The sight of myself disappearing shocks me into doubt and I stare at the razor before moving again and
there, like a switch, behind her eyes. now I see my hand (stranger girl’s hand) aloft with the blade in it. now I feel the warm water squishing into my jeans (stranger girl’s jeans). now I
Two minds suckling at the same senses, two thinkers poring over the same memories and preoccupations and pain.
Diluted blood washes against our submerged body. Someone says, Help me.
The other, I’ll take over now.
What if people—
They’ll never know.
Can I? the one asks, hesitant, wary. Are you sure?
And the other: Go.
* * * *
Now, in the kitchen:
It’s the only middle ground between the impossible painting in the basement and the impossible flood in the attic. I’m drinking ginger ale. I’m pacing. James is not supposed to be home yet.
He is, though, slamming in like a tidal wave, stinking of liquor. When he catches me in the kitchen, his face goes red to purple. “What the hell are you doing? You think this is what I pay you for? Why the fuck is the house still a garbage pit?”
“I needed a break,” I say.
I am doing the wrong things. I should put down the bottle and get out of his way. I should go clean something, even if it’s already clean, keep him at bay with diligence. I shouldn’t stand here calmly by the sink, sipping my drink as if I’m his equal, entitled to my own time and space.
He gives me that lustful, disdainful up-and-down. This time, there are an extra thousand needles in it. His color goes pinker as he smiles, eyes still hard as pebbles.
“I ran into this chick named Selene today,” he says.
I answer flatly. “Okay.” As if the name doesn’t mean anything to me. As if my gut isn’t turning to ice.
“Lesbian. Smoking hot. She was wearing this see-through top and you could see this tattoo on her tit of a—”
“And?”
I’m not the one who loved Selene, but the memories are mine. My grip tightens on the bottle. James grins at my tense hands. I’ve shown that he got to me. Now he’ll try to escalate.
“She used to fuck this other chick, called herself R. A black coffee babe. Perfect miniature titties. Good fuck, she said. Crazy fuck.”
I put the bottle on the counter. It’s time to go. I should be in motion; I should be prowling the tracks.
James blocks my way into the hall. “Is R a common name, you think?”
I growl at him. “I need to go up to the attic.”
“I told her she should see you now. How hot you are when I’ve got you bent over, scrubbing the floor. How I bought you this little French maid costume that goes up to your ass—”
I put my hands on his shoulders and shove. “Get out of my way.”
“You act like you’re too good to fuck anyone. But you sure fucked her.” The anger is back on the surface now, his smile a grimace, his teeth too wide and too white. “You think you’re too good to be a maid? Let me tell you something. No one else is going to hire a black dyke like you. If you’re going to let my house go to shit, you need to come up with another way to pay me.”
For months, I’ve been telling myself, free rent is free rent. He’s a douche. He’s all bluff. Stupid, stupid.
He grabs for my wrist and I duck under his arm. I jump backward into the kitchen and go for the corner cupboard. He could catch me faster than I could run away, but he thinks he has me trapped.
Stupid.
Mason jars of vinegar clatter as I grab for the one in back. Its lid is loose and ready.
Pepper spray, you can’t use indoors. Tasers, he’d grab me before I could stick him. But this is good capsaicin. James screams like a skinned rabbit when it hits his eyes, the whole hot quart of time-pickled habaneros.
He claws at his face, spreading the capsaicin, only making it worse.
I grab another jar. It’s not more peppers, but he doesn’t know that. “Lie down on the floor,” I say. “I’m going to the attic and I’m going to pack and I’m going to go.” Go. “You’re going to leave me alone. Got it?”
James makes a strangled noise of rage and pain. I make a show of loosening the lid on the new jar.
“On the floor,” I say again. “Now.”
One of us may think he has the guts to kill, but the other actually has. Even though James doesn’t know that, some spark of survival instinct must guess. He lowers himself onto the tile.
