Bleeding Out

by Jes Battis

  “Is it bad magic?” the girl asks.

  He shakes his tail feathers. “Magic is not human. You, me, we can be good, can be bad, can be stupid—magic is. It reflects. Like fire, or cats, all depends on what direction you approach from.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “Sweet girl.” He touches her face lightly. “Go find your mother.”

  The vision collapses. I’m back in the interrogation chamber. I’m sweating and pale. Derrick touches my hand. I recoil.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  I say nothing.

  “What did you see?” Selena asks.

  I stand. “Let him tell you. I’m going.”

  “Going where?”

  “To find my mother.”

  “Tess, we’ve been calling her for days. Nobody knows where she is.”

  “It sounds like she’s got the right idea.”

  “Tess—” Derrick tries to touch my shoulder.

  I punch him.

  It’s the first time I’ve ever hit Derrick. The first time I’ve ever wanted to. He staggers back, pressing a hand to his cheek, which is reddening. His eyes are shocked. He opens his mouth to say something, but nothing comes out.

  “You should have said no,” I whisper. I’m so angry, I can barely get the words out. “You should have recused yourself, or said it was a conflict of interest. You should have found a way. But you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I had no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice, and you made yours.”

  “It’s not that simple, Tess.”

  “It was. But it’s not anymore.”

  I walk out of the interrogation chamber. I manage to get to the elevator and wait for the doors to close. Then I lean against the metal wall and cry, not just for Derrick’s betrayal, or for Selena’s apathy, or even for my mother’s glorious deception. I cry, in the end, for the memory of a feather touching my cheek, and the tremulous voice of an old bird, assuring me that I am lovely and good.

  I don’t know where I’m going, which is nothing new. I let anger and momentum carry me down Burrard Street. I run into a protest, which has reached critical mass on the steps of the art gallery. People wearing Al-Awda T-shirts are yelling in a variety of languages about the Palestinian right of return. A girl raps in Arabic. Every tongue is charged with anger. I am an imbecile who knows nothing of this conflict, save for what I’ve read in Drinking the Sea at Gaza. I give myself up to the crowd. If I close my eyes, it’s like a west coast version of Beautiful Losers, with everyone lifting their feathers to reveal their politics. Oh, F. Where were you when I was growing up magical next to the ocean? Where were you when I was dumb and horny and cruising Derrida at house parties, trying to fit in with the UBC brats? F, you delectable layabout, why did I never learn to be careless with my mustard or methodology?

  Derrick’s interrogation has shaken loose memories, which cascade like cherry blossoms and sinister maple leaves. I give my body to the axis of evil, primeval, and penultimate evil. I give my body to Vulcan’s hammer; I bare my soft skin and my terrible curls to the witch hammer. Folla, folla, fóllame Vulcan, you bastard smith, you beautiful hunchback, you ancestor to Alexander Pope’s metrical bitchiness. Your body Quasimodo, a double-dog-dare knot, impeccably tied and removed from view like the cold vetiver breasts of the enana Mari Bárbola. She wanted nothing but a pile of snow to cavort in. I should really learn to stratify my desires in this way. I should donate my organs to magic so that I can finally look my driver’s license in the eye.

  Derrick, what have you done? What have you uncovered? The curtains spread as the crowd pushes me toward the water. The only thing that bleeds worse than lost time is memory. I’m bleeding out. I’m a speck on a monstrous, flea-bitten narrative, an innocent shred of heme, a pink-eye rhyme. I exsanguinate, I dream, I make my way to the ocean with the rest of the bleeders. I understand for the first time that to recall is to be called violently when you’re in the middle of something, like masturbating or taking a bath. To recall is to leap out of the water, to drop your hands, to open the door naked, dripping, and say: What the hell are you doing here, memory?

  And memory breaks the chain on the door. Memory strides in, reeking of insult and ambergris. Memory sets fire to your afternoon. Bleeding out, burning, all you can do is ride the hyphen between now and then, a hyphen with no seat belts, no holy-shit handle, no brakes, a malicious wooden horse that drags you screaming through the ionosphere like Quijote on a bender.

