Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  Thingy was no exception to this rule—witness her interminable collections: buttons and plastic rings, lockets bristling with locks of her own hair, pamphlets and mysterious shards of glass—but, to her credit, her own red eft stage came early and lasted an inordinately long time. Oh, she was wild and fair. It seemed to me, following behind her, as if she skimmed across the surface of the earth incandescent with disdain. She was never caught, no one even came close, and she left no trace of her passing: no footprint, no turned stone. There was no way to track Thingy’s progress but, I suppose, myself.

  When Thingy saw the other face in the mirror, she murdered it. Every time. It never seemed to occur to her that sometimes that face was mine.

  To whit: under the pier. It was a bright night, the moon high and demanding. The sea lathered the sides of the pylons into a froth of sea haze and salt which glimmered in the barnacles’ fans. On our way down the beach, Thingy and I had been flanked by ghost crabs sidling in and out of their dark holes, but here there seemed to be no animate life. Just the concrete and the barnacle encrustations. The creosote stained wood and the tightly shuttered winkles.

  As we got closer, the immaterial forms under the pier solidified into three boys, a little older than us, who were leaning against the side of the concrete abutment and watching us approach. Two of them were smoking cigarettes and there was a bottle in a brown paper bag screwed into the sand at their feet. Thingy walked right up to them.

  “Hi,” she said, fluffing the skirt of her dress. “Do any of you have a cigarette I could bum?” Of course, they did.

  Up close, the boys were much older, closer to being men than we had first expected. Two were tall and very alike, clearly brothers with widely spaced eyes and dark eyelashes, sharp noses and thin mouths that seemed to draw their faces forward into a point. The other boy was the outsider, the instigator. He was shorter, but more muscular. His skin, even in the weird glamour of moonlight, was assiduously browned against his white T-shirt and his face had the homely, dangerous aspect of a mule: all nose and teeth, no humility, no forgiveness.

  “My name is Ingrid,” Thingy said, despite the fact that they hadn’t asked. Their only response was a collective shrug, a lingering gaze from the short one that spent as much time on her bare feet as it did her frank, sea-dewed cleavage. There was a sense that we’d walked into the middle of something which had to be suspended due to our presence, a sense of biding time.

  “I don’t live here normally,” Thingy said, as if responding to a further questions. “My family owns a summer home, down the beach.” Thingy waited for their reaction and when none came she exhaled an thin line of smoke and lifted the wine glass out of my hand without looking at me as if I were some sort of retainer.

  “I think I need a drink,” she said, tilting the glass until the wine pattered a little hollow at her feet. “I’ve finished this one.” As the boys finally turned their attention on her, really looked, she smiled a smile thin as the crest on a wave and stepped forward, closing the circle, leaving me out.

  (The eft was sprinting across the loam, her hide bright, her eye sure. The crow was dazzled; the snake was lulled. And what was I, then? A clutch of eggs? The mud-green mother? When you learn to say thank you, Ingrid, you might say it to me that you will never have to experience that sense of padding I was muffled in for so long. It was as if I was wrapped in layers and layers of gauze. My breath stale in my lungs, my heart slow and sluggish in my chest. I had to wait a long time for my life, but you, my dear, will get to live yours stripped and lean—a bright and furious instant, each of your many instants also your only one. This is a fact of which I would be jealous if I weren’t the one, through whatever circuitous fashion, to bring it about.)

  “Ingrid, huh,” said the mule-faced boy, pouring a long shot into Thingy’s wine glass. The smell was both caramel and antiseptic. He passed the bottle to the brother on his right who fitted the neck into his mouth in a way that seemed needlessly convoluted. Once it had made its way around the circle, Thingy passed the bottle back to me, yet, even as I drank, the circle did not bloom open. The liquor clotted in the back of my throat, almost choking me, and I sat in the sand, my back to the concrete abutment, headless of the prick of empty barnacles which I would later find had caught the fine material of Thingy’s borrowed dress and torn it in a hundred tiny places.

