that her lungs filled up with buckets of tarry black water and she sank. But I don’t like to think about that. It’s easier to imagine her turning into an angelfish and swimming away, or being bodily assumed into the clouds.

  Most likely, Dad says, a freak wave knocked her overboard. Then the current yanked the sled away faster than she could swim. In my night terrors, I watch the sea turn into a great, gloved hand that rises out of the ocean to snatch her. I told Wallow this once, hoping to stir up some fraternal empathy. Instead, Wallow sneered at me.

  “Are you serious? That’s what you have nightmares about, bro? Some lame-ass Mickey Mouse glove that comes out of the sea?” His lip curled up, but there was envy in his voice, too. “I just see my own hands, you know? Pushing her down that hill.”

  * * *

  The following evening, Wallow and I head over to Herb’s Crab Sledding Rentals. Herb smokes on his porch in his yellowed boxers and a threadbare Santa hat, rain or shine. Back when we were regular sledders, Wallow always used to razz Herb about his getup.

  “Ho-ho-ho,” Herb says reflexively. “Merry Christmas. Sleigh bells ring, are ya listening.” He gives a halfhearted shake to a sock full of quarters. “Hang on, nauticats. Can’t sled without informed consent.”

  Thanks to the Olivia Bill, new island legislation requires all island children to take a fourteen-hour Sea Safety! course before they can sled. They have to wear helmets and life preservers, and sign multiple waivers. Herb is dangling the permission form in front of our faces. Wallow accepts it with a genial “Thanks, Herb!” Then he crushes it in his good fist.

  “Now wait a sec…” Herb scratches his ear. “I, ah, I didn’t recognize you boys. I’m sorry, but you know I can’t rent to you. Anyhow, it’ll be dark soon, and neither one of you is certified.”

  Wallow walks over to one of the sleds and, unhelmeted, unjacketed, shoves it into the water. The half shell bobs there, one of the sturdier two-seaters, a boiled-red color. He picks up a pair of oars, so that we can row against the riptides. He glares at Herb.

  “We are going to take the sled out tonight, and tomorrow night, and every night until our parents get back. We are going to keep taking it out until we find Olivia.” He pauses. “And we are going to pay you three hundred and seventy-six dollars in cash.” Coincidentally, this is the exact dollar amount of Granana’s Social Security check.

  Herb doesn’t say a word. He takes the wad of cash, runs a moistened finger through it, and stuffs it under his Santa hat. He waits until we are both in the sled before he opens his mouth.

  “Boys,” he says. “You have that crab sled back here before dawn. Otherwise, I’m calling the Coast Guard.”

  Every night, we go a little farther. Out here, you can see dozens of shooting stars, whole galactic herds of them, winking out into cheery oblivion. They make me think of lemmings, flinging themselves over an astral cliff.

  We are working our way around the island, with Gannon’s Boat Graveyard as our ground zero. I swim parallel to the beach, and Wallow follows along in the crab sled, marking up the shoreline that we’ve covered on our map. “X” marks all the places where Olivia is not. It’s slow going. I’m not a strong swimmer, and I have to paddle back to Wallow every fifteen minutes.

  “And just what are we going to do when we find her?” I want to know.

  It’s the third night of our search. We are halfway around the island, on the sandbar near the twinkling lights of the Bowl-a-Bed Hotel. Wallow’s face is momentarily illuminated by the cycloptic gaze of the lighthouse. It arcs out over the water, a thin scythe of light that serves only to make the rest of the ocean look scarier.

  “What exactly are we going to do with her, Wallow?”

  This question has been weighing on my mind more and more heavily of late. Because let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that there is a Glowworm Grotto, and that Olivia’s ghost haunts it. Then what? Do we genie-in-a-bottle her? Keep her company on weekends? I envision eternal Saturday nights spent treading cold water in a cave, crooning lullabies to the husk of Olivia, and shudder.

  “What do you mean?” Wallow says, frowning. “We’ll rescue her. We’ll preserve her, uh, you know, her memory.”

  “And how exactly do you propose we do that?”

  “I don’t know, bro!” Wallow furrows his brow, flustered. You can tell he hasn’t thought much beyond finding Olivia. “We’ll … we’ll put her in an aquarium.”

  “An aquarium?” Now it’s my turn to be derisive. “And then what? Are you going to get her a kiddie pool?”

  It seems to me that nobody’s asking the hard questions here. For example, what if ghost-Olivia doesn’t have eyes anymore? Or a nose? What if an eel has taken up residence inside her skull, and every time it lights up it sends this unholy electricity radiating through her sockets?

