The bouncer looks like an enormous Georg, balloon Georg, like someone put their mouth to Georg’s pinkie toe and inflated him. I consider asking the bouncer if he knows about the wood alcohol and the blind people, if he can imagine what it would be like to take a swallow from a bottle and find the world winking out (wink, wink) as if a bird had pecked out each of your eyes.
It’s the kind of thing I’d say to Georg, and then I’d say, “That reminds me: I have a bottle of liquor for your next birthday. Home-brewed.”
And Georg would tut and say, “Valeria. You do not scare me.”
And I’d say, “You don’t scare me either, Georg. Let’s do a shot together.”
And he’d say, “Yes, okay. Let’s. Nazdorov’ya!”
Then he’d look at my results on his screen and his brow would smooth, and he’d hand me the slip of paper and tell me that I am all right. That I can go now.
“Palooka,” I say to the bouncer, and he steps aside to reveal a little door. He opens the door to let me through.
This is not the real password. The real password is Georg’s slip of paper.
* * *
—
THE LAWYER MY FATHER HIRED was expensive, his neckties in soft colors, like paint swatches selected for the nursery walls. The child psychiatrist he hired was expensive, too, the print of her dress silk Rorschach blots. I sat between them, not next to my father. Our seating arrangement was such because my father couldn’t look at me without his face crumpling, which, the expensive lawyer cautioned him, could not happen in front of the judge. I was eleven.
My mother was there, too, though not really. Really, she was dead. All the same, I pictured her sitting at the end of the table. She waved at me somberly, her head aflame.
We sat not in a courtroom but a conference room reserved for family court with posters of weary lambs taped to the walls and the fug of spoiled milk rising from the carpet every time I shifted my chair. The meeting was a formality. The professionals my father hired (poised and filigreed) had already conferred with the state social workers (overworked and oxidized) and come up with a plan. Seven years in a private psychiatric hospital, until I turned eighteen, probation for five years thereafter. I didn’t even have to testify. After all, I had already confessed. We watched as the judge put her signature to my plan; it was over in a moment.
The adults were rolling their chairs back, well pleased (except for my father, whose face I could not see), when I said, “Your Honor?”
I said it the way I’d practiced in the stall during my last bathroom break. No one heard me, so I said it louder.
“Your Honor?”
They all turned to look at me now. Except for my father, who flinched his head lower, as if some object had come flying at it. And except for my mother, who had never taken her eyes from me. The flames around her head turned blue and began to smoke.
“Your Honor?” I said once more. Three times. Like a spell.
The lawyer and the psychiatrist tried to shush me, the lawyer by speaking over me, the psychiatrist by gripping my arm in a pinching way. The judge silenced them both and gestured for me to continue.
“Could it be longer?” I asked.
The judge pursed her lips. “The sentencing is over, Valeria. Now we all go home.” One corner of her mouth tugged down after she said this. She’d remembered that I would not be going home, that my father would go home alone; I would go to an asylum; my mother had gone in the ground.
“Not the sentencing,” I said. “My punishment. Could you make it longer?”
She peered at me, again shushing my lawyer.
“Please.”
Somehow it worked. She extended my probation, ten years past my eighteenth birthday instead of five. “You’ll be twenty-eight before you’re finished,” she warned me.
“I’ll never be that old.” I’d felt so certain of that then.
At the end of the table, my mother’s head singed the wall behind her. She smiled at me. And despite all the promises he had made beforehand, my father lowered his face into his hands and began to cry.
* * *
—
I FIND ELLIOT AND RHETT in a booth at the back of the speakeasy drinking potion-colored drinks. “Last Words,” they tell me, meaning that this is the drink’s name.
“Hey, kid, how’d you get in here?” I say. Rhett is only eighteen.
He jerks his chin, indicating his father. But of course I’d already guessed that Elliot must have sweet-talked someone or other.
“We’re celebrating,” Elliot says.
“Celebrating what?”
“Acceptance!”
“You don’t say. Which one?”
“UC Davis,” Rhett announces, quick, before his father can tell me first.
“Hey, congrats.” I slide into the booth. I take a sip from Elliot’s glass: gin and lime and other things. “Who’s gonna order me one of those?”
Elliot begins talking about his new installation, Midas, which he will put up in Nita’s gallery next week; his voice is stuffed with pride. I can tell by the set of Rhett’s mouth that Elliot has been going on about this for a while now. I also know that Elliot will continue describing the piece until Rhett offers to see it. If Rhett doesn’t offer soon, Elliot will have to outright ask him to come, but it’ll be better for everyone if Rhett offers. Rhett is the only one Elliot really loves. This is part of my punishment, and I accept it. If Elliot doesn’t love me, that means he’s safe.
I find Rhett’s leg under the table and nudge it. The boy comes to, blinking.
“I could come see it,” Rhett says. I nudge him again. “Your show. Midas. It sounds really cool.”
“Are you sure?” Elliot asks. “It’s during the day.”
“I have a free period on Friday.”
“Maybe one of your teachers would let you do a write-up?”
“A write-up?”
“Of my piece.”
“Um. I’m not taking an art class.”
