by A M Homes
Hearing something, I call, “Hello, hello, is anybody out there?”
There is no answer.
The fever becomes a summer cold, my head aches, I am sneezing constantly. I take aspirin and Scotch and continue with the routine.
They are up there in the hills, a camouflaged commando with a bullhorn and a bullet. I wait for the sound, the amplified bellow of a human bark. “We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up. The building is surrounded. There is no way out. I repeat, there is no way out. You have until the count of ten.”
One, two, three, what will I do? Will I give up graciously, be led away screaming, or do I attempt an escape?
What excuse could I give, what feeble apology might I offer?
I am what I am.
The day comes and goes.
I keep to my routine. The imagery of my eleven o’clock session is thoroughly depleting.
Promptly at one, I take my towel to the lake, stripping near the water, neatly draping my clothing over the low branch of a tree. I force myself in. It is cold, it is bitter cold, painfully cold, so cold that all one can think of is the cold. I swim in circles until I am numb, until there is nothing left. It is torture. Sheer hell. I love it. Breathless, I walk out of the water, my body shriveled, pulled tight against the bones.
Naked by the lake is how she found me. She is there on the beach, standing between me and my clothing. I turn away, overcome with false modesty. She watches. She wears war paint and carries a quiver filled with white arrows ending in blue suction cups and a bow to match. She giggles and makes a gesture that points to my shriveled self down below.
She finds me amusing.
Her amusement I find humiliating, arousing.
I instantly want to do something—to silence that stupid giggling.
She collapses, beside herself with glee.
I say something sharp like, “Quiet, you little fool.” Followed by this interdiction: “Have you no manners? When you come upon someone in their nakedness, you should pretend you have seen no such thing. You act as if you have come upon someone dressed in white tails. And if you are compelled to comment, you address the person by saying something along the lines of, ‘My, you’re looking well today.’ ”
“You’re my captive, my prisoner,” she says, still half-laughing.
If only she knew how true it was.
She points to a hearty oak tree. “I must tie you up. Will you go easily?”
What choice do I have, she has won my heart instantly. I pretend to play along.
“You mustn’t come so close. Perhaps on my person I have a hidden gun, you might get shot, wounded by my release.”
“And where would you hide such a weapon?”
“You never know.”
“Then that’s the price I pay,” she says, yanking my arms behind my back, exposing me. She produces a coil of rope—the tickling touch of her small, clammy hands causes blood to rush from my head. My knees buckle beneath me.
“Your totem pole rises,” she says, referring to the state of my nakedness. I am thawing from the freeze.
So it does.
She jerks my arms tighter behind my back, showing herself to be surprisingly strong and quite adept, if not practiced, at the art of knot tying. “You’re a trespasser on my land,” she says. “This is my great-grandfather’s forest.”
“But I’ve taken a summer’s rental.” She is bent at my feet, binding my ankles to the tree. “One of your relatives has taken five hundred dollars from me so that I might enjoy myself until Labor Day.”
“I’ve heard nothing about it,” she says, wrapping the length of rope around my ankles.
“Is this the way you win your friends?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, I take it you’re a popular girl?”
She looks at me. “Have you any goods you might buy your freedom with?”
I shake my head.
“Ruby, darling, gemstone, littlest one, where are you?” A woman’s voice echoes through the woods.
“I’m hiding,” she calls back.
“Where are you?”
“I’m hiding.”
“I’m driving into town to buy you a little something, do you want to pick it out yourself? Where are you?”
“Coming,” she screams, and quickly rounds up quiver, her bow, her remaining supplies, and takes off up the hill, leaving me tied to the tree. “See you later,” she calls to me.
The ease with which she abandons me is thrilling, as is the seriousness of her game. I am naked in the New Hampshire woods thoroughly tied to a tree. She is not joking. My shoulders are stretched in their sockets, my wrists aching. The rough bark rubs my buttocks raw as I wiggle trying to free myself. I have been bound and tied by a wicked wood nymph. I writhe. My tumescence rises farther still, stimulated by my situation. A breeze stirs the trees, sweeping over, tickling, like tonguing me right there. I sneeze first, then cum, shooting off aimlessly into the afternoon.