  My yellow bedroom. In photographs, the wallpaper has an unremarkable stencil but the carpet is steady-state and pleasant to the toes. I’ve arranged a scene in the royal chamber of Castle Grayskull. Evil-Lyn avoids the trapdoor and adjusts her headpiece. She and the sorceress have a colloquy. Drinks are served. My dresser always felt empty, but my bookshelf groaned. I would read anything. I would read for the sound it made. I would read under siege. I would read until I was dry. A numbered carpet and the press of others. We sing.

  Four hugs a day, that’s the minimum.

  I said a-boom chicka rocka chicka rocka chick-a-boom.

  I called the witch-doctor, he told me what to do, he said

  ooh ee ooh ah ah

  ching chang

  walla walla bing bang

  I told those little monkeys, no more jumping on the bed. I drew orcas and flying saucers. I murdered crafts. My letters were backward. I wanted more Munsch, less sunlight, one hug a day tops. I remember a walled-in play area, dark and aggressive. A boy nicknamed Oggie would flash anyone. I spent most of my time playing with three trees, which flatly refused to grant me ingress to Narnia.

  I sit in the library, wiping snot on my sleeve. Fabric hurts me. I want to be quiet and nude. Two sisters pass by my table, snickering. They drop a tissue in front of me. Our lunchroom has ultramarine benches. You can buy ice-cream sandwiches, corn nuts, pizza subs kissed by the microwave. Chris Nixon deliberately wears tank tops. He stands outside of metal shop, indolent, pressing his ass against the cinder-block wall.

  Sex for the first time is a matter of weights and measures. He’s heavy and smells good, a star forward in love with the prettiest puck bunny.

  Don’t kiss me, he says. I don’t really know you. Don’t touch my feet.

  Others follow. Who are you? Boys with crew cuts and secrets.

  You are obsessed with Pavel Bure. You only read Russian moralist novels.

  You want to rent porn after coffee. You force me to go off-roading. You steal my credit card and my tent. You lend me your mezuzah, which I mail back. You want to engineer the Borg in the UBC cybernetics lab. You refuse to discuss your philosophy paper. You think fondly of me while slicing deli meat. You demand your Banana Republic scarf back. You dance with me at the Odyssey and are flattered by the attention of boys.

  You stand me up. You are stood up in turn. You introduce yourself with a paper heart and later give me a bacterial infection. You smoke pot with your grandmother. You speak endlessly of tow trucks and their drivers. You let me devour you after tea. You pay for both of my pineapple dogs. You say, Look, don’t tell anyone about this. You say, My parents are in town but I’ll call.

  Forgive me for leaving you in the bathroom.

  Forgive me for rejecting your vinyl billfold.

  Forgive me for missing your recital.

  You were all ahead of your time.

  I smell seaweed. Unlike the little mermaid, I will hold out for something better and refuse to surrender my fins. The bleeding continues. Most likely, it’s Ursula’s magic. I know I said that I wouldn’t sign the contract with the fishbone stylus, I know I said I would keep my voice, but everything looks different when you’re drowning. Take the sound of my magic if you want, you tentacled hag. Give my guts to Flotsam and Jetsam. Only keep your promise. Throw both halves of me into a shrimper’s net. Only keep your promise. Let me start over.

  In sixth grade, for zoning reasons, I attend Robertson Annex. Every door is red. The bike rac
k has been licked clean. Every door is red except for one, which is green. That day I wear a skirt with white and green stripes. I’m pleasingly piebald, but resemble a candy cane. A boy with dark hair draws close to me. We stand on a ramp, which leads to our portable classroom. He says something nice and then hits me. My tears unnerve him. I’m angry and pinioned by shame. It’s the first time a boy has ever touched me.

  In the library, Miss Barth reads to us from Hatchet. The boys laugh when the pilot farts before dying. I’m intrigued by the computers. The catalogue is a system called Unicorn, which introduces me to Ramona the Brave and Superfudge. The halls beyond are dark, but the temperature in the library always stays the same. I wear shorts and a stained shirt that my mother has screen-printed with a duck’s bottom. It reads: NOT PLAYING WITH A FULL DUCK.

  A.D. Rundle Junior Secondary has something called Gummer Day. Students are flushed down toilets and up trees. I will dive into a toilet if it leads anywhere other than this place. There is one new development. Ninth-grade boys, wild hobgoblins in hypercolor T-shirts, cruelly calibrated to turn armpits electric purple. F is made class president. His sandy hair is a bowl that makes me want popcorn. Open my closet and you’ll find colored scrunchy socks stacked like a pyramid of uncracked eggs, Mossimo jeans, a shirt with a pastoral scene from Calvin and Hobbes, a sandwich quietly giving way to entropy.

