Come Closer

by Sara Gran

  SOON AFTER that I stopped going to work. I don’t know if I gave notice or just stopped going, only that I never found myself at Fields & Carmine anymore. Ed had no idea. In better days he had called me at work twice a day but it was months now since either of us had called just to hear the other’s voice and say hello. By the time he even knew I had lost my job, it was the least of our concerns.

  AGAIN, I found myself in the dark little bar around the corner from what used to be my office. Again, I was sitting with the same man—handsome, tattooed, drunk.

  “Eric,” I said. I didn’t know how I had gotten here or how I knew his name, but here I was.

  “Naamah,” he said. “That’s a weird one. What’s that, Arabic?”

  “Satanic,” I answered.

  “Huh?”

  “Akashic.”

  “What’s that, like Persian?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Huh. So, are we going?”

  “Going?”

  “For a ride. You said you wanted to go for a ride.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m coming. We’re going.”

  CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year’s came and went. I missed them entirety. The days were short and cold and the nights far too long. Ed stopped asking where I had been. No longer expected me home for dinner, no longer responded when Naamah tried to pick her little fights. He was at the end of his rope now. He had tried kindness, understanding, suggestions, attempts at therapy, he had yelled at me, he had pleaded, ignored, and now, finally, he was going on with his life.

  The tables started to turn, and Edward was the one picking the fights. He was the one late for dinner, and then late for bed, and then home late, late, into the night.

  The proof was a phone call. He thought I was out, not surprisingly. We’d given up keeping track of each other’s whereabouts, and I wasn’t usually home in the evenings anymore. But that night I was in the bedroom. The demon was doing something with the herbs she kept buried in my lingerie drawer. The little bundles of twigs and roots had started showing up a few weeks ago. What she did with them, I was never quite sure, but the time the demon spent at home was often spent with them, burning a little pile in an ashtray or rearranging the bundles into different combinations. Luckily the demon was interested in what Ed was saying and so she took me closer to the wall to listen. He was on the phone with someone.

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t think she’s going to the doctor anymore.” A pause for the woman on the other end to answer. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. No, not tonight, I’m already home. Tomorrow ... Yeah, I know. It has to change ... Of course I tried talking to her, I tried a million times. Look, just drop it, okay ... No, I really don’t want to talk about it. Tomorrow. Tomorrow ... All right, good night ... I love you, too.”

  Edward hung up the phone, and the demon went back to playing with her herbs.

  SOON ED was spending whole weekends out of the house. He made vague claims about business trips that neither of us pretended to believe. When he was home, he slept on the couch. We used chilly exaggerated “pleases” and “thank yous” with other. If one of our limbs were to brush against the other person’s it was immediately retracted and stiffened.

  On his last day at home, Ed found me in bed with another man. The man had come to read the gas meter, apparently, and I couldn’t say for sure what happened after that. When Ed came home, the man got up, got dressed, and scurried out of the building so quickly I didn’t see him go.

  Edward left me right then and there.

  I lay on the bed, still naked, and cried silently to myself. Ed pulled out a brown leather suitcase I had never seen before and started packing. Even now I can’t stop thinking about that suitcase. Was he waiting for this occasion? Did his girlfriend buy it for him?

  He spoke the whole time that he packed, throwing as many clothes around the room as into the suitcase. Through the demon’s filter I heard only snatches of words and phrases.

  “I knew it ... I fucking knew it ... Bullshit ... Responsibility ... Refuse to take responsibility ... Refuse to talk about it ... ”

  Edward threw a shoe across the room. I felt my lips bend into a smile. I rolled back and forth on the bed and I heard myself laughing. The demon was hysterical, ecstatic. She wanted him gone. The last thing I remember from that day is Edward kneeling by the bed, trying to get me to focus on his words.

  “Amanda, are you listening? Amanda this is TOO MUCH. I’m leaving. Amanda, do you hear me? I’M LEAVING!”

