Love Letters of the Angels of Death

by Jennifer Quist

  You tell me it probably makes for better conversation than hashing over your adventures in the university’s Womyn’s Studies department. You pull the photo album out of my hands, flipping it open. “It’s not exactly Home Ec.,” you say. And now you’re the one who might be boasting.

  It sounds like a trap so I just shrug. “Are you – enjoying it?”

  You slide your fingernail between two plastic pages that have been slicked together by the tropical humidity trapped inside the pockets of the album. “My classes are – lively, at times,” you answer. And then you’re talking, loud and fast, about the danged cleverness of the patriarchy – its expertness at keeping women distracted by details, missing key points, bickering with each other.

  I wait until you’re quiet again before I risk taking a long sideways look at your face. Your neck is bent as you grimace close to a snapshot of a scorpion-like creature I’d found sunning itself on a village road early, early one morning. In my brain, I know you’re not what I’ve been trained to believe is beautiful – nothing like the tawny, yielding sweetness of your pretty roommate. Your talk is fast and complicated but it all makes sense. And I know there’s nothing to fear in it.

  When you leave and I find one of your long, pale hairs caught in the threads of my sweater, I pull it free from my clothes. It moves in the air in front of me as I hold it between my thumb and my index finger. I wind it around the top joint of my finger, pulling it tightly enough to cut a white line into my flesh.

  Even after all this, it takes weeks before I can admit that it’s you and not the pretty roommate that keeps me coming to visit your apartment. My roommate-cousin is disgusted with me.

  “I can see what you’re doing, Brigham, even if you can’t,” he says. “You’re getting lazy – and scared. Every pretty girl is a challenge, Dude. But you’re balking at the challenge and settling for the sure thing.”

  It’s an ignorant warning, and I try to take it as the gift he intends it to be. He doesn’t even know you. I forgive him. And I keep coming back to you anyway.

  We’re high above the river, on the bridge. It’s the only bridge in the city that’s tall enough to guarantee an effective suicide. And it’s the only bridge I’ve ever seen that’s equipped with hundreds of metres of plumbing riveted to its flaky black girders. The city runs water through the pipes and turns the whole thing into a mechanical waterfall every July long weekend – like a bad sprinkler system watering nothing but the bridge’s asphalt road and the river below. But tonight, it’s Remembrance Day, and the pipes are dry and empty. This is where we are when you stop and rest your face in your hands, looking into the darkening east. Your elbows must be getting cold through your coat sleeves, bent against the steel railing beneath them.

  “So tell me: if you were walking out here to jump to your death,” you begin, “would you dive off the eastern side, or the western side?”

  I smirk. “That’s easy.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah. I’d jump into the dark left behind by the sun – all poignant and miserable. That’s usually what people are going for when they commit suicide. So, if I came here all distraught in the evening, like this, I’d definitely go over the eastern side.” I curve my arm and arc it over the railing in a simulation of my swan dive. “But, if I stayed up all night and was coming here in the morning – which is more likely for me, I think – I’d go over the western side.”

  “Easy.” You’re nodding.

  “I think about this stuff. Bridges are my thing,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, naturally. My name is Brigham. It means ‘from the bridge town.’”

  You laugh. “The bridge town? What’s that supposed to mean? What kind of town doesn’t have at least one bridge in it?”

  I turn around and face the west. “A dry one, I guess. What can I say? That’s what my name means.”

  “You know, I’m glad this came up,” you say. “It is high time we talked about your name.”

  We each take a deep breath. You let yours out to ask, “How can you go through life being called ‘Brigham’ all the time?”

  It’s not the direction I thought we were headed. I blow out my own breath. “That’s easy too. I’ve never been called anything else so I guess I can’t imagine how much better life must be for the rest of you.” I lean sideways, toward you, nudging you firmly enough to jostle your chin out of your hands.

  You’re standing up straight now, turning your back to the frozen pipes, facing the headlights on the bridge’s busy roadway. “Fine, but – I mean, how come no one ever shortens your name?”

  I shift to stand in front of you, a barrier between you and the traffic that doesn’t see us. “Shorten it? Why? It’s only two syllables long to begin with. And the H is silent and everything.”

  “Yeah, but they’re such heavy syllables,” you’re arguing. “It’s just weird that no one has a nickname for you, not even your cousin. It’s not normal. You know what I mean?”

  I lay my gloved hands on the railing, one on either side of you, not quite like an embrace. Something’s been in our minds for weeks now but it’s never been in our hands like it is right now. My face is almost directly over the crown of your head. You’ve got to be able to feel my breath on your scalp as I say, “Actually, no, I don’t know what you mean.”

  You sigh as if you’re frustrated with me. You’re not looking up at me but you’re talking and talking – still defensive because even as you stand between my arms, you’re afraid this might not be what it seems. And, by now, that would be a catastrophe.

  Your voice is transposed just slightly higher than usual as you say, “You see, Brigham, names don’t really exist in the material world. They’re just totally arbitrary social constructs. Like, your parents gave you your name when you were a newborn baby because they wanted you to belong to them. And naming you was the most obvious way of emphasizing their connection to you, right? But then no one else ever renamed you with a nickname or anything and that’s not normal.”

