Things to Make and Break

by May-Lan Tan

  The pieces clicked into place. “This is the anniversary you meant?”

  “It’s been in the vault all this time.”

  “You mean you actually honored the agreement? Why?”

  “It’s just good form,” she said, shrugging. “I always keep my promises.”

  “What did he want you to do?”

  “He’d listed all the things he didn’t want to do. Like he didn’t want to fuck, photograph or film me, or cook and eat me, or piss or shit on me. I didn’t have to drink his come or pass it to anyone else’s mouth.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It went on like that.” She lit a cigarette off the one she had going and blew smoke through her nostrils. “No enema was necessary. I wouldn’t have to change my name or get a tattoo. I’d be acting my own age. I wouldn’t have to smoke, or to masturbate. I wouldn’t be tickled or scratched or bitten.

  “There would be no candle wax, coffins, speculums, or cattle prods involved. I wouldn’t have to wear a diaper, a straitjacket, or a labial clip. I’d be allowed to keep all of my hair. I wouldn’t be acting like an animal, a waiter, an ashtray, a toilet, or any piece of furniture.

  “There would be no abrasion. No dolls. I wouldn’t be asphyxiated, inseminated, branded, or breastfed. I wouldn’t be fucked with feet or have to use a chamber pot, and he didn’t want to do that thing where you squeeze your legs together to form a triangular saké vessel.

  “No telephones, animals, or electricity would be used. I wouldn’t be mummified in cling film or otherwise, or have to do any chores. I wouldn’t be force-fed or entered into an auction. Pages and pages of this shit.

  “Even just by reading the contract, I was already playing the game. Anyway, I don’t believe in turning things down. And I was young, a little unsure of my worth. I liked the idea of being paid that much to do something that, apparently, only I could do. Most of all, I wanted to know what a person could want so much. If I didn’t do it, I’d never find out. I signed the contract, filled in my bank details, and completed the health questionnaire, which included some unusual measurements. I mailed it to his PO box. About a week later, a long white envelope without a postmark arrived, containing instructions for my pickup. As the day drew near, I began to look forward to it in a peculiar sort of way.

  “I went to the meeting place at three in the afternoon. It was a street address with no floor number so I thought it would be a house, but it turned out to be a garden next to a cemetery. I arrived just as the rain cleared. The flowers looked beaded and swollen, and the marble tombstones and stone statues glistened in the sunlight.

  “A white van reversed through the gates. I went over and opened one of the back doors and climbed in. There was a metal bulb stuck to the floor that followed me like an eye. The windows were sealed, and when I closed the doors it was so dark I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or shut. As we started to move, I crouched on the floor and took off my clothes, as I’d been instructed. The glinting eye watched me.

  “The sound of car horns and jackhammers faded. We drove in a straight line, without stopping, for what seemed like a few hours. The road surface changed and we took some wild turns. The van stopped, and the engine cut off. The floor shuddered when the front doors slammed. I waited for someone to come and let me out. I could hear sounds in the distance, water rushing and children squealing. The noise grew and faded, distorting as if going around a bend.

  “I crawled across the floor, feeling for the doors. I found the handles, but they wouldn’t turn. I started shouting and banging on the metal. When my hands were sore, I lay on my back and hammered the doors with my feet. I wondered if I was going to die there, while the camera watched. I curled into a ball on my side and cried. Next thing I knew, I caught a knock to the chin that made me bite my tongue so hard I saw sparks. I was bouncing in the back of the van and we were going very fast, off-road. We slowed down and crunched up a slope. Then we reversed and braked, but the motor kept running. I heard a clicking sound. The doors swung slowly open.

  “It was night. Out in the cool, blue forest stood a statuesque woman with a shaved head, holding a rope. I climbed out and walked unsteadily toward her. She had bare feet and long toes and wore a long-sleeved chainmail leotard that glittered in the taillights. I thought she was the man’s sister. The overt beauty that had appeared almost repulsive on him was wonderful on her. She took my hands and placed them together as if in prayer, and tied my wrists together. I thought I recognized the temperature of her touch. When I tried to summon a memory of my patron, all I could picture was a suit, a cipher—I realized it would have been easy to pass in the polarized atmosphere of the strip club.

