When we got into Benjamin’s studio, he was sweeping a space for us to stand in. “Careful,” he said, “there’s a lot of glass on the floor.” I stayed near the wall. His sculptures were massive, assembled from clay and broken ceramic and windowpanes. Mostly they were mythical figures, but also there was a beautiful one of a naked man with a jagged slice of glass between his legs. “I call that one ‘William,’” Benjamin said when he saw me looking.
In Anele’s studio there were the photographs. “This is my newest series, ‘The Artists,’” she said. Everyone moved to their respective images, drinking them in before looking at their neighbor’s. Lydia laughed, as if she were remembering some cheerful childhood dream. “I love it,” she purred. “They’re posed but not posed.”
Each print was set in a different place around the property. Benjamin was lying next to the lake, muddied and bound in filthy strips of linen, limbless as a silk-wrapped fly. His eyes were open, fixed on the sky, but glassy, reflecting a single bird. Diego was crumpled at the base of the hotel steps, body awkwardly jutting this way and that, his dark irises swollen with his dilated pupils. In Lydia’s, she stood with her neck in a noose on the top of a stump, and tipped forward, her arms outstretched, a serene smile on her face. And mine, well.
Anele stepped next to me. “What do you think?” she asked.
I did not remember that afternoon very clearly—all the action that passed before our breathless dart across the meadow was hazy, like a watercolor painting—but here I looked completely, irrevocably dead. My body was crumpled like Diego’s, as if I’d been sitting demurely on the chair and then shot through the heart. Several of my many bandages were visible. My breast had slid out from underneath the sheet—this I did not remember—and there was nothing in my eyes. Or even worse—there was nothingness. Not the absence of a thing but the presence of a non-thing. I felt as if I was seeing a premonition of my own death, or a terrible memory I’d long forgotten.
Like the others, the composition was beautiful. The colors were perfectly saturated.
I did not know what to say to her. That she knew perfectly well that she had betrayed my trust, that our beautiful afternoon was ruined? That I had been exposed in a way I had not intended, and that she should feel guilty about this exposure even though it was clear she did not? I could not look at her. I trailed the group as they went to Lydia’s studio, where she played something for us. It was infuriatingly beautiful, a song in several movements that conjured an image of a terrified girl being chased from a manor, and then stumbling into the forest and nearly dying upon the banks of a surging river, and then transforming into a hawk. She then narrated the “poem” part, in which a young woman floated through space and meditated on the planets and her own life before the accident that had launched her from orbit.
When it was my turn, I primly read a brief passage from the scene where Lucille rejects the gift from her old piano teacher and then breaks into her house to retrieve it.
“Standing before the blazing inferno,” I concluded, “Lucille realized two terrible facts: that her childhood had been tremendously lonely, and that her old age would be, if possible, even worse.”
Everyone clapped politely and stood. We retired to the table, where we opened several bottles of wine.
Lydia filled my glass to the brim. “Do you ever worry,” she asked me, “that you’re the madwoman in the attic?”
“What?” I said.
“Do you ever worry about writing the madwoman-in-the-attic story?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know. That old trope. Writing a story where the female protagonist is utterly batty. It’s sort of tiresome and regressive and, well, done”—here she gesticulated so forcefully that a few drops of red spattered the tablecloth—“don’t you think? And the mad lesbian, isn’t that a stereotype as well? Do you ever wonder about that? I mean, I’m not a lesbian, I’m just saying.”
There was a beat of silence. Everyone was studying his or her glass closely; Diego reached his finger into his wine and removed some invisible detritus from the surface.
“She isn’t batty or mad,” I said finally. “She’s just—she’s just a nervous character.”
“I’ve never known anyone like that,” Lydia said.
“She’s me,” I clarified. “More or less. She’s just in her head a lot.”
Lydia shrugged. “So don’t write about yourself.”
“Men are permitted to write concealed autobiography, but I cannot do the same? It’s ego if I do it?”
“To be an artist,” Diego interjected, derailing the subject, “you must be willing to have an ego and stake everything on it.”
Anele shook her head. “You have to work hard. Ego only creates problems.”
“But without ego,” Diego said, “your writing is just scribbles in a journal. Your art is just doodles. Ego demands that what you do is important enough that you be given money to work on it.” He gestured to the hotel around us. “It demands that what you say is important enough that it be published or shown to the world.”
The Painter frowned and said something, but I could not hear it, naturally. Everyone took deep sips of their wine.
That night I heard Lydia walk past my room. Through my door’s crack I could see her feet shuffling along the hardwood. She discarded her nightgown in the hallway, and as she turned into Diego’s room her nudity was like a blade unsheathed.
I felt something strange move through my body. Once when I was visiting my grandfather as a girl, I’d startled a garter snake out of the grass, and it had dived for the safety of the neatly assembled woodpile so fast that its muscular body snapped rigid before being slurped into the darkness. I felt this way now, as if I was plummeting somewhere so quickly my body was out of control. I crawled back into bed, and had a dream.
