Her palm cupped my chin, her thumb rubbed back and forth against my cheek. “What is it? What’s going on, Danny?”
She tilted her head slightly. Was it in confusion or in anticipation of me tilting my head in the opposite direction? Of our lips meeting, parting? Our tongues finding each other? Textured tastebuds tickling together? Electricity radiating outward, buzzing our brains, shooting down our throats, tightening tendrils of warmth that stretched down to our groins?
Did she just lean in ever so slightly?
kwuh/tck/tck
dee-de-de
I don’t know if I really heard it, or if my mind was playing tricks on my dick. Either way, the spell was broken, it didn’t matter if it was electricity or interference crackling between us. What came out of my mouth next wasn’t her tongue, it was a fabricated cough, followed by an over-the-top-sickly, “You think you could help me with the steam shower?”
Lorelei made herself some hot chocolate and sang Eric Clapton tunes, while I flitted about the premises, like a bat on crack. I came up empty-handed. Not one crackle, not a single scratch. We were secure.
And somehow I felt all the worse for it.
I told her I’d drive us up to Providence the next day so she could nap. I promised to take her to this old donut place I knew hidden off of Route 2, best damn donuts and coffee-milk she’ll ever have. She gave me a half laugh and a nod, and we both went off to our separate rooms.
I wish I could run away from me.
* * *
I sat in his home lab for the entire day today. I slipped underneath the yellow “Do Not Enter” tape, and broke into 454 Angell and found my way to the basement. It was empty, of course. The entire house was. The Department had collected all of his equipment and “cleaned” the house.*
* * *
* There’s a trick to falling. Surrender. You simply give in to the inevitable. More often than not, a greater injury is suffered from trying to prevent the fall. You can’t fight failure any more than you can resist the gravity of the future. It pulls at you whether you resist or not.
I learned about the safety in surrender skiing with Toby. We were teenagers visiting his uncle, a Marine colonel stationed in Oslo. Toby had spent the first ten years of his life suckling on the teats of the Rockies in Utah. He was an expert and effortless skier. On the other hand, I was drastically underskilled. Nevertheless, I was fairly athletic and competitive, which is how we ended up at the top of a bowl, riddled with moguls the size of VW Bugs.
Toby went first. I watched his legs piston back and forth from Volkswagen to Volkswagen. Effortless.
So down I went, following his trail, picking up speed down the practically vertical slope, dropping from mound to mound, a jarring attempt at interrupting gravity, yelping with a fake-it-till-you-make-it adrenaline rush, all the while losing more and more control, skidding over the top of one mogul, slamming into the valley between two others. The end of this terrifying short story was becoming quickly and painfully obvious to me. Still I resisted, twisting my body against its will, trying to compensate for quark-like shifts in my center of gravity. Moguls rushed up at me with an angry velocity, hunting for an opening.
My thighs burned, melting muscle tissue; my knees vibrated, grinding down the cartilage; my wrists twisted rapidly, narrowly escaping the relentless and erratic torque of the poles.
My epiphany happened just after I sped past Toby. The simultaneous realization and acceptance. My embrace of the inevitable. The fall was coming. I could not outrun it. So I gave in.
I knelt before the altar of failure and prostrated myself. And in letting go of resistance, I was finally free. I was released from the bonds of ego, loosened from the noose of ambition. The hard rattling of resistance gave in to the sweet embrace of impact.
I delighted in the simplicity of surrender as the world whirled around me, blinking in and out of existence. The snow cooled my legs, having already snapped me out of my bindings. My arms stretched out, pulled by the poles, dancing behind me like excited dachshund puppies, while I lay on my back and accelerated downhill.
Toby remarked how spectacular my spill was, after he raced down to me with my skis under his arm. I sat up and laughed. I felt intact. Settled. And subsequently invulnerable. I knew how to fall. I could fall with the best of them. By having let go of my fear of falling, I had mastered the art of failure.
Providence, Day 1: Where 454 Angell once stood, now stands . . . a Starbucks.