  I hide in a blue bathroom stall. I dream. Three girls come in. I smell smoke and hair spray. I am Garion, Sendaria’s favorite son. Mr. Wolf keeps an eye on me, while Aunt Pol disinfects my orbicular scar. The girls leave. I think about ways to escape tomorrow’s PE class. Mrs. Covey thinks I am a waste of perfectly good atoms, and no longer trusts me when I claim to have cramps.

  Rain sounds like applause on the deck. Pumpkins seethe in the garden. The cat snores with her claws in my hair. I push back my Princess Jasmine bedsheets and set fire to a pot of turkey soup. My deaf uncle walks up the stairs. He’s drunk and wearing a padded vest. He smells faintly of fried cabbage.

  Why have you got every light on in the house?

  Because I’m twelve and the switches obey me.

  Because it’s dark, I say.

  I try to look stunned, which I’ve learned makes people leave you alone. He goes back downstairs. I go into the master bedroom and steal the key to the hall closet, filled with 5-1/4 floppy discs and dirty magazines belonging to my stepdad. I analyze Velvet, a less scrupulous version of Hustler. Some of the women ride horses. One woman is trapped in a sinister garage. Occasionally, there are pictures of naked men, which make me anxious and curiously focused. I study each grainy ass and thigh with the intensity that, until now, I’ve summoned only for my rock tumbler.

  I barely speak until we get our first computer. I make my needs known, but I’m not expository. Then my parents bring home a Tandy 1000 HX from Radio Shack. It demands disks like a tyrant, the amber light on the 3.5-inch drive always flashing. I use GW-BASIC to draw a medieval cityscape I saw in a fantasy book by Steve Jackson. I become obsessed with the CIRCLE command, which, when you add a time step, allows you to craft blooming white holes that eat the screen. We have trained our cat Sookie to use the toilet. I start to think of the bathroom as a shared litter box. We also have a collage room and a backyard smothered in wood chips. The grape vines enchant me. I turn them into a kind of desiccated parlor. Although I prefer the conditions of the den, I must pay respect to the caterpillars.

  I trade a game that isn’t mine with a sinister kid. One of the discs falls out of my knapsack. My stepfather finds it the next morning in a puddle. He throws it at my feet and goes to work. I resuscitate the disc with a blow-dryer, although the drive seems repulsed by it. I must conquer every game ever programmed by Sierra. I pore over hints that materialize only through the alchemical medium of cellophane. The cheat manuals remind me of my She-Ra sticker albums, with full-color representations of Swift Wind and Bow, effete leader of the rebels. I remove a glass pendant from our chandelier and use it to focus my latent telekinesis, which I feel is about to explode.

  In HeroQuest I, your character must learn to climb. This can be done slowly, but I prefer to break my hero, physically and psychically. I position him in front of the tree by the healer’s hut. Climb tree, I type, and all sixteen of his EGA colors wrinkle until he reaches the bough. Climb down, I type. Climb tree. Climb down. Climb tree. He never complains. When he achieves proficiency, I reward us both by singing to Baba Yaga’s house with chicken feet. Hut of brown, now sit down. If only real magic were that simple.

  We’re at the water now. I’m with Lucian. We lie in bed. Our fingers are proximal. On the TV, a bodiless pair of jeans is dancing. He snickers. I explore his waistband. We haven’t hit naked yet, but I’m resourceful. My hand is having a great time. He smells like the midnight jungle of Perrin, which, by day, becomes a kaleidoscopic desert. I’m Bastian Balthazar Bux and he’s my luck dragon. I’m delighted. I should have stolen this book a long time ago.

  He dries me off gently. There’s nothing better, he says, than a freshly showered Tess. In that moment, I believe him.

  I’m walking through sand. I half expect to see him sitting on a log, doing whatever necromancers do diurnally. But he’s not there. The crowd disperses. I watch the dogs of summer chasing tennis balls that zoom and flare like amber comets. One of them coughs on my foot. I take this as a sign and turn around, heading for home. My phone vibrates. It’s Derrick. I ignore it and keep walking. He’ll only be maudlin, and I can’t deal with that. I need to find the one person who might actually have answers. But before that, I need a drink and some advice. I change direction and head for the Downtown East Side. If I’m fortunate, Lady Duessa will be receiving visitors.