In it, I was sitting across from my wife, who was nude but wrapped in a gauzy fabric. She had a clipboard in her hand and was moving a pencil down it as if ticking off entries on a list.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Devil’s Throat,” I said.
“What are you doing?”
“Carrying a basket through the forest.”
“What’s in the basket?”
I looked down, and there they were: four beautiful spheres.
“Two eggs,” I counted. “Two figs.”
“Are you sure?”
I did not look down again, afraid that the answer would change. “Yes.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I do not know.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I am not certain.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I cannot tell.”
“And what is through the forest?”
“I don’t remember.”
“And what is through the forest?”
I woke up before I could answer.
The abjections returned. They were more plentiful. They spread to my stomach, my armpits. They grew large and had segments within, so when I lanced them they crumpled chamber by chamber, like a temple from which an adventurer is feverishly tearing. I could hear their insides. They crackled, like Pop Rocks. I could hear them. I remembered from science class years ago that aging stars bloat and swell in their final days, before collapsing and then exploding in a hypernova. Hypernova. This is what it felt like. As if my solar system were dying. I soaked in the tub for a while.
On this same day I opened up my mind and remembered several scenes from my Girl Scout days. I remembered dropping a roasted marshmallow into the dirt of the fire pit and eating it anyway, the carbonized sugar and stones crunching in equal measure. I remembered sharing with my peers a list of interesting facts I’d memorized: most white dogs are deaf; you should never wake sleepwalkers, but you may be able to gently guide their sleeping forms to bed; cashews are related to poison ivy. I remembered eating all the graham crackers that our counselor had
hidden in the bottom of the plastic food tub. When she asked us who had taken them, I did not answer. I remembered, in greater detail, my illness there, sleeping through the day on my cot, listening to the birds and the distant shouts of my comrades. The thought of events passing without my being there—of shared events and shared pleasure from which I was situationally excluded—caused me suffering beyond measure. I became very convinced that I was fine, and when I stood I became so dizzy that I swooned back onto the taut fabric. It was as if I were a minor character in someone else’s play, and the plot required me to stay there at that moment, no matter how I resisted. Perhaps that is what caused my grief.
Here, at Devil’s Throat, everything felt wrong. I became disgusted by my own dramatizations and tried to imagine the opposite of what I felt, that my significant pain in that moment was of no significance whatsoever. That I was dwarfed by the smallest minutiae: The complex comedies and tragedies of insects. Atoms, dancing. A neutrino, tunneling through the earth.
To distract myself from my troubles, I decided to continue exploring the lake. I left my cabin and struck off toward where I’d seen the canoe, which was no longer there. I recognized the pulse of the water, however, and beyond that the shore curved farther. I followed it for another half an hour or so, examining the pebbles and sand at the shore, breaking off tree limbs when they disrupted the outline of the woods. Eventually I came to a small pier—no boats there either, but I could practically feel the rough wood grain on the backs of my thighs—and there was a gap in the trees, marked by a slender red ribbon tied to the trunk. A path.
I started down it. I felt certain this was the way. Indeed, before I reached each turn I remembered the turn, but as though I was coming from the opposite direction. Had I taken the boat onto the lake? Or just sat on the pier? And next to me—who had been next to me?
An animal cried out, and I stopped. It was the sound of suffering, of fear or mating, and was objectively terrible. A fisher cat? A bear?
But then: a young girl—no older than five or six—was standing next to a tree. Her eyes were wide and wet, as if she’d been crying but had stopped when she’d heard my footsteps galumphing on the forest floor. She was wearing shorts with knee socks and sneakers, and her neon-green sweatshirt said “YES I CAN / BE A TOP COOKIE SELLER” in bubble font.
“Hello,” I said. “Are you all right?”
She shook her head.
“Are you lost?”
She nodded.
I went over to her and showed her my palm. “If you’d like, you may take my hand, and we can walk to the camp. You’re with the Girl Scouts, right?”
She nodded again and placed her soft little hand into mine. I did not expect it to be so precise. We started walking. I remembered the Brownies story I’d told Anele, and it felt fortuitous that I’d come across a soul who could answer the inquiry I could not.
“May I ask you a question?” I said.
She nodded gravely and did not meet my eyes. Finally—a kindred spirit.
“In Brownies, there’s a rhyme. Do you know it?”
I felt the shudder pass through her body and, via her warm, sticky hand, into my own.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to say it.”
We walked a little farther. The path seemed more overgrown here than would be appropriate for a camp for young people.
“Twist me, and turn me—” the girl began. Her voice was reedy but strong, like a steel wire. She faltered. I did not press. We continued to walk, breaking rhythm only when it was necessary to avoid a patch of poison ivy, where a beam of sunlight struck the oily leaves and they glistened.
“Twist me, and turn me, and show me the elf,” she finished. “I looked in the water and saw—”
She stopped, and I remembered.