Ruined. Stained. This unplanned eruption has wrecked my routine.
Heavy knock, pounding at the door. “Can you hear me,” the sergeant shouts. He is back, he must have gone off to run an errand.
“Yes,” I say. “Of course I can hear you. I’m not deaf, you know. No need to yell.”
“Assume the position,” a second muffled voice commands me.
“It’s time,” the sergeant says. “Are you ready?”
I am. I am so excited I can hardly contain myself. With my legs spread, my back to the door, arms extended up over my head, I stand ready.
The door opens. The room fills with guards. They grab me roughly. I smile. I try to turn my head to see who’s there. My jailers are not in their usual attire but in riot gear, flak jackets, helmets with the visors pulled down. They, too, realize it’s a special occasion. I can’t tell who is who.
“Is that you, Jenkins, Smith, Williams?” I ask.
They don’t answer.
They kick the debris of my packing process out of the way. Accidentally, and I forgot to mention this before, my haste, my hurry, caused the television set to fall to the floor. Parts of it are now scattered around the room.
I am cuffed, shackled, belly-chained.
I try to play along. When I speak, my words come out with a spray. “Spectacular sunrise,” I say, speech suddenly sloppy, sloshy with superfluous saliva, my s’s surprisingly sibilant.
“Did he spit? I just saw him spit. He spit at us,” one of the guards says.
“Don’t worry, we’re covered,” another adds.
I nod in the direction of my bed, my belongings neatly piled, wrapped in white linen. “My luggage,” I say—l’s lazy, elongated with loads of lugubrious loogies. “Shall I take my luggage with me now or do I get it later?”
They are pulling me out of the room. I try to joke, to break the ice. “Why couldn’t the milkmaid milk the cow? She had no regard for the feelings of udders.”
I am taken through corridors I’ve not seen before, though it’s difficult to know for sure. Rat maze, a monkey house for men. The noise, the constant tremulous roar, the echoes of the caged, is deafening.
The committee room. Rumor, rampant, rife, rarely accurate, paints a portrait of it as a limbo land of three doors, the one through which the prisoner is led, one through which the committee walks, and a third that supposedly opens onto a long road, a broad and uncrowded street. The reputation of the room presents a place where persecution persists, performance is primary, and punctuality is preferred. And I have heard that the prisoner is kept chained like some wildebeest supposedly for the protection of the furniture, which on occasion has taken flight, split the air, and splintered, cracking committee heads and ruining the antiquities—desks and chairs made of that rare upstate governmental wood known as Oh, Albany.
We’re buzzed in. All in all, it’s not what you’d expect; no spotlights, no proscenium, no bleachers or orchestra pit, none of the stuff of an extravaganza. I am unimpressed.
There is a table covered in white cloth, four chairs, a small stenographer’s desk, and a single seat set apart.
I take the single seat and scope out the room. I am looking for the three doors. There is the one behind me, the one through which I passed. On that same wall is a second one, and the third on the opposite side of the room is clearly marked, labeled with a red and white sign that says Exit.
Door number three. I’m banking on it. Let’s make a deal.
The three committee members enter through the second door. One is a youngish man who looks vaguely familiar— is this what they mean by a jury of one’s peers? And there are two women, one black and middle-aged and the other an old white woman with white hair—I find her the most frightening.
I stand.
Guards tackle me from behind, slamming me down. “Oh,” I say, expressing my surprise as they pin me to the floor, forcibly causing my breath to escape. Their boots are pressed into my neck, my back—leaving prints, I’m sure, on the back of my clean white shirt—and I’d tried so hard to put myself together, to make a pleasant appearance. Their disregard for my outfit is most distressing. Chains are produced and wrapped round and round me in a display of metallurgical madness. I’m then lifted back into the chair and my links are locked to the floor. A leather strap not unlike a seat belt is fastened around my gut, holding me in proper posture. I am incredibly secure. I don’t resist.
