What the #@&% Is That?

by John Joseph Adams

  “You remind me of someone,” Selene said. “Coffee?”

  “I don’t—” I started, then I said, “Sure.”

  Whether it was because of her confidence, or the aphrodisiac of art, or the ghost sensation of her fingers on my skin, I took a chance on her. I took a chance in the café a block away from campus, sitting beside her on a worn red leather loveseat, inhaling the smoke embedded in the walls. She took her coffee black, and I scanned the menu for a drink I could see through, all the way to the bottom.

  She pushed a napkin and pencil in my direction. “I like your style,” she lied. “Draw for me.”

  * * * *

  I call it a memory from before my time, but is it?

  Memory, they say, is more like notes scribbled in a journal than a video recorded for playback. One part of the brain jots notes in shorthand and leaves them behind. Later, in the process of recall, another part of the mind reads the notes and constructs a scene to fit them, conjuring or editing details at its convenience.

  If I trawl her mind (my mind) for notes written long ago, and then turn them over to my mind (her mind) to be staged as vignettes, whose memories are they? Do they belong to her, who drew the original charcoal strokes, whose wrist really trembled beneath Selene’s touch? Or to me, who, for all I know, could have confabulated that grand old hall to replace a real, unromantic, cramped classroom?

  Everyone’s brain is a liar. Mine (hers, mine) is more duplicitous than most.

  * * * *

  This is a ghost story. Did I say that?

  No. It’s a love story. But all love stories become ghost stories if you watch them long enough.

  * * * *

  Now:

  James’s footsteps pound on the stair and I look up in time to see him leaning over the railing. “Hey, sweet,” he says with a leer. “How about making me some coffee?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  I don’t ask how he takes it. James is predictable. That’s why he tells me anyway.

  “Black as the devil,” he says, drawing his eyes up and down my skin. “And hot as hell.”

  That girl, who called herself R and vanished years ago, wouldn’t have liked this any more than I do. She told the world to fuck off with her bomber jacket and shit-kicking boots.

  Me, I wrap my chest in compression bandages, buy baggy T-shirts that come in plastic-wrapped three-packs, and wear my loose painter’s jeans from the days I did house painting for cash. First things I did in this body were crop my hair short and throw away her long-lasting mascara.

  All that, and James still pushes his eyes into me, still has to remind me that under all my clothing is a body he wants to control.

  Likes to brag, James. Likes to brag about how many lesbians he’s fucked. How they dance a different jig once they’ve had a ride on his cock carousel. All talk. I’ve seen him pick a girl I know he’s never seen before and spin a tale for his buddies about how he pushed her against the bed and made her beg. Four shots and he’ll brag about me even when I’m in the room. This black maid girl living in the house? Suh-weet, isn’t she? Bro, lemme tell you. You don’t even know.

  Free rent is free rent, even from a douche.

  I go into the kitchen and displace the morning’s dishes from the counter to the sink. The coffee pot has yesterday’s dregs in it and I don’t care enough about James’ comfort to rinse them out. I just dump out the old grounds and dump in the new, toss a couple of mugs’ worth of water into the tank, and jab the thing on. The maker pisses black. It’s as dark as Selene’s coffee but bitter. I imagine both of them drinking down the impenetrable murk. Anything could be hiding there, sliding anonymously into their stomachs, invading their organs, their skins.

  James is sitting at the coffee table when I return. “Hey, take a look at this,” he says, and turns his laptop so I can see the screen.

  A woodcut of the devil stares back at me, grin ghastly in oil-slick skin. Naked witches cavort around him. His huge erection casts a shadow the length of a witch’s arm.

  “Black as the devil,” he repeats. His gaze trails me, searching for signs he’s made me uncomfortable. He glances down at the devil’s enormous cock and then back at me again, hoping to see me flinch.

  I put the mug down beside him. “Coffee.” I turn back toward the kitchen. He yells something after me and laughs, but I don’t bother to make it out.

  Take a goddamn joke, why don’t you, he probably said.

