The Refrigerator Monologues

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I popped a Xanax. Alex asked if I wanted something stronger. Cathy Earnshaw perished beautifully on our rabbit-eared TV. She tied me off and whispered, Prince sweet, night good. She slid the needle in like Sleeping Beauty’s spindle, and for the first time in a year, sunflowers opened up in my mind, yellow and red as summer.

  The rest is silence. Silence, and then a cough I couldn’t shake, and then red marks on my skin like angry kisses, like spotlights, like the actual, terrible, unfor-fucking-givable cliché that I was. The Daisy Show was such a hack-fest. A product of its times. Heavy-handed, preachy, full of bullshit moralizing, and fucking Christ what a predictable finale! What is this after-school-special horseshit? It’s the kind of thing some asshole in Ohio gets a National Book Award for writing while he screws his grad students and cries his way to tenure. My boyfriend took all the magic and left me with nothing but the dregs of realism. The Misha Malinov Show was always the prime-time attraction. I’m just . . . some public-access embarrassment. I died in a free clinic in the left armpit of Guignol City and you know exactly what killed me so just nod piously and spare me the humiliation of stitching on my scarlet A. Someone who didn’t know me at all grabbed a dress at Goodwill and put me in the ground at the public’s expense. Finally, government funding for the arts!

  The worst part of dying is that you never get to find out the end of the story. Did the Insomniac finally defeat Miasma? Fucked if I know. I didn’t get that script. I was just a deep dark past, the battery of sadness hidden in the hero’s heart. I was Rosaline, for fuck’s sake. Juliet will show up in scene two and teach the torches to burn bright or whatever and I’d hate her, but let’s be real, ladies and gentlemen, he’ll suck her dry too, and we’ll all meet her for tea down here at the Lethe Café. The play is still going. It’s booked every night until the sun goes out. I’m just the local theater ghost.

  And that’s that, my darlings. The two hours’ traffick upon our stage, complete with fatal loins! Not bad, really. Maybe I’ll make it into a one-woman show. And you know, I am glad that we know each other now, really know each other, companion bosoms, from the heart of my bottom. Delilah Daredevil Does Deadtown. I love you. My dear departed, I love you so.

  I’ll take the first caller on line one.

  THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE GIRL IN THE REFRIGERATOR

  The moon strikes the dinner hour and the Lethe Café house band shuffles in, jangling and shattering the shinbone bell over the door. No loss—it’ll grow back in the morning.

  The whole time I was alive, I never loved a rock star like I love these four onyx-winged gargoyles with Christmas lights wrapped around their horns and pen-nib piercings running up and down their brimstone ears. Quarter Inch Bleed. Deadtown’s putrefying punk sensation.

  I’m so excited that somewhere up above me, somewhere up in the dirt, the heart I used to have gives one last thrilling, dusty thump.

  We don’t have much use for money down here except as interior decor. I’ve got a beaded curtain that’s all old-as-fuck Greek drachmas. You know, the kind they used to put on corpses’ eyes so they could cross the Styx. But the Styx isn’t a river anymore. The underworld’s come a long way since Helen and Medea and Iphigenia and Clytemnestra painted the town black—the original Hell Hath Club. Deadtown’s like a dear old grandfather trying to use the Internet. Slow as snails on quaaludes, but he does his best to get with the times. You can find the Styx in the pipes nowadays. Deadtown Municipal Waterworks. We drink it out of our faucets, we bathe in it, it shoots out of fire hydrants on warm nights and all the neighborhood children come out to jump and dance in the spray. And all those coins come spurting up out of the drains, float down the gutters, fire like bullets out of the hydrants into the sky. So, we do have money, but money isn’t currency. It doesn’t matter. Not here.

  What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death. And it’s not like you can kill yourself to escape. Deadtown will do anything for the delight of distraction. When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are. Remember that bit in The Odyssey where Odysseus (my upstairs neighbor and a total dick, by the way) brings the dead back to life for about half a second by feeding them blood? No. That’s disgusting. He brought them back to life by telling them his story. The blood was his own weird fetish. The dead don’t turn out for gore; they come for the show.