  Wallow fixes me with a baleful stare. “Are you pussying out, bro? She’s your sister, for Christ’s sake. You telling me you’re afraid of your own kid sister? Don’t worry about what we’re going to do with her, bro. We have to find her first.”

  I say nothing. But I keep thinking: It’s been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and evaporated, and rained down. Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world. So that now there is only silt, and our stupid, salt-diluted longing. And nothing left of our sister to find.

  * * *

  On the fourth night of our search, I see a churning clump of ghost children. They are drifting straight for me, all kelped together, an eyeless panic of legs and feet and hair. I kick for the surface, heart hammering.

  “Wallow!” I screa
m, hurling myself at the crab sled. “I just saw—I just—I’m not doing this anymore, bro, I am not. You can go stick your face in dead kids for a change. Let Olivia come find us.”

  “Calm it down.” Wallow pokes at the ocean with his oar. “It’s only trash.” He fishes out a nasty mass of diapers and chicken gristle and whiskery red seaweed, all threaded around the plastic rings of a six-pack. “See?”

  I sit huddled in the corner of the sled, staring dully at the blank surface of the water. I know what I saw.

  * * *

  The goggles are starting to feel less like a superpower and more like a divine punishment, one of those particularly inventive cruelties that you read about in Greek mythology. Every now and then, I think about how much simpler and more pleasant things would be if the goggles conferred a different kind of vision. Like if I could read messages written in squid ink, or laser through the Brazilian girls’ tankinis. But then Wallow interrupts these thoughts by dunking me under the water. Repeatedly.

  “Keep looking,” he snarls, water dripping off his face.

  * * *

  On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial déjà vu, like I’m watching a dream return to my body. It wings toward me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana’s carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing’s too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It’s a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can’t remember which:

  There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

  * * *

  I wake up from one of those naps which leach the strength from your bones to a lightning storm. I must have fallen asleep in the crab sled. Otherworldly light goes roiling through an eerie blue froth of clouds.

  Wallow is standing at the prow of the sled. Each flash of lightning limns his bared teeth, the hollows of his eyes. It’s as if somebody up there were taking an X-ray of grief, again and again.

  “I just want to tell her that I’m sorry,” Wallow says softly. He doesn’t know that I’m awake. He’s talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There’s not a trace of fear in his voice. And it’s clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be.

  We have rowed almost all the way around the island. In a quarter of an hour, we’ll be back at Gannon’s Boat Graveyard. Thank merciful Christ. Our parents are coming back tomorrow, and I can go back to playing video games and feeling dry and blameless.

  Then the lighthouse beacon sweeps out again. It bounces off an outcropping of rocks that we didn’t notice on our first expedition. White sequins of light pop along the water.

  “Did you see that? That’s it!” Wallow says excitedly. “That’s gotta be it!”

  “Oh. Excellent.”

  We paddle the rest of the way out in silence. I row the crab sled like a condemned man. The current keeps pushing us back, but we make a quiet kind of progress. I keep praying that the crags will turn out to be low, heaped clouds, or else a seamless mass of stone. Instead, you can tell that they are pocked with dozens of holes. For a second, I’m relieved—nobody, not even string-beany Olivia, could swim into such narrow openings. Wallow’s eyes dart around wildly.

  “There has to be an entrance,” he mutters. “Look!”

  Sure enough, there is a muted glow coming from the far end of a salt-eaten overhang, like light from under a door.

  “No way can I fit through there,” I gasp, knowing immediately that I can. And that the crab sled can’t, of course. Which means I’ll be going in to meet her alone.

  What if the light, I am thinking, is Olivia?

  “It’s just worms, bro,” Wallow says, as if reading my mind. But there’s this inscrutable sadness on his face. His muddy eyes swallow up the light and give nothing back.

  I look over my shoulder. We’re less than half a mile out from shore, could skip a stone to the mangrove islets; and yet the land draws back like a fat swimmer’s chimera, impossibly far away.

  “Ready?” He grabs at the scruff of my neck and pushes me toward the water. “Set?”

  “No!” Staring at the unlit spaces in the crags, I am choked with horror. I fumble the goggles off my face. “Do your own detective work!” I dangle the goggles over the edge of the sled. “I quit.”

  Wallow lunges forward and pins me against the side of the boat. He tries to spatula me overboard with his one good arm, but I limbo under his cast.

  “Don’t do it, Timothy,” he cautions, but it is too late.