  Or Do you fuck your girlfriend with a strap-on that size?

  Or Come sit in my lap and I’ll show you my devil.

  The black liquid that remains in the coffee maker roils as if something is swimming through it. A woman’s hand, I think, and imagine I can see fingers breaking through the surface, her old pulse still hidden in the dark.

  * * * *

  Memories of Selene:

  Starving artist, thinned to the bone, a beauty of fragile and skeletal proportions. She was an apprentice tattoo artist. While everyone else in the shop wore leather and torn denim, she dressed in scarves and diaphanous skirts, and wore her hair waist-length. Unless you slid your hand along that smooth forearm, nudged the lacy sleeve upward to reveal the iron of her bicep, you’d never know she had the strength to hold a tattoo gun for an hour.

  Tattooed on her inner right thigh: a serpent.

  On her inner left: a devil.

  Between, she was Eve, tempted and temptation.

  She could open me up like a gate with fingertips that had been trained to a needle’s precision. She drew pleasure in shapes I imagined as the tattoos I’d seen from her sketches: coiled dragons, cherry blossoms, angel’s wings.

  When she wrapped herself around me, I imagined she was the boa of her ink, all smooth skin and constricting muscle. A woman like that unhinges her jaw and swallows you down.

  “I,” Selene would whisper, “can take you places you’ve never been before.”

  I was too robbed of breath to whisper back, You wouldn’t understand the places I’ve been.

  * * * *

  Memories. Not entirely mine:

  I used to have dreams. Cocooned in blankets like a spider’s brood, I dreamed of the entryway, the basement, the overgrown hedges in the yard.

  The house where I grew up was palatial. Four stories of niches and hideaways and secret treasures and doors I could never remember. But it was a demon-haunted palace, with windows that admitted the arid night, and dust that had resided there for generations, and the growling of a furnace that could no longer keep the building warm.

  In the basement, one whole wall was dominated by the painting of a train tunnel. Garish ambient light sparked across the tracks. The hint of a vast shape lurked in the far, dark distance.

  If I wedged my hand behind the frame and felt behind the painting, I could locate a handle that pulled the whole wall aside, revealing a space behind it as large as a warehouse. It was populated by forgotten things: rocking horses and broken dollhouses, old claw-footed bed tables and rolled-up rugs.

  Water—stale and clouded with mud—pressed down on the room, threatening to rupture the walls and drown everything. Somewhere, that vast and vague presence from the painting swam through it, always moving nearer.

  A dream, I think: impossible, set against the reality of plots of land and blueprints. And how could I have watched my hand disappear beneath the frame as I searched for the switch? I, who couldn’t even drink tea?

  Still, I have more memories there than of most real places.

  * * * *

  A memory that isn’t:

  Waiting on the outside, listening through the water, pushing nothingness through nothingness, feeling and seeing only the forward, only the toward.

  * * * *

  When the brain senses a void, it struggles to fill it. Where there are no shorthands for memories, it will jot some and then forget their authorship, aver their authenticity.

  Do I remember water and waiting?

  I may be wrong.

  * * * *
<
br />   Now, in the kitchen:

  James comes down with his heavy tread. “Jesus Christ. Might as well be eating out of a toilet for all the shit lying around.”

  He picks up a bowl I haven’t yet moved from the counter and throws it into the sink so hard that the pile of dishes beneath it jumps. I keep my attention on the even sweep of the broom across the tile.

  I like having a broom handle in my grip when James comes through. He likes to scare people. Best to put him in his place.

  A girl comes out of the game room in the back. She was there for the party last night, one of the ones who’re always there at the parties. The red glaze in her eyes implies she was probably too drunk to drive home. She goes for the purse lying on a barstool. James catches her wrist and presses her against the wall, holding her there with the full weight of his body. He laughs as she tries to push him off. She complains about the smell of his cologne and how she’s got to be somewhere, and he just stands there. Even when she giggles and tries to play it off as a joke, he keeps her pinned, until she finally droops.

  He presses harder just for a second before he lets up. “There you go, Linds.”

