I walked a little farther and noticed something red in the beach’s stones. I knelt and picked up a small glass bead. It looked like it had come from a camper’s bracelet. Perhaps it had been in the water for quite a long time and had washed up on this shore just for me.
I put it in my pocket and walked back to my cabin.
That evening, when I undressed for bed, I noticed a small, raised bump on the inside of my thigh. I pressed it. A shock of pain bisected my leg, and when it passed I observed that the bump was soft, as though filled with liquid or jelly. I felt my fingers twitch with the desire to squeeze it, but I resisted. The next day, however, there was another, and then another. They clustered on my thighs, erupted underneath my breasts. I was alarmed. Perhaps there was some kind of insect here that I hadn’t known about—not ticks or mosquitos. Some kind of poisonous spider? But I thought about how I slept and in which kind of garment, and could not fathom how I’d been bitten. They did not itch, but they felt full, and I felt full, as if I needed release.
I sat on the edge of the bathtub, burning a safety pin over a lighter. The metal blackened slightly, and I blew on the shaft and tested it for heat with the pad of my finger. Satisfied that it was cool and sterile, I inserted the pin into the original abjection. It resisted only briefly—a split second of thrashing fists before yielding—and then discharged. A limb of pus and blood climbed the stalk of the needle before collapsing under its own weight and trailing down my leg like an untended menstrual cycle. I soaked half a roll of toilet paper—cheap toilet paper, but still—with my own blood, taking out one after another. I felt pleasantly sore afterward, but cleansed. I covered each one with a blob of ointment and a slick bandage.
Anele came to my cabin one early evening to collect her promised portrait session. She looked sweaty and triumphant, and straps of large camera bags crisscrossed her torso. I glanced behind her and saw dark clouds in the distance. A storm?
“It’s a while off,” she said, as if reading my mind. “A few hours at least. This won’t take very long, I promise.” We walked back toward the hotel, and then veered off into a meadow about a half mile away. The grasses became taller and taller and eventually came up to our waists, and more than once I leaned over to brush my thighs and calves with my palms, to discourage ticks and their bites. The third time I did this, I stood and noticed Anele had stopped and was watching me. She smiled, then kept walking.
“Did you enjoy scouting?” she asked. “How long did you do it?”
“From Brownies until Seniors. Almost my whole girlhood.” The word Brownies broke off in my mouth like something cloying, stale, and I spit onto the ground.
“You don’t seem like a Girl Scout,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You just seem very—ethereal. I guess I think of Girl Scouts as hearty and outdoorsy.”
“It is possible to be both.” I stopped and looked down at my legs, where the thumb of a Band-Aid poked out from beneath my shorts. Anele had not stopped walking, and I rushed to catch up. The grass ended suddenly and we were at a large elm. In front of the trunk was a wrought iron chair, painted white.
“Oh, perfect timing,” said Anele. “The light.” I was not a photographer—I had never professionalized my visual observations, only my theories and perspective problems and narrative impulses—but she didn’t need to explain further. The sun was low and everything was awash in honey light, including my skin. Behind the tree, the impending storm darkened the sky. Were we driving toward the storm, a photograph of the side mirror would reveal light in the past and darkness in the future.
Anele handed me a white sheet.
“Can you wear this?” she asked. “Only this. Just wrap it around your body, however you feel comfortable.” She turned around and began setting up her camera. “Tell me about the Brownies,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Brownies were little girls. Kindergarten age. The name came from these little house elves who supposedly lived in people’s homes and did work in exchange for gifts. There’s this whole story about a naughty brother and sister who always wanted to play and never wanted to help their father clean the house.” I unbuttoned my blouse and unhooked my bra. “Then the grandmother tells them to consult this old owl nearby about these little imps. And while she technically tells both of the children, the little girl goes to find the owl—”
I wrapped the sheet tightly around my chest, like a modest lover in a television show aired before late night. “I’m ready,” I said.