  We get them all when they die, all the nightclubs that ever shut, every theater that burned to the ground, every museum that lost funding and got remodeled into condominiums, every amusement park sold for scrap or left to be slowly claimed by weeds and sun. Just like our triceratops pies and great auk eggs over easy. The minute a TV show gets canceled, a book goes out of print, a play closes, some soldier blows up a statue, a dance goes out of style, a song gets forgotten, that’s the minute we get them. (I swear to god, we are never going to get Harry Potter and I am not okay about it.) The Alexandrian Library has a line around it like Studio 54, you wouldn’t believe it—and Studio 54’s waiting list goes all the way back to the Paleolithic era. The gang’s all here, the artists too, writers, musicians, painters, actors. I know you don’t want to die and it probably keeps you awake some nights, the idea of everything that is you ceasing to be and all your works turning to dust, but down here you can see most of the Beatles playing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Oscar Wilde sings Paul’s parts, Sappho hits the drums, Sojourner Truth and Basquiat do spoken word while Joan of Arc and Judy Garland perform an interpretive dance, and Laurence Olivier reads the phonebook during the set break. It’s not all bad.

  But Quarter Inch Bleed is homegrown. Local gargoyles made good. When they play, I feel like they’re playing my life. Everyone feels that way. They’re kind of . . . post-punk post-pop hipster rock sludgemetal folk-industrial techno-blues alt-grunge cabaret torch singers. You know, soul music. They start setting up on the little Lethe stage, playing my secret favorite song: the rustling of sheet music and set lists, the coughing and quiet warm-up, the tuning of instruments, the squeak of speakers and amps, the last drags on cigarettes and popping of knuckles. The four of them arch their long black wings, run through a couple of tongue twisters to loosen up their muzzles, pluck a few strings, tap a few keys with their claws. They’re all there, Stan and Jack and Alan and Gail, their brilliant fur shining in the moonlight, their horns glittering with festive electric lights.

  The Hell Hath Club holds down a booth like a fortress. No one can budge us from our prime seats. The Lethe Café is crowded now, with more pushing in all the time. Daisy snuggles in closer to me. Pauline rolls her eyes and fishes a cigar out of her cleavage. Under the table, she and Bayou are holding hands. Julia flickers in and out in time to the noise and bustle of the café.

  And then we hear it. A soft, awful sound sawing back and forth under the honkings of Jack running through a D scale on his accordion. It’s coming from behind the bar, behind the swinging kitchen doors. Crying. Wheezing. Teeth chattering. Neil’s horned head snaps up, his canine ears twitching. His boiling red eyes fill with concern. But it’s not his business, it’s ours. We know that sound. The Hell Hath Club abandons their front-row-center seats without a word. The bartender holds the doors open for us with an onyx-scaled hand. We listen in the kitchen, surrounded by knives.

  It’s coming from the refrigerator.

  Bayou heaves the door open with her muscled Atlantean arms. The frosted air clears. A woman sits on the floor of the industrial fridge, naked, her dark skin blue and white, her hair frozen, ice clotted around her shoulders, her thighs, her neck. Two huge bruises shaped like hands blacken her throat.

  “Fuck,” Polly breathes. Even she feels bad for the popsicle. “She’s brand-new. How long you been dead, kitten?”

  “Hello, broccoli,” the girl whispers. “Hello, grape juice.” She coughs. “Not f
rom concentrate.”

  Death really knocks you sideways. When I died, I woke up in a pile of garbage under the Phlegethon Bridge. It’s the roughest Monday morning you’ll ever pull. I crouch down next to the woman. Tug her long, tightly curled, slowly melting hair away from her face. The ends shine bright blue. She keeps shaking and shivering, but the sobbing slows down.

  “I’m Paige Embry,” I say gently. “Whatever happened to you, you’re perfectly safe now. What’s your name?”

  She looks up at me with wild golden eyes, her lip trembling, her eyelashes clumped together with frost like white mascara.

  “Samantha,” she croaks.

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SAMANTHA DANE

  Hello, broccoli.

  Hello, grape juice, not from concentrate.

  Hello, farm-fresh butter.

  Hello, nonfat milk.

  Hello, individually wrapped cheese slices that I hate but Jason won’t stop buying. Hello, eggs from Nina’s chickens. Hello, boysenberry yogurt I should have thrown out weeks ago. Hello, bell peppers I was going to use to make sesame beef stir-fry tonight. Hello, half-defrosted beef. Hello, peaches and rhubarb I bought to bake a pie I’ll never bake now.