The members take their seats and arrange the high stacks of paper that are before them on the table.
A secretary appears with a pot of coffee and a tray of Danish. Coffee is poured and each of the panelists picks a Danish. A pitcher of cream is passed around.
“There seems to be a problem,” the woman with white hair says, licking her fingers.
“Yes,” the man says, looking, I assume, for the sugar. He glares at me.
I nod.
“Is there any Sweet’n Low, saccharin, or Equal?” the black woman asks.
The secretary shakes her head, sits down, and stenos everything they’ve said so far with the world’s fastest fingers.
“Let’s start with the simple things,” the black woman says, turning her attention to me. “Do you know why you’re here?”
I nod.
“You’ve been held in this facility for twenty-three years?”
“Yes.”
“And how has that been?”
“Fine. Good. Well.”
“How do you spend your days?”
I pause a moment to think.
She continues, on my behalf, “You read. You’ve checked out four thousand one hundred sixty books from our library since you arrived, implying, given our inventory, that on several occasions you’ve read the same thing twice?” She raises her eyebrows; they appear to turn into fully formed question marks.
Terrified, I nod.
“You write,” she says. “You’ve mailed fourteen thousand five hundred sixty-four letters; if nothing else, you’re prolific.” I think of the unmailed letter tucked into my luggage, fourteen thousand five hundred sixty-five letters. “And,” she continues, “you exercise. You’ve been in the outside yard two thousand eighty-two times.” She pauses. “And yet we don’t seem to be able to keep you entertained.” Again she stops. “I’m referring to the incident on the Fourth of July.”
She is wearing a red blouse, a red silk blouse, with red flowers—it’s the first time in years that I’ve seen such bright color. I can’t keep my eyes off it. Red flowers. Sunlight. My grandmother’s geraniums. Mama is home, she comes into the yard.
“We have taken possession of you,” the old woman says, scaring me. “As though you were our own, we have kept and cared for you. How do you think we feel to have failed so miserably?”
“You make us look bad,” the man says. “It’s embarrassing.” He pauses. “We must put our feet down.”
Boom! A stack of files, a pile of notebooks, falls to the floor. The sound is heart stopping.
“Is this some mock execution?” I blurt. “Am I supposed to find this arousing?” I rattle my chains, loud as I can. “A perverse and pornographic plethysmograph? Are you measuring me? Do I measure up? Are you jerking me off with your chain-link routine? I can tell you I’m not amused. I am limp as a lady.”
Fear has eaten my sanity.
“Let’s just get on with it, shall we,” the man says, his voice shaking.
There are big windows in the room. Lots of light. Bright. White. A shade flaps in a breeze, knocking against the window frame.
“Columbia County case No. 71-124,” the secretary reads aloud.
“August 1971. Defendant aged thirty-one, white male, single. No record of previous arrests. Personal file. Born Richmond, Virginia, on March eleventh, 1940. Father, employee Commonwealth Bank, suffered giantness, deceased as of 1945. Mother, mentally disordered, manic-depressive type, alcoholic, frequently hospitalized, committed vehicular suicide July 1949. Defendant raised by maternal grandmother, deceased, natural causes, September 1970.
“Defendant graduated University of Virginia, Charlottesville, May 1961. Pursued menial jobs, moving frequently. Relocated Philadelphia, PA, 1969, last employment prior to arrest, Phil’s Foot Parlor, a children’s shoe store, employed eighteen months—no difficulties.”
As they begin to tell the tale, I realize it is my story they’re telling. They’re telling my story and they’re getting it wrong. That or twisting it on purpose, forcing me to correct them, to add to their file, filling in the bits and pieces they didn’t have before. Like a fairy tale, a myth, or the game of telephone, each time it’s repeated, it changes. The exception being that I know what really happened, I was there, witness and participant. This is the story of my life.