* * * *
It wasn’t a bathtub. It was a lake. She walked out in the late fall frost, just before the first snow of the year. It was nighttime, which made the waters black, but they were filthy anyway, choked with seaweed and pollution. She wore her shit-kicking boots with their steel toes to help her sink and took one sloshing step into the water and then another until she was buried to the ankle, knee, thigh.
Help me.
It was a bathtub, but the water was cold, ice-cold, and she kept a hairdryer beside it, because she thought it would be artistically beautiful to die as a spark, to make herself into fire and ash. Her hand slid out and her fingers were about to touch the cord.
I’ll take over now.
It was the waters beyond the world, which God once divided into the heaven and the Earth, and we were both swimming, and one of us was a ghost and the other one was in love, and our dirty, muddy thoughts hid us in sinister eddies.
Can I? Are you sure?
It was nothing. It was nowhere. These are all lies from my duplicitous brain. The past is a fracture, the future a mist. Only the waters of the present are certain, but even they are so opaque.
Go.
* * * *
I ended what needed ending. Like a surgeon. That’s not the same thing as murder.
I tell myself an awful lot of lies.
* * * *
The attic. Now:
My things disappear into the duffel I came here with, one after another, and I try to ignore the sucking sounds of the mud-water around my dry feet. The paintings won’t fit. I’ll leave them. He always said they were crap. If he doesn’t give them back, he’ll throw them out. I’m not too proud to steal from the garbage. I’ve stolen worse.
Wood creaks, and a wall bows in, and I stumble back just as the flood bursts through. And there she is, the dark shape resolving into my younger self. She’s bloated and discolored as though drowned. Her clothing hangs in wet folds and she reeks of stagnant water, of algae and fish and forgotten things.
Her eyes cast about the room, but it’s perfunctory. When she looks back, she only has eyes for me.
“He’s going to come after you,” she says. “As soon as he talks himself into believing that he’s the big, strong man and you’re the itty-bitty girl.”
“So let me pack,” I say, but I stand there, staring at her, not returning to my duffel.
Her eyes want to butcher me and wear my skin, want to steal the air from my lungs and put it back into hers. “You thought you could do better than me?”
I shrug. It wasn’t a matter of better or worse. I thought there was life for the taking.
“Did anyone miss me? Did anyone even fucking know?”
“Who?”
She blinks, as if she’d forgotten her isolation, her total reliance on the sun that was Selene. “My parents—”
“I didn’t go back.”
“That’s it? You just let everything die?”
No, I don’t say, You let yourself die.
“And what the hell have you done with my life? Who am I now? Who is this jackass you’re living with?”
“Craigslist,” I say. “Free rent.”
She scoffs, a wet, choking noise. “You could have finished college. You could have done things. You could have—” She stops, surveying the room again, taking in the paintings this time with her expressions darkening. “What shit is this?”
“You made art,” I say. “So do I.”
This ref
erence to continuity doesn’t seem to appease her. It’s clear that she disagrees with my assessment of our relative talents. What did she think? That I would keep tracing her charcoal portraits, frame all her vignettes, draw Selene and Selene and Selene until arthritis got too bad for me to hold a pencil?
She approaches. I hold my ground. Up close, cool air rolls off of her like fog. A long, low, hidden sound echoes up from her throat, as if traveling from another dimension. Vibrations shudder through my bones.
She exhales breath like rotting fish. “You did think you could do better. How much better, huh?”
“I’m still alive.”
The muscles in her neck bunch. I expect to see her jaw open to reveal row on row of jutting, dagger teeth. “Maybe not for long.”
I have years and strength training on my side. I know everything in the room that can be turned into a weapon. “Try it and you’ll regret it.”
Like you never did? is the question in the air.
There’s a crash below us, and then swearing. The echo of James’s footsteps is louder than it has any right to be.
“Here comes James,” the dead me says conversationally. “Better run.”