  WITH ED gone, time slipped away from me. I would wake up from a blackout thinking an hour or two had passed to find out days had gone by. Occasional slices of consciousness blended into each other and I was left with a string of non sequiturs.

  I was in a bed, on a huge round mattress with the softest sheets I’ve ever felt. The walls were sky blue with white rococo trim around the top. It reminded me of the Fitzgerald house. The room was huge, almost as big as the loft. It was maybe the biggest room I’d ever seen. I was naked and alone. And then the blackness drowned out my eyes and ears and the rest of me and I was gone.

  Out of the blue room. Back in the loft. I was sitting in front of the fireplace, methodically burning each item of Ed’s clothing. There was a knock at the door. No, a knock on a door. From the inside of the bathroom. The immense dining-room table had been moved in front of the bathroom to keep someone in.

  “Please,” a woman was crying out. “I’ll do anything, just please let me out. I need a doctor. I’ve been hurt.”

  “Oh no,” Naamah answered. “I don’t think you’re done yet.”

  Pink. Lots of pink. Slowly I saw I was in a woman’s bedroom. No, a lingerie shop. Everything was pink and gold. The type of store found in every upscale mall and shopping district in the country. I could have been anywhere. Thin notes of classical music streamed through the aisles of wiry bras and flimsy negligees. I was walking down a long rack of bras, pulling out a lacy number every few feet. With a jagged, chipped fingernail on the index finger of my right hand I tore into the softest part of each little confection. Rrrrrrrrrip into white lace, red satin, black sheer nylon. Rrrrrrrrrip; a yellow underwire makes a particularly satisfying little sound. I walked the rest of the aisle and then back up the other side, singling out every fourth or fifth bra for a nice deep rrrrip.

  Days later. All around me was grayness and a sour smell. On a train. The car was half full. A few men in sorry, sagging suits, women with too many children. I looked down; I was wearing a black dress I’d never seen before, buttoned down the front, very nice, and an equally mysterious pair of white leather pumps. Eyes. I felt a pair of furtive eyes darting up at us and then away, up and then away. I looked up; across the car I saw a dirty, rat-faced young woman, twenty at the oldest, watching me with a repulsive, knowing smirk. Greasy dark hair fell straight down from her scalp to the top of her shoulders. She wore a grimy denim jacket and underneath that a black top with the name of a death metal band on it. Her dishwater eyes shone. The rat face glanced around to make sure no one was watching and then turned back to give me her full attention. Then she stuck out her tongue, wide and flat, straight down to her chin. The top half of her body leaned backwards and her tongue slowly curled up towards her nose. For all the world she looked like a snake charmer with a wide, pink snake. The pink snake stretched to the tip of her nose, past the bridge, and then up to rest its tip in between her eyebrows. To my horror—and to Naamah’s great amusement—the girl, with the blue underside of her tongue covering half of her face, leaned back even further, so her head was facing the ceiling, and her eyes rolled back to show only the whites.

  From under her tongue came a little black cloud that smelled like blood. I watched in awe as the cloud floated towards my mouth. When it was close enough Naamah opened her mouth, leaned towards the cloud, and ate it right out of the air, as easy as a frog swallowing a fly.

  I woke up on a street corner not far from home, vomiting into a trash can.

  “Miss? Excuse me, m
iss.”

  I looked up to see a police officer standing in front of me, a burly mustached beefcake of a man trying to peek down my shirt. He offered me a ride home. I gratefully accepted. In the back of the squad car the doors didn’t have latches. A thick divider of plastic separated the front seat from the back—or would have if the officer had shut it.

  They always trust a pretty face.

  And then the officer said, “The wife’s got it too. The stomach flu. Last week the kids had it, now my mother’s coming down with it. It’s a killer, this virus, it’s a fucking killer and they all got it.”