* * *
The empty basement was dark, and all the more so because its walls had been covered in primer paint. I wondered on which wall Picasso’s bullfighter hid beneath the surface. In the corner of the room lay a discarded, grime-covered, white-and-blue toothbrush that the cleaning crew had overlooked or left themselves.
The emptiness was actually helpful. There were no distorting tangents, and so I was less distracted. Like the Oracle of Delphi, I had a cave within which to channel voices from beyond, echoing around the empty concrete foundation, while I paged through a folder full of transcripts of conversations and facsimiles of Eve’s journal entries.
Ever since my diagnosis, I’ve been having a recurring dream: I am thirteen again, in ballet class. My instructor is banging her stick on the floor, a relentless taskmaster. I am exhausted, my body stretched to my limit, but still, I push, I attack the choreography, landing lightly with every thump of the maîtresse’s stick. It rattles my bones, making them click like a metronome. It clatters through my skull, or so I think, until the pirouette. I know I must spot. I feel myself lilting, and I must spot. I must not let the maîtresse see me falter. I turn my gaze, to the mirror, so I may stay on pointe, and finally see myself.
I am a skeleton in a tutu. The clicking metronome was not my teacher. It was me, the bones of my feet tapping against the floor. I am a dancing Day of the Dead figurine. My hair is up in a bun. A rose is tucked behind my ear, a large origami blossom folded out of petals of skin. Beads of blood glisten like dew along its edge. And my eyes are enormous—cut and polished diamonds wedged into the sockets of my skull.
The vision terrifies me, but stopping scares me even more. I keep spinning, bones blurring across my eyes, spinning, it is too much, I feel myself tipping, tilting, falling—
And I shudder awake, like one in the gloaming between awake and asleep who feels herself teetering off the edge of the bed and flinches back to consciousness.
I reach out across the expanse of mattress and find nothing. K is not there. I am alone. Once again he has evaporated into the night.
Reidier has his own dreams to contend with, down in his lair. With the transcript in hand, I find my way to roughly where Reidier sat at his computer and recorded yet another video file.
Reidier sits in his chair, leaning off toward the right side. From where I stand, I can see he was facing the stairs.
His finger absentmindedly taps on the arm of his chair.
He finally speaks, unprompted. “I had a dream last night, Kai. A dream of doors, all sorts of doors. Portals really. A piece of chalk drawing a rectangle on a surface, and I could fall through to anywhere. But there was a catch, each door I went through I came out slightly younger, slightly altered, slightly less myself. What are we to do about this, Kai?”
The anxiety of Eve’s diagnosis, compounded by the stress of Reidier’s work, would inevitably wind the tension of the relationship tighter. With tragic irony, it seems to be both pulling them apart and binding them together, a Chinese finger puzzle coiled around their hearts. They find themselves isolated from each other while haunted by nightmares of transformation.
As Eve sunk into her unsettling reality, she found something altogether unexpected: her voice. Eve started writing with a prolific and creative fury. In analyzing both the content and style of her work during this initial postdiagnosis period, it seems that Eve’s writing was both a means of coping/engaging with the challenging circumstances and a confabulatory side effect from the tumor itself. To understand the degree to w
hich both function and form are operating on these levels within her work, one need not look any further than her memoiresque novella, A Moi.112
Excerpt from A Moi: Graffiti Me
She lay in bed listening to the murmur of the blades as they sliced through the humidity.
I have the distinct feeling that my bedroom ceiling fan is spreading rumors about me.
It was an amusing thought, one that gave rise to a smile. It surprised her how well she was assimilating his secret.
She turned to see if he was awake, so she could whisper the absurd suspicion into his ear. His revelation had given her the idea after all.
Their bed sprawled out in front of her. Empty. He was nowhere in sight. Another woman, another couple, might have been surprised, worried even. For her, though, his Cimmerian absences had become a common feature of their bedroom, one she was as intimately familiar with as the whispers of the ceiling fan.