  9

  Duessa’s place is in full swing when I arrive. I can hear the music from the street. People have parked their track bikes, scooters, and skateboards everywhere. A vampire in plaid and Carhartt pants ushers me inside. He hasn’t changed in the three years since I last saw him, save for the fact that he’s wearing a Bluetooth earpiece. I nod politely and walk down the hall. There are deep grooves in the wood floor, made by soles more monstrous than mine. I reach the main room, which is alive with garlands and Christmas lights. Everyone is in their best drag, including the demons. A salad bar has been set up in one corner, complete with a soft-serve ice-cream dispenser, which I appreciate. I fill a paper plate with comestibles and look for somewhere to stand.

  The music stops, and Duessa appears on a makeshift stage. Everyone applauds. Her strapless gown is trimmed with ermine. Her hair is extremely high, and she’s wearing gold earrings made of tiny, pendulous amphorae that flash and tinkle as she walks. Her stilettos are actually stilettos.

  She grabs the mic. “Good evening, ladies, boys, immortals, transfags, and gentlebitches. Welcome to my ball. Prizes will be awarded for best costume, best walk, and best weaponry. Start your engines and gird your loins, everyone. Our first category is realness.”

  The cheering soars. Duessa steps down and takes a seat at the judge’s table, next to Wolfie, who is busy lighting votive candles with his index finger. The music resumes. A boy dressed as Cleopatra walks across the stage. Everyone holds up numbers. A girl follows him, wearing high-tops and a dozen pocket watches. Her score is decent. A youth in full armor is next. His hair is braided, and he’s a bit older now, but I realize that it’s Dukwan.

  “¡Guapo!” Duessa yells. “Look at that fine Banjee boy!”

  Dukwan smiles and gives his best walk. His score is high. A number of well-dressed hopefuls follow him. I finish my vegetables and move on to dessert, exhausting the chocolate sauce, which is swiftly replaced. I drift away from the festivities and down a hallway, eating my sundae. I pass the backstage dressing area, where vampire hairdressers and makeup artists work at lightning speed. The pile of discarded gowns resembles a beautiful Anglo-Saxon hoard.

  I walk through a pair of stained-glass doors, which lead to a kind of study. Handwoven rugs are scattered across the floor. A giant
astrolabe sleeps in the corner, while a winged orb flutters aimlessly above me. A desk made of carved rock crystal sits against the far wall. Votive candles burn atop it, throwing its quartz veins into startling relief. Books are stacked everywhere, some bound in leather and various hides, others barely held together by masking tape. I tell myself not to touch anything, not even the desk chair, which reclines.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  The voice seems to come from nowhere. I scan the room. Then I look down and see a four-inch brass figurine staring up at me. She carries a tablet, which, I assume, must be Duessa’s appointment book.

  “Um—no. I don’t. Sorry.” I realize that she’s a Lar—a household spirit. I’ve never seen one in person before.

  “You really shouldn’t be here, then.”

  “I was hoping to catch Lady Duessa after she’s done judging.”

  “You and half the city.”

  “My name’s Tess Corday. Maybe… I’m on a list somewhere?”

  The Lar seems to relax, although it’s difficult to tell, given that she’s been sculpted from bronze. “Right. I’ve heard your name before. I suppose you can wait here. When she’s done, I’ll let her know that you’ve arrived.”

  “Thank you.”

  The figurine shrugs. “It’s my job.”

  She makes her way swiftly out of the study, which still takes a few moments, owing to the fact that she has very short legs. I look away politely until I’m certain that she’s gone. I don’t know what I should do while I’m waiting. There’s some kind of sideboard in one corner of the room, but I doubt that any of the bottles are drinkable. I finish my sundae and place the empty bowl on the counter, next to a red cratera covered in horny satyrs. My phone starts to vibrate. It’s Mia calling, so I answer.

  “I can’t really talk. I’m in Lady Duessa’s office.”

  “Whoa. What’s it like?”

  “Cool and creepy. Is everything okay?”

  “Derrick says you won’t talk to him.”