  He paused and looked in the rearview mirror, where he saw me staring at him. He cleared his throat and adjusted his hat on his head.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I apologize. What I mean is, the flu is a terrible thing.”

  W WERE back on the red beach by the crimson sea. Now I knew that the sea was blood, and it had stained the sand.

  She dipped in and out of the ocean, as sleek and happy as a dolphin.

  I turned and tried to run. But it was as if I were the one who was underwater, I couldn’t gather the momentum to move my arms and legs. And then she was right next to me, standing on the beach, smiling to show her small pointed teeth, watching me try to run.

  “Amanda,” she said, “stop trying. I love you. I’m never letting you go.”

  AND THEN ONE DAY, during a long white snowstorm, Ed came home. The demon had brought me back to the apartment after days of her kind of fun and there he was, sitting on the sofa in a rumpled suit and tie, a little puddle of melted snow around his feet. For the first time in weeks I found my own voice.

  “Ed,” I cried. I ran to him, to his sad, aged face, and sat down close and put my arms around him. He stayed still and tense in his forward-facing position but I didn’t mind. Just to see him again was more than I had hoped for. After a quick moment of having him in my arms he pulled away and stood up. He paced awkwardly in front of the sofa, looking out the windows, towards the door, anywhere but at me.

  “I tried to call,” he said. “I wrote. You never answered. I thought maybe you’d moved. I, I,—”

  He started to cry. He fought it at first, said “I” a few more times in a strangled, choked voice and then admitted he was crying, let his face crumple and tears pour down and his nose run as he paced. My heart leapt. Maybe there was a way, I thought, I could explain and—

  “Oh Ed, I—” I love you, I wanted to say. I love you and I miss you and I don’t know why this happened. To us, out of everyone in the world. Remember the flowers you gave me on our third date? Remember the seagulls we laughed at on the beach last year? The horrible movie, the one with the subtitles, we made jokes about for weeks. Long Saturdays in the park. Sundays at the flea market. The Christmas party where we drank so much and got in a huge fight and almost killed each other, the next day it was so funny. The candy you bought me when you didn’t come home. It’s not fair. It’s not fair. But Naamah locked my throat closed and I sat poker-faced as he pulled himself together.

  “I’m filing for a divorce,” he said. “I want to get married again.”

  All the nights I waited. The nights you never called.

  “I’m sure it’s not a surprise. It’s been over a year. She—well, I know you know. We both—there’s no point in getting into it. I don’t know why we could never talk about it, we could have done this so much sooner, we could have both gone on...”

  The rooftop pool in California where we watched the sunset. All the take-out meals. The feel of your skin warm and dry against mine. Your mother’s birthday parties. Your father’s funeral. We were going to go to Hawaii someday, to Paris someday. We were going to buy a new dishwasher, a new car. Nothing’s changed, I wanted to say, not for me, I’m still here, look at me, look at me—but when I tried to open my mouth I couldn’t. I was falling, down into the thick red haze, an endless black well, I clung and grasped with all my might, I wanted to stay, but there was nothing to cling to, nothing to grab, and I fell and fell until I was gone.

  I was lying on the crimson sand by the blood red sea. Naamah lay next to me. She smiled and in the sand she wrote two words with her left index finger: I WIN.

  FIRST WAS LILITH. SHE was Adam’s first wife but she wasn’t good enough at all, she wouldn’t lie down and take it and she wouldn’t do what she was asked or told. So I was made to order. Everything would be in place. Everything would be just so. There wouldn’t be any mistakes, this time, and so on the new wild earth he watched while I was made from a handful of clean dust. First were the bones. He started with the feet and then up the legs to the hips, spine, and ribs, out for the arms, and then the white round skull on top. Next was what I needed to live—liver, spleen, bowels, uterus, heart and lungs, brain, eyes and tongue, all made from dust before my partner’s eyes. Then the muscles were layered on, then the fascia, the meridians, the tendons, and the veins. I was filled with blood, bile, mucus, tears. And then I was wrapped in skin and sprinkled with hair and the new lids on my eyes rolled up and the irises rolled down and, now complete and real, I saw my partner, alone in the world with me.