  “This is what I think of your diabolical goggles!” I howl. I hoist the goggles over my head and, with all the force in my puny arms, hurl them to the floor of the crab sled.

  This proves to be pretty anticlimactic. Naturally, the goggles remain intact. There’s not even a hairline fracture. Stupid scratchproof lenses.

  The worst part is that Wallow just watches me impassively, his cast held aloft in the air, as if he were patiently waiting to ask the universe a question. He nudges the goggles toward me with his foot.

  “You finished?”

  “Wally!” I blubber, a last-ditch plea. “This is crazy. What if something happens to me in there and you can’t come in after me? Let’s go back.”

  “What?” Wallow barks, disgusted. “And leave Olivia here for dead? Is that what you want?”

  “Bingo!” That is exactly what I want. Maybe Granana is slightly off target when it comes to the Food Pyramid, but she has the right idea about death. I want my parents to stop sailing around taking pictures of Sudanese leper colonies. I want Wallow to row back to shore and sleep through the night. I want everybody in the goddam family to leave Olivia here for dead.

  But there’s my brother. Struggling with his own repugnance, like an entomologist who has just discovered a loathsome new species of beetle.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’ll go,” I mumble, not meeting his eyes. I position myself on the edge of the boat. “I’ll go.”

  So that’s what it comes down to, then. I’d rather drown in Olivia’s ghost than have him look at me that way.

  * * *

  To enter the grotto, you have to slide in on your back, like a letter through a mail slot. Something scrapes my coccyx bone on the way in. There’s a polar chill in the water tonight. No outside light can wiggle its way inside.

  But, sure enough, phosphorescent dots spangle the domed roof of the grotto. It’s like a radiant checkerboard of shit. You can’t impose any mental pictures on it—it’s too uniform. It defies the mind’s desire to constellate randomness. The Glowworm Grotto is nothing like the night sky. The stars here are all equally bright and evenly spaced, like a better-ordered cosmos.

  “Olivia?”

  The grotto smells like salt and blood and bat shit. Shadows web the walls. I try and fail to touch the bottom.

  “Oliviaaa?”

  Her name echoes around the cave. After a while, there is only rippled water again, and the gonged absence of sound. Ten more minutes, I think. I could splash around here for ten more minutes and be done with this. I could take off the goggles, even. I could leave without ever looking below the surface of the water, and Wallow would never know.

  “Oli—”

  I take a deep breath, and dive.

  Below me, tiny fish are rising out of golden cylinders of coral. It looks like an undersea calliope, piping a song that you can see instead of hear. One of the fish swims right up and taps against my scratchproof lenses. It’s just a regular blue fish, solid and alive. It taps and taps, oblivious of the thick glass. My eyes cross, trying to keep it in focus.

  The fish swims off to the beat of some subaqueous music. Everything down here is dancing—the worms’ green light and the und
ulant walls and the leopard-spotted polyps. Everything. And following this fish is like trying to work backward from the dance to the song. I can’t hear it, though; I can’t remember a single note of it. It fills me with a hitching sort of sadness.

  I trail the fish at an embarrassed distance, feeling warm-blooded and ridiculous in my rubbery flippers, marooned in this clumsy body. Like I’m an impostor, an imperfect monster.

  I look for my sister, but it’s hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can’t tell the living from the dead. It’s all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.

  NOTES

  Note: The page numbers have been removed for the eBook edition.

  The list of definitions of “uncanny” and “canny”: Dictionary of the Scots Language http://www.dsl.ac.uk/

  general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain: Henry James. The Turn of the Screw (London: Henry James, Everyman, J.M. Dent, 1993): 4.

  beautiful hand: ibid: 4.

  utmost price: ibid: 3.

  transforming the concerns of art, literature, film: Nicholas Royle. The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): 27.

  belonging to the house: Sigmund Freud, translated by David McClintock. “The Uncanny” in The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Group USA, 2003): 126.

  private: ibid: 130.

  secret: ibid: 130.

  concealed: ibid: 129.

  the uncanny is a ‘province’ still before us: Nicholas Royle. The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): 27.

  When something that should have remained hidden … foreign to ourselves: these are not exact quotes, but paraphrased and compiled from:

  Nicholas Royle. The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003): 1–2.

  Sigmund Freud, translated by David McClintock. “The Uncanny” in The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Group USA, 2003): 135–51.

  The uncanny that we find in fiction: Sigmund Freud: 155.

  In a sense, then, [the fiction writer] betrays us: ibid: 157.