  She rubs her wrist. “Thanks.”

  He has never done that to me.

  He will never do that to me.

  Lindsay starts opening random kitchen cabinets in search of a coffee mug. No matter that she was in a hurry to leave the house while James was holding her, she pauses to wrinkle her nose at the work I’m doing. “She’s really your maid?” she asks, flashing a look at James.

  “Yes, ma’am,” James says with a put-on Southern accent.

  “Like, she has to do all her chores or you’ll spank her?”

  James’s grin widens, but he’s not drunk enough to answer with a bald lie. His sober self knows just enough to be wary of me and my broom handle.

  Both of them are watching me to see if I’ll get upset, but I keep on sweeping with perfect measure.

  Lindsay says, in a voice as sweet and malicious as a drugged daiquiri, “Think you’ll get all that done?”

  “I finish my work,” I say. And I will.

  The deal was light housekeeping, cooking dinners, and handling the administrative business of the house—intercepting calls from the landlord, scheduling service and maintenance—and I could live in the unfurnished attic and use it as my studio for a while. The deal didn’t include the seven parties James had thrown this month. Didn’t include his insults and humiliation. Didn’t include picking up the panties of the girls he’d bullied into having sex with him, and listening to his trash talk the morning after.

  James and Lindsay head out. When the sweeping’s done, I open the corner cabinet and regard my supply of mason jars filled with vinegar. If James asked, I’d say they were natural cleaners. They are, too—I keep a piece of citrus or a sweet-smelling herb in each one to make the rooms smell good after scrubbing. But their real purpose is to camouflage the outlaw jar I hide behind them, the one crammed with habanero. James would notice the smell if he shoved his nose into the cabinet, but that’s one thing I know he’ll never do. He might pry into every other aspect of my personal life, but cleaning is beneath him.

  I take the moment of freedom from James’s gaze to go out into the summer sun, squinting against the glass-sharp shards of light tossed at me by the pool. A careless excess in the local drought, but James is like that. Today there’s a shadow occluding the turquoise, and I think of the painting of the distant train, and the water pressing on the secret basement room, and what it was like to float and listen. I shade my eyes with my hand and return inside to get away from shadows that don’t belong.

  * * * *

  Of Selene:

  Late night, in the bathroom, walking in on Selene as she gazed, red-eyed and insomniac, into the mirror. “What is it?” I asked, ready to step in, to save her. That was always my mistake: thinking I could save anyone.

  She stared into her own eyes. “I don’t know if I can love you anymore,” she said. “I love you. But you make me hate myself. And you refuse to admit that anyone could hate me. You’re so goddamn noble, I can’t fucking breathe.”

  And:

  Bitter night when she shoved through the door to my one-room apartment, one scarf over her head and another wrapped around her shoulders. Cold swirled behind her as she sneered at the gallery I’d made of my walls with my sketches, sketches, sketches of her.

  “You make me too fucking pretty. Stop dolling me up. You’re good enough to make me look real. Stop emulating this bullshit pop-art Photoshop crap.”

  She grabbed my hand, which already clutched a charcoal pencil, in the midst of creating another version of her. She forced my fist up, down, sideways, slashing her drawn self until it was black with fury.

  And:

  Blackout swallowing my apartment, no light but our flickering cell phones. Panting, she came, and then collapsed on top of me, breasts slick with sweat.

  Suddenly, like the snake on her thigh, she struck. She jammed her thumb into my neck, almost hard enough to make me choke. “We’d both be better off if you were dead. Just look at you. What good are you if you can’t even see through me?” She leaned close, the lines of her body catching the barely there light. “What the hell kind of person would lead you on, pretend to love you for so long? You’re a piece of shit to fall for a piece of shit like me.”

  Me, swallowing the pain, even as she still pushed on my windpipe.

  “Go to hell,” she said when I did nothing. “Go to hell and I’ll follow. We’ll burn together.”

  * * * *

  What if hell isn’t a pit of fire and fumes? What if it’s water instead, cold, motionless, and eternally pressing in?