Anele turned. She came over and began to fiddle with my hair. “Does she find the owl?”
I tried to frown slightly, but Anele was brushing some lipstick over my mouth, blunt as a thumb. “Yes,” I said. “She does. It gives her a riddle, to find the Brownie.”
“Goddammit,” she muttered. She pushed around the outline of my mouth, her finger slipping against the cosmetic wax. “Sorry, I overshot the edge of your lip.” She began to apply it again. “What’s the Brownie riddle?”
The bottom went out beneath me, and for a very brief second I was certain that the distant lightning had reached out and flicked me, like the finger of a god.
“I don’t remember,” I whispered. Anele’s eyes left my mouth and she looked at me for a long, hard second before twirling the tube shut.
“You’re very beautiful,” she said, though whether her voice was admiring or merely reassuring was difficult to tell. She pushed me down into the chair and returned to her camera. My skin was glazed with heat, and a mosquito screamed past my ear and bit me before I could flick it away. For the first time I noticed the camera, which she must have set up while I was changing. It looked like an old-fashioned thing; it seemed that Anele would lean over and cover her head with a heavy cloth and take the photo by depressing a button at the end of a cord. I did not know such cameras still existed.
She saw me looking. “It’s called a large-format camera. The negative is about the size of your hand.” She tilted my chin upward.
“Now,” she said, “what I need you to do is to fall over.”
“Pardon?” I asked. I felt a ripple of thunder through the bones of the chair. This detail had not been in her original request, I was certain.
“I need you to fall out of the chair,” she said. “However you land, stay that way. Keep your eyes open and your body still.”
“I—”
“The faster we do this, the less likely we are to get rained on,” she said, her voice firm and friendly. She smiled widely and then disappeared beneath the camera’s hood.
I hesitated. I looked down at the earth. The grasses were glowing with the light from the sunset, but I could see dirt and rocks. I did not want to injure myself. Truth be told, I didn’t even want to dirty myself.
Anele came out from under the hood. “Is everything okay?” she asked.
I looked at her face and then back at the earth. I tipped over.
The surprises came all at once: First, the earth was not as hard as I had imagined it; it yielded as if it were loam. The sun, which had been hidden behind Anele’s body, was now uncovered and glowed between her legs like some mythical entreaty. I heard the dry click of the shutter, the sound of some insect biting down. There was lightning then, distinct, forking across the sky and over the distant hotel. So many omens. I felt strangely content there, on the ground, as if I could stay there for hours, listening to the cicadas and watching the light change and then vanish.
And then Anele was kneeling down in front of me, helping me sit back up. “We have to run, we have to run!” she said, and if I felt any anger or strangeness, it was crushed beneath this girlish appeal. She tossed my clothes to me and folded down the camera. At that moment the last of the day’s heat vanished, as if sucked down a drain, replaced with the chill of oncoming rain. Anele began to run and I followed her, my clothes clutched to my bosom, the sheet flapping behind me. I felt light, airy. I laughed. I did not turn around to look at the sky, but I could visualize it as
clearly as if I had: clouds roiling upon us like men at a bar, suffocating, and us laughing, together, away. I heard the rain then, the sound of something tearing, and we were up on the porch in seconds. When I turned back, the distant trees and sky and even our cars were visually obliterated by the downfall. I was soaked through. The sheet was filthy now, dirty and half translucent and clinging to me like a condom. I felt elated, happier than I’d been in months. Perhaps even years.
Was this friendship? Was this how things were supposed to be? It felt that way, that I had ecstatically stumbled into happiness, and everything seemed right and correct. Anele looked beautiful, barely winded. She smiled at me. “Thank you for your help,” she said, and disappeared into the hotel.
I made progress on my novel. I found that the index cards hindered my process, so I simply buckled down over my keyboard and wrote until I emerged from my trance. Sometimes I sat on the porch and gave imaginary interviews to NPR personalities.
