by John Langan
Needless to say, coming to America changed everything. Lottie worked in her aunt’s bakery in the Bronx because her mother’s sister demanded it, and Rainer and Clara were too much in need of the extra money she could earn to fight that demand. Once she had that experience, and since the family had not yet climbed back to their old social station, Lottie had a much easier time convincing Rainer and Clara she’d do much more good working at the camp bakery than she would sitting at the camp school. Rainer wasn’t happy, but neither could he argue the economics of the thing. Clara kept her own counsel, though Lottie thought her mother pleased in a way she did her best to keep secret. They worked at the camp bakery together, Lottie and Clara, and Lottie enjoyed it in a way she’d never enjoyed working with her mother at her aunt’s. There, under the watchful eye of her older sister, Clara had been constantly tense, waiting for the reproval her sister sprinkled as liberally as the powdered sugar on her donuts. If she could correct Lottie before her sister did, Clara jumped at the opportunity, with a sharpness that made Lottie flinch.
Since they moved to the camp, though, Clara’s behavior has undergone a sea-change. Outside her sister’s radius, Clara is relaxed, forgiving, and even funny. To Lottie’s surprise and embarrassment, she’s learned that her mother has a great talent and memory for dirty jokes, which she never fails to indulge while they’re making long breads and pastries. It’s won her popularity with most of her fellow workers, male and female, with whom Lottie has been shocked to see her mother enjoying the occasional cigarette. “You don’t tell your father,” Clara said to her when she first spied her puffing away. The thought hadn’t even crossed Lottie’s mind, since she was sure Rainer would never believe her. She wouldn’t dream of imitating her mother’s behavior. She’s pretty sure that Clara’s new-found liberalism doesn’t extend to her oldest daughter. But once her initial surprise has faded a bit, Lottie has found that she likes this Clara better than the one who made her time working at her aunt’s an exercise in extended misery. She still misses her old mother, the one she had in Germany, who sang bits from Mozart operas in a high, ringing voice as she went about the house, but she’s come to seem more and more distant to Lottie, a pleasant ghost.
As I said, Lottie likes working in the bakery. The last few days, though, have not been among her better ones. She’s done all the things she did when she first started working for her aunt, made all the same stupid mistakes all over again. She’s mixed batter wrong. She’s spilled batter on the floor. She’s left things in the oven too long. She’s taken things from the oven too soon. She’s broken more bowls than she thought possible. Her co-workers have covered for her when and where they could—they don’t like her quite as much as they do her mother, but they still like her well-enough. Even so, she’s gone from being one of the favorite employees to someone whose job is increasingly uncertain. Clara has watched this happen, and I’m pretty sure she knows its cause. She knows that Lottie has gone from thinking the world is flat to learning it’s round, so to speak, and pretty much all at once. For the last few days, her mother has done what she can to keep Lottie out of sight, sending her on as many errands as she reasonably can.
It’s on one of these errands that Lottie has her encounter. Clara’s sent her back to one of the storage closets to fetch some slivered almonds for the danishes. This closet is at the rear of the bakery, next to one of the back doors, and is used to keep whatever there isn’t room for in the main closets. Already narrow and shallow, it’s made more so by the supplies crowded into it. The closet has no light and no window, so Lottie leaves the door open as she searches for the slivered almonds. Later, she’ll say that she heard the back door to the bakery squeak open, but didn’t give it a second thought, since she was busy trying to shift a heavy bag of flour to see what was concealed beneath it. Sure enough, there are the almonds. Lottie heaves the bag of flour the rest of the way off the almonds, listening to the footsteps dragging across the floor behind her. An alarm bell starts ringing in her head, but at that moment she isn’t sure why. I know, I know: with all that she’s learned the past few days, how could she not have known what’s sliding ever-closer? You know yourselves, though, that it’s one thing to hear something in a story, another to meet it in real life. Lottie’s busy trying to ensure the bag of flour isn’t going to topple over, even as she grabs the bag of almonds. Her mission accomplished, she turns to leave and finds Helen standing in the doorway.