  “That’s kind of an old fashioned name,” one of the brothers said. He lit a cigarette of his own and I drank from the bottle. This time the liquor went down more smoothly. Something numbing was rising from my stomach up my throat and to the back of my tongue like a frigid tide. All three boys were wearing khaki shorts and one of the brothers wore a T-shirt with End-Time Harvest printed across the chest in squat block letters and underneath that a phone number. I drank again from the bottle. There was sand on the rim, sand in between my teeth. Maybe I had more than one drink, maybe another.

  The brothers both wore their hair gelled into a plump swoop that rose from their foreheads like the crest of a water-going bird. A merganser, I thought, and I pictured the bird’s lean hooked beak, its round eyes rimmed in black.

  The water, far out but turning with the tide, dashed and foamed under the pier like a dog racing to strangle itself on the end of its line.

  “Were you named after your grandmother or something?” the mule-faced boy asked.

  “I was named after myself,” Thingy said. She giggled and sipped from her glass.

  How could we be so many things? Newts and efts. Fish-eating ducks and coarse-coated mules. Snakes and crows and girls and boys and the sea, which subsumed, and the mountains which marked where we were birthed into these forms and where we would be turned out of them.

  Suddenly, as I now know it sometimes happens, I was drunk.

  Belly drunk. Bone drunk. Drunk so I felt if I opened my mouth the pulpy mess of my being would push out of me and land in the sand at my feet with a wet thud. With my eyes open or closed I saw the same lurid slur: Thing, smoke, fire point, arrow pier, dark water, dark sand. Somewhere far away, but getting closer, a raging white light as thin as a wire.

  “Your friend ok?” said a merganser.

  “Is she going to puke?” said the mule.

  Oh, Thing—oh mermaid splitting her fishtail, uncoiling her dark length in the surf. Oh, sharp-toothed snout, wall-eye.

  No, it was only my dear as she had always been. Only the velvet bodice, her own knees, nicked with razor marks, thudding into the sand on either side of my feet and her hand on my jaw turning my face from side to side.

  “Alice,” Thingy hissed. “What are you doing?”

  We are well past that, I wanted to say, but there were no words in me. I might have made a sound. I might have made a noise like a howl, but very quiet, very low. The mule and the mergansers clustered behind Thingy and looked down at me from over her shoulder. I could tell I was embarrassing them, though not Thingy who was made of sterner stuff. After all, she had known me when our world was only blood and the gummy slide of fluids. I had felt with her the plug of mucus in her throat and her rage as a slick gloved finger slide into her mouth to scoop it out. She had felt with me the vernix drying in my creases, the amniotic fluid stiffening on me like a second tighter skin. After that, Thingy told me with her stern gaze, we could neither repel nor charm each other. After that, Thingy did not say, but said, there was nothing in this world that could keep us apart.

  “Why don’t you go to sleep,” Thingy said and, for the benefit of the mule, helped me by pushing on my shoulder until I tipped, the dress catching and pulling against the concrete as I slid. I landed in the wet sand, my mouth open, my arm caught awkwardly beneath me.

  Then, I suppose, I slept.

  This is what I remember from a summer night when I was thirteen:

  Where Thingy stands is a bowl of light.

  The mergansers preen. One dabbles his bill in the feathers of his chest; one rears back and beats his wings.

  “It isn’t that late.”
r />   The water comes hissing to Thingy’s feet, laps her ankles.

  Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

  “My mother can tell time by the moon.”

  The mule bends and presses his snout to Thingy’s belly. Something dark is in the surf.

  Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

  My Thing has a head made of light that floats above her shoulders. There is a song about this. A song I remember.

  Something dark is struggling in the breakers.

  “Give me another cigarette. Please.”

  No, that is the moon.

  The mule takes the hem of Thingy’s dress in his teeth and nibbles.

  “You’re friend’s going to drown. She’s getting sand in her mouth.”

  If I could hear someone hum it. . . If I could hear the first line. . .

  “Look! Look!”

  The mergansers have beaks like twin needles. Fire-point. Twin lights.

  A song about a girl who has the wrong love. A song about what happens next.

  When Thingy turns the mule presses his face in the small of her back, mergansers encircle her shoulders with their wings.

  “Oh, look! Look!”