“When I write, I feel like I’m being hypnotized,” I told Terry Gross.
“It was at that moment I knew everything was going to change,” I told Ira Glass.
“Pickled things, and shrimp,” I told Lynne Rossetto Kasper.
I crossed paths with the others at breakfast sometimes. One morning Diego told me about the previous day’s social engagements—which I had ignored in favor of Lucille’s social engagements near my novel’s climax—and in doing so he said a curious word: colonist.
“Colonist?” I said.
“We’re at an artist colony,” he said. “So we’re colonists, right? Like Columbus.” He drained his orange juice and stood up from the table.
I suppose he meant it to be funny, but I was horrified. Resident had seemed such a rich and appropriate term, an umbrella I would have been content to carry all of my days. But now the word colonist settled down next to me, with teeth. What were we colonizing? Each other’s space? The wilderness? Our own minds? This last thought was a troubling one, even though it was not very different from my conception of being allowed to be a resident in your own mind. Resident suggests a door hatch in the front of your brain, propped open to allow for introspection, and when you enter, you are faced with objects that you’d previously forgotten about. “I remember this!” you might say, holding up a small wooden frog, or a floppy rag doll with no face, or a picture book whose sensory impressions flood back to you as you turn the pages—a toadstool with a wedge missing from its cap; a flurry of luminous autumn leaves; a summer breeze dancing with milkweed. In contrast, colonist sounds monstrous, as if you have kicked down the door hatch of your mind and inside you find a strange family eating supper.
Now when I worked, I felt strange around the entrance to my own interiority. Was I actually just an invader, bearing smallpox-ridden blankets and lies? What secrets and mysteries lay undiscovered in there?
I still felt weak. I considered that I had died in that room with its drapes and pulls, and that the me who bent over my keyboard day after day was a ghost who was tethered to her work regardless of the fiddling details of her mortal coil.
I woke up to moaning. I was standing at the base of the stairs, barefoot and in my pajamas. My loosened bun hung limply against my neck. I registered the wooden panels of the hallway, the moonlight streaming through the windows that surrounded the door. I had not sleepwalked in years, yet here I was, upright and elsewhere.
I heard it again. I’d heard sounds like this before, when I was a child and our cat had eaten an entire loaf of bread. It was a sound of gluttony regretted, of wallowing in one’s own excess. My feet made no sound as I padded across the hardwood floor.
The hallway was cast in shadow. Moonlight slanted through a window, cutting three silver bars across the paneled walls. At the end of the hall, I descended the stairs and followed the sound toward the dining room. From the doorway I could see Diego on his back on the table. Straddling his pelvis was Lydia, in her seafoam nightgown, which was hitched up around her hips. The bottoms of her feet were facing me, dark with dirt.
As Lydia undulated, I noticed patches of moonlight appearing and disappearing beneath her, bisected by darkness. My mind sleepily turned over once, twice, like a struggling engine, and then surged to life. He gripped her hips to pull her into him and then push her away. The rhythm was organic, like wind rippling over the water.
They did not seem to notice me. Lydia was facing away, and Diego’s eyes were screwed shut, as if to open them would be to release some of his pleasure.
The moonlight was overbearing, illuminating details that seemed impossible: the slickness of him, the sheer fabric that surrounded her flesh like an aura. I knew I should move—I should go back to my bedroom, perhaps rub out this mounting wave of pleasure and horror and then sleep—but I could not. Their lovemaking seemed to go on and on, but neither appeared to climax, just rut with impossibly consistent tempo.
After some time I left them there. Back in my own room, I touched myself—how long it had been!—and my mind was a jumble of static. I thought of my wife, the dark stain of her nipples, her mouth open and ribbons of sound coiling out.