  I pull my head back so I can see you better. “Maybe it’s just that my name doesn’t lend itself to nicknames very well. Like, what would you even call someone with a ‘heavy’ name like mine? Briggy? The Hamster?”

  You laugh, leaning forward until your forehead touches my chest. But you jerk back almost on contact. “Brigs!” you announce. “You could be known as Brigs. Wouldn’t that look great stamped on the back of a football jersey?”

  “A football jersey? Since when do you care about football jerseys?” I say, slipping up again, speaking as if I’ve known you far longer than I have.

  “Whatever. Brigs – I love it. Starting now,” you tap the end of my chin with your fingertip, “I am renaming you and calling you Brigs.”

  “As a totally arbitrary social construct,” I lower my face toward you, so close my eyes can’t focus anymore and I have to close them, “to show that I belong to you?”

  You tilt your head and breathe the word, “Exactly,” right into my mouth.

  Later, when I learn to love you, I tell you so.

  “I believe you,” is what you say in return.

  But when I tell you you’re beautiful you call me a liar. You still do.

  A little over ten months after Janae’s wedding, I marry you. You’re twenty-one years old, and I’m twenty-two. Your university friends think it’s madness and oppression, but I can tell you’re thriving on all the indignation.

  “A short engagement,” you crow. “I think we’ve discovered a new, post-modern, Western relationship taboo. They all hate it. If I had French braids and a homemade calico dress they’d be able to understand it and denounce it. But as it is, there’s nothing they can do but hate it.”

  And then you make me give you a high five.

  The morning before our wedding, I accidentally press and twist on my razor blade against my skin
and cut a long, horizontal gash into my throat. The cut is red and scabby enough for it to be the first thing you notice when I meet you on our wedding day. You laugh right at me and accuse me of trying to decapitate myself rather than marry you. I still don’t think it’s funny.

  There’s no groom’s cake at our wedding reception. Maybe that’s a shame. I know you keep your own little list of bridal regrets – the dearth of pictures, the way the printers used a “y” instead of an “i” in the spelling of my mother’s name on the invitations. Then there was the way Dad kept circulating around the reception hall telling everyone what he paid for and precisely how much it cost.

  “It’s no one’s fault but my own,” you say, years and years later. “I couldn’t hate myself more for caring about it. But I really, really did care.”

  I think what I remember best about the parts of our wedding day we spent in other people’s company was that old man who shook our hands in the receiving line and thanked us for having the reception the same evening as the ceremony itself. He said, “A wedding reception’s nothing without a little sexual tension, eh kids?”

  There was much more advice given than that. But if any of the guests knew to tell us that good husbands are like good anthropologists, none of them said so. An anthropologist: that’s what you call me when you find me standing over your cluttered dresser top opening and closing some kind of contraption that’s part scissors, part rubber stamp.

  “Sheesh, Brigs, it’s just an eyelash curler.”

  I hold it above my face so light glints off its metal before I turn and point the artefact toward you. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you use this.”

  “That’s because I don’t use it. Janae gave it to me ages ago when she was putting me through one of those beauty rehab sessions she calls makeovers.”

  I stand there, still pointing the instrument toward you.

  You sigh like it’s all very tiresome, but you do take the eyelash curler from me anyway. Leaning into the mirror, you pull your eyelids apart before pinching your upper lashes between the contraption’s black bumpers. I don’t get too close as I study the ritual with pretended nonchalance, silently measuring the movements of your reflection in the mirror. I watch, calculating, and mentally composing my ongoing thesis on a micro-culture that doesn’t really belong to anyone but you.

  My attention here means something to you, and you turn and step closer as you finish the curling manoeuvre, coming to stand beneath me, your arm curving around my waist. You wink your single curled eyelash at me, slowly, so I can see it all.

  Fourteen

  We are back – back in the town where I’m not known as the kid with the highest grade point average in the graduating class of 1990. And I’m not known as the man who moved on to become one of the youngest-ever vice presidents of a major regional petroleum company either. Just like you said, I am indeed known here as “the one who found the body.”

  It hasn’t been too difficult for us to stay out of town since Mom died here a couple years ago. But my cousin, Aunt Marla’s daughter, is getting married this weekend. And the reception is going to be in the same church hall where people once straggled in to congratulate the newly married you and me. So here we are, back in town – the boys all fussy and hot in their wrinkly, white dress shirts, and you flicking glances over your shoulders like you’re trying to catch someone looking at us with anything even vaguely like morbid pity.

  We’ve arrived too early for the reception and, with all the people milling around, Aunt Marla’s house is small and sweltering. That’s why we’re dragging our droopy boys down the street to a park Mom used to take them to. I ask the boys if they remember being here with her. They try but I’m not sure they remember anything at all – until they see the merry-go-round.

  “Oh, this place,” Scottie says.