A sigh escaped her, as last night ebbed its way out of her memory and washed over her. Nowadays their intimacy took on an altogether different nature. It was the closeness of conspirators.
Sliding up against her in bed, his chest pushing against her shoulder blades, she stirred from her slumber to the pressure of him. In that lacuna between awake and asleep, time held no meaning, and she was back in the past with him, her arm reflexively reaching back for his hand, pulling it across her hip, up her stomach, and pressing his palm against her breast. She tilted her shoulder toward him as he pulled her into orbit, her lips instinctually finding his.
It wasn’t until she was on her back, his weight pinning her down into the mattress, pinning her wrists above her head, flattening his left palm against her right, aligning their fingers, that she finally snapped into consciousness and understood what he was doing.
Hands pressed together, palm to palm—a simple, loving, romantic gesture to most. An intimate communion, but on a far less innocent level. It was the union of a lock and key, the hushed tone of a cipher, their fingers encrypted together.
It was five. Their shared number. Five was the secret number they had arrived at, so many nights ago, on their first date, when he taught her the essence of cryptography. Five was their private key.113
He had a secret to tell.
Arms pinned above her head, his body weighing her down, she opened her legs, and hooked her heels behind his knees with false promise. An amorous performance.
He slid into her, like a key into a lock, and she opened. Him sinking in, her pulling him, their bodies slaves to habit and desire. Slowly, deeper, until he thumped against the back of her, knocking a moan loose from her throat.
He exhaled heat into her ear and whispered in a breathless, hushed tone: The house is a spy.
Their home, the one he had offered up as compensation for the relocation, the one the twins romped and stomped through, the one they had finally, grudgingly settled into, was made of glass.
The walls have a thousand ears and a thousand eyes. The place could smell their pulse and taste their thoughts.
It was not the sanctuary they thought it was. It was their own little domestic panopticon.
Palm to palm, sharing their coded five, him confessing his discovery beneath the camouflage of sweat and grunts. Somehow, in the end, pinning down her hands, holding himself over her, gazes locked, staring right into each others’ eyes, the conspirators came together in a wave of relief and concession. He collapsed onto her, she wrapped her arms around him and embraced the weight of his secret.
I’m sorry, he panted into her ear. I’ll fix it. I’ll fix it all, I promise.
She could feel the emptiness in the room. The stillness, save for the fan aspirating down into the sheets. She looked at the expanse next to her. She imagined him sitting there in the future, after the crab inside her skull had finished feeding on her mind and taken over the shell of her defunct and departed body, the weight of emptiness building up behind him.
How would he deal with the distance then, after the cancer consumed her?
She lay in bed watching short-story ideas dance across the ceiling to the beat of the ceiling fan. The mad scientist who made tinier and tinier machines, microrobots, so small they’re practically atomic, so small they could manipulate atoms. They could rearrange molecules at will and replicate any physical structure within moments. Too small and fast for the naked eye, an object would shimmer and blur as it morphed from one shape into another. A swarm of activity. A fog of substance. Robomites, foglets that could take any form, even something as mundane as a toaster.
The mad scientist and the toaster would talk over breakfast. The scientist would confide in the appliance about the challenges of marriage. His wife was . . . (sigh . . . changing thoughts). Having an affair with a young student was so cliché, he would mutter while scraping strawberry jam across his toast.
A dalliance mired in ennui, the toaster would echo.
The scientist would nod and crunch down on a corner of the bread. But a visiting professor, there’s something alluring about that, something elegant about him.
Something very French about that, the toaster would comment. You’re thinking about Spencer?
The scientist would nod, his mouth full of toast and jam.
What made you suspicious? the toaster would push.
Something the ceiling fan told me the other day, the scientist would remark. That and all the recent hang-ups. Almost every time the phone rings, it’s either a hang-up or a click like someone’s listening in on the extension.
Yes, the ceiling fan was spreading rumors about her.