These are seconds I don’t have, but I waste them, warning her. “If you kill me now, you won’t know how to fit back in. You’ll never get your old life back. You’ll be a shambling corpse trying to fit into a life that left you behind.”
She grins and the muddy water around her rises, churning. There are more sounds below us, of creaking, straining, foulness rushing in. What will happen to me if she attacks? The younger, dead me probably doesn’t care. No more than I cared what would become of her.
Muddy water surges through the attic floor. I grab the half-packed duffel. I’m out of time. I run ahead of the lashing wave, my steps smacking against the stairs as I flee downward.
Suddenly, I’m thrown backward, toward the water pouring from the attic. I stretch out my arms, pushing against the wall to slow my fall. When I blink away the fear, I expect to see R in front of me, corralling me back into her domain, but it’s James instead, his eyes blood-streaked from rubbing.
“You little bitch,” he says. “You think you can just do this to my house?”
I don’t know what he means, but more importantly, I’m not sure what to do. I can’t back up into the water, and James is a wall of rage between me and the bottom of the stairs. He may be stupid, but he’s stronger than me, and I only have one weapon I can think of.
I draw back the duffel to swing at him. Then I see that James’s gaze is no longer on me. He’s staring behind me, his jaw slack, his red eyes round.
With fear so icy that it cracks his voice, he whispers, “What the fuck is that!”
I turn and see what he sees: the dead me, rising, grinning like the damned.
“It’s—she’s—” I hear his hands scrabbling against the wall as he braces himself. “It’s the devil!”
How must she look to his burning eyes? Dark as the woodcut he showed me earlier, the waves cavorting around her like witches. Black as the devil and cold as hell.
R rears up in a mockery of Aphrodite from the shell. She launches toward us. She and her water pass through me, and I expect the cold, I expect the twinning of our minds, but instead there’s nothing but the sensation of rushing and then she’s on the other side, roaring down the stairway as if it were a tunnel studded with tracks.
“Jesus fuck—” are the last words I hear from James, then a wave reaches upward from below. It smashes him against the stairs, and he cries out in pain. His second shout is drowned as the undertow pulls him down.
Behind me, I can hear the water roaring in the attic. Beneath me, James’s swagger sinks below turbulent waves. I’m trapped between oceans above and below, alone on the tiny island of these steps, and I don’t know how high the tide will rise.
* * * *
What made way for me? Turn the question over and over and there’s still only the one answer. Someone is going to die.
* * * *
After I killed myself, I dried my skin and I went to sit by the window in the kitchen of my apartment. It was a small, bleak place, all I could afford.
But outside the window grew a persimmon tree, its leaves limned in sunlight. I stared at the patterns of the leaf-shadows on its bark; I stared at the heavy fruits among the green. I stared at the way a leaf had fallen against the window and stuck there by the fragile adhesive of dew. Its veins were defined like brass details.
I put my hand on the glass and watched my own veins, flowing toward my knuckles, toward my fingertips, all those hungry capillaries.
Glutted on detail, I walked out under the light-polluted skies. I breathed the city air. I strode across asphalt and carpets and grass. I wasn’t her, but I was.
* * * *
Frozen in place:
I remain while the noises surge below, the crash of waters, and wordless screams whose echoes grow weaker. The dead girl’s long, distorted calls hang lonely in the air, twisted by the measureless fathoms she swam through to reach this world.
The tide lowers as the noise quiets. It recedes to the bottom of the stairs, then farther. I secure my grip on the duffel and make my way down.
The ocean has vanished, but the floor is a foot deep in sewage. Real sewage this time. Sewage that sticks to my shoes, that stings with its foul stench. The dead me stands in the worst of it, shit streaking the calves of her jeans.
“You burst a pipe,” I accuse her. There’s more than a pipe’s worth of sewage, but what does that matter to a dead girl?
She smiles a smile I know. A confession.
“He thought I did it,” I say. “He was coming after me because of this.”
