by Chris Adrian
“Miss Claflin!” she said, rising up suddenly in front of her desk and leaning over so the delicate crucifix she wore on an extra-long chain swung at Jemma’s eye. “Please tell me where daydreamers are punished.”
“Oh,” Jemma said, fidgeting in her chair and thinking furiously, flying through the pyramidal Hell in a rapid sweep, looking around her desperately for the easily distracted girls with half-lidded eyes. “Not in the first circle, or the second. Um, not in number three, or number four, that’s for greedy people. Not in number five, where the angry people get wet, like you said. Uh, it must be lower. Boy, I wish it was higher, but it must be lower. Is it between five and six?”
“Is it? Is it? I thought you would know, being a practiced artist of the daydream. Do not try to distract us with answers to questions I have not asked, Miss Claflin. If you are ignorant then proclaim your ignorance. We have not, in fact, discussed the fate of incorrigible daydreamers, who waste their lives in idle speculation. It is a kind of sloth, but not punished with the worst kinds of sloth. Daydreamers remediate in Purgatory. That’s where you’ll go. Can’t you just see the newspaper article, children? Miss Jemma Claflin was hit by a bus this afternoon as she walked along, daydreaming of the loveliness of creampuffs. Stern angels escorted her immediately to Purgatory, where she will spend three quarters of eternity peeling and sewing the skin onto the same banana, and trying to organize her thoughts.”
“How long is three-quarters of eternity?” asked Rachel.
“Just as long as it sounds. Enough of review, though. Almost everyone is ready. Books away, pencils out!” Sister Gertrude erased the board with a damp sponge, eschewing the dry eraser so no trace of the pyramid would be left to tempt and assist incipient cheaters.
The test wasn’t so terrible. It was the usual format, matching, multiple choice, and fill in the blank. With a ruler Jemma carefully drew lines between sins in the left column and the appropriate place in Hell in the right column, eating five pounds of gummy bears connected with circle number three, not sharing your snack with somebody who forgot theirs connected to number four, and saying your prayers wrong connected with number six. She had no trouble with any of the multiple choice questions except the last one: Lying children are punished a) with hot licorice whips b) by being turned into snakes c) by having their tongues split every morning with a rusty knife d) tickling and boiling. No one was tickled in Hell, everybody knew that. Only gluttons were punished with food. She knew the right answer involved a forked tongue, but snakes had forked tongues, so b and c both seemed like the right answer to her. She stared and stared at the paper, waiting for one or the other to seem more right. In the end she chose b.
The last question was the hardest one. It was sort of a trick; Jemma didn’t like it. Bullies are punished in the seventh circle for _____ and _____ and ______. Jemma ran through all sorts of combinations in her head: a thousand years, then another thousand, then five hundred? She raised her hand and asked Sister Gertrude if there was a mistake with the question. She only shook her head. Five and five and five thousand years, she wondered. It was for always, but how to divide that up into three? Was this a religion test or a math test? Time was almost up when she finally got it. The tests were being handed toward the front as she scribbled in her answer, forever and forever and forever.
Jemma and her brother took a long detour on their way down to the beach. Their mother was awake and active when they got home. She’d blown up a pair of inner tubes for them to take down to the river, and was in the middle of preparations for dinner. She told them not to come home for at least two hours, because the cooking would require her absolute attention, and might be dangerous to little bystanders.