  * * * *

  I believed—she believed:

  Selene’s an addict. A cutter. She burns herself up like a match and throws herself on the ground. I’m stronger than she is. I’m a good person. I can hold her. I can keep her. If I love her enough, all of this will go away.

  * * * *

  I believe:

  I was once nothing and now I am someone. Let Selene drive herself into frenzy; let James leer and boast; let memories haunt me; let the world’s shit pile up in the kitchen where I can demolish it with my broom. I used to be outside and now I’m in. At the end of the tunnel, there was me.

  * * * *

  Now:

  Should clean the windows today, but there’s a free hour when I know James won’t be home. I’ve got to take the time to paint when I can. I can finish the windows after my break.

  As I approach the stairs, I feel a sudden tug. I glance upward toward my attic studio, but the pull isn’t coming from there. I take a step toward the descending stairs instead, and there it is, a mental string pulled taut.

  I put my foot on the top stair and sudden knowledge swims through me: If I walk the stairs, if I go down into the shadows below, I’ll find the painting from my parents’ house. It will loom over me, orange light grinning over tracks that stretch toward the shadowed leviathan.

  Will it smell like old dust and chipped paint and rusting tin toys? Will there be a handle beneath it that will slide away a wall?

  No, because I’ve cleaned that basement a hundred times, and it isn’t there. Train tracks don’t go with James’s tits-and-ass décor.

  I will not go look.

  I take the stairs up to my studio two, three steps at a time. I push open the red-painted door and it slams shut behind me.

  James lets me have the attic loft because it’s got no carpet and no insulation, because the window doesn’t open, and because the duct from the air conditioner forgets all about it. It’s too hot and too humid and my paints turn out tacky and are slow to dry, but it’s my space, mine.

  My canvases cover the walls, some hanging unframed, others propped against whatever surfaces I could find. Seen all together, they are a blur of blue and brown, loneliness and perdition.

  I’m a better artist than she was. She was always pulling herself in multi
ple directions: toward the naïve sentimentality that she couldn’t shed, and toward the intellectual abstraction she couldn’t emulate.

  I paint what I paint. The swirls, the jaws, the geometries, the realistic figures that shade themselves in when I’m not paying attention, the bloody eyes, the listing trees. I close my eyes and paint nothing I remember.

  Today, the paintings stand in half a foot of impossible water. It surges around my feet, but my shoes stay dry even as I kick a sodden clod and watch it break apart and churn away. The air tastes like murk: restless, muddy incipience.

  Something is coming.

  I try to remember what caused it before, what let me through. I’ve thought on this a hundred times, trying to think of another answer, but there’s only one: it was coalescing death.

  I remember the habanero in the kitchen. I note which canvases have frames that I can break down most easily into weapons. I mentally inventory every mirror in the house that could yield dagger shards, every knife in its drawer, every hammer and bat and nail gun.

  I will not be the one to die.

  * * * *

  Memory:

  Standing in the bathroom and staring at the bruise Selene’s thumb left on my throat.

  She’s gone this time, really gone. Car missing, phone service dropped, handwriting scrawled across the painting of her that I hung above my bed: GOOD-BYE R, SHOULD HAVE KILLED YOU, I’M SORRY.

  I looked into my reflection, bruised and grieving, and I saw

  this red-eyed girl

  unfamiliar

  miserable

  half-shattered

  pathetic

  stranger girl’s hands pouring a bath. testing the water to see if it’s warm enough. digging through old drawers until she finds a straight razor. laying the metal on the edge of the tub where it glints under the bathroom’s fluorescents. she gets in without taking off her clothes. she submerges her wrists. the water quickens to match her pulse as

  I look down and I can see all the way to the bottom of the tub. This is good water. This is clear water. I pick up the razor from where it lies beside me. I drag it across my wrist—vertically, I’ve done my homework—but my hand is shaking and I know it’s too shallow before I’ve even finished the stroke. Pink spills out and I watch it cloud into the bath, making it red and impenetrable and bad.