  I wonder if Jason will shudder whenever he sees peaches once he finds me like this. Maybe he’ll stop buying that crappy cheese. I wonder if he’ll ever find me. If he comes soon, maybe I’ll still make it. In the meantime, it’s just you and me, extra chunky peanut butter. Just you and me.

  There’s something about getting strangled by a minotaur and stuffed into a refrigerator that really makes you consider your choices in life. I was gonna be famous, you know. Diane Arbus, Julia Margaret Cameron, Annie Leibovitz, fucking Ansel Adams, they’d have had nothing on Samantha Dane. That’s what I chose. I chose art. I chose work. I chose a viewfinder and a darkroom and a shutter speed like a butterfly’s blink. And I chose Jason Remarque. If you snip one of those choices out, would I be spending this quiet Thursday night making sesame beef and watching cartoons instead of feeling my heartbeat slowly give up with a half-eaten rotisserie chicken scraping against my back? Life is just full of funny questions, isn’t it?

  Let’s try this one: what if I’d found that stupid button instead of Jason?

  He always told me he got it at an estate sale, though I have no idea what kind of estate sale would sell a shitty, ugly button clearly made with a home machine by some furious yet crafty ’80s stonerpunk. It had a hand-drawn zombified bald eagle front and center with the words The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics carefully inked in a circle around the poor thing’s rotting wings. Our witty artist had turned his A’s into anarchist symbols, obviously. The level of artistic ability on display topped out at “obsessively doodled in the Health Sciences textbook of a tenth-grader with borderline personality disorder.” Jason saw it in a box of similar homespun antiestablishment arts and crafts items and bought it instantly. He pinned it on the I’m-an-edgy-artist-but-don’t-make-a-thing-about-it-man leather jacket I bought him for Christmas and showed up to my birthday dinner proud as a peacock with a 4.0. Hey, don’t look at me like that, Sam. It spoke to me! I like an outraged political statement that’s thirty years out of date. If they’d had one that said Warren G. Harding Is the Anti-Christ, I’d have grabbed that one, too. Occupy Yesterday, baby!

  It cost him $1.50.

  It made him a god.

  Not, like, Zeus or Shiva or anything. Not God god. One of the minor ones, the redneck backwoods cousins of the fancy cosmic pantheon that only people who actually speak ancient Greek have ever heard of. I’m not being catty about it, I promise. Even Jason would admit the rest of the Avant Garde have way better powers. But Jason’s was the prettiest. No contest.

  We met in art school in New York like we’d been cast in some kind of indie romance flick. I called him my manic pixie fucktoy. He silkscreened it onto a T-shirt and wore it to his thesis defense. I was photography, Jason was graphic design and emergent urban media, which is how tenure-tracks spell graffiti on your diploma. We were two peas in a student housing unit: young, on scholarship, profoundly convinced of our own genius, highly enamored of Adderall, fashionably cynical, and comically well-read. We had matching his-and-hers eating disorders. We both hated our parents. (His: hardware store owners. Mine: professional alcoholics.) We both dyed our hair with the same cheap beauty supply store goo: #143 Lady Sings the Blues. We were hateably adorable. Only art divided us: my work was all about permanence, capturing time and feeling and freezing it forever. His was devoted to ephemerality: temporary, illicit, testament to the vitality of the fleeting and the impossibility of the very permanence I worshipped.

  I was always pretty good at writing those little cards that hang next to your pieces in galleries. All about the active verbs, man.

  Jason started doing his thing long before graduation. We’d light out from the dorms after midnight, his backpack clanking and jingling with cans of paint, my camera strap snug around my neck—as if it ever left. He’d cover the side of a bank in a Warhol-style portrait of the guy on the cover of the Monopoly game’s big round face, or spray a little medieval goblin on the door of every apartment block on the East Side that had voted majority Republican, or paint a graveyard on the parking lot of an NYPD station with the names of every person shot by police in the last year lovingly stenciled on the asphalt. Signed them all with a flamboyant drop-shadowed letter C. That was his nom de paint: Chiaroscuro.

  See? Hateably adorable.