  “She led me by the rope through the trees. I tried to read the line of her body, but I couldn’t tell if this was the same person or not. Waiting at the edge of the forest were four men with flashlights. They wore metal masks shaped like horses’ heads, and one of them held a black box with a handle. The masks were very tall, so that the men’s faces were in the horses’ necks. I didn’t know how they were able to see.

  “We walked across the meadow and up a hill. The men wore toolbelts that clanked as they walked. It felt so creepy, marching across the countryside in this secret procession. When we reached the top, I saw a makeshift scaffold and, lying flat on the ground beside it, a life-sized wooden cross with cables snaking out. The men switched off their flashlights and the woman let go of the rope.

  “They formed a circle around me, the men with their masks on, me with my wrists tied. There were no trees, and a three-quarters moon had come out. The woman said something that was a command without being a word, like an acrobat giving a cue, and I felt one of the men come up behind me and take something out of his belt. I wanted to turn around but I was afraid, so I shut my eyes. He started brushing my hair. He did this for quite a long time. The bristles were sharp and stiff.

  “The woman untied my hands, and two men picked me up by the armpits and ankles and laid me out on the cross. There was a short bar extending between my legs and a platform for my feet. They fastened my arms to the crossbeam just above the elbow and at the wrist, with multi-stranded cable that threaded right through the wood, and fixed my knees and ankles to the standing beam. One man had a special machine that clamped and melted the cable—I could smell hot plastic and wire. Another went around trimming the ends with wirecutters.

  “The way everything fit my body, and was so ultratech, made me feel almost safe. The woman knelt beside me, and the man with the tallest horse’s head came over with the metal box. He unsnapped the latches and opened it and started passing things to her: a pair of latex gloves that she put on, and some makeup sponges, which she tucked into my arm restraints, making them tighter. She flicked my veins and swabbed them with a cotton ball soaked in chilly pink liquid. The man gave her two syringes, clear and cloudy. Holding one between her teeth, she uncapped the other and emptied it into my arm. Whatever it was, it burned going in. She dropped the used syringe into the black box and stuck a small round Band-Aid over the puncture wound before injecting my other arm.

  “When she removed the sponges from under the cable ties, one arm felt hot and the other felt cold, and then they both felt like air. The man took out a long thin nail and started to hammer it through my palm. I could see the blood streaking and feel the pounding of the mallet vibrating in my teeth and eye sockets, but I was numb from the neck down. They didn’t put nails in my feet. It would have caused too much damage.”

  She opened her hand and pointed to the satiny disc. “See how it’s not perfectly centered? They went between the bones. This spot is symbolic anyway. You’d have been nailed through the wrists. So then the woman was kneeling beside me again. She had a tiny pot that looked like lip balm, and she twisted it open and dipped her index finger into it. Her movements had a loopy, layered quality, and I realized my eyes were strobing. When I tried to look directly at anything, my focal point kept oscillating either side of it. The stars looked like needles.

>   “Her outstretched finger was covered in gold paint and seemed unnaturally luminous. I had an impulse to touch it, but my hands were nailed down. The brightness seemed important, and sexual. I began to feel turned on, not in the human way, but as if I was a plant, photosynthesizing. When she daubed the paint on my forehead, my skin seemed to feather beneath her touch, like an eye opening. She put her finger in her mouth and sucked off the paint. The gesture struck me as unbearably raw. It just about doubled me over. I’ve never experienced anything like it—I felt like I was going to burst. The feeling subsided, and I felt pure and spun, like after a crying jag. I got lost in her face for a while. When she opened her mouth, I saw a galaxy inside it.

  “The men threw the cables over the scaffold. They winched me up and forward, and I heard hammering. Within seconds, I began to feel the strain. If I let myself hang from my arms, my chest felt tight and I had trouble breathing. I had to push against the platform with my feet and keep my whole body engaged. You need a super-strong core. I guess that’s why she didn’t just pick some girl off the street.”