  My first sight was his face twisted with disgust, before he quickly turned away. He was disgusted by me, and begged never to have to look at me again. Because he had never known what was inside before. He had imagined a person was as sleek and neat on the inside as outside. He couldn’t stand the mess, the chaos, the blood.

  I wasn’t needed. I wasn’t wanted. But Lilith taught me a few tricks on the banks of the Red Sea. When Adam refused to sleep with Eve, horrified that Cain had killed Abel, I came to him in his sleep. He thought it was a dream, but he was the father of my first child.

  They can’t say no. All I need is a way in. A dream is the easy way but then they never know, they never even know I had them. I need someone like Amanda. She says she didn’t know. She says she didn’t want me. But I couldn’t have gotten in if she did-n’ t want me. Everyone wanted me. Each and every one.

  Everyone except Ed.

  THEN I WAS SITTING on the sofa in our apartment. Through the windows I saw a wall of white snow falling down. People were everywhere, all of them moving, walking from one room to another and back again. Two were snapping photos, a few more were looking through the apartment, poking under the table and in the bookcases. A strange kind of party. A man took my picture; I shuddered at the bright light. When my eyes cleared I looked toward the open door of the bedroom. Where was Ed?

  My hearing faded back in. At first all I heard was a general buzz, the chatter of the party, and then one voice singled itself out. A man was talking to me, yelling almost, right in my ear. I turned my head. The man was sitting next to me on the sofa, an older man with slicked back hair and a cheap suit, talking loudly at me.

  “Why did you DO IT? Where you having AN AFFAIR? Did he GAMBLE? Did he DRINK?”

  Shhh, I tried to tell him, you don’t have to yell, but the words came out garbled and fuzzy; my mouth wasn’t all mine again yet. I looked down and saw a stain on my dress, a big red wet stain on my abdomen. I’m bleeding, I tried to tell the man. He watched me carefully as I unbuttoned my jacket and then my shirt. Everyone was watching but if I was bleeding to death, I thought, I certainly ought to be able to see the wound. But after my shirt was undone and my stomach was bare there was no red. It wasn’t me who was bleeding.

  “Ed,” I screamed. I jumped up off the sofa. “Edward!” Everyone in the room stopped moving and looked at me.

  “Where is he?” I screamed.

  No one answered. They stood still around me and watched as I ran to the bathroom, which was empty, then to the kitchen, also empty, and then to the bedroom.

  In the bedroom, blood was everywhere. Splattered on the walls, smeared on the floor. The bed was soaked through with it. On the white cotton sheets we had picked out together last year. On the goose down pillows Ed’s mother had given us two years ago for Christmas. On the black-and-white quilt we’d found at a flea market upstate, one b
eautiful sunny Saturday three years before. The smell was sickening. I closed my eyes and wished it all away, but when I opened them again nothing had changed. The man with slicked back hair stood next to me again.

  “Why did you DO IT? Why did you KILL him?”

  I moaned and vomited on the floor. When I held my head back up I saw, finger painted in browning crimson on the white wall above the bed:

  I WIN.

  SOMEONE EIN the building, I guess, called the police. His screams must have been unbearably loud—our nearest neighbor was two stories down. With the assistance of a public defender, who was obviously terrified of me, I pleaded to insanity and agreed to indefinite incarceration in a psychiatric hospital.

  First I stabbed a girl with one of those homemade knives. I don’t know why. Then, in solitary, I grew my nails long and attacked one of the guards. Lucky for her she wasn’t pretty to begin with. So I got moved to high security

  She has a grand old time here, she has all the girls following her orders, she’s sleeping with one of the guards and maybe one of the doctors. She’s like a fox in a chicken coop here in the hospital.