They rolled their tubes down the hill, but turned right instead of left at the Nottinghams, and went down a half mile into the woods beyond the fifth hole, wedging the tubes along the way in the branches of a live oak tree. There was a path that led down to a clearing and a pond, and the railroad tracks, which ran along the eastern border of the forest, but never crossed any road. Teenagers went down to the pond, sometimes, to drink or smoke or swim without their pants, younger kids almost never went down there. Lately, though, the teenagers had fled, driven away by the memory of friends, replaced by younger kids looking for gruesome mementos. Two boys had died down there early in the summer, Andy Nyman and Chris Dodd. They’d laid down in the train tracks to let the train pass over them. They were both quite tall, with big strong chins, and there was speculation that their noble chins were what had done them in, or that they’d lifted them too proudly. The cowcatcher caught Andy under the chin and took his head clean off, throwing it hundreds of yards into the bushes. Chris lost his head, eventually, but not as cleanly as his friend—his body was lifted and dropped again before the train, then crushed and mangled by the many wheels. Many parts of him had not ever been found, a couple toes, an eyeball, and the whole left hand. It was mostly for the hand that the children searched, because a rumor had grown up that it could, if ever found, grant wishes like the fabled monkey’s paw, five or less, as many as the number of fingers still attached.
David Tracy and Johnny Cobb, two of Calvin’s friends, were already there, and already looking. “If you find it,” Calvin told Jemma, “don’t touch it. Just come and get me.” He handed her a stick with which to poke in the bushes, and ran off to go greet his friends with punches to the stomach and shoulder. Jemma began to wander around, in and out of the clearing in little loops, beating the bushes with her stick, and calling out to the hand like to a kitty. She wasn’t dressed for bushwacking: she wore a pair of bright-yellow terry-cloth overalls over her bathing suit. It was getting to be the hottest part of the day. She undid the bib of her overalls to let it flop down over her belly, but felt no cooler.
She took longer and longer loops out of the clearing. Calvin and the other boys weren’t doing much looking. They were sitting on a mossy log that stuck out of the pond, passing a cigarette back and forth. Jemma called to the hand again, and this time thought she heard a stirring among the leaves and twigs on the ground. She walked in the direction of the noise, passing another split oak and some holly bushes, and coming in a few hundred feet to another clear space, littered with magazines and bottles. Someone had built a fire there, a long time ago. Jemma poked her foot in the ashes, uncovering a half-burnt latex glove, but no hand. She picked up some bottles and threw them against a tree. None of them broke.
A flash of yellow caught her eyes, a little bit beyond the little clearing. She thought it was a bird, and so went very quietly, thinking she could catch it in her hands, then run back to her brother, saying, I found a finger! When he peered over her closed hands she’d open them, releasing the bird right into his face.
But it was a twinkie. Someone had impaled it on a hawthorn bush, still wrapped up. Jemma wondered, just for a moment, if this could possibly be a twinkie tree just beginning to bloom, and considered running for her brother to tell him, but the other wrappers scattered on the ground, and an empty box she found half buried under the bush, spoke against that lovely possibility. She knew what had happened: someone had glutted themselves on soft golden cake, and played with their food when they could eat no more of it, instead of making the effort to bring it to somebody who needed it, or at least giving it a proper burial. It still looked quite fresh inside the wrapper, except where it was pierced by the thorn, where there was a little circle of green rot. She leaned close, and sniffed it, and saw how one edge of the plastic had been gnawed at unsuccessfully by some little animal. She pinched it and discovered how it was still very soft. It couldn’t have been there very long.
She went back to the big clearing, kicking an almost empty can of shortening in front of her. She kicked it toward the pond, and it would have gone in if Johnny, demonstrating an extra sense for kickable objects, jumped backward off the log, turned around, and sent it flying over Jemma’s head back toward the trees.
“What have you been eating?” her brother asked her.
“Nothing,” she said.
“There’s stuff on your face.”
“Oh. I had a cookie, from before.” He put his hand out at her. “I ate it all.” The boys searched her, patting all her pockets, David extracting and inspecting her little vinyl change purse, then returning it. “Told you,” she said. “I didn’t find the hand.”
“Us neither,” said Calvin. He lit up another cigarette and passed it around. Johnny could blow smoke rings. Jemma asked for a puff.
“Okay,” said Calvin, “but only pretend.” He held the filter an inch or so from her lips. Jemma pursed her lips and sucked in air, and held it in as long as she could, then stuck out her bottom lip and blew out straight up, hard enough to lift her bangs. It made her cough, and the boys laughed at her.