She shrugs. “Did he really need a reason?”
James lies on his back in the water, his face as red as a blister, eyes and nose both leaking. Drying vomit crusts the side of his face.
With shock, I see that he’s still alive. I don’t know how he survived, but how is a strange question at the moment. A breath rattles his lungs. He paddles his arms uselessly, trying to push himself up.
“You could take him,” I say.
R raises her lip at me in a snarl. There’s nothing in her gaze but disdain for the suggestion.
When R gave her life for Selene, baring her wrists, drinking electricity, stumbling into the lake, she made herself a fragile creature, easy to treasure and easy to break. Now it won’t happen the same way. Watching the echo of my past gather herself to spring, her wrists invisible beneath the filthy water, her shoulders hunched like the wings of a buzzard, I think maybe we’ve both learned something.
The water doesn’t take James. Not entirely. He rises back to the surface when she stops holding him down, his body discolored and starting to bloat. The stench of him surpasses even that of the sewage.
There’s something missing in me: the space where I should feel joy or satisfaction or outrage or dread is polished smooth and empty. I am like the day I came into the world. All I can see is detail, the intricate spray of droplets as dead-me raises her hand away from his skin, how well-defined the thrashing ripples are around her ankles as she backs out of the water and onto the stairs.
“Did I look like that?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “You wanted to go.”
She stares at him. “It’s so gruesome.”
I say, “If it helps, I thought you were beautiful.”
She gives me a cold look. She hasn’t gotten older, but she’s not the nineteen-year-old she used to be. She won’t be drawn in by the romance of leaving a beautiful corpse.
“Why did you come?” she asks. “Who the hell were you?”
“I don’t remember. Why did you come back?”
She looks up, at the walls, at the ceiling, at all the places where we can both feel the water-not-water pressing in. Goosebumps prickle along her skin, and she slides crossed arms over her chest, trying for warmth.
She won’t meet my gaze. “I don’t re
member either.”
And we both know, without saying, that it’s the not knowing that’s terrible. The water, the cold, they’re no more inherently frightening than what’s left for us in this world. The serpentine girlfriends who wrap themselves around our throats. The landlords whose bravery comes in whiskey shots. The coldness of being a girl who was once alive and is now dead, or of being a dead girl who’s come back to life.
Curious, I reach for her hand. I can do this, can’t I? Touch my own skin? Look to myself for comfort?
She startles, and her eyes are angry, but she doesn’t break my grip.
* * * *
Her hand:
Soft in mine, and waterlogged, like a piece of driftwood that’s been floating alone too long. I pull her palm toward me in the dim light. I can see her pulse point, the life that was extinguished in her, changed but still there.
“Back?” she asks.
I didn’t say it first, but did I have to? What is it but a thought alighting in my mind (her mind, my mind)?
“Maybe,” I say, tightening my fingers around her wrist.
We pull each other up with our mutual strength. Before us, the basement stairs stretch downward, drowned in sewage. Simultaneously, we set our feet on the top stair. In the waters that wait, we will swim as leviathans, vast and inexorable, and come to know what death and life and death has made us.
* * * *
Those few moments, when we were in the body together, when my face was my face and a stranger’s face, when my mind was my mind and a stranger’s mind—what did they mean? Grief pulled me down. Desire pushed me up.
This is a ghost story. I said that. But we are both ghosts now.
And it’s a love story. I said that, too.
I’m still sorting it out.
CASTLEWEEP
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
“The walls weep, but only on nights when the moon is full.”
Uh-huh, Cort mused as he cast an amused glance across the folding camp table at Shelly. And the gorillas dance in the clearing while the frabulous chimpanzee thumps out a beat on a hollow log and the black colobus monkeys chorus in counterpoint from their perches high in the odum trees. Shelly’s tight grin showed that she was having an equally hard time repressing a laugh. Sharing a knowing smirk with her, he decided, would have to do.
What the #@&% Is That? Page 32