  A turtle. It swims out of water, swims up the beach. So painful. Leaking water from its shell.

  Ha ha ha.

  “Give me the bottle.”

  The mule brays; his mane bristles.

  The bottoms of Thingy’s feet are white and kick up sand.

  After the chorus, a mother travels a long way but cannot save her children.

  In the end, someone cracks the eggs to bake a cake.

  In my mouth, the ocean coils a finger.

  My Thing glows inside her black dress and on the turtle’s back she lays her hands.

  A Song About What Happens Next

  When I came back into a better understanding of myself, I was alone under the pier. The tide hissed up the beach toward my face and fell just short. I watched the water recede, bubbles of foam bursting in its wake.

  The tide hissed up the beach toward my face and slapped me. Seawater rushed up my nose and into my mouth and I sat up coughing, dizzy. I looked around.

  Further in the direction we had been traveling, the beach was a long, clean sweep of gray sand. The dunes massed blackly behind it as if herding the sand toward the sea. In the far distance, the mainland blazed with the lights of hotels and restaurants, banks and stores that sold clever beach blankets and tins of sex wax. At the tip of the spit, the lights winked out leaving only an abandoned lighthouse to sulk at the mouth of the bay.

  The other direction was mostly dark. The night had clouded up, the moon high now and small. There was no sign of Thingy or any of the boys. I got to my feet unsteadily, gripping the concrete abutment for support and scraping my palms on the barnacles.

  “Thingy?” I said. And then, “Thingy?” I said again.

  But she was gone, that was clear, and I was here surrounded by nothing more prophetic than an empty bottle in a soft paper bag, many cigarette butts stubbed into the sand like tiny, haphazard pylons and a fork, the shaft pitted, the tines bent willy-nilly.

  I stood for a while running my hand through the wet, gritty tangle of my hair. I was still drunk and I remember thinking that the dress, which was clearly ruined, was not so much the issue as my face with which Mrs. Clawson had taken such pains.

  I bent from the waist and vomited a brown stream into the churning surf at my feet. I did it again. And then again. There was sand in my eyelashes and sand on my lips. One side of my throat was stiff with sand and my legs inside the wet flop of the skirt pricked with salt and sand. I stayed bent, heaving like a donkey, the dress heavy as canvass against my shins, but nothing else came out of me. Eventually I straightened and turned back in the direction from which Thingy and I had come.

  After a long struggle up the side of the dune, I found myself back in the road, the summerhouses presenting on either side of me their austere, flat faces. Most of these buildings were uninhabited. Their owners lived in Charleston or New York or Labrador or Bavaria, for all I knew, but they were not here and the road itself was dark and still. In some houses though, the lights were on and as I made my way up the road I saw through some of the windows and into the depressing grandeur within. A man was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. A woman wearing a blue bathing suit was cutting the heads off a cluster of peony buds and cramming the tight, sour balls into a range of small vases arrayed before her on the table. In one house, a dog had fallen asleep in the bay window, its fur pressed up against the glass in brown and white whorls. Beyond it, in the bright sofa-adorned living room, people walked back and forth carrying things.

  I took the turns at random until I came to a road that seemed slightly more familiar and heard, blown toward me over the constant groan of the ocean a babble of voices and music and a woman’s rising laugh. It was Thingy’s road and, at the end of it, Thingy’s house: all the lights lit, the windows ablaze against the dark pit of the sky, people strewn about the upper balconies and the veranda while the small fires of their cigarettes rose and fell like lovelorn fireflies strobing their asses off in the sterile salt air.

  Let’s imagine for a moment, dear Ingrid, the scene. You haven’t yet attended any parties—though if Thingy had had her way, this would not be the case. Well before your birth, you were scheduled to attend, indeed to be the guest of honor at countless mother’s teas and luncheons, a Mother’s Day brunch and a formal introduction to the Rotary, in which Mrs. Clawson was a member.

  Thingy even bought outfits for the still imagined you to wear to these events. Little frocks in butter yellow with overskirts of white organdy polka-dot, miniature blush-rose gowns and long, flowing shifts in picked white lace—all of which I’ve kept as a memory of her. I’ve put them away in the attic, enough to fill six shoeboxes. You can unearth them later in your life, if you’re so inclined, Ingrid. If you become the sort of girl who is charmed by the mysteries of the past.