  That kind of thing was hot shit back then. Street art, ninja galleries. Art wants to be free. The gallery system is a noose around the neck of the artist. You know. Jason didn’t always go political; he re-created the unicorn tapestries on the walls of a public elementary school. He thought the kids would like it. Everyone likes horses. I shot him working. I shot people’s faces when they saw him painting at 3 AM. I shot the finished pieces. I think the longest one of Jason’s pieces lasted was seventy-two hours. They broke out the big rollers and painted over his goblins and gravestones real quick. Except for the unicorns. The school kept them. The kids changed the foursquare rules to require hitting every unicorn hunter in the face before you can win. Everyone likes horses.

  Jason railed against the contemporary scene, the cults of personality, the eagerness with which other students talked about selling installation pieces to cancer hospitals or tech campuses. Me, I never minded the gallery system. It’s a tight collar at worst, really. The summer after we graduated, I showed a series of my Chiaroscuro photographs at the Eugenia Falk Memorial Gallery. Everyone ate white cheese and white wine and said white things about my work. I called the series The Gallery System Is a Noose Around the Neck of the Artist. Sold like candy at fat camp.

  When he bought that button, we’d just moved into the kind of apartment stand-up comics build sets around. How small was it? So far uptown, you’re basically in Canada, am I right? But it was ours. We only had one roommate: our tech. When a photographer and a graphic designer love each other very much, their gear merges into one big lump of wires and monitors and reference books and laser cutters, then starts multiplying. But as a roommate, gear is kind. Pirated copies of Photoshop could not tell us to fuck quieter or stop having five-minute dance parties every hour on the hour. We spent a weekend turning the bathroom into my darkroom, packing the medicine cabinet with developing chemicals instead of shampoo.

  “Art doesn’t need to pee!” Jason crowed, and kissed me like he majored in it.

  I stopped off at the pound on the way home from a grant-writing seminar and got a cat in lieu of an endowment. A big, fat Abyssinian, tragically born without whiskers. We named him MacArthur the Genius Cat and let him eat people food. It was a lifelike photographs capturing the early 2000s zeitgeist that people will be sick of seeing in special exhibitions a hundred years from now. If I’d been any happier, I’d have been a Prozac prescription.

  Then a fucking hideous undead bird landed on our little world, shitting everywhere and squawking The Wages of Sin Are Reaganomics i
n the general direction of the next millennium.

  I never told Jason this. I guess I probably never will. But that first time it happened was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. So beautiful I forgot to go for my camera, and I was born reaching for a camera.

  At 2 AM, Wall Street is a ghost town. Almost countryside quiet, sodium streetlights throwing post-apocalyptic orange flames all over the empty roads, signs flashing HALAL and ATM and NEW YORK STATE LOTTO with no one to see them. Jason climbed a ladder wedged in an alley between two office buildings while I kept watch. I smiled at the comforting whoosh-whoosh sound of his spray can hitting a stencil of Alan Greenspan dancing with the Statue of Liberty while lasciviously grabbing her ass. The love of my life finished up the prongs on Liberty’s crown, blew on the wet, bloodred paint, waited, and slowly peeled back the stencil. The moon squinted down skeptically. A little trite by her standards. Jason Remarque reached out his hand to scrape off a stray smudge above the Fed’s giant doofy glasses.

  Alan Greenspan and Lady Liberty stepped off the wall of the New York Stock Exchange and into the open air. The wind off the river seemed to inflate them like red balloons, their aerosolized paint-bodies puffing out of 2-D and into an impossible 3. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve took his hand off Liberty’s ass and placed it gracefully around her waist, sweeping her into a silent, perfect Viennese waltz a hundred feet into the skyline and climbing. The Statue of Liberty reached forward and adjusted her dancing partner’s glasses. The stray smudge of paint still floated above the frames where Jason had left it. We watched them, dumbfounded, unable to reconcile what we saw with, you know, any possible goddamned definition of reality. We thought we lived in a universe where gravity is a thing, time moves at one second per second, the gallery system is a noose around the neck of the artist, and movies aren’t real life. Because that’s all your brain can say for itself when something that can’t happen happens in front of you: It looks like a movie. Oh! We’re in a movie now. That’s okay, then. Movies can’t hurt you. Oooh, look at that! Her torch just came on!