Lottie doesn’t scream. She doesn’t drop the almonds, either. It’s funny, she later says the first thought to barge into her head was, Don’t drop the almonds. She clutches the bag to her chest. Helen lurches forward, tugging the door closed behind her and plunging the little space into blackness. Lottie breathes in sharply and retreats a step. The almonds, she’s thinking, the almonds. Helen stays where she is. Lottie can hear her breathing, a slow, labored inhale and a wet, bubbling exhale, what you might expect to hear from a fish dying on the shore, drowning in air. Lottie stands in the darkness, so afraid she can’t breathe. Dead, she thinks, I must be dead. Before Helen closed the door, Lottie had a quick look at her, at those yellow eyes, those blank, pitiless eyes, which she’s sure can see her plain as day. She can smell the woman, can smell her death, a reek of rotten flowers and spoiled flesh that rapidly fills the air in the closet. Lottie gags, momentarily feeling her breakfast churning at the back of her throat. At the sound of Lottie choking, Helen chuckles, a liquid wheeze that sends goosebumps chasing each other across Lottie’s skin. She swallows hard, forcing her legs to take two trembling steps back, until she’s pressed up against the closet’s rear wall. Her left hand pressing that bag of almonds to her chest as if it’s a bag of diamonds, her right hand flails out in the darkness, searching for anything with which she might defend herself. She tries to remember what she saw in this part of the closet and can’t. All she can feel are the ends of bags of salt, stacked one on top of the other and immovable as a heap of bricks. She digs her fingers into one of the bags of salt, waiting for the dead woman’s advance.
Helen chuckles again, that liquid wheeze. Her laugh goes on and on, filling the closet the way her awful smell has. She laughs and she laughs, and Lottie suddenly understands that the woman isn’t laughing, she’s speaking. What Lottie took for one continuous chuckle is actually sentences. They’re in no language she’s ever heard, and between Rainer and living in the camp, she’s encountered a few, living and dead. The words seem little more than phlegmy coughs, grunts, and clicks of the tongue. For the briefest of moments, Lottie wonders if this is Helen’s original language, what she spoke prior to coming to America, but she rejects that idea immediately. She knows, in the way you just know some things, that this is speech Helen has brought back with her from the grave. It is a death-tongue, the tongue you learn once you leave this life for lands uncharted, and Lottie realizes she understands what Helen is saying.
It isn’t so much that Lottie is able to translate Helen’s words as it is that she sees what the woman is saying. More than sees: for a moment, she’s there. One second, she’s standing in a dark closet full of the reek of death. The next, she’s looking out at a vast, black ocean. Great, foaming waves rear and collapse as far as the eye can see, while overhead churning clouds flicker with lightning. When Lottie and her family crossed the Atlantic, they passed through a storm, and she well remembers gazing out at the waves bursting themselves against and over their ship’s prow and deck. Boarding that ship, Lottie had thought it the most enormous thing she’d ever seen; but as it slid up and down the heaving ocean like a toy in a bathtub, its hull sounding the successive booms of the waves’ relentless pounding, she knew that she’d been wrong, that here was true enormity. Now, faced with the black ocean, she confronts a vastness that makes the Atlantic seem little more than a pond. As she watches, huge backs slide up out of and back under the waves; Lottie’s reasonably sure they aren’t whales, since no whale she knows of sports a row of spikes down its spine. She has the sense of more, and bigger, beasts w
aiting beneath the water’s surface, forms as immense as a nightmare. The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean—it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile. Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.
Helen keeps talking. Lottie hears her there a few feet away from her, but also from across a long distance, as if she isn’t just looking at the black ocean, she’s there. From where Lottie is, which is kind of floating above the scene, a little bit beyond the reach of the highest waves, like she’s in a hot-air balloon, she can see that the surface of the water is crowded, full of floating objects. There are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. She can’t tell how many there are. They cover the ocean in all directions. As she peers at them, she realizes that they’re heads, the heads of people submerged in the water up to their necks. It’s as if the biggest shipwreck in history has occurred, and here are the survivors. Only, they aren’t thrashing about and screaming, the way you’d expect people in fear of their lives to do. Lottie thinks they might be dead already, that this might be a sea of corpses. She focuses on one in particular, a girl, and it’s like looking through a telescope. Suddenly, she can see the girl’s face up-close. It’s frozen, the eyes open wide and unblinking, a strand of oily seaweed tangled in her matted hair. Her skin is alabaster-white, her lips blue, but her mouth is moving. She’s speaking, in a low monotone. If Lottie concentrates, she can pick out the girl’s words.