“Art is the universal subject.”
“I guess.”
“And besides, if your teachers aren’t offering extra credit, they’re not really doing their job.”
Elliot turns to flag down the waiter for another round of Last Words, and when he does, Rhett catches my eye and shakes his head: Oh, Dad.
When I married Elliot, Rhett was fourteen and I was twenty-three. I was nervous around Rhett at first, not for the usual stepmother reasons, not because I was closer to his age than his father’s, not because I was afraid he wouldn’t like me. In fact, I’d hoped that he wouldn’t like me. I’m not good with kids, I’d told Elliot when we first started seeing each other. So okay, he’d been warned.
The prefix step-, as in stepmother or stepfather, comes from an old German word meaning “bereft” and “orphaned,” connoting a sense of great loss. And no wonder! Look how the stepmothers behave in fairy tales. Though to this I would say: Why should it be natural to love another person’s child? Unnatural if you don’t? It is unnatural to not love your own child; that much we can agree upon. We can tell my mother she’s outvoted. We’ll have to tell it to her ghost.
The first weekend Rhett stayed with us, he and I ran into each other in the hallway early in the morning, both of us in our pajamas. We stilled and stared at each other, both in unison. He raised his hand, a cautious greeting. I scuttled back to my room.
It turned out that Rhett liked me. He liked the colors I dyed my hair. He liked the hard things I would say. He began to come to me with carefully practiced stories of some little incident that had occurred at school, then with requests for advice. The more aloof I was, the more persistent he was.
I had told Elliot I wasn’t good with children, but I hadn’t told him about the rest: my monstrous birth; my mother’s headaches; the unfortunate cats; the school friends who’d left our house c
rying because I was too fierce in my play; the hospital where I had passed my teenage years. All the people I had disabled or devoured. I hadn’t told him about Georg and my probation. About the smell of burnt skin, a whiff of which remained permanently in my nose. I hadn’t told him about that.
So when Rhett stopped eating, I knew it was my fault. I must have done something to make the boy wither. What I did, I did to protect us all, moving myself to the very edge of the scene. During Rhett’s weekends with Elliot, I went on work trips or booked the day up with errands and lunches. Then Rhett was put in the hospitals, this facility or that one, and the weekend visits ceased. I was expected to visit the facility on family days, of course, but I kept to the back of Elliot’s shoulder so that I was blocked from the boy’s view.
I was familiar with this scene, the private hospital where desperation is girdled in luxury. Before our visits, I went through the boxes Elliot had prepared, plucking out the items I knew the intake nurse would remove—shoelaces, ballpoint pen, mouthwash. Finally, Elliot noticed.
“How do you know they won’t allow mouthwash?”
I shrugged and said, “Common sense.” My heart pounded.
I let the nurses do it after that.
At one of my appointments with Georg during this time, I pointed at the Apricity and said, “Too bad it can’t give you a number. Too bad you don’t have a machine that can do that.”
“What number?” Georg asked.
“A number. Like they do for radiation in the air or toxins in the water. And if the number’s high enough, you know it’s not safe anymore. To drink. To breathe.”
Georg coughed drily. “And this imaginary machine, it would assign a number to you?”
“I’m just saying it would be an objective measure.”
He glared at me from under his formidable brow. “You think you are a toxin?”
I have not cried since I was a child. I must have cried when I was a child, though I cannot remember it. When Georg asked me that question, I felt the tears waiting there behind my eyes, like a person who holds his hand on the doorknob but dares not turn it and step through.
Just then, my results came up on the Apricity; I could tell by Georg’s face, his brow smoothing. He started to turn his screen to show me, which wasn’t allowed. Not that I care about rules. That’s not the reason I stopped him. It’s that I didn’t want to see them, whatever things the machine said to him about me. I do not deserve happiness. I don’t want to know where to seek it. When I grabbed his hand, Georg winced. When he pulled away, I saw that my nails had left tiny marks in his skin.
He turned his screen away and glowered at me. “It is an okay number.”
“But it doesn’t give you a number,” I said.
“It is okay,” he repeated, nodding to himself. “Valeria. You are not a toxin. You are—what? You are safe for public consumption.”
* * *
—
AFTER WE WALK RHETT to the bus that will take him back to his mother’s, Elliot and I go honey tasting. There is a shop in Bayview that sources their honey from an apiary out back. The walls of the shop are set with clear glass jugs beveled like beehives, spigots at the bottom, which the honey pours through. While the clerk assists Elliot in finding the sweetest honey, I wander to the windows at the back of the shop that allow customers a view of the bees. The actual hives are just stacks of screens; they look like old dressers. A beekeeper tends them, veil pulled over her face. The honeybee is the only species of bee that dies when it stings you. Its intestines release with the barb of its stinger, and it flies away gutted.
A spoon at my lips.
“Try this,” Elliot says.
It is so sweet that a shiver runs through me.
“This is the sweetest one?” I ask.
“Nope.” Elliot touches the tip of my nose. “That’s you.”
When I stick out my tongue in reply, he puts more honey on it.
Elliot doesn’t know what I am. It is both endless salvation and an endless gutting that he doesn’t know.