“It belongs to me,” I shout. “Me. Mine. It’s not yours to tell. You’ve got it all wrong.”
A guard comes forward, hissing in my ear, “Didn’t you see Bambi} Don’t you remember when Thumper says: ‘If you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all’? It’s not necessary to comment.”
A pain cuts through my chest and into my arm. “Defendant departed Philadelphia in white Rambler station wagon, Pennsylvania plate MJB 464, proceeding to the state of New Hampshire, where through an advertisement in the New York Times he arranged to rent a cabin from the Somerfield family. Defendant took possession of the cabin on May twenty-first, 1971. A short time later defendant meets Alice Somerfield, the twelve-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter of his landlord, at a nearby lake.”
Yes. Yes, I met her at the lake. I told you this before. She appeared out of nowhere on the pebbly beach by the lake in madras shorts, cinched at the waist with a length of rope, an old hunting knife hanging off her hip, white Keds, no socks, red nail polish—half picked off—blond hair, blue eyes, like Pippi Longstocking gone awry. She tied me to a tree and then disappeared. There and gone, like a figment of my imagination.
Later, I hear a noise in the woods and am drawn to the window hoping to see her. Every day, I swim in the lake with my eyes on the shore, watching. Once, I see her high on a hill, chasing after something with her butterfly net.
June 18, I return from the lake and find at my door a dead butterfly affixed to a piece of yellow construction paper. Its name, “Hoary Elfin,” is printed neatly below. Around the border, scrawled in the waxy calligraphy of Crayola, is an invitation: Tea tomorrow, 4 p.m. The invite is accompanied by a small separate map consisting of a squiggly line—I take to be illustrative of a path through the woods—and two X marks, one labeled “you are here” and the other “I am here.”
Everything is crystal clear. The same size and shape as some missing part of me. She is the piece that completes the puzzle.
She lives alone in a small cabin that was once her grandmother’s playhouse—hardly bigger than a bread box—but with cold running water and an old camping stove. Her tea set is chipped crockery, china from England. “Gram’s,” she says. “But I’m glad she can’t make it out anymore. The chips would bother her.”
Her costume for the event is an antique lace and linen blouse—clearly a cherished thing—now several sizes too small, pulling across the chest, binding under the arms, neatly tucked into a blue and green plaid skirt like the uniform from Our Lady of Pompei.
“A girl’s got to live, doesn’t she?” she asks, banging the dishes around, setting her table. “What’s the use of having something if you can’t break it.”
My sentiments exactly.
When I am overstimulated, all of life becomes more extreme, my senses heighten, colors saturate, turning into the high hysterical hues of shock, horror, and ecstasy.
Nothing could be more perfect. She has a certain je ne sais quoi, call it a kind of charm. A lucky charm. Magically delicious.
We settle down to tea: I sit perched precariously on a three-legged stool and behave politely. She serves cookies she’s been saving since last Christmas.
“Haven’t opened the tin since December twenty-sixth. I was hoarding them for an occasion.”
“Surprisingly crisp,” I say, biting the head off a snowman.
She crosses one leg over the other and I can’t help but notice, not the skinned knee, not the bruised shin, but the writing on the bottom of her shoe, neat print.
“Tell me about your sneakers,” I say, children’s feet of course being my area of expertise.
“On the right is Emily Dickinson, 712, and on the left, the one you’re looking at, is Sylvia Plath, ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air.’ ”
Disturbingly disarming. I nod appreciatively.
She smiles. “It drives Mother crazy, especially when I put Ferlinghetti on my patent leathers. She hates modern poetry.”
“And who is your favorite poet?” I ask, admittedly condescending.
“I have no favorite,” she says. “A person my age should have many poets.”
The conversation pauses. I take a sip of tea and eat the whole of an old iced Christmas stocking. The ancient icing shatters between my teeth.
“And how long have you been interested in lepidoptera?”