I haunted that empty house for three days.* It wasn’t until the last day that I remembered another random clip of Reidier, sitting in his lab, wearing an eye-patch over his right eye.
* * *
* How nice for you, Hilary. I dwelled in the pit of Hell’s Kitchen for over three months. And now here I am, chasing down your clues written in sand.
Providence, Day 5: The Sci-Li’s still there but no Reidier. Not a trace. It’s like the whole thing never happened. Just another confabulation in one of Eve’s nonexistent, hypothetical stories. It looks like this whole goddamn pilgrimage has been a wild goose chase, tracking down a red herring through the water at night.
I have gleaned almost nothing from my alma mater, save for an overdue balance of $368.72 owed for reserving a research shelf in the library that I apparently never closed after finishing my thesis.
Every night we drive from Providence back to Newport. Lorelei tries to keep my spirits up. Still I can see the shine from our Gould Island adventure fading, and her doubts creeping back into her tone. It’s starting to feel less like she’s helping me track down Hilary and more like she’s just trying to help me keep track of myself.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am losing bits of me along the way, dissolving breadcrumb by breadcrumb as I trot deeper and deeper into the dark, imaginary forest. How else could you explain my reaction to her hand on my thigh in the car?
One hand on the wheel, the other patting my leg reassuringly as her eyes shift back and forth between the road and the furrows in my forehead.
I should have been ecstatic. Pity was getting me further with Lorelei than bravado ever had. Instead of taking that touch, that connection, that opening and placing my hand on hers, finally holding hands with my dear, sweet, luminous Lorelei, all I wanted to do was take the pen from behind my ear and stab it right through the meat, right between the knuckles, pierce all the way through and stake that patronizing palm to my flesh.
There. That’s our connection. There’s our shared experience.
Of course I don’t do it. I don’t want to hurt her. I just want to be understood.
My mother’s suicide note is three phone books thick. You can get lost in it, and I have. There comes a point when too much is nothing at all. Infinity and zero, twin extremes.
How do you parse infinity?
How do you divide by zero?
“Did I tell you what I discovered down a
t The Athenaeum?” Lorelei had taken a walk down to the old nineteenth-century library on Benefit Street while I banged my head against the wall at the Sci-Li. It’s a quirky old building built like a Greek temple up on plinth.
I shook my head no as I glared down at her hand on my thigh. My right elbow rested on the door against the window, my head leaning against my hand, surreptitiously fingering the pen still stuck behind my ear.
“Oh my God, I can’t believe I forgot. Well, they had this big H. P. Lovecraft exhibit there. The Weird Tales guy.”
“Yeah, I know who he is. Providence’s sci-fi/fantasy pulp darling.”
“I had no idea how influential he was. He was like, practically the father of modern horror.”
“But a horrible writer. Like a dumbed-down version of Faulkner with twice the verbosity.”
“Ok, so great thinker, meh writer. Still, do you know where he was born?”
“Providence?”
“Yes, but where in Providence?”
“Hospital?”
“Nope, at his family home on 194 Angell Street.”
My fingers wrapped around my pen and plucked it from its perch behind my ear.
Lorelei went on, “That was its number then. Today it would be at 454 Angell.”
Lorelei raised her eyebrows at me as if to exclaim, Can you believe that?!
I couldn’t.
“That’s a pretty big coincidence, don’t you think?”
I shrugged, staring out the window. “Only if you’re implying that a rift in the earth opened up in 454’s basement and swallowed Hilary up.”
“I mean maybe metaphorically. I don’t know, I just thought it was interesting at the very least. And kind of apt. In a number of his works, Lovecraft refers to the Necronomicon, this fictional grimoire that contains an account of the Old Ones and a way to summon them. Some people think the book actually exists, that Lovecraft read it and stole some ideas, but in reading the book, he opened up a portal, drew the ire of interdimensional demons that not only drove him crazy, but went back in time and infected his father with insanity. That it was actually that, not syphilis, that killed his father.”
Here & There Page 39