  Regardless, try to imagine the scene from a distance. The party has become a looser, messier event than it was even when Thingy and I first left it. There are fewer people in the house, fewer cars parked along the sides of the road, but those who remain seem to have swelled to take the place of their wiser or soberer compatriots. On the balcony and veranda there is a sense that all bordering lines have been eradicated. The provisional shapes of people’s bodies merge into each other, merge into the wrought-iron railings and cunningly replicated Doric columns that distinguish the wall on either side of the front door.

  A man is talking too loudly. He says, “Damn it, Cynthia,” or maybe, “Damn you, Cynthia,” and a woman laughs a teetering laugh like a gull caught in an updraft, soaring helplessly higher above the sheer, rocky shore. Inside the house there is a sense of many bodies moving very quickly. It is almost as if people are running back and forth in front of the windows; tearing back and forth with their arms over their heads and their dresses floating out behind them as if giving chase. Someone tosses a full drink into the oleander. Someone on the balcony tips the dregs of their glass onto the head of another someone standing in the yard, then runs into the house and slams the door.

  Now, from the same critical distance, Ingrid, imagine me. Stiff-kneed, soaked, small as a rat inside my pink dress. Imagine my hair matted to my cheek and neck. The sand gritting in between my toes and the burn from a cut on my foot I didn’t remember getting as I shifted my weight on the black, absorbing road. Is it any wonder, even at the end of such a difficult journey, that I took the long way around? Is it any wonder that I slunk?

  I picked my way through the narrow side yard catching glimpses as I went of partygoers in all manner of disarray. At the foot of a bed of day lilies, I clambered over the low iron fence that ringed the Clawson’s backyard pool. Despite the discarded glasses, puddles of melting ice cubes and an open tube of dark lipstick bobbing enticingly in the drain—all of which gave clear evidence that the party had indeed swept through the pool area with its scouring wind
s—I seemed to be alone. At the back of the house, a large plateglass window stretched the length of the wall. I perched on the side of a beach chair, adjusting the plastic so it cradled my haunches, and looked through the window, down the length of the brilliant, white living room where I found myself unsurprised to see Thingy with the three boys from the pier clustered at her side. She was holding a group of adults in disheveled formal clothing enthralled as she waved her arms in the air in front of her.

  “They found a turtle on the beach,” Mr. Clawson said.

  I jumped and jerked around. In my haste I slipped out of my cradle of plastic slats and was dumped unceremoniously onto the ground, my legs braced like a marionettes over the chair’s metal frame. To his great credit, Mr. Clawson didn’t laugh. He actually didn’t seem to fully notice, his eyes locked on his daughter as she hitched up her skirt and preformed a curious waddle across the living room.

  “They watched her lay her eggs,” Mr. Clawson said as he maneuvered around the chair. The branch of a struggling camellia snagged his pant leg and he pushed it away as one might the snout of a friendly, but impolite dog. He drank out of his glass and sung the ice cubes around its belly, the picture of a man at ease, a man preoccupied with ease. He stared a moment longer through the window, then, as I pulled myself upright, eased himself down onto the concrete by my side.

  Thingy’s father had dull, straw-colored hair which he wore very short on the sides and back and cut in the front in a straight fringe across his forehead as if to mark with its line the definitive place where his face came to an end. He had a round face, a snub nose and a thick, heavy jaw that had settled as he aged so it appeared to weigh down his thin neck. It gave him a contemplative look, the look of a deep thinker who was willing to dive ever deeper into his thoughts like an inexperienced tourist scubaing just a little further into the cave. He was wearing white trousers through the seat of which the denser white of his pockets could be clearly seen. As he braced his arms and leaned back against them, the sleeve of his polo shirt brushed against my thigh. He looked rumpled and distracted. He looked as if, at any moment, he might burst into some prodigiously mournful song, but he only sighed and sat with me in more or less companionable silence as we watched his daughter tell the tale.