  She lit two cigarettes and handed one to me. “That’s when I started to see shit.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Winged embryos flying through the sky. Gods fucking each other with snakes coming out of their eyes. I saw a tribe of glass people holding weapons and tools made of skin. They had shiny transparent bones and organs nested inside their bodies, and real blood in the mesh of their veins.

  “I saw hundreds of people walking through darkness and light. Young and old, through sun and snow. Some walked on their knees.

  “I saw a boy with shells covering his body, swimming along the ocean floor. Sometimes a single pearl of air escaped from his lips. When he came to an underwater volcano, he hovered beside it until an octopus rose from its mouth. The boy’s legs scissored and he shot toward the octopus and bit it between the eyes.

  “I saw a tall, bearded man in a red cloak banging a drum and dancing on giant stone steps. The cloak had a hood that looked like a girl’s face with blond hair and a bloody heart attached.

  “I saw four children kneeling on a bed and peeping through a window into a moonlit garden, where a man and a woman stood facing each other. While the man wore simple clothes, the woman was sheathed in a gold silk dress with a high neck, her wrists and ankles dripping jewels. She got on her hands and knees in front of him and pressed her forehead to the ground.

  “I saw a desert so vast it hugged the planet’s curvature. The sky was egg-yolk yellow, and the sun and sand were white tinged with violet. Thousands of statues stood in perfect rows. There was a ripple as they tipped their faces toward the sun. They were still again, so still I wondered if I’d imagined the movement, if they’d been positioned that way to begin. At some unspoken cue, they began to move in perfect unison. It was a slow dance, a sequence of poses. The figures moved in impossible ways. No two steps were exactly alike, it was a progression or a story. There was a crackling sound and they stood still, their faces upturned. The sun’s edge blackened as if burned by flame. As the shadow slid across the sun, the figures bowed. The darker the sky grew, the deeper they bowed. The bluish corona appeared. Perfect, it quivered and was gone.

  “It was dark. I was thirsty. When I sat up, I saw the metal eye and knew I was in the van. It wasn’t moving. Crawling across the floor, I could feel that my hands were bandaged. I clambered out and shut the doors. I looked around. I was on a quiet residential street. It was dawn.

  “As the van pulled away, I felt like I was re entering Earth’s orbit after being away a hundred years. I couldn’t remember anything about myself. I wasn’t even sure if the clothes I was wearing belonged to me. It took me a while to recognize where I was standing, at the end of my road. I went home and took off the bandages. My wounds had been neatly sewn up. The next day, the money landed in my account.

  “For months, I barely spoke to anyone. I just felt very spaced all the time. All I wanted to do was stay in my room listening to music. One morning I woke up and went outside. It was autumn and the sunlight was knives cutting through me. When people passed me on the street, I could look into their eyes and see what color the sky was at the moment of their birth. What color it would be when they died. I could move through their whole lives, even things they hadn’t done yet, as easily as walking through the rooms of a house. It wasn’t like flashing images—more like knowing where your tongue is in your mouth so you don’t bite it.

  “To me, other people used to be a show that was on sometimes, like fish at the aquarium, and now I could feel everyone around the world at once, in painfully exquisite detail. When this faded after a few weeks, I was relieved. But I started to wonder if what had happened was something I needed. I went back to the club to look for her, hoping to find out what else she wanted to do.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “I did, eventually. Before I could approach her, she walked up to the stage, holding an envelope. I saw her do the handshake on this other girl. Then she took a step back, slipped the envelope back into her pocket, and left. The club burned down a few weeks later.”

  It began to pour. We were instantly drenched, and Julia’s hair frizzed into a ball. We laughed as we slid down the slide and ran across the street. We stepped into the elevator, wet and shivering, and I pushed her up against the doors as we began to rise.