It isn’t very pretty. She’s joined a monologue about a man, one of the girl’s father’s friends. Using the kind of language that would earn Lottie a smack upside the head from Clara and a night in her room without supper, the girl is describing the most pornographic of fantasies about this fellow. Lottie wouldn’t repeat what she’d heard, and I don’t see any need to improvise, but the girl’s inventions made her cheeks burn. Nor is that the worst. From lust, the girl moves to anger. When she’s finished describing what she’d do with the older man, she starts in on her sisters. They’re younger, and has the girl ever stopped loathing them? From the first moment her mother had announced her pregnancy, there was that much less of her and the girl’s father for her. The birth of her first sister made a bad situation intolerable. Her second sister’s appearance, the following year, poured salt in a gaping wound. She, who had had nothing to do with these babies’ creation, no say in the decision to bring them into the world, was expected to act as their third parent, to surrender her life to her sisters. She never lost the sensation she’d experienced holding them when they were infants, the maddening awareness of their delicacy, their fragility. Their paper-thin skulls, the soft-spots gently throbbing, had offered her an almost unbearable temptation, kissing-cousin to what she felt handling her mother’s fine china, that urge to hurl the teacups against the wall, smash the saucers to the floor, watch it all burst into fine shards and powder. It was that same feeling, but magnified, intensified to the tenth power. Cradling her sisters in her arms, she sensed herself standing at the edge of a precipice, one step away from a lunge that would ever end. That sensation, that awareness of the violence trembling at the edge of her fingertips, was delicious. It was like drawing your nails slowly over a patch of skin that was itching, so that you felt it in the back of your mouth. There was the same mixture of pleasure and agony. As her sisters grew, so did the possibilities for harm. How often had she let her hands linger on their necks, trailing over their soft, downy skin, imagining what it would be like to slide her fingers around them and squeeze? How often, when she was drying the dishes, had she tested the heft of one of the sharp knives, imagining what it would be like to press the point against their throats, watch the skin dimple around it, then push until it slid all the way in? How often, playing with them, had she shoved a little too hard, pinched a little too fiercely, passed off as accident what was purest intention? How often had she stood at that precipice, one foot raised, balancing, feeling the emptiness in front of her beckoning, calling her as intimately as any lover? All it would take to send her plummeting was a sudden breeze, and how she prayed that breeze would come.
With a shock, Lottie realizes that the girl she’s been listening to is herself. That’s her mouth saying those horrible things. That’s Gretchen and Christina whose lives are being threatened. That’s Italo playing lead in that x-rated fantasy. Glancing about, she sees that she—the other one, I mean—is surrounded by her family, Clara, Rainer, and her sisters forming a tight circle around her, her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents encircling them. Everyone’s face is frozen in the same, blank stare, and everyone is carrying on their own monologue. None is any nicer than what Lottie hears her other-self saying. Quite a few are worse. Here’s Clara, regretting that she never brought that tinker who came around the house every other week up to her bedroom. He was tall, and his hands and feet were big, not to mention that nose. Maybe he’d have been able to satisfy her. Here’s Rainer, bemoaning the idiots who surround him, the buffoons he’s forced to spend his days beside and who wouldn’t understand the least of his thoughts, who understand only the satisfaction of their animal urges. Although, to be honest, none of his wretched family is as smart as even the dumbest of his co-workers, but what can you expect, with a house full of women? Here’s Gretchen, wishing she were strong enough to hold the pillow over Christina’s face until she could be the youngest again. Here’s Christina, wondering what it would be like to set fire to that dog that scares her with its barking every time she walks past it—and while she’s at it, why not set fire to the old woman who owns the dog and laughs at her fright? And so and so on out from there, everyone uttering their most secret depravities.