“Myself,” I whispered.
Horrifying. It was grotesque in the extreme—no wonder the rhyme had removed itself from my memory. Sending a child after an enslaved mythical brownie and then providing a rhyme that—assuming the child did not fall into the pond and drown, or get lost in the night—would only serve to tell the child that she herself was the enslaved mythical brownie? And not her brother, mind you, but her? Every adult and speaking animal in that story was suspect—having either not taken proper care of the protagonist or actively sent her into harm’s blundering path.
“I understand,” I said to her.
The path widened, and then there we were, at the edge of a campsite. A ways off, large military-style platform tents circled a blackened fire pit. A fresh stack of wood was nearby, draped in a blue tarp. To our left there was a low, wide building, and in front of it teenage girls were clustered around picnic tables. Sound gathered over them like smoke: conversation, clattering mess kits, the clank of ladle against pot, creaking benches, howls of laughter. One of them—lean and tan and wearing a baggy T-shirt with a bear on it—leaped up when we cleared the trees.
“Emily!” she said. “How did you—?”
“She was wandering in the woods,” I said. I waited for her to ask me who I was or where I was from, but she didn’t. She tilted her head a little, and there was something older in her features, something wry and correct. Perhaps she was waiting for me to ask where the adults were, but even though there were none in sight, I didn’t. The question was hardly necessary. If the civilized world ended, these girls would go on forever with their mess kits and bonfires and first aid and stories, and it wouldn’t matter either way where the adults were.
“Thanks for bringing her back,” she said. She took Emily’s hand.
“You all look very happy,” I said. “Very content.”
The girl smiled wanly, and her eyes glinted with an unspent joke.
“Thank you for our conversation,” I said to Emily, who blinked and then ran toward the picnic benches, where the voices of the older girls greeted her in smatters. “Goodbye,” I said to the teenager, and then walked back into the trees.
When I emerged on the other side, the light had changed. I took off my shoes and walked to the edge of the water, and then in. It lapped up and slapped my legs.
“Twist me, and turn me,” I mumbled, circling slowly over the stones. They dug up into the soft arches of my heels. “And show me the elf. I looked in the water and saw—”
When I tipped over and searched for my face, I saw nothing but the sky.
On the first day of August, I opened my studio door to discover the lower half of a rabbit lying across my porch steps. Behind me, the cursor blinked in the middle of an unfinished sentence: “Lucille did not know what was on the other side of that door, but whatever it was, she knew it would reveal—”
I knelt down before the unfortunate creature. The wind ruffled its fur; the back legs were loose, as if it were sleeping. Its visible organs glistened like caramels, and it smelled like copper.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “You deserved better than that.”
When I had collected myself, I gathered it up in a tea towel. I took the rabbit to the dining room of the hotel, where Lydia, Diego, and Benjamin were laughing over mugs. I laid the bundle down on the table. “What is it?” Lydia breathed playfully, lifting the edge of the hem. She gasped and jumped out of her chair, her chest heaving with the force of a retch.
“What’s—” Diego began. He leaned a little closer. “Jesus.”
“She’s fucking crazy!” Lydia howled.
“I found it,” I said. “In front of my studio.”
“It was probably an owl or something,” Benjamin said. “I’ve seen a bunch of them around.”
Lydia spat. “Oh god. I’m so done. You’re crazy. You’re crazy. You just walk around mumbling and staring all of the time. What is wrong with you? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I took a step toward her. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, ever
ything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt many things in my life, but shame is not among them.” The volume of my voice caused me to stand on my tiptoes. I could not remember yelling like this, ever. “You may think that I have an obligation to you, but I assure you that us being thrown together in this arbitrary arrangement does not cohesion make. I have never had less of an obligation to anyone in my life, you aggressively ordinary woman.”
Lydia began to cry. Benjamin grabbed my shoulders and steered me forcefully into the foyer.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I tried to answer, but my head weighed a thousand pounds. I bent toward him, pressing my scalp into his shirt.
“I feel so sick,” I said.
“Maybe you need to just go work in your studio for a while. Or take a nap. Or something.”
I felt a plug of mucus release itself from my nose. I wiped it on my hand.
“You look terrible,” he said. I must have looked stricken at this, because he corrected himself. “You look troubled. Are you troubled?”
“I suppose I must be,” I said.
“When was the last time you heard from your wife?”
I closed my eyes. So many letters, sent off into oblivion. Never a letter for me.
“You’re the kindest one,” I said to him.
As I sat on my studio’s deck that night, I considered the rabbit. I thought about the wind-strewn puffs of fur that had blown across the wood, the dark entrance to its torso. I swirled water in a wineglass.
Many years ago—the night after I kissed Mrs. Z——’s tall daughter on the mouth on the dock and felt something unfold inside me like a morning glory—I woke up in the darkness.
How could I have known she’d shared none of my ecstasy? How could I have known that she was merely curious, and then afraid?
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 19