“Let’s go swim,” she said to her brother.
“My brother says they came down here to kiss,” said David, “and to dress up like girls to dance and have pillow fights, and talk about baking cookies.”
“And they put on makeup and played field hockey,” said Johnny.
“And they felt so bad about kissing that they laid down under the train. It was totally on purpose.”
“I wish we could find that hand,” said Calvin. “I’ve got some wishes.”
“I wish we could go swimming,” said Jemma.
“Go ahead,” said her brother. “You know the way.” Jemma looked over her shoulder into the warm shade beneath the trees.
“Come on,” she said.
“We’ve got more smoking to do. Go ahead. If you find the hand, don’t touch it and don’t make any wishes. Come right back here right away.” She stared at him a little while longer, but he just puffed on the cigarette and looked at the sky. She walked away, looking back a few times before they were out of sight. He was never looking at her. The path was clear all the way up, it had been trampled true by three generations of teenagers. Jemma found her tube and rolled it up the hill like a stone, going very slowly, hoping Calvin would catch up with her.
She had an imaginary brother that she could force to accompany her when the real one would not. He went with her now, leading or following, all he asked was that she not look directly at him. If he was following she could hear him stepping behind her, crushing leaves or sliding on loose dirt, and when he went ahead of her his shadow flashed across the shiny leaves of holly bushes along the path as they passed through breaks in the canopy of leaves. He called back to her that it was very hot, and she agreed.
The beach was crowded, full of adults and kids on the sand and everywhere in the water, some standing in it up to their necks, some just to their chests, and some just getting their feet wet. Tiffany Cropp almost ran into her as Jemma rolled her tube down toward the water, passing by with her sister, a very fancy float suspended between them—it was a little island with an inflatable palm tree growing out of one side. Jemma tested the water with her foot before walking in. It was warmer than she had hoped it would be.
Kids swarmed to the tube like tadpoles toward a lump of bread, all of them clinging with their hands and arms, so they all faced each other over the hole, and Jemma had no room to sit. Jemma didn’t mind, though she didn’t join in their chatter. Jemma drifted, and watched her imaginary brother playing in the water, just from the corner of her eye. He sported like a dolphin or a whale, leaping in somersaults, or in high arcs that landed him on his back, and she got a glimpse of his foot, or of his hand, as he fell back in the water.
She realized she was daydreaming, and remembered what Sister Gertrude had said to her. She let go of the tube and stood in the water, submerged to her neck, thinking of the punishment she would get after she died, and then realizing she was daydreaming about that. She tried not to think about it, but found that she could not, and tried not to picture it, to consider the lesson but not the entertainment, but couldn’t do that either. She tried to focus just on the water against her neck and the wind blowing gently against her face, but Purgatory was unfolding in her mind, a gray wasteland peopled with dreamy sinners and little monkeys on tricycles with sidecars full of bananas. She began to cry.
Someone splashed water at the back of her head. She turned around and saw her brother. “What’s the matter, Bubba?” he asked her. She told him she was going to Purgatory for almost ever, and that there was nothing she could do to stop it. He frowned, then scowled, then slapped the water with his hand. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Only somebody stupid would listen to that crap. What does she know? She doesn’t know anything, or whatever she does know is all wrong.” Jemma protested that Sister Gertrude knew quite a lot, that she knew more about Hell than anybody Jemma had ever met.
“Why are you defending her?” Calvin asked. “Oh, come on, I’ll show you how wrong she’s got it.” He took her by the arm and pulled her after him out of the water. They knelt in the middle of the wet sand and he started to draw with his fingers. “I’ll show you,” he said. He drew another pyramid, this one with the pointy side down. “Okay, here it is. What is it?”
“Hell,” Jemma said in a very small voice.
“Right. Okay, level one. Who’s there?”