Lottie feels her skin crawling, as if the words she’s heard are ants scrambling across it. Her head spins. She claps her hands over her ears, but it’s too late. Those ants have already found their way into her head and are running madly round and round her brain. She pulls away from the scene, lowers the telescope, so to speak, until she’s back above the highest waves. The roar of the ocean, she understands, is the accumulated voices of this multitude, of who knows how many monologues of rage, pain, and frustration. She hangs in space, still listening to Helen speaking in the darkness, and the sea begins to churn beneath her. When the Schmidts crossed the Atlantic, Lottie had stood at the railing on the front deck watching the sea froth as the ship sliced through it. Now the water below bubbles and foams in much the same way, as if it’s a giant pot under which the gas has been turned to high. The people floating there are tossed in all directions; despite which, as far as Lottie can tell, they continue talking. Something is coming. Lottie can feel it rising beneath her, shouldering the ocean aside as it ascends from unimaginable depths. Something is coming. Lottie hears Helen’s voice rising, feels the bag of slivered almonds pressed against her breast. Something is coming. Lottie can see its outline forming in the water, a rounded shape larger than any object she’s ever seen, larger than the ship that brought her to America, larger than Brooklyn Bridge, larger than the dam her father is helping to build. It’s drawing closer, increasing in size as it comes, until it breaks the ocean’s surface and Lottie sees that it’s a mouth, a titanic maw ringed with jagged teeth the size of houses. It continues to rise toward her, waterfalls streaming down its sides, waves crashing against it, hundreds of people sliding down into its cavernous gullet. It’s like the mouth of an inconceivably huge snake, one of those monsters you read about in ancient myths, so big it wraps around the earth and holds its own tail in its mouth. Lottie sees that it’s closing, that its edges are rising to meet one another, and that when they do she’ll be caught within them, dragged down to wherever it is this thing calls home. Lottie tries to withdraw further, to raise herself to a safer distance, but it’s no use. She’s as high as she can go. Helen is shouting, the enor
mous jaws climbing with each guttural cough and grunt. Lottie feels herself overwhelmed. The sheer size of this thing—it’s as if the immensity alone threatens to extinguish her, blow her out the way a strong wind would a candle. Faced with that mouth, that throat leading down to endless depths, Lottie feels herself flicker. She tenses, pushing the bag of almonds into herself so fiercely it actually hurts, and in that momentary flare of pain she’s saved. Without really thinking about it, she clutches the bag, wheels back her arm, and throws the bag as hard as she can at the sound of Helen’s voice. The jaws are scaling the sky to either side of her, each one taller than any building, when the bag of slivered almonds strikes Helen full in the face.
With a squawk, she breaks off her speech. Instantly, the enormous jaws, the black ocean, the crowds of people, vanish, and Lottie’s in the darkened closet. All strength gone from her legs, she slumps against the wall. It’s as if she can breathe again. She sucks in lungfuls of air, not caring that it’s rich with Helen’s stench, while her heart throbs so hard it makes her nauseated. The closet spins around her, which squeezing her eyes closed helps only a little. She hears Helen shuffling toward her and does what she should have in the first place: she screams, as long and loud as she can. When Helen grabs her mouth with one cold, damp hand, Lottie lashes out, punching and kicking. The dead woman responds in kind, slamming Lottie’s head with her other hand. Fireworks flash behind Lottie’s eyes, and she swings out into unconsciousness and back. Someone is pounding on the closet door, shouting for whoever’s inside to open up. That voice rapidly becomes a chorus. Helen hisses, no word in her death-tongue, just a sign of frustration. She heaves Lottie into the air and pivots around. Frantic, Lottie tears at Helen’s fingers, trying to pry them loose. She can hear her mother’s voice among those at the door. She kicks furiously, connecting with her captor’s legs. Helen staggers, but maintains her grip. “He waits, girl,” she says. “He will always be waiting for you.”