  The merry-go-round is one of those old, old ones installed in playgrounds the Lions Clubs and Rotarians built before you and I were born. I’m pretty sure most cities around here have banned them for safety reasons by now. But those kinds of hysterical cultural over-corrections take a long time to make it to little towns like this one. Maybe this merry-go-round was originally put here as part of some sort of attempt to recapitulate the 1960s space-flight training programs – like a beautiful token of hope in a generation of tiny, prospective astronauts. Who could have told the Rotarians we’d never really grow up to live in domed, glass space colonies full of classical music and bright white furniture?

  The merry-go-round itself is a metal-clad disc with a radius equal to the height of our middle son – our Levi. The whole thing spins on a single, central pole that still glides freely, somehow, even though it’s been standing out here in the wind and snow without being greased for thirty years. Out of the centre of the disc, steel bars spread out in rays. Each is flecked with a few remaining chips of primary-coloured paint. It doesn’t make me happy to wonder how I can tell just by looking at them that these bars would taste like salt if I licked them – the panicky perspiration of the hundreds of desperate hands that have clung to them, braced against all the powers of centrifugal force.

  Our boys are running ahead of us now, over the flat, un-irrigated grass to the playground. Maybe we would have been able to appreciate the dated equipment in a cool, retro sense if the imminent threat it posed to our kids wasn’t quite so clear to us.

  The sight of it all seems to have put space travel into your mind too. “Wow,” you say, stopping at the edge of the park to lean back and cross your arms over your middle. “Look at this junk. It must be pre-Star Wars.”

  I shrug. “Probably. I know I can’t remember the town without it.”

  “I’m tellin’ ya,” you’re nodding. “Hey! Not so fast, you guys!”

  And you’re stomping over to the merry-go-round, catching it by one of the bars, pulling back with all your mass and strength to bring it to a stop. The boys lurch and stumble against the bars. “Let Benny get down,” you say, as our sheepish older sons scoot their two-year-old brother to the edge of the disc. “What the heck were you guys thinking? This thing is actually really dangerous. Benny is too little to play anywhere near it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Scottie takes Benny’s hand and helps him up the ladder of the slide instead. It’s not safe either, but at least it operates under the more familiar and predictable perils of friction and gravity.

  There’s a wooden picnic table someone’s pulled into the shade of a spruce tree in a far corner of the park, and you and I head there together to stay out of the sun. We sit on top of the table, turned to watch the kids play.

  “So do we want to drive past it on our way out of town?” you ask me.

  “Drive past it?”

  “Yeah. The Mountain View Mobile Home Community.”

  I lie back on the tabletop, my arm bent beneath my head like a pillow, and I look up into the sky that’s so blue it seems almost fake – like the blue screen that comes up on a television when there’s no input. “Why would we want to drive past it?”

  You’re afraid you’ve upset me so you lie down beside me, resting your head on my elbow. “Just to see if her old trailer’s still there. That’s why they call them mobile homes, right? Because the whole thing could be gone by now. I hope it is.”

  The last time I asked Aunt Marla about it, she said the trailer Mom died in was still sitting vacant in the trailer park. Even after the way the landlord made us rush all Mom’s stuff out of it before we’d finished burying her, he hadn’t managed to rent the place to anyone else. But I hadn’t heard anything more about the Dead Lady Trailer in years. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s gone – moved to another aluminum and fibreboard slum in some other little town where no one ever heard what happened to my mother.

  But we won’t be driving through the trailer park today. I know it as soon as I hear Benny start to wail. We’ve been distracted and looked away from t
he children too long and everyone is about to pay for it.

  Scottie and Aaron are standing stunned at the bottom of the slide. Levi is still spinning around on the merry-go-round, by himself. But he’s inching along the bar, moving toward the edge like he’s trying to look for something fallen underneath it. We can all hear Benny crying but none of us can see him.

  I’m running and – even though I know it won’t do any good – yelling. “Where’s the baby?”

  Levi is so scared he can barely answer me. “Benny – fell off.”

  You’ve run to the merry-go-round from the other side so you’re the first one to see Benny. From the neck down, his body has slid underneath the spinning disc. All you can see of him is his little blond head, awake but stunned, not crying anymore, lying with his face propped on one of his round, white cheeks in the sand. He’s dusty and scared but he’s safe where he is as long as he doesn’t move. And then you see him pressing his palms against the ground, getting ready to rise.

  “Stop, Benny! Head down!”

  As we hear the sound of your voice, we understand it’s inevitable. Everything’s moving too quickly and too slowly – all at the same time. It means I don’t quite reach the merry-go-round in time to haul it to a stop before the little boy hears you. And he has to look for you – he does it without thought. He jerks his head up like there’s a line strung between the muscles in his neck and the vocal cords in your own. He lifts himself right into the orbit of the metal disc. It hits his scalp like the dulled edge of a buzz saw. All six of us scream at once.

  I’ve stopped the spinning and now Levi is standing over Benny, struggling to undo it all by hefting his brother to his feet. Then he sees the blood. Both of Levi’s hands come up to cover his mouth and nose and he turns away to gag.

  “Scottie! Come and get Levi out of here!” you’re calling.

  Benny’s angel-white hair is clumped into mucky red dreadlocks against the back of his head. The cut must be somewhere beneath it, gashed across the flesh over his occipital lobe. It must be the worst cut any of our kids has ever had.