“Virtuous pagans,” Jemma said automatically.
“Wrong,” said Calvin. He drew a line a few inches form the base of the pyramid and wrote over it, harmless nuns. “See? How about level two?”
“People who kiss too much.”
“Not people,” he said. “Nuns.” He wrote it down: Kissy nuns. “On we go—level three.”
“The gluttons,” Jemma said.
“Close,” he said. Fat nuns. He took her down through every level, describing torments as they went; angry nuns, blabby nuns, ugly nuns, stupid nuns, creepy nuns, cruel nuns, beating nuns, thieving nuns, lying nuns, treacherous nuns, and finally Sister Gertrude cramped up in the tip of the inverted pyramid. “At the very bottom,” he said, “in her very own level where nobody lives but her. Do you know why?”
“No,” Jemma said, still sniffling, and somewhat ambivalent about the nuns burning and clawing their flesh in her imagination, feeling sorry for them but knowing too that their punishment was just, and didn’t Sister Gertrude herself say it went against God’s will to pity those he’d set aside for deserving punishment?
“Because she’s a dumb-ass, ass-licking, shit-eating, motherfucking, dog-fucking, lizard-fucking bitch. There’s only one of those and she lives right here.” He pounded his fist over Sister Gertrude’s chamber. Jemma’s mouth had fallen open at the incredible stream of bad language that had come out of his mouth. She was shocked, but delighted, too, to hear the forbidden words. Her heart raced and she drew in a breath, deeper and deeper, gasping, and then she laughed. Calvin was smiling but not laughing, driving his fist into Hell, grinding all the nuns deeper into their punishment. “Just wait,” he said. “Just fucking wait.”
Dinner was not much fun. Jemma’s twinkie was sullen in her belly; she wished she had not eaten it. It made her mother angry how little she ate. Her father was angry, too. He usually was, on the days their mother woke up late, though he was quite solicitous when she was sleeping, never screaming at her to get out of bed, and directing Calvin and Jemma to take care of her when they got home from school. But that night he found fault with the way the napkins were folded, and the fluffiness of the soufflé (it was too fluffy—fluffy like a cat, is what he said); and the meticulously constructed rib roast complete with immaculate little socks on every bone, he compared to a very fancy shoe. Jemma and Calvin left the table early and had dessert in Calvin’s room, watching television.
They watched a documentary about blood and a half hour special on the Severna Strangler, in which a shrill lady stood in front of the various houses of his victims while pictures of the murdered parents and children popped up around her in the air, and proclaimed the horror of what he’d done. She only stood in from of the houses in the dark, and the bright camera lights made her face shine as golden and unnatural as a twinkie. Jemma’s stomach still hurt. She l
et Calvin eat her sorbet.
“Moron,” Calvin said to the television, because the lady had proclaimed, like Deb, that the Strangler had moved on. “You’re just going to make him mad, saying that. You think he’s not watching? Now he’ll kill again tonight, and it’ll be your fault.” He turned to Jemma and said, “He’s going to do it tonight.”
“Shut up,” she said.
“Tonight. You better sleep in my room.” Jemma changed the channel, and found another documentary, this one about Mark Twain’s dog. “That dog better look out,” Calvin said shortly. “He’ll get him, too.”
“He’s in the TV,” Jemma said.
“You think that’ll stop him? You think his hands can’t pass right through the TV? They’re magic, killing hands. And thanks to that stupid lady, he’s coming for us tonight.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“Can’t help it, can I, if it’s true?”
“Stop it!” Jemma screamed.
“I’ll be ready, though,” he said. Jemma got up and ran downstairs to get their father. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs just in time to see her mother fling a dish at her father’s head. He was sitting on the couch, sipping at his drink. He ducked casually, leaning over to the side. The dish flew over the couch and shattered against a piano leg.
“Go on,” her father said calmly. “Throw another dish. That will solve everything. That’s your problem, really, the dishes.”