* * *
—
ELLIOT IS FRIVOLOUS. Elliot is charming. Elliot is harmless.
There should be some folkloric creature like Elliot, one that, when stabbed, does not bleed. The knife goes in and comes out silver, comes out clean.
I met Elliot at one of Nita’s parties. I’d met Nita when I worked for a marketing firm that promoted her gallery. Nita liked the blouse I was wearing, so she invited me to her party. That was Nita.
The marketing job was my first out of college. When I left the facility, the doctors had warned me to prepare for a difficult adjustment. But college hadn’t been difficult. I’d fallen in with the boarding school kids, my past imprisonment similar enough to theirs that my references passed without suspicion. At the end of four years, I’d claimed a degree in linguistics. Words were like me, shifting. My father visited me at school just once, for the graduation ceremony, still ducking his head, now over a slice of white cake. Do you know the origin for the word father? It’s related to the Greek and Latin pater, from pa, one of the first sounds a baby can make.
At that party, at Nita’s, that one night, Elliot came up to me with an extra drink. I have always attracted this type of man, the kind who approaches women with not the offer of the drink, but the drink itself. To make small talk, I insulted the large painting that Nita had hung over her mantel. A scribble, I believe I called it.
Elliot squinted at the corner of the canvas. “Can you read the artist’s signature?”
But I didn’t need to. I could already tell what it said by the way he smiled.
“Shit. It’s you, isn’t it?”
We ended up having sex in the spare bedroom on a pile of other people’s coats. I knew he was older. Did I know he was married? A father? I must have sensed it, though he had, that night, removed his wedding ring before attending the party.
So when I say that Elliot is harmless, I know that his ex-wife would not agree with this statement. What I mean is that Elliot is harmless to me. Which is not to say that I don’t love Elliot. Do I love Elliot? I do. As much as someone like me is capable of such an emotion. Maybe I do not feel it as you do. How would we ever know how our feelings compare? There is no origin for the word love. It is one of the first words and has always meant only itself.
* * *
—
ELLIOT AND I LEAVE THE SHOP having purchased a jar of honey so heavy that we cannot carry it out. It will be delivered to our apartment tomorrow. There is nowhere else we have to go, so we wander. The Bayview district was for years a shipyard, then during World War II, a laboratory used to test the effect of radioactive material on animals, after that deserted, after that government housing. Now the young, wealthy, and careless have reclaimed the neighborhood for their own. We wander past a shop that sells leather driving gloves; a restaurant that serves only wild-caught game; and two more speakeasies, one disguised as a florist’s, the other as a bank. When, next, we pass a VRcade, I do something unprecedented. I suggest we go inside. Then I do something else unprecedented. I say, “Let’s play.”
“Play? Both of us?” Elliot blinks.
I nod.
He mimes a heart attack.
Elliot loves games. We don’t have a VR system in our apartment, I keep saying no, so Elliot will sometimes go to a VRcade by himself or with Rhett. He never asks why I don’t want to go. He explains me to himself: “Women only like games of their own making, everyone knows that.”
The VRcade attendant is an old biddy with hair as pink as mine. She smiles to see me. “Cerise?” she asks, touching the top of her head. I know that she is referring to the color of her dyeing cartridge.
“Magenta,” I say, touching my head in turn.
She leans forward and says in almost a whisper, “Do you know where that word comes from?”
In fa
ct, I do. “A town in Italy. They discovered the color of dye there.”
“But do you know this? The town had just suffered a battle. They named the dye after the blood-soaked ground.”
I shake my head. I did not know that.
She hands us our masks and gloves. “You kids have fun.” Then quick as a snake, she grabs my wrist and, with her free hand, wags a finger between our two faces, hers and mine. “It’s like looking in an enchanted mirror.”
The VRcade is well outfitted, our booth clean and the menu of games richly stocked. I scroll through the titles, half expecting it not to be there. It is an older game, after all. But there it is, slotted between Alligator Alley and Anodyne Astronauts.
“Amusement?” Elliot says when I bring it up on the screen. His voice sounds just this: amused. “Look at the date. It’s practically vintage.”
“Like you,” I say.
“I’m better than vintage, baby. I’m a classic.”
The screen shows an amusement park at night, the bright shrouds of the game tents, the piping music, the spindles of the Ferris wheel tipped with lights. I lower my mask and the park deepens and widens around me, as if I’m inside it, the world convincing enough except where it’s pixelated in the corners. Even so, I feel it, that expansiveness specific to childhood, the breath filling you all the way up to the puff of your cheeks, the feeling that each breath is good. Elliot appears next to me. His avatar has been mistranslated, and in the game his hands are clumps of pixels, as if he holds two fuzzy bouquets.
His avatar turns to me with its flat smile. Elliot’s voice booms in my mask’s earpiece: “Your face!”
“What?” I lift my hands to it but of course feel only the plastic of the mask.
“It’s all blown out. Pixels.”
“Your hands, too,” I say.
“You sure you want to play this one?”
“We have to get a candy apple to start the story. The booth is over there.”
Tell the Machine Goodnight Page 13