The next day the mist returned. When I woke it was hovering in my open window, like a solicitous spirit with something to tell me. I slammed it shut so hard the frame rattled. I felt disoriented from the previous evening. Should I say something to them? Ask them to be more discreet, perhaps? Or perhaps my inadvertent observation was only my problem, and not theirs? In the kitchen Lydia was making coffee, but I did not meet her eyes.
In my cabin I tried hard to focus. I stood out on my balcony and strained to see the lake, but I could not. Exhausted by the weather, I lay down on the floor. From there, the room changed utterly. I felt stuck to the ceiling by a force equivalent to, though the opposite of, gravity, and from here I could see the hidden spaces beneath the furniture: a mouse’s nest, a stranger’s index card, a lone, bone-white button tilted on an axis.
I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, of Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of defamiliarization; of zooming in so close to something, and observing it so slowly, that it begins to warp, and change, and acquire new meaning. When I’d first begun to experience this phenomenon, I’d been too young to understand what it was; certainly too young to consult a reference book. The first time, I lay down on the floor examining the metal-and-rubber foot of our family refrigerator, wreathed in dust and human hair, and from this reference point all other objects began to change. The foot, instead of being insignificant, one of four, et cetera, suddenly became everything: a stoic little home at the base of a large mountain, from which one could see a tiny curl of smoke and glinting, illuminated windows, a home from which a hero would emerge eventually. Every nick on the foot was a balcony or a door. The detritus beneath the fridge became a wrecked, ravaged landscape, the expanse of kitchen tile a rambling kingdom waiting for salvation. This was how my mother found me: staring at the foot of the refrigerator so intensely my eyes were slightly crossed, my body curled up, my lips moving almost imperceptibly. The second time is not worth explaining in detail, though it was the reason Mrs. Z——’s daughter transferred out of our shared high school English class, and by the third time—I was an adult then—I’d come to understand what it was that I was doing, and began to do it more consciously. This process has been useful for my writing—in fact, I believe that what talent I have comes not from some sort of muse or creative spirit but from my ability to manipulate proportions, and time—but it has put a strain on my relationships. How I married my wife is still a mystery to me.
I finished the day’s work long after dark. The fog had burned away by midday, and now everything was clear and sharp. The moon was nearing fullness and glinted off the lake’s waves, agitated by the wind. I set off through the trees, my feet crunching on rock. Everything shone with a thin, silvery light. I imagined myself a cat, night vision illuminating what was otherwise secret. The hotel glowed in the distance: a lighthouse beckoning me home.
But then, before me, liqui
d shadow spilled across my path, darker than the darkness. I tried to look past it. If I could reach the bench, I could reach the other side of the trees. But the flatness of the dark in the intervening woods was a horror. I pulled my bag tightly to my side.
You are a fool, I thought to myself. You have been reading too much and your mind is wound too tightly. You have been drowning in memory. Your wife, she would be embarrassed for you if she knew that you had drifted this far.
But I could not take my eyes from the bench. The whiteness seemed transformed, as if it were no longer painted wood but bone. As if a thousand years ago some creature had climbed out of the lake and died in this exact spot in anticipation of my arrival. Around me black bushes roiled in the wind, and I did not see thorns before touching one. It sank into my index finger, and I sucked the wound as I walked. Perhaps this blood offering kept whatever was nearby at bay. I sucked and sucked and then, at the other side of the shadows, the moonlight was restored. I did not look behind me.
Anele suggested one evening at dinner that we get together to share the work we’d been doing. I balked, but the others seemed enthusiastic. “After supper?” Lydia suggested. I pushed my chicken around my plate, hoping that someone would register my displeasure, but no one seemed to notice.
And so as we digested we looked at Diego’s drawings, several panels of a dystopian world ruled by zombies thirsty for knowledge. Then the Painter let us into her studio but said nothing about her work. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling in tiny square canvases with the same unsettling red design delicately painted on each one. They resembled handprints, but had an extra finger and were entirely too small to be human hands. I was too afraid to examine them closely, to see if they were as identical as they appeared.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 18