  Kissing Julia was like kissing language. Her tongue was a flame, licking phoneme and diphthong. She swallowed me like a sword and her eyes were doves, her mouth a lake of fire. Her cunt a cup of tears. Her body a city: I carved a key out of soap, found the trapdoors, and learned the secret knocks. I drew a map and held it inside me, the dark, oily streets running through me like veins. I chalked hopscotch grids on pavements and wrote on walls. I watched leaves fall and animals die. The sun turned black, and when she pressed her thumbs against my windpipe, I heard galloping horses and the hard bass of gunfire. We came like dragons, heaven and earth getting closer. Her eyes blazed red and gold, and in them, kingdoms burned.

  In the morning she was gone and there was ash on my pillow.

  I stopped going to the playground. I started smoking in the apartment, out the kitchen window. I wasn’t sure about the choking, and I didn’t like the way everything seemed darker and brighter around her. One night as I was coming back from work, I looked up and saw her watching from her dining room window. I realized I hadn’t heard any scuffling from upstairs in a while. The lamp shone through her hair as she smiled. I waved and she disappeared. I thought she might be coming downstairs, so I hung around by the mailboxes until some other people came in. The following night I went upstairs and rang her doorbell. A little girl in a ballerina costume answered. She said she’d been living there since before Easter, but she also told me her parents were unicorns.

  Last week I was in another city. Julia was there, in a black bar on a black street, holding a dark drink.

  “You again,” she said and took a sip.

  I offered her a cigarette. She said she’d quit.

  DD-MM-YY

  I kick off my shoes and roll my suitcase down the hall to my room. When I turn on the light, I see a bump under the bedclothes, and pink-and-yellow hair piled on my pillow. That’s Coney. She grew up next door. Her family moved away, but she still has a key to our house. Her skirt and bracelets are on the floor. I switch off the light and go and knock on Marc’s door. I open it.

  The desk lamp’s on, and his hand luggage is on the bed. Shit, now I owe him fifty dollars. Our colleges break up at the same time but he always beats me back. He must skip out early. He can’t stand to lose a wager. I go out to the deck to look for him. There’s a towel spread across one of the loungers, and his Camels and lighter are on the picnic table. The pack’s almost full. I ease one out and spark it up. I blow out the smoke. The swimming pool glows in the dark. My parents are away. I’ve forgotten where they went.

  Marc and I always tell people we’re twins, but we’re actually triple
ts. The third son was stillborn and in biology class I learned that we probably killed him. I believe it. We’re still kind of like that. I phone Marc, and he picks up right away. I can hear music and laughter and splashing.

  “Ha ha, you lose,” he says. “Suck a bag of cocktips, you fucksqueek.”

  “Dicklick,” I say, moving the towel so I can sit.

  “Cumface.”

  “Soapy titjack.”

  “Diarrhea weenieclown.”

  “Ball juggler.”

  “That isn’t a thing, you anal dildo,” he says. “We’re at Galen’s. Come, and bring my smokes. You fucking scrote, you’re smoking one right now.”

  “I’m not. I’ve quit,” I say, exhaling away from the phone. “You didn’t tell me Coney was coming.”

  “Huh. So she made it back.”

  “Was she out with you?”

  “She got too mash-up. I had to put her in a cab.”

  “Fuck, man. She wasn’t moving. What if she’s ODing again?”

  “Why do you think I told her to lie in your bed?” he says.

  “You’re an asshole. Worse. You’re a jackhole.”

  He laughs. “Come, dummy. Let’s have fun.” I can hear a girl talking to him. “Babe,” he says, “can’t you see that Daddy’s on the phone?”

  I roll my eyes. I share DNA with this person. “I’m tired,” I say.

  “Stop being such a period.”

  “Maybe I’ll come down later.” I put out my cigarette and go back inside.

  “You’re the jackhole, jackhole,” he says and hangs up.

  My brother used to be some kind of expert who could tell you all of the best things. He knew when to pick off a scab so the skin underneath would be gray and sticky and tight. He could turn Coke into beer and pull wings off butterflies. Now he doesn’t know shit. I make a peanut butter sandwich and eat it over the sink. I go to my parents’ bathroom and take some of my mother’s Seconal, cupping my hand beneath the faucet. I lie on their bed waiting for the pills to land.